Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Read online

  But chiefly it is the place for which I am grateful, not as it now is, but as it was. It is that which constantly makes its way to the top of the rag-bag of memories that I have become. Suddenly I will see the chaffinch’s nest which Pen and I found on a winter’s morning when, under a hard blue sky, every single twig and thread was coated with sparkling hoarfrost. Chaffinches make the neatest, prettiest nest of all, and that one had been turned into an exquisite miracle of silver and diamonds. Or the stream above the weir which marks the lake’s beginning, where it runs shallow under alders and we had decided to bathe naked – it seemed like a wild thing to do. We rode out to it bareback in nothing but cotton frocks, turned the ponies loose to graze, scrambled down the bank, stripped off our frocks – and found that the water didn’t even reach our knees. Having got so far we felt we had to lie down in it, which was cold and uncomfortable because the bottom was gravel, not mud, which was why the water running limpid over gold had looked so tempting. And no sooner had we pulled on our frocks and vaulted onto our ponies (bare pony under wet bare bottoms felt very odd) than Aunt Joyce appeared, walking her dog. Why, she asked, were we wet? So we had to tell her – would she think our nakedness wicked? But when she said it would have made more sense to choose a deeper place and wear swimsuits she was laughing, so that was all right. Or the huge old hollow oak at the bottom of the farm orchard, with flames roaring out of it as though it was a giant’s torch, when Andrew, then seven, had thought he could smoke out a wasps’ nest (or was it a hornets’?) by lighting a fire inside it – the tree went on burning all night. Or the two trees in the orchard which bore little yellow apples, delicious if eaten off the branch but useless otherwise, on the day when my mother and I took our watercolour boxes and sat down to paint them in blossom – oh, the smell of apple-blossom on a sunny day! …

  Here I am almost at my end, and my beginning rises up to meet me – or rather, even when I thought I was far away from it, it was always there, and now I have come back to it. And because in my eyes it was always so beautiful, it delights me yet again. It is too much to ask – I ought not to allow myself even to think of it – but perhaps it is not entirely impossible that I might, like my mother, come to the end of my days murmuring about some random memory: ‘It was absolutely divine’.

  In the kitchen garden with Andrew, circa 1925

  INSTEAD OF A LETTER

  Introduction

  I FIRST MET Diana Athill when we shared a stage at a book festival in the summer of 2000. We had come to Hay-on-Wye to talk about the memoirs we had written: Once in a House on Fire, about my growing up under tough circumstances in Manchester; and Stet, about Athill’s fifty years in London book publishing. At eighty-two, this solidly confident and brisk lady was more than half a century older than me. The audience might have imagined that, other than our both having written about our lives, we had very little in common. But we hit it off immediately. Surprisingly youthful, Diana was formidable yet full of fun – and unafraid to talk about things that others might shy away from. On that first occasion, my pleasure in meeting her was heightened by an odd sort of déjà vu, for in her voice and her eyes I recognized all the humour and wisdom that I knew from her writing.

  Athill’s language combines immediacy, ease and precision of expression. A lifetime of reading and editing makes itself felt in the fine structure and pace of each of her books. Above all, she is a virtuoso at what she calls ‘seeing things’. Sitting down to write her first story, she told herself, ‘I’m going to get it just as it was.’

  ‘My aunt and my own temperament equipped me with eyes,’ Athill says in Instead of a Letter, as she describes an enlightening moment. ‘I was drawing horses, as I constantly did, when [my aunt] leant over my shoulder and said, “Draw a naked man – a man or a woman.”’ The young Diana drew ‘a shapeless forked radish’. Seeing the look on her aunt’s face, she knew ‘that I had failed in some way: that there was something of significance I should have been able to do with the human body instead of being embarrassed by it.’

  That childhood epiphany occurred in the early 1920s; eighty years on, Diana Athill is recognized as a remarkably honest anatomist of human psychology. Her books bristle with intimacy. She looks at life, and herself, with peeling lucidity. Her writing is vivacious and unsentimental; often funny and painful in the same wince; piercing yet charming. These qualities shine through both her fiction and her non-fiction. Yet for most of her working life – spent as chief editor at the publishing house of André Deutsch, which she helped to found – Diana Athill did not regard herself primarily as a writer. She was forty-four years old when her first book, Instead of a Letter, was published in 1962. The autobiography of an ordinary person, someone of no great public eminence, Instead of a Letter was a curious work of non-fiction – what its author referred to as a ‘documentary’, and what we would today call a ‘memoir’. Athill went on to publish several other books: a collection of short stories (An Unavoidable Delay, 1962), a novel (Don’t Look at Me Like That, 1967) and two more ‘documentaries’ (After a Funeral, 1986 and Make Believe, 1993). But she never relinquished her day job, which offered her security and standing (she was known to be one of the best book editors in London) as well as satisfaction. As her work saved her from having to write for a living, she wrote only when she felt confident that she had something to say.

  Athill’s fifty years in publishing are the subject of her sixth book, Stet, which received enthusiastic and widespread acclaim in Britain (where it was published by Granta Books in 2000) and in North America. She had not published a book for almost a decade, and many readers were new to her lively and intelligent voice. Stet told the story of her relationship with André Deutsch (who died the year the book came out), the man who had been her boss, close friend and (briefly) lover, and narrated the history of the books she helped shape, giving sharp and entertaining cameos of authors such as V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Brian Moore. Memoirs set in the world of publishing make up a small and not particularly popular genre, but Stet broke out of the boundaries of its obvious audience (not a large one) and became, as many reviewers noted, that thing called a ‘classic’ – a book to be enjoyed by people who had never crossed a publisher’s doorstep, had never wanted to, and never would. This was a victory for her skill as a writer, and for the personality in her writing. For all its candour and nuance, however, Stet is only obliquely self-revealing. Having introduced us to an individual already formed, it leaves us wondering how Athill came to be the person she is, how she came to see the way she sees.

  Instead of a Letter, Athill’s most personal book, allows us to watch the formation of that character. At its heart lies the tragic story of how she fell in love for the first time, eventually to suffer severe disappointment and attacks of grief and loneliness that eroded her self-esteem. In this memoir, we witness a soul first being drained of vitality, then slowly, painstakingly returning to life. We see Athill emerge, not only alive, but full of vivacity, blessed with a way of seeing that is lyrically sensitive yet grounded in a thumpingly pragmatic, sensibly-proportioned approach to herself and to life.

  Athill’s vision is especially remarkable given the insularity of her privileged background. ‘There I used to be,’ she writes of her idyllic beginnings in the Norfolk countryside, ‘as snug and as smug as anyone, believing with the best that we were the best.’ Born in 1917, the daughter of an army colonel, she spent much of her childhood at her grandparents’ house where, in spite of her family’s ailing finances,

  necessities included a head gardener with two men under him, two grooms, a chauffeur, a butler and a footman, a cook and a kitchenmaid with a scullery maid to help them, a head housemaid with two under-housemaids, and my grandmother’s lady’s maid. They included, too, animals for our pleasure and governesses and schools for our instruction. They included books and a great deal of wholesome food, linen sheets rather than cotton, and three separate rooms for being in at different times of the day, not counting the dining-room, the
smoking-room, the front hall, in which, for some reason, my grandmother always had tea, and the nursery.

  Swathed in comfort, boasting an armigerous ancestry rich with ‘rustic Athill knights’, she seemed poised to grow up and go out into the world with her ‘sense of superiority’ unruffled. Yet, even at the age of ten, Diana had shocked her grandmother with a flight of fancy that suggested she understood there was a more turbulent world beyond the shelter of nursery teas:

  I thought that it was as though people were confined in a bowl which was floating on a sea. While snug at the bottom of the bowl they lived their lives complacently, but the bowl spun and tossed on the sea and its spinning sometimes sent one of them up its side until he could see over its rim. All round would be the endless chaos of dangerous, cold grey water, unsuspected till then, and anyone who had seen it and had understood that what he had thought was safety was only a little bowl, would not be able to bear it.

  Through reading books and with the encouragement of the aunt who had nudged her to try her hand at drawing nudes, Diana began to sense that ‘the family’s way of thinking’ was narrowly trammelled. Still, she galloped – largely unquestioning – through an adolescence that revolved around ‘horses and sex’, in which ‘hours – weeks, months, years’ were spent thinking about clothes. By the time she left school, she had grown to be an ‘exuberant, slightly gauche girl’, ‘affected and a little arrogant’, her attitudes in danger of hardening into blinkered self-satisfaction.

  Meanwhile, ‘Paul began’. A high-spirited man who ‘went like steel to magnet for the essence of any person, place, activity or situation, working from no preconception or preferred framework,’ Paul was an Oxford undergraduate who came to the family house to tutor Athill’s younger brother. At fifteen, Diana fell fervently in love – with the man, and with his embrace of life – and, in that moment, ‘the lines of my life were laid down’. She learned, through her irrepressibly open-minded lover, to regard difference without prejudice, to move between worlds, even bring them together. It was Paul, Athill tells us, who ‘broke down my conditioning and made me anxious to meet people as people, regardless of class or race: a freedom from shackles which did not then chafe me, but which would probably have become locked on me, for which I shall always thank him.’

  The social breadth of this new vision was matched by an intense sensuality that intoxicated Diana.

  When [Paul] went with me to pick primroses one Easter… he was astonished at my matter-of-fact attitude to the thick cushions of flowers in a certain part of the wood. I took it for granted that primroses grew thickly there – they always did. He, who lived either in London or on the coast, where they did not flourish, saw them.

  Paul buried his face in a clump of primroses, laughing. After that, Diana saw:

  At once the frail, reddish, slightly hairy stalks of the primroses, their delicate petals, the neat funnels of their centres, the young leaves, folded and lettuce-green among the darker, broader old ones, the grouping of each constellation of flowers, their delicious, rain-fresh scent – everything about them became alive.

  In the mid-1930s, Athill went up to Oxford to study English Literature. During her three years there, she became engaged to Paul, at the same time enjoying sundry ‘subsidiary relationships’ with other men: ‘little explosions of meeting’ that ‘were constantly blasting new shafts into the mine of experience.’ She and her friends lived in the shadow of impending war, but managed to be happy, to avoid feeling blighted by ‘this horror about life’. ‘I was frivolous, and I was lazy,’ she says of her undergraduate self, ‘and it seems to me now that I was lucky to be those things, because by being able almost all the time to slide sideways, not to think, I could store three years away like jewels before it came.’

  The horror, when ‘it’ hit, came not only in the form of the Second World War and its bombs. In a cruelly protracted way, Diana lost Paul. The shock of this rejection tore a hole in her life, marking the start of what she refers to as ‘twenty years of unhappiness’. Her contented childhood and her happy years at Oxford had given her a stability and resilience that ultimately helped her to retain her ‘bias towards being well-disposed to life.’ But for a long time, ‘the most intense emotion [she] could conceive of was one of pain.’

  Athill’s account of the ‘revolting humiliations’ of grief and of the spartan emotional existence into which she sank during the war is pungent with sadness and haunted by a creeping threat of sourness. ‘A long, flat unhappiness of that sort drains one, substitutes for blood some thin, acid fluid with a disagreeable smell,’ she observes. ‘Years of emptiness. Years leprous with boredom, drained by the war of meaning.’ Having found a modest job working for the BBC’s Overseas Service, she ‘retreated into a curious hermit existence’ while her ‘soul shrank to the size of a pea.’

  Athill analyses her misery – and her attempts to dodge or defeat it – with exquisite acuity. Instead of a Letter glitters with chiaruscuro effects, evincing the author’s life-saving skill at seeing in the dark. ‘After the late shift the tiny sequins of the traffic lights, reduced by masks during the blackout, changed from red to amber to green down the whole length of empty, silent Oxford Street. They looked as though they were signalling a whispered conversation, and they were the kind of thing with which I filled my days.’

  To fill her nights as well as her days, Athill began to ‘grab at emotion’ in a series of ‘foolish’ and brief sexual encounters. In these harsher, sadder passages, Instead of a Letter is suffused with an unusual kind of intimacy. The narrative not only explores the recesses of Athill’s psyche and ‘the body’s truth’, revealing her most private thoughts, feelings and actions, but also invites the reader to watch the writer watching herself. ‘I would split in two,’ she says of her trance-like phase of casual affairs, ‘one half going obediently and easily through the routine, the other watching with an ironic amusement.’ The sharpness of what she elsewhere refers to as her ‘beady eye’ (trained, to such comic and discomfiting effect, upon others in her later memoirs) is here very often turned upon herself.

  This ‘watching half’ of Athill keeps her work refreshingly free of self-absorption. Escaping the characteristic dangers of memoir, she reveals herself without sliding into narcissism, and lights up the smallest, most ordinary details of her life in a way that conveys their significance and appeal without distorting them through exaggeration or sentimentality. Hers is a rare kind of candour: she addresses her readers with a strikingly modern lack of squeamishness and secrecy about personal experience, but is never gratuitously shocking or cloyingly confessional. It is, as she acknowledges, ‘difficult to consider with detachment’ such experiences as promiscuity, abortion, and the life-threatening miscarriage she describes in After a Funeral. But Athill writes with a detachment that is carefully calibrated. Her memoirs have a distinctive introspective quality – free of claustrophobia, yet never less than fully engaged. Rendering her ordeals and delights, she pulls us into her story, her consciousness, without pushing us into the sticky position of voyeurs. She makes us privy to sometimes shocking intimacies but spares us the imposition of any self-pity. The depth of her psychological probing is matched and relieved by a tonic buoyancy in the telling.

  Despite its frequent sadness, Instead of a Letter is a radiant and inspiring book. Its final episodes surge with a sense of revival as Athill describes how ‘one by one, nerves which I thought to be dead have come to life.’ It also reveals how she became a writer: the very moment, as so often in her work, brought to life.

  One January morning in 1958: ‘I was crossing the Outer Circle in Regent’s Park, bringing my dog in from her walk, when a passing car slowed, accelerated again, slowed and stopped.’ A comic moment of misrecognized identity and mistaken assumptions followed, leaving Athill feeling ‘extraordinarily alive and cheerful’. As soon as she got home, she began to jot down memories inspired by her brief encounter with the man in the car. ‘At that point it happened’: propelled by ‘t
he energy, the feeling of something bubbling inside me,’ her first story ‘came straight out, with no pause.’

  Beyond her commitment ‘to get it just as it was’, and a determination to write a story that she ‘meant people to read’, Athill had no clearly defined sense of her literary enterprise. She distinguished between ‘invented’ stories and those that corresponded more closely to her own experience, but made no sharper distinction between fiction and non-fiction, except to observe that, although she felt prouder of the ‘invented’ stories, the others were usually better.

  Instead of a Letter began as an impromptu experiment. Looking back (forty years later) on the genesis of her first book, Athill remembered:

  I put a piece of paper in my typewriter and began to write – about my grandmother! And from there it went on – this is literally true – without my ever knowing when I sat down to write what I was going to say. I would be dying to say it, whatever it was – really itching to get back to the typewriter the moment I got home from the office (and sometimes scribbling away under my desk when I was in the office) – but I never knew what it was going to be.