Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  It was interesting to learn that while I was dismayed at having to spend so much time doing things for him or worrying about him, nothing in me questioned for a moment that so it must be. The dismay, though real enough, was on the surface, while something underneath and not even thought about took it for granted that what was necessary had to be done.

  I was most forcibly struck by the extent of my acceptance of the situation when, during one of his spells in hospital, he became constipated, largely because the catheter he was on then was a bad one which caused him to suffer spasms at the slightest provocation. This frightened him so that he was reluctant to move – froze him up. Eventually they gave him a laxative, and when I arrived that afternoon a nurse said, ‘I’ve been trying to get him to the toilet, but he refused to go till you came.’ And as soon as I reached his bedside he said, ‘Thank god you’re here, now I can go to the loo.’ [Here I shall spare you several lines of over-detailed description, returning to the scene near its end.] Luckily there were lots of substantial paper towels in the loo, and a large covered bin into which to dispose of them, and plenty of hot water: it was not difficult to clean him, the pan and the floor up. What astonished me was that I didn’t mind doing it. There was no recoil, no feeling of disgust – I seemed to watch myself doing it in a businesslike way, without making any effort, like a professional nurse. But at the same time I was surprised at this. And indeed, I still feel surprised. Not so much at having done it, but at not having to make an effort to do it. (When Barry was back in bed he remarked that it was lucky that I had been there. I answered rather tartly that he could perfectly well have gone to the loo with the nurse, to which he replied, ‘Yes, but it would have been less pleasant’!!!) After that, I realized that I had moved, after all those years, into a state of Wifehood. Having recognized that, and thought that after such a long time of happy exemption it was perhaps only fair that I should have a taste of munching the pudding, I stopped minding the loss of ‘my own way’ quite so much. But my word, what bliss any escape into it always is!

  It was just as well that this automatic shift into wifehood came about, because I have had to remain in it ever since. Barry’s prostate trouble was over, but his diabetes became worse, so that quite soon he had to add insulin injections to his treatment. These, to my relief, he was willing to administer himself, but they have never made him feel any better. Most diabetics seem to be able to live normal lives once their treatment has been decided on and they have learnt how to manage their diet, but Barry, perhaps because he refuses to make any effort to eat right, feels permanently exhausted and hardly ever able to leave his bed. And I – this causes pangs of guilt, but not strong enough pangs to produce much action – have found it impossible to take control of his diet with an iron hand, which would involve not only a great deal of cooking, but also compelling him to eat things he doesn’t like, which no one has ever been able to do. While as for preventing him from eating what he does like … Naturally I avoid buying cakes, sweet biscuits and so on, whereupon this bedridden man, who has to be driven to the library three or four times a week in order to keep him in reading matter, will, as soon as I am out, get himself to the shops in order to buy a coffee cake or doughnuts without a moment’s hesitation, and will stop this idiocy only when his blood-sugar readings go through the ceiling and he feels really terrible. He will then be sensible until the readings become not too bad (they are never very good), at which point he will start all over again, while to wean him from fats and from huge dollops of double cream in his coffee is simply impossible. It is some consolation to me that both Sally and her daughter Jess, who know him as well as I do, are equally unable to control him and assure me that there is nothing I can do about it, but still I can’t help feeling that the sort of ‘wife’ I have shrunk into being is a very bad one.

  Our main trouble is that what he calls his ‘weakness’ – the dreadful draining-away of energy from which he suffers – goes so deep that he has lost interest in almost everything. This intelligent man will now read nothing but crime fiction, and never a whole book of that. At the library he will pick at random five or six such books from the shelves, and the next day will want to take them back because (surprise surprise!) they are ‘unreadable’, but if you give him something else he will say he ‘can’t be bothered’. Neither can he be ‘bothered’ with anything on television except sport, and less and less of that: quite often nowadays I will go into his room while the television is on and find him lying facing away from it. He no longer ever volunteers conversation, and responds to other people’s attempts with monosyllables. Days and days go by without his saying anything to me but ‘What are we having for supper?’ and ‘Will you take me to the library?’ This means that almost the only pleasure left to him is food, so that depriving him of foods he enjoys seems like cruelty, and I am unable to prevent myself feeling from time to time that if a life so severely diminished is shortened by eating doughnuts, what will it matter?*

  He had a flash of return to himself in the summer of 2006, when the Royal Court did a season of readings in their Theatre Upstairs of the plays which made them famous during the 1960s, which included Skivers, one of his. This reading was directed by Pam Brighton, who had directed its first performance, and the Royal Court’s casting director had got together a wonderful cast of young actors (most of the characters in the play are schoolboys). Although excited at the prospect of it, we had no idea what to expect, so it was a glorious surprise when it turned out to be so well done that within minutes the full house forgot that it was watching a reading and felt that it was watching an excellent full performance of the play. The audience was as responsive as any playwright could wish, and when at the end Barry had to go on stage to thank everyone concerned, and said in a choked voice (looking so small and old), ‘I never, ever, expected to see that play again,’ they rose to him. Sally and I were crying, and Jess and Beachy, who had never seen a play of his, were ecstatic (‘But it’s the best play I’ve ever seen!’ Jess kept saying), and the post-play party in the bar was a lovely hugger-mugger of old friends and happiness. But when I said in the taxi on the way home ‘Do you think it may have started you up again?’ he answered calmly, ‘Oh no, it won’t do that.’ And it didn’t.

  Our life went back to being, in about equal parts, both sad and boring. What, I sometimes ask myself, keeps me and, I am sure, innumerable other old spouses or spouselike people in similar situations, going through the motions of care? The only answer I can produce appears in the shape of a metaphor: in a plant there is no apparent similarity between its roots and whatever flower or fruit appears at the top of its stem, but they are both part of the same thing, and it seems to me that obligations which have grown out of love, however little they resemble what they grew out of, are also part of the same thing. How, if that were not so, could they be so effortlessly binding in spite of being so unwelcome? One doesn’t, in these situations, make a choice between alternatives because there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. Perhaps a wonderfully unselfish person (and they do exist) gets satisfaction from making a good a job of it. If you are a selfish one, you manage by contriving as many escapes and compensations as you can while still staying on the job. It is not an admirable solution, but I don’t suppose I am the only old person to resort to it.

  * It has turned out, since this was written, that he has serious heart trouble on top of his diabetes.

  12

  MY ESCAPES HAVE been into gardening, drawing, pottering and – the one I use most often – into books: reading them, reviewing them or (a new use of this particular occupation) writing them. I say ‘a new use’, but it is new only as far as I am concerned. I have just been reading Jenny Uglow’s life of Mrs Gaskell, and if ever someone perfected employment of this method, she did, having had the luck to be born with enough energy for at least ten people. The obligations she accepted willingly, even happily, and survived by dodging, were those of marriage and motherhood, and neither her husband nor her daughters ever
had cause to complain; but somehow she managed to clear spaces in her intensely busy life in which to be purely herself, and write her books. Or perhaps it was less a matter of clearing spaces than of having the ability to concentrate her attention fully on what she wanted to do in whatever space, however limited, became available. It is odd that she is so often considered a rather humdrum figure, when she was in fact one of dazzling vitality, a quality much to be envied. Dwindling energy is one of the most boring things about being old. From time to time you get a day when it seems to be restored, and you can’t help feeling that you are ‘back to normal’, but it never lasts. You just have to resign yourself to doing less – or rather, to taking more breaks than you used to in whatever you are doing. In my case I fear that what I most often do less of is my duty towards my companion rather than the indulgence of my private inclinations.

  Reviewing books, which I do most often for the Literary Review, doesn’t go far towards paying the household bills, but is enjoyable because as Rebecca West once said in a Paris Review interview, ‘it makes you really open your mind towards the book’. It also pushes me towards books I might not otherwise read. Frederick Brown’s very stout life of Flaubert, for instance: if I had seen it on one of my visits to our local bookshop (which happily shows no sign of ‘struggling’ to survive, as people say such businesses are now doing), I would probably have thought ‘interesting – but so fat and I’ve no room left on my shelves even for thin books, and anyway I know a fair amount about Flaubert already’, and veered off towards the new paperbacks, thus depriving myself of a real feast of enjoyment. And Gertrude Bell – why had I never wanted to read anything by or about her, in spite of loving Freya Stark and taking it for granted that T. E. Lawrence was worth reading even though I didn’t much like him? I believe the shaming reason is simply her name. Gertrude: those two syllables, which seem to me ugly, have always evoked the image of a grimly dowdy and disagreeable woman, and I’m sure I would never have picked up Georgina Howell’s biography of Bell if the Literary Review hadn’t asked me to review it – and there, suddenly, was that truly extraordinary woman, to be followed deep into one of the world’s most fascinating regions and a hair-raising passage of recent history. It was ridiculous to have known nothing about her until now, but what a wonderful discovery to be pushed, or led, into in one’s eighty-ninth year!

  (If I may be forgiven a lapse into senile rambling, I’m unable to explain why that name conjured disagreeable dowdiness, because the only Gertrude I ever actually knew was my great-aunt Gertie, whose aura was one not of dowdiness but of tragedy spiced with comedy, poor woman. She was one of the four handsome daughters of Dr Bright, Master of University College, Oxford, a widower who raised his children with the help of his wife’s sister and made, on the whole, a good job of picking out suitable husbands for them from among the undergraduates who passed through his care. But with Gertie … well, she fell in love with and was either engaged to, or on the verge of being engaged to, not an undergraduate but a junior fellow of his college. And one morning the parlour maid knocked on the door of the Master’s study to announce that there was a lady downstairs, with a little boy, who was asking to see him. ‘Show her up,’ said the Master, and she did, and no sooner was the lady through the door than she whipped out of her muff a pistol and shot him. ‘L-l-l-luckily she shot me in p-p-p-profile,’ he was to tell a colleague (he had a famous stammer), so his portliness was only grazed, not punctured. The lady, it turned out, was the junior fellow’s wife, or perhaps only felt she ought to be. It was a long time before this story was told in a hushed voice to the oldest of my cousins, and another long time before she passed it on to the rest of us, so its details were slightly blurred, but I have since learnt that it was a well-known incident in the college’s history. Gertie recovered from what must have been a dreadful shock in time to marry a bishop, but while my grandmother and her other two sisters gave the impression of comfortable assurance, she always seemed to me to be a little frail and querulous.)

  Back to books. I am puzzled by something which I believe I share with a good many other oldies: I have gone off novels. When I was young I read almost nothing else, and all through fifty years of working as a publisher fiction was my principal interest, so that nothing thrilled me more than the first work of a gifted novelist. Of course there are many novels which I remember with gratitude – and some with awe – and there are still some which I admire and enjoy; but over and over again, these days, even when I acknowledge that something is well written, or amusing, or clever, I start asking myself before I have gone very far into it, ‘Do I want to go on with this?’, and the answer is ‘No’.

  The novel has several ways of hooking a reader: offering escape into thrills and/or the exotic, offering puzzles to be solved, offering daydream material; offering a reflection of your own life; offering revelation of other kinds of life; offering an alternative to recognizable life in the shape of fantasy. It can set out to make you laugh, make you cry, make you gasp with amazement. Or, at its best, it can take you into a completely real-seeming world in which you can experience all those sensations. I well remember my feelings as I approached the end of my first reading of Middlemarch: ‘Oh no – I’m going to have to leave this world, and I don’t want to!’

  I never responded with enthusiasm to thrills, puzzles or fantasies, but in my teens I gulped daydream material for quite a while before moving on to ‘complete worlds’, which is what I prefer to this day when I can find them. But in the 1950s and ’60s I veered off towards novels that reflected, more or less, my own life. If they depended on that kind of recognition from people who were not quite like me, then I had no time for them – Angela Thirkell’s books, for example, which were catnip to a kind of middle-class Englishwoman not respected by me. But Margaret Drabble’s – how cross I was when Weidenfeld captured Margaret Drabble, who hit off the kind of people and situations familiar to me so exactly that I longed to publish her as well as read her. The ‘NW1 novel’ seemed new at the time, and for several years it was the kind I turned to most eagerly, thoroughly enjoying each moment in a love affair or other kind of relationship which was observed with special accuracy. But eventually novels of that kind seemed to develop a slow puncture, so that gradually they went flat on me; or rather, that happened to my reception of them. I became bored with what they had to tell me: I knew it too well. And because a great many of today’s novels still focus mainly on the love lives of the kind of women I see around me all the time, that means that I am bored by a large proportion of available fiction.

  Happily that is not true of the fiction that takes one into the lives of people completely different from oneself, V. S. Naipaul’s, for example, or Philip Roth’s. And it could never apply to the giants: Tolstoy, Eliot, Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Trollope (yes, I put him up there, I think he has been severely underestimated). They are so rare because they are a different kind of person, just as a musical genius is: they have an imaginative energy of a kind so extraordinary that it is hardly too much to describe it as uncanny. Just occasionally a present-day novelist breaks through into their territory. I would say that David Foster Wallace does in Infinite Jest, exhausting though he can be; that Margaret Atwood often gets a foothold there, and Pat Barker with her series of novels about the First World War; and that Hilary Mantel definitely did with A Place of Greater Safety (the nerve of it – to take on the French Revolution in the shoes of Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and Danton!).

  And then, of course, there are the fiction writers whose minds one falls in love with regardless of the kind of book they are writing – for me, Chekhov, W. G. Sebald and Alice Munro, but I am not going to attempt an analysis of the attraction of those three very different writers because it would take three separate chapters of a different kind of book, and anyway I am a reader not a critic, so probably couldn’t do it even if I wanted to. So ‘going off’ novels doesn’t mean that I don’t think being able to write them is a wonderful and enviable gift, only that
old age has made me pernickety, like someone whose appetite has dwindled so that she can only be tempted by rare delicacies. The pernicketiness does not extend to non-fiction because the attractiveness of non-fiction depends more on its subject than it does on its author’s imagination.

  I no longer feel the need to ponder human relationships – particularly not love affairs – but I do still want to be fed facts, to be given material which extends the region in which my mind can wander; and probably the best example of the kind of thing I am grateful for is the way my understanding of the early stages of the industrial revolution has been enlarged by three – no, four – books.

  The first of them is Pandaemonium, that marvellous compendium of material collected over many years by Humphrey Jennings, published long after his death as a result of devoted work by his daughter Mary-Lou with the help of Charles Madge, and subtitled ‘The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, l660–1886’. Because of the astonishing variety and high quality of the texts and the way they are put together, this book generates an addictive excitement of the mind. I couldn’t possibly have stopped reading it halfway through, and it left me with an acute awareness of how the delights of discovery and achievement led to tragic consequences as they became more and more orientated towards profit – how idealism capsized into greed and squalor. (We published this book in 1985, but didn’t manage to sell many copies of it, so it will be hard to find nowadays. If you can get hold of a copy, I strongly advise you to do so.) The second and third books are a biography, Brian Dolan’s life of Josiah Wedgwood, and letters, those of Charles Darwin. Wedgwood’s life exemplifies so vividly that moment in history when men suddenly sensed that in science and technology they had found an ‘open sesame’ to great things … To great and good things, so Wedgwood and his friends Thomas Bentley, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin firmly believed, because enlightenment was surely going to be moral as well as intellectual. Wedgwood, within a comparatively short lifetime, turned the simple trade of potter into a dazzling industry, first by discovering the scientist in himself, then (and this is what is so moving about him) by believing that what mattered was doing things as well as you possibly could, which would inevitably lead to success, and that nothing but good could come for the working man from technological advance as a result. It is true that shortly before his death omens did begin to blur the innocence of this vision, but still it is impossible not to envy the climate of hope in which he lived. And Charles Darwin’s letters, particularly those of his youth, illustrate not only his own developing genius, but the way in which the most ordinary lives – those of country doctors, clergymen, squires, tradesmen – were also being stirred by ripples of science: how everywhere people were tapping rocks, collecting shells, dissecting plants, observing birds. It was this eagerness to learn by scientific observation that provided the atmosphere in which Thomas Bewick flourished, and it is his life story, told to what I can only call perfection by Jenny Uglow, which is my fourth book.