She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . .
She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . .
This is what Diana Athill has to say about interviews written by Lynn Barber, and it’s a pretty apt description of her own writing.
As is well known, Athill was an esteemed publishing editor throughout her working life (John Updike, V.S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys were among her authors), and wrote a beautiful memoir, called Instead of a Letter, about an early love affair which broke her heart. When she retired, she had plenty of hobbies with which to occupy herself: embroidery, watercolour classes, gardening, making quince jelly. But Athill is no ordinary old lady. She is blessed with what she calls ‘an inability to stop watching’, a habit which has made her produce another five volumes of memoir, winning her plaudits, prizes and an OBE.
Athill is acclaimed because she is highly intelligent, witty, observant and utterly irreverent. She may look like the distinguished former head of an Oxford college, but she’s as prickly and delightfully filthy-minded as a Joe Orton. She does not hesitate to speak ill of the dead, or dying; to mock the afflicted (herself very much included); to call a cock a cock and a fuck a fuck; and to admit that ‘A good dollop of fame would be delicious in one’s riper years, when consolations can be so sparse.’
The current volume is a collection, spanning some 30 years, of her letters to the American poet Edward Field. It covers the publication of several of her books, as well as the deaths of her beloved mother and her former employer Andre Deutsch, the departure (to his native Jamaica, not the celestial realms) of her companion and erstwhile lover, playwright Barry Reckord, and the arrival of fame and relative fortune. Instead of a Book is probably a better companion piece than introduction, but readers unfamiliar with Athill’s other work will still find much to enjoy, as well as learn from.
The news from advanced old age is not all bad, although I fear Athill may be unusually brave. She says here that cataract operations don’t hurt (although they do feel peculiar), and that the large dose of intravenous valium administered in advance makes coloscopy painless, too. By and large, people — even the French — seem to be kind to old ladies. The NHS is wonderful. Books and friends give pleasure.
Things like not looking pretty anymore, getting fat, hair getting terribly thin…it’s amazing how little they matter if you forget about them
When builders are called in she is relieved to be too deaf to be troubled by their noise. She has ‘an improved ability to survive sadness’.
‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning and look out of the window, and am suddenly quite amazed by how lovely everything is,’ she writes. Later she describes a new friend as ‘on the side of the angels’. So is Diana Athill.
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