by Diana Athill
Much love
Di
15 OCTOBER 2001
Darling Edward,
I’m writing this on my knee, because simultaneously the central light and the light by my table have been smitten by metal fatigue (or Bakelite fatigue) so that the bit into which the lamp is screwed has crumbled – and the one in the bathroom, too, but that’s less tiresome. Probably any normal person with a screwdriver can fix a new lamp-holder to an electric flex, but not me, and not Barry. And the only electrician we know is a bit high-handed and has decided that this is not a proper emergency so he will come ‘when he has a few minutes to spare’ . . . so evening after evening I’m reduced to writing in my armchair. (Yes, I know I could move that reading light to my table, but then I’d have to move it back to near the chair whenever I wanted just to read.) The whole house is feeling a bit besieged by minor mishaps – Barbara’s car was broken into last night – just when she decided to buy a case of much better and more expensive wine than she usually buys and had left it in the car – but hidden in the boot, so the thieves couldn’t have seen it before they broke in; and Vanessa [Barbara’s daughter] fell down stairs and hurt her foot – I think only bruised it badly, but may have cracked the bone; and Hannah has conjunctivitis. The only happy person is Vanessa, who adores medical crises and is longing to be taken to hospital for an X-ray. Hannah, on the other hand, has taken to looking at Barbara and me with dread whenever she sees us together, and creeping under pieces of furniture, because she knows that we collaborate when it comes to eye drop time.
You ask for news of Barbara: she’s back at work, after managing to enjoy much of her Italian holiday, and she’s looking better.
To my great pleasure Louisa – Granta’s superior publicity girl who did such miracles for me over Stet – is back in their office now that her baby is nearly a year old, and is already getting to work on Yesterday Morning. She’s already got me booked for the Edinburgh Festival, and is weighing up various offers for serialization, and has a major interview fixed for the Observer. The date they give for it in their catalogue is January. And did I tell you – no, I don’t think I did – that just as I decided that evidently Stet had not earned its advance, a boring-looking envelope arrived from Granta, looking just like the ones which include photostats of press cuttings (which by now are likely to be six lines in the Kilkenny Examiner) so that I nearly didn’t open it. And it contained a royalty cheque for £3000! Yum yum!! Lots of little treats, I’m giving myself.
This last weekend, while Barbara was being carried off on a mock Orient Express Experience (a train journey round East Anglia including lunch – so expensive that she utterly refuses to tell me how much, and the lunch was disgusting – surprise surprise) I made 18 pots of Quince Jelly from the beautiful golden quinces born by the quince tree I planted with my own hands. The wet summer we had has caused huge fruit crops of every kind. And I put up two litres of quince vodka – but that will take months to mature. The amazing thing is that although the quinces are golden-skinned and pale-cream-fleshed, the jelly has come out a gorgeous deep red. What colour the vodka will be, who knows, but people say it tastes perfectly delicious. We will keep some against your next visit.
Big hugs to you both XXX
Diana
10 NOVEMBER 2001
Darling Edward –
What energy, doing lunches! It’s weeks since B and I even thought of having anyone in. He hardly gets out of bed now, and as his belly gets larger his face gets smaller. After they scanned his belly and told him ‘The doctor will tell you if anything’s wrong’ he never heard another word – so I hoped we were right in assuming nothing was wrong. Now he will be going for another scan – prostate, this time. When I said ‘Did the doctor suggest it, or did you ask for it’ all he did was grunt and drift out of the room. He doesn’t want to communicate anymore. I know I’m far from being a born carer, like you, so I’m sure it’s my fault – but he is very difficult now. It may be partly that, knowing that I’ve got Barbara and Vanessa to worry about, he doesn’t want to add to it, but I think it’s more that his energy is at such a low ebb that he just can’t be bothered with anything. For the prostate scan, whether he likes it or not I’m going with him. He’s quite capable of saying he won’t have an operation, supposing they tell him one is necessary, if left to himself. (I wouldn’t have known anything about it if I hadn’t chanced to see the hospital’s form lying on the floor when I took him in a tray of food.)
Granta has just sent me the first printed copy of Yesterday Morning (they get to work well ahead of publication, which is why their sales are so good). It looks very pleasing – jacket is delightful and they’ve used the snapshots and so on, which they squeezed out of me very nicely. But they’ve done one bad thing – they’ve lost the dedication, god knows how because it was certainly there on the typescript – and the dedication is (or was) to Barbara. I decided on that before she told me she was ill, but of course when I knew about the illness, having her there as dedicatee became even more important to me, and I’m really miserable at what they have done. Of course I will write the dedication into her copy of the book, but it won’t be the same.
How I hope that Tom Powers takes your Afghan book – but I fear that it’s unlikely, simply because it was written 30 years ago. As you say, public ignorance about Afghanistan is abysmal, so most people have no notion of how little it has changed in 30 years, and would simply assume that a diary from that long ago must be out of date. I’m trying to imagine a Steerforth editorial meeting discussing the book, as though it were an André Deutsch meeting, and it seems to me that would be the argument raised against it, and that probably it would prevail. Touch wood that I’m wrong!
Have a good time with Neil’s sister. How very odd that the fare goes down near Christmas! I’d expect the opposite. I love to think of your reading Robert Fisk together – though every time I read something in a newspaper which makes sense as a comment on this goddam war, I end up depressed because its never on a front page, always quite low down on page 3 or 4. The whole thing must be even more distressing to you, with your memories of the country. From the feminine point of view it’s hard not to feel un-distressed at the thought that the mullahs may possibly get their come-uppance because although women have certainly always been kept most firmly in their Islamic place in Afghanistan, it does seem by all accounts as though the Taliban have been doing it a good deal more zealously. All religious zealots give me the horrors – the appalling self-righteousness with which they trample their way ahead. If only, if only our Leaders didn’t see fit to behave in the same way!
If anyone could get me on-line it would be you. But Barbara apparently can’t use her own computer (she has one at home) and Adam can’t find the time to teach her, so I’ll have to buy one and I can’t afford it, so there we are.
Lots of love. Diana
25 DECEMBER 2001, Norfolk
Darling Edward,
Starting this letter in bed (so writing may wander a bit) on Christmas evening, having retired rather early in order to get a bit of solitude. Three days of intensive family makes me realize how spoiled I am – so used to my own space and quietness that I can no longer bear unbroken company very easily. The first two days, chez my brother, were great fun but incredibly noisy – the four nephews and their spouses (only two spouses – Charlie solo, of course, and Willie divorced) being accompanied by nine great-nephews and nieces, ages ranging from six to seventeen, all bright and beautiful.
From there, yesterday, I drove the sixty miles to our country retreat, where Barbara had been with Vanessa for three days.
Adam arrived late last night, so today, although B insisted on stuffing the turkey, he and I have done most of the cookery, and he has cheered B up. And before he arrived yesterday B and I went for drinks to our neighbour with all of B’s ‘gang’, and she was soon giggling away with them as merrily as ever, and stayed on at least two hours longer than I did. God be praised for them. They are obviously abl
e to provide exactly the kind of light relief she needs. We’ll be seeing them again tomorrow – and she insists she has to be back in London before the New Year because she has to be in her office. Up to now she’s refused to take taxis – has driven her car as near as possible to the tube, and then taken that. But I think – I hope to god! – that when she gets back she’ll capitulate to a taxi. [She didn’t.]
Although my book’s publication date is still in mid-January so that reviews won’t start to appear until then, they’ve got it out into the shops already. If they’d left it until after the New Year, delivery would have clashed with the shops stock-taking, which would have been a Bad Thing. So I guess a few Xmas sales are being made, and I’ve had a few favourable responses – but mostly from people who would like it anyway. I looked through it again the other day, and thought it wasn’t bad, but that I ought to have filled it out a bit. The trouble with writing such a personal thing is that one is so afraid of becoming boring – but better too little than too much.
31 DECEMBER – BACK IN LONDON –
Came home to find your Village Calendar – very nice to have, bless you two old legends. Many New Year hugs and kisses.
Di
[Poem from Edward Field, 12 January 2002]
INCOMPETENCE
for Diana Athill
Though I’m a competent, functioning man now,
managing to juggle several different careers in my
complicated life
I keep dreaming of my old life, my years of
incompetence,
the way concentration camp survivors can’t stop
dreaming of the horrors of the camp.
I seem to dream of nothing but missing trains,
losing the only person I’ve ever loved, who is helpless
without me,
going about naked, and realizing it with shame,
and, again and again, shitting where I shouldn’t
– all over the place –
rehearsing the agonies, failures and humiliations
of my early life.
After years and years of psychotherapy
and much unraveling of these dreams,
interpretations that were mostly pure speculation,
I woke the other morning
with the absolute conviction that my dreams
had little to do with me, the present me, anymore.
After I told my friend Diana that
my dreams show that the old me
was still inside, had never gone away,
and I was afraid I’d revert to it,
she assured me I wouldn’t – and now I believe her.
She thinks that this competent person she knows,
the one that I am now,
is the real me, which of course it is.
I’m pretty capable, and even splendid and admirable,
the way I handle things.
But is the concentration camp survivor
ever sure that it’s truly over, that he won’t wake up
and find himself back in that horror again?
For nothing was, could be realer than that,
certainly not the pleasant routine of normal life
regained,
or even this dear one, as dear to me as life itself,
whom I can feed and take care of.
13 JANUARY 2002
Darling Edward –
I can’t resist sending you the Observer interview, which I think gets the book off to a very good start. I’m especially pleased with the photo. They so rarely reflect one’s idea of oneself – and this one does! Poor old Jane Bown – and ‘old’ is the word, she’s quite as old as me, perhaps older – had such a hard time with it. She always works by natural light, and having laboured her way to my flat, and then up our stairs, it turned out that in my sitting room there was no light. It was a terribly gloomy January morning and my window is small and faces the evening light, not the morning. So downstairs we had to go, and then we had to heave the furniture in Barbara’s sitting room around until we got a chair right up by the window, and then I had to sit in a position that nearly killed my neck and shoulders (though the strain, luckily, doesn’t show) so that as much of the still-meagre light as possible was on my face – and still she worried. But what a good result! She’s a famous portrait photographer and has ‘done’ everybody who has been anybody in the last 60 years or so, but she’s as anxious about each one as ever she was, and says she’s never stopped longing to hurry away to her studio to see how it’s going to come out – such a nice woman. Actually, it’s an honour to be done by her, but she clearly doesn’t think of it like that for a moment. And charming Kate Kellaway who did the interview, is a genuine fan of mine, and a fellow Norfolk woman, so the whole thing was enjoyable.
There isn’t quite the fuss being made about this book as there was about Stet – for that I had big interviews in all the main broadsheets, while this time only in the Observer and in our local Norfolk paper (very good). But there have been four interviews for radio, and it’s to be read as ‘Book of the Week’ on Radio 4. There have also been some good reviews already (very good in the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard). However, one big disappointment looks very likely. At the Mail on Sunday it appears that civil war is going on between Features and News, and it looks as though Features is losing. Their extract from the book, though ready to go, fully illustrated and all, was not published as planned last Sunday, and I doubt that it will be this Sunday – Features said that they were ‘still hoping’ last Wednesday, but I think in fact they’d have known for sure by then if it was to be in. They have to pay us, anyway – but it will be disappointing not to get that extra readership. Otherwise, however, the omens are good.
I haven’t seen Barbara for several days – she took herself off to Norfolk for the weekend the day before yesterday, and is going to the opera with friends next week, so that looks good. And Barry is much less uncomfortable than I expected after having horrid things done to his penis. First of all they pushed something up it, which they said ought to improve the too-frequent peeing, then they circumcised him – doing both at one time seemed to me brutal, but can’t in fact have been all that bad. We’d arranged it that he would call me when he was ready for me to come and pick him up, so I was waiting by the phone . . . and waiting . . . and waiting . . . till I got so worried that I telephoned the hospital, and got no answer. It rang and rang forever. So after half an hour of that I decided to give it another half an hour, then go to the hospital to see what was up and though I was worried that the moment I left he’d probably ring and then what . . . Then, in the middle of that worry, plod-plod he came up the stairs, having come home by bus! ‘What were you fussing about?’ he said. ‘I told you I’d ring if I needed you.’ He was bleeding a bit, and leaking quite much, so I sped off to buy special incontinence pads. But he only had to use two of them before both bleeding and leaking stopped, and was cheerfully walking to the library two days later. They did the circumcision because for some time now his foreskin had been most odd – it had sort of stretched, so it dangled loose like a sad finger of a glove with nothing in it, and it was causing him a lot of itching. He’ll be much better without it – and I suppose it must be the fact that it stretched like that which made its removal so easy and comparatively painless. Barry is really bad at bearing pain, so the light-hearted way he is taking this must be true, and not heroic, which is a great relief. There’s not enough news at the moment to fill another page – so, much love and goodbye for now. Diana
[note on envelope] P.S. Your last letter came after this was sealed and stamped. Thank you for the work-in-progress, which I love. XX
22 JANUARY 2002
Darling Edward –
I’m sorry to report that we are going through a really horrid time. Having seemed to come through the doctor’s tinkering with his cock very well, Barry began to feel less and less well – got antibiotics from his doctor – was uncharacteristically brave in i
nsisting on ‘giving them a chance’ when they didn’t work, and 10 days after the tinkering had to be rushed to the hospital in agony, having been unable to pee for 24 hours. Or rather, he could pee drops, which made him refuse to believe in a blockage, but the blockage was there, and the accumulation was backing into his kidneys, and he was finally in dreadful pain. The ambulance I called by dialling 999 came at once, and the hospital is nearby, but once in its Accident and Emergency he had to wait three hours before being seen by a doctor, and then almost another hour before she reappeared with a catheter, and then she couldn’t get it in. So then another hour or so before a second and more experienced doctor came down from the urology ward and managed to get it in after knocking him out with pethidine and gas. It was truly a nightmare seeing him in such agony and being able to do nothing, so what it must have been like for him, being in that agony – !!! After that we had another four hours in Accident and Emergency before they found him a bed, but that was alright because he wasn’t in pain anymore.
It’s a bad infection, but by today (three days after he went in) it seems obvious that it’s responding to an absolute bombardment of antibiotics. His fever is gone, and he’s much more like himself – wanted a shower this afternoon, and didn’t need all that much help having it. On Monday (two days from now) I think they are going to take out the catheter and see if he can manage without it. If he can’t, he’s going to have to come home with it. Then they are going to attack the prostate with drugs – and if the drugs fail to reduce it, they will do the big operation.
One good thing is that they found his blood sugar soaring, so he’s been on an insulin drip for two days which has brought it down a lot. They think that when he gets home it may prove possible to control it by increasing the drug he is already on, but he may have to go on to insulin injections. ‘Oh, Di’ll be able to do that,’ he said blithely; but I think I’ll have to be brutal and insist on his learning to do it himself – otherwise I’d have to give up going to Norfolk for weekends – not to mention the holiday in Ireland which I’m planning when I go to the Galway Book Festival the end of April! He’s amazingly bad at doing things – but thousands of people of whom it’s true must have managed it, so let’s hope! Luckily there’s a bus which I catch in Adelaide Road, which stops actually at the Royal Free Hospital. It’s exhausting, but less so than I would have expected. It seems to be rather good for one to have to do things.
