After a Funeral

by Diana Athill

  ‘We do want another,’ he said gently, ‘because I am going to drink it myself.’ Which he did, and another whole bottle that evening, before we drove over to the casino in Ostende.

  When we said goodbye the next day he was again looking yellow and shadowy round the eyes, although he insisted that the illness was over and that it was only grief at seeing us go away. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I think I should never visit England or see people I love, like this, because it’s so terrible when it ends.’ He tried to mock at his own lugubriousness, but the loneliness of his exile surrounded him like a cloud as he stood on the quay. The loneliness, and something else. I was not able to define why I felt such a weight of foreboding for him, but I felt it: again ‘My god, what has he done to himself, what will become of him?’

  Mémé and I comforted each other that in those four days his physical improvement had been evident; that at the casino, whatever recklessness could be sensed in him, he had in fact behaved sensibly; and that the affair with Inge really was over. He had dismissed it as a joke, with hardly the patience to speak of it, and he had told Mémé that he had already found another girl: ‘Not serious, he isn’t in love or anything, but I think she’s going to live with him so he’ll be looked after.’ (The girl should be pitied, I felt, but who cared about some unknown girl so long as Didi’s relish for life and his writing energy could be restored?) He had talked, too, with resigned good sense about living in Germany: ‘It’s absurd and sentimental to go on pining for England when it won’t have me, and anyway I’ve had more kindness in Germany than I ever had there.’ Sensible and calm; nothing in the evidence to cause anxiety. But when he spoke like that his voice and expression became a little hard, and at any moment when he was not responding to talk or laughter, a look of deep, settled melancholy covered his face like a mask. I could tell myself as firmly as possible that there was nothing more than usual to worry about for him, but it was after that meeting that I first asked myself: ‘Is he mentally sick?’

  The girl he told Mémé about can only have been a stop-gap, because while he never mentioned her to me, he was soon writing about another one, with whom he was not living. ‘Why can I never fall in love with simple people? Ursula is complicated, elegant, very sure of herself, older than me. I have got it badly, I am even “courting” and go and play cards with her mother in the evenings.’ He was in a state of frenzy but the girl said ‘Why must you do everything in a rush? There is plenty of time, I won’t fly away,’ and he admitted that she was right. The first letters about her, though agitated, were cheerful.

  Then came a short one which was a distillation of rapture. She had consented, she had slept with him, it was spring, the leaves, the sun…an absurd little letter, but happiness showered out from it like dazzle from a sparkler. ‘Let this be it!’ I thought. ‘Why shouldn’t poor Didi find a girl who suits him and loves him? He’s not too old to break a pattern—let this be it!’ But before my answer to his radiant note can have reached him there came another letter, of pure misery. Then another, and another.

  They were baffling and they became irritating. They were, simply from the fact of having been written, cries for help, but how could help be given? What had happened? Usually his letters were vivid and concrete like his serious writing, describing incidents and people, relishing absurdities, full of the kind of gossip we both enjoy; but now events, facts and personalities had vanished. It was only his state of mind the letters contained, his despair and hopelessness. It seemed probable that the events behind them were no more than a broken date or the girl’s apparent interest in another man at a party, and that he omitted them because he knew their inadequacy as causes of his mood. I felt that his despair had detached itself from any cause and that he was using Ursula as, earlier, he had used Inge: as a point of departure into a state which existed on its own.

  One Friday night, thinking about him as I lay in my bath, I said to myself ‘Let’s face it, I was right, he’s a nut.’ It was true that his isolation and loneliness made him vulnerable—would make anyone vulnerable—to this kind of suffering, but the letters were not normal. The pendulum swing, the insufficiency of the causes…I wished I knew more about depressive conditions, because from what little I did know it seemed obvious that a depressive condition was what he was in. The next morning I received a letter from him in which he said ‘I am mad.’

  It started on a deliberately dramatic note—‘I am writing this early in the morning—very early in the morning’—but as it went on the theatricality fell away. He had just spent a terrible night trying to think out his condition, and he could not escape the conclusion that he was insane. ‘Not mentally insane, emotionally insane. This horrible mental sanity which makes me able to see it, and know I can do nothing about it.’ It was not a new thing, he said, it had been going on for a long time: fits of despair, hopelessness, disgust with life and disgust with himself. And when he tried to force himself out of it and behave normally it was worse, because every moment of it had to be deliberate (it was something of that, of course, that I had glimpsed in Bruges). ‘For the last six days I have not been drinking, not a drop. My behaviour has been so normal and wise, even going for walks and “acting” so sane. Reasonable. Not too much coffee, not too many cigarettes, to bed at eleven, a shower in the morning, washing the car, trying to write, reading, being polite and charming to my visitors. But I have only been doing what my mind tells me to do because although insane I know what sane behaviour is and “act” accordingly’…‘Only acting, only acting’…‘To realize it, to see it, and not to be free to do what I should do because of my love for you and Mémé and Dolly’—‘What shall I do?’…‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t.’

  He returned to his ‘lack of freedom’ several times. He longed, he said, for an accident so that he could die without knowing how he was hurting the people he loved (each time adding reassurance, to himself as well as me: ‘Don’t worry, I shan’t make an accident happen intentionally.’) He ended: ‘I shan’t even say I’m sorry to write like this because of how hypocritical that would be. All I need do is not send it. But I shall send it, because utter loneliness on top of all this would be even more unbearable.’

  Didi had become, it seemed to me, someone in whom loss or frustration could act like a bent wire poked down a drain to recover something, bringing up not only the object but also strings and lumps of horrible deposit which had been hidden there for who knows how long. He had become an inviter of wounds and a potential victim of them because any one of them could re-animate the one inflicted on him when, long before he could defend himself, he was not wanted. He couldn’t love if he was loved in return because he could only believe in the fugitive and unloving as a love-object; only know love as the loneliness and pain which he had learnt as a child.

  To Didi psychiatrists are a joke: one of those nonsensical American fads. The further East you go, the further back in time in relation to psychiatry, and an incomplete medical training would not do much to alter such an attitude. I knew this, but still I could only tell him, with all the emphasis of concern, that if one knows oneself mentally ill the only course is to consult a specialist. Then I sat back to wait for the next letter, which I expected and feared would be elated. It came almost at once.

  Didi’s passions in writing are few and profound, because he is impatient of anything but the great. The writers he loves best are Céline and the Russians, particularly Chekhov, whom he reads and rereads with endless joy. (‘If at times I say “Why was I ever born?”—I can answer “But to read Chekhov.”’) What he asks of writing is truth. He distrusts shapeliness, polish, story-making, although verbal virtuosity enchants him (he loves Nabokov). He may sometimes be prevented from seeing the good in some writing because of the presence of qualities he distrusts (though this may be my own resentment speaking, because he doesn’t like mine), but he is never taken in by anything phoney and he himself is determined to go beyond artfulness into truth.

  Perhaps it is not,
therefore, surprising that it was Henry Miller who now called him up from the depths, for even if one thinks that Miller often defeats his own ends by the woolliness of his expression, one can’t deny that he has spent his life fighting his way through ‘artfulness’ to the raw truth. To me he often seems to fail, but to Didi, at that moment, he was sanity.

  Long ago, on a superficial reading, he had dismissed Tropic of Cancer. Now, having bought a copy to send Mémé, he had looked into it idly, and lightning had struck.

  It is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature [when Didi uses that word he uses it carefully and gravely—it is his accolade] I have come across. I think it is going to change my life…It is a revelation—suddenly I saw what a piddle, a piece of pipi, me and my whining and despair. If you read Tropic and then come across my novel, or your book, or [half a dozen currently successful writers] they make you or rather me want to vomit. I took that novel I have been writing and stuck it in the toilet and many of my friends and particularly me have used the paper and the words on it for exactly what it should be used for. I am only sorry I did not read Tropic before I published the first book, because I’d have stuck that one where I’ve just stuck this one—a whole novel which would hardly amount in depth, understanding and perception to one simple phrase in Tropic of Cancer.

  There were seven sides to this letter, which ended ‘I didn’t send this just after writing it because of fear that it might be just one of my “moments.” But no, God be praised. Reading Tropic has suddenly made me grow up…I am all right now, and in a feverish haste to write, to write.’

  Four days later he was still reporting: ‘Reading Miller has put me right back on earth.’ He added:

  He too, you see, had something fantastic in him to express and felt the misery of not getting it out easily. I do not regret throwing my manuscript away. Perhaps it was that which was eating me, writing something tepid and mediocre and knowing all the way it was not what I wanted, not what I feel, that my insides want to gush out with something dazzling, some volcano I have to let erupt, and not just another bloody ‘novel.’ I am in a feverish state of writing, and quite happy.

  In all that Didi had told me about his ‘despair’ his writing had never been mentioned except casually. I told myself I must give him the benefit of the doubt, but I didn’t believe that what had been eating him was anything to do with his writing. He had always known, and had very often said, that sincerity and passion were what he valued most in writing, so his ‘discovery’ in Miller of their vital importance was not a discovery at all. And I knew that feeling—most writers know it—of having ‘something dazzling’ inside (quickly…now…if only one can press the right button something different will happen, something new and far more important…). It is illusory. It may have something to do with the process of gestation, or be a stage in the collection of creative energy, but what comes out at that time almost always has to be scrapped, and what finally comes out is always another book of the kind you write, never something totally new. Didi was never going to write a ‘volcano’ it was not his style.

  I concluded sadly—indeed with horror—that his manuscript had been sacrificed unnecessarily: that he had simply used Miller as a launching pad out of despair, as he had used Inge and Ursula as launching pads into it. But would the experience be the less useful for that? Whatever the mechanism which released him from depression, if he had been released, who cared? It was appalling that the book on which he had been working for so long should have been destroyed, but his hold on sanity was more important than his book.

  He was released. The following months were hard ones because he was physically ill, unable to work, and penniless, but he was cheerful. Later, however, he was to introduce a puzzling element into his recovery. One day, he told me, he must let me see the account he wrote in his diary of how he emerged from that crisis, because ‘it was strange, very strange.’ Soon afterwards he sent me the diary, and it was strange, though not in the way he meant.

  He sent me a vividly written account of a night he had spent dissuading a desperate girl whom he disliked from killing herself: a tedious, exhausting night, but for him it had a glorious significance. Watching this girl, wearily arguing with her, following her round, drying her tears, mopping up her drunken vomit, listening to her hysterical insults when she turned against him because of what he had said about the man she was despairing over, he had a sudden revelation: this was himself! This pathetic, disgusting, pitiable, boring girl was a mirror in which he was seeing himself. And suddenly he found himself free to reject what he saw; to reject it so completely that he could never be like that again.

  It was as though the Henry Miller ‘revelation’ had never happened. Not only was there no mention of it then or since, but its effects had been wiped out of the story. He might simply have ‘rewritten’ the last few months of his life, substituting the desperate girl incident for the Henry Miller incident.

  I haven’t questioned him about this. I would like to understand the tricks he played on himself, but I am scared of blundering. The mechanisms improvised by people in his state to keep themselves going must be vulnerable—patched up of string and safety-pins, so to speak, rather than properly built—and no doubt they could be jolted out of gear in unforeseen ways, so it is better not to touch. What matters is that Didi, although doubly threatened by the wound he carries inside him and the lonely insecurity of exile, has managed to haul himself through that crisis and says that he feels happy and strong, and capable of making decisions, and is now writing a thousand words a day.

  A Guest 3

  THAT WAS HOW I had come to see Didi (I might as well go on calling him that) two years after meeting him. The outlines were to remain unchanged, but there was to be much shuffling of detail and I still had a lot to learn about the complexities of his sickness.

  When I wrote that portrait I still believed almost everything Didi told me. Often I was right to do so, because there were times when he was capable of piercing honesty; as both his published writing and his diary proved, he could tune himself up to a pitch where he hit the truth exactly. But at other times he was unable to resist the ‘adjustment’ of detail. He didn’t lie in order to deceive, and not often to save his bacon. He lied to make things more like they ought to be: more amusing, sadder, more romantic, more strange, less humiliating. The lies could be as trivial as a description of a dinner’s being delicious when in fact it was bad; it was their pointlessness, even more than the masterly naturalness with which he told them, which made them hard to spot, and in the end made me stop trying to spot them: that, and the knowledge that I was as likely to be doing him an injustice by suspecting a lie as I was to be fooled by believing one.

  For one of them I am grateful. Didi was ten years younger than I am, but he passed himself off as eight years younger than that, and did so with great thoroughness, even to altering the date of his birth on his papers. ‘Oh lord!’ I said to him soon after we met, ‘eighteen years difference! I really am old enough to be your mother.’ He answered impatiently: ‘Don’t be absurd, age means nothing. Don’t you realize that you are far younger mentally and physically than most women in their early thirties?’

  I am grateful that our relationship began with me being ‘old enough to be his mother’ because I fell in love with him the second time we met. A few days after my dinner party he took me out to show me the places which had become most precious to him during his student days, and sitting beside him in a small Hampstead pub I knew that I was in danger.

  I was ‘in danger’ because I already had a lover of five years’ standing who suited me perfectly and was more profoundly valuable to me than any other man could be. Not for a moment did I suppose that I would reach the point of wanting to break with Luke, but I might want to deceive him and that would be so unnatural between us that it would make me unhappy. It would be impossible for me to love little goat-face better than I loved Luke—but ‘falling in love’ has little to do with love, and I was startled
to be reminded of how intoxicating it can be. The sensations involved are, after all, undeniably delicious: not least the sensation of danger, of being aware of risk and of a sudden release from one’s inhibitions against embracing risk. ‘Careful! This is likely to end in a painful mess…But so what if it does!’ It is exhilarating.

  I was, however, ‘old enough to be his mother,’ and in that knowledge lay sobriety. I find the spectacle of a woman throwing herself at a man who doesn’t want her distressing and shaming. There is no good reason why I shouldn’t find the sight of a man throwing himself at a woman who doesn’t want him equally distressing, but I don’t. Conditioning is irreversible. I can no longer remember exactly how I was conditioned, but conditioned I was: a woman should be the pursued, not the pursuer, her dignity depends on it. And how could a charming young man who could obviously take his pick of girls want a woman old enough to be his mother, who wasn’t even beautiful? He couldn’t, of course. Didi’s true age would have been enough to chasten me, but it was the word ‘mother’ which made it conclusive.