Diana Athill recalls her life at age 97
In 1967, she published her first book in America, afraid to let her mother see it. Later, she screwed up her courage and sent Mum the book. They discussed it once, and never again, but their relationship was further deepened by knowing their differences could never derail their love.
Her most fascinating descriptions concern personal matters. How I adored reading about that "admirable old juggins," her subconscious, which she imagines "plodding along pig-headed, single-minded, a tortoise lumbering through undergrowth." It is this part that conspires to make her illogically but happily pregnant at the age of 43, a venture that nearly kills her instead of giving her a child. The experience also gives rise to the title of the book.
I loved reading her evocations of the past -- for instance of having friends with whom she conversed about nothing that matters, as she "had cousins for that." In a chapter entitled "The Bit that ought not to be True," she describes how by age fifteen, she had rejected the values of her family and the society around her. Yet she felt unable to share her dissenting views, since "they would almost certainly feel that they ought to cast me out -- and I did not want to be cast out, nor were they by nature caster-outers." So she kept quiet, though she "found this hypocrisy shaming."
In a meditation on fashion, she mourns the passing of the evening dress and the changed way in which clothes were viewed postwar, as were the women who wore them. This was evident in the 1950s, and the change in attitudes was reflected in an altered language of fashion. When a Canadian friend offered to lend her a "sexy" piece of clothing, she thought the description odd, even vulgar, and put it down to a transatlantic usage. Later, wearing the borrowed garment, she found it very becoming, and was reassured that the friend "couldn't have meant anything rude."
A delightful whimsy permeates the story of her being presented at court "during the very brief period when Edward was on the throne before bolting to marry Mrs. Simpson." Shopping for this event - reduced by the bored king to a garden party from the customary evening event for debutantes - did not go well. Why, she asks herself, "did I come away from the elegant shop...with a dress in the one colour I knew didn't suit me?" A black hat and gloves make matters worse, and her mood drops to match "the mask of desperate boredom on the sulky little royal countenance."
Other wonderful comments on clothing involve the "Infallibility of the Guilty Impulse," which led to the purchase of pricey clothing from catalogues and expensive shops, until her previously drab wardrobe "could hardly recognize itself." All the guilt-inducing garments proved great successes. And "just in time," because "over ninety-five, one's idea of luxury shifts away from clothes." Yet fashion can be taken too far, as in the case of a yellow-clad woman in a shop who looks "as though she were enclosed and protected by an invisible bubble of pure elegance," which leads Diana to think it "impossible to imagine her in bed with a man."
It's a truism that men are mostly oblivious of women's clothing, but one of Diana's boyfriends took this to extremes. She explains that while he "accepted the fact that if a woman was going to a party she took off the dress she had been wearing and put on another, he hadn't a clue why." Since they were "getting on very well together," she saw "saw no reason to try to change him." In any case, "clothes were not important" in publishing, and her work provided only a modest income.
Diana Athill was born to a middle-class family. Though not particularly wealthy, she grew up at Ditchingham Hall, her grandparents' estate in Norfolk. Descriptions of her chidhood home with its well-designed grounds and walled kitchen garden are full of joyful images: the taste of perfect muslin-wrapped pears, the scent of parma violets, and the daily summer duty of berry-picking, for which she used a cabbage leaf as a container.
Perhaps it was this social context that gave rise to the comment that "Few events in my life have been decided by me." She says that her biggest decision was to move into an old people's home. The scene was set in part when a friend she'd known since Oxford moved into the unique Mary Feilding Guild in North London.
Though it meant culling a lot of her enormous book collection, this move proved a good decision, and even led to the making of new friends. These fellow gardeners were able to transform a bit of unused land on the property. Diana and four others cheered on a fellow pensioner who lost a shoe in the mud while tramping in freshly planted rosebushes and finished the job with her bare feet.
Engaged at a young age before WWII, Diana Athill was abandoned by her fiance when the Air Force took him to Egypt, where he met someone else and abruptly stopped writing to her. The loss of him broke her heart at the time, but in retrospect she does not consider this a tragedy. Though they suited one another well, the "snag was that he was a person who lived in the moment...which made him wonderful to be with but dangerous to be apart from."
Her most valuable life lessons, she tells us, learned from this and from other love affairs, are the risks of romanticism on the one hand, and possessiveness on the other. "Both of these can be dangerous, and in conjunction with sexuality even lethal." The powerful sexual impulse came into play when she sat in the back seat of a car beside Stephen, and her hand, "which was resting on the seat between us, began to hum with invitation." This led to her first affair with a married man.
She has no regrets about her childlessness, having diagnosed in herself "a streak of beady-eyed detachment...that steers me away from very strong emotional commitment." Comfortable in the role of Other Woman, she has "never for a moment expected or wanted to wreck anyone's marriage." In this way, she feels that she "was able to enjoy a relationship while living my own life and discovering myself, as I don't think I could have done in an ordinary marriage," where "a woman has to shape herself into a good fit in another person's life."
Athill also shares some astute observations of politics. With the threat of Brexit now imminent, her words seem prophetic. Her concise summary of a certain unrealistic but persistent British attitude to Europe is timely and poignant: "The difference between being at the hub of a vast empire and being a tiny island off the shores of but not belonging to Europe seems to be something they are unable to understand." Acknowledging England's "blundering" attempts to become European, she puts her finger on what lies beneath: "an apparent feeling that Europe ought to be grateful for our condescension in joining it."
I'm also of a mind with her on poetry. She prefers the kind that tell a story, and reads "to see something, not to discover codes." Speaking of poetry, she describes a bit about the life of the handsome, intelligent and club-footed Lord Byron, then comments that "the direction taken by his career was largely determined by immaturity." This is not meant as a criticism, but rather a comment on the society and the mostly absent family that produced him, then encouraged him into a "disastrous marriage."
In closing, I'd like to share what Diana considers the "necessary bedrock for love." This she experienced with Barry, beginning at age 43 and continuing until his death over forty years later. "We just happened to know each other well enough to talk and listen without inhibition, and to recognize that we could do this from our first meeting."