by Diana Athill
Yes. Yes…
There is nothing I would welcome more than death at this moment, this very instant—here and now. How can I put it, and to whom? How can I express what I am going through to anyone but myself? Now I know I am diseased, that it is nobody’s fault, that I have matured physically and also mentally except in one part of my brain coupled with a part of my feelings—particularly my emotions, which haven’t matured at all. These two parts, a part of my brain and all my emotions, are in the same state they were in when I was seven or eight. If only they had shrivelled and died—but no, they remain young and fresh. Too too often I am at the mercy of their young power, their freshness which overpowers everything else in me, and I am left in this hopeless state of seeing myself, in my thirties, intelligent, terribly self-aware, overpowered by the feelings of a child. This exhausting fight, my mature reasoning self fighting desperately to get the upper hand, but succumbing despairingly in the unequal struggle—and I am left with what I am left with now: hopelessness, self-pity—an ugly and repulsive self-pity—and such despair, sadness, loneliness and finally utter darkness. Relief, o Lord, relief. There is nothing for me but to get drunk tonight…
I have no affection or respect for myself at all. I loathe and find intensely repulsive a man of my sort. I want to get out of my skin—it must be like a woman who has to put up with the embraces of a husband she loathes—that is how I feel about myself.
Day after day, week after week, month after month it continued. At times when he couldn’t face the diary he wrote to me. He told me most of what he was going through, but because he was writing to be read by someone else he was able to introduce saving touches of irony, and what was reflected back to him from the letters was less frightening than what was reflected back from the diary, in the way that a mirror is less frightening to a sick woman—can even make her feel better—when she has been able to put on make-up. What we hung on to in our letters was that this was an illness, and that it would pass. If he could only endure, it would go away. When he was most ashamed of himself, and he was very ashamed (‘My moaning, my endless whining’) I told him, and meant it, that he was brave. And he was brave, ploughing his lonely way through this morass of despair and self-loathing, hanging grimly on to a purely formal, unfelt knowledge that the world, and himself, would look different if only he could survive.
That time, anyway, it was because I was there that he didn’t kill himself. I was outside both the situation and the place where he was experiencing it, so I offered an alternative to death.
I am going to ask something which I know I shouldn’t. Get me to London. It is unforgivable to ask it because as you know very well I shall not have a penny and it means you will be keeping me, but if I could be in London for three months or so I’m sure I could get round this work permit thing and find a job and then I’d be all right. This place is killing me. If I have to stay here I can’t not kill myself.
I cabled ‘Yes of course,’ and then thought: ‘Oh my god!’
If Didi were to be given a visa for more than a holiday visit, he would need a work permit. To get a permit he would need an employer, and the employer would have to convince the Home Office that it was impossible to find a native qualified to do the job.
The law was clearly intended to protect the native’s chances of employment against undercutting by foreigners ready to work for low wages, and to prevent foreigners from becoming a charge on the state. Since this was reasonable, it seemed likely that the Home Office would be reasonable towards someone who offered no threat. If a writer needed to be in England to finish a book, he would be doing no one out of anything; and if someone undertook financial responsibility for him he would cost the state nothing. So I applied for a permit for Didi, undertaking to ship him back to Germany if the authorities decided not to renew his visa. It was possible, after all, that once he came out of this crisis he would finish his second book in England. Given this start, Didi could then look for a job in which he could support himself and for which a permit could be granted, whereupon he could exchange the one I had procured for him for another more genuinely useful. Meanwhile he could no doubt find odd jobs—translating, baby-sitting, decorating?—for which he could be paid in cash without the Home Office’s being any the wiser. It would be illegal for him to take such jobs, but I can’t say that I felt any scruple at the idea of helping him to do so.
The permit was granted without trouble, but it took time simply because any dealings with the Civil Service take time. It was two months before I received the final confirmation, but they were encouraging enough from the start for me to tell Didi that the omens were hopeful, and I felt that having escape to look forward to would do almost as much for him as coming to London at once would have done.
This was true. He was soon reporting that he had ‘become a human being again,’ and gaiety and humour returned to his letters. He didn’t, however, go back to his job, from which he had been absent on sick leave, and although he wrote about events again, not only about his mood, he gave no explanation of how he was living. He began to sound busy, but without describing any specific business, and I was puzzled over what he was up to. He was spending a lot of time in Düsseldorf, where he had made a new friend.
This friend, Peter, delighted him. For the first time in all his years in Germany he had met someone whom he could love rather than merely find agreeable. Peter was young, at odds with his family in some way, generous, intelligent, amusing, natural, ‘un-German,’ and had a large library which contained all the books Didi loved best. They enjoyed the same reading, shared the same political convictions, laughed at the same jokes, and perhaps the best of all was that Didi was able to feel that he was contributing something good to Peter’s life which had been lacking. He wrote a great deal about Peter, and a little about a kind and gentle girl to whom Peter had introduced him and with whom Didi was having an affair.
This picture emerged only gradually. Didi’s ostensible reason for not coming to London as soon as the permit was granted was that he hoped to raise some money first by selling a television play on which he had been working, but I began to suspect, from a curious ‘airiness’ of tone which appeared in his letters, that this was not the whole truth. It looked as though, once the climax of his crisis was past with his desperate appeal to me and my response to it, he had started to enjoy himself enough to be reconciled with Germany—and to do this while being kept by Peter and the girl.
I found myself split-minded over this. I was relieved, but I was also cross. Commonsense told me to act on the relief—in other words, to leave well alone and make no attempt to remind him of my invitation—but inwardly I grumbled. It had not, after all, been a light decision to ‘take him on,’ and I had been to some trouble to procure his permit; come to think of it, muttered the inward voice, it had been quite generous of me to do what I had done, and now the little wretch was preferring someone else’s generosity. Of course one doesn’t want gratitude, I told myself, but still…but still…And then the voice of commonsense: Oh come off it, thank your stars if he doesn’t come after all, you know quite well what a problem he would be if he did. That was the first of many a long spell of inward muttering that I was to go through in the next three years.
Two or three months after the permit had been granted, by which time commonsense had won, Didi wrote to say that he would be with me in six weeks. In an ‘Oh well!’ mood, I bought a camp bed and a sleeping bag and emptied a drawer in the sitting-room bureau—my spare room, which I usually let, was occupied at the time, and Didi would have to camp—and this improved my temper. Preparing for a guest is pleasant in itself, and it reminded me how enjoyable Didi had been in that role before. I am out all day, and I knew from experience that he would be out most evenings, so his sleeping in the sitting-room would not be inconvenient, and since he was obviously well out of his crisis, his company when I had it would be gay.
A few days before he was to arrive, he sent the following letter:
Dearest sweetheart—H
m, hm, hm…Hold your breath, sweetie…because I find the whole thing terribly funny. Yesterday I was at the British consulate for my visa…and I was refused—refused—a visa!!!! My initial perplexity (and anger for ten minutes) gave way to a long laugh.
‘But why?’ I ask.—‘We must write to England first.’—‘I must know why.’—‘I am sorry’—the clerk is a nice man who stutters a bit and is very polite and is himself perplexed. ‘It is the consul,’ he says.—‘But I want to know why?’—‘Sorry.’
He went on to complain that he had got rid of his room and sold his car to a man who had insisted on making a profit when he let Didi have it back (‘It is impossible to be here without a car’); this refusal of a visa had caused him so much inconvenience and expense, besides being cruel and unreasonable, that he was now in a fit of Anglophobia and quite glad not to be coming; and I wasn’t to worry because although it would have killed him if it had happened while he was ill, now he had recovered he could stand it.
It was clear from the tone of the letter that the refusal was no disaster to Didi, but it puzzled and angered me because I had been told definitely that now he had a work permit he would get a visa without trouble. ‘They’ mustn’t be allowed to get away with this, and I telephoned the man at the Home Office with whom I had been dealing. I was angry, he was puzzled and apologetic. He would call me back when he had looked into it. When he did so his voice was cold. There had evidently been some mistake, he said, because the visa had not been refused. The applicant had been told that it would be three or four days before he had it, which was customary, but that was all.
For a moment I thought that Didi had made the whole thing up, so that he could stay in Germany without hurting my feelings by admitting that he wanted to do so; then, reading his letter again, I suddenly saw what had happened as surely as if I had been in the consul’s office at the time. He hadn’t made it up—not consciously: he had simply heard the words spoken by the clerk as refusal. To get what he wanted he had not misrepresented, but had misinterpreted.
And this was, in fact, what he had done. Much later I was to read his diary account of the incident, and sure enough, he thought the visa had been refused and raved at the ‘bloody limey authorities’ who, he could see, had enjoyed refusing, and at the expense and inconvenience to which he had been put. The only part of his story to me which was a conscious lie was the tale of having sold his car and being forced to buy it back for more than he got for it. He hadn’t sold it, although he had let his flat. In his diary he was on the very edge of seeing the trick he had played on himself—he admitted that he was pleased to stay in Germany and wrote ‘no wonder!’ on reporting that he’d had a tart letter from me—but he still contrived, by a hair’s breadth, to believe himself a victim of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
My letter was tart because, having seen what he was up to, I wanted to end the situation. I told him that he had made a stupid mistake and that his visa was there for the taking, but that if he didn’t want to take it there was no reason why he should. And as he clearly didn’t, why not stop this play-acting and admit as much? It didn’t matter to me whether he came to England or not, but uncertainty was inconvenient so if he had decided not to come would he please let me know.
I expected him to reply either by admitting that he was now happy in Germany, or with a flurry of hurt feelings and indignation, but his answer was perfunctory and airy: ‘I think, sweetie, that you are being just a tiny little bit unfair…’ Perhaps the clerk in the consul’s office had made a mistake, and of course he wanted to come—how could I suppose otherwise?—but just at the moment he did have rather a lot of things to settle.
My idea of a depressive was of someone who has spells of illness and who, between those spells, reverts to being ‘normal.’ It was to be some time before I would begin to understand how far out of kilter such a personality is all through, and that the crises of despair and self-disgust are only parts of a crippled whole. I suspected that Didi was living on his friends in Düsseldorf, but I didn’t then know that he was also on a feverish gambling and drinking jag; and I had a good many other things to think about besides him. Retrospectively I can see the incident at the consulate, and the situation which led up to it, as a clear indication of his condition, but at the time it seemed no more than irritating and odd, and my reaction to feeling irritated and puzzled was to dismiss it as a waste of time. When, some two months later, in June 1966, Didi at last arrived in England, I had no trouble in forgetting how annoying he had been.
Didi made this easy. He had come, finally, because he had again been moved to come. The part of him which loved London and which trusted it as a place—the only place—in which he could feel at home and happy had surfaced again, and he made a festival of his arrival, radiating pleasure and affection. His power to project his moods was exceptional: all his friends recognized it. To decide that you would ignore what Didi was feeling was a waste of time, and when what he was feeling happened to be good, a perverse one because it meant rejecting genuine pleasures.
Didi had charm, and charm is not a trivial quality. It is a way of responding. People who have it make what they are regarding (and that includes you if they are regarding you) more vivid and enjoyable, funnier, more interesting, because that is how they find it. However mechanical charm becomes, and it does often become mechanical with exploitation, it is always to begin with a spontaneous quality. Didi’s had not become mechanical. He often knew he was exercising it and sometimes deliberately exploited it, but even then it gave him so much pleasure that the freshness was preserved. He could cut it off, but when he did that he was depriving himself more than he was punishing others. There were to be angry times when I would say to myself ‘He has nothing to recommend him but his charm: when he suppresses that there is nothing left.’ I would be saying more than I knew. I would think that I meant only that his one virtue was a petty one, but in fact that virtue sprang from the centre of his being and was the thing about him which had enabled him to write with originality and truth. When it left him it was as though he went blind. On his arrival in London he was overflowing with it.
Having Didi in the house: footsteps running up the stairs, bringing a funny story. ‘Listen, this is true, I swear it. I looked at her and I thought she may be mad but there’s something serene about her—something sort of holy, and I whispered to L. all right, she’s mad, but I believe because she’ll be in the car, all the traffic lights are going to be green. And they were—every traffic light between London Airport and Kensington! So she said God always does such things for her and it was God who brought us together, so I must edit her book, I must. And L. said quickly “He’s very busy with his own work, you know, it would be very expensive to get him to edit your book.” And she said “Would a thousand pounds be enough?” I nearly fainted—well, you can imagine!—and I said very nonchalantly with no breath in my voice, oh well, I supposed…And she had this sort of shopping bag on her knee, and she pushed her hands into it and took out a thousand pounds in dollars.’
‘Didiiii! Show me—show me at once!’
‘Are you mad? How could I take them, how could I do such a thing? No, we were scared, L. and I, it was too mad, all those traffic lights and everything. We said we must make a proper contract, and I must do a sample bit before she decides—we became very sober and virtuous, it was terrible.’ (Part of me knew, of course, that the holy lady would never be mad enough, but Didi could always make things seem possible.)
Or I would come home and find a tray in the sitting-room with ‘a little aperitif’ all ready: cubes of cheese, radishes cut into roses, celery feathery in a glass and salted almonds roasting in the oven. ‘Do you want help in the kitchen, Didi?’—‘No, what are you thinking of! You know me.’ Exchange of news through the door open between sitting-room and kitchen while he, with a flowered apron of mine round his middle, performs alchemy with three courgettes, a pound of mince and a bechamel sauce. ‘Is Didi in a cooking mood? Is he making one of his delic
ious creamy things?’ says Luke when he arrives, and Didi calls ‘Don’t tell him, it’s to be a surprise’—then darts in with a lettuce: ‘Look, what beautiful salad I found in the market—look at it.’ He never mixes a dressing in advance. When the salad is in the bowl he grinds the pepper over it, scatters salt, sprinkles oil and lemon juice, pausing every now and then to bend over it and inhale its smell to see how near perfection he has come—no, a few more grinds of pepper, another drop or two of lemon. Luke has gone into the kitchen and started to pick and nibble. Didi drives him out, crying ‘Stop him! He’s ruining his appetite—’ then sees that I am smoking and exclaims in despair ‘You’re both hopeless.’ A little later he comes through the door without the apron, an almost tranced expression on his face. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘now we can start opening our appetites,’ and he pours himself a drink with ritual gravity and walks about the room as he takes the first sips, his eyes half closed to concentrate his senses. Didi’s appetite can be opened by things which would close most people’s for the night such as the best part of a bottle of whisky or several pints of beer (he has probably had the beer already before coming home to cook), but to see him now you would think him a gourmet of impeccable chastity, savouring one glass of dry sherry for the meal’s sake; and however unorthodox his methods, his appetite is opened. He eats as though he were reading a poem.
Then there is the pleasure of sitting on the floor by Luke’s chair, relaxed against his knee, while Didi, who is making us laugh, looks at us with tenderness. He is loving us, romanticizing and simplifying us as he does so delightfully to those he loves with affection, and so disastrously to those he loves with passion. In his eyes we are being lovable Luke and sweetheart Diana: dear, gentle, funny, trusting people (slightly childish in our trustingness—he has to look after us), with a touching relationship. He enjoys sharing jokes and ideas with us, and he admires Luke’s writing, but he loves us as ‘characters’ more than he likes us as companions; and we, sitting opposite him, accept our roles smugly, if slightly sheepishly. It makes us feel very nice. And we are relaxed because we know that at just the right moment Didi will get up and leave, saying that he has arranged to meet so-and-so, he is late already.