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Diana Athill at 90: "It's in the genes. My mother died at 96 without a wrinkle |
Delicious wit and English charm
Ruth Gorb meets renowned publisher and author Diana Athill and finds there is more in the 90-year-old’s book than sex
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THERE has been a flurry of excited adulation around the publication of Diana Athill’s new book. Part of it is due to the fact that in December she celebrated her 90th birthday.
But there has also been considerable emphasis on her interest in sex. “I can’t think why,” she says briskly. “There’s so much else in the book.”
The briskness is part of her very English charm. And while the book is about growing old, old age is the last thing one associates with her.
She has huge intellectual energy, a delicious wit, and the smooth skin of a woman half her age. “Pure luck. It’s in the genes. My mother died at 96 without a wrinkle on her face.”
There is also her phenomenal output. With four books already behind her, she went on to produce three more while in her 80s – a most extraordinary late flowering which came after her legendary career in publishing: she was the most respected editor in the business, and was responsible for nurturing the talents of, among others, Norman Mailer, VS Naipaul, Molly Keane, Philip Roth, and the dramatically badly behaved Jean Rhys.
She was their mentor, guide and friend, and together with Andre Deutsch established a distinguished publishing house which was one of the last small independents. (She also, in the early days of the firm, had a brief affair with Andre Deutsch which did not last but which matured into an enduring friendship.)
When she retired at 75, after 50 years in publishing, she was asked to write a book about the authors she had known. The starting point was her relationship with Jean Rhys and her involvement in the difficult birth of Rhys’s 1966 masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea.
Then she started remembering things. “I did it for fun really. I thought people in publishing would enjoy it, but that was all. I called it Stet, and to my amazement it was the most successful of my books.”
That got her going, she says, and she produced the enchanting memoir of her childhood, Yesterday Morning.
When Ian Jack of Granta suggested a book about growing old, she was sceptical. “Bloody mad,” she said. “Old age is just a nuisance. But then something clicked. I found there was a lot to say. Now that I’ve done it I actually think it is a pioneering book. Realistic.
“I make the point that old age is not a cosy time, but you have to accept things and not fuss. Of course, I was brought up to have a stiff upper lip.”
Her childhood was blissfully happy and privileged, spent largely in her grandparents’ house in the Norfolk countryside. But when she was 15 something happened that was to affect the rest of her life. She fell passionately in love with a young undergraduate.
She went up to Oxford and she and the young man became engaged to be married. The war came, he joined the Air Force, and suddenly his letters stopped. There was a formal note, two years later, saying he was about to marry someone else. Not long after he died in action. Her unhappiness almost destroyed her. In its acute form, she says, it lasted two years. Then she managed to pick up the threads of her life.
“I had a nice time, enjoyed my job, lots of affairs...” But she still would have said her life was a failure. She had no husband, she had no children, therefore she was a failure as a woman.
Then one day she sat down at the typewriter and started to write it all down.
“Writing was therapeutic. Something painful had to be sorted out. Each day I was itching to get back to it. It was almost uncanny. I finished, and there was a rather shapely book. It wasn’t published for 16 years, but it had cured my nagging sense of failure – and it made me realise I could write.”
The book was called Instead of a Letter. It has become a classic piece of autobiography and is read and loved years after it was published. It was followed by another memoir, After a Funeral, the story of a young Egyptian whom Diana Athill looked after until his suicide in her flat.
Once again the writing is intensely personal, every line revealing the beauty of spirit of its author, and her pragmatism: the books had done their job, she says, and got rid of the pain. To any family criticism suggesting that she should not only write about herself, she is unrepentant. “Every life is important and the life you know best is your own. You just have to do it as honestly as you can.”
She lives where she has lived for more than 50 years, in a top-floor flat overlooking Primrose Hill – “I think I have the best view in the whole of London”. For almost all those years she lived with one man; they were lovers for most of that time, then friends (she says she “ceased to be a sexual being” in her 70s) and more recently she has looked after him as he became ill. Yes, he is black, like so many of her men –“they seem to go for fair English types like me”.
She resents the aches and pains that come with age, but her health is good and there are so many advantages now. “You’re not shy any more; I can stand up and talk without a script. I don’t care what other people think; it’s nice to say ‘so what’. You forget things, of course, but one of the good things about that is that you can reread all the books you loved and they come as quite new – I’ve discovered that The Count of Monte Cristo really is jolly good.”
One is overwhelmed in her company by her enthusiasm, her essential niceness, and her intrinsic happiness. There is not an iota of regret about never having married or had children. “Just think if my life had been about being the wife of a man killed in the war, being a single mother…I never would have written.”
That, quite evidently, is a fate she cannot bear to contemplate.
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