Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill
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LIFE CLASS
The Selected Memoirs of
Diana Athill
Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
YESTERDAY MORNING
NOW
‘OH MY GOD,’
THEN
LESSONS
THE HOUSE
GOD AND GRAMPS
PAIN
FALLING IN LOVE
NOW
LOOKING BACK
INSTEAD OF A LETTER
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
STET
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART TWO
IN 1962 I WROTE
MORDECAI RICHLER AND BRIAN MOORE
JEAN RHYS
ALFRED CHESTER
V. S. NAIPAUL
MOLLY KEANE
POSTSCRIPT
SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
POSTSCRIPT
ALSO BY DIANA ATHILL
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
In the early 1980s, the publisher André Deutsch had an idea for a book I could write about the partition of India. I didn’t take it up, which I regret now because it was a good suggestion and I was wrong to imagine, as I told him, that ‘everything’ had already been written about the subject. Instead, I proposed a thought of my own: a book about Indian railways, part travel account, part technical history and part family memoir. Too many parts, clearly, but André liked the idea and a few weeks later I went to his office, where he took out a fountain pen and ceremonially wrote a cheque, saying words to the effect that this was his happiest moment since the day he thought he’d signed up George Orwell (as I guess he told many writers of first books) and then stealing a cigarette from my packet to smoke in celebration.
I went to India for a year and did too much research. There was certainly a lot to find out, but the finding out eventually became a way of postponing the writing. Soon after I came home to London, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi, which meant there was further postponement as I turned back to journalism. Then one day the phone rang and it was André, wondering how the book was ‘coming along’. The truth was that it wasn’t coming along, but I wrote two short chapters in a panic and sent them in as evidence that his money hadn’t gone completely to waste. André’s response was to invite me to his office for lunch. It was there that I met a brisk woman in glasses, who told me that what I had written was very good and then read a page or two of it aloud to us: to André, perhaps because he had never bothered to read it himself (the thought occurred to me only later), and to me perhaps to persuade me that what I’d written was as good as she said, and the book worth persevering with.
She had a fine voice, precise and low, of the kind many more people had then than now, though even in 1984 her kind of accent had lost its claim to be the English that the nicest and best people spoke. ‘Patrician’, ‘RP’ and ‘Oxbridge’ would be the easy adjectives, though what it reminded me of was listening to the BBC’s Home Service as a boy and watching British films of the same period where pretty well everyone spoke like this other than junior policemen and Cockney chars in pinafores. No matter. She read aloud – a few hundred words about an old-fashioned grocer’s shop in an Indian railway town – and the fact was that her voice’s elegance and intelligence seemed to elevate what I’d written, just as words scribbled in ballpoint seem profoundly transformed when set in twelve-point Baskerville. There may have been an almost maternal element to her encouragement. She certainly had something of the kindly schoolmistress or university tutor about her: her thick-framed glasses, her enthusiasm, her opinion that I simply had to go on with it otherwise I’d be letting myself down. As life turned out, I didn’t go on with it; I went back to newspapers and returned André’s advance, and therefore as an illustration of Diana Athill’s persuasive editorial technique my story is unsatisfactory, showing nothing more than how my torpor, fear and the need to make money could defeat one of the finest minds in British publishing. All I know is that if anyone could have drawn that book out of me it would have been her.
Diana would have been sixty-six then. She had been André’s right-hand woman for nearly forty years and went on serving the company that bore his name, even after André had left it, for another eight. André was the entrepreneurial spirit behind the enterprise but it was mainly Diana who developed its reputation for good books by finding and fostering writers such as Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul. The story of her long professional life as an editor is brilliantly told in Stet, the second book in this anthology, and there’s no need to add to it here. What I didn’t know when I met her was that she was also a writer; or rather had been a writer, because her most recent book had been published nearly twenty years before. Few people remembered her novel (Don’t Look at Me Like That, 1967) or her story collection (An Unavoidable Delay, 1962), which found a publisher in the USA but none in Britain. It was the middle book of her small 1960s oeuvre that knowledgeable readers, particularly women, mentioned when I said that I’d met her. ‘Oh, but you must read Instead of a Letter,’ they said. The book wasn’t easy to find. It had been republished a few times since it first appeared in 1962 and probably was more often in print than out of it, but by the early 1980s Instead of a Letter was more of a cult than the popular classic it deserved to be. The times weren’t right. Literary taste was still largely dictated by male sensibilities, and, while feminist publishing in Britain had begun to thrive, Athill didn’t quite fit its political agenda. As to the book’s form, ‘memoir’ had yet to be established as a successful category in bookshops. Writers wrote them, of course, but rarely did they become known for the memoir alone (J.R. Ackerley and Laurie Lee may be two exceptions). Publishers and readers thought instead of ‘autobiographies’, in which intimate personal disclosure took a back seat to records of achievement. The boundary between the two forms is blurred and bridgeable: V.S. Pritchett’s wonderful account of his early life, A Cab at the Door, was described as ‘autobiography’ when it first appeared in 1968, whereas now it would have ‘memoir’ written all over it. Gore Vidal explained the difference in this way: ‘A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked’. His statement is arguable, but it has the virtue of simplicity. More important, by stressing subjective, unverified memory it permits the memoirist to misremember and, unconsciously or otherwise, to embroider and invent – an indulgence, it has to be said, that Diana Athill has never been interested to take.
At any rate, I got Instead of a Letter from the library. It told Diana’s story from birth to the age of forty-two, a life begun idyllically in the English countryside, a life rich with privilege and promise – horses, sailing, books, an Oxford education – until, aged twenty-two, she is jilted by her fiancé and her dreams of a future as an R
AF pilot’s wife turn to dust. Happiness vanishes for the next twenty years. Rejection destroys her confidence, especially in her relationships with men, and she regains it fully only in early middle age, not through the once hoped-for avenues of marriage and children but when she begins to write and has a story published in a newspaper. Put like that it seems an ordinary enough progression – happy, then unhappy, then happy enough – and perhaps an advertisement for a creative-writing school (‘Miserable? Jilted? Then learn to write the Miss Lonelyhearts way!’). But at that time I had never read a book like it, and to my mind only a few memoirs have equalled it since.
The most memorable and pleasing aspect of memoirs often comes from the picture they offer of a character or a period. We remember V.S. Pritchett’s rackety father besotted by Christian Science and mistresses, or John McGahern’s loving mother walking her son through the lanes of County Leitrim, or Blake Morrison’s father bluffing his Yorkshire way out of and into trouble. The writer attends as a witness, but his own selfhood – what he was like – is present at most as an interlocutor of the character of others. Direct self-description is one of the hardest tasks a writer can undertake, because self-knowledge is so difficult and because the risks of self-indulgence, self-dramatization and falsity of all kinds are so great (and easily spotted and mocked). Diana’s book was certainly about herself, and the core of it about the severe disappointment that altered, and for a long time deadened, the course of her life. In other hands, it could have been a long wallow with an unconvincingly bright little salvation at the end. Many books are now constructed on this principle: look, I was an addict; behold, my suffering when I was abused. Often the authors say their motive is to give consolation and hope to others in the same position. Instead of a Letter certainly had this effect. About a hundred readers (ninety-nine of them women) wrote to her after the book was first published to share their experience and say how much comfort the book had provided – a large response to an unknown writer when authorship was much less publicized than it is now, and when communication involved the trouble of taking out pen and paper and buying a stamp. To be jilted, to have one’s engagement broken off, left a public as well as a private scar (I remember the hush around the subject when in the 1950s it happened to an older cousin of mine). The distress caused by rejection may well be a historical constant in human beings, but at least since 1962 our more open and casual attitudes towards sex and marriage mean that the humiliation is no longer so deep. ‘Guilt never caused me any serious distress, but humiliation did,’ Diana writes in this anthology’s third book, Yesterday Morning. ‘Humiliation … was the sharpest misery I knew.’
An instructive story of self-help wasn’t, however, what she intended by Instead of a Letter, nor is it by any means the book’s most important attraction. Like thousands of other readers before and since, what held me about the writing was its candour. The quality has since become an Athill trademark, though in itself candour is no guarantee of literary pleasure or interest: frank books aren’t always good books and can often be tedious by boasting of their frankness. Athill’s way of being candid is more subtle and its effect more persuasive. The reader feels that what he is reading is as true a portrait of the writer and her experience as any words on paper can achieve. Part of this comes from her considerable gift as a maker of sentences, which are so lucid and direct; some of it is owed to the breaking of taboos that then surrounded female sexual behaviour; most of it, though, stems from her triumphant struggle to ‘get it right’, a lesson she learned from two of the writers she edited. Jean Rhys told her that the trick of good writing was ‘to get it as it was, as it really was’. Vidia Naipaul said that ‘provided you really get it right, the reader will understand’.
All feeling and experience occur inside specific contexts – a room, a field, a conversation, a country house, a crowded pub – and by getting these things ‘right’, as a good novelist might, Diana opened up what could have been a narrow story of injury and self-absorption into a book that takes pleasure in the world. Also, the harder thing, she got herself right by letting us see how she appeared to others. A chilling moment comes in Instead of a Letter when, soon after her engagement has been broken off, she reads a passage in her younger sister’s diary. Her sister had a boyfriend who would hold her hand but refused to kiss her, though she was ‘dizzy with expectation’ that he might. This, remember, was early 1940. Diana read her diary entry: ‘He told me that he was not going to kiss me though he wanted to. He said that I was going to be a fascinating woman but that I mustn’t begin that sort of thing too soon or it would spoil me. Look at Di, he said, you don’t want to be like her. And of course I don’t.’ More than twenty years later, Diana wrote that ‘the shrivelling sensation of reading those words is something I still flinch from recalling’. She saw with a ‘shameful, accepting humility … that I was diseased in other people’s eyes: that unhappiness was not a misfortune but a taint. In the depths of my being I must have wanted to kill my sister for it, but all I recognised was a shuddering acknowledgment that out of the mouths of babes …’ She then decided that she would be a model sister to her sibling, rejoicing at her triumphs and fretting over her sorrows. ‘But there was a streak of falsity in it: I was overcompensating for my resentment at the scar she had left with her innocent, idle thrust.’
In a first-person narrative, someone else’s diary can offer a useful change in the point of view. Another diary crops up in Diana’s second memoir, After a Funeral, which was published in 1986. The book – Diana preferred to call it a ‘documentary’ – recounts the tragic story of ‘Didi’, a promising writer from Egypt who went to stay with Diana as her lodger after she befriended him as his publisher (‘Didi’ was in fact Waguih Ghali, whose novel Beer in the Snooker Club was published by Deutsch in 1964.) Their relationship becomes difficult and, on his part, bitter. Sex isn’t the issue. Diana has a partner, called Luke in the book, and though she begins by wanting Didi she has sex with him only once, when both of them are drunk. One evening she goes into Didi’s room and finds that he has left his diary open on his desk. She reads:
I have started to detest her. I find her unbearable… my reactions to Diana are sparked by my physical antipathy to Diana. I find it impossible to live in the same flat as someone whose physical body seems to provoke mine to cringe. This has led me to detest everything she does, says or writes … I’d be sitting in my room watching a stupid thing on telly and annoyed with myself for not switching it off and working … In her sitting-room her typewriter would go tick tick tick tick tick. ‘Christ,’ I’d tell myself, ‘there she is, hammering away at that bloody mediocre muck – dishing out one tedious stupid sentence after another, and thinking – no, pretending it is writing.
To quote such a passage about oneself in a book by oneself takes … what? Courage certainly, but also an unusually strong sense of duty towards the truth and the usefulness of truth to literature. In Yesterday Morning she writes that the damage lies do – the context is the anti-Catholic prejudices of her grandfather – may be ‘the central reason for trying to write the truth, even if indecent, about oneself.’ That may be the moral reason, but there is also a literary one: Rhys’s ‘to get it as it was, as it really was’. She exposes for all to see her pragmatic code of personal behaviour. Private diaries left lying around invite themselves to be read; married men can be fucked so long as nobody finds out (or worse, confesses) and the harmony of the marital home is kept intact. This is the way she was – as probably many of us are and will go on being. The consequence is that Diana in her books doesn’t always come across as the most likeable of women. When Didi in his diary notes that she pronounces ‘spritzer’ as ‘SpritzA!’ – Colonel Blimp speaking – the reader may feel a certain sympathy with his antagonism, even though accents are harmless accidents of birth. But if she were more likeable, would she be more sympathetic – or as believable?
The qualities that come with being a writer of Diana’s sort aren’t always attractive. After sh
e and Didi have their drunken sex, Didi comes into the kitchen the next day and pleads with her not to tell her lover.
‘Promise me one thing. Promise that this is one thing you’ll never tell Luke about.’
‘Of course I won’t, I promise.’ (I was already mulling in my head the written account, as exact as possible, which I was going to show Luke one day.)
Graham Greene’s famous dictum about the ‘chip of ice’ that lurks in every writer’s heart has never had a better illustration. It would be hopelessly wrong, however, to think of Diana as all ice: a cold-eyed writing machine. The reason that we can read Didi’s diaries and letters is that he left them to her in a letter in which he described her as the person he loved most. Then he killed himself, despite her enormous kindness to him, in his rent-free room in the flat where more than forty years later, as I write this, she still lives.
Recently I went to see her there. The flat is on the top floor of the last house in a Victorian cul-de-sac that ends in the green open spaces of Primrose Hill and has a fine view south across central London. Her cousin, the journalist Barbara Smith, owns the house and keeps an apartment on the ground floor; they have had this arrangement for half Diana’s life, but when I visited her, in March 2009, Diana was making plans to move into a residential home for old people while she still had all her wits about her and could save friends and relations the trouble of making decisions on her behalf. Three months before, she had turned ninety-one. When a person is that age the present tense is safest deployed with fingers crossed, though there are very few signs of serious failing. She has a hearing aid and walks with the aid of a handsome silver-topped stick and uses a stair-lift to take her up (but not down) the four flights to her flat, but she still drives her little car and her conversation is as witty and direct as ever. She looks majestic.