Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  And Molly never did cry. Forty years later, telling me that, her voice took on a tone of forlorn incredulity. There was, indeed, nothing she didn’t know about her tribe’s concept of good behaviour, in all its gallantry, absurdity and cruelty.

  The part of the novel which calls most directly on her personal experience of clamping down on pain is so quietly handled that I believe it sometimes escapes quick readers. On their way back to Cambridge in Richard’s car the boys are involved in a crash and Hubert is killed. It is easy to see that when the news comes his stricken parents behave impeccably according to their lights: no scenes, not a tear – the deep chill of sorrow evident only in the rigidity of their adherence to the forms of normality. But there comes a day when Aroon can’t resist pretending to her father that Richard truly was her lover and he says ‘Well, thank God’ which puzzles her a little; but his leaving her rather suddenly to visit the young horses down on the bog (so he says) ends their talk. And on that same day her mother has gone out, carrying a little bunch of cyclamen, and Aroon has wondered where she is off to. And it never occurs to her that both parents are slipping off to visit Hubert’s grave in secret; that only guiltily can they allow their broken hearts this indulgence. That her father is felled by a stroke in the graveyard, not the bog, and that her mother, who comes screaming back to the house in search of help, was there with him … in the commotion and horror of it all Aroon makes no comment on this, and again it is left to the reader to understand.

  It is impossible for someone of great natural charm to remain unaware of the effect he or she has on others, which makes the gift a dangerous one: the ability to get away with murder demands to be exploited, and over-exploited charm can be less attractive than charmlessness. Molly Keane was remarkable in being both one of the most charming people I ever met, and an entirely successful escaper from that attendant danger.

  Of course she knew how winning she could be. She once said to me: ‘When I was young I’m afraid I used to sing for my supper,’ meaning that when she first met people more interesting and sophisticated than her own family she won herself a warm welcome, in spite of being neither pretty nor well-dressed, by her funniness and charm. She needed to do this because she was too intelligent for her background and her mother had made her feel an ugly duckling, and a delinquent one at that (probably, like many unloved children, she did respond by being tiresome from her parents’ point of view). Being taken up by people who were charmed by her was her salvation, and winning them over did not end by making her unspontaneous or manipulative because her clear sight, sensitivity, honesty and generosity were even stronger than her charm. By the time I knew her, when she was in her seventies, she would occasionally resort to ‘turning it on’ in order to get through an interview or some fatiguing public occasion, and very skilfully she did it; but otherwise she was always more interested in what was happening around her, and in the people she was meeting, than she was in the impression she was making, so even on a slight acquaintance it was the woman herself one saw, not a mask, and the woman was lovable.

  In spite of liking her so much I have to consider my acquaintance with her as less than a friendship, properly speaking. Someone in her seventies with two daughters to love, a wide circle of acquaintances and an unusually large number of true and intimate friends of long standing, hasn’t much room in her life for new close friends. I see that only too clearly now that I have overtaken the age Molly had reached when we met: one feels almost regretful on recognizing exceptionally congenial qualities in a newly met person, because one knows one no longer has the energy to clear an adequate space for them. When Molly and I exchanged letters about her work I was always tempted by her image in my mind to run on into gossip and jokes, while hers were quick scrawls about the matter under discussion; and enjoyable though our meetings were when she came to London, they didn’t much advance the intimacy between us, and I sometimes thought I discerned in them a courteously disguised distaste for an important aspect of my life: the fact that I live with a black man. Molly was well aware of how others could see attitudes belonging to her background and generation, such as disliking left-wing politics and mixed marriages; but an attitude is not necessarily quite expunged by knowing that it is not respectable.

  Only once did I spend more than a meal-time with her. We gave a launching party for Good Behaviour in Dublin, I decided to take my car over and stay on for a ten-day holiday, and Molly invited me to stay with her for (I thought) the weekend at the start of the holiday. After the party I drove her to her home in Ardmore, and learnt on the way that she had arranged parties for me on every day of the coming week and had told a friend that she was bringing me to stay with him for two nights at the end of it. At first I was slightly dismayed by this unexpected abundance of hospitality, but I was soon enjoying every minute of it.

  Partly this was because of the difference between Counties Cork and Waterford and my native East Anglia. Most of the people we met were the Irish equivalent of my family’s friends: country gentlefolk preoccupied with hunting, shooting, farming, gardening … the very people I had escaped from (so I had felt, fond though I was of many of them) when I moved on from Oxford to earn my living in London. Had I been faced with a week of parties given by Norfolk people of that kind who were strangers to me I would have seen it as a grim ordeal by boredom – and it would have been pretty boring because my hosts, given the tedious duty of entertaining a foreign body, and I as the reluctant victim of their hospitality, would between us have erected an impenetrable wall of polite small-talk from which eventually both sides would have retreated in a state of exhaustion. But in Ireland … much as I distrust generalizations about national characteristics, there’s no denying that most Irish people are more articulate than the English, appearing to see talk as a positive pleasure rather than a tiresome necessity. I don’t suppose I shared many more interests with my Irish hosts than I would have done with English ones (although I did know quite a lot about theirs) – but they were so much more lively and witty, and so much readier to start or to follow a new trail, than the people among whom I was raised, that whether or not interests were shared didn’t seem to matter. All the parties were thoroughly enjoyable.

  They were given an appetizing touch of spice by the stories Molly told on the way to them about the people we were going to meet, which were splendidly indiscreet. If she disliked someone she either kept silent or spoke briefly with indignant disapproval; with the rest she rejoiced in their follies, if follies they displayed, but as a fascinated observer rather than a censorious judge. Perhaps novelists are so often good at gossip because – like God with forgiveness – c’est leur métier.

  On one of those drives she gave me a gleeful glimpse of local standards of literary criticism. An elderly neighbour, blue-blooded but rustic in her ways (I gathered that she usually kept her gumboots on and her false teeth out) had said to her: ‘I read your book, Molly, and I absolutely hated it – but I must say that it was very well written. I didn’t find a single spelling mistake.’

  The drives, and the time spent alone with Molly in her house tucked into the hillside overlooking Ardmore and its bay, were even better than the parties. She was an exquisitely kind and considerate hostess, but it wasn’t that which made the visit so memorable. It was the extent to which Molly was alive to everything around her – to the daughters she worried about and adored, the people she knew, the events she remembered, her garden, the food she cooked, the problems and satisfactions of writing. And it was also the fact that day by day I became more aware of the qualities she kept hidden: her courage, her unselfishness – simply her goodness.

  The chief difference, it seems to me, between the person who is lucky enough to possess the ability to create – whether with words or sound or pigment or wood or whatever – and those who haven’t got it, is that the former react to experience directly and each in his own way, while the latter are less ready to trust their own responses and often prefer to make use of those generally a
greed to be acceptable by their friends and relations. And while the former certainly include by far the greater proportion of individuals who would be difficult to live with, they also include a similarly large proportion of individuals who are exciting or disturbing or amusing or inspiring to know. And Molly, in addition to having charm and being good, was also a creator.

  I am glad, therefore, that our last exchange of letters was about her writing, and not just one of general well-wishing (as they had been for some years, since she became seriously ill with heart trouble). I had just reread Good Behaviour for some forgotten reason, and on meeting Molly’s daughter Virginia as we walked our dogs, had told her how greatly I had re-enjoyed it. Virginia urged me to write and tell Molly, saying that although the worst of her depression at being weak and helpless had lifted, she still needed cheering up. So I wrote her a long letter about why I love that book so much, and also her last book, Loving and Giving, and said that although I knew she was downcast at not having been able to write another book, she surely must acknowledge that what she had done had been marvellously well done – that her writing had, in fact, won laurels on which anyone should be proud to rest. She replied that my letter had done her good and had lifted her depression about her writing ‘right off the ground’, then went on to say very sweetly how much she valued my opinion, ending with words which I knew to be valedictory, of such generosity that I can only treasure them.

  I feel a real loss at losing your company. I shan’t get to London again and I’m too weak and foolish to ask you to come here. But we have had many good moments together and you have done everything for my books – think what that has meant to me, to my life. With my love and thanks. Molly

  By ‘doing everything’ for her books she meant that if we had not published Good Behaviour, Time After Time and Loving and Giving, her earlier books would not have been reissued in paperback by Virago. The real originator of this sequence (not counting Ian Parsons) was Gina Pollinger, as I am sure Molly recognized and must have acknowledged with a similar generosity and more reason; but I do still get great satisfaction from remembering that Molly’s reappearance under our imprint brought her serious recognition as a writer, and also put an end to the money problems that had harassed her throughout her long widowhood. I do think of it, as she bade me, and it makes me happy. Remembering that outcome, and the pleasure of knowing her, is a good way to end this book.

  POSTSCRIPT

  HAVING SEEN ANDRé Deutsch Limited fade out, why am I not sadder than I am?

  I suppose it is because, although I have often shaken my head over symptoms of change in British publishing such as lower standards of copy-preparation and proofreading, I cannot feel that they are crucial. It is, of course, true that reading is going the same way as eating, the greatest demand being for the quick and easy, and for the simple, instantly recognizable flavours such as sugar and vinegar, or their mental equivalents; but that is not the terminal tragedy which it sometimes seems to the disgruntled old. It is not, after all, a new development: quick and easy has always been what the majority wants. The difference between my early days in publishing and the present is not that this common desire has come into being, but that it is now catered for more lavishly than it used to be. And that is probably because the grip on our trade of a particular caste has begun to relax.

  Of that caste I am a member: one of the mostly London-dwelling, university-educated, upper-middle-class English people who took over publishing towards the end of the nineteenth century from the booksellers who used to run it. Most of us loved books and genuinely tried to understand the differences between good and bad writing; but I suspect that if we were examined from a god’s-eye viewpoint it would be seen that quite often our ‘good’ was good only according to the notions of the caste. Straining for that god’s-eye view, I sometimes think that not a few of the books I once took pleasure in publishing were pretty futile, and that the same was true of other houses. Two quintessentially ‘caste’ writers, one from the less pretentious end of the scale, the other from its highest reaches, were Angela Thirkell and Virginia Woolf. Thirkell is embarrassing – I always knew that, but would have published her, given the chance, because she was so obviously a seller. And Woolf, whom I revered in my youth, now seems almost more embarrassing because the claims made for her were so high. Not only did she belong to the caste, but she was unable to see beyond its boundaries – and that self-consciously ‘beautiful’ writing, all those adjectives – oh dear! Caste standards – it ought not to need saying – have no right to be considered sacrosanct.

  Keeping that in mind is a useful specific against melancholy; and even better is the fact that there are plenty of people about who are making a stand against too much quick-and-easy. The speed with which the corners of supermarkets devoted to organic produce are growing into long shelves is remarkable; and there are still publishers – not many, but some – who are more single-mindedly determined to support serious writing than we ever were.

  I have just visited one: the first time in seven years that I have set foot in a publisher’s office. It astonished me: how familiar it was, the way I knew what was happening behind its doors … and how much I loved it. ‘It’s still there!’ I said to myself; and on the way home I saw that by ‘it’ I meant not only publishing of a kind I recognized, but something even more reassuring: being young. Old people don’t want to mop and mow, but age has a blinkering effect, and their narrowed field of vision often contains things that are going from bad to worse; it is therefore consoling to be reminded that much exists outside that narrow field, just as it did when we were forty or thirty or twenty.

  Finding myself not gravely distressed by the way publishing is changing seems reasonable enough. I am harder put to understand how anyone can feel in their bones, as I can, that life is worth living when every day we see such alarming evidence that a lot of it is unacceptable: that idiocy and cruelty, far from being brought to heel by human ingenuity, are as rampant as ever. I suppose the answer lies in something of which that small publishing house is a part.

  Years ago, in a pub near Baker Street, I heard a man say that humankind is seventy per cent brutish, thirty per cent intelligent, and though the thirty per cent is never going to win, it will always be able to leaven the mass just enough to keep us going. That rough and ready assessment of our plight has stayed with me as though it were true, given that one takes ‘intelligence’ to mean not just intellectual agility, but whatever it is in beings that makes for readiness to understand, to look for the essence in other beings and things and events, to respect that essence, to collaborate, to discover, to endure when endurance is necessary, to enjoy: briefly, to co-exist. It does, alas, seem likely that sooner or later, either through our own folly or a collision with some wandering heavenly body, we will all vanish in the wake of the dinosaurs; but until that happens I believe that the yeast of intelligence will continue to operate one way or another.

  Even if it operates in vain, it remains evolution’s peak (as far as we can see): something to enjoy and foster as much as possible; something not to betray by succumbing to despair, however deep the many pits of darkness. It even seems to me possible dimly to perceive it as belonging not to a particular planet, but to universal laws of being, potentially present anywhere in the universe where the kind of physical (or should it be chemical?) conditions prevail which kindle life out of dust: an aspect of something which human beings have called by the various names of god, because having no name for it made them feel dizzy.

  In the microscopic terms of my own existence, believing this means that in spite of reading the newspapers, and in spite of seeing the sad end of André’s brave endeavour, and in spite of losing a considerable part of my youth to heartbreak, I wake up every morning liking being here. (I apologize to André, and to my young self, for being able to dismiss so lightly events which were once so painfully heavy.) I also wake up knowing that I have been extraordinarily lucky, and a good chunk of that luck came with the j
ob. When I was moved to scribble ‘Stet’ against the time I spent being an editor it was because it gave so many kinds of enlargement, interest, amusement and pleasure to my days. It was a job on the side of the thirty per cent.

  SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END

  1

  NEAR THE PARK which my bedroom overlooks there came to stay a family which owned a pack of pugs, five or six of them, active little dogs, none of them overweight as pugs so often are. I saw them recently on their morning walk, and they caused me a pang. I have always wanted a pug and now I can’t have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair. There are dog-walkers, of course; but the best part of owning a dog is walking with it, enjoying its delight when it detects the signs that a walk is imminent, and its glee when its lead is unsnapped and it can bound off over the grass, casting cheerful looks back at you from time to time to make sure that you are still in touch. Our own dog is as old in dog years as I am in human ones (mine amount to eighty-nine), and wants no more than the little potter I can still provide, but I enjoy watching other people’s animals busy about their pleasures.