Spoiling a good story
Carole Angier
THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL: ANNE FRANK THE DEFINITIVE EDITION edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler Viking £16, pp. 338 Is this new edition of Anne Frank's clas- sic diary necessary? Is it a good thing?
No, it isn't necessary. The complete text was published in 1989, in an impeccably scholarly analytical edition. This was (pre- sumably) in Dutch, and the foreword here does not tell us if it was ever translated into English. Now that would be a good and necessary thing to do — though not of course as commercially attractive.
Both the critical edition and this fore- word tell us, as the standard Diary of Anne Frank does not, that Anne wrote two ver- sions of her diary: a first unedited one, and a second edited one, after she had heard on the BBC that a collection would be made after the war of eyewitness accounts of Dutch suffering. Otto Frank drew on both of Anne's versions for the third, stan- dard one, which he edited, and which has been read by millions of people over the last 50 years.
This information is probably the most important thing that the standard diary leaves out: because it shows that, from a careless girl, Anne grew in two short years not only into a woman but into a writer. But if you want to follow this you need the critical edition, which contains all three versions of the diary, Anne's two, plus Otto's distillation. This 'definitive edition' contains '30 per cent more material': but we are not told if that represents all that Otto left out, or which bits of it are new, or which of Anne's versions they come from. The 'definitive edition' is unnecessary in another way as well. The 30 per cent of new material deals, naturally, with sensitive subjects — that's why Otto removed it: Anne's harsher criticisms of her mother and the other adults in hiding in the secret annexe; and (as anyone who has seen the Tunes in recent weeks will know) sex. Actu- ally, not only sex, but related embarrass- ments as well, e.g. details of the toilet arrangements, which often failed.
I don't think we should be prudish, and say 'What relevance do sex and blocked lavatories have to this tragic tale of inno- cent suffering?' The point about Anne Frank is that she is a vividly normal teenage girl; that is why she more than any- one has made the Holocaust real to decades of young readers. The objection is not to there being sex in her diary, and lavatory arrangements, and moments of furiously hating her mother. The objection is that they were already there. Otto Frank did his editing (like everything else) extremely well, and with absolute integrity. He did not cut out Anne's sexuality, or her fight to free herself from her family. He just cut out some instances of these things. His edition is, therefore, a better, tighter, but equally true book, which Anne the bud- ding writer would have wanted.
So is this 'definitive edition' not a good thing either? Not very good, certainly. But not bad. What's bad is the Times publishing the sexy bits in heavy type. That is despica- ble. The book itself is not despicable. Some of the bits Otto left out are valuable: e.g. Anne's extraordinarily modern hopes and ideas about women, which show that she had grown up not just emotionally but intellectually in those two terrible years. Altogether The Diary of Anne Frank is so good — so intelligent, candid, moving and true — that it doesn't hurt to have more of or to renew attention to it with a new edition. And though Anne was never (as the dust jacket of this book claims) a `remote and flawless symbol', she was, per- haps, in danger of becoming a stereotype. We always remember that, after two years in hiding, she wrote still believe that peo- ple are truly good at heart.' We need to remember that when she wrote that line she was still surrounded by a loving family, and by their extraordinarily brave and kind helpers. We do not know what she would have said in the last, unwritten chapter of her diary. About that last experience Anne Frank is silent.
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