by Diana Athill
Had my 70th birthday just before Christmas. A tremendous to-do was made about André’s, in November – profiles in the newspapers, subscription raised for a portrait etc. I was given a sweet little party by the office and lots of lovely little presents in addition to a very splendid official one – the most superb sound system complete with compact disc player and all – but the difference of emphasis was very marked. It is true that I would never have started a publishing firm on my own, as he did, and if I hadn’t existed some other person without-whom-it-couldn’t-have-existed would have turned up; so some difference of emphasis was justified – but I think a good deal of it was the difference between what a man gets and what a woman gets. Pondering it, I reckon that distribution of honours – and of money! – could have been more equitable if I’d rolled up my sleeves and fought for it; but I can’t decide whether my not ever doing so was a matter of gender or of temperament – or even of class? I was raised in a setting where fussing about money was considered pretty vulgar. I suppose any individual is so inextricable a tangle of all those elements that the question is an unreal one . . . Anyway, the difference was quite funny, but I admit that my appreciation of the funniness was distinctly wry! If there were any way of measuring the amount put into something (as opposed to window-dressing) I’m quite sure my contribution would outweigh his [Nonsense! – I was in a bad temper because of the celebrations].
Ah well! I guess I enjoyed not bothering to roll up my sleeves and fight!
Love from Diana
23 MARCH 1988
Darling Edward,
My split winter hasn’t gone too badly – I get a bit exhausted in the London part because so much work piles up, but otherwise it has been OK. Your favourable interpretation of my calling my mother Ma was undeserved. As children we called her, always, Mummy or Mum – words which sound so silly on adult lips that we all three felt we ought to change them. My brother tried to change to Mother, but it never sounded convincing and now he’s slipped back to Mum. My sister and I both adopted Ma, which seems to have to English ears a faintly jokey sound which makes it sound less embarrassing than Mummy (which we will still use, sometimes, between us). Quite often we call her Gran, that having been established by the grandchildren. She doesn’t mind what we call her. When she was a young, modern mother I remember her taking it into her head that we ought to call her and Dad by their first names . . . ‘What a flighty and ridiculous notion’ we all three thought in a disapproving way, so poor Ma’s bid to be dashing came to nothing. (She also thought it would be nice if we all, children and adults, felt natural about seeing each other naked – a daring notion for the time, I wonder what she had been reading? – which we squelched even more firmly. What boring brats!)
Love from Diana
7 JUNE 1988
Dearest Edward,
Do send me copies of new poems – they’ll make up for not seeing you.
My ma is doing well. While I was in Venice she had a heart attack – not a big one, but still there was discussion about telephoning me, which she forbad (and the doctor, too, said to my brother that it probably wasn’t necessary, so they didn’t). Naturally I expressed concern when I got back – and a few days later she said: ‘Come here – sit down – there’s something I want to say to you. I want you to understand that I am not afraid of dying alone. Dying will not be much fun, but it won’t be more fun for having someone here, and I’ve had a long life and a good one, so don’t fuss.’ Altho’ I know quite well, of course, that she would hate to be alone when it becomes apparent that this is it (who wouldn’t!) I still found that a weight-lifting moment. Also, I like to know that my old ma is brave and generous.
Venice was heaven – I can’t wait to get back there. I’d never before really got the feel of it . . . strange, silent, secretive place, when it isn’t flashing and sparkling with sun on water. And the wild hordes of tourists (a bit less thick in May than they will be later, but still alarming) are mercifully conservative in their habits. On their main runs and stamping grounds you feel that you might well be trampled under foot at any minute, but you only have to go three yards down a side street, and they might not exist. Luckily the trend is towards more and more package tours, and people organizing them have to keep them to set routes, while the solo tourist like me becomes increasingly rare.
Barry sends his love, and we both wish you luck with the new novel – three families and a hundred years to pilot them through, my God! Rather you than me!!!
Hugs, Diana
17 AUGUST 1988
Dearest Ed –
I wonder where you’ve got to for the summer. It doesn’t seem likely that you are in New York, but I suppose you’ll find a letter sent there sooner or later.
I’m writing simply to let off steam about feeling terrible about Norman. Out of the blue there comes a phone call – ‘It’s Norman here – Norman Glass. I’m at Heathrow. Can you come and fetch me’ . . . This is at 7 in the morning of a day on which I’m about to drive up to my mother’s – which also happens to be the day after a Trinidadian friend and her daughter have arrived to stay for three weeks and revealed that they have brought with them a) No warm clothes, not so much as a cardigan, and b) No money. Poor Norman, he couldn’t have hit a worse moment. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’ The fact that I only ever met him three times (twice he turned up to be taken to lunch, and once Alfred was staying in a flat he was living in, and N came in just as I was leaving) and that those meetings were about twenty years ago, rises up within me and injects an hysterical tone in my voice. ‘Then what am I going to do? I’m in a very bad position.’ – ‘I’m really very sorry, Norman, but I truly can’t.’ – ‘But you were always so strong and reliable.’ – ‘Well, I’m not strong and reliable now – I can’t imagine why you thought I would be when we haven’t even set eyes on each other for twenty years – I’m far from being strong’ – hysteria increasing – ‘I’m old, dammit.’ – ‘Well, I’m not all that young myself, and I’m not at all well, and I’ve got no money.’ – ‘Norman, I’m very sorry but I simply cannot do anything about it and that’s that. Goodbye.’ And I hung up, literally shaking, half with rage at his nerve and half with shame – because he must really have reached the bottom of the barrel, to be calling me, since our only link was that distant fact that we both knew Alfred. But to take him on in my present circumstances would be impossible . . . to tell the truth to take Norman on in any circumstances would be impossible . . . Oh dear! I think he said he’d come in from Athens – he must have run completely out of resources there (perhaps he’d been thrown out). I keep on having to suppress pangs of thinking ‘what in God’s name happened to him after I said no?’ Fuck Norman! But oh dear . . .
Otherwise things are OK, though I have little time to myself. Last week I was inveigled by her special do-gooders into visiting in prison the most famous murderer in Britain. Did you ever hear of The Moors Murders, some twenty-four years ago – a young man and his girl who were caught for the murder of an adult and then it turned out that they’d been debauching and murdering children and burying them up on a Yorkshire moor. It was a crime – or series of crimes – so cold-blooded and appalling that it became in the whole nation’s mind a sort of epitome of evil. The man has gone round the bend in gaol. The woman (who never actually did the killing, but who lured the children into his hands and was at his side throughout the whole of each unspeakable murder) has spent her years in prison educating herself, has worked with a counsellor, and is now being urged to write the truth about it all. She is dismayingly impressive. What we do about it will depend on what she finally manages to write. What was creepy was that in spite of keeping the utmost secrecy about this visit, I was still there in the prison when the phone rang in the office and it was one of the most disreputable of the daily newspapers calling to ask ‘Are you doing a book about Myra Hindley?’ – one of the prison officers must be in their pay and must have run to the phone the moment I was signed in! She (Myra) has be
come a sort of legendary figure of Evil, much treasured by the press. I was violently against the whole idea to start with, because of that – and still am against it, I think – but couldn’t help feeling that anyone who is so startlingly much her own woman after twenty-four years locked up, with all that on her conscience, will be interesting to listen to – if she can really do it. As they used to say in the Publishers Weekly, ‘You Meet Such Interesting People’.
Much love to you both, Diana
P.S. Simultaneously the most infuriating and the most comic thing about Norman’s call was his imperious tone of voice, which changed to Stern Disapproval as I let him down.
[One of Myra Hindley’s ‘do-gooders’, a Methodist minister, believed that if she plumbed the darkest depth of her guilt by ‘writing it out’ it would save her soul, while the other thought we could learn from it something useful about the nature of evil. After a long talk with her I concluded that probably, if she forced herself to abandon the few flimsy defences she had contrived against being totally submerged in guilt (which she never denied, only tried slightly to mitigate), she would go mad rather than be ‘saved’; and that knowing more than we already knew about her crimes would not be of the smallest use. One way and another, the world has been told an immense amount about evil, without ever becoming better at dealing with it. Helping her to write the book they wanted from her, so that André Deutsch could publish it, would therefore be profiting from the public’s greed for horrors, as disreputable as the worst kind of cheap journalism. So I had to tell the ‘do-gooders’ that we could have no part in it, and that was that.]
5 FEBRUARY 1989
Darling Edward,
Barbara has given her son Adam instructions to start decorating the flat, including redesigning the kitchen – she has been corrupted, she says, by her lovely Bethesda kitchen and can’t face anything less efficient and handsome – ditto the washing-machine room, that hell-hole next to the bedroom you were in. Cornelius has surfaced to the point of saying over the phone that he’s sorry, and he’ll see what he can do – which seems still to be nothing. [Cornelius, the charming builder who knew about propagating lilies, had eventually faded out on us. Reclining on his bosom had been – alas – a mistake.] However, as Adam too, seems to be doing nothing, there’s no great sense of urgency and my guess is that everything will hang fire until I suddenly wake up and think ‘Oh my God, she’ll be back next month’ and have to do everything myself.
I’ve started going to Tai Chi classes. The theory, I have to admit, suggested to me that the ancient Chinese were fairly simple-minded, but the series of movements (terribly hard to learn) is very beautiful when done by our serene and elegant teacher, and I would like to master the whole ritual, breathing included – I feel it would be good for one’s balance, and calming. I guess it’s not unlike acupuncture – something which works, although the reasons why, as given by Ancient Chinese Science, are entirely unconvincing. At one point we had to lie on our backs and do ‘bone breathing’ – slow deep breathing imagining that we were drawing in the air through little holes in the tips of our toes, and that it ran up through the hollow tubes of one’s bones as far as the pelvis, then across and down the hollow tubes of the other leg and out through the holes in the toes of that foot. Can they, I wondered, really have had such a rum idea of anatomy? But squelched the thought and went on imagining as well as I could – and the fact was that it was an amazingly relaxing exercise and almost sent me to sleep!
I’ve done fifteen pages of writing since you were here. I can’t work when I’m at my ma’s, nor every evening when I’m here, and only a page or two when I do because of being tired, so it’s very slow; but I think it feels as though its going to continue. [It didn’t – I’ve even forgotten what it was.]
Love from both to both, Diana
[UNDATED]
Dearest Edward –
Glad to have served as one of those valuable – oh, what is the technical term for when an animal suddenly starts tearing up grass or something when what it ought by the logic of the situation to be doing is challenging another animal to a fight? ‘Displaced activity’? Not quite – I’ve watched a lot of nature documentaries on telly, but not, it seems, attentively enough. Anyway, I know the feeling well. The letters I’ve written, the floors I’ve swept, the buttons I’ve sewed on when sending in my tax returns becomes Seriously Overdue. And tackling a publisher over terms would be far worse. Perhaps by now you’ve done it? If so, how I hope it was successful.
You are a tease, writing on the back of that review of the New and Selected, and not sending all of it. Barry said he thought the tone of it was ‘a bit patronizing’ – but I think it might be going to become better as it goes on? Barry, by the way, was also greatly entertained by your saying that ‘my’ workmen ‘lose their anxiety about doing the job well and getting paid’, which is, he says, exactly what happens. It was indeed quite interesting to see how quickly, after a long conversation about how it was only natural to want to change after living with the same girlfriend for seven years, the painter started forgetting to spread plastic sheeting over all of the carpet – and by the time he finished the job there was hardly an object in the flat without specks of white paint. However, all is clean and looking fine if not inspected too closely, so I’m happy to be back from Scotland (I feared he might still be here!). Barbara is pleased with her quarters too – and now her things have arrived from Washington it looks quite good – also the catamaran-sailing Dwight has made her hot-water system work properly, one must grant him that.
Much love from us both, Diana
18 JULY 1989
Dearest Edward,
I owe you two, if not three, letters. God knows why I’ve been in such a whirl – nothing important being done – and yet a constant state of not having a minute to spare. Barry went off to Jamaica in May, planning to be back on June 18, then finished a play and decided to put it on there to make some money, so called to say he’ll be there another month – and now is only just coming up to the opening so will probably be longer . . . which all seemed in anticipation like a marvellous opportunity for me to get a lot of writing done: and I’ve hardly done a word. If it wasn’t my Ma it was the builders and decorators, and if wasn’t the b. & d. it was some sort of evening out, and if it wasn’t some sort of evening out it was falling into bed exhausted. I feel as tho’ I can’t remember a time when there was not someone hammering or painting or whatever in the house, nor can I foresee a time when they’ll no longer be here. Barbara’s flat is done, and she’s back and very pleased; and now my flat is being done; and when that is finished extra things wanted by Barbara, such as the verandah and the front steps etc. will start. The painter working in my flat, a dear innocent soul but not a ball of fire, tackled a wall with the minute attention to detail of a miniature painter and can take three days to finish a closet. Just as well B is still away, as his room can be used for all the clobber out of whichever other room is being worked on.
Your account of your Moroccan trip inspired passionate envy – it really did sound a good experience, and even the unsuccessful bits such as getting nowhere with Paul [Bowles] must have been interesting. Alfred’s house being so haunted is very strange. You must look up Dris. I’ve lost your last letter – everything is heaped in the centre of my sitting room, under dust sheets which, if disturbed, raise a dense cloud of the white plaster dust which they are keeping off (??) the buried furniture, so I hesitate to dig for it although I’m sure it had other things in it I wanted to respond to – (pause, during which I learn that Barbara’s vacuum cleaner as well as mine is sick unto death with a surfeit of the above plaster dust, so there’s nothing for it but a dustpan and brush) – and realizing as I write that, although I’m quite enjoying all this domestic chaos, and very much enjoying having Barbara back, I had become, because of it, unfit (temporarily, I hope) for human consumption and shouldn’t even think of letter writing, having nothing else to talk about except office gossip about writers u
nknown to you, and a marvellous performance of The Three Sisters by a visiting Hungarian company which you are unlikely ever to see (the acting so splendid – that one quite forgot that one was not understanding a word they spoke).
So forgive this boring scrawl, darling Edward, the purpose of which is simply to say that you are both often thought of and much loved by
Diana
31 OCTOBER 1989
Dearest Ed –
No, you didn’t write from San Diego – none of this had I heard – and I want to know it all because clearly it was an enormously frightful experience – one of life’s major faults (in the geological sense) – let me, at the risk of causing you embarrassment, quote the last two lines of this morning’s dialogue between me and Barry. DIANA: He’s a very good man, is Ed. BARRY: Yes, an excellent man.
I don’t suppose you feel good. You probably feel that in caring for Neil’s mother you simply had no alternative to doing what had to be done, and are sharply aware of your own recoil and resentment, but handsome is as handsome does, my love.
