Letters to a Friend

by Diana Athill

  I’m in the middle of two days of Toothlessness. An ancient crown in my top jaw came to its long-expected end and has to be replaced by a new tooth added to the plate I already have. So the plate has been snatched from me and I’m going about with only two teeth (considerably more macabre than none) in my top jaw. When the same thing happened to Barbara a month ago she drove off to the country and went into purdah – but then, she’s been a Beauty, so I suppose feels the humiliation more sharply. I decided simply on avoiding smiling and much talk. Have just come in from walking Hannah on the first mild, sunny morning we’ve had for ages, and was astonished at how intense is the social life of us dog-walkers. It’s accepted etiquette among us that if we are in a hurry we don’t have to stop and gossip, we just wave, call ‘Hi!’ – and smile. And the quicker one hurries by, the broader the smile must be . . . By the time I got home I had cramp in the face from attempts to perfect a broad closed-lipped grin. And this evening I’m going to attend my chair-caning class (because my chair has reached a Crucial Stage) and say to hell with it – all this self-consciousness is too fatiguing.

  My book is now over 80 pages long – it feels quite solid when one picks it up. Just finished 12 pages about Jean Rhys, which could have been much longer (perhaps it will be, a bit). I’m wondering, now, whether to use a shortened version of my Alfred intro – I suppose it will depend on how long other portraits become. VS Naipaul, for instance, has had to be fairly brief owing to his being alive, and John Updike certainly will be because there’s nothing much to say except that he’s a nice man and the perfect author from the editor’s point of view [in the end, because of this, he didn’t get a portrait] – so an enormous Alfred might be rather out of proportion. However – I’ve never been able to plan ahead when I’m writing – I always have to wait and see what comes next, so now I have to reread what I’ve done so far and see what happens.

  How frightful about your computer disaster – its like air versus ground travel, the former with so many dazzling advantages but so much more likely to be fatal if an accident happens. It’s getting more difficult to find cartridges for this typewriter – this to my and Barry’s mind lovely, new, modern electronic machine is, according to the shops which supply ribbons etc., becoming very old-fashioned, so much so that its own cartridges have been discontinued and one has to shop around for something that will be compatible . . . So no doubt we will be driven, in the end, to getting a word processor. But I’m happy messing about the way I do, so will wait until I have to.

  I’ve got fifteen rather measly little snowdrops, and a scattering of early pink crocuses (croci?) out in the front garden and today the sun is perceptibly hot. I hope you, too, are enjoying such happy signs.

  With much love,

  Diana

  18 APRIL 1996

  Darling Edward –

  I do so want to read your autobiography. If you are coming over soon you must not fail to bring a copy – and if you aren’t coming over soon, hijack the next person you know who is coming, and give them a copy to bring. It would, of course, be best to see it first in glorious print – but nowadays ‘famous’ seems to mean TV or Hello famous, so it wouldn’t be surprising if it took your agent a while to find it a publisher, and I don’t want to wait a while before reading it.

  Mine has now got to page 106 – I work in fits and starts, with longish gaps between – and ought I suppose to have at least another 100 pages. Sometimes when I read what I’ve done I think it dead boring and sometimes I think it’s quite good – but that’s what always happens to everyone, so one just has to hope. I’ve just finished describing how I stopped liking André, but decided that it would be foolish to walk out of a job that suited me so well because of that; and need to draw breath again. The trouble with life is that incidents so often merely follow each other rather than grow out of each other . . .

  I do hope Neil’s poor dear nose is not going to need plastic surgery – unless a scar is terribly disfiguring people soon get used to it – and the results of plastic surgery are often quite obtrusive. I once had a minuscule skin graft done on my leg after they’d dug out a small skin cancer (I was and still am sure that they did the graft because it was good practice for baby surgeons, being small and in an inconspicuous place so it wouldn’t be a disaster if it was bungled). It was declared a great success – and was indeed very neat – but it is still visible after more that 20 years, and for ages would have been most unsightly had it been on my nose. And they kept me in bed for 21 days, perfectly well though I was. I supposed it was because moving about might well be quite disturbing to a leg – but then my neighbour in the ward, who had had the same thing done on the lobe of her ear and was confidently expecting to go home in about two days, was appalled to be told that she too must stay immobile for 21 days. Apparently a graft anywhere may fail to take if blood is sent coursing through the veins by exercise . . . But that was long ago, and techniques have probably improved a lot. Anyway, kiss him better for me.

  I have been reading a review in the NY Review of Books of a translation of a Polish poet – View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska – which I like the sound of a lot. It’s Harcourt Brace, paperback edition $12. Could you get it for me, next time you are passing a book shop, and convey it to me as and when you convey your autobiography? (Not by mailing it – the cost of mailing makes me feel quite faint.) One of my ex-authors who lives in Chicago although he’s a Parsee called Boman Desai, has now done 1574 pages of a far from finished novel about Brahms and Clara Schumann, and having already mailed me the first 800 pages has announced his intention of sending the rest in a few days time – the mind boggles at what he’s spending, and a) I’m not even a publisher any more and b) the last three novels he’s sent me, all I could say was ‘No’ (his first I loved). It’s the dreadful loneliness of not knowing a soul who is interested in writing, which is all he lives for. It is possible that the present work, which is the result of a mad passion of love for his subject and an incredible accumulation of knowledge about it, may be going to come off. I am actually looking forward to reading the next 674 pages. Won’t it be lovely if it does? [It did, and was called Trio – but not published in the UK.]

  Much love, Diana

  Let me know of any English book you want in exchange for the Szymborska.

  11 MAY 1996

  Dearest Edward –

  I no longer feel I should apologize for handwriting after your compliments on same. I owe it to Nicolas Bentley who wrote an italic hand so exquisite that there are examples of it in the Victoria and Albert Museum. When I exclaimed about it he told me his natural hand had been an evil and illegible scrawl, so he had deliberately taught himself italic, and anyone could. So I bought the requisite pen, and worked away – my natural hand was large and loopy like loose knitting – and was soon able to write quite a pretty italic, but only very slowly – so at last I couldn’t be bothered any more, but the loose knitting had been tightened up for good, except when I’m scribbling notes – and then it turns into unravelled knitting. The natural hand is gone for good – who knows what psychic damage this represents.

  OK. I’ll wait patiently for my first sight of the memoirs. Why don’t you buck the trend and say ‘What’s all this nonsense about seduction by older men? It was delicious’ and then tell all? Though perhaps your compatriots are more pious than Europeans are in their observation of passing fashions in thinking, so this might not be very good advice.

  Have just tidied, and put everything that absolutely must be done onto this table, on a corner of which I’m writing. Typewriter and my book have vanished under the pile – and here am I, writing to you instead of starting my attack on the mountain. For 78 years, four months and three weeks I’ve been meaning to overcome this fatal habit of postponing the boring by quickly doing something nice instead – oh dear!

  Much love. Diana

  4 JUNE 1996

  Dearest Edward –

  I wish the review-copy idea had worked because
now (late in the day, you may well think!) I have to face the fact of how troublesome and expensive I’ve been! Please please please think of something you want from here which will give you as much, or more, pleasure than the Polish poems give me. I took them to the country last weekend to be my bedside reading, and left them there, thinking that I had learnt the spelling of her name by heart – but I find that it will need at least next weekend and probably longer to fix it. I like the poems very much, but whether that’s because they are good poems, or because what she says makes me like her I can’t be sure. It’s always hard to judge the goodness of a poem in translation, anyhow. The friend who looks after our country garden for us has just ended a doomed relationship with another Polish Poet with whom she went to Krakow a couple of times, and she met my nice Polish lady there and says she is, indeed, a delightful person, very witty and charming and warm. Her poet, who makes his living in this country by translating, was I think her first translator into English.

  Barry got back from Washington today which was very nice, because I had miscalculated and was expecting him to return on the Tuesday of next week, just after I leave for Ireland, which would have meant not seeing him until almost two weeks after that.

  Love and love, Diana

  18 OCTOBER 1996

  Dearest Edward,

  Did I tell you that just as I had said to myself rather gloomily ‘When Christmas comes you will have entered your eightieth year’, crick crack and two of my few remaining teeth broke off, whereupon my dentist sent me to a specialist who has announced his opinion that there’s nothing for it now but complete dentures, top and bottom. He set about measuring me with nightmarish metal devices resembling very elaborate medieval Scolds’ Bridles, and drawing signs all over the outside of my face – to start with I lay there thinking ‘We’re not talking tens, here – we are talking hundreds here, or are we talking in thousands?’ and so, I’m sure, we shall be, when we actually start to talk. But now my dentist, who has received the specialist’s full report and suggestions, has deserted to Arizona (I don’t suppose he even notices the price of the ticket), so I must wait another ten days, whistling through my gaps, until we actually decide what to do. I considered a course of Prozac, but chose instead to plunge into a rereading of the novels of Anthony Trollope. I once found them boring, but for this emergency they are just the thing, and for days I’ve taken my nose out of them only to walk Hannah and to eat.

  Very much love to you both, Diana

  [DATE UNREADABLE]

  Darling Edward –

  I’m glad to hear that your money-making plans are ticking over so pleasantly, although the fame plans seem to be in the doldrums. May the latter suddenly take on new life.

  It’s hard to find a dentist here who is still working ‘on the Health’ – mine slid out of it ages ago, and doesn’t charge much more now he’s off it than he was allowed to do when on. And ‘on’ is now allowed to be applied to only the most basic necessities, minus so-called ‘cosmetic’ features. False teeth – yes. False teeth made carefully enough not to go ‘clack clack’ – no. So when mine said ‘end of the road’, it was a Specialist he passed me on to. Because André’s father was a dentist, giving him a lively interest in the trade, he has been cross-examining me about exactly what’s to be done. He was reassured on hearing the specialist’s name – Maurice Faigenblum (to André only Jews can be any good at any kind of medicine). Last week he said ‘What is he charging?’ and I told him – £2000, which I had just instructed my bank to abstract from my savings account. Whereupon there came a great crash of hot red coals on my head – because he instantly wrote me a cheque for £2000!!!! How can I possibly finish a book full of bitchiness about him? I know I’d have preferred it if he’d paid me a living wage and if there’d been a decent pension involved, because what was always his argument – ‘Don’t fuss, I’ll always look after you’ – while obviously good for his self-esteem, this was bad and still is bad for mine. But the generous things he has done for me since I began having to live on £10,000 a year are mounting up, and this last splendid gesture really has put me in my place.

  I’ve already had three sessions with Mr Faigenblum, and can feel myself sinking rapidly into that fatuous mood towards him that one so often sees in people being treated by surgeons, gynaecologists, or any other kind of so-called experts whose hands one has to give oneself into: he can do no wrong! Supposing he was my teacher, I’d soon be leaving shy little bundles of flowers on the corner of his desk. He has staggeringly sophisticated equipment, including a way of administering a local anaesthetic which hardly pricks at all and doesn’t make any part of your face numb – just kills the feeling in the tooth concerned. This may be run of the mill in New York, where dentistry is more advanced than here, but I’d never even heard of it. At our first session he said ‘Your mouth does certainly present problems that are – ’ little pause while he looks for the mot juste, which he then spoke almost sotto voce, as though to himself – ‘daunting’. Oh gallant Mr Faigenblum, so bravely and cleverly doing his best for this troublesome person! And also, he disagrees with my dentist’s opinion that everything should go, and instead is demolishing the stumps in order to build them up again, swearing that he can make them hold. So everything dental is much better than I expected it to be, hurrah hurrah!

  What Barbara [who had just spent three weeks in Iran for the Economist] dreaded about Iran was a) not a drop of drink, ever, b) not being allowed to sit in cafés, c) not having any contacts, d) the clothes. She says the clothes were, in fact, maddening. It was very hot, so not being allowed to reveal an inch of body or a single hair was very trying. She bought a chador in the end, because it was less clinging than a scarf. You can’t leave your bedroom at all without it, not even in the ‘western style’ hotel. The drink she did without better than she expected, and people were very nice and helpful. Official interviews are pointless because pure propaganda; hostile-to-regime interviews impossible because too dangerous; but she talked to quite a number of intelligent middle-class people and was able to build up a picture. And for the first week Adam [her son] was with her, which made cafés possible, and two days of glorious sightseeing – Isfahan and Qum – so she enjoyed it in the end although she says she’ll have to pad a good deal to fill the fourteen pages of the ‘special report’. [It was brilliant – and the Economist broke its rule and gave her a byline.]

  Very much love, Diana

  20 DECEMBER 1996

  (tomorrow will be the last birthday of my seventies)

  Darling Edward –

  Hi! From one flu victim to another. Oh isn’t it vile? Mine has just reached stage of temperature returning to normal and nose stopping running, but now guts have started to run, damn them . . . am very unhappy, but definitely mending and shall be able to get to Norfolk for Christmas.

  My poor darling sister has got back to England, bearing her husband’s ashes, which are being buried today. [Her husband had died on a flight to Australia, where they were going to visit a son.] It’s hateful not being able to be there, but she says friends and the rest of the family are rallying well. She is good at making friends, and is a very good friend to the friends she makes and they to her, and will not be left alone until she goes to stay with her daughter on Christmas Eve, so we’ve agreed that early in January is the time when she’ll need my company most, and I’ll go then. But it feels sad and uncomfortable, not being able to join in the formal ceremony of farewell for David.

  The one marvellous thing about my horrid flu is that it didn’t start until the very last hour of my weekend in Amsterdam and I was able to control its first symptoms sternly enough for my angelic hosts not to notice them, and to get home to my own dear bed by the time when I really had to collapse into it. Did I tell you I’d been invited there to see the documentary about Jean Rhys for which I’d been one of the four interviewees? The interview, last May, was great fun because Jan Louter, the producer, and Valeria Schnitt, the director, and the cameraman and the so
und man were all so young and enthusiastic and intelligent and nice, and they said then that I must come and see the preview, but I thought they’d forgotten – then suddenly, a ticket for Amsterdam, and Valeria waiting at Schipol, and they’d found me an absurd but charming hotel called Hotel de Filosoof, and the film was really extraordinarily sensitive and good (though I don’t know how it would work for people who weren’t already interested in Jean Rhys and who didn’t already know Wide Sargasso Sea) and the dinner after it was wonderful and went on until after midnight, and they all treated me with extraordinary sweetness, and I had a lovely Sunday after all that for sightseeing, and Valeria put me back on the plane on Monday morning – and the whole thing was a delight.

  I’d heard several times about Lennox Honychurch, the local historian of the island of Dominica (where Jean was raised), who was always described by people researching as ‘wonderfully helpful’, and I had formed a picture of an elderly and earnest black schoolmaster, so that was what I was looking for when Valeria told me that he, too, would be coming over for the film, on my plane, because luckily he happened to be visiting England. And before I left a shy Caribbean voice spoke on the phone, and I told him what kind of hat I’d be wearing, and he told me he’d be wearing his green white and blue scarf. So I peered about at Heathrow, and there sure enough was an elderly and earnest black schoolmaster, but he didn’t have such a scarf, and was obviously not looking for my hat. So I went back to reading my newspaper – and a Caribbean voice suddenly said ‘Diana Athill?’ – and there stood a most enchanting young man, white, with the most beautiful greenish hazel eyes and an elegant black moustache, looking barely thirty years old (actually he’s forty-six) a truly Lovely Surprise. And he turned out to be, indeed, a perfect honey. It’s his lonely fate to be the only intellectual white person living in Dominica, his family one of the very few remains of the plantocracy, and he has made his own career as historian of the Caribbean (is at present at Oxford doing some special research). When he visits Europe he is obviously greedy for talk, ideas, intellectual companionship, while at the same time he has the cheerful self-confidence of his looks and wits, and a kind sweet nature. We were booked into the same hotel and spent a lot of the Sunday together.