by Diana Athill
When I started writing this particular diary was at the time when I realized I was abnormal. Not only mentally, but also in another, sexual way—and this I shall explain later. Mental disorder first. I understood my reactions to people were strange, often eerie—in fact mad. Mental disorder is often a product of, or a cause of, remarkable intelligence. I had already finished school when not yet fifteen, and was in the university, living alone. Because my family did realize I was insane—or nearly so—and they couldn’t bear me—and as you know, didn’t try (except poor Dolly). Although I suspected there was something wrong with me, I wasn’t sure until I started studying at the Sorbonne. It was clear then. I couldn’t live with anyone else, and my love affairs were heartbreaking catastrophes (they always have been)—catastrophes as soon as it became a matter of cohabitation. So I knew something was wrong. I tried everything to become normal. Drinking, not drinking, sport, travel, reading, being very diligent in my studies. I was good at all these things, but still I would suddenly turn against the very people who loved me, and become terribly unjust and unfair towards them. The most horrible thing was, I could see the injustice while doing it or saying it, and afterwards…how terrible it was trying to explain, to say—without mentioning it—that it was a slight case of insanity.
Anyway, when I started writing I improved a lot, and then I discovered my salvation—a combination of salvation and writing. My diaries. As I mentioned already, I’d know that I was starting to become unjust and strange even while doing so. So, I’d sit down and write—give vent to my feelings in writing, instead of in talking or behaviour. This would simmer me down, and I’d become normal again and often shake my head at the strangeness of it all. Often, of course, I wouldn’t have time to sit down and write, and there would be a surprising outburst, but it wouldn’t last long. You know of course that all this causes me terrible mental depression. In depression my diary becomes hopeless because it was writing it and reading it and seeing the way I sometimes am which often used to cause depression (that is why when I was going through my last attack I wrote to you and not in the diary).
This diary, then, this medicine, this dark and innermost secret womb of mine, is something I have created to save me—and it has, but to suddenly have it exposed in this way is enough to make me go berserk. Your excuse for reading it should not have been ‘Anyone would have done it’ but ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’
Anyway, to go on. Remember X? The way he came to you and said ‘For heaven’s sake, Diana, why don’t you leave me alone, why do you send me voices?’ Suppose that in some strange way he’d been aware that he was mad, and instead of coming to you he kept a diary and wrote ‘That bitch Diana, sending me bloody voices all the time’—and suppose writing like that kept him from behaving abnormally towards you—he knew it was insanity, yet he wanted to express it because it is better to express it than to stifle it, so he expressed it in a diary. And then supposing you went and read his diary, what would you have thought? And how would he have thought?
Let me quote from my diary. ‘She started to irritate me to shouting point. I say unconsciously, because poor Diana (or anyone else) has no inkling of what goes on in me at times, and how the most innocent remark is apt to be distorted in me, unjustly, infuriatingly—sign of my insanity.’
It is a pity you didn’t read this diary properly, thoroughly and slowly. Because then it would neither have insulted nor pained you—but only made you feel sorry and you would have understood and, as I know you, would have been even more sympathetic to all my bloody messes.
Something which must have shocked you, choked you even in its brutality, must have been when I wrote ‘…cringe at her touch.’ Do you remember Gudrun and all I told you (even let you read part of that diary)? I wrote masses of things like that about her—at one time I said ‘lying on the beach, she took some sand and sprinkled it on my foot, and this indirect touch, this symbolic tie, made me cringe to the very core of me.’ Do you think I was writing this to be bitchy about the poor girl? Or as a demonstration of my sickness? Didn’t I welcome her and cook for her and see her every day in spite of what I wrote all the time? And later we became lovers. What terrible sickness is this, then? A sickness. You read, I suppose, the last entry, where I gave this long moan about lack of sex for five months. Why? I didn’t lack opportunities or a responding partner. It is this horrible thing of being unable to so much as touch a woman unless I am madly in love, or, as I have told you myself, very drunk indeed. And yet I want sex, often very much. Gudrun was around all the time, and this wanting and not wanting at the same time seems to end up by creating a monstrous fastidiousness in me—a sickness, as I have said, and anything the poor girl did I found, or forced myself to find, repulsive. The same thing has happened with you. You are not unattractive, in fact very sensually built. Because it is you I can’t get disgustingly drunk and try to make love to you, the way I would to another person, and this wanting and not wanting has created this strange thing in me. But all this is my own mess. I combat it in my own way and the result is that I am normal in my behaviour and everything. Do you understand the difference now in what the contents of the diary are to me, and what they are to someone reading them?
I hope you will understand all this and feel sorry for what you did, and never never let your friendship to me be impaired. After all, Diana, I have only you really, haven’t I? I’ll leave as soon as possible.
I was touched by this letter. It was full of distortions—Didi’s claim, for one, that by letting off steam in his diary he was able to be ‘normal in his behaviour and everything,’ which made me splutter aloud—and it was aimed at winning my forgiveness so that he could stay on in my flat, but it was near enough to the painful truth of his condition to make my heart ache for him.
Oddly, I almost discounted his equation of the situation between him and Gudrun with the situation between him and me. He was simply trying, I thought, to counterbalance the expressions of physical disgust in the diary, because he felt them to be the most offensive element in what I had read. I acknowledged that I too had made the comparison, and it occurred to me suddenly that violent physical distaste had woken in Didi as soon as Luke left, the moment I became technically ‘available,’ so to speak; but still I felt that any sexuality in the tension between us was unimportant, a possibility to be considered in theory, perhaps, but not with any conviction.
It puzzles me slightly that once the first shock of seeing words on a page was over, I took so coolly Didi’s ‘cringing’ at my mere presence, remaining fundamentally untouched by it in my sexual self-confidence. Partly this may be due to my really having uncommonly little sexual vanity. Even when I was very young it seemed to me evident that while A might be sexually attractive to B, he or she might well be unattractive to C, and long ago I learnt to accept that I was no dazzling exception to this rule; and what did this matter, considering that I was sexually attractive enough for my own purposes, in spite of it? I had had plenty of lovers in my time, and even now I knew that I pleased the only man I seriously wanted to please, so I was not vulnerable on this score; it was easy for me to relax after the first flinching, and see Didi’s physical recoil from me as part of his sickness, something which left me untouched. As for there being distorted sexuality in that sickness (which there was, of course; Didi was being pretty accurate in that part of his letter), I was still blinded to it by the thoroughness with which I had accepted the ‘old enough to be his mother’ image of myself, and my lack of approach to his ‘type.’ I knew that I was now sexually detached from Didi, and I thought that Didi had always been sexually detached from me, so I dismissed the Gudrun-Diana equation as an attempt—a touching and generous attempt—to anoint my supposed wounds, and concentrated in dismay on Didi’s evident intention of continuing to live with me.
‘Didi,’ I wrote,
you say ‘don’t say I know,’ but how can I not say it when you have told it so plainly? You’ve put it all down in that painful letter, so un
less I suppose you to be lying, which you obviously aren’t, I know. I know that you are a tragic person, not a beastly one—and yes, I am sorry to have precipitated this horribleness for you. I am sorry.
The condition you describe is a horror, and it isn’t possible for anyone who hasn’t experienced it to feel it in their bones—they can only look at it from outside. And one of the worst things in it is that it makes friendship in any ordinary, mutual, give and take sense impossible at close quarters (as you have often said before now, with your talk of ‘no one can stick me for more than three weeks’). I would like to say ‘Because you have told me, and because I have understood what you have said, and because I am sorry with all my heart, stay here.’ But I can’t because I’m not up to it.
It is not possible for two people to live under the same roof for a long time unless each of them is able to allow the other space, so to speak—give the other a certain amount of attention and consideration. And at anything but surface level you, except during your better times (like in the first three months you were here), can’t do it because you are so deeply bogged down in your own state. The worst shock you gave me—worse even than the diary—was driving home that evening after we’d been with X when you said savagely ‘You’re in the position of power’ at a time when I was so far from thinking about you and me, so deep in something completely removed from that and very painful and important to me, that it seemed absolutely incredible that anyone should have so little of the ordinary sensitivity of friendship that he couldn’t be aware of it and allow for it. It was that night that I realized you couldn’t be a friend except from time to time, only someone I wanted to help because I was fond of him and he was in a mess, which is different.
I’ve got a bad vanity, which is the vanity of wanting to feel that I am a nice person rather than a nasty one. Therefore I wanted to go on being the same towards you in spite of that disappointment, and I’ve tried hard to do so. But it’s bloody difficult—too difficult, it turns out, for me—to do that when you can’t help seeing that the person opposite you is seeing you all the time as stupid, wildly irritating, displeasing. Do you know that it’s months since you have been able to look at me except in fleeting, hostile glances, while you talk to me? I expect you do. And months since you’ve been able to prevent yourself from snapping a contradiction to every lightest thing I say? Yes, of course you know it, because you know your own symptoms so well, but you may not know quite to what an extent I was aware of it, and how extraordinarily lowering it is as an experience whatever the reason for it. I could say to myself till I was blue in the face ‘This is only Didi being as he can’t help being, it’s what he means when he says people can’t stick him for long, it’s the dreadful thing which happens to him, not something he can help’—and I realized enough of it to say that to myself many times, long before reading this letter which has made it even more clear. But however much I said it, it didn’t prevent it from being depressing and unpleasant to go through, so however hard I tried your presence here stopped being a very real pleasure to me and gradually became something to endure.
Probably the person who could live with you through the bad times as well as the good would have to be totally unselfish—make no claims for his or her self at all—which God knows is far from true about me. I should loathe to lose my affection for you, but I could if this went on, however wicked and unjust of me this would be. That’s why I felt that reading the diary was a good thing, because it tipped me into saying you must leave. The whole thing was becoming false on my side and obviously more painful on your side, so to have something happen which made it violently obvious that this was happening would at least end it.
I don’t in the least want my friendship for you to be impaired. I want to withdraw on to neutral territory, so to speak, have a rest, and let everything I value in you come up again in my mind, and my concern and affection for you come alive again. I’m a poor thing to be the only thing you have, as events have proved, but I don’t want to stop being at least something you have, for the reason that you have been a lot for me, too, and I liked having you in my life so want to go on having you there. If the strain is taken off I’m perfectly sure this will happen. It’s really a matter of hoping for practical ways of taking the strain off, such as the BBC providing you with a job—because if you don’t go I shall fail you hopelessly, Didi. It’s appalling to know it and to say it, but I can’t not, because it’s true—as you must realize from the extent to which I have failed you already. I’ve already reached the stage of being well and truly unable to meet the claims which you, because of what you describe in your letter, inevitably make on people at close quarters, and I can’t patch or cobble up my resources for more than a very little longer.
So that’s how it is. You are burdened with something terrible, and I’m not up to it in the circumstances. ‘Sorry’ is an inadequate word for what I feel when you show me your abyss—it’s more like misery and self-loathing because I’m not able to work a miracle on myself and become someone who can be unaffected by everything you do or say, and who doesn’t want to live her own dim existence in her own dim way, alone. It’s a nightmare that anyone should suffer as much as you do without someone else being able to take off at least part of it, and I’m ashamed of not being able to.
That, I thought, must end it. It was as exact a description as I could manage of the toll the situation was taking on me, and surely it made clear that I had gone beyond appeals to sympathy, that I had reached the point of rejection. The level of sincerity on which it was written was split. I wholly meant it when I said that he must go, while I only knew that I ought to mean it when I blamed myself for my failure to endure him any longer (and in addition exaggerated that aspect of my feelings in an attempt to avoid ‘punishment’ and ‘blame,’ and to make the rejection as little painful as possible); but it seemed to me that the parts of the letter which were not wholly sincere were nevertheless true, and that they therefore needed to be written. Surely Didi must be able to see, when he read it, that it wasn’t him that I had come to hate, but the situation; and that I had come to hate the situation so that there was no alternative to ending it. And immediately after writing the letter I thought of ‘a practical way of taking the strain off.’ If Didi could find a room to rent for £3 or £4, I could let my spare room again for £5 a week, as I used to do, pay his rent for him—and still be better off. I suggested this in a separate note and felt that the end was in sight.
I left both letter and note in the hall, and they disappeared, so Didi must have taken them. I waited for him to react. Nothing happened. A day went by—another day—another and another. He was always out when I came home from work, returning very quietly long after I had gone to bed, and he was always asleep when I left in the mornings. He was going to ignore the letter. He wrote for himself at this time ‘I am behaving like what I am—a creep. Creep into the flat, creep out of it…’ and I listened to the faint sounds of the creeping and thought with resignation ‘I must be mad.’ If I were to get rid of him, what I must do now was to go into his room at whatever time suited me, whether he was asleep or not, and say: ‘Didi, you have read my letter and it is intolerable that you have not yet acted on it. Out!’—and that I was incapable of doing. Simply incapable—I didn’t know (still don’t know) why.
The situation began to seem to me—and this is often my undoing at times when I ought to act—comic. What a pity, I thought, that I didn’t have a big house instead of a small flat: a shabby big house built of wood, with lilac bushes and raspberry canes struggling through the nettles in the garden—a Russian country house. The house in my mind came out of a story by Turgenev—I can’t remember which one—and was the sort of house in which the cast of characters might include an old man in carpet slippers who appears to be unrelated to the family: an old man slightly on the margin of the action whose presence is unquestioned even though people are often annoyed with him. He lives there until he dies, and perhaps his death sparks a moment
of truth among the other characters: they pause uneasily for a moment, facing guilt. Didi, I thought, half despairing, half laughing, was going to be my old man in carpet slippers. He always said that when he read about Russians he felt that he was reading about Egyptians, and I reckoned that he might just as well feel that he was reading about me, too.
Something, however, had happened as a result of the explosion over the diary. The comedy was accentuated by the fact that it had brought about some kind of release in Didi, the first sign of which was the end of his five months’ abstinence from love. At a time when it seemed to me and my allies (my cousin and Sheila, who spent much time and energy debating with me what was to be done about him) that his relations with me must be his dominant preoccupation, he chose to fall in love in a particularly ‘Didi-ish’ way.
The girl was very young and only moderately pretty, but she was unusually composed for her age, and although she didn’t wear black she spoke good French. This was only natural since she was half French and had been brought up in France, but to Didi it made her overpoweringly ‘elegant’ and superior to the clod-hopping women of England. To us, the onlookers, it seemed that in falling madly in love with this girl at first sight Didi was ducking his dilemma with me with an almost sublime insouciance, but his own description of the beginning of the affair reveals that this was not wholly true.
I didn’t—couldn’t—see Diana or anyone else in the house. Crept in and out, shrinking as soon as I passed the front door, busied myself translating, drinking, making sure my physical presence was at least reduced to the minimum. Terrible for both of us. She is, however, endowed with an unbelievable greatness—she is beginning to forgive me. And my gratitude would have made me run amok if something else hadn’t suddenly happened. Ah Didi…Didi…Love…love is here again. I love and am loved. It is glorious. I am basking in it. I even sigh with my own secret happiness, and inexplicably I have become careless about all my material worries. I don’t care any more. Even if I get thrown out of England—so what? I am too happy to care. [There follows a description of his meeting with the girl, and an account of the rest of that evening]…I was in my most charming, debonair, attractive mood, the one only real despair can induce (despair because of the incident with Diana, weighing very heavily on me). From despair in a gay mood to recklessness and madness. Went into an off-licence. No one. I tap. No one heard, or if they heard they didn’t bother. A man quarrelling with someone inside. Facing me were three gallon jars of wine. I took a gallon flask of Burgundy, worth about £3. I’ll never make a good thief because going out, drunk as I was, my heart was knocking so hard, my teeth chattering. Into the car and away fast. Just as we passed the shop two men emerged looking round madly—for a pedestrian. Usually I have a terrible conscience when I do something like that, but I didn’t this time. But I was still shaking a bit and bumped slightly into another car—but moved away quickly. Absolute recklessness…[and later, when they were dancing in a restaurant] suddenly she was in my arms and we were kissing and hugging madly—madly. We spent about two hours there, kissing and hugging. We spoke in French and how I wanted to scream (because I haven’t for so long) ‘Je t’aime, je t’aime’—et d’ailleurs je l’aimais. Enfin. Drove home singing.