by Diana Athill
Till June, my dearest dears.
Diana
[I did go to Vienna to see Marie-Louise’s paintings hung in the Belvedere: a wonderful occasion, like seeing beautiful creatures being released from cages into their natural habitat.]
25 OCTOBER 1994
Darling Edward,
How lovely to get your letter, of which the article in the Kenyon Review seemed like a particularly sumptuous part. Oh to be that young again – and how I wish that when I was, I’d been it in Paris. I’d have been rather like you – a little bit puritanical and cautious while at the same time entranced. The sentence I most sympathized with is ‘Whatever hang-ups this indicated, I’d preferred men who seemed perfectly ordinary’ – my sentiments, precisely, about life in general which I don’t like to see pushed to fanciful extremes because it’s good enough as it is. And even in my excursions with nuts, what I liked about them was getting to know them well enough to experience them as ordinary – Hakim hating my dirty pot-holder in the kitchen and fussing about what toothpaste he used, and so on.
My fall is much better, though gardening can be done only in short and rather careful instalments and I’ve done one editing job, pushed into it by André.
Are you hearing with delightful clarity again, after getting rid of all that wax?
Pity Neil’s sister is perched so high up – though a friend of ours who spent two winters just outside Taos (which is probably where they are?) loved it. I suspect it’s less grim than the Andes. Hope so, anyway. I adored it in the spring – but then it was all flowering lilacs and judas trees, and that magical air was pure intoxication.
Love to Neil and to you
Diana
10 DECEMBER 1994
I’ve just said to Barry: ‘Now I’m going to write Edward and Neil a lovely Christmas letter.’ Then I sat down, reached for my pen – and my mind went blank. We never do anything. The days flow gently by and our minds – or mine, anyway – cooks slowly, slowly into a sort of bland, very lightly seasoned gruel. My back is quite better, yes – but that’s hardly an event. We haven’t even had – this is a risky thing to say, but it’s true – we haven’t even had a cold yet, and we’re almost halfway through December. It’s not much good that a great drama is happening at this very moment to a close friend – after nearly fifty years of developing a solid habit of Disaster she is being Swept Away by a splendid Polish Poet (B says that’s no guarantee that Disaster is over) – because you don’t know her.
By the end of this month I’ll be 77 – ouch! – so perhaps it’s just as well that nothing happens to me. If anything did it probably wouldn’t be good.
Although, come to think of it, today something delicious did happen. I’m sure I told you that when it became apparent that my pension from Deutsch would be risible, André bought me (I thought) an annuity to bring me in another thousand pounds a year. This year I noticed rather belatedly that it had ceased to come in, so I dug out the papers (which I’d never examined) and saw that it was a kind of insurance policy and that it expired at my death or at Jan. 1, 1993 whichever came earlier. Well, I thought, the mean old bastard. But I didn’t quite understand the wording of the policy, so I sent it to my accountant, and he said he didn’t quite understand either, so would write to the issuing company for elucidation. Which replied that yes, the annual payment had come to an end in Jan. 1993, and on that date, on the ‘maturing’ of the policy, the sum of £11,500 had become due to Miss Athill but she hadn’t yet claimed it! And this very morning the glorious cheque arrived. The temptation instantly to spend it must, alas, be resisted, and it must be invested at once in an attempt to make it replace the £1000 a year which I’ve ceased to get. Which it won’t do since nothing nowadays brings in as much as 10% – which takes the shine out of the glory, I suppose. But still – no one could call taking a cheque that big out of an envelope anything less than nice. I try not to dwell on the thought that if I died before the start of 1993 that lump sum would have gone (I suppose?) to André, who has always believed in his right hand getting back what his left hand gave . . . but no, that’s probably unfair, because the policy, though bought by him, was in my name. I shall never know why he chose to do his good deed in this form, because he’s decaying so fast, poor old boy, that he has completely forgotten. That really shook me. He used to remind me regularly, about once every six months: ‘You know that pension thing I bought for you? You know I did it out of my own money, not the firm’s?’ Then, about three months ago, before all the above emerged, I happened to refer to it, and he had no idea what I was talking about. No amount of prompting could make him remember – very disconcerting and sad. Talking with him has become almost impossible because of the way his memory is crumbling.
I think of you very often, and want to read your poem about food.
Much love, Diana
24 MAY 1995
Dearest Edward,
My feet make slow but definitely steady progress, and I’ve managed to persuade the surgeon to advance the removal of the pin from the pin toe, from June 26th to June 7th – a handsome advance! – after which I’ll be able to wear a pair of trainers and drive my car. God, how I look forward to that freedom! I’m beginning to suspect that the gloomy house doctor at the hospital who said – behind the surgeon’s back – ‘You won’t be quite over this operation for six months’ was probably right as far as walking is concerned. There may well be a bit of discomfort if I try to walk too much for that long. But once I can drive, I shan’t mind that. It’s been ages since I could walk any distance without discomfort, anyway. [I’d had bunions straightened when Edward and Neil were last in London. Complete recovery was much quicker than expected.]
Last night friends took me out to dinner at the Camden Brasserie, quite near but unknown to me and Barry because of our cheese-paring ways – which served delicious food. We must go there when you are next here – it’s really special. We miss you very much. How I did enjoy your visits, you dear dear friends for whom I shall be forever grateful to Alfred.
Love, Diana
P.S. I do wish I could remember the very first poem of yours I ever read which came to me all those years ago, via Alfred. All I can remember is that – mystifyingly – I thought ‘He sounds much more like an English person than an American.’ What can it have been?
6 JUNE 1995
Dearest Edward –
Marvellous package! I enjoy the poems very much. The Food Chain is marvellous, St Petersburg 1918 very beautiful – something tremendously poignant about the two images, the mother on the grass and the leaping young men. I laughed aloud at Columbian Gold . . . I loved them all, though not having a cock, the penis poems I felt a bit distanced from, enjoying them through the eyes of someone who does have one, rather than through my own. Colossus ’94, on the other hand, might have been written for – almost by! – me. (Thinking again of that long-ago reaction – that your poem seemed English – it occurs to me that probably what I really felt was that your poems were like poems I would have written, supposing I’d been a poet!) The poems arrived just as I was getting into Barbara’s car, to be carried off for a weekend in the country (lovely) so Barry hasn’t had a chance to read them yet. I’ve just handed them over.
By now you’re seventy-one. Which, in my experience, is not noticeably different from being seventy – it’s the decades which rattle one, like ‘sleeping policemen’ built into the surface of the road. Any age over forty is improbable and amazing if one stops to ponder it, which is why I’ve come to think it is a mistake to do so – but I think you rather like the complicated melange of sensations you get from a sharp awareness of getting older, which must mean that you are braver than I am. May this year of your life run smoothly and include many more pleasures than pains, with much love, Diana
14 JULY 1995
Dearest Edward,
I seem to have abandoned hope of reclaiming my typewriter from Barry. His needs repairing, which entails me driving it to a remote back street hardly on the ma
p of the city. We’ve been left behind by technology. The place was crawling with typewriter menders just the other day – or so it seemed to me – and now one might as well be seeking a blacksmith to shoe one’s carriage horses. (Maybe I’ve even forgotten how to type – another good reason for not starting the book!)
Which reminds me – the firm of André Deutsch has been sold to a large organization which makes videos. One of my ex-authors saw a little item about it in the Daily Express, and called me with the news. She has a squeaky voice, so try as I might I failed to hear the name of the buyer – a string of initials. But the sad comment on AD’s fortune is that none of the quality papers considered the event as ‘News’. Someone alerted André, who was on holiday in Zurich, and he called me later, saying that apparently Tom stays on as part of the deal; that they paid half a million for it (pathetic, considering that when Tom sold just the children’s list he got a million for it); and that AD is described as being over £700,000 in debt. What can the purchasers imagine they are gaining – and why?
I’ve been minus pin and pain for almost a month now, and yesterday found myself able to graduate from canvas shoes to a pair of pre-op sandals. Still can’t walk far, but the distance within my power increases each week – and anyway, in the stupefying heatwave we’ve been having, with a level of humidity almost worthy of NY, walking far is the last thing I’d want to do.
Have been spending quite a lot of time in our country lair, which is heaven. But last time, when a totally exhausted Barbara had taken a whole week in order to Flop, it coincided with the abandonment of an old friend of mine and Barbara’s by her new-found and thought-to-be miraculous Polish poet lover. Our poor friend, always with a tendency to depression, has had years and years of penniless loneliness, so when this splendid apparition insisted on leaving his wife and buying a house to share with her, it delighted us almost as much as it did her. But no sooner had they moved into the house than he evidently began to think ‘my god, what have I done?’ – they’d known and liked each other for four years before the affair began, so he didn’t have much excuse. Actually Barbara had started trying to repress doubts during the move, on observing that while she was sanding floors, tiling the bathroom, painting ceilings, and even humping the refrigerator from van to kitchen, he never lifted a single finger, not even to pack and unpack his own books. Anyway, first he stopped fucking her, then he stopped talking to her, then he started telephoning his wife for an hour every night – then – whoosh – he was gone, leaving the most extraordinary 18-point letter which he must have been composing for weeks. The house is a good half hour drive from ours, and when we weren’t driving madly along twisty lanes in the expectation of finding a corpse behind locked doors, we were propping her up and mopping her up, and listening and listening and listening to her tale of woe. After three days and the best part of three nights of this, we had got her to the point of acknowledging that if he’d been as awful as she’d insisted he’d been, then she was well rid of him, when – whoosh, and he was back! The latest bulletin is that he says he must be allowed to talk to Barbara and me, because it’s not fair that we should have only her version. Which I herewith swear by all I hold sacred will be the point at which I go on strike. Barbara says she hopes he does because then she’ll be able to Tell Him What She Thinks of Him, but I know that that way madness lies. The only way to retain one’s sanity as an onlooker to such a drama is to take sides, and stick to your side regardless, not even looking at the other party.
Wimbledon was lovely – Barry and I are still feeling bereft without it. [The one sporting occasion I always watched with Barry was tennis at Wimbledon.]
Hurrah that you may well have a new book of poems ready by the fall.
Love, Diana
Yesterday someone must have watched me taking £100 out of a cash point – and when, fifteen minutes later, I went to pay for some fruit I’d just bought, there was my handbag open and my wallet gone! The dismay and fury over, one can’t help admiring the sheer skill of it.
28 JANUARY 1996
Dearest Edward –
Forgive paper [lined], but at the moment it’s the kind I like writing on – a lovely new pad for my First Draft of the book (now sixty-six pages). I’m still stubbornly sticking to pen plus steam-typewriter despite all the siren songs of all the computer users I know. I enjoy writing like this, so there!
I knew you must be enjoying the blizzard, and thought enviously of you stumping about that amazing townscape. It’s reached us now, but less dramatically – at first two days of excruciatingly scythe-like wind, now quite gentle but persistent snow. It collects in hard snowballs all over poor Hannah’s little woolly legs, which she loathes; so she sits down to try picking them off, and when she stands up again there are snowballs all over her little woolly bum. Barry and I were very sad during the wind, cut off as we are from the Wonders of Modern Science such as central heating (how I yearn for Westbeth!). The wind didn’t only drill its way through every crack and cranny of our grotty old window frames but it also forced the exhaust fumes of our gas fires back down the chimneys, threatening us with death by carbon-monoxide poisoning, so we had to depend on tiny electric heaters. By about midnight my sitting room was just about becoming too warm for an overcoat. Today I awoke to a face covered with bright red patches, particularly around the nose. Is it the weather or is it a bottle of magic new face-wash fallen for in the Supermarket and composed of no less than sixteen unrecognizable and ugly-sounding chemicals? To be on the safe side I must struggle out and buy a pot of my usual Pond’s Cold Cream, which in the Newness stakes comes only just after an infusion of nettle-leaves and oak-bark.
Thank you for sending Tom Powers’ piece. He’s very good, isn’t he? I’m gratified to be published by such an excellent writer. As for your naughty translation – I’m getting old, old, old. I tried hard to feel a sexual frisson – I dwelt on the images presented most earnestly – but nothing could I raise! And if you can’t raise a sexual frisson at a dirty poem, you find yourself thinking ‘Is it worth the trouble?’ Of course if someone pays you good money for them then the answer will be ‘yes!’ even from Methusaleh.
At the moment I’m quite pleased with my sixty-six pages [of the book which became Stet], but I suspect there’s going to be quite a bit of rewriting in this one. I tend to skim along too quickly, then see that I’ll have to expand (‘Now there,’ you will say, ‘is exactly the situation computers are designed for’ – shut up!). The worst thing is the absolutely final disappearance of poor old André’s memory: not a cheep of the facts and figures I was going to depend on him for can I now get. The other day I volunteered to visit him at Gwen’s, because he’d called in a miserable state to say he couldn’t get up. I was rather cheered when he responded in classic André fashion by calling back five minutes later to say: ‘As you are coming over, could you be an angel and take me to Harrods?’ He has never missed a chance to try to squeeze something extra out of one. But when I got there, and he returned to the subject of Harrods, he stopped halfway through and said ‘But why do I want to go to Harrods? I can’t remember.’ He was sitting in a low armchair, wearing a very dirty and ragged little old towelling bathrobe, with his skinny knees up round his ears and his poor little shrunken balls dangling – so unlike his dapper decorous self. It was no surprise to learn that Gwen’s doctor, coming to visit her two days later (she’s 89 and pretty groggy) caught sight of A and whisked him off to hospital. But now he sounds a bit brighter and expects to be back home in a day or two – says he’s had a brain scan and the doctor says he’s fine. Oh darlings, let us hope we all go down bang.
Very much love, Diana
[UNDATED]
Dearest Edward –
I felt indignant when you claimed Pond’s Cold Cream as an old American remedy. I refuse to believe that it’s not English – it’s been going all my life and was old-fashioned when my nanny used to apply it to my little chapped hands (a frequent occurrence for an infant reared in East Anglia)
. Whenever my friend Nan sees it on my dressing-table she goes into a huff. She (like most women) has convinced herself that the only thing her skin can endure is some sort of designer unguent called Luminescence or Perpetual Dew in a pink container the size of a thimble for which you pay twenty-five pounds, so she takes my adherence to good old Ponds as a tacit criticism. When I made the mistake of explaining that every one of these things is made of (or at least based on) lanolin, or else petroleum jelly, or else glycerin she actually flounced out of the room and banged the door!
How clever of you to know about those boilers-behind-gas-fires that heat radiators. But alas – because we are up in the roof our outside walls are not made of brick (I think of lathe and plaster, then space, then tiles) – which means that if you stuck through them the kind of exhaust-pipe those boilers have to have, everything would burst into flame. I don’t understand why the existing chimney, which must be made of brick, couldn’t be used, but have been assured twice that it can’t. However, we have come across a dreamy man called Ivor who is a gas-fitter and who absolutely agrees with us about the monstrosity of the privatized Gas Board. (That awful Fat Cat who was, I think, being Exposed in the newspapers while you were here because of his astronomical salary, has been made to retire – with a golden handshake of several million pounds!) One of the ways the Board makes the profit that can support these bastards is by doing away with all local showrooms (we now have to go to a place called Wood Green if we want to see samples of all makes of gas heater). So what bliss to find Ivor, who doesn’t just come when he says he’s coming, but calls the day before to confirm the appointment – and who when asked to get me leaflets about heaters of a given size within a given price-range does just that, on the very next day – and all these leaflets described heaters cheaper than anything the loathesome Gas board said existed! And who is going to put me in a nice little new heater next week which he promises won’t blow back fumes – and I would go to the stake for a promise of Ivor’s. It’s pathetic, how thrilled one is nowadays at coming across someone efficient and helpful who charges no more than is reasonable . . . something which was surely taken for granted in the days when I first met Pond’s Cold Cream?