Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (2 page)

All feeling and experience occur inside specific contexts – a room, a field, a conversation, a country house, a crowded pub – and by getting these things ‘right’, as a good novelist might, Diana opened up what could have been a narrow story of injury and self-absorption into a book that takes pleasure in the world. Also, the harder thing, she got herself right by letting us see how she appeared to others. A chilling moment comes in
Instead of a Letter
when, soon after her engagement has been broken off, she reads a passage in her younger sister’s diary. Her sister had a boyfriend who would hold her hand but refused to kiss her, though she was ‘dizzy with expectation’ that he might. This, remember, was early 1940. Diana read her diary entry: ‘He told me that he was not going to kiss me though he wanted to. He said that I was going to be a fascinating woman but that I mustn’t begin that sort of thing too soon or it would spoil me.
Look at Di, he said, you don’t want to
be like her. And of course I don’t
.’ More than twenty years later, Diana wrote that ‘the shrivelling sensation of reading those words is something I still flinch from recalling’. She saw with a ‘shameful, accepting humility … that I
was
diseased in other people’s eyes: that unhappiness was not a misfortune but a taint. In the depths of my being I must have wanted to kill my sister for it, but all I recognised was a shuddering acknowledgment that out of the mouths of babes …’ She then decided that she would be a model sister to her sibling, rejoicing at her triumphs and fretting over her sorrows. ‘But there was a streak of falsity in it: I was overcompensating for my resentment at the scar she had left with her innocent, idle thrust.’

In a first-person narrative, someone else’s diary can offer a useful change in the point of view. Another diary crops up in Diana’s second memoir,
After a Funeral
, which was published in 1986. The book – Diana preferred to call it a ‘documentary’ – recounts the tragic story of ‘Didi’, a promising writer from Egypt who went to stay with Diana as her lodger after she befriended him as his publisher (‘Didi’ was in fact Waguih Ghali, whose novel
Beer in the
Snooker Club
was published by Deutsch in 1964.) Their relationship becomes difficult and, on his part, bitter. Sex isn’t the issue. Diana has a partner, called Luke in the book, and though she begins by wanting Didi she has sex with him only once, when both of them are drunk. One evening she goes into Didi’s room and finds that he has left his diary open on his desk. She reads:

To quote such a passage about oneself in a book by oneself takes … what? Courage certainly, but also an unusually strong sense of duty towards the truth and the usefulness of truth to literature. In
Yesterday Morning
she writes that the damage lies do – the context is the anti-Catholic prejudices of her grandfather – may be ‘the central reason for trying to write the truth, even if indecent, about oneself.’ That may be the moral reason, but there is also a literary one: Rhys’s ‘to get it as it was, as it really was’. She exposes for all to see her pragmatic code of personal behaviour. Private diaries left lying around invite themselves to be read; married men can be fucked so long as nobody finds out (or worse, confesses) and the harmony of the marital home is kept intact. This is the way she was – as probably many of us are and will go on being. The consequence is that Diana in her books doesn’t always come across as the most likeable of women. When Didi in his diary notes that she pronounces ‘spritzer’ as ‘SpritzA!’ – Colonel Blimp speaking – the reader may feel a certain sympathy with his antagonism, even though accents are harmless accidents of birth. But if she were more likeable, would she be more sympathetic – or as believable?

The qualities that come with being a writer of Diana’s sort aren’t always attractive. After she and Didi have their drunken sex, Didi comes into the kitchen the next day and pleads with her not to tell her lover.

Graham Greene’s famous dictum about the ‘chip of ice’ that lurks in every writer’s heart has never had a better illustration. It would be hopelessly wrong, however, to think of Diana as all ice: a cold-eyed writing machine. The reason that we can read Didi’s diaries and letters is that he left them to her in a letter in which he described her as the person he loved most. Then he killed himself, despite her enormous kindness to him, in his rent-free room in the flat where more than forty years later, as I write this, she still lives.

Recently I went to see her there. The flat is on the top floor of the last house in a Victorian cul-de-sac that ends in the green open spaces of Primrose Hill and has a fine view south across central London. Her cousin, the journalist Barbara Smith, owns the house and keeps an apartment on the ground floor; they have had this arrangement for half Diana’s life, but when I visited her, in March 2009, Diana was making plans to move into a residential home for old people while she still had all her wits about her and could save friends and relations the trouble of making decisions on her behalf. Three months before, she had turned ninety-one. When a person is that age the present tense is safest deployed with fingers crossed, though there are very few signs of serious failing. She has a hearing aid and walks with the aid of a handsome silver-topped stick and uses a stair-lift to take her up (but not down) the four flights to her flat, but she still drives her little car and her conversation is as witty and direct as ever. She looks majestic.

As Diana’s former publisher, I edited three of the four books that make up this collection. Very little needs to be said about that. The typescript arrived, a few suggestions for changes were made, Diana absorbed them with her quick editorial brain, and a slightly amended typescript was soon in the post. Editing her was pure pleasure because I loved reading her; it was like having someone speak into your ear, someone humane and self-amused and wise that you wanted to hear. ‘Good writing’ is difficult to define, and definitions differ according to taste, but you know it when you see it, which is rarer than publishing companies would have you suppose. I remember my excitement when I read the first few pages of the typescript that became
Somewhere Towards the End
(Diana’s choice of title and a good one, as her titles always are). The book arose out of a brief conversation and the exchange of a postcard or two: it seemed to me that while the memoir genre abounded in accounts of youth – the ‘coming-of-age narrative’ is a literary cliché of our times – very few books have let us know about life at the other end of the road. In fact, other than self-help guides (take a cod-liver oil capsule every day) and the late novels of Philip Roth, I could think of none. There are, of course, books about the process of dying by victims of cruel and slow terminal disease, but writers have been shy of the subject of
just being old
, as if shame and indignity had replaced wisdom and experience as the best-known qualities of great age. Our conversation hardly amounted to an editorial briefing and I had no word of progress for a couple of years. Then a few early pages arrived and with them the first vivid sense of what it is like to become old, like reports from another country that we shall all, if spared earlier elimination, shortly be moving to. In different hands, the book could have been filled with a sentimental longing for the past, brittle cheer towards the present, or the religious consolation of the future. None of those things could ever have appealed to Diana. Instead,
Somewhere
Towards the End
is a beautifully turned series of episodes, none of them sermonic, in which the author reveals how she has come to terms (or not) with what she calls ‘falling away’ and the unavoidable fact of death. It was, wrote the late Simon Gray – no stranger himself to intimations of mortality – both ‘exhilarating and comforting’ in its good sense, candour and lively spirit. Every passage is rooted in specifics. On the second page, she describes her new tree fern (
£
18 from the Thompson & Morgan plant catalogue) and her doubts that she will live long enough to see it reach mature height: a small thought, but it immediately takes us inside the mind of someone going on for ninety. She has ‘got it right’, and continues to get it right throughout the book, in the sense that we utterly believe that this is how life is and was for her. She describes her final lover, Sam:

Stet, Yesterday Morning, Somewhere Towards the End
: they may not be her last books – fingers crossed again – but they represent the late flowering of a writing career previously conducted in sporadic bursts. All were written when she was in her eighties and all are memoirs. Sometimes they overlap; they weren’t planned as a sequence. A few places and people in them wear a light disguise; when Diana began to write, it wasn’t done to name names in intimate personal histories. Now it seems reasonable to name two of them, because of the important part they played in shaping her life.

The first is a place. ‘Beckton’, the country house and estate where Diana spent so much of her childhood, is in fact Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, just across the river Waveney from Suffolk. Her mother’s grandfather, a Yorkshire doctor enriched by railway shares and a good marriage, bought it in the 1890s. A cousin of hers still lives there. (Diana herself is far from well off. Publishing never paid her much, partly owing to her indifference about asking for more, which she came to see ‘as foolish, if not reprehensible’, and she had no inheritance. Having no money, Diana finds it easy to talk about. The royalties from her greatest success,
Somewhere Towards the End
will pay for her stay in the old people’s home, somewhere closer towards the end.)

The second is a person. ‘Paul’, the young pilot who broke her heart, was Tony Irvine. As squadron leader A.T. Irvine he died in the late afternoon of April 13, Easter Sunday, 1941, when his Blenheim bomber crashed into a mountain near the village of Vigla in northern Greece. Germany had just begun its invasion of Greece and a squadron of seven Blenheims set out to bomb troop formations before they poured south through the Monastir Gap. German fighters attacked the Blenheims (‘dreadful, clumsy planes’ in Diana’s recollection) and six were shot down in the space of four minutes. Irvine’s plane was last seen climbing into the mist that surrounded the mountainside, possibly trying to escape. The following day its wreckage was found eighty-four feet below the peak. Irvine had married by that time and his wife was pregnant with a son. When Irvine’s father died, long after, this son found a letter from Diana among his possessions and got in touch with her. They met one or twice. He must now be a man in his late sixties.

‘Just say,’ I said to Diana, ‘that Paul hadn’t jilted you, that you’d married him. Would you have written a book?’

Her reply was quick but thoughtful. ‘If I’d been an air force wife, I probably wouldn’t have written a book. If I’d been an air force widow, I might have done.’

In any event, a long time passed before she started on the book that became
Instead of a Letter
. She said she had no intention of writing it, no premeditation, no structure, no model presented by the books of other writers. ‘That book
happened to me
,’ she said, meaning that it had somehow taken charge of her and couldn’t be stopped. She had written nine stories for her collection and begun a tenth. ‘It was going to be about my grandmother but it fizzled out and I put it away. Then I took it out again and it simply
went on
. I couldn’t stop. I wrote it even in the office in any spare moment. There was no plan and it’s remained for me a very baffling book, but it worked as a piece of therapy to a quite extraordinary extent.’

She realized she could write, and that she was best at it when not covering reality with the polite wallpaper of fiction but by recounting experience as it really had been, as honestly as she could evoke it to her own satisfaction: ‘I’ve never actually planned a book,’ she said. ‘I’ve never thought of readers.’ In the forty-seven years since, only six books have followed, which brings her total to eight. She said, ‘I’ve never written anything unless I’ve wanted to. I really am an amateur.’

I thought of her self-description – ‘amateur’ – as I went down the stairs and began to walk across Primrose Hill. Really, we should have more of them. More people who write only when they feel they have something to tell us; more writers driven by the scrupulous need to make us see clearly and exactly what they have witnessed and felt.