Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  It was clear enough that the Stangl interviews were the thread on which the rest must hang, but it was not easy to decide where to break them and introduce other voices: his wife’s or his sister-in-law’s, those of the men who worked under him, those of the five survivors, and many more. I have forgotten how long it took us, working usually in my flat (I had to take many days away from the office for this book); but I know it was months – Gitta often had to go back to her typewriter to provide links or expansions. From time to time we got stuck: there would be a chunk of material, fascinating in itself but seemingly impossible to fit in. ‘Oh God, we’ll just have to sacrifice it’, I would say; and then, a little later, there would be some slight shift in the mass of the book, and click! in would go the problem piece, fitting exactly. This happened with almost uncanny regularity. Gitta thought she had just been collecting everything she could find, but the extent to which she had unconsciously been structuring her book became clearer and clearer. An interviewer does, after all, control the direction of an interview, and the further she had delved into Stangl’s background, the more sure her touch had become at discovering what was relevant. We shortened a good deal, but we did not, in the end, have to leave anything out.

  That was the most impressive thing about her work on this book: the way she knew, even when she felt as though she didn’t, exactly what, in this most complicated operation, she was after. That, and her astonishing power as an interviewer which enabled her to draw out of people all that they had to give. And another thing which won my admiration was her lack of author’s vanity. She would sometimes say ‘no’ to an alteration I suggested, on the grounds that it sounded too unlike her; but usually if a point were made more concisely or emphatically she appeared not to mind if I altered her original words. What she was committed to was getting things said rather than to making an impression as awordsmith.

  I could write at length about Into That Darkness, but it would make more sense for those of my readers who don’t know it to get hold of a copy. The reason why working on it was so important to me was that its subject engaged me so completely. I still think – and often – of how that unremarkable man became a monster as the result of a chain of choices between right and wrong – some of the early ones quite trivial – and the way in which no one he respected intervened in favour of the right, while a number of people he respected (senior officers, a priest, a doctor – his idea of respectability was conventional) behaved as though the wrong were right. Chief among them, of course, the Führer. Stangl did not have a strong centre – had probably been deprived of it by a dreary childhood – so he became a creature of the regime. Other people without much centre didn’t – or not to the same extent – so some quality inherent in him (perhaps lack of imagination combined with ambition) must have been evident to those who picked him for his appalling jobs. But it was surely environment rather than genes which made him what he became.

  One good thing about being old is that one no longer minds so much about what people think of one. Boasting is disapproved of, but still I am going to quote the words with which Gitta acknowledged my help, because they gave me so much pleasure: ‘Diana Athill edited Into That Darkness. She has lent it – and me – her warmth, her intelligence, her literary fluency, and a quality of involvement I had little right to expect. I am grateful that she has become my friend.’ Which makes us quits, because I was and am grateful to my friend Gitta for allowing me that involvement.

  Soon after the book was finished Gitta became ill: a cancer, discovered – thank God – early enough for complete extirpation. I know, of course, that there can be no proof of this, but I have always been convinced that it was a consequence of the strain she underwent when she had the courage to follow that man so closely into his dreadful night.

  9

  DOMESTIC LIFE AT Carlisle Street (and later) was as full of incident as professional life, and this was for two reasons: the first, André’s weakness for the square peg; the second, love.

  The square pegs were many, often harmless and soon remedied, sometimes dramatic. Two were actually deranged, one of them a sales manager, the other put in charge of publicity (I was at last allowed to hand over the advertising to a publicity department, such an overpowering relief that it was some time before I could believe it, and rejoice). The sales manager, who had been imported from Australia, was living in a hotel, and I remember going there with André, hoping to find out why he hadn’t appeared at the office for three days, and being told by the receptionist in a hushed voice, as if he were divulging the movements of a celebrity: ‘The Colonel left for Berlin two days ago.’ The Colonel?? We were never to find out more about his attack of military rank, nor about his disappearance. The publicity lady simply suffered from folie de grandeur, which provided its own solution when she realized that the job was beneath her.

  The square peg I remember most fondly I shall call Louise. André found her in New York, writing copy for Tiffany’s catalogue, and saw in a flash that she was just the person to manage the editorial department: not to do editing, but to organize the editors. He had long nursed a dream of programming and wall-charts which would somehow overcome the hazards which beset a book’s progress from typewriter to printing press: authors having second thoughts, indexers going down with flu, holders of copyright not answering letters and so on. Louise was going to cure him of this dream, but we were unable to foresee the happy outcome, and awaited her arrival with dread. He had announced her thus: ‘You are all going to have to obey her absolutely. Even I am going to obey her.’

  She did at first sight seem a little alarming – but only because she was so chic. She was willowy and fine-boned, and her clothes were almost painfully enviable: the sort of casual clothes at which classy New Yorkers excel, so simple that you can’t pinpoint why you know they are very expensive, you just do know it. But her striking poise and confidence did not prevent her manner from being engaging, so I took her to lunch on her first day feeling warmer towards her than I had expected; and indeed, we had not finished the first course before every trace of alarm had been dispersed.

  Louise couldn’t wait to tell me why she had accepted André’s offer. She had met Ken Tynan in New York (Tynan was even more famous there, both as theatre critic and as personality, than he was in London); she had fallen madly in love with him; when he had left for London she had been flat broke (how did she get those clothes?) so that she couldn’t possibly follow him, and had been in despair … and then, out of the blue, came this God-sent chance. Did I think Ken would mind? She was almost sure he wouldn’t, he had said this, that and the other, done this, that and the other… Surely that must mean that their affair was about to go from strength to strength … Or did I think, perhaps, that she had been unwise? I had never been nearer Tynan than the far side of a room at a drinks party, but it was impossible not to hear a great deal about him, and what I had heard made me pretty sure that she had been very unwise. I could already envisage mopping-up operations ahead, but what chiefly occupied my mind on that first day was the cheerful certainty that this charming but daft girl was never going to manage anything, not even her doomed love-life.

  What still remained to be discovered was the extent of her curiously vulnerable recklessness – her almost heroic compulsion to plunge into disaster – and her total uselessness in an office. She was a brilliant con-artist as far as the first moves went – that first impression of exceptional poise and confidence never failed – but she couldn’t follow through. I don’t think she even tried to. I came to know her quite well, even had her to stay in my flat when her need to be rescued became acute, and often wondered how well she knew herself. Did she wake at night and start sweating at the thought of being found out, or did she simply blank out awkward facts such as that she had conned her way into a job she couldn’t do and was now lying in her teeth to hide the fact that she wasn’t doing it? Blank them out, and then switch on some kind of instinctive escape mechanism by which she would wriggle out of t
his situation and into another?

  Not until she had left us did we discover that she had been hiding book-proofs behind a radiator instead of sending them out, as she had said that she had done, to distinguished persons in the hope that they would provide glowing quotes to go on book-jackets; but we did realize quite soon that when Louise said she had done something it didn’t necessarily mean that she had, and it was only a matter of weeks before André was muttering and rumbling – though not to her. He was rarely able to sack a square peg. His method was to complain about them angrily to everyone from Nick and me to our switchboard operator (never, of course, admitting that he had brought the offender in) until he had created such a thick miasma of discomfort in the office that even the most obtuse peg would sense that something was amiss, and would eventually leave. (On one appalling, and unforgiven, occasion, much later, when a peg had failed to do this, André broke down, gulping: ‘I can’t – I can’t – You do it!’ And I had to.)

  Luckily Louise had sensitive feelers and soon became aware that thin ice was melting under her feet. So when one evening she found herself next to Tom Maschler of Cape’s at a dinner party, she switched on her act. And a few days later Tom called André to apologize for having done a wicked thing: he had poached our Louise! ‘I hope to God,’ said André, ‘that I wasn’t too gracious about it.’ Luckily Tom suspected nothing, and that was that. I went on seeing Louise from time to time, but thought it better not to ask her about her new job – it was her love-life that I was following. She finally accepted rejection by Tynan, embarked on a therapeutic flutter with a man who didn’t interest her at all, became pregnant by him, and had an excuse to flee back to New York just in time – or so I suspected – to avoid being sacked.

  I didn’t say to André ‘I told you so’ because I knew so well, by then, that it would have no effect whatsoever.

  The love which most disturbed the office – this was both surprising and gratifying – was that which afflicted men, not women. Among people of my grandparents’ generation and, to a slightly lesser extent, my parents’ it was taken for granted that men were to be preferred to women in responsible jobs because they were in better control of their emotional lives. A woman might be as intelligent as a man, but her intelligence could not be relied on because if, for instance, she was crossed in love she would go to pieces. Menstrual moodiness was not actually mentioned, but the idea of it lurked: women, poor things, were so designed that they couldn’t be expected to overcome their bodies’ vagaries. To my generation this was not true, but it was still present as something which needed to be disproved. I was therefore delighted to find that while I and my woman colleagues at work sometimes endured gruelling emotional experiences in our private lives, we none of us ever allowed them to impinge on our work in anything like the shameless way that Nick and André did.

  Nick, usually a pattern of gentlemanly reticence with an upper lip so stiff that it almost creaked, fell violently in love with a young woman who was working for us, and by the time he had left his wife, forced her into divorcing him, been dumped by his mistress, and returned to his wife, the amount of hysteria that had been unleashed left the onlookers prostrate with exhaustion. At the stage when Nick was alone in a dreary rented flat soon after his woman had decided that she didn’t want him after all, I felt truly sorry for him: a man so dignified having been reduced to making such a pathetic exhibition of himself, and all for nothing – it was tragic. But his dignity and my sympathy were a good deal reduced when, less than a week later, André reported that Nick was back with his wife and that we were all being asked to behave as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t see any explanation for such a rapid anticlimax other than an inability to imagine life without being cooked, cleaned and shopped for.

  André’s love trials, less severe than Nick’s but no less hard on the audience, were incidental to a story which turned out to be life-long and – with ups and downs – happy.

  Earlier, at the time when I first became his confidante, he used to get through women very quickly. There would be an earnest report of falling in love (it was always love, never liking, that he fell into), soon followed by the news that it was over. On one occasion only three days passed between the falling and the revelation that the woman was impossible because ‘she keeps on telephoning’. ‘But isn’t that rather nice?’ I asked. ‘No, she wants to talk about her troubles.’ Another time he invited someone he had just met to share a short holiday in Cornwall, only to see next day that this was a mistake; whereupon he bullied Sheila Dunn to go with them and she in turn had to bully him not to lock the girl out of his bedroom – a situation I remembered on reading in Liane de Pougy’s My Blue Notebooks how an ex-lover of hers summoned her to his rescue because a new flame had trundled into his bedroom equipped with her pillow, obviously expecting (quelle horreur!) to stay in his bed all night.

  This flightiness was soon to change. In 1949 André went on the first of the skiing holidays in Davos which he was to take every winter for the rest of his active life, asking me before he left to look after his latest girl. I spent an evening with her – and it seemed to me that she showed no sign of infatuation, which was lucky. As soon as André got home he called me, to announce: ‘I’m in love!’

  ‘I know you are – you left me in charge of her.’

  ‘Not with her. This is the real thing.’

  And it was. Staying at the same hotel in Davos was the woman who would put an end to his days of philandering.

  Her dark-haired brown-eyed beauty was of the slightly sharp-featured kind which most excited him, so it was not surprising that she had appealed to him on sight, but why she was the one who caught him for keeps – and it was obvious from the start that this had happened – is more mysterious.

  I thought about it a lot, and came to the conclusion that four things had combined to give her the unshakeable authority she was to hold over his imagination: she was ten years older than he was, she was married, she was shy and reserved by nature and she was seriously rich.

  Glamour requires a certain distance, and this beauty’s seniority, her married status and her reserve endowed her with it: André would never be able to feel in complete possession of her. And her – or rather her husband’s – money, which I am convinced André never thought of as something from which he might profit, enhanced this slightly out-of-reach glamour a good deal – and did so all the more effectively because she herself made very little of having money. She was gloriously special in André’s eyes less for her amazing richness than because she was above her amazing richness.

  At first he longed to marry her and felt, when her husband made this impossible, that they were in a tragic plight. But they were able to go on seeing each other, and finally he seemed to become resigned to the situation. He was in fact far too single-minded in his self-absorption to be good at marriage, however sincerely he would have adored his wife, and no one could have spent many years of meeting him almost every day without seeing as much.

  In almost fifty years I met his beloved no more than a couple of dozen times, because André insisted that she was fiercely jealous of me. To begin with that was not inconceivable – I was ten years younger than she was, shared his interests and was with him every weekday – but as the years passed it seemed less and less likely; and by the time he said it (as he did) to an eighty-year-old me of a ninety-year-old her, it had become no more than an automatic twitch of an ossified male vanity. The truth was more likely to be that she had no intention of being lumbered with her lover’s hangers-on. I believe she never once met his mother (for which no one who knew Maria Deutsch would dream of blaming her).

  In any relationship as long as theirs there are ups and downs, and twice during our Carlisle Street days André was overtaken by fits of jealousy. Neither time, as far as I could see, did he have good reason for it, though that was not from want of trying to find one. Because both times, in addition to collapsing into a melting jelly of woe, unable to think or talk for days
on end about anything else (‘How can you expect me to think about print-runs when this is going on?’ – which was hard to take given the degree of commitment he demanded from everyone else), he devoted evening after evening to what he called ‘driving round’, which meant spying, and for ‘driving round’ he insisted on a companion. He would endlessly circle whatever restaurant he thought she might be dining at; and having failed to catch her coming or going would then drive up and down the street where his suspected rival lived, hoping (or dreading) to see her car parked on it. Which he never did. If he had I would have known, because although I soon went on strike about ‘driving round’ with him, finding it as disgusting as it was boring, and was succeeded by other reluctant attendants, I still had to hear a blow-by-blow account of every evening, together with all the other moaning.

  Why did I feel that I must go on listening? Nowadays, of course, I would soon find a way of escaping from such a desperately boring ordeal, but at the time it seemed to me that listening was what friends are for … which is, I suppose, true enough up to a point, and it is not easy to draw a line between a genuine need for sympathy and greedy self-indulgence. I could and did draw it, but still I felt that André couldn’t help crossing that line so that I must bear with him. I remember a particularly violent spasm of impatience, and thinking ‘Hang on, don’t let it rip, if he knew what I’m really feeling how could our friendship survive?’.