Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  It is not the artist’s skill that works the spell, charming though it is in Bouts’s case and awe-inspiring in della Francesca’s. It is the selflessness of such art that is magnetic, as it is in a Chinese bronze of the Buddha, a medieval wood-carving of an angel, or an African mask. The person making the object wasn’t trying to express his own personality or his own interpretation of appearances; he was trying to represent something outside himself for which he felt the utmost respect, love or dread – to show us this wonderful thing as well as he possibly could. How the purity of this intention makes itself felt in the artefact I don’t understand, but it does. You need only compare any halfway respectable Madonna and child from the fourteenth or fifteenth century with even the best modern one to see that it does, and that it is something to do with the artist’s taking for granted the truth of what he is representing. From the seventeenth century on there is always a taint of sentimentality or hysteria in religious art, however splendid the technique, and by the twentieth century it soaks the object right through: think of the junkety smugness of Eric Gill! Of course great artists painting nonreligious works often attend to what they are making with a respect and love which takes them beyond self and approaches the same purity, but there is no longer a subject strong enough to save the bacon of an artist less than great (Bouts was good, not great).

  Early religious music, lovely though much of it is, has a less powerful effect on me: I prefer Bach’s instrumental music to his cantatas. The words, I suppose, make the cantatas too dogmatic for me: even the greatest religious poetry and prose leaves me unmoved. The painter of a triptych for an altar did it with dogmatic intent, but his medium is less suited to teaching than words are. Dogmatically, painting is a blunt instrument, so the lily, the goldfinch, the pomegranate, the dove, the mother, the child can all be taken to exist for their own sakes, regardless of their message. Although – baffling paradox – it is precisely their creator’s belief in the truth of the message that gives them their force.

  My indifference to religious writing is overcome by one majestic exception: the Bible. I was brought up to know both the Old Testament and the New fairly well, and am still glad of it. The beauty of the language has much to do with this, but my maternal grandmother’s gift for reading aloud to children has much more. She left us in no doubt that we were listening to very special true stories – special because their truth concerned us closely. Nowadays, if I read the story of Joseph and his brethren, or of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, or of the nativity, or of the raising of Lazarus, something odd but enjoyable happens. This laptop offers the choice of a number of different typefaces and I can tell it which to use with a touch of a finger. When I read those stories it is as though at a finger-touch my adult mind is replaced by my child mind. There go the familiar stories, unfolding before my eyes, sounding and looking just as they sounded and looked when Gran read them to me. Of course I can still think about them in an adult way and of course it does not mean that I kneel down and worship God: I love the story of how he called Samuel in the night, but he still doesn’t call me. It is simply that those stories are engraved in my imagination so deeply that they can’t be erased by disbelief. They have, in fact, nothing to do with belief or disbelief as I mean the words now, but they restore the sensation of belief as it used to be in the same way that Christmas carols do. They still trail a whiff of that old special importance, to be caught by some part of my awareness which is usually dormant. The Bible was shown to me through the prism of belief, the absolute belief of those who wrote it and the diluted but still real belief of my grandmother, who did not think God was like the Jehovah of the Jews but still believed that he existed, and who probably saw Jesus’s son-ship, immaculate conception and so on as metaphor but still held that in order to be good people we must believe in his divinity. Coming to me in this persuasive way it did certainly influence the way I was to see life; yet it failed to convince me of its central teaching. How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it – or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text?

  I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader’s conscious response to a text, whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.

  For example, I have a much younger friend, Sally, who when her children were just beginning to read became annoyed because so many of the books written for them were about animals: it was a mouse, not a child, which disobeyed its mother and got into trouble, a rabbit who raided the kitchen garden, an elephant who became king. Why, she asked, was she expected to feed her children on this pap of fantasy instead of on stories about real life? The answer, it seems to me, is that children respond to animal protagonists because when very small what they need is not to discover and recognize ‘real life’, but to discover and recognize their own feelings. Take a pair of well-known animal characters, Piglet and Tigger, in The House at Pooh Corner: Piglet is an anxious, timid little person, capable of being brave if he absolutely has to be, but only at great cost to himself, and Tigger is so exuberantly bouncy that he can be a nuisance. Both of them express things which a child discovers and recognizes with pleasure because they exist within himself. If those characteristics were expressed on the page by a child, they would belong to that child and would call for the use of the kind of critical faculty one employs vis-à-vis another person. Expressed by a ‘made up’ animal (I have yet to meet a child so simple-minded that it doesn’t know perfectly well that animals don’t talk in human language), they slip past the critical faculty into the undergrowth of feelings which need so urgently to be sorted out and understood. (When a story about people, not animals, is popular with the very young – the Postman Pat stories, for example – the people are drawn in such an unrealistic way that they might as well be animals.) What was important for Sally’s little children was not to be given only sensible, real-life stories, but to have plenty of them about for when they began to need them.

  When I was in my early teens I used to sink luxuriously into a romantic novel as though into a hot bath, and couldn’t have too many of them. I never believed, however, that anyone in real life looked or behaved like the heroes and heroines of those books. What I needed was to practise the sensations of sex – to indulge in a kind of non-genital masturbation – because I was a steamy girl forbidden by the society in which I lived to make love. Perhaps because I was lucky enough also to have plenty of good writing at my disposal, the romantic novels did not make a romantic lover of me: it was only the ‘nyum-nyum’ sensations I needed, and I gave no more credence to their soppy message than a young child gives to a rabbit’s little blue coat. Or than I myself gave to the Holy Trinity, first met at a time when I had taken my fill of baby-stories about animals and before I had begun to hunger for the sexy taste of romances, when I was just starting to feel my appetite for real life.

  5

  SO HERE I go, into advanced old age, towards my inevitable and no longer distant end, without the ‘support’ of religion and having to face the prospect ahead in all its bald reality. What are my feelings about that? I turn for enlightenment to the people I know who have gone ahead of me.

  Most of the women on both sides of my family live into their nineties, keeping their wits about them. None of them has ever had to go into an old person’s home, or has even had to employ live-in carers. All the married ones outlived their husbands and had daughters to see them through their last days, and the few who did their dying in hospital were there for only a day or two. I have become sharply aware of how lucky we have been in that respect, since the old age and death of my closest friend has taught me how much it costs to employ skilled home nursing, or to take refuge in a ‘home’ with staff as kind and understanding as they are efficient (no such place exists but some are nearer to it than others, usually because they cost hair-raising sums). No one in my family could have afforded either alternative for more than a week or so. What everyone wants is to live until the e
nd in their own home, with the companionship of someone they love and trust. That is what my lot wanted and achieved, including my widowed mother, although I still feel guilty at the knowledge that in her case this happy conclusion was achieved by a narrow squeak.

  By the time she was ninety-two I was seventy. She was deaf, blind in one eye and depending on a contact lens for sight in the other, so arthritic in her hips that she could hardly walk, and in her right arm that it was almost useless. She also had angina (still mild and infrequent) and vertigo (horribly trying and not infrequent). I was living in London, still by great good luck working, sharing a flat with an old friend who had barely enough money to cover his keep, while I had never earned enough to save a penny. Nothing would have made my mother confess that she longed to have me at home with her in Norfolk, but I knew that she did, and I believed that if you are the child of a loving, reliable and generously undemanding woman you owe her this consolation in her last years. I think that for people to look after their children when they are young, and to be looked after by them when they are old, is the natural order of events – although stupid or perverse parents can dislocate it. My mother was not stupid or perverse.

  I ought, of course, to have seen to it that in the past I was paid what was due to me for my skills so that I could have bought a house in which, eventually, I could have accommodated my mother, instead of continuing in a small flat which an extraordinarily generous cousin let me have for a peppercorn rent. Foreseeing my mother’s old age, I did once raise the matter with André Deutsch (who was justified in taking more out of our firm than he allowed me because without him it would not have existed, but who allowed the discrepancy to become too great, being unable to resist taking advantage of my idiocy about money. No doubt if I had kicked and screamed I could have brought him to heel, but I was too lazy to face the hassle.). He thought, as usual, that the firm could not afford to increase my salary, but he consulted a money-wise friend who said that if I could find a suitable house, he could arrange for an insurance company to buy it, whereupon I could occupy it while I lived on advantageous terms which I have now forgotten. I found a charming little house with a surprisingly large garden and a ground floor which could become a flat for my mother, but the insurance company’s surveyor declared it a bad risk because it was at the end of a row and had a bulge. It did not have even a hint of a bulge, nor has it now, a great many years later (I look carefully whenever I pass it), but I was not unwilling to be discouraged. Given support in this sensible project I would have pursued it happily enough, but without support my underlying reluctance to change my congenial way of life won the day, and I failed to look for another house.

  And that is where the guilt is. There was a real, financial reason why it would have been unwise to give up my job and my London life; but no doubt my mother and I could have managed if we had absolutely had to. The reason was not as compelling as my strong disinclination to do so.

  I was being no more selfish than my mother had been when her mother, at the age of ninety-four, was approaching death. My mother wanted to visit my sister in Southern Rhodesia, as it then was. Ought she to postpone the visit, given Gran’s condition? She asked herself the question, then reported that Aunt Joyce, who lived with Gran and was carrying the full weight of her illness, had agreed that the postponement might alarm Gran by betraying that she was expected to die. I knew this was rationalization: that my mother was terrified of being there for the death and was hoping it would happen in her absence, as it did. All her life she had been the spoilt youngest daughter, the wilful one who could get away with things, unlike her responsible elders. I felt ashamed for her – perhaps even shocked – but not able to blame her. I was not seeing much of her at the time and thought I was free of family dependency, but that uncanny genetic closeness which forces one to feel in one’s nerves what one’s nearest kin are feeling in theirs was at work. And I am still unable to make her selfishness then feel like an excuse for my own.

  Finally, however, the discomfort of guilt became too much for me, so I decided on a compromise between my disinclination to uproot and what I couldn’t help seeing as my duty. I decided to spend four days – the weekend and a shopping day – with my mother for every three days in London, shuttling by car in good weather and by rail when the roads threatened to be bad. She had people to keep an eye on her during the week: Eileen Barry, a home help kind and reliable far beyond the call of duty, every morning; Sid Pooley, who chopped logs and did rough work in the garden every afternoon, while his wife Ruby mowed the lawns, picked and arranged flowers, and kept the bird-table supplied; and Myra, who cooked her supper, did her washing and ironing, and shopped for her (though rarely to my mother’s satisfaction because, naturally enough, she bought things at shops she would visit anyway while catering for her family, and they were not to my mother’s taste). At that time, in the country, such unprofessional but reliable help was not expensive – indeed, the home help was supplied free by the social services (this, I hear, has been discontinued).

  Having announced my four-nights/three-nights plan I returned to London and collapsed into bed feeling horribly ill, with a temperature so low that I thought the thermometer must be broken; but once that involuntary protest was over I hit my stride, becoming quite good at suspending my life, which is what has to be done when living with an old person. You buy and cook the food that suits her, eat it at her set mealtimes, work in the garden according to her instructions, put your own work aside, don’t listen to music because her hearing aid distorts it, and talk almost exclusively about her interests. She is no longer able to adapt to other people’s needs and tastes, and you are there to enable her to indulge her own. Luckily gardening, my mother’s great passion, is genuinely an interest of mine, and so is making things. All she could make by then, because of limited eyesight and rheumatic hands, was knitted garments, but her knitting was adventurous and I truly enjoyed discussing whether purple should be introduced, or a new pattern embarked on for the yoke. While my mother was well there was real pleasure in seeing her contented, and knowing she was more fully so because of my presence.

  But she was not always well. Sometimes she went grey in the face and quietly slipped one of her ‘heart pills’ under her tongue; more often she had a less dangerous but more distressing attack of vertigo. She was clever at keeping her medicaments for this in strategic places, so that whether a ‘dizzy’ came on in the drawing room, the kitchen, her bedroom or the bathroom she could get herself without too much trouble into a chair with the necessary equipment. But gradually the length and intensity of the attacks increased, and the occasions on which I was thankful that I had been there to help her became more frequent. This did not lessen my anxiety at the prospect of such crises – indeed, it increased. If I woke during the night worry would start to nag, and I could rarely go to sleep again. I knew her usual movements very well: how she almost always shuffled along to the lavatory at about four in the morning (only the most acute emergency could make her use the commode I persuaded her to keep in her bedroom); how she began the slow process of washing and dressing at about six-thirty. If I didn’t hear these sounds… was it because I had missed them, or was something wrong? I would have to get up and check. If I heard her cough, was it just an ordinary cough or was it the first retching of a vertigo? I had to listen tensely until its nature became clear. The anxiety seemed nearer to some kind of animal panic than anything rational. After all, I knew that I could help her through a vertigo, and even supposing it were a heart attack and she died of it, I knew that this sooner-rather-than-later inevitable event would be the timely conclusion of a long and good life, not a tragedy. But still, the way she was a little older, a little more helpless, a little more battered by that wretched vertigo with every week that passed – the fact that death was, so to speak, up in the attic of her house, waiting to come down and do something cruelly and fatally painful to her – frightened me.

  I had been observing the four-night/three-night plan f
or about a year before I realized quite how much it frightened me. Of course it was tiring, even without the worry. I was working hard on my London days, so I never had time to be on my own and do my own things in my own home. I began to feel heavily weary. I drove to work every day, leaving my car in a garage about fifteen minutes walk away from the office – a pleasant walk, taking me through Russell Square, which I had always enjoyed. Now it began to seem exhausting; my feet seemed less manageable than they ought to be so I had to be careful not to stumble; I even began to dread it. And one weekend with my mother I felt so bad-tempered, so dreary, so near to irrational tears, that I decided I must see my doctor as soon as I got home. High blood pressure, he said: very much too high. This was both alarming and a relief: alarming because I had a secret dread of having a stroke, a relief because there was a real reason for feeling lousy, it was not just my imagination. The doctor said it was not surprising that I was suffering from stress and that I must take a proper holiday, and I added a scold to myself about my weight, which I hadn’t bothered to check for months: it had gone up to twelve and a half stone! So my sister kindly came over from Zimbabwe for five weeks to be with my mother, and I stayed in my own dear bed for a week, then went for a week to a luxurious health clinic to start the process of weight-loss (successfully continued on my own). Once my blood pressure was back to normal and I was feeling well again – better than I had felt for years – I decided that I would not go on with the unbroken four/three plan, but would keep every third weekend to myself in London. This made sense, but it renewed guilt. In London I was able to shrug off anxiety and think about my own concerns (even enjoy them more than I used to because of having had to turn my back on them), but the night-time worries when I was staying with my mother were sharper than ever.