In Gratitude

by Jenny Diski

  jennydiski.co.uk

  AFTERWORD

  The Poet

  When you live in a house with somebody else, they’re always there, even when they’re not physically present, in ways that can be distracting, reassuring, sociable, comforting or completely annoying. Today, almost five months after Jenny’s death, something of this is still true, though in a much more sorrowful way. I’ve grown accustomed to her absence, but the house is full of reminders, things that can jolt me into tears or flood me with delight at unexpected (and sometimes unsuitable) moments. When Jenny was alive, we used to talk all the time, about everything, inexhaustibly. Looking back, I think of that as the texture and fabric of our lives together, that and writing. And talking about writing. Or not talking about it, as sometimes you can’t, or don’t want to.

  The best way to illustrate that is probably by using Jenny’s own words which, funny and self-deprecating as they can be, are also true to the constant mystery and difficulty of love. She wrote the two short pieces of prose that follow, and published them on her blog, in 2007, just before and on her sixtieth birthday. I’d been particularly annoying for several days as her birthday approached. The house is full of books, and I’d already spent about two whole days standing in front of banks of shelves, investigating some fourteen hundred novels as part of the work of the poem I was composing for her. I was getting on Jenny’s nerves and in a way quite enjoying it. Jenny wasn’t enjoying it. There’s nothing more unsettling than feeling someone hanging around within earshot, doing something you aren’t part of. It points up the difficult gaps and differences and anxieties that always exist between lovers, and points to the leaps we try to make to get across the gaps. And if you’re trying to work it’s very distracting. But for a fuller explanation of what was going on, I’ll let Jenny speak for herself.

  The Poet has a project and it’s secret. That’s the thing about poets, they can have projects and spend several days wandering around the house, gazing at shelves, opening and closing books, going ‘Hmmm,’ ‘Yes, that’s good,’ ‘No, that won’t do,’ ‘Well, possibly,’ and when politely asked what the fuck he is doing, tell you, ‘It’s a project. I don’t know if it’s going to work yet so I can’t tell you about it. I’ll know by next week. I’ll tell you then.’ It’s remarkably aggravating and full of mystery, hard thinking and purpose, all three of which are so lacking in my own prosaic doings.

  When I’m thinking about writing something, I have the decency to keep him up all night talking about it, demanding his full attention at three in the morning, teasing out the maybes and possibles and then losing interest entirely. That way, he’s always included in my thinking. None of this poetic withholding. He has such an aura of deep brooding about his sodding Project, whereas I plod on, page after page (‘Thank God, that’s 60,000 words, not so many more to go’), month after month, wailing and moaning about not being able to write, getting it wrong, taking too long, wondering what on earth I’m doing. Monday, the Poet will know what he’s doing and if it’s going to work; Friday, it’ll be finished. And what’s more it’ll be a poem, which is so much more serious a thing than a novel.

  And on top of that, as if being a poet and having a secret project wasn’t cool and superior enough, he’s downstairs baking a coffee and walnut cake for my birthday. It’s insupportable.

  All is revealed. The Poet’s project worked, it turned out, but not until he’d examined over a thousand novels to find what he was looking for, while I padded (part of the time) behind him yelling, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ It also turned out that it was a poem for my birthday. Ooops. It was related to the present he gave me (as if a poem wasn’t enough): an etching of a rectangle divided into four on white paper in a white frame, by Linda Karshan. So beautiful and exactly what I want to look at. Also somewhat like a window on a window. The poem is below. His byzantine method of making the poem is explained in a note at the end.

  Also, the cake was alarmingly delicious.

  60 Windows

  for Jenny Diski, on her sixtieth birthday

  Tiny room whose window was never opened

  Curtain for the window

  On the cane chair under the window

  Pale green even in the window

  Emptying the basin out of the window

  Halts by the window and gazes

  Lay on the ground under the window

  Kneeling up to the window

  An octagonal vaulted chamber with a balconied window

  Her bed had its back to the window

  Through the curtainless window day stole in

  She went to the other window

  Sitting at the table near the window, working

  Opened windows into the wrong world

  A gale, exploding against the window

  Awnings lowered outside the windows

  A reproduction of a stained-glass-window angel

  Whistling up at vague windows

  Got up and went to the window. It was raining again.

  Early light, coming through the uncurtained window

  With its tiny windows looking on to the street

  Pat wandered from the window and took up the George Moore novel

  He came out through the French windows

  She got up and stood at the window

  There was moonlight in the window

  There’s a sharp rapping at the window

  I am in the window, smoking

  They had seen it happen from a window

  Then went to the window that looked on the street below

  Watching you from the apartment window

  In my memory, at the window

  The rain was still thudding against the window-pane

  I think that I might open the window

  A camera is being held to the window

  Silver things in the window

  From the street the windows were in darkness

  His reflection could be seen in the front window

  High up, from one of the small barred windows

  His right arm through the open window

  I put all the lamps on and opened all the windows

  A huge wall broken by gaping windows loomed above

  Sordid glare of shop windows, made beautiful by distance

  A board nailed across a broken window

  They opened all the windows

  Sat and sewed by the window in the clear autumn afternoon

  The room was almost in darkness, the windows quite covered

  The night I stared at from my window

  A castle whose windows were glittering orange squares

  The windows, between lengths of white embossed satin

  Our windows, on the second floor, overlooked the street

  The butcher pulled down black window shades

  She had been sitting in her own window

  The inner courtyard on to which my window looked out

  The middle one of the three windows was half way open

  The sun filtered through the windows with remarkable subtlety

  Rushed to the window, not to sail out of it

  No lights behind its white painted windows

  Has to look out of the window at the elements, at nature

  Draw down the upper frame of the window

  The windows were shuttered. But there was a crack.

  ‘60 Windows’ is composed entirely of phrases that mention windows, taken from page 60 of sixty different novels.

  The Daughter

  Mum first told me about her diagnosis at her local pub in Cambridge. It was a very hot day in May and I was there with my son, Louis. The pub had a pig and a few toys for Louis to wheel about on. He was two, and wanted attention, but so did Mum, and when I had got Louis interested enough in a toy to sit with her and talk, she said without a pause or any build-up, that she had inoperable cancer. I felt dizzy, and sick, and resentful of her for telling me in such a public place with a child to look after and be okay for. Mum looked so depresse
d, her body shrunk to a knot of despair, not unfamiliar and really not much worse than she had seemed during the past few months of her depression, which had deepened since Doris’s death.

  Neither of us knew what we were to do, and that was fine. That was how it had always been. I went to Mum for advice and what she could offer me was reassurance about my abilities, the complications of every possible choice, and the phrase, ‘I dunno Chlo.’ There was comfort in that acknowledgement. She would support my decisions knowing they were one of many good and bad ones I could make. I wasn’t to behave a certain way. I could have said, ‘Be brave! You will win the fight with cancer!’ and she would have probably told me to fuck off, but she would have understood because one thing she did know was that she didn’t know anything, so why should I know what she needed me to say?

  And that was the trouble with the death that she would and wouldn’t be a part of. That not knowing. I was with her while she died. Her death was almost as mysterious to me as it was to her when she could think and write about it. What was she experiencing? I could only observe her body and my own feelings. From my side, so much love, so much tenderness towards the child in her struggling away, catching breaths. She was hot and silky soft, and I held her hand and lay next to her, not knowing if she knew I was there or could understand that this was the death she had been so desperate to know.

  She died on the 28th of April 2016 at four thirty in the morning. It was just as her nurses had told her they could deliver. Mum’s pain was managed, her anxiety was too. She was unconscious and at home in her bed, under cashmere.

  Did she want company at that moment? I felt she did. I used to tease her about her overuse of the word solitude. She certainly needed to be alone for long stretches of time. But the solitude that she sought so desperately was always dependent on others being there for her to take time away from. She loved to chat, and sing, and was naturally playful. Mum and Ian did lots of that together. In the final weeks of her life, she needed the physical presence of others and, to my surprise, she told me that her main regret was not making more good friends and spending time with people having interesting conversations. She was pretty high when she said that, but her need at that point was obvious. When Doris died it felt to me that she needed it to be a personal and solitary experience. Company during those final days seemed like an intrusion. With Mum, I had the opposite feeling, that she was scared and didn’t want to be alone. But, who knows.

  I avoided reading In Gratitude after she died. I read some of the articles when they were published in the London Review of Books, mostly the ones that weren’t about her treatment. I wonder if I would have read the book if I hadn’t agreed to do this afterword. Probably not for years. I was uncomfortable, even quite annoyed, with Mum for exposing herself and her thoughts about Doris and Peter. I’ve always been very private and my instinct is to say ‘Shhh.’ She used to joke that I was Saffy to her Edina from the TV comedy, Absolutely Fabulous. That was true enough for her to make the joke. For me, her articles were another layer of complication during her illness. For her, it was what made it easier. Fair enough.

  In her first chapter, when she hears the diagnosis, Mum asks, ‘Will I suffer in silence . . . or will I refuse to go gentle and make an almighty fuss?’ She did a bit of both. Mum hated complaining about the physical difficulties of her illnesses, and whenever she mentioned them she always apologised for being a nuisance and for going on and on, when she never actually did. The fuss was, for me, her fury. My god she was hard to handle. She was so tough. She fought: Doris, her mother, me, Ian, her friends, her nurses, her readers, everyone, with all her might and, crucially, with considerable humour. It wasn’t her battling the cancer, fibrosis, or death, but finding the best way to engage with her situation and to understand it.

  Of course, the writing process did that too. The most important thing was to try to make the unknown known or at least to create enough of something to observe and engage with. How else could she get some control when she didn’t know what time of the day it was or how to move her fingers with enough precision to type a word? She would ring me up while I was in the playground with my children to ask where she was and what day it was. Was she in Spain? There were bruises, black eyes, constant falls, broken bones, terrifying delusions, on top of a deep and grinding depression. During the later stages of her illness, when we came for lunch after not seeing her for weeks because Rosie had chickenpox, she made her entrance by falling into the kitchen, Ian and her legs unable to hold her up. Her body was totally transformed by a steroid-induced ‘fat suit’, as she called it.

  I explained calmly to Louis that Granjen had ‘wobbly legs’ but the brutality and tragedy of her situation was obvious to him and all of us, especially Mum. The descriptions of her illnesses and the medication’s side effects in the book are pretty tame, controlled, sometimes humorous. Quite different to her day-to-day experience of them. Her tweets are rawer, and many of them painful to read.

  So, during all this, that spirit of revolt helped. In that stance, the embodiment of the fleeting teenage look she describes in the book, she was the self she needed to be. She was ‘granite’, but the granite could fall to dust in a moment. It was hard to know which side you would get. Mum had both states in her already, but the depression, the many pills she was given and withdrawing from, along with the morphine she always kept by her side, made both parts more pronounced.

  I may not have felt comfortable with her making her (our) situation so public, but I also admired her openness. That refusal to disguise anything by making it more pleasant and inoffensive helped me a great deal. There were no niceties about her illness. We didn’t ignore it or pretend that she would be okay. Mum and I often discussed the fact she would die soon, how she felt about it, how I would cope, how I would talk to her grandchildren about her, and she found that relieving. We both did. The writing was part of it. And what brilliant writing it is. Even when she was mad as a bat and her style changed – perhaps a touch more vicious, looser and absurd – it was still astonishingly good.

  The parts of the book that have me in tears are the vulnerable bits. Like when she describes her depression in the 1980s, which was essentially about not writing, and Doris told her she could write about her interesting life and someone else could smooth out her prose. I can imagine that happening, and the dissolution, as well as the determination that followed it.

  I often felt what she wrote about Doris was true to Mum’s experience, but didn’t give Doris enough opportunity to be just as fucked-up as Mum. I told Mum so, and she agreed. Doris was flawed, Mum was flawed. Both were damaged by their childhoods and both were just as independent, determined and ruthless when they needed to be. I remember being privy to that anger she talks about when approaching Doris’s house. Once we were there it was civil. Tea, cake, politics, but never any mention of each other’s work. I think, though, that Doris had a lot of respect for Mum, and was proud of her. I will always remember arriving for tea with Mum towards the end of Doris’s life, and seeing Doris’s eyes light up and her arms reach out to hold her hands. I honestly don’t think I had seen her so thrilled by the presence of someone. She laughed and laughed in her company. Mum really woke Doris up.

  Doris and Peter had excruciating final years. I looked after their household, their finances, helped with many medical emergencies, and was generally available for them. I had been very close to Doris, and our relationship was far less complicated than it had been with Mum. I felt the latter period was private, and Peter should be left in peace by Mum, Doris, whoever. Mum, though, was a writer, and you don’t censor them. Suggest, but don’t censor.

  I did try once. I felt one line in her memoir was particularly hard for me to ignore. She wrote that none of the people waiting outside ITU for Peter, including me, had any warmth for him. My feelings about Peter are mixed, but warmth is in there. I hated reading it in the London Review of Books and said I would prefer it if she rewrote that line for the book. All hell broke loos
e. She ‘was a writer’; she could write what she bloody well wanted and if I didn’t like it, well that was my problem. The lack of warmth was her idea of what we all experienced and she had a right to put it down. A few minutes later she changed the sentence. I think after I read it to her and she realised it wasn’t a particularly good line anyway. We sat together on her bed and she dictated something else in an instant, which captured the complexity much better. Changing a line of her work at that stage brought on a flood of paranoia, and made the granite world she needed to believe in collapse for a while. She then raged and said all sorts of things which she would have regretted had she the capacity to remember them.

  When I visited the following week the fury had gone, and she was in an entirely different mood. She said that she wanted me to write the final chapter of the book, and thought it was very important I should. She knew she wouldn’t be able to finish the Doris and Peter section as thoroughly as she would have liked. She wanted me to write my thoughts, uncensored, about her and her illness and my experience with Doris and Peter. She felt her story was also mine and that the final years of Doris and Peter’s lives involved us both. I don’t want to go into that time, so this afterword is the compromise.

  It was a very moving gesture, and a good example of how generous Mum could be. Most of the time she was incredibly thoughtful and considerate of my feelings, my children’s feelings, my partner’s and, of course, Ian’s. She could think herself into anyone’s mind, which is why she could attack with such precision when she felt threatened, but it also meant she was able to be the most kind and caring person I have known.

  She wanted In Gratitude to be dedicated to her grandchildren, Louis and Rosie. The book was rushed to publication so that Mum could hold a copy before she died. As she forgot most things during that period, the intention didn’t get through in time for the publication of the hardback. But it did make sense. She was delighted by her grandchildren, and seeing them was an effective medicine. The side effect, though, was the pain of thinking of what she would miss and that they wouldn’t know her. It’s true, they have lost so much. Louis loved her deeply. Rosie, almost one when she died, enjoyed rolling around her. Mum was surprised at her uncomplicated love for them, and felt pride at creating what she thought was a good mum (me). She said I was better at it than she was. I’m not sure that’s true, although I can imagine her worrying constantly about not managing it, which I wouldn’t have the energy to do. She often pictured me drugged and dead at twenty-five, just as Doris imagined she would be.