Victoria Lane

A life in letters

At 93, with a new epistolary memoir just published, Diana Athill remains as sharp a conversationalist as ever

Diana Athill, now nearly 94, lives in what must be the nicest retirement home in London, a large red brick house at the top of Highgate village, run by a charitable trust and populated by former writers and doctors and psychiatrists. On this unseasonably warm day she has on a flowing Kenyan kaftan — the residents’ summer clothes get packed away in autumn to make space, and she is worried about what to wear if the heatwave continues. A strong, boxer’s face, direct blue eyes. She aims a hearing aid at her ear, it whistles briefly, and away we go.

Her latest book (see review, p. 38) is a kind of epistolary memoir, called Instead of a Book: her first book was Instead of a Letter, and she thinks this will be her last. ‘I depend on what’s coming in as to what is going to go out, and at this stage in life not a great deal comes in.’

The book comprises about 30 years’ worth of letters to the New York poet Edward Field (now a stripling of 87). In 1981 they struck up a correspondence about his contemporary Alfred Chester, who was published by André Deutsch and had been one of Athill’s authors until he went mad and died in his forties. She and Edward, and his boyfriend Neil, became great friends.

The letters are full of off-the-cuff brilliance. They begin by recalling Chester and his increasing instability. At one point she observes that R.D. Laing’s school of psychiatry — ‘that the mad were really sane, etc’ — was ‘heaping a great load of exhausting theory on to the helpless patients … as though they had said to patients with enteritis, “You’re quite right to vomit, the food you are being served is disgusting — go on, eat and vomit, eat and vomit, that’s what everyone ought to do with such food.

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