Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  We have now reached the second of my two shocking failures as an editor (I don’t intend ever to confess the other one). From the professional point of view there was no question as to what I ought to do: this was one of our most valuable authors; even if his book had been really bad rather than just flawed we would certainly have published it in the expectation that he would soon be back on form; so what I must say was ‘wonderful’ and damn well sound as though I meant it.

  Instead I sat there muttering: ‘Oh my God, what am I going to say to him?’ I had never lied to him – I kept reminding myself of that, disregarding the fact that I had never before needed to lie. ‘If I lie now, how will he be able to trust me in the future when I praise something?’ The obvious answer to that was that if I lied convincingly he would never know that I had done it, but this did not occur to me. After what seemed to me like hours of sincere angst I ended by persuading myself that I ‘owed it to our friendship’ to tell him what I truly thought.

  Nothing practical would be gained. A beginner writer sometimes makes mistakes which he can remedy if they are pointed out, but a novelist of Vidia’s quality and experience who produces an unconvincing character has suffered a lapse of imagination about which nothing can be done. It happened to Dickens whenever he attempted a good woman; it happened to George Eliot with Daniel Deronda. And as for my own attitude – I had often seen through other people who insisted on telling the truth about a friend’s shortcomings: I knew that their motives were usually suspect. But my own were as invisible to me as a cuttlefish becomes when it saturates the surrounding water with ink.

  So I told him. I began by saying how much I admired the many things in the book which I did admire, and then I said that I had to tell him (had to tell him!) that two of his three central characters had failed to convince me. It was like saying to Conrad ‘Lord Jim is a very fine novel except that Jim doesn’t quite come off’.

  Vidia looked disconcerted, then stood up and said quietly that he was sorry they didn’t work for me, because he had done the best he could with them, there was nothing more he could do, so there was no point in discussing it. As he left the room I think I muttered something about its being a splendid book all the same, after which I felt a mixture of relief at his appearing to be sorry rather than angry, and a slight (only slight!) sense of let-down and silliness. And I supposed that was that.

  The next day Vidia’s agent called André to say that he had been instructed to retrieve Guerrillas because we had lost confidence in Vidia’s writing and therefore he was leaving us.

  André must have fought back because there was nothing he hated more than losing an author, but the battle didn’t last long. Although I believe I was named, André was kind enough not to blame me. Nor did I blame myself. I went into a rage. I fulminated to myself, my colleagues, my friends: ‘All those years of friendship, and a mere dozen words of criticism – a mere dozen words! – send him flouncing out in a tantrum like some hysterical prima donna!’ I had long and scathing conversations with him in my head; but more satisfying was a daydream of being at a huge and important party, seeing him enter the room, turning on my heel and walking out.

  For at least two weeks I seethed … and then, in the third week, it suddenly occurred to me that never again would I have to listen to Vidia telling me how damaged he was, and it was as though the sun came out. I didn’t have to like Vidia any more! I could still like his work, I could still be sorry for his pain; but I no longer faced the task of fashioning affection out of these elements in order to deal as a good editor should with the exhausting, and finally tedious, task of listening to his woe. ‘Do you know what,’ I said to André, ‘I’ve begun to see that it’s a release.’ (Rather to my surprise, he laughed.) I still, however, failed to see that my editorial ‘mistake’ had been an act of aggression. In fact I went on failing to see that for years.

  Guerrillas was sold to Secker & Warburg the day after it left us.

  A month or so after this I went into André’s office to discuss something and his phone rang before I had opened my mouth. This always happened. Usually I threw myself back in my chair with a groan, then reached for something to read, but this time I jumped up and grabbed the extension. ‘Why – Vidia!’ he had said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Vidia was speaking from Trinidad, his voice tense: André must call his agent at once and tell him to recover the manuscript of Guerrillas from Secker & Warburg and deliver it to us.

  André, who was uncommonly good at rising to unexpected occasions, became instantly fatherly. Naturally, he said, he would be delighted to get the book back, but Vidia must not act too impetuously: whatever had gone wrong might well turn out to be less serious that he now felt. This was Thursday. What Vidia must do was think it over very carefully without taking action until Monday. Then, if he still wanted to come back to us, he must call his agent, not André, listen to his advice, and if that failed to change his mind, instruct him to act. André would be waiting for the agent’s call on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, hoping – of course – that it would be good news for us.

  Which – of course – it was. My private sun did go back behind a film of cloud, but in spite of that there was satisfaction in knowing that he thought himself better off with us than with them, and I had no doubt of the value of whatever books were still to come.

  Vidia never said why he bolted from Secker’s, but his agent told André that it was because when they announced Guerrillas in their catalogue they described him as ‘the West Indian novelist’.

  The books still to come were, indeed, worth having (though the last of them was his least important): India, a Wounded Civilization, The Return of Eva Perón, Among the Believers, A Bend in the River and Finding the Centre. I had decided that the only thing to do was to behave exactly as I had always done in our pre-Guerrillas working relationship, while quietly cutting down our extracurricular friendship, and he apparently felt the same. The result was a smooth passage, less involving but less testing than it used to be. Nobody else knew – and I myself was unaware of it until I came to look back – that having resolved never again to utter a word of criticism to Vidia, I was guilty of an absurd pettiness. In Among the Believers, a book which I admired very much, there were two minor points to which in the past I would have drawn his attention, and I refrained from doing so: thus betraying, though luckily only to my retrospecting self, that I was still hanging on to my self-righteous interpretation of the Guerrillas incident. Vidia would certainly not have ‘flounced out like some hysterical prima donna’ over matters so trivial. One was a place where he seemed to draw too sweeping a conclusion from too slight an event and could probably have avoided giving that impression by some quite small adjustment; and the other was that when an Iranian speaking English said ‘sheep’ Vidia, misled by his accent, thought he said ‘ship’, which made some dialogue as he reported it sound puzzling. To keep mum about that! There is nothing like self-deception for making one ridiculous.

  When Vidia really did leave us in 1984 I could see why – and even why he did so in a way which seemed unkind, without a word of warning or explanation. He had come to the conclusion that André Deutsch Limited was going downhill. It was true. The recession, combined with a gradual but relentless shrinkage in the readership of books such as those we published, was well on the way to making firms of our size and kind unviable; and André had lost his vigour and flair. His decision to sell the firm, which more or less coincided with Vidia’s departure, was made (so he felt and told me) because publishing was ‘no fun any more’, but it was equally a matter of his own slowly failing health. The firm continued for ten years or so under Tom Rosenthal, chuntering not-so-slowly downwards all the time (Tom had been running Secker’s when they called Vidia a West Indian, so his appearance on the scene did nothing to change Vidia’s mind).

  A writer of reputation can always win an even bigger advance than he is worth by allowing himself to be tempted away from publisher A by publisher B, an
d publisher B will then have to try extra hard on his behalf to justify the advance: it makes sense to move on if you time it right. And if you perceive that there is something going seriously wrong with publisher A you would be foolish not to do so. And having decided to go, how could you look in the eye someone you have known for over twenty years, of whom you have been really quite fond, and tell him ‘I’m leaving because you are getting past it’? Of course you could not. Vidia’s agent managed to conceal from André what Vidia felt, but André suspected something: he told me that he thought it was something to do with himself and that he couldn’t get it out of the agent, but perhaps I might have better luck. I called the agent and asked him if there was any point in my getting in touch with Vidia, and he – in considerable embarrassment – told me the truth; whereupon I could only silently agree with Vidia’s silence, and tell poor André that I’d been so convincingly assured of the uselessness of any further attempt to change Vidia’s mind that we had better give up.

  So this leaving did not make me angry, or surprised, or even sad, except for André’s sake. Vidia was doing what he had to do, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that we had enjoyed the best of him, anyway. And when many years later Mordecai Richler (in at the story’s end, oddly enough, as well as its beginning) told me that he had recently met Vidia with his new wife and had been pleased to see that he was ‘amazingly jolly’, I was very glad indeed.

  * Since writing this I have read the letters which Vidia and his father exchanged while Vidia was at Oxford. Letters Between a Father and Son fully reveals the son’s loneliness and misery, and makes the self he was able to present to the world even more extraordinary.

  * Only one of his father’s letters refers to anyone of African descent – and that one letter is frantically agitated: a niece has started to date a man half-Indian, half-African; how should he deal with this frightful event?

  MOLLY KEANE

  I KNOW THAT I have sometimes been described as ‘one of the best editors in London’, and I can’t deny that it has given me pleasure; but I also know how little I had to do to earn this reputation beyond routine work and being agreeable to interesting people. And another example of this is my dealings with the person I liked best among those I came to know on the job: the Irish novelist Molly Keane.

  It is common knowledge that after establishing herself in her youth as a novelist and playwright, Molly went silent for over thirty years and was ‘rediscovered’ in 1981 when André Deutsch Limited published Good Behaviour. Because I was her editor I was often congratulated on this ‘rediscovery’ – which is nonsense. We got the book by pure luck.

  The person who persuaded Molly to offer it for publication was Peggy Ashcroft, who had remained a close friend of hers since acting in one of her plays, and who said one day, when staying with her, how sad it was that she had stopped writing. Molly told her that she had recently started again and had a novel which she was unsure about tucked away in a drawer. Peggy insisted on taking it to bed with her that night, and as a result of her enthusiasm Molly sent it to Ian Parsons of Chatto & Windus. That was where our good luck began: Ian didn’t like it. Worse mistakes have been made – publishers often used to console themselves by remembering that André Gide, reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, turned it down … although if you envisage that enormous manuscript, and discovering that many of its sentences are as long as most people’s paragraphs, that mistake was perhaps less odd than failing to respond to a novel as accessible as Good Behaviour.

  Our next stroke of luck was that Molly then chose Gina Pollinger as her agent. Gina had been an editor before she married into agenting, and her last job as such had been with us. When she called me to say that she had just read something she loved, and felt sure I would love it too, I was hearing from someone whose taste I knew and respected, rather than listening to a sales spiel, so naturally I read the book at once – and it happened that I, unlike Ian Parsons, had not fallen on my head. So much for being Molly’s rediscoverer.

  Molly did usually need a little editing because she could get into muddles about timing – make, for instance, an event happen after an interval of two years when something in the text revealed that at least three years must have passed – and she had little tricks of phrasing, such as describing a person’s interests as her ‘importances’, which she sometimes overdid. (Such tricks are part of a writer’s ‘voice’, so it is usually best to leave some of them in – but not enough of them to be annoying.) She was always glad to have such things pointed out, and she was equally co-operative over the only big question that needed solving in the course of her last three novels.

  This occurred in Good Behaviour, at a point where a small English boy is discovered hiding up a tree in order to read poetry, which causes his extremely upper-class parents to go into paroxysms of dismay. At that point Molly’s sense of comedy had taken the bit between its teeth and bolted, carrying the story off into the realm of the grotesque. It was wildly funny, but funny in a way at odds with the rest of the book so that it fractured its surface. I asked her to cool it, which she did. She was always ‘splendidly cooperative to work with’, as John Gielgud was to say in a letter to the Daily Telegraph after her death, remembering the days when he directed the four plays which she wrote in the thirties.

  He also paid a warm tribute to her charm and wit, adding that ‘she was endlessly painstaking and industrious’ – slightly surprising words applied to someone as sparkly as Molly, but they do catch the absence of pretentiousness in her attitude to her work. Her background was that of the Irish landed gentry, whose daughters were lucky, in her day, if they got more than a scrappy education. Not that most of them, including Molly, were likely to clamour for more, since horses and men interested them far more than anything else; but Molly had come to feel the lack and it made her humble: she needed to be convinced that she was a good writer.

  She was well aware, however, that Good Behaviour was different from the eleven early novels which she had written under the pen-name M. J. Farrell – a pen-name because who would want to dance with a girl so brainy that she wrote books? (You probably need to have had a ‘county’ upbringing fully to feel the withering effect of that adjective: ‘You’re the brainy one, aren’t you?’ It still makes me flinch.) Molly always said that she wrote the early books simply for money, because her parents couldn’t afford to give her a dress allowance – though the verve of the writing suggests that she must have enjoyed doing it. Good Behaviour, on the other hand, had insisted on being written. She described it as a book that ‘truly interested and involved’ her: ‘Black comedy, perhaps, but with some of the truth in it, and the pity I feel for the kind of people I lived with and laughed with in the happy maligned thirties.’ She said that she dropped the pen-name because so much time had gone by; but in fact she took a lot of urging, and left me with the impression that she finally agreed because she had allowed herself to be persuaded that this one was the real thing.

  The reason why Good Behaviour is so gripping is that Molly brings off something much cleverer than she had ever attempted before: she manoeuvres her readers into collaboration. Her narrator, Aroon St Charles, the large, clumsy daughter of a remote and elegant little mother who finds her painfully boring, tells us everything she sees – and often fails to understand what she is telling. It is up to us, the readers, to do the understanding – most crucially concerning Aroon’s beloved brother Hubert and the friend he brings home from Cambridge, Richard Massingham (once the little boy who read poetry up a tree). Aroon has never heard of homosexuality, because the rules of Good Behaviour are the rules of behaving ‘as if’. You may be afraid but you must behave as if you were brave; you may be poor but you must behave as if you can afford things; your husband may be randy but you must behave as if he wasn’t; embarrassing things such as men falling in love with men may happen, but you must behave as if they don’t. How could Aroon, who doesn’t read and has few friends, know anything about being gay? But in spite of a
ll the ‘as iffing’, her father starts to feel uneasy about the two young men, they become alarmed – and Hubert has a brilliant idea: Richard must start behaving as though he were courting Aroon. He must even go into her bedroom one night, and make sure that her father hears him leaving it … We hear nothing of all this but what Aroon tells us: that Richard does this, and Richard does that, so surely he must like her – must even be finding her attractive – must love her! After he has been to her room we see her half-sensing that something is wrong (his Respecting her Virginity is acceptable, but there is something about his manner …). And we see her, very soon, working herself into a blissful daze of happiness at having a lover. And all the time, as though we were observant guests in the house, we can see what is really going on. It is powerfully involving, and it continues throughout the book: at one point thirty pages go by before we are allowed a flash of understanding (the family lawyer has made a tentative pass at Aroon, which seems a bit odd – until the times comes, as it would do in ‘real life’, when one exclaims ‘But of course! He knew what was in her father’s will!’).

  Molly called this book ‘black comedy’, and comic it often is – brilliantly so. She is studying tribal behaviour, and no one could hit off its absurdities to better effect. But its strength comes from her fierce, sad knowledge of what underlies Good Behaviour, and is crippled by it; and she once told me something about herself which struck me as the seed from which this novel’s power grew.

  Molly’s husband Robert Keane died in his thirties, with appalling suddenness, when they were visiting London with their two little daughters, having a very good time. He became violently ill so that he had to be rushed to hospital, but once he was there everything seemed to be under control, so she went back to the children for the night, worried but not really frightened. During the night the telephone rang. It was the hospital matron, who said: ‘Mrs Keane, you must be brave. Your husband is dead.’ Molly had friends in London, but they were busy theatre friends, and she was seized at once by the thought ‘I must not be a nuisance. I must not make scenes’ – the quintessential Good Behaviour reaction. And some time during those terrible first days her eldest daughter, Sally, who was six, clutched her hand and said: ‘Mummy, we mustn’t cry, we mustn’t cry.’