by Diana Athill
There have been spells when he could find no work, was thrown out of rooms and came near to starving. The winter he finished his novel he lived in an unheated cellar—unheated until he discovered a way of leading a wire from the next-door house’s electricity supply into his room. I have seen a photograph of the heater he improvised, of which he was proud: a spidery coil of wire between two structures of brick. After he had sold his book he rang at the neighbours’ door, told them what he had done, and offered to pay—and they called the police. ‘It’s funny, but the police in Germany are impeccable, they have always been very nice to me. It’s the ordinary people I loathe.’ Some of the ordinary people, however, have been uncommonly good to him. Once he sat on a bench in a square thinking ‘I suppose I shall have to kill myself, it would be better than dying of cold and starvation,’ only to be saved by a man he scarcely knew. He had been living in an attic above a pub and this man came to the bar often and sometimes bought Didi a drink because he enjoyed talking about foreign parts. ‘Where’s the young Egyptian?’ he had asked, and the publican said that he had thrown him out. The man got into his car and drove round the town until he found Didi on his bench, and took him home, and kept him there for three months. It was a small house—Didi had to share a bedroom with two little girls—and they were poor, though the man’s business prospered later. It was this incident which rooted Didi in that particular town.
In spite of taking a purring pleasure in any luxury which comes his way, Didi never complains of the often very austere conditions in which he has had to live. What he does complain of, and bitterly, is the loneliness. During five years in Germany he has met people who are kind and pleasant—he has quite a large circle of drinking, card-playing friends in the town where he settled—but he has met hardly anyone with whom he can talk. This makes him homesick for London more than for Egypt, because it was in London, when he was here as a student, that he first escaped from his background into a carefree and bohemian freedom which he has romanticized ever since.
Another suffering of exile is having to be grateful. Didi is disaster-prone, and other people besides the man in the pub have had to pick up the pieces, and have done it c heerfully because of the attraction of his personality; he has often had no alternative to accepting kindness. He loves kindness—he glows when he speaks of it—but he suffers from ‘appalling gratitude pains.’ They make him want to ‘become very small, shrink up to nothing and be invisible.’ In these moods the word ‘little’ will start occurring often in his letters: ‘back in my little room’—‘safe in my little car’—‘sitting in a corner like a little mouse.’ This mouselike mood clamped down on his pride usually bodes ill.
I have only seen one brief appearance of the boy ‘who was always very angry, and shouting,’ but I know of others from his letters. The one I saw took place when he decided pessimistically that the insurance company we were cheating was not, after all, going to pay up. Five days had passed without an answer from them, and he began to rage against ‘these crooks.’ Did I know a good lawyer, he was not going to be treated like this by these crooks. I pointed out that these things always take time, and that anyway very little time had passed: write again, I suggested, or perhaps go to see them? Dolly backed me up, and suddenly Didi was striding about the room and shouting ‘How can I visit them? I can’t deal with these bloody crooks!’ He was trembling, and yelling at the top of his voice.
Dolly yelled back ‘Don’t shout at me like that!’ and he crashed out of the room, some kind of panic in his sudden fury. Fifteen minutes later he returned, calm, and admitted that we were right. While the scene was going on I had been amazed and rather disgusted at his childishness, but on his return I felt a curious kind of concern and admiration, as though in mastering his nervous rage he had mastered something more threatening than it appeared to be. It did not seem surprising when this incident was followed by a typical disaster: he visited the company, came away with a cheque for the hire of the imaginary car as well as the repairs to the real one—and the next day Dolly called me in tears to tell me that he’d had his wallet, with all the money in it, stolen.
The second time I knew him to ‘take off’ in this way was over a contract with a German publisher. Its terms were tough, but customary. He could have improved them a little if he had argued, but he had not even read the short and uncomplicated document before signing it, which was not the publisher’s fault. When, much later, he discovered what the terms were, he declared that he would rather his novel was never published in Germany than accept them. I told him that he had accepted them, and through no one’s fault but his own, but he refused to listen, becoming more hysterical as the argument continued. The German publisher agreed to improve the terms a little, but instead of being satisfied Didi became even angrier. He had cast the German publisher, by then, as a blood-sucking capitalist, and wrote as though defending a high moral cause. Realizing that he was embracing the situation with a mad relish, I tried to play it down; but all he answered was ‘If you order me to accept, I will, but only because I’m fond of you.’ Refusing him this ridiculous way out, I repeated that he must accept his own responsibility for the situation, accept the improvement he had been offered, and then, when his next book was written, negotiate a new contract which suited him better.
His reply to this was a letter of triumph. He had cancelled the contract. That bastard had thought he couldn’t because it meant repaying £500, but now he knew better, now he knew that he couldn’t treat Didi like mud. A friend had produced the money; he would be joint owner with Didi of the rights in his work until the £500 was paid off.
There were few rights left to sell in the existing novel—certainly not £500-worth—and the next book appeared to be far from finished, besides which Didi would need every penny he could make from it. If that generous but foolish friend ever got his money back he would be lucky. And what had Didi gained? He had lost the pleasure of having the book appear in Germany; he had let himself in for the worst ‘gratitude pains’ yet; all he had gained was a moment of perverse emotional release. When he complained later that the contract need not have been cancelled, saying of the German publisher ‘he handled me the wrong way,’ I could have spanked him.
Didi’s self-destructive impulse appears most strongly when he is in love. ‘I am always in love. I only stop being in love with one woman when I fall in love with the next.’ The cards are stacked against him from the start because of his stubborn belief that people only love intensely if they are not loved in return. Against protests he puts on a smug, knowing look, and quotes cases. ‘I could make any woman love me if I had the strength of mind,’ he says. All he would have to do, it seems, is to keep up the right kind of indifference at the right time.
He didn’t talk like this, however, about the Swedish girl he once wanted to marry. He lost his passport at that time, and how could he ask her to share his stateless existence? His pride, and his romantic idea of what marriage should be, are genuine. But the end of that story as I heard it is so typical of him that it is hard to believe that he himself didn’t make it so.
‘Her father got fed up at last,’ said Mémé. ‘He said that either they must marry or it must end. And how could Didi marry her? So he went away to Germany although he loved her very much. But after a bit he got some money—only a very little, but some, from his father’s estate. He couldn’t bear it any more, so he wrote to her and they arranged to meet in Hamburg and get married there. And on the way there he had a car smash.’
It was a bad smash. Didi was unconscious for days and in hospital for weeks. The girl arrived in Hamburg and he wasn’t there. She went back home believing that he had simply chosen not to turn up, and took a job abroad to save her face. When at last he was able to write, the letter took a long time to reach her, and she refused to believe his explanation. Didi says that he was near death in the hospital, and near it again after he was discharged, saved only by an English girl, an old friend, who happened to be teaching in Hambur
g and who rescued him. I have met this girl, and what she knew of the story was different. Rescue him she did—he was ill and starving when she found him, and in and out of hospital because of various disasters—but she had the impression that he had been prevented from meeting the Swedish girl only by passport difficulties. ‘Which accident?’ she asked. ‘He had so many! Perhaps he was rolling them all up into one, but I don’t know.’
The romantic story as he told it, and as Mémé knew it, sounds too good to be true, but certainly it represents in Didi’s mind the ill-fated ending of a genuine love, and certainly it sums up a truth about him: that on the threshold of anything promising he is always frustrated by disaster apparently beyond his control.
Since then his loves have been either trivial or unhappy. He is hungry for a great love but gloomily sure that he can never enjoy one since he can see no prospect of being able to get married decently. The trivial affairs he despises, so he turns them into tragedy in an attempt to redeem them: witness what happened with Inge.
Inge moved into a room above his. She was a barmaid, and ‘barmaids in Germany,’ he said, ‘aren’t like in England, they are usually more or less tarts. She’d slept with pretty well every man in town by then, and naturally she was soon sleeping with me.’ A convenient arrangement: only one flight of stairs to go up, and she had a good room with a stove for cooking, where he could be fed and warm of an evening. Soon he was spending most of his time up there, and they had slipped into a domesticated pattern; but Didi would never take her out to meet his friends.
‘I am horrible to her,’ he told me. ‘It makes her very angry, and she’s quite right. But I can’t go out with her, I’m ashamed of her, she’s so…ugly.’
I thought this disgusting, and said so. He agreed with ironical detachment. ‘And you see,’ he said, ‘the funny thing is that because I don’t love her and treat her so badly, she fell in love with me. It was bound to happen.’
Inge told him that the situation was becoming unbearable and that it must end. ‘She was right, of course, so I stopped going upstairs and she started going out with other men.’ No sooner did she start doing that than Didi was in torment. Within a week he was desperate for her, he was in love. She took him back; relief and happiness; and then the same thing all over again. Their relationship became cyclic, one of them on, one of them off, and it went on like that for several months. When Didi first told me about it they were in a period of calm and he claimed that they were cured. ‘Now we are just very good friends, thank heavens. She’s a very good friend to me—it was she who lent me the money to insure the car.’ He laughed as he remembered himself creeping upstairs to put threads of cotton in her door so that he could tell whether she had come in while he was out, and how he had won one round by persuading an ex-girlfriend to stay in his room with him for three days.
During his visit to England he could talk of it as past history, but he had to go back to Germany. He arrived desperate at having glimpsed London again, and his family, for so short a time, and had to endure a gruelling spell without work and was down to living on tea and bread before he found a job as a clerk in the Pay Corps of the British Army. Then he could eat and smoke again, and drink beer on Saturdays, and the work was easy, among Englishmen whom he found amusing, and in an agreeable place. Before two months were up he was writing ‘I’m afraid this contentment is bad for me, I am in danger of losing my capacity for despair which is very valuable to me.’ I was beginning to know Didi. ‘Watch it!’ I said to myself, and I was right. Only two letters later the great Inge catastrophe began.
They had resumed their affair and to begin with it had gone smoothly enough to contribute to the dangerous contentment, but on New Year’s Eve Didi went to a good party, and he didn’t take Inge. She kept quiet, but this time it was conclusive. Two weeks later they were in her room and decided that they wanted some beer. Didi was going for it, but he couldn’t find his shoes so Inge went instead. She didn’t come back. She met a man in the bar and went off with him.
‘I am sorry I haven’t written for some time, but I’ve been having passion-trouble…’ To start with the letters were amused: he was suffering, he said, but how absurd to suffer over ‘this bitch’ whom he didn’t love, didn’t even find physically attractive any more. How absurd that he had started to put threads in her door again, to listen for her steps on the stairs…One paragraph would be a detached description of his ridiculous state, the next a melodramatic account of torment, then back to irony again: ‘Luckily there is a streak in me which takes a sort of pleasure in all this.’
At first I paid more attention to the lucidity of the self-analysis than I did to the outcries of misery, expecting that I would soon be hearing of a new girl; but in letter after letter it was still Inge, and gradually the despair began to overcome the lucidity. ‘Knowing that it’s absurd is all very well, but it doesn’t make any difference. I can’t eat any more, my throat shuts up, and it’s three nights since I’ve been able to sleep.’
Then there came a frantic letter. Inge had brought a new man to the house. Didi heard them on the stairs, passing his door, then the sounds of their love-making above him. One evening he rushed upstairs after the man had gone, broke the door open and beat Inge up. Other lodgers came running in their dressing-gowns and his landlady pulled him off the girl and was now throwing him out. He was appalled by what he had done, and even more appalled by the violence of his own despair. He was afraid that he might kill himself. He had tried to once, he now said, when he was sixteen, and had been found in time by a happy accident. He had just passed a night so bad that he could imagine slipping into it again, and he was terrified.
After that his letters became drunker and drunker, written at three or four in the morning, either tragic or wildly gay, the smell of the whisky or the cognac on them. ‘Don’t worry any more, I’m almost over it now. Just finished a bottle of cognac…’ and then an account of a wild time. A swing became evident between despair and elation, with every now and then a short, unnaturally cool note as though he had forced himself to grasp the pendulum and hold it still for a moment.
Finally the friend who had lent him the money to pay off the German publisher intervened and carried him off for a week’s skiing. There was intense relief at being physically removed from the situation, exuberant joy at the skiing. ‘For the first two days I sang all my favourite songs all the time and I don’t think I thought of Inge once.’ On the third day he broke his leg.
Soon after that, while his leg was still in plaster, Mémé and I went to meet him for a long weekend in Bruges. We met at nine in the morning after all-night journeys, in the sleazy lounge of the only Belgian address we knew, a hotel in Brussels, where the smell of the morning’s coffee mixed with the smell of last night’s cigars and became unappetizing. Mémé and I had arrived much earlier and had killed time by walking in a drizzle round the grey sleeping town, our own lack of sleep, and the weather, making us sure that Didi would fail to turn up. When we saw his car outside the hotel we ran to find him in the lounge. The excitement of greeting disguised his appearance, but once the embraces and cries of joy were over we saw that he was very thin, his skin yellow and dull with deep rings of shadow under his eyes. He was ill—evidently as ill as he looked, since he admitted it and he is usually impatient of physical illness and plays it down. He had ‘a sort of abscess,’ hadn’t eaten or slept for two days, and had been in pain throughout his long drive. Mémé offered to go out to buy painkillers, but he said ‘No, no pills, I can’t take any more. It’s pills which caused this.’ Sleeping pills, pep pills, tranquillizers: it became obvious that he had been living on them, and on drink, for weeks.
So ill did he seem that Mémé and I began to plot getting him back to Germany and into the hands of a doctor, but he wouldn’t hear of it: an exact description—‘wouldn’t hear’—of Didi refusing something. At first there is a polite, slightly amused but adamant ‘no,’ then at persistence he withdraws, he is not there, not hearing, and
the speaker is put into a position of absurd importunity. I saw that if he were to be managed it would have to be done as Dolly would do it: a big scene with screams and tears and emotional blackmail. Against someone unable to mount a scene he was impregnable.
He went to a doctor of his own accord when we reached Bruges, and came back with medicine and a veto on alcohol, and we went to our rooms for a few hours’ sleep. I got none for thinking ‘My god, what has he done to himself, what will become of him?’
But the medicine worked, the pain went off, and soon he was eating with his usual gusto. Because he could neither walk nor drink we did little for four days but sit about talking, Didi and Mémé enjoying an orgy of family reminiscence which Didi is always capable of turning into entertainment for anyone. Whether it was an idyllic re-creation of days on the beach at Alexandria, the dirt on some prosperous uncle, or a drama in which an aunt said to her son ‘All right then, go on, shoot yourself,’ and he did, falling dead at her feet, he told it with such skill and enjoyment that he could always hold an audience; and Mémé’s delighted participation—he had been away from home long enough to share his cousin’s nostalgia—made him excel himself. For those four days the feeling between the cousins really was love.
On the fourth day Didi felt enough recovered to announce before lunch that we would go to a pleasant-looking bar and have ‘a little aperitif of white wine.’ Mémé and I were pleased: a glass or two now could do him no harm, we felt, and would do us much good. It was a small bar, warm on a cold day, no one there but the proprietress and the waitress. Yes, they had a good Moselle, and were pleased to be asked for it in beer-drinking Belgium. It was brought up dusty from the cellar, an ice bucket was found, nuts and cubes of cheese sprinkled with celery salt were provided—Didi somehow made them join in his game of ceremony. It was a delicious wine, and the big fair waitress blushed with pleasure at the charming way he invited her to join us for a glass. ‘But first,’ he said, ‘would you be kind enough to bring us up another bottle.’—‘Another bottle?’ she said in surprise, because we had still only tasted the first, and can’t have looked a hard-drinking group: a middle-aged woman, a gracefully drooping schoolboy, and a sick-looking man walking with two sticks. I said ‘Do we really want another, Didi? This is only an aperitif, after all.’