Weird Deer

Cornelia Shields has been trying to transcribe all the details of her father’s death, but she says it’s hard.

“I’m trying to get it all down,” she told me over the phone last Wednesday, “My dad was never so proud of me as the day he found out I was keeping a diary. I keep a written one and a video diary and I try to do it faithfully, but you know, I don’t keep up like Dad did.”

No one did.

Since the early ‘70’s, her father, Robert Shields, got down more than anyone. He died last Sunday the world’s most prolific known diarist, having recorded over 37 million words about the minutiae of his life, from the price of King Oscar kippered snacks to the content of his dreams.

The diary sat in boxes in his study, on his porch and his basement, neatly typed sheets full of details:

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9, 1994; DAYTON, WASHINGTON.

1:10-1:15 I made handwritten memoranda for the diary. I am behind on typed entries.

He was famous not the style of his writing or for its content, but for his dedication to the act itself. He didn’t hide from Nazis or have a charmed inner circle. He didn’t scale mountains or revolutionize politics. He didn’t create an aesthetic or concoct slogans. He taught English, preached to a congregation, bought gas and went to the bathroom. He had an ordinary existence, pedestrian and plain, but he kept track of his life with zeal.

His diary, which no one has read fully, is, in its excerpted form, analogous to Andy Warhol’s epic films, John Cage’s aeleatory compositions, or Bernadette Mayer’s midwinter poetry—it explodes the frame of what is valuable. For Shields, everything had value and everything was worth recording, so he recorded everything.

For over thirty years, he stopped what he was doing every five minutes to write notes by hand. He woke up every two hours to record his dreams at night and then he spent at least four hours every day transcribing these written notes onto a typewriter.

He appeared on Prime Time Live, Good Morning America, Oprah, and NPR. Various newspapers printed features on him, from the New York Times to the Oregonian. All this, even though no one ever read more than a few pages of the diary at any one time, and even though Shields lived an unadventurous life in a small Washington town.

In his study in Dayton, Shields first typed out his entries on an IBM Selectric, and then later on a Wheelwriter, averaging 90 words a minute.

“People say that he spent so much time writing that he didn’t really get to live his life,” Cornelia says, “but he typed wicked fast.”

In the mid-80s, Shields donated his life savings—about $100,000 he earned teaching and running a ghostwriting service—to Washington State University, with the stipulation that the university library would store his diary for posterity. No one is allowed to read the diary for fifty years, not even his family.

“It was supposed to be private,” Cornelia admits, “but if you went into his study, the latest page would be up on his desk, so you could look at it that way.

“I guess some poor fool at the IRS has read a lot of it,” Cornelia laughs, “Dad was in some trouble with them and so they subpoenaed it. The IRS man said, “I’m so sick of that man’s jokes!” Dad got a kick out of that story, but, you know, that’s when he had his first heart attack.”

No one outside of the IRS and WSU, of course, knows for sure what’s in the diaries, so it’s all speculation what exactly Shields’ copious documentation holds.

“I think he tried for accuracy,” Cornelia says, “If he found out some little detail was wrong, he would go back and change it.

Despite his efforts at accuracy or objectivity, his obsessive catalog reflected his perception, according to Cornelia.

“His outlook was just so different than anyone else’s. Was a little paranoid and had a persecution complex and I’m sure that’s reflected in the diaries.”

Though this sounds like the blogger profile exactly, Shields was clearly of a different time than prolific online writers like Verbatim and NewMexiKen. By all accounts, Shields didn’t focus on worldly events or try too hard to stamp the news with the imprint of his opinion. Instead, he filtered his experience of the world through his unique consciousness and, as accurately as he could, he recorded it. All of it.