Somewhere Towards the End

by Diana Athill

  Bewick himself did not embrace what was ‘modern’ in his day with much enthusiasm. He adhered to the traditional techniques of wood-engraving, he abhorred enclosure, and he much preferred the tremendously long walks he undertook as a young and middle-aged man to the train journeys which had become possible when he was old. But his innate gifts as a naturalist and his brilliance as an artist brought him fame because they answered what was then a ‘modern’ need, and in his private life his keen discussion of new developments in science and politics with his fellow tradesmen – the creativity and intellectual liveliness that blossomed among these men of little education, who often gathered together in clubs or debating societies such as Newcastle’s ‘Lit. and Phil.’, the Literary and Philosophical Society to which Bewick belonged and which is still in existence – was typical of this fecund time. It is evoked with such sensitivity, and in such rich detail, by Uglow as she brings to life the passionate, vulnerable, eccentric, reliable, wholly lovable man she clearly hates to leave behind at the end of her book.

  I have gained much from many non-fiction books, but will let those four stand for them all. What refreshment, to be able to take a holiday from oneself in such good company.

  Another kind of reading which is common among old people, and which I indulge in quite often, is returning to old favourites. Often this is pure pleasure, but sometimes it makes me see that even the run-of-the-mill novel of today is much more sophisticated and interesting than that of my early youth, not to mention those popular just before the First World War, books bought by my parents when they were young which were still on our shelves when I began to move on from children’s books, so that I read them too, and enjoyed them. Everyone in my family was familiar with, and loved, the classics, but naturally what they mostly read was the equivalent of what is reviewed on the literary pages of today, ranging from the seriously good to the cosy Aga-saga or Bridget Jones type of entertainment, and some of these still lurk in the little Norfolk house where I spend many weekends. From time to time I pull one out, just to remind myself, and end up unsure whether I am more dismayed or amused. The best of them seem ponderous and verbose, over-given to description (what a lot about cutting from here to there we have learnt from the cinema!), while as for the rest! Infantile tosh: that is what they so often are.

  At the end of the 1800s and during the pre-war years of the twentieth century there was an extraordinary fashion for ‘historical’ romances. A few of them, books by Dumas and Rider Haggard, for example, are saved by imaginative vigour and a gift for storytelling – though perhaps I like Haggard just because he was ‘ours’, the Haggards being neighbours of my grandparents, so that we went to parties with his grandchildren and on most Sundays listened to Sir Rider reading the lessons in church (very dramatically – his rendering of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the burning fiery furnace was long remembered). But there was a teeming undergrowth of books such as those of Jeffery Farnol, who favoured chapter headings like ‘How and Why I Fought With One Gabbing Dick, a Pedlar’ or ‘In Which I Begin to Appreciate the Virtues of the Chaste Goddess’, or Agnes and Egerton Castle, of whose If Youth But Knew the following is a typical paragraph:

  ‘What things,’ said the fiddler, addressing his violin as the court fool of old his bauble (after the singular fashion which led people to call him crazy) – ‘what things, beloved, could we not converse upon tonight, were we not constrained by sinners? What a song of the call of the spring to last year’s fawn – of the dream which comes to the dreamer but once in his life’s day, and that before the dawn? Chaste and still as the night, and yet tremulous; shadows, mere shadows, yet afire; voiceless, formless, impalpable, yet something more lovely than all the sunshine can show, than all the beauty arms can hold hereafter, than all the music ears shall hear … O youth! O love!’ sighed the fiddler, and drew from his fiddle a long echo to the sigh.

  In these novels young women were called maidens and were wilful but chaste, sometimes defiant, but if so, absolutely certain to end by yielding tremulously to a young man who may have been wrong-headed to start with but proved stunningly honourable when it came to the crunch, and this pair was more than likely to encounter a picturesque tinker or itinerant musician, or suchlike, possessed of endless funds of wry wisdom. Heroes and heroines were of noble, or at least extremely gentle, birth, although because their breeding was true they would mingle happily with peasants or with those tinkers (a fairly frequent device was to have them disguised as humbler beings, thus allowing for misunderstandings and revelations). The reverence for class in these books was blatant. The novel in Britain is still a middle-class phenomenon, but no longer so fatuously as it was then. And these ridiculous books were cheerfully enjoyed by intelligent adults – and by me, in my early teens. So who knows what will be made a hundred years or so from now of the perfectly acceptable fiction of which I, and many other old people, have had enough? Perhaps we shall be proved right.

  I depend so much on reading because I never developed the habit of watching television. I have never even bought a set. In 1968 I was given one by the woman who used to clean for me, because it had started to go into snaky waves at crucial moments and she was replacing it with one less tiresome, and for a few weeks I watched it all of every evening, always hoping that the next thing to appear on the screen would be wonderful, and it wasn’t. So then I put it in my lodger’s room, and in that room, now Barry’s, it still is (or rather, its successor is – he has replaced it several times), watched by me only for Wimbledon and the Derby, or when Tiger Woods is playing. I used to watch the Grand National too, but can no longer bear to do so because of horses being killed. (Though quite tough when young, now I find any sort of cruelty unwatchable and, if vivid, unreadable: I couldn’t read all of even my much admired William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal, which describes the destruction of Delhi in 1857, a brilliant and important book, because of the horrors he was having to report. The routine horrors in the daily news are different, in that one has to be aware of those, though I dwell on details as little as possible.) I am always embarrassingly at a loss when people discuss television programmes, as they so often do, and the many columns of newsprint devoted to television are meaningless babble to me, but although I realize this ignorance is truly nothing to be proud of, I have to suppose that some foolish part of my mind is attached to it, because I have never been able to remedy it. It is easier to imagine returning to radio than buying a television set. I once listened to Radio Three a lot, being hungry for music, but now that deafness has distorted most musical sounds to the point of ugliness, I have given that up. If, however, I become unable to read, which god forbid, I expect Radio Four will become welcome. I have dear friends in New York who are almost ready to move to London for the sake of Radio Four.

  13

  THE ACTIVITIES I escape into are mostly ordinary things which have become more valuable because I am old, enjoyed with increasing intensity because of the knowledge that I shan’t be able to enjoy them for much longer; but easily the best part of my old age has been, and still is, a little less ordinary. It is entirely to do with having had the luck to discover that I can write. I don’t suppose that I shall carry it as far as my friend Rose Hacker, who at the age of a hundred is the oldest newspaper columnist in Britain (she writes for the Camden News), but it looks as though it will still be with me when (if!) I reach my ninetieth birthday, and it is impossible adequately to describe how grateful I am for that.

  It took me by surprise, and has done so twice, which appears to be unusual, because the majority of writers seem to know quite early in their lives that writing is what they want to do. I knew from early childhood that I loved books, and from my early teens that I enjoyed writing letters and was considered by my friends to write good ones, but I didn’t aspire to writing books, probably because when I was young ‘books’ meant ‘novels’, and I lack the kind of imagination a novelist must have: the ability to create characters and events and even (in cases of genius) whole wor
lds. And probably the fact that my love of other people’s writing led me into a career as an editor meant that much of whatever creative energy I possessed found an outlet in my daily work, so that it took many years to build up perceptible pressure.

  But pressure did build, making its first appearance in the form of little outbreaks like those small hot springs that bubble up here and there in volcanic territory: nine short stories, none of them planned. There would be an agreeable sort of itchy feeling, a first sentence would appear from nowhere, and blip, out would come a story. One of them won the Observer’s short-story competition, an intoxicating thrill in that it showed I had been putting down words in the right way, but it didn’t make any more stories come after a tenth had fizzled out after two pages. That was followed by a lull of almost a year. Then, looking for something in a rarely opened drawer, I happened on those two pages, and read them. Perhaps, I thought, something could be made of them after all, so the next day I put paper in my typewriter and this time it wasn’t blip, it was whoosh! – and Instead of a Letter, my first book, began. Those stories had been no more than hints of what was accumulating in the unconscious part of my mind, and the purpose of that accumulation, which I hadn’t known I needed, was healing.

  Twenty years earlier I’d had my heart broken, after which I had gradually learnt to live quite comfortably by accepting – so I thought – that as a woman I was a failure. Now, when this book turned out to be an account of that event which was as nearly accurate as I could make it, I was cured. It was an extraordinary experience. The actual writing was extraordinary because, although I was longing all day to get back from the office and sit down to it, I never knew (and this is literally true) what the next paragraph I was going to write would be. I would quickly read the last two or three pages from the day before, and on it would instantly go; and yet, in spite of this absolute lack of method, the finished book appeared to be a carefully structured work. (It struck me then, and I am sure this is true, that a great deal of that sort of work must go on in one’s sleep.) And the final result was extraordinary too, in that once the book was done the sense of failure had vanished for good and I was happier than I had ever been in my life. I was also sure that writing was what I liked doing best, and hoped that more of it would come to me.

  More did come, twice in the shape of traumatic events – one the suicide of a man I had been trying to help, the other the murder of a young woman. I plunged straight into ‘writing them out’, as what seemed to me the natural and certain way of ridding my mind of distress, and in both cases the events in themselves made ‘stories’, so the experience of writing them was a good deal less mysterious than that of writing Instead of a Letter. ‘Enjoyable’ seems the wrong word for the writing of them, but absorbing – indeed consuming – it was. And of course both books ‘got me over’ something painful: so much so that as soon as they were finished I put them away, and away they would have stayed had friends not urged me to get them published (the second of them was in a drawer for sixteen years).

  Neither of those books meant a great deal to me after they had served their purpose, though naturally I was very pleased if people spoke well of them, and the same was true of the novel which I wrote in the 1960s because my publisher nagged me. (One can’t help being very pleased if told convincingly that one writes well: it’s like a shot of essential vitamins to one’s self-esteem). In those days anyone who wrote anything at all good that was not a novel was constantly badgered with ‘And now when are you going to give us your novel?’ (I never did this myself when I was a publisher because I couldn’t see any sense in it. There were plenty of people around who were damn well going to give us their novel come hell or high water, anyway.) I capitulated, against my better judgement, and although I was proud of it in the end because it turned out quite a neat little book, and I still take pleasure in remembering writing parts of it, as a whole it was such appallingly hard work that I swore never again. What it proved was that while anyone who can write at all can squeeze out one novel at a pinch, this particular person was right in knowing herself not to be a novelist. I felt detached from that book because I had not really wanted to write it. The other two – perhaps I followed their fortunes with less interest than those of Instead of a Letter simply because I had become slightly embarrassed at making public things usually considered private, and for a private reason. I believed, and still believe, that there is no point in describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching in my upbringing: Do Not Think Yourself Important.

  Much as I wanted to continue to write, I found it impossible unless something was itching to come out. I could cover paper easily in ordinary ways such as letters, blurbs, reviews of books and so on, but if I tried to tell a story or examine a subject because that was what, intellectually, I wanted to do, not because there was pressure inside me to do it, the writing would be inert. With persistence, I could go on covering paper, but plod plod plod it would go until I was bored out of my mind. It is hard to explain, probably because I have never been able to force myself to examine it, but it seems to be something to do with hitting on a rhythm – perhaps getting down to a level at which that rhythm exists. Without it, my sentences are dead. With it, and I can always tell when I have hit it, don’t ask me how, the sentences start to flow as though on their own. Real writers, I am sure, are more disciplined than this and must be able to keep themselves at it, as well as being, no doubt, gifted with readier access to that mysterious rhythm. My own dependence on a specific kind of stimulus has always seemed to me proof that I am an amateur – though that is not to take back the statement that ‘writing is what I like doing best’.

  Anyway, by the time I retired from my job, at the age of seventy-five, I hadn’t written anything for a long time because it was a long time since anything had happened to me that needed curing. I was sorry about that, because I did so greatly enjoy the act of writing, but it had become so firmly attached in my mind to the need to write for therapeutic reasons that I couldn’t envisage myself doing it for any other reason. People started saying to me ‘You had fifty years in publishing, you worked with all those interesting people – you ought to write about it, you know, you really ought!’ and a cloud of boredom would descend on me, out of which I would answer: ‘But I don’t work like that.’ And that was true for at least the first two years of my retirement.

  Then I began to catch myself remembering incidents from, or aspects of, the past with enough pleasure to want to dwell on them, so every now and then I would scribble a few pages about whatever it was that had floated to the surface in that way. Mostly it was about our firm’s early days, because starting up a firm with almost no money and no experience at all really was great fun. (I am speaking for myself when I say ‘no experience at all’: André Deutsch, the moving spirit of the adventure, had only about a year’s experience but had sucked out of that year more than many people gain from a lifetime.) Looking back at it I could see what an unusual and interesting time it had been and how lucky I was to have been involved in it. Once my memories reached the point at which we moved into our offices in Great Russell Street and were able confidently to consider ourselves proper publishers, the fizz went out of them. Indeed, at the thought that there were still thirty years ahead the cloud of boredom would reappear, because how on earth could I plod my way through thirty years without sending everyone else to sleep as well as myself? So I would push aside whatever I had just written and forget about it, until another odd or amusing memory floated up.