by Diana Athill
16 OCTOBER 2002
Dearest Edward –
I’m very flattered that you and Neil are ‘collecting’ my letters, and yes, it would amuse me to see them eventually, because they must cover a lot of happenings. I’m delighted that they make you laugh. God knows that anything that raises a laugh is valuable at the moment, and that must be even more true for you, living in the eye of the storm so to speak, than it is for us. The only thing I can find to be thankful for is that at least you two can’t be conscripted!
I’m sorry I forgot to report on Edinburgh. I had a lovely time. Flew up and spent the night before with old friends. They ferried me to my hotel the next morning, and of course attended my Event, bursting with pride. Coming, as they do, from the very earliest reaches of my life (he figures in Yesterday Morning as a small boy in a blue coat stumping away through an orchard with my brother and me in pursuit, and then becoming, up an apple-tree, one of our best friends) they added a pinch of something special to my success. Because the Event was a success. I was, to my surprise, billed as a solo turn, not as part of a discussion on memoir-writing which was what I had expected, and the tent – a big one – was sold out. The audience was expecting to enjoy itself, and did (this seems often to be true of audiences at British book fiestas) – which meant, of course, that the speaker enjoyed herself too. And afterwards, when we all trooped off to the enormous central selling tent (this was the ritual end of all Events) I had to sign copies till my hand ached – they said I sold over 100 copies! An enormous and very beautiful Georgian square called Charlotte Square was entirely dedicated to the book part of the festival, and had become a city of very large tents connected by canopied walkways. It was always teeming with people. In the corner a most odd tent shaped like a giant Yurt and furnished with oriental carpets and cushions was the authors’ gathering and refreshment place – a handy sort of dropping-in place where one was welcome at any time. My friends Carole Angier (biographer of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi) and Hilary Spurling (biographer of Matisse and Ivy Compton Burnett) were there, each to do their own thing the next day, so we dined together at my very swish hotel, which was fun – tho’ my energy rather gave out after that, so I didn’t go on with them to sample the Fringe into the small hours – which would have been even more fun. And the next day, before going to my friends’ events, I decided to do what I really wanted to do so instead of attending any part of the festival. I had an Orgy of wonderful picture-seeing. Edinburgh has great galleries – the National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery, and the Gallery of Modern Art. I meant to visit all three, but was so carried away by the Gallery of Modern Art (really one of the best in Europe, I think) that I only managed a part of the National Gallery as well before having to return to Charlotte Square. It’s a lovely city – absolutely a city, yet so small that sometimes, when you look down a street, you see mountains, or the sea, at the end of it. I would happily have stayed there much longer, but the Festival only pays for one’s hotel for one night, and a mere one night extra cost so much that I staggered under the shock! Anyway, I can’t really leave B alone for more than three days or so. He’s all right at present – but I have to admit that I’m pretty depressed about him. He has withdrawn so completely from life. He never actually listens to a word I say – and that extends to other people, too. The other day a friend called him and tried to persuade him to meet her somewhere, and when the conversation ended I said, ‘What did she want you to do?’ – ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But you’ve just been talking to her about it!’ – ‘I didn’t listen.’ He reads quite a lot now, besides watching sport – but never anything but accounts of murders – real ones, not fiction. It’s quite a big genre – boringly written (almost always) accounts of famous murders. Reading nothing but those is surely a bit creepy? And anything other people talk about as being interesting, he dismisses as worthless. Carole’s book about Primo Levi, which he hasn’t read (he long ago dismissed Primo Levi as ‘having nothing to say’) has been getting mixed reviews – some raves, two (and those two, alas, important ones) vicious. I told him the other day that poor Carole was shaken because she’d had a real stinker in the London Review of Books, and he perked up at once and asked to see it. I hadn’t got it. A week later he asks me ‘Which issue of the LRB was Carole’s bad review in? I want to get it.’ Only at the prospect of despising something can he feel a little cheerful! It does mean, alas, that in terms of companionship there’s not much left of us.
But one of my worries about him has been eased recently. His niece Margaret (the one-time Ambassador’s wife) came to stay a week ago, and said that she wanted to have a talk with me about the future, because I wouldn’t be able to go on looking after him indefinitely. This has been worrying me, too. I can’t count on continuing to drive a car for many more years, and I’m already unable to walk more than three or four hundred yards, and can’t carry heavy things . . . It won’t be all that long before I’m hard put to it to look after myself! So it was a great relief when Margaret said that she’d been thinking about this, so she was having a little extension to her house in Jamaica made habitable, where there is always a housekeeper and also a man who has been working for her for 30 years, and she herself goes there quite often – and that she intends to dedicate this to Barry. She says she has a good doctor there, and his brother Lloyd and his sister are nearby . . . Her idea is that he should go out there for another visit in the new year, and stay there longer this time, so that he can get used to the idea of perhaps being there all the time in the future. He won’t like the idea – he always impatiently dismisses as nonsense any mutterings of mine about getting old! But still, it is a comfort to know that if I really feel I can’t cope any longer, he has somewhere to go. Sally has always said she’ll take him, but I’m not quite sure that she could, really. Anyhow, one way or another he’ll be cared for. And I know that I can send out an SOS if the pressure becomes intolerable. Which, of course, it is far from being while I can still go pottering off on my own from time to time.
End of paper, end of letter . . . but no end of lots and lots of love
Diana
7 NOVEMBER 2002
Darling Edward,
It’s wonderful to have a fellow-carer to beef to, who talks sense back. Neil’s addiction to real life crime cheers me a lot.
You’ll have had your physical by the time you get this – my fingers are tightly crossed. A week from today I’m having a biopsy on a tiny thing on the bridge of my nose which they say may be an incipient rodent ulcer. It’s so minuscule that I don’t see why they were bothering, but my doctor said that while a rodent ulcer that is dealt with at an early stage is gone for good, if allowed to develop ‘it’s a really horrible thing.’ – ‘Horrible in what way?’ – ‘It can eat away a whole face, even the eyes.’ – Yuk! Reach for that scalpel, quick!
The other day I wrote 600 words about a biography (very dull) of Brian Moore for the Evening Standard – and got a cheque today for £400. I really must try to stir myself up to get more reviewing from papers that pay, rather than just waiting for the odd commission from the dear old Oldie, which pays £85 for something like half a page! Last week the Sunday Times mag devoted all of itself to what famous people are earning – page after page of White Trash earning millions – or rather making millions because few of them could be described as earning anything. It’s obviously easy to earn millions if you press the right buttons, so one should be ashamed of not even earning hundreds. Yet a feeling of deep fatigue overwhelms me at even the thought of doing anything about it. What a Pity.
Now now – don’t let a beautiful autumn become an omen! We’ve had lots of beautiful autumns since 1939. If those fuckers plunge us into war, let us at least enjoy good weather if we get it.
XXXXX
Diana
30 NOVEMBER 2002
Daring Edward,
I’m glad nothing worse turned up in your medical overhaul. I’ve been on medication for high blood pressure for about five years, and no
side effect has ever made itself felt, in spite of all those ominous warnings they always feel bound to include in the packaging, so I think you can reasonably expect to be equally lucky. I suppose it depends on which of the various drugs you’ve been given – but on the whole, most of the many people who have to take them seem to get by quite well. But no red meat and no butter – of all the sobering prospects, that’s one of the most!! Why not make it very nearly no, rather than utterly no? i.e. about once every month or six weeks get yourself a small but particularly exquisite piece of fillet steak and eat it almost raw? That’s what I do (though the reason I eat very nearly no red meat is because I’ve gone off it, not because it’s verboten – but the need sometimes seizes me, nevertheless, and then how I enjoy that delicious little treat). I expect you’ll feel the better for your austere diet, anyway.
Alas, but I’m sure we’d get no joy from Granta about my letters to you. I’ve got to write to Ian Jack about something else next week so will ask him – but don’t get hopes up. [I didn’t approach him in the end – it was only later when I saw the transcription that I approached Granta.]
Barry seems to be a good deal better, though he still spends most of the day in bed. But when he gets up he does quite testing things, like going into Camden Town to buy Jamaican food from a little shop someone told him about, and his blood sugar level isn’t too bad. But I still touch wood every time I think he’s better, because with diabetes you never know.
XXX Diana
29 DECEMBER 2002
Darling Edward –
I’d like to see a statistical study done of this subject – but have you ever known of a serious domestic emergency occurring on a Monday morning, with a week of working days stretching conveniently ahead? I never have.
In the night of Dec. 20, which had been a Friday, at 3.30 a.m. I – who was in the 48th hour of a bout of flu – woke up to an odd sensation. Which, it turned out, was caused by the dripping of rain water onto my prostrate body. From the ceiling of my bedroom. Next morning I was at least able to speak to Len Jones. Len is all but the property of Hilary Bach, who lives six houses along from us. For years and years he’s done all the Bachs’ building, plumbing and electrical things – but very occasionally as a huge privilege, the Bachs allow friends to borrow him. This time Len quite saw the urgency, and said that if the Bachs had not yet gone off to Oxford to stay with their daughter for Xmas, he could get out onto their roof and walk along the intervening roofs to ours (to which, as he knows, our house offers no access) with a tarpaulin, which would keep out the rain until the end of the Winter Break. (All London builders and scaffolders take a complete two week break at Christmas, which they observe as strictly as any Muslim observes Ramadan.) Need I tell you that the Bachs had left for Oxford the day before!
So – I moved my bed into my sitting room, put buckets in place, and concentrated hard on getting over my flu by Monday, the 23rd, when I was due to go to Norfolk to stay with my brother. Which I managed to do, give or take the odd fit of coughing – and my darling nephew Phil drove my car for me on the evening of the 23rd, and we gave Charlie a lift, and thus began a lovely Christmas break during which I was able not to think even once about my bedroom ceiling.
Barry reports that it’s got no worse. He’s been having a very West Indian Xmas, which started with a visit to Brixton market from which he returned laden with exotic foods – isn’t it marvellous that he’s suddenly become able to face such excursions? The last time he visited the hospital it was because he had been summoned (to our surprise) to the heart clinic. He was his usual clueless self, when he got back, about what had been said to him, but he did know that he’d been prescribed some new pills, and he has been taking them. I think the improvement in his energy is the result. And simultaneously an old friend, ex-wife of one of his school-fellows, got in touch and told him about sources of Caribbean food.
I’ve moved on from my brother’s to our house, where Barbara has been over Xmas, and we have both been asked to a couple of parties this weekend. It’s deliciously quiet in this house, after all the va et vient at my brother’s. This Christmas only three grandsons were there, but they have lots of friends. Everyone was very loving and amusing, and I had a lovely time, but a bit of silence is not unwelcome. It was amazingly beautiful on the coast, where he lives – a strange, shifting coastline. A few hundred years ago the sea came right up to where their village is, but now there’s a good half-mile of marsh-land between the village and the sea, and beyond that a long, low stretch of dunes.
It was warm, with lovely sunny mornings – exquisite light, the sea a deep blue for once (usually, there, the colour of gravy) with magical mother-of-pearl effects. Two years ago my sister-in-law gave Andrew a tree-house for his 80th birthday – there’s some kind of pine tree near their house, and you climb forty sturdy steps (with good hand-rails) up to the little house perched in it, and it really is magic up there. When I heard about it I thought ‘what a waste of money!’ – but the truth is, it was an enchantingly poetic idea on her part, astonishing in someone famous for a positively Monumental Practicality (which she has needed, raising four boys on a pittance. She has never in her life had any help of any sort in her house, doing all the decorating and so on herself – and when they were young even making the boys’ clothes. A heroic woman. She still thinks nothing of having forty people in for supper after the Carol service.).
Charlie impressed me greatly this Christmas. His mother has a bad knee, which gives her a lot of pain, and her heart is in a dicey condition. She refuses to give an inch to either condition, and my selfish old brother is all too ready to ignore anything amiss unless it’s forced on him. The way Charlie joked and wheedled her out of the kitchen and into an armchair, and then did a lot of work without appearing to do so, was masterly – so kind, and so clever. He is a dear person. And she, in addition to her astounding energy and practicality, is often very funny – and she has a wonderful eye for pretty things. My lucky old brother chose well.
Several fans rolled up with books for me to sign. I always feel that Barbara rather disapproves of such manifestations (she has always disliked autobiographical writing, and I suspect makes no exception for mine!). But my brother and sister are delightfully proud of me, which I like very much.
Back to London the day after tomorrow. Oh dear, I wish our house wasn’t so tall and didn’t have parts of it sticking out behind – you can’t get to the roof just with a ladder. Scaffolding costs fortunes. Perhaps it would be cheaper to take down the ceiling in my bedroom and get at the roof from inside: Oh well, we’ll have to see.
Happy New Year (I don’t see why it shouldn’t be OK at a personal level) to both of you, my dears.
Love and love
Diana
1 JANUARY 2003
Darling Edward –
Found Robert’s [Robert Friend’s] poems when I got home yesterday. Love them – more and more as he got older. Want to have his last one on my gravestone.
Have found five typos, for when (d.v.) it gets reprinted.
P. 56, 2nd stanza – should surely be dirtied, not dirties?
P. 61, first line – Of only should be If only.
P. 128, third stanza – who hands on you should be who hangs on you.
P. 155, second stanza. I think of rain should be oh rain, as he is addressing it?
Will give it to B today – I’m not sure that he’ll read, he seemed a bit low today.
Barbara to her grief, is not writing about the Middle East nowadays because the Economist, under a new editor, has gone hawkish which she abominates. She says she’s not walking out only because they’d like her to. For the Xmas number she wrote a long and excellent piece about dogs! (They go frivolous for Xmas Day.) Her piece was serious in a way – about how humans have manipulated dogs genetically through the ages – but was entertaining too. She’s really very good, and it’s a sad waste that she’s always worked for a paper which allows no byline. (Though she was allowed her name on that spe
cial feature she did on Iran, as an extraordinary exception.)
Charlie will be coming round soon, bringing things I left behind by accident at his parents’ house. I’ll get you his e-mail address then. He’s quite impossible to get on the phone, even though he has a mobile – the most elusive customer.
I’m beginning to look forward to reading my letters! Hope the reality isn’t a great let down after your kind enthusiasm. XXXXX
D
21 JANUARY 2003
Darling Edward –
I’m enclosing a rambling letter which I wrote when I was in Norfolk last weekend – and by the way, yes of course you must drive there with me if you want to visit that old man. It will be fun. But this letter is really about my letters, which I found when I got back here.
Heavens! What a labour you’ve undertaken!! I’d no idea I’d covered so much paper to you. I must confess to enjoying them now. They recall so much, and sometimes I’m quite struck by how good they are! But I think that trying to get one’s own letters published would be very unseemly. There’s a good reason for publishing an autobiographical book – one is trying to get to the bottom of experiences which may be relevant to other people. But to publish one’s private conversation, which is what letters are – what could that be but saying ‘Hey – look at me!’ and there are two other reasons against it – the first, that it would make me self-conscious in the future when I wrote to you, feeling that I wasn’t just talking to you but was writing for possible publication. And the second, which is very important, is that a book of my letters would be pointless without yours – would be only half the conversation – and I haven’t kept yours. I know I ought to have. How I have kicked myself for not having kept Alfred’s and Jean’s – I ought to have learned my lesson. But I’m not, and I’ve never been, a keeper – I think because I and my friends wrote so many letters to each other when we were young that it really was just like talking, so letters are fixed in my mind as being talking, and thus ephemeral. One listens, one responds, one goes on to the next bit . . . I did, when young, keep love letters, but not anything else.
