Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  I had written to him a little earlier, asking him whether his paper had omitted to review one of our books because he did not like it, or because he had lost it – the sort of nagging a publisher only permits himself for a book he cares about. I was therefore pleased to hear that he was on the line, and more pleased when he said that he had good news for me. ‘Hurrah,’ I thought. ‘He is going to send it out for review after all.’

  ‘At least, I think I have good news,’ he went on, ‘if it is for you … Did you send in a story for our competition?’

  The consolation prizes, I thought in a split second. There were several of them, of twenty-five pounds each. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then you have won first prize,’ he said. ‘You have won five hundred pounds.’

  You do not look up because you know that you cannot climb the tree. You have forgotten, by now, that there is fruit hidden among its leaves. Then, suddenly, without a puff of wind, a great velvety peach falls plump into your hand. It happens to other people, perhaps; it never happens to oneself … I am still licking peach juice off my fingers.

  Although, if the metaphor is to be exact, the peach does not fall into your hand so much as land on your head. It stuns you. Imagining such an event, I would have imagined blank incredulity followed by a clean burst of rapture, but the two emotions blurred together, there was no perfect moment. By the time I had gathered my wits to accept such a moment, I found that it was already in the past, I had had it. Something ought to happen at moments of delicious surprise: one ought to fly up into the air, one ought to change into music or light. I went on sitting at my desk, watching the cold pigeons huddling on a bit of roof outside my office window, and it was totally inadequate. Even when I was hurrying down Bond Street at lunch-time that day, buying prettier Christmas presents than I had planned, I found that frustration was mixed with my delight because none of the people in the street looked as though the world had changed. There were moments during that lovely day when I felt that I had better stop groping or I might touch a thread of real anguish in the evanescence of moments. For the first time in years I remembered little Rosalba’s song from The Rose and the Ring, and I was humming it all day:

  Oh what fun

  To have a plum bun,

  How I wish

  It never were done!

  But although at first it seemed as though nothing – or not enough – had changed, two things did happen as a result of this event: one of them no more than an amusing insight, the other with a value hard to calculate.

  ‘Poverty’ is a word which should be forbidden to anyone who has lived as comfortably as I have lived, with a family in the background which, however ill it could afford it, could be counted on to rescue me in an emergency. But I have never had any income beyond my earnings, and my earnings have always been small. (The small independent publisher who does not plough most of his profits back into his firm will soon either dwindle to nothing, or stop being independent.) Every penny I have earned I have always spent at once, and always without having many of the things I would have liked. To me, therefore, five hundred pounds tax-free seemed wealth. I could go to Greece during the coming spring without worrying – I could even travel first-class! I could buy a fitted carpet, and new curtains which I really liked, and there would still be money over. During that winter I felt rich, and because I felt it I gave an impression of being it. A little while earlier I had been looking at dresses in a large, smart shop, and when I had pointed to a pretty one and said ‘I’ll try that,’ the girl serving me had answered in a tired voice: ‘It’s expensive. Why try on something you can’t afford?’ In the same shop, wearing the same clothes, soon after I had paid my five hundred pounds into the bank, I was served with such civil alacrity that I could have ordered two grand pianos to be sent home on approval and they would have offered a third. Courteous men spent hours unrolling bolts of material for me, urging me to consider another, and yet another. A pattern for matching? Why, yes! And instead of the strip two inches wide which I was expecting, lengths big enough to make a bedspread were procured for me. For about a month I believe I could have furnished a whole house on credit, not because I was looking different, not because I could, in fact, afford it; simply because, for the first time in my life and for no very solid reason, I was feeling carefree about money. I learnt a great deal about the power of mood during that month.

  The second happening was of more consequence. This plenty was the result of competent judges preferring my story to several thousand others, and my story was something I had done spontaneously, for the pleasure of it; something as much a part of me as the colour of my eyes. To have written one story considered good does not amount to much, but it does amount to something: it is not failure. It would be an absurd exaggeration to say that for twenty years I had been unhappy – I had enjoyed many things, and for most of the later years I had been contented enough – but it is the exact truth to say that if, at any minute during those years I had been asked to think about it, made to stop doing whatever was distracting me and pass judgment on my own life, I should have said without hesitation that failure was its essence. I had never really wanted anything but the most commonplace satisfactions of a woman’s life, and those, which I had wanted passionately, I had failed to achieve. That I would have answered in such a way is not speculation. I did answer exactly that, to myself, over and over again, in the minutes before falling asleep, in the worse minutes of waking up, when I was walking down a street, when I looked up from a book, while I was stirring scrambled eggs in a pan. The knowledge was my familiar companion. It had been, at first, hot coals of pain and grief, and had later grown cold; but cold though it had become, its lumpy presence had still been there. My only pride had been that having by nature an easy disposition, and a fund of pleasure in life stored up from a happy childhood and youth, I was good at living with failure. I did not think that it had turned me disagreeable or mad, and that I considered an achievement.

  And now something which did not go against my grain, something which was as natural to me as love, had worked. I believe that even had I never written another word, the success of that story alone would have begun to dissolve the lumps. Bury me, dear friends, with a copy of the Observer folded under my head, for it was the Observer’s prize that woke me up to the fact that I had become happy.

  It is surely important to make a few notes on that rare condition, happiness, now that I am in it. It began when I started to write, was fanned into a glorious glow when I won that prize, was confirmed when, soon afterwards, I began to love, and it shows no sign of altering.

  A symptom of life: opening my eyes in the morning to wakefulness. The long hours of unconsciousness which I used to treasure are now meaningless. Even on Sundays I will sleep for no more than eight hours unless I am unusually and genuinely tired.

  A symptom of life: not caring much where I live. Single women can root themselves in their rooms, their furniture, their ornaments, so that not to have the right things about them in the right order becomes intolerable to them. I love rooms and objects and materials; I love to choose them and to arrange them, and when – rarely – I have done it well, I am snug and satisfied. But I attach less importance to it now than I used to. Recently, being between flats, I have been camping here and there with friends, and once in a place which was everything I dislike. I expected to be uneasy and discontented, but found that while there was a table to write on, a stove to cook on, and a bed, I was at home.

  A symptom of life: people saying ‘What has happened to her? She looks so well,’ or ‘She looks so young.’ My own sensation of physical well-being is perceptible to other people. ‘She might be twenty-five,’ said a woman in her seventies, and even allowing for the telescoping of the years when seen from that age, which would make thirty-five more accurate than twenty-five, some degree of physical rejuvenation is suggested. If it exists, it corresponds to an inward change towards the years. I was twenty-three when I began to be aware of ageing as somethin
g sad. While I had Paul every year passing carried me towards something better than I had hitherto known, possibilities proliferated, anything might happen to me. When I had accepted his disappearance the years became slow steps downhill. Common sense forbade me to consider myself old while still in my twenties, but I felt old, and once past my thirtieth birthday I began to accept the feeling as rational. Most of my thirties were overshadowed, when I allowed myself to notice it, not only by my forties but by my old age: by a sense that there was nothing ahead but old age, by an awareness of the disabilities of old age, a shrinking when I watched an old person stepping carefully, painfully on to the curb of a pavement, or noticed the round, puzzled eyes of old-age pensioners sitting on a bench in the sun, looking baffled by what had happened to them. Now that I am, in fact, several years nearer to them, have my first grey hairs, a neck less smooth and a waist considerably less slim – can observe in my own body the clear indications of time passing and know that they are there for good, not as a sign of a physical condition that could be cured – I have, perversely, stopped feeling old. The process of ageing is undeniable, but it no longer touches an exposed nerve. Being happy has made it unimportant.

  This is because the present has become real. No one can be detached from his past, but anyone can come to see it as being past, and when that happens one is partly liberated from its consequences. I cannot only see mine as being past, but have become indifferent to it. Then is less real than now, and now has become potent enough to shape the future, who knows how, so that the future is no longer an immutable threat. Nothing is immutable: that is the thing. My condition has changed – even, to a small extent, my nature has changed – so possibilities exist again.

  The sensation of happiness itself is one for which I have only a physical vocabulary: warmth, expansion, floating, opening, relaxation. This was so from its beginning, and has become more so with its confirmation in love. Unintellectual, unspiritual as I am, I have always identified closely with my body: for most of the time I am it and it is me. What happens to me physically is therefore of great importance to my general condition – a disposition threatening serious problems in illness or old age, but conducive to an especial happiness in love. To split the relationship of love into ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ is something which I cannot do. Making love is not a fugitive good, contained only in the time in which it is being done: it is, each time, an addition, an expansion of a whole happiness. I have never in the past known it to be quite wiped out by subsequent events, and I know that it will not be wiped out now. This final way of communication is one of the things which, like my feeling for Beckton and Oxford, I know to be stored in me: a good which I have experienced, which enters into and is entered by everything I see and hear and feel and smell, and of which I can only be deprived by the decay of consciousness. That when two people have lived together for several years their lovemaking loses its value is, in most cases, obvious, and I should expect it to do so with me: I should expect that only if the man I was living with and I were really as well suited as we had first believed would the habit of companionship and interdependence successfully supersede physical delight. But I do not see that this would discredit physical delight. If it exists, it will always have existed. Now, therefore, that it exists again for me, I am by that much richer to the end of my days.

  So happiness, followed by love and increased by it, has for me the colour of physical pleasure although it embraces many other things and although it seems to me to mean something larger than my own emotions and sensations. This is a period in which many people are concerned with the difficulty of communication. Poetry, novels, plays, paintings: they emphasize this theme so constantly that anyone who feels that human beings can communicate is beginning to look naïve. But what is meeting a man from a different country, a different tradition, a different social and economic background, and finding that you and he can both speak about anything exactly as you feel, in perfect confidence of understanding even if not of agreement, if it is not communication? The discovery of trust and easiness which comes with such a meeting is another, and greater, enduring good.

  On the face of it this love is of the same kind as others I have known and is no more likely to lead to a permanent companionship. I must take my own word for it that it is not the same. It does not feel the same. Then, with a sort of despairing joy, I used to jump off cliffs into expected disaster; now, hardly knowing what I was doing, I slipped off a smooth rock into clear, warm water.

  I have come to have a horror of many of the states to which human beings give the name of love – a horror at the sight of them, and at the knowledge that I have been in them. I feel like André Gide, when he wrote in So Be It, ‘There are many sufferings I claim to be imaginary … few things interest me less than so-called broken hearts and sentimental affairs.’ Gide, poor man, was not well equipped to talk about love, split as he knew himself to be between physical and mental to such an extent that both were crippled. (I know of no more striking example of the dependence of style on honesty than his descriptions of relationships with boys. Trying to write most honestly, he is betrayed by the sudden, tinny ring of his words because he is not writing honestly. He is persuading himself that a sick greed had beauty. I would have been prepared to believe that it did have beauty if it were not for the timbre of those sentences.) But the old man’s impatience with sad love stories contains much truth. Hunger, possessiveness, self-pity, the stubborn obsession to impose on another being the image we ourselves have fabricated: good God, the torments human beings are impelled to inflict on themselves and each other!

  I am frightened by my own arrogance in saying that now, because I had stopped expecting to love and had therefore almost stopped wanting to love, I love; but that is what it feels like. I do not want the man I love to be other than he is; I want more of his time and presence than he is free to give me, but not much more. I want him to exist as himself, without misfortune or unhappiness. Perhaps this is because I am too old and fixed in my habits to want anything more, or perhaps I am deceiving myself. If I am telling the truth – I must reread this in ten years’ time! – I shall have been justified in calling my present condition happiness.

  I do not think that I have become more agreeable for it. My relationship with other people has changed: they have, with one exception, become less important to me. In a sad or neutral condition I pored over my friends’ lives almost to the extent of living them vicariously, whereas now I am more detached, particularly from their misfortunes. I have one friend, a woman, who is bound by some flaw in her nature to uncertainty and confusion so that she has rarely been able to know the rewards which her beauty, intelligence, and generous ways ought to have earned her. There have been times in the past when I was so concerned for her that I would lie awake puzzling her problems in real distress, but now, although I am still sorry for them, they no longer attack my own peace of mind. This increased selfishness both dismays and pleases me: dismays, because it is disagreeable to see in oneself so clear a demonstration of the limitations of sympathy; pleases, because I have suspected the motives of the concern I used to feel. A fictional character who has always made me uneasy is Sonia, in War and Peace – humble, unselfish Sonia, abdicating from her own claims on life, identifying so thoroughly with the Rostovs that their lives were substituted for hers. Tolstoy need do no more than present Sonia without comment to show that in spite of her virtues he dismisses her as a person incomplete, a failed human being. His attitude towards her has always made me wince: it is the right attitude, and there have been times when I myself was near deserving it. To grasp greedily is detestable; to abdicate is despicable. When unhappy, I have veered towards the despicable rather than the detestable, and if vanity must choose between the two evils, whose vanity would not prefer to be detested rather than despised?

  In these circumstances happiness will, of course, end, in so far as it depends on a relationship. Or if not ‘of course’, then ‘probably’. I have been puzzled becau
se, in foreseeing this probability, I remain sure that I am not ‘expecting disaster’ as I used to do when I fell in love. If the man I love were to stop loving me, or were to go away, there would certainly be an eclipse of joy at first total: I should have a bad time to go through. Am I so far from being frightened by this only because I can see no reason why such a thing should happen soon? Is it because, growing old, I am used to the thought of the losses which come with age, so that I would see such a loss as just another of them? Or is it because I happen to trust the relationship as one in which no mystification is likely to enter (the worst part of Paul’s disappearance was the silence)? No doubt these things contribute to my lack of ‘disaster-expectation’, but there is something else as well. It is embarrassing to revert to my writing when it still amounts to so little – to hardly more than a private satisfaction – but I believe that it is the impulse to write which underlies my peace of mind. If I ask myself, ‘So what will become of me if that happens?’ the answer is, ‘I will be all right after a time. I will go on writing.’ And because I can say that, I can live in the present with nothing but gratitude for and joy in what it offers.