Letters to a Friend

by Diana Athill

  And then came the day when I walked into the office and there was Alfred sitting in reception, and no sooner were we up in my room that he told me that he’d come to ask me to tell the prime minister to stop the voices. Then there was something about having attacked Dris because he was on ‘their’ side – he must have been, because he kept on denying ‘they’ were there when ‘they’ so clearly were – and then a reference to what I had said to him when I was in Marrakesh the other day. ‘But Alfred, love, I never was in Marrakesh,’ whereupon he started to try to trap me into admitting that I knew what I had said on that occasion, and there was a little cold hint that whereas up to this point I was being seen by him more or less as a potential friend and helper, I might become one of ‘them’ at any moment. Anyway, we struck a sort of bargain. He said that if he could admit that he knew that I believed him to be mad, surely I could admit that I knew that he believed absolutely in the reality of what he was telling me – ‘it’s as real to me as a bus going down the street.’ So if I would fix him up with a meeting with the prime minister, he would go see a doctor of my choice. OK I said.

  I thought the best doctor to phone would be Ronald Laing – he would at least be kind, it seemed to me. He was away so they put me onto his buddy David Cooper. Cooper said he’d see him but I mustn’t cheat, I must keep my side of the bargain. Luckily I’d told Alfred that I had no way in to the prime minister, but could get on to a member of parliament, if that would do, and he’d accepted that. So I called a member of parliament of my acquaintance who said ‘God, no! Are you mad yourself? If you knew how many nuts we have after us about their bloody voices!’ But by that time it had sunk through into my mind that Alfred would not have come to me if it were not that something in him was badly wanting to be taken to a doctor – probably I had seemed the right person to come to simply because of all of the people he knew I was probably the squarest and the most likely to think in terms of doctors. So I guessed that if I told him that I tried the MP, but that he wouldn’t see him, he would probably choose to accept that, and go to the doctor anyway, and he did. He didn’t like him, though – said he was like an Irish bookie. (I believe he was, rather – he collapsed not long after into alcoholism which is something many Irish bookies must do, or would, if they didn’t have strong Irish heads.) But the doctor took some trouble and said that if I could arrange for payment he could arrange for a psychiatric social worker to go and talk to Alfred every day and try to help him through this crisis. So I called Alfred’s brother – how did I get his number? Perhaps the doc had got it from Alfred? – and told him he must pay, and he agreed that he would (sounding less villainous than Alfred had led me to expect, so that it occurred to me that perhaps having Alfred as a brother was no joy-ride). And Alfred was lent a place by someone on the edge of London, and the young man started to visit him, and it seemed that their talks were going alright – the young man used to report back to me for lack of anyone else, and was soon tremendously on Alfred’s side and most excited at having the privilege of knowing him. And I, apart from a couple of telephone calls, left it at that. I did not go to visit him, I did not ask him round to my place. In other words, my affection for him, though genuine as far as it went, only went so far – the strain of all this had exhausted me, and I felt scared of this unknown quantity of madness, so I kept thinking ‘Well, I’ve done what I can in a practical way,’ and putting off seeing him. And then, when the young man said he’d gone back to Morocco, I felt relieved. Very! And never again did I hear another word from Alfred.

  Sometimes I’ve told myself ‘Well, maybe he felt embarrassed . . .’ But really I feel sure that he felt ‘she’s no true friend’ and in that he was right. Not a really true friend. And I wish I had been. So you can see how sad those letters have made me feel.

  Yours, Diana Athill

  I never even heard from anyone how he died. I would like to know, if it wouldn’t be too painful for you to tell me briefly. I don’t, by the way, imagine that I could have made any real difference by being closer to him after fixing up the young man’s visits. Just selfish disappointment, really, at finding myself a less generously loving person than I would have liked to be!!

  13 AUGUST 1981

  Dear Edward (if I may?),

  Thank you very much for your letter – Oh, I was so glad to get it. [Because it told me not to feel bad – none of Alfred’s friends were able to cope with his madness.]

  You’ll be less glad to get this one, because it has to say the ‘no’ I warned you of. But André Deutsch points out that Harpers have a big organization in this country, so if you let them have the British rights as well as the US rights, they could – well, to make you flinch by quoting André exactly: ‘the forty-five copies we could sell in this country, they could sell.’ It’s worth considering, I think.

  Your comparison with [J. R.] Ackerley ought to be true, but in this country Ackerley has two things going for him which Alfred lacked. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday benefits from the special possessive feeling the English have for India – a feeling with large accretions of nostalgia accumulating on it daily; and Ackerley didn’t just have a dog, he fell in love with it and wrote about it at length [in My Dog Tulip], and even though his passion did rather raise the eyebrows of your average English dog lover – well, you Can’t Go Wrong with Books About Dogs. Whereas Alfred’s only asset is that he’s a marvellous writer (far better than dear Ackerley), and it’s terrifying how being a marvellous writer has diminished in weight as a reason for buying books during my long career in publishing. Of course André was exaggerating when he said ‘forty-five’ – but he wasn’t exaggerating enormously.

  How lovely to have a Prix de Rome – I am glad for you. Please don’t fail to get in touch when you are in London. I think I’d remember if we met in Sullivan St. – I’d liked your poems so much – but then again, my head is full of holes these days, so you might have fallen through one of them. All I can clearly remember is feet coming up that dangerous stairway as Alfred and I sat eating mushrooms in sour cream, and Alfred whispering Oh my God – sssshhhh!, and us having to pretend we weren’t there, because the feet belonged to a boy Alfred was trying to get rid of – a recent pickup I gathered, about whom he’d thought better. (But perhaps someone he was testing?) It wasn’t long after Arthur’s departure – I remember how I wished he were still there, not because I liked him (didn’t know him at all well, but took against him fairly strongly) but because of poor Alfred’s forlornness. Oh yes – and then I said: ‘But Alfred, dear heart, what on earth makes you suppose that it’s likely that someone you pick up in a urinal will suddenly become your true love?’ And he was condescending to me for being so lacking in romanticism.

  Good luck with your huge popular novel – how clever you and Neil must be – and I do look forward to meeting you both sometime in your Roman year. Sincerely, Diana

  [The ‘huge popular novel’: Edward had never written fiction, but Neil had, and now because Neil needed to defy his blindness, they had decided to collaborate on a novel – a straightforward ‘good story’ novel, not an egghead one, because it must please a readership wide enough to bring them in some money. They chose to make it a family saga illustrating the history of New York’s Greenwich Village, a subject in which they were both genuinely interested. The collaboration was far from easy, but it was successful. Village, by Bruce Elliot, was published by Avon Books, publisher of original paperbacks, and sold 220,000 copies. Their attempts to follow up this dizzying success have not so far come to anything, perhaps because none of their many ideas have interested them as much as that first one. They have, however, given Village a second life, reissued as The Villagers; and neither of them appears to be much distressed at Bruce Elliot’s demise.

  Alfred’s Arthur: his great love. He’d smuggled him from Paris to New York by sending him a girl to marry, and then Arthur went hetero on him – and ended up, I believe, with six children.]

  17 AUGUST 1981

  Dear Edward,
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  Alfred’s ‘Letter From The Wandering Jew’ arrived today and I read it straight away. Heartbreaking. [This was something he’d sent Edward not long before his death in Israel, hoping Edward could sell it to a newspaper for him.] I’m glad his poor heart broke (if he didn’t give himself an o.d. of tranquillizers etc. – and if he did, he was right to do so). What is so terrible is the thought that perhaps before too long the scientists who are working on the assumption that mental and emotional disturbances are caused by various kinds of chemical imbalance will prove to be right – I feel almost sure they are – and it will become possible to see that the hell lived through by Alfred, and all the other hells lived through by a great many other mad people, come from some quite simple mechanical defect (‘simple’ compared with the kinds of solution proposed by psychiatrists). There was a time when I veered towards being impressed by the Laing school of thought (that the mad were really sane etc.) – but now I suspect that the only good thing about that school was the rejection of the violence done by conventional psychiatrists to the insane; and that they were heaping a great load of exhausting theory onto the helpless patients and doing them no good at all – as though they had said to patients with enteritis ‘you’re quite right to vomit, the food you are being served is disgusting – go on, eat and vomit, eat and vomit, that’s what everyone ought to do with such food’ instead of giving the poor things a soothing medicine. I think of that young psychiatric social worker finding tremendous significance in the wisdom of Alfred’s madness – and now I think ‘what nonsense!’ The wisdom, the brilliance, was poor darling Alfred surviving being mad, reappearing in fits and starts as himself in spite of his madness. Since no one has yet found out how the chemistry of the brain operates or how to remedy its malfunctions, nothing else could be done, I suppose, but attempt psychiatric methods – and tranquillizers – but how dreadful to think that there is quite likely a method of curing madness such as Alfred’s waiting to be produced by some laboratory, and that if it comes, he won’t be here.

  I remembered the other day how the very first time I met him – soon after the publication of Jamie, I think, when he was living in Paris with Arthur [Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire, his first novel, was published by André Deutsch in 1956] – he began to talk about identity: did I feel that I knew who ‘I’ was? Yes, I said, rather apologetically – it seemed a bit crude and simple-minded to admit to it! and he said I was lucky, he didn’t, he felt he was just whatever he happened to be behaving as at the moment – and I thought at the time, and for a long time afterwards, that this preoccupation of his was purely philosophical. Still – nothing would have been gained by recognizing it as the maggot stirring in the brain, since there was no way in which anyone could get at the vile thing. But how I wished, reading this sad sad piece, that some accident could have carried him off before all the joy had been leeched out of him. Compared to you, I was only a slight acquaintance of his – so if contemplating his plight at the end makes my heart ache so badly, I can’t bear to think what it must have done to yours. Diana

  [There was a first meeting sometime between this letter and the next, at which I saw how much I liked them both; but it was not until their next visit to London that the friendship became established.]

  6 FEBRUARY 1983

  Dear Edward –

  Lovely to get your letter – and of course I don’t mind your sending my Alfred piece out. [It was used as introduction to a reissue of his novel The Exquisite Corpse in America by Carroll & Graf.]

  The very name of Norman [Glass – a friend of Alfred’s] fills me with alarm . . . but why should one feel looming a terrible sense of obligation towards a person who deliberately chooses to live a perilous existence? Will he end murdered? Or a toothless and decrepit old nut huddled in a corner of some monastery or whatever? I suppose it could be argued that in either case he wouldn’t be much worse off than those of us who cautiously end up in a hospital bed, because after all that’s no fun either . . . But I do think you’re right to advise him against Mexico.

  Barry [on a visit to Jamaica] sounds rather cheerful on the telephone. At the moment he’s got some darling friends of ours staying with him – a couple much younger, so that to me she seems almost like a daughter. To Barry too, by now I think, tho’ to start with, when she was acting in a play of his, she was a girlfriend. Friends used to be astonished – and I think rather disapproving – at our all three getting on so well, but Sal didn’t turn up till after B and I had already turned into something nearer Family than Lovers. The great luck is that this lovely and amazing girl, when she decided to marry someone her own age, hit on a lovely and amazing boy, and her Henry fits in as naturally and unjealously as possible. She has now become a farmer, as her parents have always been, and has just started her first pregnancy and they are taking a heavily deserved two-week hol in Jamaica staying on the edge of the sea with Barry. B’s brother Lloyd owns a studio apartment in a condominium in Montego Bay – a very approximate and wobbly attempt at the kind of thing which, I imagine, exists in Miami. B cheerfully contemplated having Sal and Henry and his mother there all at once, saying ‘But why not? There is a separate bedroom’. His mother is a very querulous (tho’ strong) 85, who specializes in being Displeased – and, if one happens to be around, Barry is wholly unscrupulous, saying ‘Go and sit with Mama and chat with her for a bit’ and then vanishing for the day . . . which, luckily for Sal and Henry, Sal already knew. B was astonished when she said she thought she would expire if she had to spend her hard-won vacation closeted with Mama – but when we had acted out a few little scenes for him, of what would happen, he had to agree that we were quite right, so he has put the old lady off until Sal and Henry have left. And is therefore having a nice easy rum-and-sun-soaked time, which he needed. But I bet Mama manages to make him rue it before he is through!

  I’m quite pleased with myself, because I haven’t once woken up in the night and heard thieves and rapists creaking up the stairs – and that in spite of being home for a week with some kind of throat infection – not a bad one. It is really strange how subjective that kind of nervousness is, depending entirely on one’s mood or chemistry, not on objective fact. I’ve gone through my Ritual Fury at the filthy condition in which B leaves his room – it is my contention that if an able-bodied adult doesn’t choose to keep him/her self clean, that’s his/her business, so it’s understood that while I have a full-time office job and he’s working at home, I do not clean up after Barry, or wash for him. But regularly, once a year or so, when he hops off to see his Ma, he wins – simply because it’s not possible to leave that room to Suppurate for three months – people want to come and stay in it from time to time, when it’s available. So I storm through it, swearing and spluttering – and end up feeling rather pleased and soothed at its clean and fresh appearance. Once I wrote Barry a letter while at Storm-pitch, saying ‘An old man you can’t help becoming, I know, but a dirty old man – a filthy, stinking old man . . . that you can help and it’s too much.’ (Marginal Note: all it actually is, is a fair number of unwashed socks stuffed into shopping bags, and half an inch or so of cigarette ash on all flat surfaces.) And oh the horror of what happened. He was staying with Lloyd and Lloyd’s boyfriend Colin, and just before that letter arrived he had a spat with them and left – and Colin had staying a pretty boy of dubious morals who Lloyd threw out – and the pretty boy in a fit of pique stole all the mail that came in one day, which included that letter, and read it, and later showed it to Colin . . . Which all goes to show that my father wasn’t far out when he used to say: ‘Never write a letter which you would blush to see published in the correspondence columns of The Times.’

  Well now, I wonder about this one . . .

  Anyway, it brings you both the Season’s Greetings as well as much love, Diana.

  21 JULY 1983

  Dear Edward,

  I was so very glad that you will be in London for a while. This is to confirm what I fixed with Neil on the phone – that y
ou will come and have supper with me on Saturday, July 30, at about 7.30. It won’t be a dinner party. My friend Barry’s sister is staying with us – her first visit to England from Jamaica in sixty years, which is fun because she is loving it – and I’m too lazy to make a meal for more than five people.

  Map enclosed – which you may need even if you come by taxi because sometimes they don’t know it.

  It will be lovely to see you both again. Diana

  24 AUGUST 1983

  Dear Edward,

  I enclose my Alfred memories [he had asked for a descriptive piece, which I included eventually in my book Stet]. I don’t think they’d be of much interest to anyone who didn’t know him – for one thing I’m not sure that I could be bothered to put in whatever ‘explaining’ might be necessary, or to pin down dates (something I can never do even to recent ones – how on earth can people even begin to answer when a lawyer asks them in court ‘Where were you on Tuesday the 10th of November two years ago?’ I couldn’t tell them where I was at 8.30 last Tuesday!).

  You once said something about Alfred being dreadful when he put Dris out of the car in Spain. Can that have been on the journey when they had the accident? [Described in my book Stet.] There must have been something wrong about that story as I heard it – altho’ Dris did a lot of the telling . . . probably your story is something quite different. But I’m sure the bits of Alfred I was allowed to see were edited – not with the intention of deceiving, but for stylistic reasons.

  I loved our evening with you, and so – this is a marvel – did Barry. It’s a marvel because he’s becoming more unsociable every day. When people come to us he feels safe because he can say will they please forgive him but he has to get a piece of work finished (and then hope they don’t hear that he’s listening to football on the telly). But going out he often jibs at, because once out there’s no escape. So you and Neil should feel flattered that a) he looked forward to our evening with you, and b) enjoyed it.