by Diana Athill
Love to you both, Diana
4 OCTOBER 1983
Dear Edward,
I’ll get round to xeroxing some of Alfred’s letters when I get back from a spell of holiday I’m just about to embark on. After five weeks running without a weekend off (usually I manage to stay in London for one weekend in three, but my ma’s helpers were away) I collapsed into a state of very heavy exhaustion and couldn’t drag myself out of bed one morning. So I called my doctor who couldn’t see me for a week, and by the time the appointment came round was feeling better enough to contemplate cancelling it – but I’m glad I didn’t, because she found that my blood pressure was a good deal too high and ordered me to take a couple of weeks’ rest at once, after which, if the b.p. has gone down hurrah and if it hasn’t we will start medication.
I think it’s worry rather than physical fatigue. My mother doesn’t often have ‘turns’ (angina attacks, or a wretched vertigo which is very distressing) but she does sometimes, and when I’m there I go to bed listening for the bell which I’ve had rigged up between her room and mine; and if in the morning I wake up and don’t hear her shuffling along to the bathroom at exactly her usual time, I go along to her room quite expecting to find her dead. How I admire the innumerable people who live all the time with their ancient parents. The way it abolishes one’s own life and substitutes a half-bored, half-pitying anxiety over someone else’s is pretty grim. I know what you mean about ‘nothing to keep you from dying’ once the parents have gone. I see my mother as a sort of breakwater between me and the sea – an increasingly frail and worm-eaten one, but still something to prevent the direct impact of the breakers on my own crumbling sand. I’d love to read your poem for your ma.
Yes, it was amazing to find Venice still so possible. You wouldn’t have thought it was if you had gone straight to St Mark’s Square and the shopping streets between there and the Rialto Bridge – unbelievable, the turmoil of tourism around there. But one benefit of package tourism is that it can’t let its members stray: they’ve got to be conveyed from A to B within a certain time or the whole thing will collapse. The Pensione Accademia, where I stayed, is literally only inches off the beaten track, but was still very serene, and the flat rented by my nephew was yards off it and might have been in a city without tourism! We spent most of our time marvelling at what a secret, silent town it is. I’d love to go back there now, but think taking it easy in my own pad for half the hol, and a spell in a luxurious fat farm for the other half, makes more sense in the circumstances. I have a faiblesse for fat farms (though my favourite one, which is in a very distinguished Georgian house with a magical garden, hasn’t a vacancy, and the one I’m actually going to is composed of rather suburban-looking architecture – I only hope that it’s being a good deal more expensive than my favourite means it’s even more comfortable). People who’ve never been to such places suppose them to be fiercely austere and say ‘But imagine paying all that money to be fed on lettuce!’ But in fact the whole secret of a good one is that it is infinitely cosseting, from the snugness of its electric blankets to the soft yet firm hands of its masseurs, and such starving as one does is done on very pretty and tasty morsels of this and that – little bowls of fresh yogurt mixed with honey and adorned with grapes. I think there’s fierce competition between them, and the ones which make the punters feel most cherished are the ones which win.
What a treat if you come in November. Diana
17 OCTOBER 1983 (FROM SHRUBLAND HALL, CODDENHAM, SUFFOLK)
[In the end, my favourite fat farm did have a place for me.]
Dearest Edward –
This is an incongruous place to be thanking you for your poems from. More about it later. First – I’ve read The Crier only once, so far – the earlier collection twice – so I’m not really familiar with the new poems, except that I am very familiar with the subject of many of them: getting old! Those poems don’t just touch a nerve, they play arpeggios on it. I expect I’ll like The Crier as much as I do Full Heart when I know it as well. It’s a bit heretical for an English person to love poems so direct, so surely aimed at the quickest route to the naked truth about feelings. I can think of several English critics who would shrink from them. But I felt I was hearing you talk only more so, which I enjoy very very very much. (Except when I get steamed up over the ridiculousness of someone so handsome and so easily able to charm suffering all those torments.) The poems about you and Neil are scary and marvellous. Bless you for sending me this wonderful package.
The above palatial surroundings are for losing weight in. It’s not a good drawing [I think it was on a letter heading]. At the top of those steps is a dear little temple, through which you reach a lush lawn, and then a terrace (draped, in season, with roses) and then a stately front of an enormous Country House. Behind the viewer is another little temple, slightly larger and very elegant, and behind that, splendid pretend-wild woods fall gracefully away. The house’s noble owners have very sensibly moved into a much smaller place and have turned the big house into a Fat Farm, which enables them to keep the garden, park and farmlands in sleekly prosperous condition. Being – rather surprisingly – Buddhists, they disapprove of huge profits, so it’s simultaneously the lushest and least expensive fat farm in England, and I adore it. Every year I say to myself ‘This is the last time – it’s too corrupt and shocking in this starving world . . .’ And every next year I reach a point of exhaustion where I say ‘If I don’t have a week at Shrubland I shall collapse.’ It’s so beautiful, and the rooms are so charming (mostly furnished with their original stuff). And being expertly massaged every day is such bliss, and the country is so delicious to walk in, and the staff is so kind, and losing about ten pounds in a week makes you feel so good (even tho’ you do quickly put it on again). Above all, it’s total relaxation. Most of the other fat ladies are very boring, and the fat gentlemen worse, but you can easily avoid them – and each time I’ve been here there have been one or two congenial spirits to go sight-seeing with in the afternoons or whatever. But mostly I read, sleep, listen to music and think my own thoughts. Heaven! And oddly enough you don’t feel hungry when eating almost nothing, if everyone else is doing the same and you are making the ritual act of acceptance – i.e. paying for it.
It’s the poems about shitting which seem the most splendidly out of place here, not just because on such an empty belly one hardly does, but because (apart from the rare congenial ones) people at a place like this talk the most tinkling-tea-spoons kind of small talk imaginable. I think it’s defence against the alarming intimacy of everyone being in dressing gowns most of the time not to mention naked some of the time – if they let their guard down, where would it end? Even if one or both of you were quite fat, I still don’t think you or Neil can be imagined here so actually to have you here (in a sense) is piquant.
Love to you both, Diana
[Here is one of Edward’s poems, to give a taste of them:]
TO LOVE
Away from home on a tour in the West
I worried about you constantly, my dearest,
until I had a dream one night where you
were a large plant I was chopping down with a shovel.
First I slashed off your feet
and then battered your head in, that head
that has already been attacked
by scalpel, drill, and saw
and is always blindly thumping things,
making my heart ache.
I woke in a sweat of course
but after the shock wore away that I
could do such a thing to you, my angel, even in a dream,
I saw how absolutely necessary it was.
Your needs had pursued me across a continent
and this was the only way of getting free, of
renouncing
even for a week the relentless care of you,
the concern of my days and nights: how to keep you,
an exotic, delicate plant, alive in an arctic clime
you were a vigorous weed, bigger than me.
And then, my leafy, my green one,
whom I water daily and put in the sun,
after chopping you down and shovelling you away
I could leave you in God’s hands
and loving you not the less for being free,
went almost light-hearted on with my journey.
11 NOVEMBER 1983
Dear Edward,
For the last week or so I’ve made The Crier my bedside reading, with great enjoyment. And great interest. You are such a different kind of person from me, and how rarely does someone open his sensibility so wide that one is able to enter into a different way of feeling.
Is it temperamental or cultural (a mixture of both, I expect) – your impulse to open, unloose, let flow, mine to control? You turned my mind anew to age and death, and I was visited by a poem (I am not a poet, of course, but from time to time – like most people I suppose – am moved to some kind of poem-like statement, particularly after reading something which has woken me up). It made me laugh, it was so different from your getting-old poems. I send it herewith [‘Familiarity’] for you to see. One thing – you are much braver than I am. I guess it is one of my deepest instincts, to control by being beady-eyed; while you have this wonderful strong instinct to feel – to risk yourself on the flood of feelings. I like it very much. Perhaps you would say you have had to learn it, and painfully at that. But encounter groups and so on are available in this country as well as in yours, and not only have I never felt tempted to try such an exercise, but I’ve known (or felt that I’ve known) that I mustn’t: it would be ‘not me’ to the extent of doing me a damage. Whereas you must have felt something quite different to venture out into these explorations. Just braver, I guess.
Barry likes your poems, too – and he’s a great one for not liking poems. Any kind of ‘poetical’ rhetoric turns him off (even when it’s fine of its kind, as I suppose it can be). So he sniffed at your books most dubiously, like a dog at an unfamiliar smell, then ventured on a small taste, then thought, ‘But I like that!’ and took another . . . it was quite funny to watch.
He’s off to Jamaica in a week or so, to spend a couple of months with his mother. She’s old enough for him to feel threatened by the possibility – each time he does this – that it will be the last time. She’s a tough old nut, in fact – but one of the signs of being raised in a poor country is that when people get poorly you expect them to die. The Reckords are middle-class Jamaicans (tho’ poor ones since Barry’s father died, when B was ten years old, so Mrs R had a struggle to give her sons their middle-class education which she would have died rather than not done) – but their attitudes about medicine and health are so different from those of middle-class English people that I never cease being surprised by them. In our childhoods B and I read the same books, learnt the same nursery rhymes – at first blush it seems that the Englishness of the education and habits bestowed on the island by its then ‘owners’ was absolute. But he only has to start running a slight temperature for it to become apparent that whereas I was raised with a wide, secure safety net of medical knowledge spread under me, which was taken wholly for granted as being accessible to me whenever I needed it, he wasn’t. In his parents’ youth probably, in his grandparents’ youth certainly, all that would have been available to a black person was herbs and obeah; and now that they haven’t got herbs and obeah anymore, but haven’t yet learnt to take medical science for granted (no wonder! It’s pretty lousy in Jamaica) they’ve got nothing. Except a sort of wobbly fatalism.
An annoying thing is that I sometimes feel scared, now, when I’m alone in the flat. I never used to. I’d miss him when he was away, but didn’t lie awake listening to the house creaking. Now, after all the stories I’ve heard of breakings-in etc., I can’t help doing so at times. Luckily the two little music students to whom my cousin has let the bottom part of the house [her work took her to Washington for six years] are even more nervous, and make a point of leaving lights on when they are out, etc., so it usually looks pretty well populated (which doesn’t always help). Poor André Deutsch was sleeping in his old girlfriend’s house to ease her nervousness when a burglar broke in, tied her up, raped her, and made off with all her jewellery, and André never even woke up! It’s a very big place – she’s wildly rich – and the man’s first words to her were ‘my mate is in your husband’s room with a knife, and he’ll slit his throat if you so much as squeak’. Which, naturally, the poor woman believed. She said the man moved absolutely silently – she couldn’t tell whether he’d left the room or not, after he’d blindfolded her – so it was not surprising that A wasn’t woken. She, who is over 70, had a most terrible time after the man had finished with her, trying to decide whether it was safe to wriggle free (he hadn’t bound her very tight) and make her way to André’s room – and wondering what she’d find there. There now. I’ve written that down so I needn’t think of it again!
The fall is being magical here. Luckily London has so many tree-filled spaces that the seasons can be felt in it and this one is being a super-technicolour spectacular. And warm, too. I wish you and Neil were still here. It seemed very right that you should be around (altho’ I know now that your feelings about being in this country aren’t exactly those of rightness!). Let me know when/if you move back to Holland because one can get ‘Bargain Breaks’ to Amsterdam very reasonably, and I like the place anyway, so it would be fun to dart across and see you.
Love from Diana
FAMILIARITY
I have learnt to recognize the plain white vans with
painted-out black windows
and the black ones, equally discreet, standing at those
back-street doors
which have a never-opened look (misleading)
so that people going by fail to notice them.
The white vans carry dead junkies picked up in alleys;
old women
found frozen when the neighbours began to wonder
and called the cops;
the man who stayed late at his office to hang himself;
the boy
stabbed in a sudden brawl outside a discotheque.
The black vans, early every morning, deliver coffins to
mortuaries.
Men who handle corpses despise people who don’t.
Why? How? What? Where? cry the hearts of the
bereaved,
and the men who handle corpses lower their eyelids over
looks of secret but impatient ribaldry.
A few of them are necrophiliacs onto a good thing, but
most
are normal men who have learnt from handling death
that it tells nothing because it has nothing to tell, there is
nothing to it.
When I first recognized those vans I waited for my skin
to crawl.
I am still surprised that they cheer me up.
‘There goes death’ I think when I see one. ‘There it
goes about its daily work
and they think I don’t see it. They think they are the
only ones
with the nerve to know how ordinary it is.’
Recognition of a van: no more familiarity than that,
and already the look I give my unrecognizing friend
has in it, I suspect, a touch of secret but impatient
ribaldry.
31 AUGUST 1984
Dearest Edward,
By the oddest coincidence, last night I was reading some of Alfred’s Tangier letters. I was so exhausted from a feverish stint of gardening (because the evenings are getting shorter it has to start the minute I get back from the office without even time out for a drink) that when I went to bed a book seemed too big – and there was a bit of typescript sticking out from under a pile of something, and I pulled it out in an idle way, and it was a letter of A’s, so I thought ‘Good – a
couple of those would be just the thing’ . . . As a result, I do rather wonder whether you and Neil would be wholly Wise to pick Tangier for the winter? One can’t avoid the impression that it wasn’t only Alfred who went mad there.
It’s good to hear of your productive industry, and that after its painful beginnings the novel is now giving you pleasure. Also that John Gross spoke up for Variety Photoplays. Perhaps that’s the start of the Tide’s turning. [Variety Photoplays: Edward’s cinema-based poems. He felt that he’d ‘gone out of fashion’. The tide did turn.]
If I hear of a house or flat I’ll quickly let you know – how much can you afford to pay?
For all of this month a niece of Barry’s, her economist husband and her two little boys have been based in our flat. They’ve trotted off on little jaunts from time to time, and Richard has mostly been at Sussex University where he’s attending some sort of seminar, but on the whole Barry’s been working in my sitting room and sleeping on its floor, while they have taken over his room. We’ve been having an uncharacteristic heatwave – positively New Yorkish at times – and I decided I was too old to go back to sharing a bed in a heatwave, particularly since B has got even fatter during the last few months (not to mention my own increasing portliness). But he quite likes sleeping on the floor, luckily. To start with I did a good deal of Inward Muttering about this invasion (particularly as for the first four days it also included another niece of Barry’s and her economist husband – tho’ luckily they left their two children in Washington where her husband, an American, is personal assistant to a congressman on the Committee of Ways and Means. (Part of the muttering went ‘Don’t tell me that a personal assistant to a congressman on the Committee of Ways and Means couldn’t afford a hotel for four nights.’) However, I’m very fond of both young women, and their husbands are charming – it’s a mystery to me how Richard manages to be charming, and cheerful as well, considering that he’s an Expert on International Debt – which certainly ensures continual employment in Jamaica, but which surely must be a bit debilitating? And now that they are packing in order to leave tomorrow, I find that I shall be sorry to see them go. The boys, 12 and 7, are models of their kind, lively and responsive, but they do what they are told! I’m used to it now, but to start with I could hardly believe it. Margaret says that having observed the disastrous consequences of permissiveness in the families of her friends, she has decided to be an Old-Fashioned Jamaican Mother – and so she is. But as she’s also a very loving and sympathetic person she manages to do it without harshness – in fact they’re an exceptionally warm and communicating family. No doubt the boys will start to fight their way out before too long – but perhaps without too much blood, given such a comfortable beginning. I hope so.