Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (69 page)
Read Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Online
Authors: Diana Athill
Only once did I spend more than a meal-time with her. We gave a launching party for
Good Behaviour
in Dublin, I decided to take my car over and stay on for a ten-day holiday, and Molly invited me to stay with her for (I thought) the weekend at the start of the holiday. After the party I drove her to her home in Ardmore, and learnt on the way that she had arranged parties for me on every day of the coming week and had told a friend that she was bringing me to stay with him for two nights at the end of it. At first I was slightly dismayed by this unexpected abundance of hospitality, but I was soon enjoying every minute of it.
Partly this was because of the difference between Counties Cork and Waterford and my native East Anglia. Most of the people we met were the Irish equivalent of my family’s friends: country gentlefolk preoccupied with hunting, shooting, farming, gardening … the very people I had escaped from (so I had felt, fond though I was of many of them) when I moved on from Oxford to earn my living in London. Had I been faced with a week of parties given by Norfolk people of that kind who were strangers to me I would have seen it as a grim ordeal by boredom – and it
would
have been pretty boring because my hosts, given the tedious duty of entertaining a foreign body, and I as the reluctant victim of their hospitality, would between us have erected an impenetrable wall of polite small-talk from which eventually both sides would have retreated in a state of exhaustion. But in Ireland … much as I distrust generalizations about national characteristics, there’s no denying that most Irish people are more articulate than the English, appearing to see talk as a positive pleasure rather than a tiresome necessity. I don’t suppose I shared many more interests with my Irish hosts than I would have done with English ones (although I did know quite a lot about theirs) – but they were so much more lively and witty, and so much readier to start or to follow a new trail, than the people among whom I was raised, that whether or not interests were shared didn’t seem to matter. All the parties were thoroughly enjoyable.
They were given an appetizing touch of spice by the stories Molly told on the way to them about the people we were going to meet, which were splendidly indiscreet. If she disliked someone she either kept silent or spoke briefly with indignant disapproval; with the rest she rejoiced in their follies, if follies they displayed, but as a fascinated observer rather than a censorious judge. Perhaps novelists are so often good at gossip because – like God with forgiveness –
c’est leur métier
.
On one of those drives she gave me a gleeful glimpse of local standards of literary criticism. An elderly neighbour, blue-blooded but rustic in her ways (I gathered that she usually kept her gumboots on and her false teeth out) had said to her: ‘I read your book, Molly, and I absolutely
hated
it – but I must say that it was very well written. I didn’t find a single spelling mistake.’
The drives, and the time spent alone with Molly in her house tucked into the hillside overlooking Ardmore and its bay, were even better than the parties. She was an exquisitely kind and considerate hostess, but it wasn’t that which made the visit so memorable. It was the extent to which Molly was alive to everything around her – to the daughters she worried about and adored, the people she knew, the events she remembered, her garden, the food she cooked, the problems and satisfactions of writing. And it was also the fact that day by day I became more aware of the qualities she kept hidden: her courage, her unselfishness – simply her goodness.
The chief difference, it seems to me, between the person who is lucky enough to possess the ability to create – whether with words or sound or pigment or wood or whatever – and those who haven’t got it, is that the former react to experience directly and each in his own way, while the latter are less ready to trust their own responses and often prefer to make use of those generally agreed to be acceptable by their friends and relations. And while the former certainly include by far the greater proportion of individuals who would be difficult to live with, they also include a similarly large proportion of individuals who are exciting or disturbing or amusing or inspiring to know. And Molly, in addition to having charm and being good, was also a creator.
I am glad, therefore, that our last exchange of letters was about her writing, and not just one of general well-wishing (as they had been for some years, since she became seriously ill with heart trouble). I had just reread
Good Behaviour
for some forgotten reason, and on meeting Molly’s daughter Virginia as we walked our dogs, had told her how greatly I had re-enjoyed it. Virginia urged me to write and tell Molly, saying that although the worst of her depression at being weak and helpless had lifted, she still needed cheering up. So I wrote her a long letter about why I love that book so much, and also her last book,
Loving and Giving
, and said that although I knew she was downcast at not having been able to write another book, she surely must acknowledge that what she had done had been marvellously well done – that her writing had, in fact, won laurels on which anyone should be proud to rest. She replied that my letter had done her good and had lifted her depression about her writing ‘right off the ground’, then went on to say very sweetly how much she valued my opinion, ending with words which I knew to be valedictory, of such generosity that I can only treasure them.
I feel a real loss at losing your company. I shan’t get to London again and I’m too weak and foolish to ask you to come here. But we have had many good moments together and you have done
everything
for my books –
think
what that has meant to me, to my life. With my love and thanks. Molly
By ‘doing everything’ for her books she meant that if we had not published
Good Behaviour, Time After Time
and
Loving and Giving
, her earlier books would not have been reissued in paperback by Virago. The real originator of this sequence (not counting Ian Parsons) was Gina Pollinger, as I am sure Molly recognized and must have acknowledged with a similar generosity and more reason; but I do still get great satisfaction from remembering that Molly’s reappearance under our imprint brought her serious recognition as a writer, and also put an end to the money problems that had harassed her throughout her long widowhood. I do think of it, as she bade me, and it makes me happy. Remembering that outcome, and the pleasure of knowing her, is a good way to end this book.
H
AVING SEEN ANDRé
Deutsch Limited fade out, why am I not sadder than I am?
I suppose it is because, although I have often shaken my head over symptoms of change in British publishing such as lower standards of copy-preparation and proofreading, I cannot feel that they are crucial. It is, of course, true that reading is going the same way as eating, the greatest demand being for the quick and easy, and for the simple, instantly recognizable flavours such as sugar and vinegar, or their mental equivalents; but that is not the terminal tragedy which it sometimes seems to the disgruntled old. It is not, after all, a new development: quick and easy has always been what the majority wants. The difference between my early days in publishing and the present is not that this common desire has come into being, but that it is now catered for more lavishly than it used to be. And that is probably because the grip on our trade of a particular caste has begun to relax.
Of that caste I am a member: one of the mostly London-dwelling, university-educated, upper-middle-class English people who took over publishing towards the end of the nineteenth century from the booksellers who used to run it. Most of us loved books and genuinely tried to understand the differences between good and bad writing; but I suspect that if we were examined from a god’s-eye viewpoint it would be seen that quite often our ‘good’ was good only according to the notions of the caste. Straining for that god’s-eye view, I sometimes think that not a few of the books I once took pleasure in publishing were pretty futile, and that the same was true of other houses. Two quintessentially ‘caste’ writers, one from the less pretentious end of the scale, the other from its highest reaches, were Angela Thirkell and Virginia Woolf. Thirkell is embarrassing – I always knew that, but would have published her, given the chance, because she was so obviously a seller. And Woolf, whom I revered in my youth, now seems almost more embarrassing because the claims made for her were so high. Not only did she belong to the caste, but she was unable to see beyond its boundaries – and that self-consciously ‘beautiful’ writing, all those adjectives – oh dear! Caste standards – it ought not to need saying – have no right to be considered sacrosanct.
Keeping that in mind is a useful specific against melancholy; and even better is the fact that there are plenty of people about who are making a stand against
too much
quick-and-easy. The speed with which the corners of supermarkets devoted to organic produce are growing into long shelves is remarkable; and there are still publishers – not many, but some – who are more single-mindedly determined to support serious writing than we ever were.
I have just visited one: the first time in seven years that I have set foot in a publisher’s office. It astonished me: how familiar it was, the way I knew what was happening behind its doors … and how much I loved it. ‘It’s still there!’ I said to myself; and on the way home I saw that by ‘it’ I meant not only publishing of a kind I recognized, but something even more reassuring: being young. Old people don’t want to mop and mow, but age has a blinkering effect, and their narrowed field of vision often contains things that
are
going from bad to worse; it is therefore consoling to be reminded that much exists outside that narrow field, just as it did when we were forty or thirty or twenty.
Finding myself not gravely distressed by the way publishing is changing seems reasonable enough. I am harder put to understand how anyone can feel in their bones, as I can, that life is worth living when every day we see such alarming evidence that a lot of it is unacceptable: that idiocy and cruelty, far from being brought to heel by human ingenuity, are as rampant as ever. I suppose the answer lies in something of which that small publishing house is a part.
Years ago, in a pub near Baker Street, I heard a man say that humankind is seventy per cent brutish, thirty per cent intelligent, and though the thirty per cent is never going to win, it will always be able to leaven the mass just enough to keep us going. That rough and ready assessment of our plight has stayed with me as though it were true, given that one takes ‘intelligence’ to mean not just intellectual agility, but whatever it is in beings that makes for readiness to understand, to look for the essence in other beings and things and events, to respect that essence, to collaborate, to discover, to endure when endurance is necessary, to enjoy: briefly, to co-exist. It does, alas, seem likely that sooner or later, either through our own folly or a collision with some wandering heavenly body, we will all vanish in the wake of the dinosaurs; but until that happens I believe that the yeast of intelligence will continue to operate one way or another.
Even if it operates in vain, it remains evolution’s peak (as far as we can see): something to enjoy and foster as much as possible; something not to betray by succumbing to despair, however deep the many pits of darkness. It even seems to me possible dimly to perceive it as belonging not to a particular planet, but to universal laws of being, potentially present anywhere in the universe where the kind of physical (or should it be chemical?) conditions prevail which kindle life out of dust: an aspect of something which human beings have called by the various names of god, because having no name for it made them feel dizzy.
In the microscopic terms of my own existence, believing this means that in spite of reading the newspapers, and in spite of seeing the sad end of André’s brave endeavour, and in spite of losing a considerable part of my youth to heartbreak, I wake up every morning
liking
being here. (I apologize to André, and to my young self, for being able to dismiss so lightly events which were once so painfully heavy.) I also wake up knowing that I have been extraordinarily lucky, and a good chunk of that luck came with the job. When I was moved to scribble ‘Stet’ against the time I spent being an editor it was because it gave so many kinds of enlargement, interest, amusement and pleasure to my days. It was a job on the side of the thirty per cent.
1
N
EAR THE PARK
which my bedroom overlooks there came to stay a family which owned a pack of pugs, five or six of them, active little dogs, none of them overweight as pugs so often are. I saw them recently on their morning walk, and they caused me a pang. I have always wanted a pug and now I can’t have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair. There are dog-walkers, of course; but the best part of owning a dog is walking with it, enjoying its delight when it detects the signs that a walk is imminent, and its glee when its lead is unsnapped and it can bound off over the grass, casting cheerful looks back at you from time to time to make sure that you are still in touch. Our own dog is as old in dog years as I am in human ones (mine amount to eighty-nine), and wants no more than the little potter I can still provide, but I enjoy watching other people’s animals busy about their pleasures.
Brought up with dogs, I am baffled by those who dislike them. They have been domesticated for so long that cohabiting with us is as natural to them as the jungle is to the tiger. They have become the only animal whose emotions we can truly penetrate: emotions resembling our own excepting in their simplicity. When a dog is anxious, angry, hungry, puzzled, happy, loving, it allows us to see in their purest form states which we ourselves know, though in us they are distorted by the complex accretions of humanity. Dogs and humans recognize each other at a deep and uncomplicated level. I would so like to begin that process all over again with a little black-velvet-faced pug – but no! It can’t be done.
And another thing that can’t be done became apparent this morning. I had seen in Thompson & Morgan’s plant catalogue a photograph of a tree fern which cost
£
18, reasonable for something so exotic. A few years ago I fell in love with the tree ferns in the forests of Dominica, and since then I learnt that they, or their cousins, can survive in English gardens, so now I ordered one from that catalogue by phone. It arrived today. Of course I knew that I would not receive a mature tree as shown in the photograph, but I was expecting a sizeable parcel, probably by special delivery. What came, by ordinary post, was a box less than twelve inches long containing a three-inch pot, from which four frail little leaves are sprouting. Whether tree ferns grow quickly or slowly I don’t know, but even if it is quickly, it is not possible that I shall ever see this one playing the part I envisaged for it in our garden. I shall pot it on towards that end as far as I can, hoping to see it reach a size at which it can be planted out, but virtuous though planting for the future is supposed to be, it doesn’t feel rewarding. It made me think of a turn of phrase often used by Jean Rhys, usually about being drunk: ‘I was a bit drunk, well very.’ She never in fact said ‘I was a bit
sad
, well very’ about being old, but no doubt she would have done if she had not hated and feared it too much to speak of it.
Jean was one of my object lessons, demonstrating how not to think about getting old. The prospect filled her with resentment and despair. Sometimes she announced the defiant intention of dyeing her pretty grey hair bright red, but she never did so; less, I think, for the sensible reason that it would have made her look grotesque than because she lacked the energy to organize it. Sometimes – very rarely – drink made her feel better, but more often it turned her querulous and tetchy. She expected old age to make her miserable, and it did, although once she was immersed in it she expressed her misery by complaining about other and lesser things, the big one itself being too much to contemplate – although she did once say that what kept panic at bay was her suicide kit. She had depended on sleeping pills for years and had saved up a substantial cache of them in the drawer of her bedside table, against the day when things got too bad. They did get very bad, but after her death I checked that drawer and the cache was intact.
My second object lesson was the Bulgarian-born, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Elias Canetti, whose defiance of death was more foolish than Jean’s dismay. He had a central European’s respect for the construction of abstract systems of thought about the inexplicable, which is uncongenial to many English minds, and which caused him to overvalue his own notions to the extent of publishing two volumes of aphorisms. I never met him, but I knew those books because André Deutsch Limited, the firm in which I worked, published them. During the long years he spent here as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Canetti had taken so violently against the British, I think because they had failed to recognize his genius (the Nobel Prize was yet to come), that he determined never to be published in this country. However Tom Rosenthal, who took over our firm towards the end of its days, had once done him a kindness which he remembered, so he finally agreed to let us have his books on condition that we began with the two lots of aphorisms and followed the American editions, which he had approved, to the last comma, including the jacket copy. This left his English editor (me) nothing to do except read the books, but that was enough to get my hackles up. Many of the aphorisms were pithy and a few were witty, but as a whole what pompous self-importance! The last straw was when his thinking turned to nonsense and he declared, as he did in several of these snippets, that he ‘rejected death’.
Later I came to know a former lover of his, the Austrian painter Marie-Louise Motesiczky, a woman who sailed into her eighties gracefully in spite of much physical pain as a result of a severe case of shingles, and a life-story that might well have flattened her. She deserves more than passing attention.
I met her by chance. Mary Hernton, a friend who was looking for a bedsitter in Hampstead, told me she had found a wonderful room in the house of an extraordinary old woman. The room, though wonderful, was not right for her purposes, but the woman had impressed Mary so much that she had invited her to tea and wanted me to meet her. What was so remarkable about her? I would see when I met her, and anyway Mary thought she had been Canetti’s mistress: her shelves were full of books owned by him and the room had once been his. I did join them for tea, and I too was impressed by Marie-Louise. She was funny, warm, charming and indiscreet. When she learnt that I published Canetti she became excited, disregarding the fact that I had never met him, and plunged at once into telling me how they had been friends and lovers for over twenty years before she learnt that he had a wife and daughter. She knew it sounded improbable, but she had lived a secluded life looking after her mother, who had come with her to England from Vienna just before Hitler invaded Austria (they were members of a rich and distinguished Jewish family). Her seclusion seemed to have spared her the knowledge of Canetti’s many other women: she never said anything to me suggesting that she knew about them, only that the revelation of his being married had brought their affair to a sudden and agonizing end. The more she told me, the more it seemed to me that Canetti and her mother, who had died quite recently at a great age, had consumed her life and had left her in emptiness … except that there was no real feeling of emptiness about Marie-Louise.
Mary had told me that she thought Marie-Louise painted, but when quite soon I visited her in her large Hampstead house, which was full of interesting objects and paintings, I could see nothing that looked as though it had been done by her. She did, however, make a passing reference to her work, so I asked if I might see some of it. I asked nervously – very nervously – because nothing is more embarrassing than being shown paintings that turn out to be dreadful. She led me – and this boded ill – into her bedroom, a large, high-ceilinged room, one whole wall of which was an enormous built-in cupboard. This she opened, to reveal racks crammed with paintings, two of which she pulled out. And I was stunned.
This sweet, funny, frail old woman was indeed a painter, the real thing, up there with Max Beckmann and Kokoschka. It was difficult to know how to take it, because one couldn’t say ‘Oh my god, you really are a painter!’, while if one took her for granted as what she was, one would feel impertinent commenting on her work. I can’t remember what I did say, but I must have scrambled through it all right because thereafter she was always happy to talk about her work, for which I was grateful. She was wonderful to talk with about painting, and it explained why there was no feeling of emptiness about her. She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things.
There was, however, something to worry about, because what were all those paintings doing, languishing in a bedroom cupboard? It turned out that there were two or three in European public collections and that there had been a show of her work at the Goethe Institute not long ago, but still it was a ridiculous situation for which one couldn’t help concluding that Canetti and her mother had been largely responsible. Both were cannibals, Canetti because of self-importance, her mother because of dependence. (Once, she told me, when she said to her mother that she was going out for twenty minutes to buy some necessity, her mother wailed ‘But what shall I do if I die before you get back?’) Though the fact that during the years of her life in England, German expressionist painting, to which her work was related, had been held in little esteem, may also have contributed to her abdication from the art scene.
But worry was wasted. Although she had been taken advantage of by her two loves, Marie-Louise was a skilful manipulator of everyone else. No sooner did she meet anyone than she began diffidently asking them for help. Could you tell her a good dentist, or plumber, or dressmaker? Might she ask you to help her with this tax return? Always in a way suggesting that you were her only hope. It was quite a while before it dawned on me that a considerable part of the population of Hampstead was waiting on her hand and foot, so that worry wasn’t really necessary, and by the time I met her a young friend of hers called Peter Black was well on the way to convincing a great Viennese gallery, the Belvedere, that it must give her the major exhibition that she deserved. I was able to help her write tactful letters to them when she disliked the catalogue descriptions they were providing, which earned me an invitation to the opening. (I also, which pleased me even more, persuaded our National Portrait Gallery to reverse its rejection of her portrait of Canetti. They had told her coldly that they were not interested in portraits of unknown people, and – although I ought not to say it – the letter in which I told them who Canetti was without showing that I knew they didn’t know, was a masterpiece. I wish I had kept a copy. The portrait is now there.)
The exhibition in Vienna was a wonderful occasion. Seeing those paintings hung where they ought to be was like seeing animals which had been confined in cages at a zoo released into their natural habitat. I am sure Marie-Louise did not wish to be pleased with anything that her native city did for her (it had murdered her beloved brother, who had stayed behind to help his fellow Jews), but although she made a game attempt at dissatisfaction with details, she could not conceal her pleasure at the whole.
At one of our last meetings before her death I asked her if Canetti had meant it literally when he declared that he would not accept it. Oh yes, she said. And she confessed that there was a time when she was so enthralled by the power of his personality that she had allowed herself to think ‘Perhaps he will really do it – will become the first human being not to die.’ She was laughing at herself when she said this, but a little tremulously. I think she still felt that his attitude was heroic.
To me it was plain silly. It is so obvious that life works in terms of species rather than of individuals. The individual just has to be born, to develop to the point at which it can procreate, and then to fall away into death to make way for its successors, and humans are no exception whatever they may fancy. We have, however, contrived to extend our falling away so much that it is often longer than our development, so what goes on in it and how to manage it is worth considering. Book after book has been written about being young, and even more of them about the elaborate and testing experiences that cluster round procreation, but there is not much on record about falling away. Being well advanced in that process, and just having had my nose rubbed in it by pugs and tree ferns, I say to myself, ‘Why not have a go at it?’ So I shall.
