In 1962, when she was in her mid-forties and one of the best-known book editors in the English-speaking world, Diana Athill published Instead of a Letter, the first of the nine memoirs she would write before her death in 2019, at the age of 101. It is to my mind the only one of the lot that is fully realized.
Athill was born in 1917 into an upper-middle-class English family and raised on their country estate in Norfolk, amid a crowd of relatives about whom she either speaks well or remains silent. In just one regard does she pass judgment. Though most members of the family had neither power nor money, what they did have—in spades—were the smugness and arrogance of class certainty. They all knew they were the best, which meant that everyone not like them was more than slightly unreal. As Athill herself developed into a genuine liberal who nonetheless loved her relatives unreservedly, she is to be commended for firmly condemning the odiousness of her family’s prejudices.
When Diana was fifteen years old an exciting young man whom she calls Paul came to the estate as a tutor to her younger brother, Andrew. She instantly fell in love with him and, in time, he with her. When she was seventeen they became engaged to be married. But before this would come her university degree. She always counted a happy childhood as her first formative experience, and her years at Oxford as her second. “I owe to Oxford,” she writes in Instead of a Letter, “much of the stability and resilience which enabled me, later, to live through twenty years of unhappiness without coming to dislike life.”
In 1939, during her final year, Paul, who had joined the Royal Air Force, was posted abroad to Egypt. The plan was for Diana to join him upon graduation, when they would marry and live happily ever after. For a few months there was a great deal of ardent letter writing between them, after which the unthinkable happened: Paul, suddenly and without explanation, stopped writing. Diana sent him letter after letter, begging for a response. None came. She never saw him again. Two years later she received a formal letter pleading for his release from their engagement—he wished to marry someone else. He was later killed in the war, but his death did nothing to relieve the pain of his desertion. This was her third formative experience, and without question the most consequential.
For Athill, the essence of a woman’s identity—of femaleness itself, in fact—turned on the achievements of marriage and motherhood. Growing up, as she did, among innumerable female relatives—mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins—all of whom saw themselves first and foremost as mothers and wives, she saw no other identity as remotely possible, much less acceptable. When Paul jilted her—and especially in the way he jilted her—she concluded not that he had done something unconscionable but that she was at fault. The loss of self-confidence was profound. She felt herself a failure at life; not only would she be alone forever, but this was a destiny she deserved. “I was a lively girl only in my capacity as a female, and once I was wounded in that capacity I became, to face the truth, dull,” she writes. Decades later it occurs to her that perhaps it was her “absolute acceptance” of her own inborn deficiency, rather than Paul’s, “which put the seal on my loneliness for so much of my life.”
She went permanently off love: never again would she risk the kind of rejection that told her she was not a real woman. Sex was a different matter. She didn’t go looking for men, but if they turned up she slept with them.
For the next forty years Diana Athill would experience sex without love in abundance. She never describes what it was like to make love, but she does tell us, with somewhat jarring equanimity, that when the sex wasn’t good it was a disappointment to be endured without complaint, whereas when it was good it was cheering. Now there’s a word for sex only an upper-class Brit could have written. It tells you, the reader, something important: its author is prepared to let you in and, at the same time, keep you at bay.
The narrator of the Athill memoirs is an observant but not especially introspective woman; psychological acuity is not the name of her game. What she does give us, however, are moments of emotional shrewdness, dotting the text with bits of insight and wisdom useful or amusing to the reader. In just Instead of a Letter we get, on the insult of her fiancé’s desertion, “The humiliations of grief are revolting”; on her parents’ unhappy marriage, “To be constantly loved and desired by someone whose touch is repulsive to you is a profound outrage”; on the lapses in her education, “I do not regret knowing nothing about mathematics, but I am sorry that I [developed a] block about Latin, and I believe that it could have been undermined” by better teaching; on her years at school in the 1930s, “I went up to Oxford…and I did not join the Communist Party” because “I was lazy.” (This last references the years when droves of Oxbridge students arrived at school and almost immediately joined the party.)
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Upon graduation Diana went down to London, got a low-level wartime job as a researcher at the BBC, and met André Deutsch, a Hungarian Jew who had fled Budapest in 1939 and was bent on becoming a publisher. Their friendship survived a brief, lackluster affair, and in 1952 they opened a publishing house that bore Deutsch’s name. Here Athill discovered her métier. Over the next forty years she became the celebrated editor of some of the most important writers of the twentieth century, among them V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, and Wole Soyinka.
The memoir that gives us a detailed account of Athill’s working life is Stet: An Editor’s Life, published in 2000. Here we learn that the indisputable figure at the center of André Deutsch Ltd. was Deutsch himself. Diana makes clear that from the start she avoided the business end of the firm and was happy editing. We never learn anything about the work itself—how she taught herself to do it or how she learned that she was good at it—but she does tell us, all too cursorily, that she was treated as a second-class citizen at the firm, a situation she had long looked upon with “a sort of amused resignation.” Despite her title of founding director, she routinely received less office space, less money, less intellectual regard than her male counterparts. It is only now that she is thinking seriously about all that:
I have been asked by younger women how I brought myself to accept this situation so calmly, and I suppose that part of the answer must be conditioning…. Many women of my age must remember how…you actually saw yourself…as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would start to look tiresome and ridiculous in your own eyes. Even now I would rather turn and walk away than risk my voice going shrill and my face going red as I slither into the sickening humiliation of undercutting my own justified anger by my own idiotic ineptitude.
The burden of this passage lies with “even now.” So much in these memoirs hangs on that: words written by a woman who throughout her life dreaded risking censure, which is why her books describe but do not probe her innermost experience. They also account for the failure of nerve that left her feeling dull and emptied out for so many years after Paul’s defection, in some important way unfitting herself to connect with the world at large:
Of social life I had, and still have, almost none…. People who have more than three or four friends whom they wish to see often, who come and go to dinner parties and so on with a wide circle of acquaintances whose company they enjoy although they do not know them very well, fill me with envious admiration.
In the winter of 1958, for no apparent reason, Athill found herself writing a story, then another, and yet another. That spring she submitted one of these short fictions to a newspaper competition, and to her amazement it won first prize. Apparently she was a writer! A kind of shock wave went through her. Certainly there was pleasure and pride in this, but, remarkably, there was also happiness. For the first time in nearly twenty years, the emptiness within began to evaporate.
And just as suddenly, Instead of a Letter, the book we are reading, comes brilliantly into focus. The organizing principle of the memoir clarifies. We see the through line that has been running just beneath the surface of the narrative. All along an inner life has slowly been cohering. As in a novel, we have been traveling with the protagonist as she moves steadily toward the moment when she becomes herself.
In 1962, Instead of a Letter was published to rave reviews. Five years later Athill produced a novel, which, along with a story collection she published earlier in 1962, received only a respectable amount of attention. It would be twenty-four years before a second memoir, After a Funeral, emerged from Athill’s pen, this one demonstrating conclusively that personal narrative was the genre in which she excelled.
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The great appeal of Athill’s memoir writing can be traced to the clarity of its sentences and the distinctiveness of its tone of voice: upper-class buoyancy. Together these elements achieve an openness of spirit; their author looks with good-natured forbearance on everyone and everything that comes her way. There is a moment in Stet that exemplifies this posture. Diana has become acquainted with the Irish writer Molly Keane and obviously wishes the acquaintanceship to evolve into a friendship, but Keane does not pick up the ball. Instead of feeling rebuffed, as many others might, Diana speculates that Keane must be among those astonishingly busy people who feel “almost regretful on recognizing exceptionally congenial qualities in a newly met person, because one knows one no longer has the energy to clear an adequate space for them.” It isn’t honesty that compels Athill to tell this story so much as a preoccupation with accuracy. She not only wants to get the experience down, she wants to get it down right. That is the operative need driving her work, opening it to a degree of frankness that fills thousands of Athill readers with respect and admiration—even when the subject of one or more of her books is problematic and the work as a whole may not exactly arrive.
“One evening in the summer of 1963 I ran downstairs to answer the door,” begins After a Funeral, which tells the story of her relationship with Waguih Ghali, an Egyptian writer of colossally bad character with whom Athill became infatuated. She had fallen in love with the manuscript for Beer in the Snooker Club, Ghali’s only book, which André Deutsch Ltd. would publish in 1964. Now, at her invitation, its author was on her London doorstep.
We are told at the outset that Didi—the name Athill gives Ghali—is the poor relation of a wealthy family, living in exile from both his country and his relatives. The Egyptian government had withdrawn his passport in the 1950s because of his membership in the Communist Party, and the family had been cruelly unloving from his birth on. When Athill meets him, he has been living hand to mouth for some years as a stateless person in Germany, longing to settle in London, the city of his heart.
Athill is instantly enchanted, as are most people upon meeting Didi. They seem to fall quickly under the spell of his remarkable charm and wit. What they cannot immediately grasp is that he is possessed of a deeply disordered personality. A compulsive gambler, alcoholic, and womanizer, he will soon prove a beguiling deadbeat who exploits every connection he makes. Athill, it turns out, is one of the easiest marks Didi has ever encountered. In no time at all—within weeks of their meeting—he is living in her spare room, and she is all but supporting him. After a Funeral is a blow-by-blow account of Didi’s incredible and repetitious transgressions and Athill’s equally incredible and equally repetitious forgiveness.
Athill is nothing if not understanding. She describes Didi’s outrageous behavior—he lies, he cheats, he steals—with a kind of social worker’s patience regarding what she calls his “illness.” It’s her upbringing, she suspects, her inbred “niceness,” that demands she go the extra mile for someone as emotionally broken as Didi. Needless to say, she does so to no avail. “I had naively hoped that if he could be made to feel that someone’s affection would endure whatever he did, his sense of his own value might be restored,” she writes. “It worked the other way. The kinder and more patient people were with him, the more evil he felt himself to be.”
From the start Diana wants to sleep with Didi, and from the start he—who sleeps with any and every woman who comes his way—rejects her. Only once, toward the end of their tortured liaison, do they make what Athill calls love. Clearly this is a power move on his part. When, in 1969, Didi commits suicide in Athill’s flat, he leaves his diaries open for her to read. What does she find in these pages? “His physical revulsion for me expressed in words”—he just doesn’t know how he has gone on living with her all this time.
What makes After a Funeral so much a product of Athill’s generation is her devotion to a relentlessly degrading relationship. The worse Didi acts, the more understanding Diana is, and the more understanding she wants the reader to be. “He couldn’t love if he was loved in return,” we are told, “because he could only…know love as the loneliness and pain which he had learnt as a child.” I do not believe a woman of the next generation would so easily have written these words and let it go at that. They reminded me of the moment in the 1970s when the women’s movement began to find its feet, and critics who were put off by its rhetoric begged the revolutionary young feminists to remember that men acted badly because their egos were fragile: the demands of the movement were destroying them.
Episode after episode puts Didi’s fragility at center stage and Diana’s sense of injury on the defensive edge. Nothing moves either of them off that dime. Didi at the beginning is Didi at the end, and so is Athill. Thus the story never deepens, and the memoir cannot achieve the status of literature. The first time I read After a Funeral I threw it halfway across the room; the second time, as I prepared to write this essay, it hit the wall.
In 1971, Athill met and became entranced by yet another distressingly disordered man. Make Believe (1993) tells the story of her affair with Hakim Jamal, a Black American militant who, like Ghali, gained Athill’s unstinting empathy, only this time to the accompaniment of headlines around the world.
Jamal was born Allen Donaldson and grew up in the Roxbury slums of Boston. By the age of twelve he was addicted to alcohol, by fourteen to heroin; by his early twenties he was doing time for attempted murder. In jail he read and taught himself to write, and he soon converted to Islam, began worshiping Malcolm X, and renamed himself. After his release he became a self-styled leader of the 1960s Black Power movement. In fact the work Jamal did for the movement was as negligible as his temper was violent and his working habits undisciplined. He also fantasized himself God. What he was really good at was seducing women. He had notable, much-publicized affairs with white middle-class women including the American actress Jean Seberg; Gale Benson, the daughter of an English MP; and Athill.
When Jamal appeared in her office with a book proposal under his arm in 1971, Athill instantly yearned for him. “The story of that beautiful child being made to hate and despise himself,” she writes in Make Believe, “wrung my heart, and the extent to which he had been stunted and twisted by his circumstance enraged me.”
Almost immediately Athill takes Jamal home, and very soon she sleeps with him. The experience is magical:
He sank right into me with the release of tension. He lay on me, holding me, kissing and kissing and kissing my cheeks, my eyes, and my mouth, over and over again…. The fucking hadn’t made me come, but the tenderness of this did.
From start to finish Athill sees Jamal almost exclusively as a spiritually soulful person whose needs are far more worthy of fulfillment than her own. These needs, of course, include sleeping with other women all the while he’s with Diana.
Athill had known Jamal a year when, together with Benson, he traveled to Trinidad to visit the commune of the Black Power militant Michael X, a man who had gained the political respect of many liberals and radicals in England and the United States but had recently become bent on mayhem. There, under Michael’s orders and possibly with the complicity of Jamal, Benson was murdered in what looked like a ritual killing. Soon after this horrifying event, Jamal returned to Boston, where on May 1, 1973, he himself was murdered. The Boston police attributed his death to the followers of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam leader, who was thought to be responsible for the assassination of Malcolm X.
Make Believe received its share of literary applause, but not all the reviews were admiring. The New Statesman called it “a deeply disturbing book [that] enacts a racist fantasy” in its portrayal of Athill’s attraction to Black culture’s “supposed air of primitive vitality, danger and primal sexuality.” Perhaps sex without love is not always so enlightening a project.
Athill published six more books after Make Believe, all of them distributed as memoirs, although I would call most of them reminiscences, as these are works in which Athill makes sketchy use of old biographical material—the affair with Paul gets repeated airings—while musing on a variety of preoccupations that do not shape a specific experience, which is what I think a memoir should do. The one work in which these musings do cohere around a single subject is Somewhere Towards the End, the 2008 book that won her enduring celebrity, and the one that reveals her fully as the amiable popularizer she was.
She was almost ninety when she wrote it, and from the beginning she announces that its subject is her old age. She also announces the constraint she has put herself under in choosing to write it:
When you begin discussing old age you come up against reluctance to depress either others or yourself, so you tend to focus on the more agreeable aspects of it: coming to terms with death, the continuing presence of young people, the discovery of new pursuits and so on.
This caveat was really not necessary, because anyone among Athill’s legions of admirers could have testified that throughout her writing life she had assiduously avoided depressing anyone. And never more so than here, where that famous upbeat tone of hers becomes instructive as well, directing the aging reader to stay active, cultivate young friends and new interests, exercise, take up gardening. It reminded me of a moment in Stet when a morbidly depressed V.S. Naipaul asks Athill how she manages to “surviv[e] the horribleness of life” and she tells him, “By relying on simple pleasures such as the taste of fruit, the delicious sensations of a hot bath or clean sheets, the way flowers tremble very slightly with life, the lilt of a bird’s flight.” I could just see Naipaul staring at her.
The question of who is being addressed in Somewhere Towards the End became an interesting one for me. At one point Athill observes that “dwindling energy is one of the most boring things about being old…. You just have to resign yourself to doing less,” and I suddenly realized how often the generic “you” is employed here—“You can do this, you can try that”—almost as though this is a self-help book. For whom, exactly, I thought. Then Athill herself had the same thought.
She is, of course, addressing the reader most like herself—that is, middle-class and middlebrow—and how could it be otherwise? For whom, after all, does one write except oneself and one’s familiars? But when Athill realizes the possible consequence of her assumptions, she immediately, to her considerable credit, moves to correct for any social injury they might be inflicting:
How successfully one manages to get through [aging] depends a good deal more on luck than it does on one’s own efforts. If one has no money, ill health, a mind never sharpened by an interesting education or absorbing work, a childhood warped by cruel or inept parents, a sex life that betrayed one into disastrous relationships…if one has any one, or some, or all of those disadvantages, or any one, or some, or all of others that I can’t bear to envisage, then whatever is said about old age by a luckier person such as I am is likely to be meaningless, or even offensive. I can speak only for, and to, the lucky.
Taken all in all, Diana Athill was a woman of parts. She endured a worthy loneliness—that of the lifelong single woman—all the while keeping company with her own working mind. Even when her subject was slight or misguided, as I sometimes thought, she wrote to make sense of things. That’s what writing meant to her. Very often the work reads as though she is listening to the sound of her own life coming back at her through the words she is writing, and she is speaking to that sound. In the great tradition of personal narrative, her voice was at once her instrument and her subject.
