by Diana Athill
Selfishness: not, I hope, a selfishness that involves all of me, but a stubborn nub of selfishness somewhere in the middle which made me wary of anything to which one has to give one’s whole self, as a mother has to give herself to an infant and a toddler. It was that which prevented me from wanting a child for so long, and then made it so easy to get over losing one. So I do have at least one major regret after all: not my childlessness, but that central selfishness in me, so clearly betrayed by the fact childlessness is not what I regret. And now I remember how my inadequacy regarding small children (I always loved them quite easily when they grew older) caused me to let down my cousin Barbara, whose house I live in, in spite of thinking her then as I think of her now as my best friend, when some forty-odd years ago she started a family. No sooner had she got three children than she and her husband separated, so that she had to raise them single-handed, working at a very demanding full-time job in order to keep them. How she struggled through those years I don’t know, and I think she herself marvels at it in retrospect. But at the time what did I do to help her? Nothing. I shut my eyes to her problems, even saw very little of her, feeling sadly that she had disappeared into this tiresome world of small children – or world of tiresome small children – and she has said since then that she never dreamt of asking me for help, so aware was she of my coldness towards her brood. About that it is not just regret that I feel. It is shame.
One regret brings up another, though it is, thank goodness, less shameful. It’s at never having had the guts to escape the narrowness of my life. I have a niece, a beautiful woman who I shall not name because she wouldn’t like it, who is the mother of three sons, the youngest of whom will soon be following his brothers to university, and who has continued throughout her marriage to work as a restorer of paintings. Not long ago she sat at dinner beside a surgeon, and happened to say to him that if she had her time over again she would choose to train in some branch of medicine. He asked her how old she was. Forty-nine, she told him. Well, he said, she still had time to train as a midwife if she wanted to, they accepted trainees up to the age of fifty; whereupon she went home and signed up. The last time I saw her she could proudly report that she had now been in charge of six births all on her own. There had been moments, she said, when she felt ‘What on earth am I doing here?’, but she still couldn’t imagine anything more thrilling than being present at – helping at – the beginning of new life. The most moving thing of all, she said, was when the father cried (there had been fathers present at all six births). When that happened she had to go out of the room to hide the fact that she was crying too. She is a person of the most delicate reserve, so watching her face light up when she spoke about being present at a birth filled me with envy. Having had the courage and initiative suddenly to step out of a familiar and exceptionally agreeable life into something quite different, she has clearly gained something of inestimable value. And I have never done anything similar.
It is not as though I was never impatient at having only one life at my disposal. A great deal of my reading has been done for the pleasure of feeling my way into other lives, and quite a number of my love affairs were undertaken for the same reason (I remember once comparing a sexual relationship with going out in a glass-bottomed boat). But to turn such idle fancies into action demands courage and energy, and those I lacked. Even if I had been able to summon up such qualities, I am sure I would never have moved over into anything as useful as midwifery, but think of the places to which I might have travelled, the languages I might have learnt! Greek, for example: I have quite often thought of how much I would like to speak modern Greek so that I could spend time earning a living there and getting to know the country in a serious way, but I never so much as took an evening class in it. And when I went to Oxford, I indolently chose to read English literature, which I knew I was going to read anyway, for pleasure, instead of widening my range by embarking on a scientific subject, such as biology. And never at any time did I seriously try to use my hands (except at embroidery, which I am good at). Think how useful and probably enjoyable it would be to build a bookcase! I really am sorry about that.
So there are two major regrets, after all: that nub of coldness at the centre, and laziness (I think laziness played a greater part than cowardice in my lack of initiative, though some cowardice there was). They are real, but I can’t claim that they torment me, or even that I shall often think about them. And at those two I shall stop, because to turn up something even worse would be a great bore. I am not sure that digging out past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.
15
HOW SUCCESSFULLY one manages to get through the present 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. But there are more of them than one at first supposes, because the kind of fortune one enjoys, or suffers, does not come only from outside oneself. Of course much of it can be inflicted or bestowed on one by others, or by things such as a virus, or climate, or war, or economic recession; but much of it is built into one genetically, and the greatest good luck of all is built-in resilience.
By chance, just as I was beginning to consider this matter, I read in the Guardian an interview conducted by Alan Rusbridger with Alice Herz-Sommer, who is 103 years old, and who provides an amazing example of the importance of that quality.
Born in Prague to Jewish parents who were not religious and who knew Mahler and Kafka, she grew up to be a brilliant pianist who studied with a pupil of Liszt’s, and married another very gifted musician. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939 she was living a happy, busy, creative life, which was of course instantly crushed. With her husband and son she was sent to Theresienstadt, the ‘show case’ camp in which more people survived than in other camps because the Nazis used it to prove their ‘humanity’ to Red Cross inspectors, although many did die there, and many many thousands more, including Alice’s husband, were dispatched from there to die elsewhere. When she and her son got back home after the war she found it wasn’t home any more: all of her husband’s family, most of her own, and all her friends had disappeared. She moved to Israel, where she brought up her son, who became a cellist, and it was at his instigation that she came to England twenty years ago. In 2001 she had to endure his sudden death at the age of sixty-five. She now lives alone in a one-room flat in north London, and might well be expected to be a grimly forlorn old woman.
Instead, the interview was illustrated with three photographs of Alice: a radiant bride in 1931, a radiant young mother just before the war – and a radiant old woman of 103 today. The joyful expression has hardly changed. And when it comes to words, she remembers that the only person who was kind on the day they were taken to the camp was a Nazi neighbour, how thrilled she was by the freedom in Israel, how much she loves England and English people. Even more important to her is how much she still loves playing the piano for three hours every day (‘Work is the best invention … it makes you happy to do something.’ Just as strikingly as Marie-Louise Motesiczky she illustrates the luck of being born creative). And she is enchanted by the beauty of life. It is not religion that inspires her. ‘It begins with this: that we are born half-good and half-bad – everybody, everybody. And there are situations where the good comes out and situations where the bad comes out. This is the reason why people invented religion, I believe.’ So she respects the hope invested in religion although she herself has felt no need for its supp
ort. She is carried along by her extraordinary good luck in being born with a nature so firmly tilted towards optimism that in spite of all that she has endured she can still say: ‘Life is beautiful, extremely beautiful. And when you are old you appreciate it more. When you are older you think, you remember, you care and you appreciate. You are thankful for everything. For everything.’ She also says: ‘I know about the bad, but I look only for the good.’
Although others must be awestruck by her courage, I doubt whether Alice Herz-Sommer herself would claim this positive attitude as a virtue. She compares it with that of her sister, a born pessimist – and ‘born’ is the key word. They were given their dispositions in the same way that one is given the colour of one’s hair. But while a painful sensitivity to evil may be useful during a person’s active years, providing as it sometimes does energy for the necessary, if endless, struggle against mankind’s ‘bad half’, in old age, when one’s chief concern must be how to get oneself through time with the minimum discomfort to self and inconvenience to others, it can only be a burden. Unfortunately examples such as Alice’s of how an active mind and a positive outlook are what one needs in old age are not likely to be useful as ‘lessons’, because those able to draw on such qualities will be doing so already, and those who can’t, can’t. Perhaps there are some of us in between those extremes who can be inspired by her to put up a better show than we would otherwise have done.
16
ONE DOESN’T NECESSARILY have to end a book about being old with a whimper, but it is impossible to end it with a bang. There are no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving – and also more particular opposites such as a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success amounting to smugness. Misfortune can mean, of course, that these swings go from better to bad and stay there, so that an individual’s happy security ends in wreckage; but most lives are a matter of ups and downs rather than of a conclusive plunge into an extreme, whether fortunate or unfortunate, and quite a lot of them seem to come to rest not far from where they started, as though the starting point provided a norm, always there to be returned to. Alice’s life swung in arcs far more extreme that most, but still I feel it may have followed this pattern. I suppose I think it because I have seen other lives do that, and I know that my own has done so.
Not long ago a friend said to me that I ought to be careful not to sound complacent, ‘because’ he added kindly, ‘you are not.’ I believe he was wrong there, and that I am, because complacent (not to say smug) I certainly started out during a happy childhood wrapped warmly in my family’s belief that we were the best kind of people possible short of saintliness: a belief common in the upper levels of the English middle class and confirmed by pride in being English, which I remember deriving from an early introduction to a map of the world. All those pink bits were ours! How lucky I was not to have been born French, for example, with their miserable little patches of mauve.
This tribal smugness was not, of course, a licence to rampage. Like all such groups, ours had its regulations which one had to observe in order to earn one’s place among the Best. Apart from all the silly little ones about language and dress, there were three which went deeper: one was supposed not to be a coward, not to tell lies, and above all not to be vain and boastful. I say ‘above all’ because that was the rule against which infantile rumbustiousness most often stubbed a toe: YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PEBBLE ON THE BEACH might have been inscribed above the nursery door, and I know several people, some of them dear to me, who still feel its truth so acutely that only with difficulty (if at all) can they forgive a book written in the first person about that person’s life.
I soon came to see our tribal complacancy as ridiculous, and can claim that I never slipped back into it, but the mood it engendered is another matter: it was based on nonsense – on wicked nonsense – but it was sustaining, it made one feel sure of oneself. I was robbed of that mood (by being rejected, more than by seeing through class smugness and imperialism, though that must have modified it a good deal), and such a deprivation – the smashing of self-confidence – whatever its cause, makes a person feel horribly chilly. Now, however, having become pleased with myself in other ways, I recognize the return of the comfortable warmth I knew in early youth. If this is smugness, and I can’t help feeling that it is, then I have to report that I have learnt through experience that, though repulsive to witness, it is a far more comfortable state to be in than its opposite. And comfort one does need, because there’s no denying that moving through advanced old age is a downhill journey. You start with what is good about it, or at least less disagreeable than you expected, and if you have been, or are being, exceptionally lucky you naturally make the most of that, but ‘at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’, and that is sobering, to say the least of it. For one thing, it’s a constant reminder of matters much larger than oneself.
There is, for example, the thought quite common among us who are old: ‘Well, thank god I shan’t to here to see that.’ Try as you may not to brood about global warming, there it is, and it doesn’t go away because I shan’t see much of it, or because, having no children, I don’t have to worry about their experience of it … All that happens when I try to use that for comfort is the looming up of other people’s children. I suppose there is a slight relief in the knowledge that you, personally, will not have to bear it, but it is unaccompanied by the pleasure usually expected from relief.
And that capaciousness of life, the variety within it which at first seems so impressive – what does that do after a while but remind you of its opposite, the tininess of a life even when seen against the scale of nothing bigger than human existence? Thought of in that light the unimportance of the individual is dizzying, so what have I been doing, thinking and tapping away at ‘I this’ and ‘I that’? I too, as well as my dear disapprovers, ask that question – though with a built-in expectation, I must admit, of justification.
Because after all, minuscule though every individual, every ‘self’, is, he/she/it is an object through which life is being expressed, and leaves some sort of contribution to the world. The majority of human beings leave their genes embodied in other human beings, others things they have made, everyone things they have done: they have taught or tortured, built or bombed, dug a garden or chopped down trees, so that our whole environment, cities, farmland, deserts – the lot! – is built up of contributions, useful or detrimental, from the innumerable swarm of selfs preceding us, to which we ourselves are adding our grains of sand. To think our existence pointless, as atheists are supposed by some religious people to do, would therefore be absurd; instead, we should remember that it does make its almost invisible but real contribution, either to usefulness or harm, which is why we should try to conduct it properly. So an individual life is interesting enough to merit examination, and my own is the only one I really know (as Jean Rhys, faced with this same worry, always used to say), and if it is to be examined, it should be examined as honestly as is possible within the examiner’s inevitable limitations. To do it otherwise is pointless – and also makes very boring reading, as witness many autobiographies by celebrities of one sort or another.
What dies is not a life’s value, but the worn-out (or damaged) container of the self, together with the self ’s awareness of itself: away that goes into nothingness, with everyone else’s. That is what is so disconcerting to an onlooker, because unless someone slips away while unconscious, a person who is just about to die is still fully alive and fully her or himself – I remember thinking as I sat beside my mother ‘But she can’t be dying
, because she’s still so entirely here’ (the wonderful words which turned out to be her last, ‘It was absolutely divine’, were not intended as such but were just part of something she was telling me). The difference between being and non-being is both so abrupt and so vast that it remains shocking even though it happens to every living thing that is, was, or ever will be. (What Henry James was thinking of when he called death ‘distinguished’, when it is the commonest thing in life, I can’t imagine – though the poor old man was at his last gasp when he said it, so one ought not to carp.)
No doubt one likes the idea of ‘last words’ because they soften the shock. Given the physical nature of the act of dying, one has to suppose that most of the pithy ones are apocryphal, but still one likes to imagine oneself signing off in a memorable way, and a reason why I have sometimes been sorry that I don’t believe in God is that I shan’t, in fairness, be able to quote ‘Dieu me pardonnerai, c’est son metier’, words which have always made me laugh and which, besides, are wonderfully sensible. As it is, what I would like to say is: ‘It’s all right. Don’t mind not knowing.’ And foolish though it may be, I have to confess that I still hope the occasion on which I have to say it does not come very soon.
POSTSCRIPT
THE TREE FERN: it now has nine fronds each measuring about twelve inches long, and within a few days of each frond unfurling to its full length, a little nub of green appears in the fuzzy top of the ‘trunk’ (out of which all fronds sprout and into which you have to pour water). This little nub is the start of a new frond, which grows very slowly to begin with but faster towards the end – so much faster that you can almost see it moving. I was right in thinking that I will never see it being a tree, but I underestimated the pleasure of watching it being a fern. It was worth buying.