Alive, Alive Oh!

by Diana Athill

  He went into his disastrous marriage because he did not yet fully know himself, and accepted the worldly wisdom of Lady Melbourne, his mother substitute. He was terribly short of money, and to her the solution was obvious: he must stop inviting trouble by messing about with his half-sister (which was making him feel guilty anyway) and marry a rich woman. Because he was so clever, Lady Melbourne may have thought that Anne Isabella Milbanke’s celebrated intellect would suit him! So there he was, tied to a woman who was not only a bit of a bluestocking but also smugly determined to save his soul. It was a dreadful mistake which inflamed his tendency to depression and drove him almost at once into uncharacteristic hysteria and cruelty. His own belief was that his romantic poetry was a safety valve which saved him from going mad, which was why he always insisted that he was not proud of it (he said this in his private diary as well as publicly). This crisis, however, was beyond solution by verse. It propelled him into exile, from which he was to send some of the best letters ever written.

  They are so good because he (like Boswell) wrote as he spoke, at a time when people usually adopted a formal and supposedly more elegant style when they put pen to paper. You can clearly hear his voice, so the many years between him and you shrivel away. Witty, often flippant, kind and generous, sometimes rather comically showing-off, sometimes shrewd, honest, always acutely alive, there he is, the man who wrote that marvellous poem Don Juan. How extraordinary – how wonderful! – it is that a lot of little black marks on paper can bring a person who died nearly two hundred years ago into your room: bring him so close that you know him much better than you would have known him if you met him in the flesh. It is extraordinary and it is enlarging. When I had to get rid of most of my books in order to fit in the little room that is now my home, there was never any doubt that Boswell and Byron would have to come with me.

  Dead Right

  Back in the 1920s my mother never went to a funeral if she could help it, and was horrified when she heard of children being exposed to such an ordeal, and my father vanished from the room if death was mentioned; and very much later, in the 1960s, when the publishers where I was a partner brought out a beautiful and amusing book about the trappings of death, booksellers refused to stock something so ‘morbid’. I was born in December 1917, so was fully immersed in this refusal to contemplate death. Indeed it was not until over thirty years later, when I had to visit a coroner’s office to identify a woman who had been found dead, that I thought for the first time how extraordinary – indeed how ridiculous – it was to have lived for so long without ever having seen a dead body. I have heard it suggested that this recoil from the subject was a result of the First World War filling everyone’s minds with an acute and appalled awareness of death, but my own explanation was, and still is, that it was a pendulum-swing away from the preceding century’s obsession with the subject – the relish for mourning, ranging from solemn viewing of the corpse by young and old alike, to passionate concern about the exact degree of blackness to be worn, and how long for (for the rest of your days if you were a widow). A mood so extreme surely had to result in a strong reaction.

  It seems to me that what influences the consciousness in wartime is not death. It is killing. And no, they are not the same thing.

  Death is the inevitable end of an individual object’s existence – I don’t say ‘end of life’ because it is a part of life. Everything begins, develops, if animal or vegetable, breeds, then fades away: everything, not just humans, animals, plants, but things which seem to us eternal, such as rocks. Mountains wear down from jagged peaks to flatness. Even planets decay. That natural process is death. Killing is the obscene intervention of violence, the violation which prevents a human being or any other animal from reaching death as it should be reached. Killing certainly did affect the minds of those exposed to it by the First World War. It shocked most of them into silence: many of the men who survived fighting in it never spoke of it, and I think it had the same effect on most of those the men returned to. It was too dreadful. They shut down on it.

  My maternal grandparents’ house, in which the children of my generation spent all their holidays, and where we stayed if our empire-serving parents were abroad in some place inhospitable to the young, was typical of those times in that the only music-making objects in it were an upright piano and a small wind-up record player that had belonged to my uncle when he was a boy – something probably unthinkable to children today. There was no pop music because there were no teenagers, only children and grown-ups. Certainly once the children had turned twelve they began being restive (the grown-ups called it ‘the awkward age’) but there was little to be done about it. There were music-hall songs and dance music, but they could only come into a home via sheet music and if there was someone there who could play the piano, and the limit of adult pianoplaying in our family was nursery rhymes to amuse the little ones. A hint of the future might have been detected in the eagerness with which we children fell on Uncle Billy’s little ‘gramophone’, which had been forgotten about by the grown-ups. We listened over and over again to the few records that went with it – some Gilbert and Sullivan songs and two or three spirituals sung by Paul Robeson. Right at the back of the cupboard where they lived I once found another record, which turned out to be a wartime song, a comic and rather witty version of ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’ called ‘Who Killed Bill Kaiser’. Although I was born before the war’s end, it was as remote and unreal to me as the Wars of the Roses, so I was as thrilled as I would have been if I had dug up a medieval helmet, and ran to show the record to my mother. All she said was, ‘That old thing – is it still there?’ It was a shock to come up so suddenly against the fact that what to me was history, to her was just something from the day before yesterday. Absolutely no trace of that day before yesterday had been injected into my consciousness by my elders, so whatever I was to feel about death, it had nothing to do with war.

  My own experience of the Second World War confirmed this. Before it started, during the horrible months when we could all feel it coming, I said to a friend: ‘If it does start I think I’ll kill myself.’ (Although the preceding war had been little talked about, poets and novelists had written about it, so we were fully aware that a repetition ought to be unthinkable.) My friend replied, ‘Killing yourself to avoid being killed would be a bit silly,’ and I felt sadly that she was being obtuse. It was not the prospect of being killed that was distressing me; it was having to know this obscenity about life. And that, not fear of death, was what polluted one’s consciousness all through the war, so that the moment it was over we too shut down on it.

  Because we did shut down. ‘IT’S OVER!’ That knowledge wiped out any other feeling. I could see no reason to be anything but happy, and death was just something that would occur when I was old – and which was not, and never had been, frightening.

  That this was true, I owe to Montaigne. I can’t remember when I read, or was told, that he considered it a good thing to spend a short time every day thinking about death, thus getting used to its inevitability and coming to understand that something inevitable is natural and can’t be too bad, but it was in my early teens, and it struck me as a sensible idea. Of course I didn’t set out to think about death in a regular way every day, but I did think about it quite often, and sure enough, it worked. Why coming to see death’s naturalness should have caused belief in an afterlife to melt away, I am unsure, but it did. Probably that belief had been no more than an unexamined acceptance of something said by a grown-up: in a child’s life there are many things more important to question than the probability of reuniting after death with other dead people – an idea that is tucked away on a back shelf of the mind like some object for which one has no use at present.

  When I was sixteen I had my appendix removed: an operation common in those days, which seems to have gone out of fashion. Going under the anaesthetic, which was chloroform, caused an interesting confrontation with that particular idea. As a little girl I had occas
ionally suspected that there was a monster under my bed waiting to come out and get me, scaring myself so much that I had to be calmed down and assured that I was imagining it. Presumably the anaesthetist preparing me for the operation diminished the flow of chloroform too soon, because I became conscious, without the least idea of where I was or what was happening: all I knew was that I was lying on my back, on a bed, with a stifling claw clamped down on my face. They had been lying! The monster had been there all the time and now it had come out and got me, I was dying! The dying felt like tipping over the edge of a cliff into black nothingness. I was hanging desperately on to the rim of the cliff. I was staring into that black nothingness – and, horror of horrors, understood that it was not nothingness: there were shapes swimming about, things happening, creatures at large out there and I was about to be pitched in amongst all that, unprepared, ignorant, totally incapable of coping. It was terrifying – surely one was supposed to change in some way at death, but I was still unchanged, still just my miserably inadequate self . . . Into my mind there came the thought, ‘If I start to believe in God perhaps I’ll be allowed to change so that I will know what to do?’ At which (and I’m still proud of this) I answered myself: ‘No! That would be too shameful, just because I’m frightened.’ I let go, and down into the black nothingness I slid.

  So: when many years later I really was near death as a result of haemorrhage after my miscarriage, and understood as much quite clearly, I was not alarmed. My last thought – if that had turned out to be what it was – would have been acceptance.

  And now I live in an old people’s home with forty-two others, our average age being ninety, or perhaps a little more. When one makes the difficult decision (and difficult it is) to retire from normal life, get rid of one’s home and most of one’s possessions, and move into such a place (or be moved, which doesn’t apply here, I am glad to say), it means that one has reached the stage of thinking, ‘How am I going to manage my increasing incompetence now that I’m so old? Who is going to look after me when I can no longer look after myself?’ Death is no longer something in the distance, but might well be encountered any time now. You might suppose that this would make it more alarming, but judging from what I now see around me, the opposite happens. Being within sight, it has become something for which one ought to prepare. One of the many things I like about my retirement home is the sensible, practical attitude towards death that prevails here. You are asked without embarrassment whether you would rather die here or in a hospital, whether you want to be kept alive whatever happens or would prefer a heart attack, for instance, to be allowed to take its course, and how you wish your body to be disposed of. When a death occurs in the home it is dealt with with the utmost respect – and also with a rather amazing tact in relation to us, the survivors: I doubt whether anyone has ever been aware of a death at the moment of its happening, or of the removal of a body, which must involve very careful management.

  These matters have become discussable with one’s friends, not, of course, as a frequent part of daily gossip over lunch in the dining room, which is our only communal occasion, but from time to time, and I am pretty sure that most of us here would consider it silly to be frightened of being dead. All of us, however, feel some degree of anxiety about the process of dying.

  That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the eighty-two-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! and he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, ninety-eight, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realize that she had stopped breathing. There was my mother, a week before her ninety-sixth birthday, who had one nasty day, which, to my relief, she couldn’t remember the next morning, then slept her way out after speaking her last words, ‘It was absolutely divine,’ about a recent drive to a beloved place. My father, alas, had a whole week of unhappiness after a blood vessel in his brain had ruptured. He looked up as one came through the door, obviously about to greet one, then when he found he couldn’t speak, his expression became one of pain and puzzlement: he understood that something was badly amiss but he didn’t know what it was. The moment of his dying, however, was sudden and painless. My brother was the only person near me who clearly resented death, and that was because he had achieved a way of life which suited him so perfectly that he wanted more. He was not frightened of it. ‘No one after eighty has any right to complain about death,’ he had said to me not long before.

  That fortunate record makes me believe that although it would be unwise to expect an easy dying, it is not unreasonable to hope for one.

  As for after it, I feel quite strongly that I would like my ashes to be scattered or buried in a place I love. (I scattered my mother’s in her garden – and the old man who tended it for her when she could no longer do it herself said, ‘Cor! That won’t half make the flowers grow.’) But such a feeling, though strong, is really absurd, because what does it matter to the dead how their bodies are disposed of? It is for the mourners to do what suits them best.

  A little while ago I took part in a television programme about death that was designed by the photographer Rankin, to help him overcome his fear of it, to which he bravely admitted. Whether it served his purpose or not I don’t know – possibly not, because that fear is brewed in the guts, not in the mind – and I remember a man I once knew who suffered from it so badly that he told me he used to wake up in the night and have to telephone his sister and beg her to come round. ‘What did she do?’ I asked, and he said she made tea and talked sense, but it didn’t do much good because the thought of all those bloody silly birds still twittering and those bastards walking up and down the street when he wasn’t there to see them drove him mad. But even if Rankin’s programme failed to make him feel better, which I hope was not the case, it was excellent, and many viewers responded to it with enthusiasm. I had already understood from the response to my own book, Somewhere Towards the End, that the taboo on the subject of death, so heavy in my youth, was evaporating, and the programme was a striking example of how true this is. Even teenagers joined willingly in discussion of it.

  The contributor I remember with the most pleasure is the man who said that not existing for thousands and thousands of years before his birth had never worried him for a moment, so why should going back into non-existence at his death cause him dismay? Everyone laughed when he said that and so did I, and as I laughed I thought: ‘Dead right!’

  What Is

  A full moon in a clear sky, waking me

  to a far-away time, a far-away space

  existing above or under the familiar –

  or interwoven with it: a place

  of dust-grey deserts, mountains of eroded rock,

  turned by being so far away into

  a silver disc

  floating there to mock

  stories of gods, myths of origin, hell’s penalties

  or heaven’s bliss;

  saying Look!

  Why want anything more marvellous

  than what is.

  D.A. 17.3.10

  Acknowledgements

  Although in some ways you become more confident with old age – stop minding, for example, what other people think – in others you become less so. As I advanced through my nineties I became increasingly unsure of my own abilities. ‘Will you write another book?’ people asked, and the answer was I couldn’t. I still enjoyed writing and could easily bring off a book review or short article for a newspaper, but a book? No. The first person I have to thank in relation to Alive, Alive Oh! is Pru Rowlandson, a friend since I was first published by Granta, where she managed (as she still does) their publicity. I forge
t her exact words, but they amounted to ‘You could at least have a go at it.’ I suppose I could, thought I, so I did. Thank you, Pru.

  Once a lot of written pages had appeared, doubt re-awoke. Could they be called a book? I needed the opinion of an outsider, someone book-wise but who didn’t know or care about me. Pru suggested Rebecca Carter. ‘Of course it’s a book,’ she said, ‘and I love it’ – which was a happy moment. She is now my agent. Thank you, Rebecca.

  I must now confess that, having spent a working lifetime as a publisher’s editor, I had never supposed that I myself might need an editor. There was a moment, after Granta had made an offer for Alive, Alive Oh! when – I blush to remember this – I bristled slightly at the suggestion that Bella Lacey should edit it. What I had forgotten during my post-publishing years was that the one person who really loves a good editor is – the author! Here is someone giving your precious book one hundred per cent of expert attention (something, believe it or not, very few books ever get however popular they become) and who is doing so in order to discover those moments (few you hope, but there are always some) when it happens to fall just a little short of your intention. Her or his job is to make your book even more yours (I have said we are speaking of a good editor). Thank you, Bella.

  Whatever happens to this book in the future, the above three people made the writing of it a great pleasure.