Letters to a Friend

by Diana Athill

  Much love, and do for heaven’s sake, prosper. I long to hear of people I love doing well.

  22 OCTOBER 1992

  Darling Edward –

  Writing in the country, where Barbara, her daughter Polly and I are spending two weeks instead-of-a-vacation, trying to get her mother’s house free of builders, and habitable again to be our ‘country place’. The end of the tunnel is in sight – but builders in despair because of the recession are very reluctant to say goodbye to a job once they’ve found one. We’re spending alarming amounts of money – I guess we have spent, by now, a good deal more than we’d have done if we had gone on the Italian holiday we decided we couldn’t afford.

  As for ‘Feeling so mis’able and baad’ – it seems that I got all of that out of my system in the days just before I left AD – largely I think because of the appallingly gloomy atmosphere weighing down poor old 102 Great Russell St – all but empty, filthy beyond belief, it had become the House of Usher incarnate. Two days after I left, Laura Morris, one of the two people (both part-time) left in the editorial dept, and one of the six people now constituting the firm as a whole, heard laughter on the floor above her, thought I must be paying a call on her colleague up there, and went upstairs to join us. The whole floor was empty. And the colleague who, as it happened, had been downstairs on Laura’s floor, had also heard the laughter . . . It was the brew of angst fermenting in that house which had made me feel so bad. The very minute I woke up on the first morning of my retirement I began to feel marvellous – a couple of hours later I saw in a shop window an ad for life class and by six o’clock that evening I was having a lovely time drawing a big man with a beer-belly (teacher has let me start using oils since then, and has pronounced me Very Promising – he runs a delightful class). And what with one thing and another I’m so busy being retired and am enjoying it so much that the idea of perhaps having to take on freelance work for the money’s sake freezes my blood. I’m going to try to manage without. I want never to set eyes on anyone else’s typescript again.

  I don’t think this means that, for nearly fifty years, I was fooling myself when I thought I liked being an editor – a great deal of it I did like. But I think it does mean that even congenial work, which one is lucky to be in, remains work – something which is really basically against nature unless undertaken for one’s own private satisfaction. Which I didn’t let myself see while I had to (or thought I had to) continue in it, but now do see. So praise god that I’m now free of it.

  I shan’t hear until some time in December if I’ve got a place at the Scottish castle [I didn’t]. If I have, that’s when I’ll get really dug into the publishing book. If I don’t get it I’ll have to start working like mad on the Self-Discipline.

  The book about Hakim [Make Believe] comes out in Feb. My publisher has already fixed me up with a very good interview as soon as I get back to London with Maureen Cleave – a woman I like a lot who is doing pieces for the Daily Telegraph magazine at present. She’s one of the best interviewers we have, and we are on the same wave-length, so that’s good.

  I find that an old friend of mine is now more or less editing the London Magazine (no one ever sees it, but on and on it goes) so I’ll try my Alfred intro on him. They do a lot of poetry (mostly very English I suspect) and I’ll tell Jeremy [Lewis] he ought to go after you. Much love my dearest dears. Diana

  [The ‘book about Hakim’, Make Believe, described getting to know (by publishing him) an American from the slums of Boston who had kicked a heroin habit, inspired by Malcolm X, but in the end turned out to think he was God: a story that ended in the murder of the Englishwoman he was living with, and his own too.]

  18 DECEMBER 1992

  Darling Edward –

  This morning your book arrived. What a beautiful book, emerging from its wrappings like the sun from cloud – and then I opened it and began to have just a quick look before getting up – obviously such a lovely fat book was going to need slow reading, so just a preliminary squint . . . and darling Edward, it is now 1:30 and I am still in bed, and I’m still thinking of it as a quick preliminary squint because that’s what it is. There’s so much marvellous reading in your poems I am going to return and return to them, and they make me love you so much. It really is a life that you are bravely putting into our hands, and it’s awe-inspiring to see that being done (who else dares to? Nobody, with this courage and candour and immensely hard-won simplicity). I shall always remember this morning as extraordinary – a sinister dark morning with a moaning wind and fierce bursts of rain rattling on the widow, and being snug in bed with this wonderful book coming alive in my hands – and it’s going to continue being here, hurrah hurrah. What a marvellous thing it is that you have made this collection, because it adds amazingly to each poem, being seen as part of the whole.

  Of course I’ve read and loved a number of the poems before, but they reappear here with added strength and point and life.

  If Counting Myself Lucky doesn’t bring fame, then fuck fame is what I say, because it will simply be proving true what one so often says as a sort of flippant ‘touch-wood thing’ – the people who write about writing really don’t know what’s what.

  But blessed Black Sparrow does, or they wouldn’t have made it look so lovely, and I do, or I wouldn’t love you so, and I don’t doubt that Barry will, when he’s able to get his hands on it. Thank you thank you thank you for sending it. Diana

  9 JANUARY 1993

  What do you think of this for a yummy New Year’s treat? And on the same day the Spectator jumped the gun (the book [Make Believe] isn’t published until the 14th) with a lead review of a page and a half – and very attentive and good. Better than the interview, really – but the interview is more fun because of making one look Famous – indeed, to our dear Indian newsagent it has made me be famous. So this is Happy Day – and may we all have lots more of them. Love, Diana

  Enc. ‘Accidental Adventures of Love and Death’ interview by Maureen Cleave, Telegraph Magazine. 37

  27 JANUARY 1993

  Dear love,

  The thing about fame is that it’s here today and gone tomorrow. Delicious interviews did not lead to good reviews – and so far the only letters which have come in as a result of publication are a) One from a jobbing sculptor asking me to commission Bust of myself, and b) A three-page effusion, illustrated, about Black Penises – unfortunately so wildly incoherent that we can’t make out whether the writer is in favour of same, or against them, although it’s clear that he does believe them to be much much much bigger than white ones. The review in the New Statesman was all about there being two kinds of racism, the ordinary kind, and – very much worse – the oblique kind, of which I am a shocking example.

  I believe I ought to have turned the story into a novel after all. As it is, reviewers seem to be so taken up by this old woman making these ‘embarrassing’ (that word has occurred more than once) admissions about herself, that they simply don’t pay attention to the story I’m telling. Which makes me very cross. And none of them seem to recognize a beady eye when they see one. Even the one really lovely review attributed my putting up with Hakim to the capacious warmness of my heart rather than to the inability to stop watching that was really behind it.

  But how wonderful that your garret has become large and light and lovely! What a difference it will make. Uprooting is always panic-making, so one doesn’t quite foresee how much better it is to live in a better place. I’m sure it will be like a holiday. The other day friends of mine left the place in which they’d lived for thirty years, in a state of quivering misery for a large, light apartment – and within a week both looked ten years younger and still, after almost five months, they say they consciously rejoice every morning at being where they now are.

  Much love, Diana

  11 MAY 1993

  Darling Edward,

  It’s a gorgeous photo and the truth is you often do look just like that, which is why I come over incredulous and irritable
when you go on about how ancient you are.

  Barbara v. much enjoyed her meetings with you. She’s rather cross with me and B because she says that we are the reasons for Hannah becoming so demanding – we are feeble about saying ‘No!’ Of the three of us, Barry is the feeblest. Hannah has become his child, and he feels strongly that children should be allowed perfect freedom, so if Hannah wants to go out, then out she must go even if she has only just come in. This is specially so at the moment, because last Friday she was operated on – spayed – and came home that evening the most pathetic little woozy scrap of dog you can imagine, wringing all our hearts into shreds; and now she still has to be restrained from playing in the park with her rougher friends who are, of course, the ones she most enjoys, even though she is feeling exceptionally bouncy. So Barry argues that in compensation she must not be crossed in any other way . . . Your dog-sitting poem is marvellous. We both treasured it on sight. Fortunately our plight is not quite so stressful as yours and Neil’s with those dogs, because as far as H is concerned we are Family – she’s our spoilt infant, not our heart-broken charge; and no doubt, just as she ended by house-training herself so she will end by sobering into more decorous ways. (And we will regret the passing of her puppyhood.)

  I’m glad you have your lovely tree. Your delight in it brings home to me our incredible luck in living where we do, absolutely embowered in trees . . . The park is so beautiful at this moment that one can hardly believe it even when looking at it – the green (or rather greens, because there are lots of them) at their freshest and most brilliant, the grass thick with daisies, the hawthorn trees swooning under Proustian loads of flowers . . . it’s delicious.

  Love

  Diana

  [Here is Edward’s dog-sitting poem:]

  THE DOG SITTERS (For Stanley and Jane)

  Old friends, we tried so hard

  to take care of your dogs.

  We petted them, talked to them, even slept with them

  and followed all your instructions

  about feeding and care –

  but they were inconsolable.

  The longer you were gone

  the more they pined for you.

  We were poor substitutes,

  almost worse than nothing

  Until you returned, days of worry

  as each fell ill with fever, diarrhoea and despair,

  moving about restlessly on the bed we shared.

  We wakened at dawn to walk them,

  but there was a mess already on the rug.

  We called the vet, coaxed them to eat,

  tried to distract them

  from the terrible sadness in their eyes

  every time that they lay down with their chins on their

  paws

  in utter hopelessness, and the puppy

  got manic, biting our hands.

  Ten days in the house by the bay

  trying to keep them alive, it was a nightmare,

  for they were afraid to go anywhere with us, for fear

  you would never come back,

  and they must be there waiting when you did,

  until you did . . . if you did . . .

  Then, the minute you got home

  they turned away from us to you

  and barely looked at us again, even when we left –

  for you had filled the terrible empty

  space that only you could fill

  and our desperate attempts

  were dismissed without a thought.

  We tried to tell each other it was a victory

  keeping them alive, but the truth is

  that when someone belongs so utterly to someone

  else

  stay out of it – that kind of love is a steamroller

  and if you get in the way, even to help,

  you can only get flattened.

  17 JUNE 1993

  Dearest Edward,

  I can’t remember if you ever mentioned a very small new press called Steerforth Press – in, I believe, Vermont. They have made an offer for Make Believe, which my publisher here seems to think is all we are likely to get, and they sound on the phone and by letter enthusiastic and pleasant, so I’ve said ‘Yes’. They want me to change the title. He said on the phone that one of the things about the book which specially struck him was that it was an unusually good study of someone thinking he was god, so could I think up a title suggesting that side of it. So I said ‘Why not A Man Who Thought He Was God’ – which I now rather like, and which I guess they’ll use. So that’s done. Thank you a thousand times beloved Edward, for your attempts to get people interested – but probably I’d better settle for a bird in the hand, don’t you think? Their advance is $2000, which seems fine to me.

  One very pleasing result of the publicity the book had here is that the paperback publishers of Instead of a Letter have decided not just to reprint that book but to reissue it properly, with a new jacket and announcing it in their catalogue. What really delights me is that they want to use on the jacket some part of that embroidery I’ve done celebrating my mother’s village (it’s just finished). I’m so pleased about that that I hardly mind whether it will work or not! And after my mother died I found a photo of myself age 21 which I had taken because my fiancé (‘Paul’ in Instead of a Letter) had just been posted to Egypt and asked me to send him a new photo. They are going to use that as a frontispiece, so I think the reissue will have its authenticity as a document nicely underlined.

  Still haven’t started the new book! Oh dear. And now my drawing classes have gone into abeyance for the summer, I am gravely tempted to start painting at home (my work made a Great Leap Forward this spring) – but probably that is the subconscious throwing up a diversionary tactic.

  At the moment Barbara is in Vienna for four days, for the Economist, so Hannah-and-Polly-sitting [Barbara’s puppy and daughter] is consuming all our time. Barbara must work very hard at keeping Hannah white and unsmelly – she only has to spend two days wholly with us to become grey and decidedly rancid. Whenever her friends in the park roll her over it seems to be on a bit of grass where horrors have been perpetrated.

  Now I must screw up my nerve and take her down to the garden for her last pee – nerve being needed because last night we surprised rats on the compost heap. Love, Diana

  29 DECEMBER 1993

  Darling Edward,

  I was thrilled to hear that your friend’s apartment will be available – the jaunt suddenly became something that is really going to happen. I’m so tickled by the idea of being in NY again – something I was on the edge of being sure would never again happen – that I hardly mind whether conservative and gentlemanly Tom Powers finds publicity for the book or not. However – I need hardly say that if, inspired by you, he does achieve a flash of vulgar commercial efficiency, I shall instantly be convinced of its value.

  Delay in writing was due, believe it or not, to that fiendish flu, which kept me confined to the flat, and mostly to my bed, for five whole weeks. Actually, the flu itself was over in not much more than one week, but the consequent bronchitis was quite hard to get rid of, the bug proving immune to the first course of antibiotics. And the second course, which worked eventually, made me feel ill and unlike letter-writing or anything else. I’m in the country now, having come to the cottage with Barbara on Dec. 23rd – no, 24th. And the day before that I was not at all sure I could manage the journey. But it turned out that the infection had been ousted, and once that had been done I quickly felt much much better, and now I’m fine.

  With much love to you both, and wishes for Fame and Happiness and Health (note: ought to have put health first) in 1994. Diana

  5 APRIL 1994

  Darling Edward [circled with Thank Yous],

  When I told Barry I’d had a wonderful time and never had I felt so deliciously looked-after in all my life, there was a short pause, then he said, hopefully, ‘Wasn’t that a bit boring?’ Kind though it would have been to answer ‘Yes, it was a bit�
�, the lie was beyond me. If it hadn’t been for you and your wickedly generous kindness to me I’d have had no more than a nice time – the wonderfulness lay in your making me ‘family’ and in meeting Harriet and Tobias (particularly Tobias) and in being able to feel amazingly at home in New York because you and Neil were there.

  An easy journey home, and swift, whisked over the ocean by a strong following wind. Wasn’t upgraded – no room – but was in the three-seater part of the row, in an aisle seat, and my neighbours were a plain but rather engaging young English couple, so much in love that they went to sleep cuddled in each other’s arms, thus leaving me the maximum elbow room. Cold, wet and windy here – but green and flowery. My magnolia’s almost over and my crab-apple tree is in full bloom.

  I found a royalty statement from my London publisher waiting for me, covering the months July–December last year. No sales, about sixty returns, and about more than half the advance still unearned, even though Steerforth’s advance was taken into account! I shan’t relay this less than invigorating news to Tom Powers [owner of Steerforth] – it would not be good for his morale.

  Must now gallop to the aid of Marie-Louise Motesiczky, the ancient painter.* (See page 67) It seems I’ve got back just in time for a Crisis and must help her compose a very severe letter to someone who wants to write rubbish about her – though her despair (it’s never anything less than despair) over this gave way, by the end of our telephone talk, to happiness about the agreement with the great Austrian gallery [the Belvedere], which was consummated while I was away – hurrah! That’s one of the best stories I’ve ever sat in on: everything coming so right for someone after such a long long time, and the person still being able to enjoy it, even though so very old. And the Austrian government is giving her an Honour of some sort, and she is going to go to Vienna to have it pinned on her bosom by the Prime Minister, even though she is certain that ‘it will be very very ugly’. Maybe I’ll go along for the ride! The Austrians are mad keen these days, to be seen pinning honours to the bosoms of Jews – I’m quite surprised that M-L is accepting one . . . but she seems to be feeling that it’s a great joke, more than anything else.