Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Sam’s chief attraction to me was that he wanted me: to be urgently wanted at a time when I no longer expected it cheered me up and brought me alive again – no small gift. Also, I am curious. His background and the whole course of his life, being so different from mine, seemed interesting even when he was being dull. A middle-class Englishman with his nature would have bored me because I would have known too much about him. Sam I wanted to find out about, and what I found out was likeable. Even when I was thinking ‘What an old noodle!’ I liked him, and what I liked best was the sense I picked up of the boy he used to be.

  He had the calm self-confidence and general benevolence bestowed by a secure and happy childhood. A middle-class adoring mother can sometimes damage her child, but in a peasant family she is more likely to make him: she must get him out of this hard life if she possibly can, even if she loses him in the process. Sam’s father owned the patch of land on which they lived (and that, too, contributed to self-confidence, because being raised on your own place, however small, is stabilizing), but it was a property too small to support a family so he had to find work in Trinidad, and then in Venezuela. It was the mother who ran the home, and she gave her son unquestioned precedence over her two daughters (Barry’s mother did the same thing and her daughter never quite forgave her).

  ‘We didn’t know it,’ Sam told me, ‘but the food we ate was just what everyone says nowadays is the healthiest: fish, fruit and vegetables, we were never short of those.’ They lived right on the sea so escaped the common West Indian overdependence on root vegetables. ‘And all that air and exercise. I thought nothing of running five miles to school and five miles back – long-distance running was a craze with us boys, we ran everywhere.’ They rode, too. Most people kept a horse (this surprised me) and if a boy wanted to get somewhere in a hurry he could jump on to some neighbour’s bare-backed nag without having to ask. And they swam as much as they ran. He marvelled when he remembered how no one fussed when they used to swim out to a little islet about two miles offshore. A very tall, good-looking, even-tempered boy, good at all the local pastimes, crammed with healthy food and plunged by his fond mother into herb baths of which she knew the secrets, Sam was evidently secure among his friends as a leader. When he recalled those happy times he seemed to bring glimpses of them into the room – a whiff of nutmeg-scented sea-breeze, very endearing.

  His mother lost him, of course – that wife was her big mistake. He begot two children on her, then could stand it no longer, left for England and his mother never saw him again. She died asking for him, people wrote and told him that. He spoke of it solemnly but placidly: it was a mother’s fate, he implied, sad but inevitable.

  He did not consider himself a bad son, husband or father for having left. He had kept in touch, sent money, seen to it that his children were educated: he had done what was proper. His son became a doctor and moved to the United States, and they saw each other from time to time. His daughter was unforgiving, ‘a stupid girl’. And his wife … Thirty-five years after he left Grenada he returned for the first time, for a three-week visit at the invitation of the prime minister. He didn’t let his wife know he was coming, but after the first week it occurred to him to drop in on her, still without warning. ‘So what happened?’ I asked. He shook his head, clicked his tongue, and said slowly and disapprovingly: ‘That’s a very cantankerous woman’. This made me laugh so much that he took offence and provided no more details. Not that he would have been able to provide any of real interest, since he obviously had no conception of the life to which he had condemned that ‘stupid’ daughter and that ‘cantankerous’ wife: a convenient ignorance shared by a great number of West Indian husbands and ‘babyfathers’ – though many of the women left behind seem to take it calmly.

  Our relationship ended gently, the gaps between our meetings becoming gradually longer. The last time we met, after an especially long one (so long that, without regret, I had thought it final), he was slower than usual and seemed abstracted and tired, but not ill. Although we had agreed already that our affair was over, he said ‘What about coming to bed?’ but I could see he was relieved when I said no. ‘The trouble with me,’ I said, ‘is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. My body has gone against it.’ He didn’t say ‘Mine too’, he wouldn’t want to go as far as that, but he did say: ‘I know, the body does go against things. You can’t do anything about that.’ And the next thing I heard about him, not very much later, was that he had died suddenly of a heart attack.

  You can’t miss someone grievously if you haven’t seen them or wanted to see them for several months and they had touched only a comparatively small corner of your life, but after his death Sam became more vivid in my mind than many of my more important dead. I saw him with photographic clarity – still can. His gestures, his expressions, the way he walked and sat, his clothes. The seven years of him played through my head with the immediacy of a newsreel: all we said, all we did, perhaps the pattern of our meetings was so repetitive that I couldn’t help learning him by heart. I particularly remember the feel of him. His skin was smooth and always seemed to be cool and dry, a pleasant, healthy skin, and his smell was pleasant and healthy. I feel him lying beside me after making love, both of us on our backs, hands linked, arms and legs touching in a friendly way. His physical presence is so clear, even now, that it is almost like a haunt (an amiable one).

  The faith Sam had decided to favour was in the transmigration of souls because, he said, how else could one explain why one person had a good life and another a horrid one: they were getting what they had earned in their previous lives, it was obvious. He was displeased when I said that if that were so, how odd that so many black people must have been very wicked in the past. He refused to take it up because, I think, transmigration was promising to him personally. He had, after all, been uncommonly lucky: a little refinement of the soul towards the end and up he would go. That, he once explained to me, was why he had given up meat and hard liquor once he was past sixty. I wish I could hope that Sam was right in expecting to come back to earth for another life. If he could, I doubt whether it would be so rarefied a life as he had aimed for, but it would certainly be several degrees more enjoyable than the one he left, which would make it much better than most. Meanwhile, perhaps because he carried into the beginning of my old age something belonging to younger days, he is still alive in my head, and I am glad of it. Dear Sam.

  4

  AN IMPORTANT ASPECT of the ebbing of sex was that other things became more interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than of a man is used by sex. I have tried to believe that most of this difference comes from conditioning, but can’t do so. Conditioning reinforces it, but essentially it is a matter of biological function. There is no physical reason why a man shouldn’t turn and walk away from any act of sex he performs, whereas every act of sex performed by a woman has the potential of changing her mode of being for the rest of her life. He simply triggers the existence of another human being; she has to build it out of her own physical substance, carry it inside her, bond with it whether she likes it or not – and to say that she has been freed from this by the pill is nonsense. She can prevent it, but only by drastic chemical intervention which throws her body’s natural behaviour out of gear. Having bodies designed to bear children means that many generations will have to pass before women are freed from the psychic patterns dictated by their physique, however easy it is for them to swallow a pill; and it is possible that they will never be able to achieve such psychic freedom. Exactly how much of personality is determined by chemistry is at present beyond assessment, but that some of it is can’t be doubted. Because of all this, when they are at the peak of their physical activity women often disappear into it, many of them discovering what kind of people they are apart from it only in middle age, some of them never. I had started to have glimpses of myself earlier than most, as a result of being de
prived of marriage and child-bearing, but not with the clarity I discovered once sex had fallen right away. My atheism is an example: it became much more firmly established.

  I had known for a long time that I did not believe in a god, an attitude which had crystallized when I was at Oxford towards the end of the 1930s and met a man called Duncan at a party. We were not to become friends because it was the end of term, and the term was Duncan’s last. He had finished his final exams that day, had already been accepted by the Colonial Service, and would be taking up a post in Cyprus in a few weeks’ time. We were drawn to each other, however, left the party together, had dinner and went punting on the river, and the next day we met again and spent the afternoon in his rooms. At that time I was stuck in the unhappiness of betrayed love, feeling shrivelled because it was months since I had heard from Paul. Being in the habit of considering myself unavailable to other men, I told Duncan I was engaged, but I am sure that if we had gone on seeing each other I would have been rescued: he was the most agreeable and intelligent man I had met at Oxford, and the morning after our afternoon together he sent me flowers with a note saying, ‘We will see each other again’. We never did. I had two letters from him, the second from Cyprus, and then the war began and I forgot him. Except that I kept, and still keep, one thing he said.

  We must have talked at supper about what we believed, because after it, as we walked over grass through the sweet summer night to the place where the punts were moored, I said that though I was unable to believe in the god I had been taught to believe in, I supposed that some kind of First Cause had to be accepted. To which Duncan replied ‘Why? Might it not be that beginnings and endings are things we think in terms of simply because our minds are too primitive to conceive of anything else?’

  Did I answer? I can remember only tilting my head back and gazing up into the star-filled sky with a feeling of extreme, almost dizzy elation, as though for the first time my eyes were capable of seeing space as it deserved to be seen. I made no attempt to plumb the implications of this idea, but neither did I hesitate to accept it as the truth. And for a long time that was the extent of my thinking about religion.

  I was brought back to it when I was beginning to be old by John Updike, when he was analysing (I don’t remember where) his own religious belief, and said, or rather wrote: ‘Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ambiguity, the ingenuity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?’ This baffled me. Perhaps it is uninteresting intellectually to believe that the nature of the universe is far, far beyond grasping, not only by oneself as an individual but by oneself as a member of our species; but emotionally, or poetically, it seems to me vastly more exciting and more beautiful than exercising any amount of ingenuity in making up fairy stories.

  John Updike would agree that our planet is a mere speck in that small part of the universe which we are capable of perceiving, and that Homo sapiens has existed for only a tiny fraction of that planet’s tiny time, and has not the slightest idea of what 90 per cent of the universe is made of (I like scientists calling what they don’t know ‘dark matter’); so how can he, or any other intelligent person, fail to agree that men are being absurdly kind to themselves when they suppose that something thought by them is universally relevant (those religious people who believe in one god do seem to see him as universal, not as local to Earth)? Faith – the decision to act as though you believe something you have no reason to believe, hoping that the decision will bring on belief and then you will feel better – that seems to me mumbo-jumbo. I can’t feel anything but sure that when men form ideas about God, creation, eternity, they are making no more sense in relation to what lies beyond the range of their comprehension than the cheeping of sparrows. And given that the universe continues to be what it is, regardless of what we believe, and what it is has always been and will continue to be the condition of our existence, why should the thought of our smallness in it be boring – or, for that matter, frightening?

  I have heard people bewailing man’s landing on the moon, as though before it was touched by an astronaut’s foot it was made of silver or mother-of-pearl, and that footprint turned it into grey dust. But the moon never was made of silver or mother-of-pearl, and it still shines as though it were so made. Whether we know less or more about it, it remains itself and continues to reflect the sun’s light in a way that is beautiful in men’s eyes. Surely the part of life which is within our range, the mere fact of life, is mysterious and exciting enough in itself? And surely the urgent practical necessity of trying to order it so that its cruelties are minimized and its beauties are allowed their fullest possibly play is compelling enough without being seen as a duty laid on us by a god?

  People of faith so often seem to forget that a god who gives their lives meaning too often provides them with justification when they want to wipe out other people who believe in other gods, or in nothing. My own belief – that we on our short-lived planet are part of a universe simultaneously perfectly ordinary in that there it is and incalculably mysterious in that it is beyond our comprehension – does not feel like believing in nothing and would never make me recruit anyone for slaughter. It feels like a state of infinite possibility, stimulating and enjoyable – not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true. And this remains so when I force myself to think about the most alarming aspect of what I can understand, which is that we will eventually become extinct, differing from the dinosaurs only in contributing a good deal more than they did to our own fate. And it also remains so when I contemplate my personal extinction.

  I once had a favourite image for falling asleep which I used when getting into bed felt particularly good. After waiting a minute or two before switching off my lamp, collecting awareness so that I would fully appreciate the embrace of darkness, I turned face downwards, sprawled my arms and legs, and my bed became a raft which floated me out onto the sea of night. It produced a sensation of luxury, the more seductive for being enlivened by an almost imperceptible thread of risk.

  Once we at André Deutsch brought out a coffee-table book about beds prefaced by an oddly inappropriate essay by Anthony Burgess. The book was supposed to be in praise of beds, but Burgess said he loathed them because he was afraid of going to sleep and needed to outwit his fear by letting sleep catch him unexpectedly in a chair or on the floor. Lying down on a bed, he felt, was like lying down on a bier from which, if he lost consciousness, he might never get up. (I did question this preface, but André’s view was that no one bothered to read prefaces, what mattered was having the man’s name on the book, not what he said – a bit of publisher-think which I deplored, but not strongly enough to make a stand.) I have read of people undergoing many things worse than this quirk of Burgess’s, but of no ordeal that was harder for me to imagine sharing. Being forced to deny oneself one of the greatest pleasures of everyday life, the natural seal of happiness, the sure escape from sorrow or boredom, the domestication of mystery … What an affliction! Could the poor man really have been so savagely haunted by the fear of death? From which it may correctly be deduced that I myself have never been enough troubled by it to want to envisage an afterlife.

  What explains irreligiosity? Lack of imagination? Courage? A genetically bestowed pattern of temperament? The first two occur in the religious as well as the irreligious, and the third only shunts the question back through the generations. Religious people of limited intelligence often think that the explanation is licentiousness, a naughty refusal to accept restraints; but many an unbeliever is as scrupulous as any religious person in acknowledging the restrictions and obligations laid on us by sharing the world with others. To the irreligious person the answer seems simple enough, though embarrassing to pronounce: he is more intelligent than his religious brother. But his religious brother sees with equal clarity that the opposite is true, and where is the neutral referee
? We must settle, I suppose, for there being in this respect two kinds of person.

  My kind enjoys an unfair advantage. In the Western world there are probably nowadays as many people without the religious instinct as with it, but all of them live in societies which developed on lines laid down by believers: everywhere on earth men started by conjuring Powers into being to whom they could turn for direction and control of their behaviour. The mechanism was obviously a necessary one in its time. So we, the irreligious, live within social structures built by the religious, and however critical or resentful we may be of parts of them, no honest atheist would deny that in so far as the saner aspects of religion hold within a society, that society is the better for it. We take a good nibble of our brother’s cake before throwing it away.

  Right behaviour, to me, is the behaviour taught me by my Christian family: one should do unto one’s neighbour as one would like him to do unto one, should turn the other cheek, should not pass on the other side of those in trouble, should be gentle to children, should avoid obsession with material possessions. I have accepted a great deal of Christ’s teaching partly because it was given me in childhood by people I loved, and partly because it continues to make sense and the nearer people come to observing it the better I like them (not that they come, or ever have come, very near it, and nor have I). So my piece of my brother’s cake is a substantial chunk, and it is covered, what’s more, with a layer of icing, because much of the painting and sculpture I love best (and such things matter a lot to me) was made by artists who lived long enough ago to believe that heaven and hell were real. In the Correr Museum in Venice, coming suddenly on Dieric Bouts’s little Madonna Nursing the Child, I was struck through with delight as I never was by a mother and child by, for example, Picasso or Mary Cassatt, and I cannot remember being more intensely moved by any painting than by Piero della Francesca’s Nativity.