Letters to a Friend
Page 17
One of the other things about Robin that I enjoy is how she took her husband’s death a couple of years ago. He’d been ailing and very miserable for some time, unable to enjoy anything and getting worse. Then he had a cataract operation and she brought him home in a taxi, and halfway up the stairs to their flat he said ‘God, I’m tired – I must sit down for a moment’, and he sat down on the stairs . . . and died! And Robin says ‘People keep telling me what a frightful shock it must have been for me – but it wasn’t really, you know . . . well, I suppose it was a bit of a shock, but what I thought was “Good God, he’s dead – how marvellous!”’ Which, of course, it was – the kind of death one would give anything to be sure of having. But not many people would have seen that so instantly, or would make so little bones about saying so! Now, she is a robust old person, which is what we’d all better work at being!
Lots and lots of love and give Neil a big hug from me.
Diana
[UNDATED LETTER]
Darling Edward,
Barry had his scan, and it seems to be OK. He says no one said anything to him at the time, so he asked the nurse, and she said ‘Oh, the doctor would have said something if there was anything to worry about’. I said ‘Surely the person who did the scan was a technician, not a doctor’ and he said vaguely ‘I think she was a doctor . . .’ It doesn’t seem very reassuring to me, but I suppose it must be. Presumably the hospital will send the result of the scan to his doctor.
I doubt whether your ‘wretched creature’ would really re-emerge if Neil died on you, because I don’t think there are two people there – I think it more likely that the wretched person turned out to be capable of being much less wretched than he thought he was when circumstances demanded it – gained something from experience that he is not going to lose. (I was halfway between saying ‘Less wretched’ and ‘More capable’.) I don’t see how someone could suddenly lose the self I know. It does, after all, contain a lot of the sensibility which comes with ‘dottiness’, but enlarged and strengthened by the things that you discovered in yourself post-Neil. The voice which speaks in your poems is a wonderfully sensible one which knows all about pain and dottiness, and that, darling Edward, is the person you are – I’m sure of it.
The paperback edition of Stet has been getting a lot of attention, which is nice. I’ve missed most of it, but people keep saying things like ‘That was a very nice bit about you on that book programme last week’ or ‘I like that photo of you in the Telegraph the other day.’ Apparently it was the lead paperback in the Evening Standard – and (this one I saw) the Guardian’s literary editor made it his Book of the Week with a very nice review.
I hope your heatwave has passed. We are shuttling madly from one extreme to another – stifling heat one day, having to light a fire the next! But I don’t think anything we can produce is as frightful as a full-blown New York heatwave – only one of which have I experienced, but I’ve never forgotten it.
Very much love
Diana
1 SEPTEMBER 2001
Darling Edward –
So you have been having rat trouble too! And much more dramatic than ours: the invader actually under your bed, and having to do the horrible deed yourself! Whereas ours [in the Norfolk cottage] may yet turn out to be largely a false alarm, since the only rat we’ve actually met was discovered by Hannah not in the house but in the little conservatory opening off the living room, where it (a pregnant female) was building a nest behind a large geranium. It was brilliantly cornered with a broom by Deirdre, my gardening lady, who then put a flower-pot over it, slipped a board between pot and wall, and carried rat two fields away before releasing it. But we have long had merry scamperings between floor and ceiling, and recently fruit left out in the kitchen had been eaten into – like you, I have wondered ‘Teeth or Beak-marks?’ and found little scraps of peel at the scene of the crime. And also we have damp stains appearing on the dining room ceiling, which is under the bathroom but the bathroom floor is imperviously tiled and we know that we have never had a flood in it . . . and I suddenly remembered a dreadful occasion in my parents’ house when similar stains, when investigated, turned out to be caused by rats’ excrement – there was a colony of them established above that ceiling and – tidy animals that they are – they choose to pee and shit always in one place. So I had to ring the South Norfolk Pest Control officer, who came at once. He said the stains might conceivably be caused by rats, but on the whole he doubts it because of their shape. So what he did was insert rat-poison into the space between floor and ceiling, using spaces where pipes go through. If it’s rats, he said, it would do for them, and we would know soon enough . . . by – oh horrors! – the stink! No stink, no rats. And if no stink – then there must be a leak in a pipe under that imperviously tiled floor, at which the imagination boggles. Well, that was just over a week ago, and still no stink. There is a very pretty kind of wood-mouse, a good deal larger than ordinary mice, of which we have a good many about the place, and he thinks the fruit might easily have been eaten by one of those – and they may make the scamperings, too. If they eat the poison he said the stink would be less. What we hope is that they scamper, but don’t go in to the space under the bathroom, so won’t find the beastly poison. And we are having the dining-room ceiling white-washed and will then touch wood that the stains don’t reappear. If they do – then it will be floor-up time alas alas.
I had a lovely call from the dear publisher yesterday. He said ‘I’ve just been looking through your proofs – and d’you know what – you’ve written a wonderfully good book!’ He then said that of course he already knew he liked it, but it had taken him by surprise, now that it was in print, to see how much he liked it. To me it now seems that the first and last chapters, both added at his suggestion, and I don’t think you have seen them, have made all the difference. I am indeed very lucky in my publisher.
Now to work – and I’ve got to review Naipaul’s new novel for the Oldie. And when I groan, all Barry says is ‘You’re having a nice full time’.
XXX Diana
Last week we had 2 days of almost NYork-like heat and humidity, and I did feel for you! I wish I could send you over some of the pleasant freshness we’re having now.
13 SEPTEMBER 2001
Darling Edward –
I’ve been trying and trying to phone – someone I know got through to a New York number on the 12th, so why not us – but all that day [the day after the 9/11 attacks] all I got was a recorded message that all the lines were busy – and same even this morning at 6 a.m. your time. Then this p.m. it changed to what seemed to be your engaged signal – then to a very odd signal I didn’t recognize – then to a parrot voice repeating ‘The service can not be connected’. I know I couldn’t say anything to make the situation less frightful, but still the frustration of not being able to hear your voice is driving me mad. And although we tell ourselves over and over again that the chances of you being within range of the worst of it that morning are small – still, not being able to hear that you are all right – in so far as anyone in downtown Manhattan can be all right – is upsetting. By pure chance I, who hardly ever watch TV, saw it as it was happening – was by a set as the first images were appearing on the screen and no one had a clue what was really happening, and as the towers toppled – so am as near as anyone in this country can be to feel the horror of it, and imagine the result of those vast boiling clouds of frightful debris and dust settling over Manhattan. Oh my dears, how we two long to be able to speak with you.
There seems no point in speculating as to what will now happen in the world – people here are saying to each other ‘At least ghastly Bush has a Democrat senate to cope with – he can’t unleash total mayhem single-handed’ – but how can anything but dreadfulness follow? I try not to allow myself to feel that civilization is going to end before we do – and brought to it by us in the West just as much as by those Muslim lunatics – but it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.
&nbs
p; Failing hearing your voice I’ve been reading your poems – particularly the last three in Counting Myself Lucky which are my favourites. I love you, and I love Neil – and I do so long to hug you both.
Diana
27 SEPTEMBER 2001
Darling Edward,
Life in Westbeth sounds as hard to struggle through as I feared. Why is everything going bad at once? The world’s evil boiling over – Neil’s head obviously unsorted-out, your back going, Barbara’s cancer, Barry’s diabetes – it’s as though one thing is bringing down another – tipple-topple, a sort of general degringolation (I love that word – it doesn’t exist in English but it ought to). It must be a good deal easier here than it is with you to hang onto small, private taking-the-mind-off things; we not having that gruesome mountain of potential stench next door.
I’ve just – oh lord, talk about degringolation!! At that point a man arrived to take the front door off its hinges and shave a bit off its bottom, because it’s been sticking worse and worse – and what has he just pointed out but that the brickwork of the whole porch has started to crumble and the arch is likely to collapse at any moment. Pause for rending of raiment! He is the most dubious-looking man got through the yellow-pages, and Barry’s insistence that he should come and do the job on Sunday evening because he’d only charge £400 has got to be withstood until Barbara and Adam, whose house it is and who will have to pay the bill, have had their say, so we are having a spat! This part of our story to be continued in our next.
So I go back to my original ball-point and to what I was about to tell you. Two weekends ago I went to the country cottage after a three-weekend gap and found there a letter in an unknown hand. And it turned out to be from the son of the man I called Paul in Instead of a Letter – my first love who all but wrecked my life. ‘Paul’ was really called Tony Irvine, and this James Irvine (now 60 years old!) was born after Tony was shot down over Greece which happened very soon after Tony and his mother got married (poor girl!). Now his mother is dead, and he has just retired, and has decided to do what he has long wanted to do: find out more about the father he never knew. He had never come across Instead of a Letter, and hit on my name by first finding a letter I’d written to his grandfather after Tony’s death, which told him that his dad had once loved and been loved by someone called Diana (I’ve now seen that letter, and have to say in all immodesty that it’s a remarkable one!). Then, when he was consulting The Times (which has superb computerized archives) with reference to one of Tony’s wartime achievements, lo and behold his name also turned up in the little announcement: ‘The marriage announced between etc. will not now take place’ – from which he got my surname and my parents’ then-address. So he found the phone number of that address – which was the home farm of my grandparents’ estate, now inhabited by the manager who runs the estate for my cousin – and asked if they could help him trace me. And they, of course, knew that I am now sharing the cottage with Barbara, so gave him that address. From which he happens to live only an hour’s drive away!
By the time I’d found his letter, he had (he says) discovered that I’m ‘famous’ because whenever he opened a paper or switched on the radio, there was someone reviewing my paperbacks, and he promptly read Instead of a Letter. So when I gave him lunch at the cottage last w.e. there was not much more for me to tell him. But it was a moving and interesting meeting. He resembles Tony a good deal, though he’s much less uninhibited. Tony was extraordinary in the directness and wholeheartedness of his response to whatever experience came his way, while there’s something defensive about James. He has four children, who look very attractive, and whom he obviously adores, and several grandchildren, and a nice-looking wife. He’s intelligent, and on the side of the angels – but has since written to say he forgot to ask me did Tony share the rather old-fashioned but serious attitude of ‘his grandfather, father, wife and son’ towards ‘religion and prayer’, which took me aback a bit, and to which I could only answer ‘no – not in my day anyway’. But I share his feeling of being a bit low after our meeting because it was as though ‘the party had been given but the birthday boy wasn’t at it.’ I think we’d both allowed ourselves to imagine that our meeting would somehow ‘bring Tony back’ – and then, though we’d enjoyed meeting, came up against the fact that of course it couldn’t do anything of the sort. Dead is dead. But we are going to meet again, and he’s going to show me his account of his father’s life, which he’s writing for his children. [This he did, and it is very good.] And it has given me a week or so plunged back into the time Tony and I had together before sadness struck, reading all his letters again and remembering a great deal, which has been great. In spite of the end being sad, and taking so long to get over, it was a more interesting and enjoyable first love than most.
Another important thing in these last weeks was reading W.G. Sebald’s new book Austerlitz. I’m not at all sure that it’s readable aloud [which Edward would do to Neil] – it’s stately pace and the lack of paragraphs might make it soporific. When reading Sebald to myself I always start by finding the continuous, paragraphless flow claustrophobic, but end hypnotized by it into complete subjection. And this book is, I truly think, a masterpiece. One has to read him slowly and attentively, whereupon it becomes like being carried along by a river past scenes that are at first only odd and interesting, then things that make you catch your breath with dismay, then stretches of extraordinary beauty, then of almost unbearable horror. The story is simple enough. The narrator meets, and over the years hears the story of, a man called Jacques Austerlitz who, at the age of 5 in 1939, was put on a Kindertransport by his mother, in Prague, and ended in Wales, being raised by an unspeakably bleak minister and his equally bleak wife under the name Dafyd Elias. These foster parents manage to obliterate his past, so even when he learns his real name, at school, he recovers nothing of it. But without realizing it he is almost petrified by despair and gradually shuts himself off from pain by concentrating almost entirely on his study of certain aspects of architecture. Then, gradually, he discovers that his mother was a singer, in Prague, where she stayed when his father, politically engaged, escaped to Paris, expecting that they would soon reunite. But when she realized that she was trapped, she summoned up the courage to put her little boy on that train, and soon afterwards was arrested and consigned to Theresienstadt. Neither parent was ever seen again. And as Austerlitz recovers more and more of this he half expects that the truth will break him out of his defensive shell. But it doesn’t. For a time it nearly finishes him off. Then he seems to work out an odd but viable modus vivendi, and plods on.
Sebald, it seems to me, at any rate, has restored to this familiar material, by particularizing it with his special kind of odd intensity, its full force. I don’t know when I was last so absorbed by a book or so moved by it. And much of it I have every intention of reading again, to savour the subtlety of his rhythms. The odd thing is that he writes in German, and I’m told by someone bilingual in German and English that his German is so old fashioned and formal (he’s lived in England almost all his adult life) that German readers mostly can’t bear him. Having lived and taught in English for years and years, he knows the language very intimately, and he always works very closely with his translator: with the result, so this person told me, that the translations of his books are much better than the originals. Certainly they don’t read like translations, but like beautifully judged English prose.
Adam’s just come in, and says he wouldn’t dream of letting a dubious-looking visitant from the yellow pages anywhere near the porch. Barry’s shrugging and muttering – ‘oh well, if he wants to spend £2000 instead of £400 . . .’ If any workman looks scruffy enough his heart always goes out to him on sight – rather odd in this case, since the scruffy character confessed to us that he had two hobbies, one collecting vintage automobiles and the other breeding Rottweiler dogs. Whether he has a surprisingly large income or a very fertile fancy I wouldn’t like to say.