Letters to a Friend

by Diana Athill

  18 AUGUST 2005

  Well – my gloomy predictions about a long haul proved mistaken. My poor old bro. died yesterday – snuffed quietly out in mid-sentence while his wife was with him. Charlie and Phil, both tearful, came round yesterday evening to tell me, on their way to Norfolk, where the other two sons already were. They, like me and like their mother too, for that matter, knew perfectly well that he was beyond recovery and was dreadfully depressed at the prospect of dragging on, and they were still, like her, badly shaken when it happened. He was a very good and much loved father. And anyway, death – I too felt surprisingly sad, considering how fully aware I was, and am, that his going now is a good thing.

  I’m going to Norfolk tomorrow. Wasn’t sure that Mary would want anyone but the boys around, but she asked me to come. I hope the funeral can be next Thursday, but the undertaker is not sure that it can be fitted in. It will be a huge affair, because almost the whole of Norfolk knew him and liked him. Phil wants to turn it into a very large and splendid party, in celebration of what was on the whole a remarkably happy life, and since he’s good at such things I expect he’ll manage it. He also wants me to speak at the funeral, which I shall be glad to do. It’s odd how having been each other’s most intimate friends in early childhood, laid down a sort of sub-structure of affection and understanding that survived a huge amount of difference in our ways of thinking and living as grown-ups.

  I’m sending herewith the last-but-one draft of the piece for The Times, which surfaced on this chaotic table just now.

  Love and love D

  22 NOVEMBER 2006

  Darling,

  Thank god about the test results, which sound about as good as one can hope for at our age and thoroughly dealable with. Also how marvellous that your doctor (doctors?) is/are lovely. Yes, of course ailments and their medication are fascinating – really important stuff, after all, and easy as it is to slip into being snide about doctors and hospitals, they are actually much more often good than bad. I, for one, hearty old woman as I seem to be, would make a very different impression if it wasn’t for the three pills I take daily, and have taken for the past five or six years, two for blood pressure and heart, one for something in my guts that is, I think, very like the thing you’ve got, perhaps identical. Because of all the stories one hears of doctors over-medicating oldies until they become zombies, from time to time I experiment with cutting my medications out, and it’s never worked. I’ve always slid into feeling lousy in one way or another, and have returned to normal health on going back to them. I think your ‘the body heals itself’ is true enough in youth and middle age, but that it’s asking a bit too much of it to expect it to do so when it’s old. I’m so happy to think that you are now in Germany at last . . . have a gorgeous time there. You certainly deserve it after what you’ve been enduring.

  Barry’s party went well. There were twelve of us, so Barbara (who alas had to be in Norfolk on the day) let us have her dining room, and all I had to do was lay the table and supply the dishes. Sally’s husband, Henry, is a wonderful cook, simply by nature it seems, he loves doing it and is quite unruffled by large numbers. He cooked, and then transported from Somerset a most delicious tiger prawn, ginger and coconut concoction, so that only the rice and the veg. had to be done on the spot. His daughter Jessamy made Barry’s favourite curry in her kitchen, and brought it over, together with a cake she had made. Sally made and brought from Somerset a sublime trifle, Xandra from across the road supplied another cake . . . I only had to supply the wine, the salad, the bread and the cheese (the last of which everyone was much too full by then to touch). It was Barry, me, Lloyd, Sally, Henry, Jessamy, Beachy (short for Beauchamp, their son), Glen (a charming lost boy from the US who seems to have been more or less adopted by that family), Xandra and Clytie and Peter. Barry behaved disgracefully, grabbed Xandra’s cake before the meal had started and began sawing at it although it was still wrapped up in cellophane, rejected Jessamy’s curry (‘I told you I wanted lamb not chicken’), didn’t say thank you to anyone for the presents he was given, and stumped off back to bed half way through the first course. He confirmed, in fact, my belief that senility has set in and that it’s not just ‘Barry being Barry’.

  So we went ahead and enjoyed ourselves, everyone knowing him too well to take offence, and sweet Sally and Jess took turns to pop upstairs from time to time and pet him a bit, so I suppose he quite liked it. But I must chase him to at least say thank you to Georgia, Adam’s wife. Adam was in New York and Georgia couldn’t come because she had a relation visiting to admire the baby, but she had taken the trouble to find six blocks of different kinds of diabetic’s chocolate, wrap them up prettily and attach a charming card saying ‘With much love from Sandy’ (Sandy is Alexander, the baby, and Barry does love him). And all Barry did when I showed it him was grunt. I suppose the occasion would have been a good deal happier if he had been able to take some pleasure in it, but to tell the truth I’m so accustomed by now to what he’s turned into that I did quite genuinely enjoy the cheerful kindness of everyone there. Not to mention the trifle! It would have been even more fun if you’d been there. Keep well, darlings. Diana

  7 DECEMBER 2006

  Darling Edward,

  At last I’ve been able to read your two e-mails about arriving. I don’t know why the computer has been misbehaving and has now suddenly pulled itself together. For the last three days when I’ve tried to see what e-mails have come in, it has said that it is about to access seven new ones, and that little arrow which starts pouring into a box has got to work, but nothing has appeared, and when it reaches four of seven it has just gone on and on and on saying that it is doing that one, for as much as twenty minutes, and still nothing appears! Although I do see that I have three in my inbox – but I can’t make them come up on the screen. However, this evening your two have at last and belatedly come up, and I’m so glad to know you have arrived safely and that the apartment seems to be OK. We are OK too, though I’ve had a stinking cold for a week now – but only a cold, no temperature, quite a good appetite, so nothing to worry about. Tomorrow Barbara goes to Stockholm for the weekend, because Adam, Georgia and Alexander are there and Adam and Georgia are going to some enormously grand Nobel banquet, so Barbara has to be there to baby-sit [Adam is employed by the Nobel Foundation]. Therefore I shall be Hannah-sitting, which has become a worry because she now has a v. bad heart and is not supposed to go up stairs but is heavy to carry – so I think I shall take her to Norfolk where the stairs are much fewer and she can manage them. Barbara nurses her with impassioned care, but when Barbara is ill as she was last week with a terrible cough, Hannah most unfairly is horrid to her – she hates her coughing so much that she refuses to stay in the same room with her! Luckily Hannah’s vet has given her a new heart pill which has made her feel quite sparkly, so I don’t think I’ll have too difficult a time.

  My book is making progress, though I don’t think it can possibly become more that 40,000 words long. But what’s wrong with very short books? I’m all for them. My beloved Ian Jack, editor of Granta magazine and boss of Granta Books, has sadly given his notice. But he won’t be actually leaving till next June, so I’m hoping he’ll be there to accept my book in – with luck – late February, and get it started. It won’t be the same once he’s gone – I’m very sad about it.

  Tell me how one gets unread messages out of the inbox! I thought you just clicked on it, but that isn’t working. Oh how awful if you really have had all your material wiped out as it went through that machine! Love and love Diana

  12 JANUARY 2007

  Darling Edward –

  I delivered my book three days ago and am now summoning up patience and touching wood. Who knows if Ian will like the second half of it as much as he liked the first. As soon as I know whether I am to rejoice or to rend my raiment I’ll let you know. I had a bad but short cold before my lovely ten-day Xmas holiday, and then a much longer one afterwards which turned into infected sinuses and is
only just clearing up under antibiotics. Have not been really ill, but feeling lousy, in spite of which I was able to write last pages of book. Barry has been having a rough time. First, a violent attack of food poisoning (we suppose, tho’ what by we don’t know) – which was even rougher on me, because of the enormous amount of shit I had to clean off acres of carpet at 3.30 a.m. when feeling far from at my best. For an hour or two I felt that the end had come, I just couldn’t go on, but as you know, one can in fact go on. Then he had a horrid fall on the stairs, the first fall he has had. Nothing broken, thank god, but bruised and very shaken. But that has led to a good development, because our darling pocket doctor, Jess, daughter of Sally and Henry who is well on in her medical studies and lives just down the road from us, agreed to go with him to his doctor instead of me. He alone at the doc’s might just as well be staying at home in bed because he never says anything about what’s wrong and never listens to what is said, and I at the doc’s with him am not much better because I’m not really sure what to ask and am inhibited when trying to report on his condition by his scowls and denials. But Jess, this morning, got him referred for a) a cardiac examination and b) a general neurological examination, both of which he urgently needs, and also got his medication changed because one of the things he’s been taking is notoriously depressing. We now have to wait for the appointments, of course, but at least something may come of it.

  Lloyd, his brother, has to go back to Jamaica next week because his tenant is moving out of his house there and will probably take most of his furniture unless Lloyd is there to keep an eye. He is v. depressed by Barry who is, I think, pleased to have him around, but who has spoken no more to him since he arrived in November than he has to me. I shall miss Lloyd, although it will be rather a relief not to have to spend so much time thinking up interesting dinners – he’s a keen foodie. But on the whole it’s his keen attitude that makes him a pleasure to have around. He’s well on in his seventies, but is full of energy and does so enormously enjoy his theatre-going and so on – a pleasant change from poor B! He says he’ll come back in March if he manages to let his house again by then. Love and love, dear loves, and touch wood for Somewhere Near the End (too downbeat a title? I like it). Diana

  14 JANUARY 2007

  Darling E,

  I like After the Fall: Poems Old and New – and I’m good at titles: do call it that. And I’m glad it’s not too long before you’ll be back home, because this time of year, through to the end of Feb., is the pits. Any kind of ailment just goes on and on, making one feel low and vulnerable even if not really ill, and the cosiness of being at home is preferable to anything else in such circumstances. My heavy catarrh drags on – not noticeable when my mind’s engaged, but lurking for empty moments: a bore. And yours sounds a bit worse.

  I read that Stasi book and nothing would make me visit the place! I hope you follow your instinct and don’t. Yes, one should know about such miserable horrors, but what the fuck good does it do to dwell on them? Particularly when one is old. At one’s active peak one probably ought to because just possibly dwelling on evil strengthens one’s ability to do something about it, but what more do we need to know beyond the plenty we know already? Did I tell you – I don’t think I did – about Alice Herz-Sommer, 103 years old and interviewed in the Guardian, survivor of Theresienstadt from which her young husband went to his death, and of the deaths of all his and most of her own family, and not long ago of her beloved son whom she had raised single-handed in Israel, to which she went (from Czechoslovakia) after the war, and who brought her to London twenty years ago where she still lives in a one-room flat not far from here. And who practices the piano (she studied under a pupil of Liszt’s) for three hours every day to this day, and says cheerfully that life is extremely beautiful – and indeed looks in her photo as though that is what she truly feels. She attributes this to her great luck in being born with an optimistic disposition, so that ‘although I know about the bad I look only for the good’. Which I have decided is a good idea! xxxxxxx Diana

  15 FEBRUARY 2007

  Darling,

  What is this airy reference to a colostomy? This must have been the medical news waiting for you on your return home – what a horrid shock [not so horrid; Edward had mistyped colonoscopy – the investigation, not the operation – and all was well]. It is of course true that lots of people have them and manage very well having done so, so you are quite right not to mop and mow and rend your raiment over it, but all the same –

  What a bloody nuisance! Barbara’s mother had one when she was sixty-three, and being one of the world’s most squeamish women, made the heaviest weather imaginable of it. I believe that nowadays they often manage to restore the guts to normal working order, but in those days there was no question of that, it was just a new hole for the shit to come out of into a colostomy bag and that was that, and she drove everyone to distraction with her horror at this fate – but in the end managed to live very successfully with it for over thirty more years! But the most recent one I know of, a few months ago, was restored to normal remarkably soon, so I devoutly hope that will be so in your case. But obviously it’s going to complicate your busy spring programme.

  I can’t print things at the moment – thought at first I must have done something silly to my printer, but peering into its innards I now think I can see something broken. Granta printed out the book for me (and will have to do so again because I have just greatly improved the last chapter).

  Extraordinary to read about your snowfall while we are in the middle of a freakish early spring! It’s true that last week we had three coldish days and a bit of snow (in London about two inches, which melted away overnight) but now it’s sun with intermittent gentle showers of rain, and the magnolia in our garden is nearly out, and birds are singing. Somewhere near here a robin is reported to have built a nest in a Christmas wreath hanging on someone’s door, and hatched four eggs! But I suppose your blizzard could still cross the Atlantic – the usual pattern seems to be that we get your bad weather about a week later.

  Barry heard this morning that he must have a cataract operation in about a month’s time – he seemed to be unaware that his sight was deteriorating, though I had noticed it. Having been assured by me that it won’t hurt (which of course it won’t) he is unworried. I hope the Royal Free, which is where he will have it, is as good as Moorfield’s, the very old-fashioned but marvellous eye hospital which did mine. I haven’t suggested he transfers, because the Royal Free is round the corner while Moorfield’s entails a good many visits to quite a distant clinic where you have to endure long waits, and he’s not up to that.

  I’m a bit overwhelmed, having foolishly accepted an invitation to be one of the judges for the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize (a big prize – £30,000 – organized by the BBC). Naturally this involves a hideous amount of reading. At this stage it’s not too bad because we are still weeding-out to reduce the number of books to the ‘long list’ of twenty, which means that quite a lot of the books are obvious non-contenders so don’t have to be read right through. But it’s going to become a headache, because there’s a lot of very good stuff there, and there are really hard decisions ahead – a big problem being that there are many kinds of non-fiction, and how do you decide between a very good biography and a very good piece of popular science? It will be like those ridiculous things at the end of big dog shows when they make the Best of Show award, choosing between a Pomeranian on the one hand and a Pit Bull on the other. But I believe – I’m not sure – that we get paid £2000, which will be nice! Goodbye for now (high time, you’ll be thinking!). XXXXXXXXX D

  16 FEBRUARY 2007

  Darling –

  Thank goodness for that! Just had a call from Ian Jack confirming acceptance of book (of which I have revised the last little chapter to v. good effect, I think). ‘So now will you send me a contract?’ – ‘Yes of course, – I’ve been thinking about money. What about – ’ and this is what I think I heard him say, but
given my deafness I may well be wrong ‘– eight thousand pounds’!!! Actually I don’t think it could have been that, but what other figure sounds roughly like ‘eight’? Certainly not ‘two’ (what I was hoping for) or even ‘three’ or ‘four’ well, we’ll see when the contract comes, and shan’t be at all surprised if it turns out I misheard ridiculously (I often do, particularly on the phone). The more I think about it the more sure I become that I must have done [but I hadn’t]. XXXXXXXXX D

  21 FEBRUARY 2007

  Darling,

  Love hearing that you enjoyed Somewhere Towards the End. I took the disc over to Granta today, so now they’ve got the final thing, and Ian confirmed that it is £8000. I’m sure I only got £2000 last time, tho’ of course more came in when they paperbacked my other books. It seems that nowadays eight is nothing special – he was very tickled when I asked him to confirm it because I couldn’t believe it was so much, he thought I was raising the subject because I was going to ask for more. Perhaps I should have done!!!

  I thought my printer was just choking on a piece of paper, but now I’ve peered into it while the ink cartridges are sliding back towards their parking place (into which they won’t fully go, which is the trouble) and I see there is a sort of comb-shaped white thing against which they are supposed to come to rest, and two of its teeth are sort of sticking up – in a broken-looking way, so that’s probably the trouble. Francis will be back from Italy in about two weeks and I’ll have to get him to come and look at it. Will see about e-mailing revised end soon, but must now cope with poor sick Hannah who I’m dog sitting today. XXXXXX D—