Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Many people will never have hands and eyes that can collaborate in a way that allows them to draw. A few specially gifted people have them from the start. In some of us they don’t work effectively to begin with, but might possibly be trained by practice – and surely the purpose of a life class is to do just that? It is to teach you how to look, and then how to make your hand reproduce what you are looking at, eventually with such confidence that the lines it draws are in themselves pleasing (or perhaps exhilarating, or scary, or whatever) as well as explanatory of the object drawn. Once that degree of skill has been achieved, off you can go and take as many liberties with appearances as you like; what you produce will never be inert.

  It was only when I tried to draw a naked body that I began to see how difficult it is, and how important. When you have a naked person in front of you, calmly exposed to your concentrated study, you see how accurate the term ‘life class’ is. What you are looking at is precisely life, that inexplicable and astounding cause of our being, to which everything possible in the way of attention and respect is due. That is why most people find it more interesting to draw other people, or animals, or plants and trees, rather than man-made objects such as architecture or machinery. (There are, of course, fine draughtsmen who specialize in those – and no doubt it’s a foolish quirk of mine that makes me suspect they will be bores.)

  Since I first tried to draw a nude figure it has seemed to me that what determines the quality of a drawing is the attention and respect, rather than the ingenuity, that an artist has devoted to what he is looking at. One should become as skilful as possible in order to probe the true nature of the object one is studying.

  An object, of course, is needed for such probing, or sometimes a subject embodied in objects – think of Goya’s Disasters of War or his bullfighting sequence. To make a flat surface interesting to look at simply for its own sake – turn it into an artefact that will hold the attention, move and/or give pleasure to others as well as yourself, does naturally require gifts – you must understand colour and be inventive about pattern, which are not common abilities. But quite often what it chiefly seems to need is taking yourself very seriously. Only a person with a gigantic sense of self-importance could, for example, produce a large number of canvases painted in a single flat colour, or even in two or three flat colours, without being bored to death. That is the kind of non-representational art that strikes me as absurd. Other kinds can be very pleasing in the same kind of way as a good piece of interior decoration, but to me they do not grip, as works that probe, question, celebrate or attack a subject can grip.

  Much as I enjoyed that second life class, I gave it up when I saw that only if I worked at it every day could I hope to draw better, and that even then, being a word person rather than an image person, I would never amount to more than an illustrator. I fear that it was a kind of vanity that caused me to lose interest once I was convinced that my best could never be better than second rate. I do still sometimes amuse myself by trying to draw, and wish I had the energy to do so more often because it remains an absorbing occupation. And however far from being an artist my feeble attempts have left me, I am grateful to those classes for one positive result: I am now much better at seeing things than I used to be. That is something often said by people who have tried to draw, and it is a good reason for making the attempt, even in old age, because it adds such a generous pinch of pleasure to one’s days.

  9

  NO LESS INTENSELY than drawing, but much more consistently, gardening has been an activity which has given me, and still gives me, great pleasure. In my early youth it was something done for you by employees: a head gardener with two men under him in my maternal grandparents’ household, and one man in ours – a full-time man to start with, becoming increasingly part-time as money dwindled. But even my grandmother, who certainly did no digging with her own hands, knew exactly what was happening in her garden and how and why it should be done. Certain things she always did herself: cut back the lavender, for instance, and spread it to dry on sheets so that the flowers could be rubbed off for lavender bags, which were kept with her linen; and spray her roses against greenfly with a big brass syringe which lived in the flower room (a little room with a sink where she arranged flowers for the house, and where the dogs slept). Her spray was nothing more lethal than a bucketful of soft soap dissolved in warm water, and the roses were always pristine. As children we loved the roses, watched eagerly for the first snowdrops, stroked the velvet of pansy petals, had our other favourite flowers, but the garden was not simply a place to be looked at. We inhabited it: climbed its trees, hid in its bushes, fished tadpoles and newts from its stream, stole its peaches and grapes (which was a sin and therefore more exciting that eating its plums and apples from the branch, which was allowed). And we were given regular tasks such as picking the sweet-peas for Gran and the strawberries and raspberries which were to come to the table that day. Towards the end of each season such tasks became a bit of a chore, but they were never disagreeable, and because they always involved delicious tastes and smells and pleasant leafy sensations, a garden was naturally accepted as a source of sensuous pleasure as well as a place full of beauty.

  That was also true for my mother and her sisters before me (it was a family in which the women were more concerned with gardening than the men). All four of them became enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardeners, and they did more gardening work than their mother had done because none of them married a man as rich as their father. As I grew up, however, I moved away from my childhood and their continuing involvement. I went away, first to Oxford, then to London, and although on my visits home I appreciated the several gardens my mother made over the years, I looked at them rather than inhabited them, and I never worked in them. I never so much as pulled a weed or sowed a seed, and I became ignorant. Once, when I was staying with a friend who had just moved into a new house, she showed me a clump of leaves in a neglected flower bed which she wanted to restore, and asked what I thought they were. ‘Pansies, I think,’ said I; so we separated the clump and planted bits of it all along the front of the bed. And what those pansies turned out to be was Michaelmas daisies.

  The London house, the top flat of which I moved into early in the 1960s and where I am still lucky enough to live, has a small front garden and a back one slightly larger than a tennis court. When my cousin Barbara bought the house the back garden consisted of a lawn with a fairly wide border the length of one side of it, an ivy-swamped raised border across the end, and a scramble of weeds that had once been a border next to the steps leading up to the lawn. The long border was full of still floriferous but very old and gnarled roses, which my cousin kept weeded and from time to time was nudged by her mother into pruning, but otherwise, apart from keeping the grass cut, she let the garden look after itself, which meant that the laurel bush and the fiercely thorny pyracanthus which grew against the wall opposite the rose bed grew almost to house height and plunged most of the space in shade. The lawn served a useful purpose, however, as a playground for her young children and a home for their guinea pigs, and that was what she minded about.

  Twenty-six years ago her job took her to Washington, where she was to live for six or seven years, and it was agreed that I should find tenants for the bottom part of the house while the middle flat should be the preserve of her son, who was then at Oxford. Just before she left she asked me if I could ‘sort of keep an eye’ on the garden so that ‘nature didn’t quite take over’. And the next morning, leaning out of my bedroom window and surveying what had now become my territory, I suddenly and absolutely unexpectedly became my mother. ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ I heard myself saying. ‘I must take the whole thing out and start from scratch.’ And that is what I did. I paid someone to do the heavy digging and cutting back, and for new brickwork in the front garden, but all the planting I did myself, and as soon as the first plant I put in with my own hands actually grew and flowered, I was hooked.

  For a long ti
me I spent most of my evenings and weekends working in that garden, which became quite adventurous and colourful, but gradually digging and mowing became too much for me, and about five years ago I reshaped it into something more sober which could be controlled by a gardening firm coming in once a fortnight – dull, but soothing to sit in on a summer evening – and lost interest in it, although I am still proud of the huge white rambling rose that submerges the crab-apple tree, the magnolia and the three other roses. But by then I had half an acre of garden in Norfolk to think about, real garden, rich in possibilities, belonging to the little house my cousin inherited from her mother in which she has generously granted me a share. She loves to sit in it, but is happy to let me run it, and building on my aunt’s original creation is a continuing joy.

  For some time now most of the work has to be done by other hands, so my cousin employs a young man who mows the lawn and keeps the hedges trimmed, while I have employed a sequence of three serious gardeners, all women, all much more knowledgeable than I am, and each in her different way a wonder-worker. I can afford help only one day a week, but what they have achieved! The first two did a tremendous amount of structural work, and my present treasure is a sophisticated plantswoman with whom I have a delightful time choosing what to plant where: to me the part of gardening that is the most fulfilling. And still, each time I’m there, I manage to do at least a little bit of work myself: tie something back, trim something off, clear some corner of weeds, plant three or four small plants, and however my bones may ache when I’ve done it, I am always deeply refreshed by it. Getting one’s hands into the earth, spreading roots, making a plant comfortable – it is a totally absorbing occupation, like painting or writing, so that you become what you are doing and are given a wonderful release from consciousness of self. And so, for that matter, is simply sitting in your garden, taking it in. The following is from a short-lived diary I kept at a time when Barry was ill. I had not been able to get to Norfolk for two months, but now his brother had come to stay so I could snatch a weekend.

  ‘Back here at last, and in exquisite spring weather, the narcissi full out with later ones still to come, the Japanese cherry by the gate a mass of pale lacy pinkness, the primroses exuberant, the magnolia opening, everything coming alive – intoxicating. However good this garden can be in summer, it’s never better than now, thanks to nothing done by me but to the clever way Aunt Doro planted her bulbs in drifts years ago now expanded by their naturalization. This afternoon I sat for a long time by the pond, in the thick of them, trying to tell myself “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, these starry green and gold creatures are just vegetable organisms shaped and coloured according to natural laws for reasons of survival. They don’t exist for the sake of beauty any more than a nettle does” … but it was impossible to believe it. It might be true, but so what! I choose it to be untrue because the daffodils don’t allow me to do otherwise.’

  And still I can see those flowers in my mind’s eye, serene beings, quietly living their own mysterious lives, and know that in a few months’ time they will be back and with any luck I will be there again to see them … Yes, I am much the richer since Barbara asked me to keep an eye on her garden.

  10

  ‘WHEN I AM eighty-two I must start thinking about giving up the car.’ That resolution, made in my early seventies, was the result of a visit made to my mother by her local policeman (we still had them then) when I happened to be staying with her. I opened the door to him, and he almost embraced me, so glad was he to find an intermediary for his embarrassing message. Could I please try to persuade my mother that the time had come for her to stop driving? No one had liked to say anything to her face, but three people in the village had told him that they had witnessed, or almost been the victim of, her driving, which had recently become … well, he didn’t want to offend, but it had become a little bit erratic. I passed the message on, she dismissed it huffily as nonsense, and about six weeks later, much to my relief, announced, ‘Oh, by the way – I have decided to get rid of the car.’

  I now understand her reluctance only too well. While pottering about in the car hardly qualifies as an ‘activity’, it is – for those whose physical mobility is limited – a part of life and a source of pleasure. At a time when strictly speaking I ought to have followed her example by overcoming reluctance, I didn’t do so. It was during my seventies when I should have stopped driving, because cataracts in both eyes developed to the point at which I could no longer read the number plate of a car three car-lengths ahead – indeed could hardly read one on a car immediately in front of me. But the licensing authority errs (quite rightly!) on the side of caution, because being unable to distinguish details within an object doesn’t mean you can’t see the object itself, and since I never suffered any uncertainty as to where or what any object, large or small, near or far, might be, I felt no serious guilt at continuing to drive up to the time of my operations.

  André Deutsch, who believed firmly that the more something costs the better it must be, took it on himself to try to organize these operations and bullied me into seeing ‘my wonderful man in Harley Street’. I saw him, and when he passed me on to his secretary so that I could make the appointment for the operation, thought to ask her how much it was going to cost. It would be done at the London Clinic, she said, where I would have to stay for two nights, ‘so we will be looking at something like £3000’. So what in fact I looked at was the splendid if rather Dickensian-seeming Moorfields Eye Hospital, where the operations were done for free with exquisite precision, the first of them at about lunchtime so that I was home in time for supper, the second early in the morning so I was home in time for lunch. And the whole thing seemed like a glorious miracle because they assumed that I knew the nature of the modern operation, so didn’t tell me in advance that they would not be simply removing the cataracts, but would also be giving me new eyes by inserting tiny permanent lenses designed to correct such faults as there had been in my sight before the cataracts began. I had been short-sighted all my life, and suddenly I could see like a hawk and no longer needed glasses, except for the readers that the ‘long sight’ of old age necessitates. Since then I have heard two or three sad stories of cataract operations which went wrong, but I remember my own with heartfelt gratitude.

  When I turned eighty-two I remembered the resolution I had made and I did start thinking about whether or not I should give up my car, but all I could see was that while walking more than a quarter of a mile had become impossible, my driving showed no sign of being any different from what it always had been. Therefore I decided, ‘No, not quite yet.’ By now, six years on, I probably ought to think again. My legs have almost given out and I am hard put to it to walk a hundred yards. It started with painful feet – painful for the simple but incurable reason that the flesh padding their soles gradually becomes thinner and thinner until at last your poor old bones are grinding into the ground with every step. This leads to incorrect walking so that soon your knees are affected, and then your hips, until there comes a time when it dawns on you that your legs as a whole have become so useless that if you tried to depend on them for more than a few steps without some sort of prop such as sticks, or god help you a Zimmer, you would simply fall down. And at that point your car begins to represent life. You hobble towards it, you ease your unwieldy body laboriously into the driver’s seat – and lo! you are back to normal. Off you whizz just like everyone else, restored to freedom, restored (almost) to youth. I always liked my car. Now I love it. But of course this increased love and dependence coincides with the deterioration of other things besides your legs, so the postponed ‘thinking about it’ does need to be done. At the time of writing this, which is precisely a month before my eighty-ninth birthday, I have to admit that my car does carry three scars acquired within the last year, after never having any to show apart from those inflicted on it by others because it lives on the street.

  Scar one: a very slight dent on its backside made when I was p
arking in a space next to a skip and failed to allow for the fact that the top rim of the skip stuck out. Scar two: not really a scar at all because easily straightened out by hand, but my passenger-side mirror did hit something hard enough to be almost flattened against the car’s side when, in a narrow street full of oncoming traffic, I failed to judge correctly how much room I had on that side. Scar three, and this one is bad: a scrape, slightly dented, far back on the driver’s side, of which I am much ashamed. At the end of a long, traffic-choked drive, when it had become dark, I forgot that the gate into Hyde Park just past the Hyde Park Hotel in the direction of Hyde Park Corner has long been permanently closed, and turned into its entrance, thus trapping myself in a little stub of roadway ending at a shut gate, with cars parked on both its sides and a row of bollards down its middle. The space between the bollards was not wide and was ill-lit, so a U-turn was not going to be easy, but the unbroken stream of headlights roaring past behind me made the prospect of reversing out into it unthinkable, so the U-turn it would have to be. I had nearly completed it when I felt the pressure of a bollard against the car’s side. And what did I do? Instead of stopping at once, reversing and starting again at a wider angle, I thought ‘If I go on it will make a nasty scrape – oh, what the hell, who cares!’ and on I went. Which was wholly the result of being an overtired old person flustered by her own silliness in landing herself in an awkward situation.