by Diana Athill
It is now midnight, early in December. From this table, with this white tea-cup, full ashtray, and small glass half-full of rum beside me, I see my story, ordinary though it has all been and sad though much of it was, as a success story. I am rising forty-three, and I am happier in the present and more interested by the future than I have ever been since I was a girl: amused and delighted, too, because to find oneself in the middle of a success story, however modest, when one has for so long believed oneself a protagonist of failure, is bizarre. But is it a story which will seem worth having lived through, of value in itself, when I come to die? Will the question my grandmother asked – and I shall have no grandchild of whom to ask it – overshadow my last days?
17
THE THINGS WHICH I will not be able to claim for myself are easy to list.
I have not been beautiful. Looks do not matter, I was taught; indeed, handsome looks are even bad, tempting to vanity and silliness. This, for a woman, is a lie. If I had been beautiful I would not necessarily have been happier, but I would have been more important. Perhaps if I had been ugly I would also have been more important, an awkward body forced to build an awkward personality to protect grief. But my kind of looks – someone may say, surprised, ‘How pretty you look in that colour,’ or, if in love with me, ‘You have lovely eyes’ – that kind of looks cannot be accounted even momentarily a reason for existence, as beauty, so confusingly and sometimes so fatally, can be.
I have been intelligent only in comparison with dull people. Compared with what I consider real intelligence I am stupid, being unable to think. I do not even know what people do in their brains to start the process of thinking. My own brain has a door which swings backwards and forwards in the draught. Things blow into it – a lot of things, some of them good but none of them under my control as I feel they ought to be. I have intuitions, sympathies, a sense of proportion, and the ability to be detached, but nothing which goes click-click-click, creating structures of thought. In my work I am often humiliated by this inability to think. I do things, or leave them undone, purely through stupidity, and this hurts and puzzles me, so that each time it happens I turn quickly to something unconnected with the organization of facts or ideas. I am good at liking or not liking somebody’s work or, at understanding what somebody means, or is trying to mean. If I am wrong about such things, it is for reasons other than stupidity. But because I see the ability to organize and to construct as something which it should be possible to learn, and I have not been able to learn it, I am more oppressed, in my work, by my lack than I am comforted by what I have. Outside work, in life, I do not mind being stupid in this way; it is sometimes inconvenient but that is my own business, and I get pleasure and interest enough from the blowing about of feelings. But clearly I shall not be able to claim intelligence of a high enough quality to justify a life.
I have not been good. My ‘good’, partly a legacy of my Christian upbringing and partly arrived at empirically, is one which centres on selflessness. I have seen few evils, and few ills, which could not be traced to the individual’s monstrous misconceptions of his own value in relation to that of other individuals. But people are what they do more than what they believe; and over and over again my actions have been those of a woman who values things as trivial as her own comfort or convenience above another person’s joy or sorrow.
I have not been brave or energetic. To push back the frontiers of experience is an activity which I believe to be essential, but lethargy and timidity have prevented my doing it to anything like the extent to which it would have been possible. For political engagement I have been too lazy; for exploratory travel I have been too unenterprising, fearing the insecurity in strange places which it would entail for someone with no money. My sympathies are with the hipster, but when I consider his techniques of broadening experience I can see myself in comparison, as square as a cube from a child’s set of bricks: to me excesses bring discomfort and fatigue rather than freedom.
So I have not been beautiful, or intelligent, or good, or brave, or energetic, and for many years I was not happy: I failed to achieve the extremely simple things which, for so long, I wanted above all else: I found no husband and it is not likely that I shall ever have a child.
There is plenty of evidence, then, that my existence has been without value: that if, like my grandmother, I approach death slowly and consciously, I shall be driven to ask the question she asked: ‘What have I lived for?’ All that I shall be able to answer is that I have written a little, and I have loved, and if I do not die until am old, those things will have become too remote to count for much. I shall remember that they once seemed worth everything, but quite possibly the fact that by then they will be over will appear to have wiped out their value. It ought to be a frightening thought, but I am still not frightened.
I was looking through a dictionary of quotations in search of a title for a friend’s play when I chanced on Carlyle and Ruskin, both saying something which caught my attention. Carlyle: ‘No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object.’ Ruskin: ‘The greatest thing a human soul does in this world is to see.’
Eyes are precarious little mechanisms, lodged in their sockets as though that were that. When I was living at Beckton we used to buy the heads of sheep for our dogs, boil them, then strip or gouge the meat from them. It was a horrifying job until you became used to it, then almost fascinating: the brain, the tongue, the eyes became meat of different textures. It was hard to believe that the rubbery globes of the eyes had ever been able to receive impulses and turn them into images; still harder to believe that when they had done that, they had filled even a sheep’s head with the world. To me the mechanism of sight is the principal wonder of conscious living: the mechanism which, more than any other, brings into the mind that which is outside. Sight brings in objective reality. Sight is the proof that you are as real as I am, that a pencil is as real, that a tree, a bird, a typewriter, a flower, a stone is as real; that each object is as much the centre of its universe as I am, and that conscious, human objects have each a universe as enormous as my own.
‘You are not the only pebble on the beach’ was often said to me during my childhood: words with the force of the metaphor still strong in them, since the East Anglian beaches I knew were composed almost entirely of pebbles. I used to spend hours searching among them because I collected cornelians and amber, which I kept in a jam jar, with water to make them gleam. I knew pebbles well: the different shades of grey, the almost white, the mottled, the porous, the ones with microscopic sparkles in the graining of their surfaces, the flat, the round, the potato-shaped, the totally opaque, the almost translucent. It was obvious that there was an infinite number of them, and an infinite variety, and that they were all equally real. I handled them, but more often I looked at them. It was by looking at pebbles that I began to feel their nature, and it is by looking that I feel the nature of people. ‘What are you thinking?’ my lover asks, and often I am not thinking, I am looking. The way the hairs of an eyebrow grow along the ridge, the slight movement under the thin skin beneath the eyes, the folding of the lips, the grain of the skin behind the ear: what I am learning from them I am not sure, but the need to study them is imperative. No doubt I should still love if I were blind, with only my reason and my hands, but could I recognize a man’s separate existence in the same way?
Marcel, the diamond-polisher whose recall by Mustafa Ali released my first story, did not find objective reality a comfort. Once he leant out of a window in the Savoy Hotel, looked down on trees in which starlings were bickering their way to bed, and pavements over which people were hurrying, then slammed the window shut and exclaimed, ‘I can’t bear it!’
‘What can’t you bear?’
‘The thought that I might die in the night, and next morning everything would still be going on. All those bastards trotting up and down the street, and those silly damned birds chirping … It’s horrible! Sometimes, when I’m at home, I wake in the middle of th
e night and start thinking about it, and then I have to telephone my sister.’
‘What does she do?’
‘She comes over and makes tea for me, and talks. Sometimes I keep her there all night.’
He walked up and down the room, splashing whisky out of his glass in his agitation, his mouth twitching, his eyes bilious: a sad little figure for whom the world would not come to an end.
To me, on the other hand, the knowledge that everything will still be going on is the answer. If I die with my wits about me, not shuffled out under drugs or reduced to incoherence by pain, I want my last thoughts to be of plants growing, children being born, people who never knew me digging their gardens or telephoning their friends. It is in the existence of other things and other people that I can feel the pulse of my own: the pulse. Something which hums and throbs in everything, and thus in me.
Reading Aldous Huxley’s account of his experiments with mescalin, I caught myself thinking that this exceptionally intelligent man was naive. The crease in his trousers, the chair and the bunch of flowers in which he discovered the vibrating truth of being: had he not known that they contained it? That every object contains it? It is true that one does not usually see it with the intensity he describes, but it is not necessary to see it in that way to know that it exists. Chemical vision-sharpeners are a luxury, not a necessity. My own (I have not seen this remarked by anyone else, but it cannot be a unique experience) comes with whatever change in glandular activity it may be that heralds menstruation, so that almost every month I have a day or two of heightened vision, a delicious spell in which to see things living.
This ‘isness business’ – what smartypants called it that? – is, to me, too obvious to be chic. Only the gifted mystic, in whom the necessary disciplines channel a power which already exists, is likely to get further in it by studying Buddhism: indeed, I suspect that in the East, as in the West, only the rare saints have gone beyond the man-invented paraphernalia with which the rest tag along in their wake for comfort and reassurance. It is the obviousness – the obviousness of the quiet throbbing of life in every object – which has filled for me the silence that should have been left by non-belief, and which makes me question whether I did, in fact, stop believing. Believing in what? God, I suppose, knows – if knowledge in a human sense is an attribute of whatever lies behind the throbbing, and I do not see why it should be. My senses tell me, not that ‘God exists’, but that ‘it is’.
The test for anyone whose balance depends on messages received through the senses will come when the senses begin to atrophy. When I can no longer see (my grandmother had not seen the stars for ten years before she died), when I can no longer hear (larks dwindled away first, she said, then all other birds), when my body, which has not only given me all my most reliable and consoling pleasures but has also helped me to go out of its limits into other people and into things, becomes no more than a painful burden – and think only of what it can do to one under the influence of something so trivial as indigestion! – what will happen then? It may turn out that the throbbing was no more than the sound of my own blood in my ears. What I hope is that even if it does I shall not be afraid, because why should that blood have throbbed so steadily, for so long, in spite of so many reasons why I need not have lived, if it were not that I too have been, with the same intensity as any flower or matchbox or dog or other human being: all part of something which can only be expressed in the words ‘I am that which I am’, and which needs no further proof or justification?
I should like to appoint someone younger than myself to be a witness at my death: to record my success or lack of it in coming to terms with death, as I mean to do if I can, by simultaneously remembering the pulse in my self, and defeating the passion for self-preservation which makes death seem an outrage (easily said! Let the hum of an aeroplane’s engine turn to a whine and my body stiffens, my stomach chills: ‘Not yet!’). To die decently and acceptingly would be to prove the value of life, and that, in spite of limitations and inadequacy, is what I have felt inclined, still feel inclined, and have a hunch that I will always feel inclined to do.
STET
an editor’s life
PART ONE
1
SOME YEARS AGO Tom Powers, an American publisher who is also a writer and historian, kindly told me I ought to write a book about my fifty years in publishing. He added: ‘Put in all the figures – that is what one wants to know.’ With those well-intentioned words he nearly finished off this book before it was begun.
Partly – as I shall explain – from conditioning, and more – I am pretty sure – because of some kind of mental kink, I cannot remember figures. When I recall the various houses I have lived in in London I can see the colours of their front doors, the way the steps leading to those doors were worn, what kind of railings guarded their areas; but not one of their numbers can I remember. My bank account has had the same number for years and years, but I still have to consult my chequebook every time I need to produce it. When I needed to tell one of my authors how many copies of his or her book we were printing, I could – having all the material to hand – tell them; but ask me three months later, was it three thousand or five, and I would not know. The only publishing figures that remain with me are the shaming £25 we paid Jean Rhys for an option to see her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and the impressive (at that time) £30,000 we were paid for the serial rights of Franz von Papen’s memoirs.
But surely I could research the figures?
No, I could not.
Soon after André Deutsch Limited, the firm of which I had been one of the directors since it was founded almost forty years earlier, was sold to Tom Rosenthal in 1985, Tom sold its complete archive to Tulsa University in Oklahoma, and I have neither the money nor the energy to go to Tulsa and dive into that mountain of paper. And I confess that I am grateful for those lacks because of another one: good researchers enjoy researching, which I have never done, and I am not going to develop the instinct for it now that I am in my eighties. So I am sorry that this will not be the useful kind of book which would interest Tom Powers, but there it is.
Why am I going to write it? Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too – they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in me squeaks ‘Oh no – let at least some of it be rescued!’ It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that. By a long-established printer’s convention, a copy editor wanting to rescue a deletion puts a row of dots under it and writes ‘Stet’ (let it stand) in the margin. This book is an attempt to ‘Stet’ some part of my experience in its original form (which happens to be sadly short of figures). Other people have given better accounts of our trade (notably Jeremy Lewis in Kindred Spirits, which is not only a delight, but also says everything which needs saying about what has happened to publishing, and why). All this book is, is the story of one old ex-editor who imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it.
The story began with my father telling me: ‘You will have to earn your living.’ He said it to me several times during my childhood (which began in 1917), and the way he said it implied that earning one’s living was not quite natural. I do not remember resenting the idea, but it was slightly alarming. This was because my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, a Yorkshire doctor of yeoman stock, had made or married the money to buy a beautiful house in Norfolk with a thousand acres of land, which seemed to the children of my generation to have been ‘ours’ from time immemorial. It was largely because of this place that my mother’s family was the one to which I felt that I belonged. My father’s had lost money, not made it, so they had no land for us to feel rooted in. They had taken off from Norfolk to Antigua in the seventeenth century, had done very well as sugar planters, but had eventually fizzled
out financially with their trade, so that by my time several generations of Athill men had taken the earning of livings for granted. But even on their more down-to-earth side, mine was the first generation in which this applied to daughters as well as sons. Daughters would not, of course, have to earn their livings if they got married, but (this was never said) now that they would have to depend on love unaided by dowries, marriage could no longer be counted on with absolute confidence.
Not until recently, when in my old age I began to ponder my career in publishing, did it occur to me that my family background had done a lot to determine the nature of that career.
In 1952, after working with André Deutsch for five years in his first publishing firm, Allan Wingate, I became a founding director with him of his second firm, to which we gave his name. I can therefore say that for nearly fifty years I was a publisher, but the truth is that I was not, and it was my background that prevented it.
Although for all my life I have been much nearer poor than rich, I have inherited a symptom of richness: I have a strong propensity for idleness. Somewhere within me lurks an unregenerate creature which feels that money ought to fall from the sky, like rain. Should it fail to do so – too bad: like a farmer enduring drought one would get by somehow, or go under, which would be unpleasant but not so unpleasant as having blighted one’s days by bothering about money. Naturally I always knew that one did in fact have to bother, and to some extent I did so, but only to the least possible extent. This meant that although I never went so far as to choose to do nothing, I did find it almost impossible to do anything I didn’t want to do. Whether it was ‘cannot’ or ‘will not’ I don’t know, but it felt like ‘cannot’; and the things I could not do included many of the things a publisher had to do.
