17 December 2015
Alive and Kicking
J R Thomas reviews “Alive, Alive Oh!” by Diana Athill
We are getting used to great age in our society. People are living to astonishing ages, in numbers that must require the recruitment of ever-increasing numbers to the office in Buckingham Palace that deals with sending out centenary congratulations. Politicians seem particularly prone to living to great ages: Mrs Thatcher got to a mere 87, but most of her inner cabinet got to even greater years – Geoffrey Howe died earlier this year at 88 (and his rival Denis Healey at 98), Jim Prior is 88, and Lord Carrington is still going strong at 96. Jim Callaghan got to 93 (less a day).
Artists seem to do well too – the list on Amazon of artists who lived past their centenaries is most impressive (though noticeably it is sculptors that live longest – it must be the extra exercise).
And being royal seems to be especially good for you. Never mind our own examples of Windsorian longevity; ex-King Michael of Romania is 94, the late King of Saudi Arabia got to 90, Dr Otto von Hapsburg would have reigned over Austria from 1922 to 2011 had the world being a little different, dying at age 98.
And perhaps now we can add publishers to the list of remarkable long lives. “Alive, Alive Oh” celebrates the remarkable life of Diana Athill, who aged 98 has just published her latest volume of memoirs. Memoirs is perhaps not the right word; these are random but telling episodes from a life of great interest, a life truly well-lived. The sub-title is “And Other Things That Matter”; and this is a book about things that have mattered to the author and which ought to matter to us. She writes beautifully; as she always has in her long writing career. She selects episodes from her life – ones that have mattered, some joyous, others painful on the page and surely searingly hurtful to have lived. But she rejoices in all of life, and how things have turned out, her writings reflecting a happy soul, one contemplating each episode of that long existence and drawing lessons from it for us all.
Ms Athill is from a Norfolk family who lived in that English way that always sounds so idyllic. A large house, walled gardens, rolling grounds, stables (two sets), horses and tennis parties; not vast wealth, but certainly enough to be very comfortable. Born in 1917, her youth was played out in the aftermath of one terrible war, and the slow slide into another. Diana Athill was never going to be a well-behaved, conventional sort of gal. Her otherwise standard English upper middle class family seemed to throw an odd branch out with her, and she was a natural but polite rebel from her late teens. She fell in love at fifteen with an RAF pilot and got engaged to him at seventeen. He survived the war, but their love did not; he found somebody else and left her with hardly a word. It made her resolve to try to avoid love again; but not its physical manifestations. Sex became her form of rebellion, beginning with a much older married man. Her independent and free spirit was fuelled by the steps made by women’s equality during the war – faltering but increasingly confident steps.
She became an assistant to the publisher Andre Deutsch after the war, helping him establish Allan Wingate, and then later becoming a director of Deutsch’s eponymous and highly regarded firm. It was in many ways her energy and capacity for friendship and for editing that attracted such a magnificent cluster of fiction writers to Deutsch. She was unquestionably a key component of the firm, but never achieved the financial rewards that that standing might be expected to have merited. She was never especially well-off in financial terms but then, she is, one suspects, not a person who had much regard for the conventional cheques and baubles of life, or would have known what to do with them had they come her way. What has given her pleasure and fascination in life is the close observation of others and the pleasures of intellect and friendship.
In spite of her best efforts to avoid it, love did intrude on Diana’s life again, later and in (as seems inevitable) unconventional circumstances. She fell in love with Barry Reckord, the Jamaican writer and playwright. He was married and had no intention of leaving his wife, but shared his life with both. For eight years or so they had an affair of passion, but then, as such things so often do, it subsided into comfort. At this point his wife divorced him, leaving Diana in dread that she might have to start to do his washing and pair up his socks. To her intense relief he found a woman who was willing to do all that and be his lover, all three then finding that the simplest arrangement was simply to live together; in time taking in the new lovers’ later husband and children too.
She has described this often funny, sometimes sad, evolving ménage in previous books, but here she makes the centrepiece of this slim volume a happening quite early in the relationship. To attempt to describe it would be a plot spoiler, but it is something so openly described, and as it progresses, so painful, that it is hard to know how she found the strength, even fifty years later, to record it.
But that is the Athill style. Most of us would swing the spotlight round onto others to avoid any revelation; Athill’s way is to gaze into the unforgiving light and to cheerfully describe each line and lump and spot of her existence. That might be maudlin if she was not the honest and optimistic person that she is. Her gradual acceptance of the fact that she could no longer look after herself in her own home, and her move to the private Highgate nursing home where she now lives, is required reading for all (most of us I guess) who will eventually have to contemplate that. The lesson is clearly not to grumble about it, but to embrace the potential of a new life and new friends. In between are essays on Trinidad and Tobago and the growth of black power there; on the inevitable approach of death; on her Norfolk childhood; on managing a loving relationship with a conventional and disapproving parent.
Hurry up with the next volume; may the typewriter long continue to clack away in Highgate.
ALIVE, ALIVE OH! by Diana Athill has recently been published by Granta Books.
