Diana Athill, a respected
literary editor of the twentieth century, is also a celebrated memoirist. In
2000, at the age of 83, she published to great acclaim a memoir of her years as
an editor at the publishing company Andre Deutch (Stet). In 2008 she won,
at the age of 91, the Whitbread (now Costa)Award for her memoir, more a
reflection on growing old, Somewhere Towards the End. The
memoirs of Athill—a total of six—attract adjectives such as ‘painfully honest’,
‘searingly painful’, ‘breathtakingly truthful’, ‘astonishingly candid’
etcetera.
After
a Funeral, which was published in 1986, when Athill
was 69, can be easily pigeon-holed into any one of the above categories. It
describes a period in Athill’s life, in the 1960s, when she took under her
wings a talented Egyptian writer in exile. The writer, referred to throughout
the memoir as ‘Didi’, became Athill’s lodger for a number of years, until, on
the Boxing Day of 1968, he took an overdose of sleeping tablets in Athill’s
flat, and died ten days later.
In six chapters Athill lays bare the five
years of sometimes pleasant, often turbulent, but never less than wholly
absorbing relationship she came to have with Didi.
Athill recounts the excitement with which
she went to a dinner party in the summer of 1963, as she knew Didi would be
there, too. Athill had loved a novel Didi had written. The book was funny and
in it, Athill felt, the author had been able to capture the quirks of the human
behaviour, apparently effortlessly. The book, she thought, was the real thing,
and she was curious to meet its author. And Didi did not disappoint. True, he
was a ‘stiff, small man’, who looked ‘more like a goat’, was ‘dressed formally’,
and was ‘gravely courteous’. However, once the party got going, Didi regaled
people with anecdotes about Germany (where he was living in exile at the time)
and German people. He was well informed on politics and trends in public
opinions.
Over the next two-three years, Athill got
to know Didi well. He came from a once rich and influential family in Egypt.
His mother married young and her husband, Didi’s father, who was much older
than her, died soon after Didi was born. His mother had ‘little time’ for him,
and he was raised by his grandparents and an aunt. Although his family was
rich—some of them very rich—he was a poor relation, and was generally treated
as an embarrassment. The family also got most of his money via lawsuits. A cousin
remembered Didi as a boy who was ‘always very angry and shouting’. As he grew
up and his political awareness expanded, Didi hurled himself into the
nationalistic ‘Away With the British’ movement. However, when the revolution
happened, he soon was disillusioned with it too, as it was not left-wing enough
for him. After his Egyptian passport was withdrawn, Didi made his way to
Germany, as he was unable to get a work permit in England. In Germany, he lived
in Hamburg, and led hand-to-mouth existence by doing one soul-destroying
unskilled or semi-skilled job after another. Matters were not helped by his
gambling and drinking; both ran completely out of control and took over his
life.
This was the state of affairs when Athill
met Didi, and decided that he needed to be rescued from his demons.
What follows is an unfeigned, at times high-minded,
but always (there is no escaping it) painfully honest account of a degringolade. Athill holds nothing back
and, in her efforts to appear as much transparent and reasonable, quotes
liberally from the voluminous diaries Didi left behind for her in addition to
his suicide note. Indeed, as you read page after page, chronicling Didi’s
apparently devious, cruel, manipulative, and frequently irrational behaviour,
you can’t help noticing how unreasonably reasonable Athill’s response to it
was. As you read Athill’s heroic attempts to ‘understand’ Didi and her quasi-
psychological explanations of why he turned out to be how he turned out, you
might wonder whether her almost inhuman reasonableness was making a bad situation
worse. (Yep, it all goes back to Didi’s less than happy childhood, Athill hints.
In a moving end to the memoir, Athill writes: ‘It was not intolerable that he
[Didi] had killed himself. It was intolerable that he had been right to do
so—that he had no alternative. It was intolerable that a man should be so
crippled by things done to him in his defenceless childhood that he had been
made, literally and precisely, unendurable to himself.’)
The picture of Didi that emerges out of
this account is of a tortured soul. The man is depicted as a walking catastrophe.
Maybe he was genetically programmed to be that way; may be the absence of a
loving and nourishing parent figure in his ‘defenceless childhood’, as Athill
suggests in the memoir, made Didi an emotional cripple; it seems he was unable
to form long-lasting, mature relationships. This handicapped him greatly in his
relationships with women, whether non-sexual (as with Athill, for the most
part) or sexual. When he came to live in London in Athill’s flat, Didi wasted
no time in forming a big circle of friends, rather several circles of friends,
which he attempted to keep separate, partly, you suspect, because he was
sponging off all of them, and was (understandably) anxious that they did not
meet; but he had very few close friends. People felt sorry for him; people,
especially middle-aged women, wanted to mother him and many, like Athill,
rescued him repeatedly; but he would not dare to let them penetrate the
carapace and witness the black hole inside. His relationships with those, who
dared to come closer to him, was inevitably marked with emotional
extremes. Didi was apparently one of
those men who literally fell in love; and repeatedly. Whenever a love affair
began he was convinced that he had found his soul-mate; that the woman was the
best thing that had happened to him. When he fell out of love (usually after
2-3 weeks) the same woman became ‘stupid’, ‘boring’, and ‘disgusting’. The
reader is informed that during almost all of the five years that Didi lived
with Athill, he never offered to pay rent; repeatedly asked her (and her
cousin, and quite a few of her friends) for money, giving barely convincing
excuses, which he then proceeded to lose in gambling or blow on alcohol; and
told repeated lies and gave false cheques to (ineffectually) cover his lies. A
classic trap of alcoholism, you might say. In his diaries, he was full of
disgust and self-loathing for his behaviour, yet could not stop fleecing
people.
All of this account seems calculated to encourage the reader to form the
impression that, talented Didi might have been, living with his was less
pleasurable than a spending a night in a vermin-infested cellar. So why didn't Athill show him the
door at the first available opportunity? Why did she allow this man, who didn't seem to be in a hurry to produce anything to follow up his début novel, and
was, into the bargain an emotional and financial drain? Athill, from time to
time, attempts to understand her own motives behind taking Didi under her wings
in a manner that is (here we go again!) candid. Athill was in her late forties
when she first met Didi, who told her that he was 13 years younger than her (when
he was only eight years younger, as Athill discovered after his death and which she feels obliged to inform her readers). Athill says that in middle aged
woman who are also childless, the sexual impulse is almost always mixed with
the mothering impulse. This, she feels, is the reason why the toy-boys of
middle-aged women are rarely impeccable. Because if these young men were
impeccable, they would not attach themselves to older women. But they are
peccable and need rescuing. Whatever else you might say about Didi, if Athill’s
account is to be believed, the inescapable conclusion, about half-way through
the memoir, is that he needed rescuing pretty much all the time. Athill
candidly admits that she was sexually attracted to Didi, and, being in an
‘open’ relationship at the time with a man she calls ‘Luke’, she was, as they
say, up for it. Didi successfully resisted Athill’s charms, saying that he did
not want their friendship to suffer, although, in—another candidly described
incident—Athill tells how Didi came into her room one night when she was
legless after an evening of heavy drinking, and ‘penetrated’ her. The whole
incident is described in a manner that gives it an eerily surreal quality, and
you wonder that what Didi did wasn’t close to statuary rape. Athill, however,
is very clear that she did not regard what Didi did as a violation and, in as
much as she could remember, enjoyed the experience!
Athill comes across in the memoir as
exceptionally tolerant of all of Didi’s misdemeanours, which would have crossed
the threshold of most people’s patience by the width of Siberia; but what she
could not countenance was Didi finding her loathsome and phoney. A whole
chapter is devoted to a three-week trip to Yugoslavia Athill undertook with
Didi and her friends, during which it would appear that Didi and she got on
each other’s nerves all the time. This trip and the contretemps must have rankled enough in Athill’s mind for her to go
into the minutiae of who said what to whom and when and how almost twenty years
after the trip. As you read this chapter (which barely manages to rise above
the level of school-ground politics) Athill allows, albeit inadvertently, a
glimpse into the quirks of her own character.
After
A Funeral was published eighteen years after
Didi’s tragic death, and it would not be a misrepresentation to say that Didi’s
was a long forgotten name by then, the only novel he published having been out
of print for a number of years. Athill obviously continued to have feelings
about the tragic life and death of this tragic unfortunate man; the memoir ends
on the note: ‘this record has been written for him [Didi], and for people who
are going to have children.’ It is therefore curious that she chose not to
reveal the real identity of Didi. Didi in real life was the Egyptian writer Waguih
Ghali. Ghali published only one novel in his life, entitled Beer
in the Snooker Club, recently reissued in paperback (and available in
paperback) after being out of print for many years. Ghali is described in the
‘product description’ as a ‘plain spoken writer of consummate wryness, grace
and humour’. A ‘reader’ who has reviewed the novel provides the additional
information that Ghali belonged to the extended family of a former UN secretary
of state. When Ghali killed himself in 1968, this became his only published
novel. In her memoir Athill informs us that Ghali worked for a long time on
another novel; however, during one of his psychological crises which resolved
miraculously on that occasion after he read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, he
destroyed it, realising, so he told Athill, that what he had written was not up
to scratch. At a later point in the memoir Athill seems sceptical of this
claim, as Ghali was an inveterate hoarder and found it near impossible to throw
away anything. However, since this unfinished novel has never been published we
have to conclude that either Ghali really destroyed the manuscript, or
Athill—to whom he bequeathed all of his written material—decided to respect the
dead author’s wish. And seeing as it was Athill who was instrumental in
publishing Beer in a Snooker Club (it was published by Andre Deutch), the
old dame must have had a good reason to not publish the unfinished novel. Either
way, it is a shame. Beer in the Snooker Club is a superb novel, and one would have
loved to read his second offering, even if unfinished, of this talented, if
deeply flawed (as per Athill’s account), writer.
