Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Read online

  The hurtling came later, at one o’clock in the morning, when we were on our way back by taxi from the dinner to which we had been invited. In England a car or a restaurant with a radio in it depresses me. Had I been told of a taxi with not only a radio but a gramophone, I should have been appalled. How could one bear to drive through an arcadian landscape untouched by time, under a full moon at that, to the sound of rock and roll or even of bouzoukia? But given an evening drinking retsina with a soap manufacturer and a municipal electrician in Corfu, those great gales of sound became exhilarating. The taxi bounced, the moon reeled, scented breezes whipped our hair, the two men sang in passionate baritone voices and embraced us, and although the fierce, tomcat wailing of the Greek music was the better, even the Elvis Presley records played in our honour took on a throb and a swing which fitted them to the night. Only on Corfu have I seen taxis fitted with that device: a narrow, cushioned slot on gimbals under the dashboard, into which the driver shoves small records from the library which he keeps on the seat beside him. He only has to push them in and pull them out; the playing is automatic and undisturbed by even the most violent bouncing. Loud it has to be – loud and strident, with the hood of the car down and a road diversified by sharp bends and sudden stretches of unsurfaced stone. Then the music becomes not an offence but a celebration, one hears it as its addicts hear it, vulgarity is blown away, and its platitudes touch the nerves like truths.

  Strenuous though the end of such an evening usually is, streaked with anxiety as to how to taper stormy declarations of premature and unreal passion into an agreeable acquaintanceship, I would not have missed the wild musical taxis of Corfu. Evenings like that – absurd, comic, undignified, even at times slightly alarming – following days like those I spent on the terrace: those are what I travel for. That I should see works of arts and monuments which I should not see otherwise, and that I should make the sudden but enduring friendships which sometimes blossom out of a time when inhibitions are melted by strangeness and renewed vitality, is certainly important; but the secret days and the comic evenings have been the best treasure I have brought back.

  Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian women are commonly supposed to go south in search of men, and so they often do. The neuroses of northern societies, in which men feel that they see too much of women, dovetail neatly with those of southern societies, where men feel that they see too little of them. Whether she shrinks or expands under it, no Englishwoman can remain unaware of having her sex openly recognized in street, train, or restaurant, after months at home during which the most startling recognition it has received has been the quick, sidelong twitch of a gooseberry eye here and there, which vanishes under a hat brim as soon as it has been observed. Whatever the weather, I feel cold when I return to London.

  But societies which acknowledge the power of sex, and therefore shelter their respectable women (and thereby increase the power of sex – it is a spiral), are romanticized by societies with opposite tendencies. Much nonsense is talked by swaggering southerners and wistful northerners about the absence of puritanism and inhibition in the warmer parts of Europe. So much theorizing, so much emphasis on masculine bella figura, so much keeping of scores – it is not, perhaps, repressed sex that one encounters in countries like Italy and Greece, but it sometimes looks suspiciously like sex-in-the-head. And in spite of the millions of real and warm relationships that must exist, fat Yanni Hajikakkis, admittedly an extreme case, seems to me to have his significance.

  He was a huge, thick-necked man with a bellow, who boasted that during his military service he had been the most spectacular sergeant in the Greek Army, able to make even colonels jump out of their boots when he let himself go. In ordinary conversation he would try to keep his voice down, but he never succeeded for more than a few sentences. Swimming with a friend of mine, at whom he was making a desultory pass, he could be heard across fifty yards of water and the beach, from the balconies of the small hotel which stood on its edge, as he argued, ‘But you cannot like to make love with your husband or you would not be here without him.’ In the Army he had been popular because he had never put his men in prison but had taken offenders outside and punched their heads, which, he told us, had made him much loved. Yanni was on holiday in Corfu when we met him, a prosperous store-owner from Salonika, rich, and contented with his lot except in one way. His mother was dead. His father was dead too, ‘but for my father I am not suffering. For Mama … “Not Mama!” I say, “No, God, not my Mama, not my Mama!” But God did not hear … What is a man without his mother? In a man’s life she is his angel, she is the only pure love. I make love to many women – I am a strong man as you see, I am always making love – but what are these whores to me? I love only my Mama and she loves only me, she would die for me – and now she is dead!’

  Whenever Yanni spoke of his mama’s death, and he spoke of it every time I met him, his big bold eyes would pop with tears, he would bow his head and drop his fists on the table so that the glasses rattled. Large, loud, and aggressively masculine though he was, through my head there would flash images of thousands of plump, soft, pale little boys – cherished, indulged little Greek boys of the middle and upper classes – growing up in a society which inspires western Europeans with nostalgia because its values are simpler and more ancient than our own, because its members believe that children love mothers, that brothers protect sisters, that insults should be revenged, and that something has been lost since they can no longer shoot their enemies without getting into trouble. No doubt there are some little Greek boys of that kind whose value as children and males in such a society does not mean that sweetmeats are stuffed between their lips even when they do not ask for them, or who are not allowed to stay up long past their bedtime because they cry and kick, but they are the minority. Mostly the baby, and particularly the boy baby, is god, and that this privileged status makes the best sort of man of him can appear doubtful.

  ‘Now that you are so lonely,’ I said to Yanni, ‘why don’t you get married?’

  ‘Married? I will never marry! How can I find today such a girl as I would marry?’

  What qualities would he require, I asked, and he catalogued them: she need not be rich because he was rich, and he held opinions too modern for him to insist on money as a matter of form; she need not be pretty, though it would be better if she were; she must come from a suitable family; she must be no more than seventeen so that he could be sure that she was a virgin (in England, he said, she would have to be under fifteen for that, from all he had heard). But above all ‘she must be like my mother, she must be to me a mama’. It was distressing to think that this prosperous man, still only in his thirties, almost certainly would get married soon in spite of his protests: that some girl in her teens really would have to buckle down to being his mama because he felt in his bones that mamas were the only kind of women who were good. Englishmen are supposed to be split-minded about women, to divide them into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ according to whether they like men or not, but no Englishman I have ever met was more split-minded than poor fat Yanni, slumped over a cafe table and bellowing the loss of his mother like a calf bereft.

  Some western Europeans go to Greece – I go to Greece – not only for its haunting beauty but to touch a life more straightforward and governed by simpler necessities than our own. After being spellbound by it we turn back to our own values and see them as over-complex, shoddy, and absurd – I have found myself envying Greek or Yugoslav women for their unquestioning acceptance of their status in a world more dominated by men than my own. But not when I was talking to Yanni; and not when, for example, I have ventured into a Greek restaurant at night in a provincial town – a restaurant kept as a preserve for men, by men, because men believe that it is right to keep their mothers, daughters, and sisters safely at home behind invisible bars. If there is a woman entertainer in the restaurant, singing bouzoukia, watch those hungry faces turned towards her, listen to the groan which greets her demure and lazy dancing – the pr
essure of frustration is explosive. The woman tourist who fondly believes herself to be succumbing to an uninhibited pagan is more likely to be serving as a crust thrown to a starving man – a deliberately starving man, who would only pick up a crust because a crust is worth nothing. If all she wants is to be free of her own inhibitions for a day or two, well and good, but I suspect that the freedom is often bestowed by someone no less cramped than herself.

  Having too little money is an advantage in travelling which I regret losing. I am still far from being able to stay in really good hotels or to fly except on the cheaper night flights, but my standards are creeping up: cheap the flight may be, but it is a flight, and not a third-class train journey. It would be possible to travel more cheaply than necessity dictates, but fondly though I remember journeys made in less comfort, I feel myself reflecting a miniature image of the rich whose money forces them so inexorably into a certain manner of living. It seems an affectation not to take a room with a shower if I can afford it, although I know by experience that a hotel too small for showers will be less impersonal. I know that an excursion by local bus is more amusing and interesting than an excursion by taxi, in spite of the heat, the jolting, and the passenger who will vomit, but the money in my purse works a sinister distortion, emphasizing the bus’s disadvantages, highlighting the taxi’s luxury, so that against my will I find myself in the latter, and thus likely to meet other people of my own sort instead of the friendly, curious strangers in the bus. An insulating layer has been put between my naked self and the place I am visiting, and I have lost something by it. I can only be grateful that the layer is never likely to become thick.

  From every journey I have made I have come home happier, and what I have gained from them has not vanished with time. It is not only that I have seen beautiful things with which to furnish my imagination, learnt interesting things, met interesting people, laughed a great deal. Something has happened as a result of all this: one by one, nerves which I thought to be dead have come to life.

  16

  BY 1958, WHEN I was forty-one, I had come to feel that middle-age, provided I did not look more than a little way ahead, was a peaceful time rather than a depressing one. A deliberate myopia could give the impression that I was on a level plain rather than on a downhill slope. It was a long time since I had been in love, a long time since every unoccupied moment had been filled with thoughts of men, or of a man. Sometimes, when I went to bed, I would try to return to the memories, hopes, speculations, and dreams which had taken up so much of my time for so many years, but I would fall asleep before they had properly begun. I worked, and liked my job. I travelled, and loved it. I met my friends, and was as familiar with their troubles as though they were my own; and because trouble was the prevailing condition in the life of almost everyone I knew, my own calm, though negative, began to seem a good fortune. My grandmother had died, and soon afterwards my father, who had retired some years earlier and had been living with my mother in a house they had bought near Beckton during the war, when it had become necessary for the Farm to house a working bailiff. These deaths, and the ageing of my other relatives, who were shrinking a little and stiffening in their joints, while their loneliness and their fear of it showed through the chinks in their courage as they pushed their days so bravely from incident to incident, had put Beckton in a new light – or had made me notice the new light sharply for the first time. It was no longer a place to which I could go back for comfort; it had become a place to which I ought to bring comfort, and the meagreness with which I did this made me realize the degree to which I had become detached from my family. When I spent a weekend with my mother I could talk only of her affairs, or of the most superficial of my own, because on many of the subjects which touched me closely our opinions and emotions would be too different for easy communication.

  Or so I felt, and continue to feel with people of her generation and background. I wish, now, that in my youth I had loved my family less. If I had not loved them I might have had the courage for revolt, instead of going quietly underground. If in my twenties I had been open about the sexual freedom I was practising, had pressed political arguments instead of sliding out of them into silence, had discussed my agnosticism instead of merely avoiding going to church, there might not have been the breach I expected and feared – or, if there had been, it might not have been permanent. With divergencies openly recognized it might have become possible for us to touch at more than a few well-defined points. Instead, I find myself apparently permanently inhibited in such relationships, even to keeping almost entirely silent on the most important thing that has ever happened to me.

  For 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. Supposing that the driver wanted to ask the way somewhere, I turned towards the car. The man peering back at me over his shoulder looked familiar. ‘Why, it’s Marcel!’ I thought. Marcel was a diamond-polisher from Johannesburg whom I had once known well. I began to hurry towards him, smiling, but when I got nearer I saw that it was not Marcel. ‘The name is Mustafa Ali from Istanbul,’ said the stranger. ‘I was wondering whether you would have a cup of coffee with me.’

  I explained that I had mistaken him for someone else, told him I was busy, and crossed the road, laughing. ‘What optimism,’ I thought, ‘at nine o’clock in the morning! And how odd that someone looking so like Marcel should do such a Marcellish thing.’ I began to remember Marcel. For the rest of the day I felt extraordinarily alive and cheerful, and that evening, as soon as I got home, I began to write about Marcel.

  It went smoothly for several pages – the little man was there in front of me, I got him down – but when, next day, I reread what I had done, it was clear that I could not persuade what I had written into any shape. Marcel would have to belong to a story about diamonds, and I did not know enough about the trade. ‘Well, it was rather fun remembering him,’ I thought, putting it aside, but the energy, the feeling of something bubbling inside me, was still there. I went on thinking about him until he reminded me of another man whom I had once known for a short time, and at that point it happened. ‘By God,’ I thought with jubilation, ‘I know what I’ll do: I’ll write about him, and I’m going to get it just as it was.’ That story came straight out, with no pause, exactly as I meant it to, and I was perfectly happy all the time it was coming.

  Until I left school I had written poems fairly regularly. I wrote half a dozen more while I was at Oxford, and another three or four, widely spaced, when I was in my twenties. They were not good and I did not suppose them to be good, but they were real in the sense that they were pushed out of me by their own growth rather than pulled out by my volition. They represented intensities of experience, they were high points of my ‘real’ life, but they were secret. I did not think of myself as someone whose intensities deserved to be communicated, so when they stopped coming I was regretful but not distressed.

  Writing prose was something of which I had rarely thought except as an enviable gift possessed by others. Two or three times, when more than usually short of money, I had taken some incident and tried to turn it into a ‘travel piece’ for the New Statesman or a ‘funny piece’ for Punch, without success. I was facetious when I tried to be funny, high-flown when I tried to describe. I could see clearly enough that I would dislike the results if they had been produced by someone else. Three times during my adult life I had scribbled a few pages for no purpose other than to put down what I was feeling: once about Crivelli’s Annunciation, once about Forster’s A Passage to India, and once about my first visit to Florence. These I kept, but simply as reminders to myself. The ‘feel’ of the story triggered by Mr Mustafa Ali was entirely different. I did not bother to envisage a market for it, but it was, from the beginning, a story which I meant people to read.

  As soon as that story was finished, another one began, and by the end of the year I had written nine. I did no
t think about them in advance: a feeling would brew up, a first sentence would occur to me, and then the story would come, as though it had been there all the time. Sometimes it would turn into ‘work’ halfway through and I would have to cast about for the conclusion to which the story must be brought, but more often it finished itself. Some of them connected very closely with my own experience, some of them, to my astonishment, depended on it so slightly that they might almost have been ‘invented’ (the ‘invented’ ones were the ones of which I felt most proud, although, with one exception, the others were better).

  In March, when I was halfway through the third of these stories, I saw the announcement of the Observer’s short-story competition for that year, the story to be called ‘The Return’ and to be three thousand words long. Neither of my finished stories had that title, but it could have made sense with either of them. One was too long, the other only needed cutting by a hundred words. Friends had encouraged me, so I put the shorter of the two in an envelope, chose for the necessary pseudonym the name of the horse which had just won the Grand National (Mr What, God bless him), posted it and forgot it. Or rather, I remembered it twice between then and December, when the results were to be announced, on selling two other stories to magazines. ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘if these have proved good enough to sell …’ But both times I slapped myself down so firmly that when the literary editor of the Observer telephoned me at my office on December 21st, my birthday, the competition did not enter my head.