Carole Angier
Cool Clear Burn
Somewhere Towards the End
By Diana Athill (Granta Books 192pp £12.99)
Tolstoy was wrong. All happy families are not alike; certainly all happy people are not alike. There are so few of them it's hard to compare. But one thing is clear: Diana Athill is a happy person, and there's no one remotely like her.
She turns ninety this year - indeed, this month. She was the best literary editor in London for nearly fifty years, during which she wrote four startling books of her own. In her eighties, she has written three more: Stet, about her publishing life, Yesterday Morning, about her lucky childhood, and now Somewhere Towards the End, about old age. It is an amazing late flowering, almost as remarkable as Philip Roth's, though she would reject the comparison.
Since this is Diana Athill, we jump straight into the three great taboos: sex, religion and death. The fourth, money, hardly makes an appearance, not because of some lingering English embarrassment - Athill is the least embarrassable person who ever lived - but because, due to an unshakeable lack of insecurity, she never had any. On sex, religion and death, however, she is a master - or rather, a mistress, which, since she never married, she usually was.
On sex especially everyone over sixty should read her - and everyone under sixty too. I have a dear friend who hoped at every decade's turn from forty on that the travails of sex and love would be over, but reported that they weren't, until seventy. Diana, in her much happier way, reports the same. She felt 'within hailing distance of middle age' throughout her sixties, and had her last affair (touchingly described here) through most of them. She is as original about sex as about everything else; or rather, in this book as in all her others, sex is the fons et origo of her originality. She is ruthlessly honest about it: how much she liked it; how, after a conventional, ie prejudiced, English beginning she always preferred black men, because they did not bore her; and how lucky this was for her, because for black men of her generation her being white was an attraction. She is entirely untamed about both old and new conventions, arguing for instance that infidelity is not as important as kindness; but also that sex will never be the moveable feast for women that it is for men, and that though old people should go on enjoying it, they should have the decency not to parade their enjoyment in public.
Above all, she is extraordinarily generous and sensible about it. She did not begin to live with her life's companion, Barry Reckord, until their affair was over and they had settled into a loving friendship. When he took much younger women as lovers she was (after one night of sorrow) undismayed, invited the most important girl to live with them, and counts the years of their ménage à trois among her happiest. She refuses to take credit for this, saying that she is simply lucky not to have a possessive nature. I do not believe it. Partly, she is - despite her denials - a kind and good person; and partly, perhaps, she was inoculated forever against possessiveness when she lost her first love (the subject of her first and still most perfect book, Instead of a Letter). Besides, it was not only Barry's exclusive love she lost, but - as she recognised in that night of sorrow - her youth, her time in the sun. To mourn that for only one night is exceptional fortitude - or again an exceptionally lasting response to inoculation. It sometimes seems it was that long-ago rejection, which fixed her outside the stream, that made her a writer. If so it was more gain than loss, for both Diana and her readers.
About religion too, and not least about death, whose approach is the real subject of this book, she is unsparingly sensible. All we know is this world, in which individual extinction is daily visible and the eventual extinction of our species certain. All this, like the loss of youth and love, she accepts stoically, because it is true.
Sometimes this sensibleness can sound a little too stiff-upper-lip, not for our post-Princess Diana age but for art (about dying, she writes: 'I will get through it somehow, so why fuss?'). But that is the extraordinary thing about Diana Athill. She sounds like a stiff-upper-lip Englishwoman, she is a stiff-upper-lip Englishwoman; but underneath she is an artist. It is as though she has kept the style of her class, but utterly transformed the substance. She wrote Instead of a Letter (and no doubt the other books as well) not like a rationalist, but like an artist: unconsciously, driven by need, never knowing what the next paragraph would be, but arriving at the perfect shape naturally - like a bird on a bough, as she wrote to Jean Rhys about Wide Sargasso Sea. Even now, writing this book, she is moved to a tragic poetry of observation about Barry's illness, and about her mother's death - especially about her mother's death. For that is another un-English side, or perhaps a very English side, of Diana Athill. She loves several people and likes many; she absorbs ideas emotionally, from people - attitudes to death from Jean Rhys, her mother, her brother; ideas on religion from an Oxford friend; the example of optimism from a Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer. She seems all sense, but is really sensibility; that is why she understood Jean Rhys better than anyone. And in the end they are similar writers: not wide but deep, exploring their own lives without mercy. Jean Rhys said that literature was a lake, and what mattered was to contribute to it, even if only a trickle. She contributed a narrow boiling river. Diana Athill has contributed a cool clear burn.