Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (40 page)

The relationship is an easy one, because the publisher usually meets his writers only after having read something they have written, and if he has thought it good it does not much matter to him what the man will be like who is about to come through his door. He is feeling well-disposed for having liked the work; the writer is feeling well-disposed for his work having been liked; neither is under obligation to attempt a close personal relationship beyond that. It is a warm and at the same time undemanding beginning, in which, if genuine liking is going to flower, it can do so freely. My own feeling, if I have been truly excited by a book, is nearer to a curiously detached kind of love than to liking: I have looked at the head of the man or woman sitting opposite me and thought, ‘It all came out of that head,’ and I could have taken it between my hands and kissed it. There cannot be many other kinds of middlemen whose wares inspire feelings so satisfying as that.

It did not surprise me to discover in myself, when I first went into publishing, this profound respect for good writing. I had not thought much about it before because I had not had occasion to use it, but it was always there. How could it not have been? It was not only a matter of being reared in a reading family, it was a matter of having lived, quite literally, a great part of my life entirely in terms of the printed word, or of images on canvas or on the screen.

It is a startling realization. To have lived from 1917 to 1961 and to have known violence only through the printed word or through images; to have known social injustice and revolution only through the printed word or through images; to have seen Jews stumbling down concrete steps into the gas chamber only through the printed word or through images; to have experienced fear, hunger, loss of liberty, or courage, relief from want and the impulse to fight for freedom only through the written word or through images: this is astounding. I remember that when shadows on a screen formed the sticklike limbs of Belsen protruding at awkward angles from piles of bodies, the feet grotesquely big at the end of legs shrunk to bone, I was engulfed in a terrible silence of unreality – my own unreality, not that of the shadows. In the same way books have been my windows on to vast tracts of experience, both destructive and creative, in which I have not lived. To the poet, to the painter, to the writer of serious prose as distinct from the entertainer (much though I owe to the latter), I am so much in debt that if artists did not exist, I cannot imagine that I would. I shall be grateful all my life to André Deutsch for having come to my party and thus steered me into a job in which I have been able to get to know a few of what seem to me by far the most real human beings in the world.

S
O WITH THE
end of the war, work which I thought worth doing came my way. Had I been asked whether it made me happy, I would have answered ‘Happy? No. But who is likely to have more than a few months of positive happiness during a lifetime?’ That I was lucky I knew. My basic sense of failure was always present like a river bed, but the water running over the bed had become deeper than I had supposed it would ever be. My work brought enough incident and movement into my life for me to be content to exist with very little beyond that.

Of social life I had, and still have, almost none. I have never had a talent for acquaintance, only an enjoyment of intimacy. People who have more than three or four friends whom they wish to see often, who come and go to dinner parties and so on with a wide circle of acquaintances whose company they enjoy although they do not know them very well, fill me with envious admiration. When I was young I enjoyed parties so much that any was better than none – the murmur of voices and clink of glasses as I came up a staircase, the smell of the women’s scent, the spurts of laughter, the sparkle of lights would delight me in themselves. Once during my twenties it occurred to me that a time would come when not only would I no longer dance but I would not mind not dancing, and I wept. But now, although I usually enjoy parties when I go to them (with the exception of large cocktail parties, which are the antithesis of social pleasure), I do not miss them, and I only missed them sharply in fits and starts during the years immediately after the war. Partly my seclusion came from lack of money and space, for I myself could not afford to entertain people other than casually, and partly it was the natural result of being a single woman moving into her thirties. Such new acquaintances as I made were usually married couples, most of whose friends were other married couples, and the occasions on which a spare woman can be comfortably fitted in are few. But chiefly, I suspect, it was my own unreadiness to offer more than a surface interest to strangers which left me so unusually isolated in this way, for other single women of my age often seem to lead more active social lives than I do.

I was not lonely because for many years I shared a flat with a cousin. My sister, who married during the war and went to live abroad soon after it, was less close to me than my cousin was and would not have been a more congenial companion, much as I liked her. Eight years younger than myself, my cousin was an exceptionally pretty girl with a haunting personality, so that her life was considerably fuller than mine, and I slid prematurely into an attitude common among good-natured middle-aged women: that of taking so strong an interest in other people’s lives that it largely fills the emptiness of one’s own. I was comfortable in the routine of those years, and when on rare occasions I felt a stab of misery my reaction to it was not revolt against my circumstances but a deliberate attempt to become resigned to them. But to say that satisfying work was something that had made me happy – that I could not have done. Something else, occupying only a fraction of each year and appearing to be marginal, made more difference to the colour of my days than did my work.

My holidays. I am not a traveller, only, once a year if I can manage it, a tourist. But those short journeys to France, Italy, Yugoslavia, or Greece have done more to alter my life than anything except love.

I owe them to the same aunt who taught me to enjoy painting. Before the war I had been taken abroad twice by my parents, driving fast round Europe on business trips, staying one night here, two nights there, never longer than the five or six nights we slept in Budapest. Most of each day was spent getting from place to place, and most of our meals were eaten with people to whom my father was selling mica, who were sometimes pleasant but rarely the companions we would have chosen. It was a useful bird’s-eye view of Europe, but a frustrating one. We would be in Paris, Vienna, or Prague – places woven in my imagination from books, films, and hearsay into magical cities where anything might happen – and all that we would do was to go to bed early to be ready for an early start. I often had to share a room with my mother. I did not try to escape – my parents would not have allowed it, and I would have been scared – but I would long to lean out of the window into the foreign night, breathe the foreign smell of cigars, coffee, drains and unknown leaves, listen to the foreign dance music which always seemed to be coming so teasingly from lit doors and windows across the street. I wanted violently to be in these places, but with a man – with Paul, or with Robert, my Oxford love, or even with whatever man had been eyeing me across the room during dinner. Failing that, I wanted to sit by the window and write long letters to my friends describing my anguish. But I did not wish to hurt my parents by betraying how different I would have liked the journey to be, so I went to bed like a good girl, telling myself how lucky I was to be seeing these places (as indeed I was), and at breakfast the next morning I would be sulky.

Then, with the war, travel became impossible. I grew so accustomed to not thinking of it and to being short of money that I no longer saw it as something I could do. Given to inertia as I have always been, it is possible that if in 1947 my aunt had not unexpectedly sent me the money for a holiday abroad, I might never again have set foot on a Channel steamer.

It was a gift typical of her, offered shyly and suddenly, with no fuss. Can any other gift have bestowed so much pleasure? Without hesitation I plumped for Florence, and set off on that simple journey as tremulous with excitement as though I were crossing the Gobi desert. I expected to step out of the train into the gold, red, and blue of a painting by Fra Angelico, and shall never forget the shock of surprised recognition, the delicious anticipation-reality complex as I experienced it again on seeing that Florence was a crumbling biscuit baked pale by the sun, with a kind of beauty quite different from but much more disturbing than the beauty its name had held for me. I remembered Proust and his conjuring with names, this elaborate balancing of places not yet seen or no longer seen against places in their reality. ‘That’s not for me,’ I thought. ‘There’s nothing to balance. This paving stone on which I am standing, that torn poster on that wall, that little dusty tree, that tomato skin in the gutter – any single object you like to name that I can see or touch is worth more to me than the whole of Petra or Angkor Vat in my imagination!’

Even more exciting than the discovery that Florence was real, was the discovery that the sudden distance between myself and my usual environment, the breaking of the daily habits by which I was conditioned, had released me from the creature produced by that conditioning. I felt as though I were my naked self, starting from scratch. A skin had been peeled off my eyes, my nerve-ends were exposed. I, who was usually able to sleep twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch if I were not woken, and would then get up reluctantly, found myself jumping out of bed at seven-thirty or eight in the morning, outraged by the idea that I should lie there one minute after my eyes had opened. There was no time to want anything but to be where I was and to see, see, see what I was seeing. That first turning loose after the war was the purest and most intense of all the holidays I have had, and it convinced me that from then on, whatever my circumstances, I must continue to travel abroad. It is not only seeing landscapes and works of art hitherto unseen, different kinds of building, faces of a different cast and complexion, behaviour formed in different moulds, which makes travelling important. It is the different eyes with which the traveller, startled out of habit by change, looks at these things.

To catalogue such ordinary journeys as mine would be tedious. I can put my finger on what I have gained from them by thinking of only one place from among those I have stayed in: the Greek island of Corfu, in the Ionian Sea.

I can recognize sandstone, chalk, and granite, but that is all. I cannot name the kind of rocks which lie under and jut through the thin skin of soil on Corfu, although the shapes of their abrupt and disorderly outcrops are printed on my brain. Hellenophiles sometimes refer to Corfu patronizingly as green and soft, because it is so much less nakedly rocky than the Cyclades or most of the mainland, but in spite of its richness of vegetation its skeleton is almost as near the surface as that of the rest of Greece. It is rock, not earth. Its bones are not the sort that make smooth, swelling lines; they heave, break, and tumble, and their debris, from which the supporting walls of olive terraces are built, is rough, layered, pocked. The terraces are not hard to climb at any point because of the foot and handholds offered by the crude masonry of the walls, but most of them have their ‘paths’: easy places made easier, where the rocks form steps or have been pressed by use into oblique, broken ledges where men climb regularly to the olive trees, and old women lead a goat or a donkey to be tethered on fresh grazing.

Each terrace has a different character. On some the stony earth, ochre or light terracotta, is almost bare, on others there are many thistles, among them a frail one of great beauty with steel-blue stems and leaves. On a recently grazed terrace the spiky grasses and small flowers will be flattened and scattered with dung, drying quickly into earthiness, while another will be green, with a higher percentage of what the English recognize as grass in its growth, and softer, more caressing plants. Each terrace has its tree or trees, with a slight depression round the roots to hold the rain when it comes.

I am a connoisseur of terraces. I look for one greener and therefore softer than the rest, with the best view possible and an old, well-grown tree to throw a wider and more opaque shade than a young tree can. Such a tree is easy to find on Corfu, where the method of cultivation (due, say other Greeks, to Corfiot laziness) is to leave olives alone and let them grow to a great age and size until they split and gnarl into extraordinary shapes. Their trunks become distorted, ropelike columns of bark-enclosed tendons which writhe apart, then join again, sometimes leaving windows of space so that you can look right through the tree. They give an impression of restless movement curiously at variance with their gentle, peaceful colouring. I have seen dull olive trees in France, Italy, and some parts of Greece – little orchard trees, monotonous in shape and no more than pretty – but because of those on Corfu, the olive is the tree I would choose to keep if I could have only one: for the variety of shape, for the comforting roughness of its bark, for its minnow leaves, dark on top and silver underneath, which cast a shadow more delicately stippled than any other, and for its ancient usefulness, which makes it, like wheat, a symbolic thing.

There is one terrace at Paleokastritsa, on the west side of Corfu, which I first found six years ago and revisited last year. Its position favours the holding of moisture and it is almost meadowlike compared to its neighbours. It is possible, though – not particularly comfortable, to lie on it without spreading a rug or a towel against prickles. (One gets better at lying as the days pass. At first every pebble and spike and exploring ant is a discomfort; but after several days of sun and wine and oil one’s body relaxes and becomes accommodating, so that one could almost sleep as Greek workmen sleep in the heat of the afternoon, lying loose and comfortable on roadside stones.)

Although this terrace would be a good place for sleeping, I have never slept on it because I found it impossible to stop looking. Below it, only a little masked by the silver tops of lower trees, is one of the bays of Paleokastritsa. This is a place where land and sea meet in an interlocking clover-leaf formation, three almost enclosed bays divided from each other by two steep promontories which may once have been islands, since they are joined to the steeper main island by a narrow strip of flat land. One of the promontories is crowned by a small monastery, but the one on which my terrace is has only rebarbative scrub and rock above its orchards. The best-known bay is under the monastery, round and dark blue, with a small hotel on its beach. The bay I overlooked is bigger, less regular in shape and more beautiful in colour. It is broken by a small promontory within it, and goes from navy blue near the open sea, through every shade of aquamarine, with depths of pure emerald under its cliffs and chunky emerald patches where a boat throws a shadow. Its depth and the nature of its sandy bottom combine in a ratio perfect for transparency, sparkle, and movement – I have never seen it when it was not netted with light, whereas some Mediterranean and Aegean bays, though lovely, can become almost too still, too smooth. Only to look at this bay is like drinking champagne would be if I enjoyed champagne, and to swim in it is something quite different from swimming in any other water that I know. From where I sat I looked back across it at the mainland. Just under the terrace is the strip of beach which edges the flat, linking neck, with a tiny, meadowlike taverna, a few caiques and rowing-boats lying at anchor, where one or two fishermen, either old men or very young boys, move slowly about and sometimes call to each other. Beyond that, cliffs (at the bottom of one of them a little spring of fresh water bubbles up a few inches from the sea – one of the several places where Ulysses is supposed to have been found by Nausicaa, although there is no room for the bushes or reeds in which he hid his nakedness); above the cliffs steep, olive-fleeced, cypress-punctuated mountainside, rising to an abrupt escarpment with a sheer rock face which turns apricot-coloured in the evening sun and is rimmed by the rapid, stumbling line of the mountain’s profile, plunging out and round to one’s right to hit the sea on the far side of the bay.

All this is bathed in light and silence. It is silent in spite of the fishermen’s voices or the occasional grinding of a truck or taxi creeping round the edge of the bay to visit the hotel or the monastery; silent in spite of a donkey on a lower terrace calling to another donkey on the further mountain. The braying of donkeys – that painfill, wheezing, lion-like sound – might be the voice of rock, as the creaking of cicadas might be the voice of sun. I once spent four hours alone on that terrace with an unread book and untouched writing-pad, turned by the spectacle into nothing but eyes, with no idea of the time that was passing until the sun went down.