Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Alfred’s gloss to the story was that the police and ambulance men had been fussing around so that Dris had no chance to explain his plan. Alfred had seen him whisked away without knowing where to, and had spent a day and a night adrift, wondering how the hell he was going to find Dris – and, indeed, whether Dris was still alive. Later this struck me as odd. It is not difficult to ask a policeman where an ambulance is going, nor to find a hospital. I supposed he must have been stoned out of his mind at the time of the accident, although I had never seen him more than mildly high and he was always careful to give me the impression that mildly high was as far as he went. I sometimes thought that Alfred tended to see me as slightly Jane-Austenish, which caused him to keep his less Jane-Austenish side averted from my view.

  I didn’t see much of him on that visit. He was affectionate and easy, but after a couple of hours I would know that I was becoming an inhibiting presence, and assume that he wanted to bring out the kif – I was unaware, then, that he also used other drugs – which I didn’t use, so I would say goodnight and leave, feeling that the real evening was starting up behind me. Dris’s foot remained a mystery. He saw a doctor, he did not have an operation, someone told me that the spur had been diagnosed as a result of gonorrhoea; and Alfred, when questioned, was vague, as though the matter had become unimportant.

  Alfred’s next visit, two years later, came out of the blue. As I came into the office one morning the receptionist behind her keyboard half rose from her chair and signalled that someone was waiting to see me. I peeked round the corner, and there was Alfred, sitting in a hunched position, staring into space. ‘Oh my God, trouble’ … the reaction was instantaneous, although his attitude might, I suppose, have been attributed to weariness.

  I welcomed him and took him to my room, asking the usual questions and getting the information that he was on his way back to Morocco from New York and had stopped off because he needed to see a dentist. Would I find him one, and would I give him some typing to do so that he could earn a little money while he was here? Of course I would. And then, in a tone which indicated that this was the visit’s real purpose: ‘Will you call the Prime Minister and tell him to stop it.’

  Stop what?

  The voices.

  I must not attempt dialogue or I will start cheating. The voices had been driving him mad. They gave him no peace, and the most dreadful thing about them was that they, not he, had written every word of his work. Did I see how appalling it was: learning that he had never existed? And even Dris was on their side. They often came at night, very loud. Jeering at him. Dris, in bed beside him, must have heard them. He could only be lying when he insisted that he didn’t. It was not really for the money that Alfred needed the typing, it was because it might drown the voices.

  He had been to New York, where he had attacked his mother with a knife (he had attacked Dris, too; though whether it was at this point, or a little later, that I learnt about these attacks I cannot remember). He was in London now because of what I had told him in Fez. But I had never been to Fez. Oh yes, I had, last week. Alarm became more specific because of the stony way he looked at me: I saw that it was possible to become one of ‘them’, an enemy, at any moment. I said cautiously that this Fez business puzzled me, because certainly my physical self had been in London last week.

  I told him I had never met the Prime Minister (Harold Wilson it was then), and would not be put through to him if I called him, but that I could approach a Member of Parliament if that would do. I also told him that I was sure the voices were a delusion. He replied that he could understand my disbelief, and that I thought he was mad, so could I not in return understand that to him the voices were real: ‘As real as a bus going down the street’? Yes, I could grant that, which seemed to help. It enabled him to make a bargain with me. If I proved that I was taking him seriously by approaching an MP, he would take me seriously enough to see a doctor.

  That settled, things began to go with astonishing slickness. When I called my dentist I got through in seconds and he was able to see Alfred that afternoon; and it turned out that we had in the office a manuscript which genuinely needed to be retyped. Both these pieces of luck seemed providential, because I was sure that Alfred would have interpreted delay or difficulty as obstruction. (He kept all his appointments with the dentist, behaving normally while there, and he typed the manuscript faultlessly.)

  After he had gone I sat there shaking: it would not have been very much more of a shock if I had come across someone dead. Then I pulled myself together and went to discuss the crisis with the person in the office most likely to know something about madness, who recommended calling the Tavistock Clinic for advice. At that time Doctors Laing and Cooper were in their heyday, and someone at the clinic suggested that I should get in touch with Laing. He was away, so his secretary passed me on to Cooper.

  Dr Cooper agreed to see Alfred, told me that having offered to speak to an MP I must do so – it would be a bad mistake to cheat – and asked me who would be paying him. Alfred’s family, I extemporized, hoping devoutly that it would not end by being me; and when, next day, I managed to speak to Alfred’s brother in New York, he agreed. He sounded agitated, but a good deal nicer than Alfred’s rare references to him had suggested. Then I called an MP of my acquaintance who said: ‘Are you out of your mind? If you knew the number of nuts we get, asking us to stop the voices …’

  The thought of telling Alfred that afternoon that the MP would not play worried me enough for me to ask someone to stay within earshot of my room while he was with me. To my surprise he took the news calmly, and agreed to visit Dr Cooper in spite of my failure. I began to see what I had been doing, talking to him in Fez: of all his friends I was probably the one most likely to think of madness in terms of illness, and of illness in terms of seeing a doctor, and because we saw little of each other I had not yet turned into an enemy. Alfred wanted to be proved wrong about the voices, he wanted someone to force him into treatment. I had been chosen as the person most likely to do that.

  Nevertheless he could bring himself to visit Dr Cooper only once, because: ‘I don’t like him, he looks like an Irish bookmaker.’ Cooper then volunteered to find a psychiatric social worker to talk him through this crisis, telling me that if this one could be overcome, Alfred would be less likely to experience another – perhaps. A pleasant, eager young man came to me for a briefing, then started to make regular visits to Alfred who had found himself a room in a remote suburb – I think it was lent to him by friends, but I didn’t know them. What Alfred thought of his conversations with the psychiatric social worker I never heard, but the young man told me that he felt privileged to be in communication with such a mind. I remember fearing that Alfred would draw the young man into his world before the young man could draw him back into ours.

  Two, or perhaps three weeks went by, during which I called Alfred a couple of times – he sounded lifeless – but did not ask him to my place or visit him at his. I knew I ought to do so, but kept putting it off. This was my first experience of mental illness, and I felt without bearings in strange and dangerous territory. Having taken such practical steps as I was able to think of, I found to my shame that the mere thought of Alfred exhausted me and that my affection was not strong enough to overcome the exhaustion. Not yet … next week, perhaps … until the telephone rang and it was the psychiatric social worker reporting that Alfred had left for Morocco – and I felt a wave of guilty relief. Asked whether he was better, the young man sounded dubious: ‘He was able to make the decision, anyway.’ And after that I never heard from Alfred again.

  I suppose it was his New York agent who sent me a copy of The Foot, his last novel, which has never been published. There was wonderful stuff in it, particularly about his childhood and losing his hair – when the wig was first put on his head, he wrote, it was as though his skull had been split with an axe … But much of the book had gone over the edge into the time of the voices. After reading The Foot I saw why The Exquisite C
orpse is so extraordinarily vivid: more than anyone had realized at the time, its strange events had been as real to Alfred ‘as a bus going down the street’. He was already entering the dislocated reality of madness, but was still able to keep his hold on style: instead of leaving the reader, flustered, on the edge of that reality, he could carry us into it. When he came to write The Foot his style had started to slither out of his grasp. By that time the sickness which found such nourishment in the ‘liberation and gentleness’ of Morocco, with its abundance of delicious kif, had won.

  Without knowing it, Alfred left me a delightful legacy: his oldest and truest friend, the poet Edward Field. Some years ago Edward’s tireless campaign to revive Alfred’s reputation in the United States caused him to get in touch with me, and almost instantly he and his friend, the novelist Neil Derrick, took their place among my most treasured friends. It is Edward who told me about Alfred’s last, sad years.

  Back in Morocco, his behaviour became so eccentric that he lost all his friends and alarmed the authorities. He was thrown out, and moved with his dogs – new ones, not Columbine and Skoura – to Israel, where he survived by becoming almost a hermit, still tormented by the voices and trying frantically to drown them with drink and drugs. I was shown by Edward what was probably the last thing he ever wrote: a piece intended to be published in a periodical as ‘A Letter from Israel’. It was heartbreaking. Gone was the sparkle, gone the vitality, humour and imagination. All it contained was baffled misery at his own loneliness and hopelessness. The madness, having won, had turned his writing – a bitter paradox – far more ordinary than it had ever been before. The world he was describing was no longer magical (magical in horror as well as in beauty), but was drab, cruel, boring – ‘mad’ only in that the mundane and tedious persecutions to which he constantly believed himself subject were, to other people, obviously of his own making. When he died – probably from heart failure brought on by drugs and alcohol – he was alone in a rented house which he hated. It is true that his death cannot be regretted, but feeling like that about the death of dear, amazing Alfred is horribly sad. However, other people are now joining Edward in keeping his writing alive in the United States: it is still a small movement, but it is a real one. May it thrive!

  * His editor at Editions du Seuil, Paris

  ** His editor at Random House, New York

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  GOOD PUBLISHERS ARE supposed to ‘discover’ writers, and perhaps they do. To me, however, they just happened to come. V. S. Naipaul came through Andrew Salkey who was working with him at the BBC, and Andrew I met through Mordecai Richler when he took me for a drink in a Soho club. When Andrew heard that I was Mordecai’s editor he asked me if he could send me a young friend of his who had just written something very good, and a few days later Vidia came to a coffee bar near our office and handed me Miguel Street.

  I was delighted by it, but worried: it was stories (though linked stories), and a publishing dogma to which André Deutsch strongly adhered was that stories didn’t sell unless they were by Names. So before talking to him about it I gave it to Francis Wyndham who was with us as part-time ‘Literary Adviser’, and Francis loved it at once and warmly. This probably tipped the balance with André, whose instinct was to distrust as ‘do-gooding’ my enthusiasm for a little book by a West Indian about a place which interested no one and where the people spoke an unfamiliar dialect. I think he welcomed its being stories because it gave him a reason for saying ‘no’: but Francis’s opinion joined to mine made him bid me find out if the author had a novel on the stocks and tell him that if he had, then that should come first and the stories could follow all in good time. Luckily Vidia was in the process of writing The Mystic Masseur.

  In fact we could well have launched him with Miguel Street, which has outlasted his first two novels in critical esteem, because in the fifties it was easier to get reviews for a writer seen by the British as black than it was for a young white writer, and reviews influenced readers a good deal more then than they do now. Publishers and reviewers were aware that new voices were speaking up in the newly independent colonies, and partly out of genuine interest, partly out of an optimistic if ill-advised sense that a vast market for books lay out there, ripe for development, they felt it to be the thing to encourage those voices. This trend did not last long, but it served to establish a number of good writers.

  Vidia did not yet have the confidence to walk away from our shilly-shallying, and fortunately it did him no real harm. Neither he nor we made any money to speak of from his first three books, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and Miguel Street, but there was never any doubt about the making of his name, which began at once with the reviews and was given substance by his own work as a reviewer, of which he got plenty as soon as he became known as a novelist. He was a very good reviewer, clearly as widely read as any literary critic of the day, and it was this rather than his first books which revealed that here was a writer who was going to reject the adjective ‘regional’, and with good reason.

  We began to meet fairly often, and I enjoyed his company because he talked well about writing and people, and was often funny. At quite an early meeting he said gravely that when he was up at Oxford – which he had not liked – he once did a thing so terrible that he would never be able to tell anyone what it was. I said it was unforgivable to reveal that much without revealing more, especially to someone like me who didn’t consider even murder literally unspeakable, but I couldn’t shift him and never learnt what the horror was – though someone told me later that when he was at Oxford Vidia did have some kind of nervous breakdown. It distressed me that he had been unhappy at a place which I loved. Having such a feeling for scholarship, high standards and tradition he ought to have liked it … but no, he would not budge. Never for a minute did it occur to me that he might have felt at a loss when he got to Oxford because of how different it was from his background, still less because of any form of racial insult: he appeared to me far too impressive a person to be subject to such discomforts.

  The image Vidia was projecting at that time, in his need to protect his pride, was so convincing that even when I read A House for Mr Biswas four years later, and was struck by the authority of his account of Mr Biswas’s nervous collapse, I failed to connect its painful vividness with his own reported ‘nervous breakdown’. Between me and the truth of his Oxford experience stood the man he wanted people to see.

  At that stage I did not know how or why he had rejected Trinidad, and if I had known it, would still have been unable to understand what it is like to be unable to accept the country in which you were born. Vidia’s books (not least A Way in the World, not written until thirty-seven years later) were to do much to educate me; but then I had no conception of how someone who feels he doesn’t belong to his ‘home’ and cannot belong anywhere else is forced to exist only in himself; nor of how exhausting and precarious such a condition (blithely seen by the young and ignorant as desirable) can be. Vidia’s self – his very being – was his writing: a great gift, but all he had. He was to report that ten years later in his career, when he had earned what seemed to others an obvious security, he was still tormented by anxiety about finding the matter for his next book, and for the one after that … an anxiety not merely about earning his living, but about existing as the person he wanted to be. No wonder that while he was still finding his way into his writing he was in danger; and how extraordinary that he could nevertheless strike an outsider as a solidly impressive man*.

  This does not mean that I failed to see the obvious delicacy of his nervous system. Because of it I was often worried by his lack of money, and was appalled on his behalf when I once saw him risk losing a commission by defying the Times Literary Supplement. They had offered their usual fee of £25 (or was it guineas?) for a review, and he had replied haughtily that he wrote nothing for less than fifty. ‘Oh silly Vidia,’ I thought, ‘now they’ll never offer him anything again.’ But lo! they paid him his fifty an
d I was filled with admiration. Of course he was right: authors ought to know their own value and refuse the insult of derisory fees.

  I was right to admire that self-respect, at that time, but it was going to develop into a quality difficult to like. In all moral qualities the line between the desirable and the deplorable is imprecise – between tolerance and lack of discrimination, prudence and cowardice, generosity and extravagance – so it is not easy to see where a man’s proper sense of his own worth turns into a more or less pompous self-importance. In retrospect it seems to me that it took eight or nine years for this process to begin to show itself in Vidia, and I think it possible that his audience was at least partly to blame for it.

  For example, after a year or so of meetings in the pubs or restaurants where I usually lunched, I began to notice that Vidia was sometimes miffed at being taken to a cheap restaurant or being offered a cheap bottle of wine – and the only consequence of my seeing this (apart from my secretly finding it funny) was that I became careful to let him choose both restaurant and wine. And this carefulness not to offend him, which was, I think, shared by all, or almost all, his English friends, came from an assumption that the reason why he was so anxious to command respect was fear that it was, or might be, denied him because of his race; which led to a squeamish dismay in oneself at the idea of being seen as racist. The shape of an attitude which someone detests, and has worked at extirpating, can often be discerned from its absence, and during the first years of Vidia’s career in England he was often coddled for precisely the reason the coddler was determined to disregard.