by Jenny Diski
DEDICATION
For Alice, Anna, Emma, Indra and Nell
for being such excellent, elegant and witty visitors.
And for Chloe, of course.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Heidi Julavits
THE VANISHING PRINCESS
OR THE ORIGIN OF CUBISM
LEAPER
MY BROTHER STANLEY
BATH TIME
HOUSEWIFE
STRICTEMPO
SHIT AND GOLD
SHORT CIRCUIT
WIDE BLUE YONDER
ON THE EXISTENCE OF MOUNT RUSHMORE AND OTHER IMPROBABILITIES
SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL: PART II
THE OLD PRINCESS
About the Author
Also by Jenny Diski
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
Heidi Julavits
I’ve been contemplating the phrase ahead of their time. What is meant when people are deemed to exist on a temporal plane the rest of us have yet to reach? It sounds like a fantastic compliment, yet the circumstance under which people hear it, in reference to themselves, is not always so positive. People are often told they are ahead of their time as a means of ego consolation following the world’s neglect of their work. If they are luckily ahead of their time, the neglect is benign. If they are less lucky, it is not.
Ignaz Semmelweiss, a Hungarian doctor in the late 1800s, tried to convince coworkers that they should wash their hands between dissecting corpses and delivering babies. His controversial “theory of contagion” won him much hostile disparagement and dishonor, after which he suffered a crippling bout of madness (possibly caused by syphilis) and perished in an asylum over twenty years before his theory was, by his doubting colleagues, embraced. So, like Semmelweiss, people can be deemed ahead of their time from a place in the future when the rest of us have finally caught up to the forward-thinking brilliance of the past, by which point the underappreciated (or maligned) innovator who’d out-thunk us by decades is usually dead.
Which is to say: it’s best to be told that you’re “ahead of your time” when you are no longer alive to hear it.
Jenny Diski, who died of cancer in 2016, just after the publication of her final book, In Gratitude (which was, in part, about dying), was ahead of her time. Also, to clarify, while Diski frequented mental wards and suffered numerous suicide attempts in her youth, she wasn’t professionally discredited during her lifetime, at least no more so than any writer whose work some people loved and others loved less. Nor would it be accurate to call her neglected; in her native UK, Diski was a prolific novelist, nonfiction writer, and regular contributor to the London Review of Books, where In Gratitude was first published as a series of essays. Still, I do not think she’s received her full due. The literary ledger needs balancing; we owe her a debt.
Twenty-four years ago, in 1993, when Diski published Skating to Antarctica, a hybrid work that fused confessional memoir, travelogue, and criticism, she expanded then-current notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be. Hybrid nonfiction has, over the decades since, benefitted from the best theory of contagion, mutated and passed along by writers like Geoff Dyer, Hilton Als, Rebecca Solnit, Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, among others. Still, I find myself embarrassed when I think I know the germination of a literary form and then realize just how wrong I am about history, and how unoriginal we all are, writers and readers, even those of us who might hope to consider ourselves practitioners and fans of a brand-new form.
Diski was, as I’ve chosen to believe based on her books and essays, under no originality delusions. As Diski writes in her collection’s title story—the complete title of which is, “The Vanishing Princess or The Origin of Cubism”—“It was to be many centuries before the form would be invented and by then no one had any notion that it had ever been done before.” Diski—again, I choose to believe—was far too shrewd to assert herself as original (in print, at least, though I hope she suffered the momentary hubris and thought it to herself); surely she knew there were writers even more deeply buried in time by foresight than she. Still, it bothers me personally that I came to Diski so late in my reading life, because she was writing the books that I only recently realized I couldn’t wait to read, only I didn’t have to wait at all, because for decades they’d already existed.
Obviously, thus, I am not a “longtime Diski fan,” but a new one. I am playing catch-up on all that I need not have missed. Strangers on a Train (2002) juxtaposes memoir and a travelogue of two American cross-country Amtrak journeys. What I Don’t Know About Animals (2010) is classic Diski in that it unearths the endless questions we might ask, if we were more actively curious, about beings that confront us daily.
Diski wrote, in total, five books of nonfiction and ten—ten!—novels.
I have read none of these novels. My Diski gateway was her nonfiction, and when it came to her fiction, I began with her short stories. The stories collected in The Vanishing Princess reveal a writer avidly experimenting with voice and structure and execution. I want to say her stories are “brave” but that sounds blurby and false; maybe it’s more useful to describe The Vanishing Princess as an artist’s sketchbook, a space where play and adventurousness are privileged over snoozy competence and sheen, a preference that seems in keeping with the authentically renegade life Diski, as a person, led.
Diski, born in London, started hard. Sexually abused by her parents, she entered the foster care system and, after meeting Doris Lessing’s son in school, was invited to live in the Lessing household. Under Lessing’s care she received, in addition to food and a roof and her first years of comparative stability, an apprenticeship in the art of the mold-breaking female writer. Her relationship with Lessing was both formative and prickly, though perhaps this was more the order of the day with Lessing rather than a mark of the uniquely charged chemistry between the two.
And yet, nothing of feminist note feels more renegade—more brave—than Diski’s ability, in her final book, On Gratitude, to confess to both the debt she owes Lessing and the emotional perplexity that, once she became a mother herself, she felt toward Lessing’s life choices. (Lessing left two small children in her native South Africa to move to London and become a writer.) Diski never judges Lessing, and perhaps this quality is what most identifies Diski as a writer: her capacity to accept people and fictional characters and even animals whose lives make no emotional sense to her, but whose existence is no less valuable and compelling and worthy of a good grapple. “I knew the difference as difference,” she writes in What I Don’t Know About Animals, “but difference wasn’t a barrier.”
The same pragmatic open-mindedness is on display in The Vanishing Princess. Originally published in England in 1995, The Vanishing Princess collects stories that rove across the aesthetic map. The title story reads like a cheekier, more bitingly urbane take on one of Angela Carter’s stories from The Bloody Chamber, as does the story “Shit and Gold,” a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin in which the miller’s daughter critiques, with wry bemusement, the multiply trapped situation in which she finds herself: “Now, it has probably crossed your mind that it’s a damn strange thing for a girl to become a wife purely on a the grounds of being able to spin straw into gold. She could become your banker, yes, but why a wife? . . . That’s how it goes in this corner of the narrative world: the prize for doing the impossible is to become the wife of a king.”
“Leaper” starts on a frank, smart-alecky Grace Paley note before stealthily shifting into oblique emotional territory. (I’d say more about this story but I don’t w
ant to ruin anything.) “Bath Time” tracks a woman’s lifelong dream to have a perfect bath, and balances the absurd with the penny-pinching real, in a way that might recall the beguiling absurd-real balance in Lessing’s The Fifth Child. “Housewife,” in its cueing of the bawdy, mainstream smut of the 1970s—Judith Krantz’s Scruples, for example—follows a woman who discovers her sexual self beyond the strictures of the expected female existence, frequently enjoys a slippery vulva state, and experiences many extra-marital orgasms while realizing, with equal shock, that she is “without the faintest remnants of a conscience.”
Then there are the more typically realist stories that explore contemporary womanhood from less of a slant. These stories start with lines that appear well behaved such as “It was Lillian’s habit to take a walk every lunchtime” and “The thought came to Ellen in the middle of the night.” But such opening sentences are not staid pacesetters; instead, they are launchpads. Both Lillian and Ellen athletically muse as a means to analyze, unpack, and cover miles of intellectual and emotional ground between typically disparate landmarks. Lillian starts thinking about ducks and ends up deconstructing her romantic relationship with a man named Charlie, whom she fears is a cheat. Ellen muses about the existence of Mount Rushmore and soon ascends far bigger questions of empathy and uncertainty.
What binds these stories, thus, is their feministly interrogative nature. Most forward-thinkingly feminist is Diski’s rattling of words and categories typically used to pathologize actively intelligent women—words and categories like “insane” and “neurotic.” Lillian thinks, “It was insane—well, neurotic—to give time and energy to suspicions that made no sense in the light of what was actually happening.” Lillian’s maybe-cheating-mate Charlie is “remarkably patient with what he called ‘LM,’ which stood for Lillian’s madness.’” (Basically, he’s patient with her for being actively engaged in the mysteries of her life, him being chief among them.) Diski calls attention to the ways in which women are taught to doubt their cognitive journeying through quotidian space, while also authentically investigating how personally restricting, in the end, such involuted mental spiralings might be. Diski’s strength is her ability to critique her own critique, but from a position of self-awareness: “One problem,” Diski archly writes, “was that Lillian was not mystified about why she was like she was.”
For me, however, what most distinguishes Diski as a thinker and writer is that she is kind. In all the ways a writer might be considered brave, it is her abundant kindness that marks her as one of the bravest writers I’ve read, because kindness is not frequently privileged among thinkers for whom superficial sharpness is the easier way to appear incisive and insightful. Kindness in women thinkers is an even riskier gambit; the products of their intellects risk appearing (to idiots) accommodating or soft, and as a result treated with less seriousness. The Diski I’ve thus far read doesn’t get hung up in this mess. She does not equate critical gravity with dismissiveness or hardline bloviating. She does not perform knee-jerk disembowelings as a means to plant the sword of her own intellectual identity on a carcass. She is not intimidated by or made to feel insecure by difference, and so does not respond to otherness with ruthlessness and obstinance. In her stories, her female protagonists respond with engagement, and via that engagement, they often come to understand that they too are a bit wanting; they see themselves differently through investigating the difference of others. Ellen, for example, confused by an inane younger student named Tracy, forces herself to inhabit Tracy’s mind. “That it had never crossed her mind that Tracy (and others, certainly) did not know where the eighteenth century was in relation to the present day, seemed to Ellen a level of ignorance close to Tracy’s.”
So I am sad that Jenny Diski is no longer around to direct us toward the temporal zones we are not yet ready to inhabit; more than ever, the present day feels like one in which we need a person ahead of her time, at least when it comes to the critical challenge of engaging, with open-hearted ferocity, things and people that make no immediate sense to us. Read Diski for the pleasures of Diski, but also read Diski to learn what we may think, in the future, about how, were we possessed by foresight, we might have better performed our humanity in the now.
The Vanishing Princess
or
The Origin of Cubism
There was once a princess who lived in a tower. It is hard to say precisely if she was imprisoned there. Certainly she had always been there, and she had never left the circular room at the top of the long winding staircase. But since she had never tried to leave it, it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that she was imprisoned.
The room had a door, and the door had a keyhole, and there was, on the side of the door that she had never seen, a key that hung from a hook in the lintel. She had been put into the room at birth and a series of people, who called themselves relatives, had come and gone, visiting the turret room, opening and shutting the door from time to time. They maintained the lock on the door very carefully, making sure it was always well oiled, so that the princess never heard the key turn in the lock, if indeed it did, and therefore never considered the possibility that she was their prisoner. Since no one ever spoke to her about the world outside the door she came to assume that it was nothing to do with her. She lacked, perhaps, curiosity; but then no one had ever suggested to her that curiosity was a quality to be cultivated. Anyway, she never attempted to open the door from her side, and so never found out if she was a prisoner or not.
But after a while the relatives stopped visiting, and there was a long period when no one came to the room at all. The princess had little sense of time and barely noticed their absence. She spent her days lying on her bed in the circular room, reading the books that filled the shelves that covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Apart from the bed and the books there was a narrow window in the room. Sometimes, when she was replacing a book she had read, or choosing the next, she passed the window. As a child she had seen green fields and woods far off in the distance, and recognised them from the stories she had read. But since her visitors had stopped coming, the land around the tower had grown rampant and it was many years since she had seen anything but vines and creepers covered with briars and merciless thorns. It looked, at the very least, unattractive.
One day, many years after the princess had been abandoned in the tower, a soldier passed nearby. He was a mercenary returning from the last of many campaigns, world-weary and bored with the sameness of everything. He noticed the tangled growth in the distance and wondered at it, that wild forest in the middle of rolling fields. Pleased to find himself curious about anything after so long a period of lassitude, he decided to investigate, and, cutting through the hedges—unworried, soldier that he was, by the merciless thorns—he discovered the tower, and the staircase, and the door to the room where the princess lay on her bed reading books.
The princess looked up from her volume as he came through the door, and waited in silence to find out what he wanted. She felt no great excitement at his arrival, for it didn’t seem to her that she was lacking anything in her life. She had what she had always had, and wanted, so far as she knew, nothing.
The soldier questioned the princess about her life in the tower and she told him what little there was to tell: about the relatives who had visited but stopped, about her books, about the view from the window.
“But what about food?” the soldier asked. “When they stopped coming, what did you do for food?”
“Food?” said the princess.
Which was how the soldier discovered that by some means or other, the princess, never having had food, had never learned to need it. This was of particular interest to the soldier, because although he had done everything and seen everything and been everywhere, and was tired of it all, there remained one thing that still gave him special pleasure: the sight of a woman eating excited him as nothing else now could. And though the princess was neither beautiful nor not beautiful, she did have an exceptionally we
ll-formed mouth.
“I’ll be back,” he said, closing the door behind him.
And as he found an oil-can above the lintel and oiled the lock, the princess couldn’t tell whether the key had been turned or not.
The soldier returned, although the princess, having no way of gauging the passing of time, had no idea how long it had been since he had first arrived. He opened the door and saw the princess on her bed, reading. She looked up and smiled. The soldier took the book from her hands and laid a small cloth on the bed on which he placed the food he had brought with him. She smiled again, and, without having to be told, began to pick up this morsel and that, first savouring the smell, then pressing it gently against her lips, and finally tasting. It pleased her, and it pleased him to watch her eat.
Now, at intervals, the soldier came to her with food. Never too often and never with too much. For the princess, food remained a pleasure but never became a necessity. Whenever he tired of his wanderings he would visit the tower with small delicacies wrapped in a white cloth; and she was always willing to exchange the pleasure of her book for the pleasure of food. This went on for many years. The princess came to expect his visits, although, in her timeless world, it couldn’t be said that she actually looked forward to them.
Then, one day, a second soldier passed that way. By now rumours had spread abroad about the strange princess in the tower and the soldier who visited her from time to time with small quantities of delicious food. The second soldier had heard these stories and one day, being battle-fatigued and lacking anything better to do, he set out to see if he couldn’t find the princess.
He recognised the thicket covering the tower from a good way off and found without difficulty the small path that the first soldier had worn through the undergrowth. When he entered the room at the top of the tower, there was the princess in her usual pose on the bed. She looked up from her book, expecting to see the first soldier and his small bundle.
