After a Funeral Read online

  Praise for Diana Athill

  “Athill, longtime editor of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys…evokes another grande dame of British letters in her uninhibited lifestyle and no-holds-barred, clarion voice:…Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.”

  —N. Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Ms. Athill was and is, not to put too fine a point on it, a knockout in every respect.”

  —Dwight Garner, New York Times

  “Athill has rendered her entire life via stories as compelling as the best fiction.”

  —Anne Kingston, Maclean’s (Canada)

  “To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy going prose and startling honesty are riveting.”

  —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

  “An astute editor, [Athill] writes with precision and clarity, using one word to convey an idea that a lesser writer might expand into a paragraph…. An enlightened woman.”

  —Mary Russell, Irish Times

  “The achievement of Athill’s work is its refusal to reduce the specificities of her captivating life to homilies about wisdom.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Athill…has led an unconventional life with unexpected results…. [She] doesn’t preach; she doesn’t have to. Just spending a few hours in her company is endlessly enlightening.”

  —Salon

  “Diana Athill is a free-thinker…she has the quality of being able to make everything seem possible and to make the unsayable said.”

  —Robert Gwyn Palmer, Grove (England)

  “She is a convivial memoirist, full of clarity and wit, original thought and understated insight.”

  —Claire Allfree, Metro London

  “What sets her apart is the flagrancy and wit of her writing…. Her memoirs display a vivacious appreciation of the life she has lived and what is still to come.”

  —Sarah Birke, New Statesman

  After a Funeral

  Also by Diana Athill

  Somewhere Towards the End

  Stet: An Editor’s Life

  Instead of a Letter

  Make Believe: A True Story

  Don’t Look at Me Like That

  An Unavoidable Delay

  AFTER A FUNERAL

  a memoir

  Diana Athill

  W. W. Norton & Company • New York • London

  Copyright © 1986 by Diane Athill

  First published in Great Britain by Johnathan Cape 1986

  Published in Great Britain by Granta Publications 2000

  First pubished in the United States by Ticknor & Fields 1986

  First published as a Norton 2010

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Athill, Diana.

  After a funeral: a memoir / Diana Athill.

  p. cm.

  “First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1986;

  first published in the United States by Ticknor & Fields 1986.”

  ISBN 978-0-393-33982-6

  1. Athill, Diana. 2. Authors, English—20th century—Biography.

  3. Suicide—Psychological aspects. I. Title.

  PR6051.T43Z46 2010

  828'.91409—dc22

  2010006107

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  Contents

  1 Beginning and End

  2 An Exile

  3 A Guest

  4 A Holiday Companion

  5 The Game

  6 ‘It had to happen…’

  After a Funeral

  Beginning and End 1

  ONE EVENING IN the summer of 1963 I ran downstairs to answer the door with special pleasure. The dinner party was supposed to be for an American couple passing through London, but privately I was looking forward to it because of someone else: a man whom I had never met. He had turned up unexpectedly, and when he telephoned I thought ‘Lucky I’m giving a party—it’s something I can ask him to naturally, without seeming to make too much of our first meeting.’

  I wanted to meet him because I loved a book he had written. I had seen in it that when he was funny, as he often was, it was not because he was trying to entertain but because he himself was enchanted by the comedy in the incident he was describing. Getting this incident, these people, this quirk of human behaviour down, and getting it down right—that was what he had been enjoying, rather than ‘expressing himself’ and while books written in this way are not necessarily great books, this is the way the great books I love best are written. It is the real thing.

  We had exchanged a good many letters about his writing, and I had heard something about him from other people. He was an Egyptian whose passport had been withdrawn because he was a Communist, and he had been living for some years as an exile in Germany. He hated that country. He was very poor, supporting himself by working in factories and docks. From his book it was possible to deduce what his early youth had been like, and to see that this hard exile’s life was a dramatic reversal of his circumstances. A German acquaintance had described him as ‘a modest, tender and gazelle-like being,’ which went with the personality suggested by his writing. I was a sucker for oppressed foreigners, and an oppressed foreigner who was a gazelle-like being and who could shrug off hardship in order to look at things with the humour and perceptiveness shown in his book was one whom I would certainly like. He would be more than an interesting new acquaintance. He would be a friend.

  When I opened the front door I was, for a moment, disappointed. He looked more like a goat than a gazelle: arched eyebrows, long nose, long upper lip, small neat beard but no moustache—a sardonic face. And he was stiff, a small man in a trim and conservatively cut blue suit with a fraction of white handkerchief at the breast pocket, white shirt, dark tie, answering my greeting with formality from behind a bunch of carnations wrapped in tissue paper. Perhaps he didn’t click his heels and bow, but it would not have been surprising if he had done so—and I had come downstairs with both hands out, so to speak, ready to cry ‘Hurrah! We’re meeting at last!’

  I recognized that I had gone further in anticipation of friendship than he had because I knew more about him than he knew about me—I had read his book. As we went upstairs I thought that he would soon relax.

  He was gravely courteous on being introduced to my other guests, and then silent, choosing to stand or sit on the edge of the group; the size of the room didn’t allow him a position outside it, but that was what he would have preferred. He was watching and listening. If a cigarette needed lighting or a glass had to be disposed of he was quick to notice and to act. His movements were calm and economical: a deft, graceful man, not a bumper or a stumbler. Might he be bored? He was clearly not much interested in the kind of small talk which goes on at the beginning of a party, but he was interested in observing the talkers. His attentive brown eyes made the smallness of the small talk more apparent.

  Soon after we had sat down to the meal someone said something more interesting, which related directly to the speaker’s experience, and instantly the sardonic goat-face changed. The eyes actually appeared to light up, melancholy gave way to animation. He began to describe something which chimed with what had been said, and he was funny. Everyone laughed. People began asking him about Germany and someone expressed admiration of a Jewish friend who now went back there on business trips. ‘He wouldn’t do that if he could get into an Egypt
ian skin from time to time,’ he said, and told us how often, when he was in a German bar among strangers, someone would mark the discovery that he was an Egyptian with a look of complicity or a nudge, and would say: ‘Ah, you will understand, then, that Hitler knew what he was doing.’ He was good on Germany, apparently well-informed on politics and trends in public opinion, emphatic on how he disliked the country but fair about its achievements.

  When he was questioned about his life as an exile he dodged sympathy by being matter-of-fact, or amusing, or sometimes impatient. The part of this experience he was willing to use in talk was made up of comic predicaments and ingenious devices for survival. When, harking back to his book, I asked about Egypt, he became even more entertaining because the impulse moving him was so obviously one of pleasure. He described things because he was amused or outraged by them, his audience was of secondary importance—he was doing in conversation what he did in writing.

  Halfway through dinner I noticed that he didn’t like one of his fellow-guests, a pretty woman who had published two novels. I had expected him to enjoy meeting a writer, considering how far he had to live, usually, from people who shared his concerns, but it wasn’t working. She was a clever woman, but self-conscious, seeing herself as one who practised an art and had difficulty reconciling its demands with those made on her by ordinary life. Sometimes I had felt that she became rather pompous, almost absurd, in this attitude, but this evening it wasn’t showing much. She did, however, contradict the Egyptian quite sharply once or twice about Germany, with which she felt an affinity, and I suspected that she was not enjoying the way he was becoming the centre of attention. He was being elaborately polite to her, with an underlying irony which came at times uncomfortably near the surface.

  After dinner he helped me take things into the kitchen, and stacked dishes while I made coffee. My hunch had been right: he was already behaving as an old friend would have done.

  ‘You’re being a bit naughty,’ I said. ‘What have you got against that poor woman? Do leave her alone—she’s very nice really.’

  ‘I’m sure she is,’ he said, ‘but I can’t bear that kind of thing—that “being a writer,” that taking one’s “art” so seriously and all.’

  ‘But you’re a writer and you take it seriously.’

  ‘I am not a writer.’ He sounded quite fierce.

  ‘What do you mean? You are—and a very good one.’

  ‘If I thought I was trying to “make literature,” to “write beautifully,” I’d never write another word.’

  I remembered our correspondence about his book, and how he had always known exactly what he wanted and why he wanted it that way. He was ready enough to accept suggestions which arose from the fact that English was not his first language, but if an alteration changed a nuance of meaning by a hair’s breadth, he was intransigent. Every sentence of his seemingly casual prose had been weighed and worked over—he was as careful in his craft as ever this woman had been.

  But I knew what he meant. ‘She does rather carry a sacred flame about,’ I said, and we both started to giggle.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and sit on the other side of the room by that sweet fat man. I really like him.’

  Two of the people who were there that evening asked him to visit them. They were somewhat taken by his exoticness: here was a man to whom things had happened which would never happen to them, things that commanded interest and sympathy. But it was the way in which he took it that charmed his new friends: the humour, the ironic understatement, the lack of self-pity, the undiminished relish for life. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a more elegant man,’ my lover said to me one day, and that was indeed the impression he made: someone in whom a sense of style came from the centre and was nearer to being a moral quality than an adornment.

  I felt elated when I went to bed that night. One can make plenty of new acquaintances in middle-age, but it is not often that one sees the possibility of knitting a new person into one’s life as one did in youth, and that had just happened.

  Five years later this man killed himself in my flat. He swallowed twenty-six sleeping pills, and then telephoned a friend. The two most common reactions to this are (from the loving) horror at the thought of his last-minute panic, and (from the knowing) the conclusion that he didn’t really mean to die. I believe both these reactions are mistaken. From the message he left me, and from what the friend he called has said about the way he spoke, I think he was needing a witness. It is bad enough merely to collapse in grief when alone; other people’s ignorance of what is happening soon makes the tears seem foolish. How much worse to be performing what he called ‘the one authentic act of my life’ in a vacuum. ‘A terrible let-down’: he used those words in his last note. Terrible indeed, to be doing something so important as dying by one’s own decision without anyone’s knowing. He picked up the telephone to make the act real. He himself would feel, I believe, that in writing his book and in choosing his death he did the only two things in his life which belonged to the man he could appear to be, and whom he might, in different circumstances, really have been.

  An Exile 2

  I HAVE DESCRIBED OUR first meeting, and now I am going to describe how he appeared after I had known him for two years. I can do this without using hindsight, because at the end of that two years I felt the need to sum him up for myself, and therefore wrote a ‘portrait’ of him. The rest of this chapter is the ‘portrait.’

  I shall call him Didi. It is inappropriate, but so is the nickname his family uses. There are places where a particular style is preserved long after it has vanished elsewhere—the sediment, usually, left by a receding empire, little pockets of the Austro-Hungarian empire in Eastern Europe, or of the Ottoman empire in Greece. Egypt, or rather his class within it, seems to me such a pocket. It preserves certain features of Edwardian England, and one of these is the nicknames: Dodo, Fido, Fifi, Pussy. And he says that they still play croquet on the lawns of the Gezira Sporting Club.

  I have never been in Egypt and have met only a few of his relations. Of his family I know only what he and they have told me, or what I have guessed; but perhaps when nostalgia causes a man to make a legend of his family, what he makes of it will tell something?

  They are landowners, and are therefore out of favour with Nasser’s regime. The property from which they made their large fortunes has now been taken away from them—or is supposed to have been taken away. There is a big difference between an uncle still close to the land, living in upper Egypt, and those who live in Cairo and Alexandria. When I talked of going to Egypt and wanting to visit some member of the family, Didi said ‘Ha! The aunts wouldn’t let you see him. They’d be very very careful who they let you meet.’ Their situation has become precarious, but on se débrouille, and surprisingly successfully, or so it seems to an outsider. An aunt of Didi’s, discussing shopping in Rome: ‘My dear, one can’t any more, the prices are terrible. It’s impossible to find anything wearable under £150.’*

  There are doctors, lawyers and professors in the family, and almost always they are presented as in some way remarkable. ‘My mother and her sisters were very beautiful and witty’—‘My father was the best doctor in Egypt’—‘Uncle so-and-so was an alcoholic from when he was seventeen’—‘Uncle such-and-such was the wittiest man in the world but he was mad, he shot himself.’ In explanation of the last, from a cousin of Didi’s: ‘You see we had one ancestor who was syphilitic, so we are often mad.’ If Didi is remembering charm, wit, elegance or intelligence he does so with a slightly elegiac gravity; horrors he recalls with sparkle and relish.

  His maternal grandparents are important, never spoken of without a glow of pleasure and love in his eyes. They represent wisdom, virtue and benevolence of a kind native to the country. They had a big house, always full of uncles and aunts and cousins, where Didi spent his early childhood, and ‘the only duty of everyone was to be happy and laugh. We laughed so much in that house…’

  They also
vomited. ‘It was a speciality in our family, when we were in love it was physical, we vomited. Everyone was always in love in my grandparents’ house—all those cousins—so there was always someone vomiting. When I was six I was in love with my cousin Kiki—she was eight years older than me but it was real love—and one day when I thought I was alone in the garden I did a sad little vomit and she saw me. “So you really do love me!” she said.’

  It is a family which expresses its feelings violently in other ways, too. ‘Terrible rows’ are frequent. A strong feeling is justified by its strength. When I first met Didi I was impressed by his self-control and the stoic way he bore the depressing hardships of exile in Germany, but I learnt gradually that his control is a balancing trick. He admires self-control but in fact he often abandons himself to the force of gravity with defiant relief.

  The family believes itself to have a tremendous generosity of emotion. The two I know best besides Didi are mother and son, Dolly and Mémé. Mémé was in England as a student and his mother came to spend a summer with him because it ‘killed’ her to be without him, although he went home for the holidays. She took a furnished flat and Didi came from Germany to join them for a few weeks: an island in his exile, which had already lasted for about five years. ‘Love’ must have been one of the most-used words in that flat. Whether they were talking to each other or about each other, they all constantly declared their love.

  That was when I first met Didi, but I had of course corresponded with him over his book. The first time I telephoned him at Dolly’s flat she answered in her pretty, husky French accent and was instantly welcoming. ‘Please, you must come to us soon, I will cook you an Egyptian meal. You must stay the weekend, we love any friend of Didi’s.’