Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

LIFE CLASS

The Selected Memoirs of

Diana Athill

 

 

Title Page
INTRODUCTION
YESTERDAY MORNING
NOW
‘OH MY GOD,’
THEN
LESSONS
THE HOUSE
GOD AND GRAMPS
PAIN
FALLING IN LOVE
NOW
LOOKING BACK
INSTEAD OF A LETTER
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
STET
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART TWO
IN 1962 I WROTE
MORDECAI RICHLER AND BRIAN MOORE
JEAN RHYS
ALFRED CHESTER
V. S. NAIPAUL
MOLLY KEANE
POSTSCRIPT
SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
POSTSCRIPT
ALSO BY DIANA ATHILL
Copyright

I
n the early 1980s, the publisher André Deutsch had an idea for a book I could write about the partition of India. I didn’t take it up, which I regret now because it was a good suggestion and I was wrong to imagine, as I told him, that ‘everything’ had already been written about the subject. Instead, I proposed a thought of my own: a book about Indian railways, part travel account, part technical history and part family memoir. Too
many
parts, clearly, but André liked the idea and a few weeks later I went to his office, where he took out a fountain pen and ceremonially wrote a cheque, saying words to the effect that this was his happiest moment since the day he thought he’d signed up George Orwell (as I guess he told many writers of first books) and then stealing a cigarette from my packet to smoke in celebration.

I went to India for a year and did too much research. There was certainly a lot to find out, but the finding out eventually became a way of postponing the writing. Soon after I came home to London, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi, which meant there was further postponement as I turned back to journalism. Then one day the phone rang and it was André, wondering how the book was ‘coming along’. The truth was that it wasn’t coming along, but I wrote two short chapters in a panic and sent them in as evidence that his money hadn’t gone completely to waste. André’s response was to invite me to his office for lunch. It was there that I met a brisk woman in glasses, who told me that what I had written was very good and then read a page or two of it aloud to us: to André, perhaps because he had never bothered to read it himself (the thought occurred to me only later), and to me perhaps to persuade me that what I’d written was as good as she said, and the book worth persevering with.

She had a fine voice, precise and low, of the kind many more people had then than now, though even in 1984 her kind of accent had lost its claim to be the English that the nicest and best people spoke. ‘Patrician’, ‘RP’ and ‘Oxbridge’ would be the easy adjectives, though what it reminded me of was listening to the BBC’s Home Service as a boy and watching British films of the same period where pretty well everyone spoke like this other than junior policemen and Cockney chars in pinafores. No matter. She read aloud – a few hundred words about an old-fashioned grocer’s shop in an Indian railway town – and the fact was that her voice’s elegance and intelligence seemed to elevate what I’d written, just as words scribbled in ballpoint seem profoundly transformed when set in twelve-point Baskerville. There may have been an almost maternal element to her encouragement. She certainly had something of the kindly schoolmistress or university tutor about her: her thick-framed glasses, her enthusiasm, her opinion that I simply
had
to go on with it otherwise I’d be letting myself down. As life turned out, I didn’t go on with it; I went back to newspapers and returned André’s advance, and therefore as an illustration of Diana Athill’s persuasive editorial technique my story is unsatisfactory, showing nothing more than how my torpor, fear and the need to make money could defeat one of the finest minds in British publishing. All I know is that if anyone could have drawn that book out of me it would have been her.

Diana would have been sixty-six then. She had been André’s right-hand woman for nearly forty years and went on serving the company that bore his name, even after André had left it, for another eight. André was the entrepreneurial spirit behind the enterprise but it was mainly Diana who developed its reputation for good books by finding and fostering writers such as Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul. The story of her long professional life as an editor is brilliantly told in
Stet
, the second book in this anthology, and there’s no need to add to it here. What I didn’t know when I met her was that she was also a writer; or rather
had been
a writer, because her most recent book had been published nearly twenty years before. Few people remembered her novel (
Don’t Look at Me Like That
, 1967) or her story collection (
An Unavoidable Delay
, 1962), which found a publisher in the USA but none in Britain. It was the middle book of her small 1960s oeuvre that knowledgeable readers, particularly women, mentioned when I said that I’d met her. ‘Oh, but you must read
Instead of a Letter
,’ they said. The book wasn’t easy to find. It had been republished a few times since it first appeared in 1962 and probably was more often in print than out of it, but by the early 1980s
Instead of a Letter
was more of a cult than the popular classic it deserved to be. The times weren’t right. Literary taste was still largely dictated by male sensibilities, and, while feminist publishing in Britain had begun to thrive, Athill didn’t quite fit its political agenda. As to the book’s form, ‘memoir’ had yet to be established as a successful category in bookshops. Writers wrote them, of course, but rarely did they become known for the memoir alone (J.R. Ackerley and Laurie Lee may be two exceptions). Publishers and readers thought instead of ‘autobiographies’, in which intimate personal disclosure took a back seat to records of achievement. The boundary between the two forms is blurred and bridgeable: V.S. Pritchett’s wonderful account of his early life,
A Cab at the Door
, was described as ‘autobiography’ when it first appeared in 1968, whereas now it would have ‘memoir’ written all over it. Gore Vidal explained the difference in this way: ‘A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked’. His statement is arguable, but it has the virtue of simplicity. More important, by stressing subjective, unverified memory it permits the memoirist to misremember and, unconsciously or otherwise, to embroider and invent – an indulgence, it has to be said, that Diana Athill has never been interested to take.

At any rate, I got
Instead of a Letter
from the library. It told Diana’s story from birth to the age of forty-two, a life begun idyllically in the English countryside, a life rich with privilege and promise – horses, sailing, books, an Oxford education – until, aged twenty-two, she is jilted by her fiancé and her dreams of a future as an RAF pilot’s wife turn to dust. Happiness vanishes for the next twenty years. Rejection destroys her confidence, especially in her relationships with men, and she regains it fully only in early middle age, not through the once hoped-for avenues of marriage and children but when she begins to write and has a story published in a newspaper. Put like that it seems an ordinary enough progression – happy, then unhappy, then happy enough – and perhaps an advertisement for a creative-writing school (‘
Miserable?
Jilted? Then learn to write the Miss Lonelyhearts way!
’). But at that time I had never read a book like it, and to my mind only a few memoirs have equalled it since.

The most memorable and pleasing aspect of memoirs often comes from the picture they offer of a character or a period. We remember V.S. Pritchett’s rackety father besotted by Christian Science and mistresses, or John McGahern’s loving mother walking her son through the lanes of County Leitrim, or Blake Morrison’s father bluffing his Yorkshire way out of and into trouble. The writer attends as a witness, but his own selfhood – what he was like – is present at most as an interlocutor of the character of others. Direct self-description is one of the hardest tasks a writer can undertake, because self-knowledge is so difficult and because the risks of self-indulgence, self-dramatization and falsity of all kinds are so great (and easily spotted and mocked). Diana’s book was certainly about herself, and the core of it about the severe disappointment that altered, and for a long time deadened, the course of her life. In other hands, it could have been a long wallow with an unconvincingly bright little salvation at the end. Many books are now constructed on this principle: look, I was an addict; behold, my suffering when I was abused. Often the authors say their motive is to give consolation and hope to others in the same position.
Instead of a Letter
certainly had this effect. About a hundred readers (ninety-nine of them women) wrote to her after the book was first published to share their experience and say how much comfort the book had provided – a large response to an unknown writer when authorship was much less publicized than it is now, and when communication involved the trouble of taking out pen and paper and buying a stamp. To be jilted, to have one’s engagement broken off, left a public as well as a private scar (I remember the hush around the subject when in the 1950s it happened to an older cousin of mine). The distress caused by rejection may well be a historical constant in human beings, but at least since 1962 our more open and casual attitudes towards sex and marriage mean that the humiliation is no longer so deep. ‘Guilt never caused me any serious distress, but humiliation did,’ Diana writes in this anthology’s third book,
Yesterday Morning
. ‘Humiliation … was the sharpest misery I knew.’

An instructive story of self-help wasn’t, however, what she intended by
Instead of a Letter
, nor is it by any means the book’s most important attraction. Like thousands of other readers before and since, what held me about the writing was its candour. The quality has since become an Athill trademark, though in itself candour is no guarantee of literary pleasure or interest: frank books aren’t always good books and can often be tedious by boasting of their frankness. Athill’s way of being candid is more subtle and its effect more persuasive. The reader feels that what he is reading is as true a portrait of the writer and her experience as any words on paper can achieve. Part of this comes from her considerable gift as a maker of sentences, which are so lucid and direct; some of it is owed to the breaking of taboos that then surrounded female sexual behaviour; most of it, though, stems from her triumphant struggle to ‘get it right’, a lesson she learned from two of the writers she edited. Jean Rhys told her that the trick of good writing was ‘to get it as it was, as it really was’. Vidia Naipaul said that ‘provided you really get it right, the reader will understand’.