by Diana Athill
Didi kept his groups of friends separate, only rarely carrying a girl from one group across the frontiers of another. At first I used to think this was because he felt they would have little in common—they were a diverse lot—and later I had moments of cynicism when I thought that since he had no money and had to batten to some extent on whoever he was with, it was so that he could move away to fresh pastures when hospitality began to wear thin. Now I believe it was more complex than that. Some of the friends he had made in the past had to be kept apart because he had given them different and conflicting ‘versions’ of himself, but chiefly he was instinctively protecting himself against his own fickleness. After a period, sometimes several months, of being very intimate with one lot of friends, seeing them every day, enjoying them with open-hearted affection, he would ‘go off’ them. Suddenly they would become insufferably tedious to him and he would start telling me that they were ‘stupid,’ ‘superficial,’ ‘terrible bores.’ But he knew they hadn’t changed and that it was only his ‘insanity’ at work. He would move away from that lot of friends—sometimes cut himself off from them completely to the point of telling them that he had gone abroad—and plunge into an equally close intimacy with another lot; and after a few weeks or months the irritation would pass and he would again be able to meet the first lot with enjoyment. The fickleness was something he was unable to overcome, but it was on the surface. Fundamentally Didi went on loving anyone of whom he was really fond, and would always go back to them with affection and appreciation after the necessary ‘rest.’
He brought home funny or interesting stories from all this social activity, and sometimes, if they were ‘special,’ he brought home girls. When he had finished the work resulting from the Six Day War he took on the editing of a manuscript, and talked a good deal about it. Although he clearly wasn’t doing the work he talked about—he was doing nothing but stay in bed until opening time, come back for a siesta when the pubs closed, get up to go out again at about seven o’clock, and return to bed at three or four or five in the morning—I didn’t fret about him. I had stopped hoping that he would ever work except under the influence of some extraordinary stimulus. So long as he was not in a depressive crisis, so long as he appeared to be getting pleasure out of his life and was therefore able to be agreeable, he was—I had come to feel—‘all right.’ By now I had stopped worrying about him—or rather, had started avoiding it by comic resignation to the future existence of my old man in carpet slippers.
It was this resignation which blinded me to what was really going on. The truth was that in accepting that I would have Didi with me forever I had given him up. I was no longer focusing on him, no longer really caring much about him. It had stopped being painful to have him about the place, and it was no longer, as it had been to start with, delightful. Sometimes it was amusing or pleasant, at other times it was mildly annoying—he broke a lot of my china, for instance, and had always taken the screwdriver when I happened to need it—but it had stopped being interesting. I had other preoccupations now. He had to have a home somewhere so all right, he could have one under my roof, but I had run out of other things to give him, and anyway he asked for nothing else. At least, I told myself, there hadn’t been another distinct crisis since ‘Crisis Diana’ a year went by—more than a year—without one, and that hadn’t happened for a long time; so perhaps the security he now had, although it was obviously not going to change him much, was of some help to him after all.
Didi knew that I had given him up, but while the fact was a relief to me, to him it was something different.
How my life will continue from here it is impossible to visualize. There is no prospect of any money coming in to me at all. Diana, I instinctively know, has given up. Given up in the sense that knowing she is too kind—that it would be against her innermost nature—to put me out of the door, she is resigned to leaving me alone and to paying the expenses which, as I have said before, sap her of all items of luxury which she is entitled to through her work and writing-earnings. Not only is she resigned to my presence—she makes it as agreeable as possible for both of us. She is charming to me—and my heart bleeds for her.
There was hardly a day during this period when Didi seemed so gay and carefree that he didn’t wake up to the knowledge that he was soon going to kill himself. It was worse than ‘being in a dep.’ It was because what he recognized as the symptoms of ‘a dep’ were absent that it was so bad. Lacking those symptoms, he didn’t look at himself and say ‘I am ill’ he looked at himself and said ‘I am hopeless.’
He was approaching forty. He was not earning his living. He knew that however much he argued with himself he was never going to earn his living. He was going to continue living as a parasite on his friends, even when he could see clearly that they couldn’t afford it. He was costing me—he worked it out carefully—not only the £5 a week I would otherwise be getting for his room, but also his heating, his telephoning, much of his eating, and he knew that it was now two years since I’d earned any extra money by writing and that I was falling into debt. He didn’t pretend not to know this. He wrote it down—and when he finally ‘solved’ the problem it was not in a way which could alleviate guilt because he did it by accepting money from another woman—a friend of rare generosity and kindness—with which to pay me. And he was costing many of his other friends money too: sometimes the odd few pounds, sometimes quite large sums. He kept a record. And when he took this money, what did he do with it? He drank it or gambled it, and he wrote that down too. While as for the most important thing in his life—love—there he was either a brute or a child: the one thing he could be sure of concerning his loves was that he would wreck them. It was true that he would be the chief sufferer from this, but the suffering was no expiation because it was of his own making. He was without hope.
During all of the last fifteen months of his life Didi was simply skating desperately over thin ice. Almost every morning there would be an ominous whine as a crack snaked over its surface, and swiftly he would skate away from that patch. A new girl to make; an evening’s drunken gaiety; an illusion of love; a Saturday afternoon when he could scoot from pub to betting shop, trying for a treble; an amusing new acquaintance who responded to his charm; an occasional mellow evening with Luke and me, talking about writing…he would dart from one to another of these reasons for not dying just yet, and I believed him to be ‘all right.’
I suspect now that it was the very security he had gained in finding a home, and someone he could trust not to throw him out, which finally made the ice give way. He had supposed that given this chance he would change, and he hadn’t changed, which brought his reason in as a dangerous ally to his unreason. Because the unreasonable sense of insecurity was still as strong as ever.
A few months before his death he had made me angry. I was having a room painted and asked Didi either to be in the flat at midday to let the painter in, or to leave his key in the door. He did neither, causing both the painter and myself a good deal of inconvenience, and instead of apologizing he protested aggressively that the painter had been rude to him about it. ‘If that bastard speaks to me like that again I’ll punch his face,’ he screamed, and I, losing my temper, said ‘If you do that you know what you can…’ and then bit it off and left the room. This is what he wrote about the incident.
The situation I am in now has been typical since boyhood. No one putting up with me. Whatever unorthodox or mischievous thing I did met with ‘He must go away.’ Where to? From Grandpa’s to Tante B, to my mother, to the S’s, to the J’s, to Dolly for a couple of nights, from Alex to Cairo to Alex to Cairo to Alex. Each autumn, the end of summer, I would be staying with friends—school would be starting again soon and I had to go ‘back.’ But ‘back’ where? To whom? The Cairo school or the Alex school? I would stand, my heart sinking inside me, with my suitcases, in the street as it were. Dolly would finally ‘arrange’ something (never at her place, though). Finally a pension, when I was still a boy, and n
ever any home since. I keep thinking about all that. And this, I suppose, turns you into a manic-depressive, presumably incapable of ‘coping with life.’ What shall I do?
When to the panic of this frightened child there was added an adult’s awareness of his own ‘impossibility,’ what indeed could he do?
I had naively hoped that if he could be made to feel that someone’s affection would endure whatever he did, his sense of his own value might be restored, but it worked the other way. The kinder and more patient people were with him, the more evil he felt himself to be. If I had ever accused him of costing me more than I could afford he would have been able to despise my meanness or otherwise work up some rationalization for what he was doing. Because I was silent he had to accuse himself. He didn’t believe that I went on loving him because he was lovable. He believed that I went on being kind to him because I was good, and what help was that? He was partly right, too. Strands of various kinds of love there certainly were in what I felt for him, but by now the bulk of my motive in accepting him as a responsibility came from a conception of how I would act if I were good, and my having got used to behaving in that way—and that, I suppose, is what most ‘goodness’ is: not, as it turned out, a way of behaving of any value in a situation like this one.
Something else which I had supposed might be helpful proved instead to be the opposite. I had believed that the more a sick person knew about himself, the more likely he would be to find means of dealing with his sickness, but to stay alive Didi needed illusion, not truth. He needed to be persuaded that he was other than he was by seeing reflected back at him from other people an image which he could accept. He was adept—extraordinarily adept—at bringing this about if he could avoid being too close to people for too long, which was why he was most at his ease in pubs and at parties and in the first stages of capturing a girl: situations in which he could almost infallibly be seen as the kind of man he ought to be. But now he was living all the time with someone who knew him too well, and whom he knew too well. I never taxed him with his shortcomings because I knew before he came to stay with me how precarious his balance was; but he knew how I felt behind my silence about his drinking, his gambling, his attitude to women, his self-deceptions. When we talked about them, as we sometimes did, it was because he liked—or thought he liked—being able at times to discuss himself with someone who wasn’t fooled, but who nevertheless accepted and forgave him.
‘I’ve started having to be very drunk, now, before I can make love to her.’
‘Oh darling—wouldn’t it be better to leave her alone?’
‘Much better, but you know me.’
‘How long is it since you’ve been able to make love to anyone sober?’
‘Not for years—years and years.’
‘It’s bad, love, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s very bad.’
While such a conversation was going on, Didi felt that it was relaxing and comforting, but in fact it amounted to a confrontation. He looked into the mirror of another person—and he saw himself as he was.
And during this period two things happened, one minor and one genuinely tragic, which affected Didi deeply.
The first was the loss of his car. Belatedly and courteously the police caught up with him and told him that he must register it in this country, before which it would have to pass a test, and it would have needed a great deal of money spent on it before it could do that. Battered, crumpled, scraped, one-eyed, it was the most disreputable Volkswagen in London. Didi loved it too much to have it scrapped—and even I agreed that it was hard not to attribute gallantry to that dilapidated little machine, which continued to run so impeccably and to consume so little oil and petrol in defiance of its own condition—so instead he ‘laid it up’ in an adventure playground run by a friend of his. He knew well enough that the children would have it stripped to the chassis within a week, but to speak of ‘laying up’ was less cruel than to speak of ‘scrapping.’
In losing his car Didi was losing far more than a convenient means of getting about. His last symbol of ‘style’ had gone, his last prop in his act of being independent. He knew, of course, that it was outrageous that someone without a penny should run a car at all, however frugal, and he had the grace to accept its loss with outward cheerfulness; but he felt as though he were amputated, not only of a means of locomotion, but of a facet of his personality which was truly important to him.
The other event was the death of his friend Peter in Düsseldorf, from some form of cancer. Didi had seen Peter only twice since he had left Germany, but he was constantly aware of his presence in life as someone he truly loved and admired, and his grief at Peter’s death was overwhelming. It was simple and complete—the kind of emotion he prided himself on, in genuine operation. His incredulous misery at the fact that Peter was gone was so great that I doubt whether he was able to perceive one of its consequences to himself, although that consequence existed. While Peter was alive, Didi still had an escape hatch. He hadn’t the least desire to return to Germany, but if for some reason his condition in London became intolerable, then Peter-in-Düsseldorf was there to play the part which Diana-in-London had played when Germany became intolerable: he could provide an alternative to suicide. Whether Didi ever formulated this thought to himself I do not know, but I am sure that Peter’s death left a wound deeper than the great one he acknowledged.
In spite of increased detachment, as the Christmas of 1968 approached I noticed signs that there was a bad time ahead. Didi had started to suffer from insomnia—a danger signal far graver than I understood—and was depending more and more on sleeping pills, which he procured in twos and threes from a friend too sensible to hand them over in any quantity. I could also see that he was stepping up his drinking again, although he disguised from me the fact that he had started to ‘borrow’ more recklessly than ever and to cash dud cheques in order to gamble.
Another ill omen was that he began to destroy his current love affair, one which had lasted longer than usual and was far better grounded than most of them, on which I had started to pin hopes (not of anything so unlikely as marriage, but of an improvement in his ability to ‘see’ a woman). This girl he liked and enjoyed as a person. It was true that he was unable to summon up any very strong sexual passion for her—that was something he could never do with any woman to whom he was drawn by affection and esteem instead of by the flash of illusion—but he had said of her ‘For the first time I’ve started to see what you and Luke mean when you say that truly liking someone is the most important thing in love. I do truly like her, and it’s marvellous.’ I had been very pleased about this. I was charmed by the girl, recognizing over the gulf of years between us a woman with whom I would enjoy friendship, and I had been seeing his relationship with her, together with the longer than usual absence of a full-scale depressive crisis, as an encouraging sign. A little before Christmas, however, I began to notice symptoms which I recognized only too clearly, and I knew that the girl would soon have to leave him in self-defence and that the crisis into which he would then plunge would be serious.
I was, however, far from realizing how bad things already were. Here is his diary entry for December 18, the last before that of December 26.
About ten days ago—the day after the last entry, in fact—I once again did what I have often done in my life: got drunk and went berserk and spent some days in my although-indescribable yet often-described-here mess. Even as I write I know it will not be the last time, and that it will probably happen over and over again. Gambling seems to be replacing sex with me. The same thrill, heart-beat, exuberance I used to feel at an anticipated conquest I now feel prior to gambling and, like sex, I want it more—and I am more daring when drunk.
Last Wednesday Anne [the friend who gave him money to pay my rent] asked me to supper. We had a few drinks, then someone phoned her for a party and of course I told her to go. She had also asked a young pseudo-actress (hopeless type) to come to supper, so I said I’d take ca
re of the girl. Anne gave me $100 to pay the rent for two months and spend the rest. The girl came, very pretty, very young, with hair falling down to her waist. We drank, got drunk, ate, danced, flirted. I had borrowed P’s car for the evening. The girl and I drove back here for ‘coffee.’ I drank whisky and suddenly got the gambling bug. Dressed, took the girl, and drunkenly drove to the club. Lost the $100. Returned home at about 4 a.m. with the girl. We slept but I didn’t touch her. She woke me at 8, I drove her to the station, wrote a letter to P (I was still very drunk) to say I was desperate, enclosed a cheque and asked her to lend me money. I took her the letter, the car and the cheque and came home to sleep. Thursday was a terrible day. Margaret [the girl he was having an affair with] came in the morning and I told her what I had done. Then L phoned up—P had already told him. He said, bless him, to go to his place at once. I called a taxi, went to a pub with Margaret, cashed an impossible cheque for £5, drank more whisky, lost another £2 on the horses, then together with Margaret went to L’s. Drank a bottle of wine, ate something, went upstairs with L—and burst into tears. Oh lord oh lord oh lord. An orgy of despising myself. P said she would lend me some money. Calmed down, drank some more, then came home with Margaret. Poor Margaret. Next morning, physically, mentally and financially bankrupt, I went to P’s parents to cook for them. One look at P and I knew she was taking back yesterday’s promise. She drove me mad—mad with her ‘advice.’ It killed me, and I still don’t know whether she is simple-minded or simply a hypocrite. ‘Tell your bank manager,’ she says, ‘they like helping foreigners’—‘tell him,’ she says, ‘that you’ll cook for my parents now and then and get paid for it—tell him you’ll be baby-sitting…’