Diana Athill was a founding editor of the Deutsch publishing house, where, over some four decades, she worked with such literary luminaries as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and John Updike. Since her retirement in 1993 she has enjoyed a second, equally successful, career as a memoirist. Stet: An Editor's Life (2000) was a critically acclaimed account of her time in publishing, and 2008's Somewhere Towards the End won the Costa Prize for Biography; several earlier memoirs, including 1962's Instead of a Letter and 1986's After A Funeral, have been reissued in recent years.
Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter is the newest addition to this oeuvre. A slim volume by comparison with its predecessors, it comprises a series of vignettes ranging from childhood reminiscences to reflections on history, culminating – in this, the author's 98th year – in a thoughtful meditation on old age and the end of life.
There is some engagement with politics, notably in an absorbing recollection of a sojourn in Tobago. Athill is astutely aware of neo-colonial privilege, the connection between the squalor endured by the native population and the ease enjoyed by affluent visitors.
Jocular affection
She observes how this dynamic is signposted in the jocular affection of tourists and investors for the island’s ramshackle inefficiencies. It is, she notes, “a corrupting relationship” for all concerned, lulling the beneficiaries into complacency and reducing the native population to “live furniture in someone else’s beautiful dream”.
Athill is similarly critical of Britain’s insularity towards the European Union, its “apparent feeling that Europe ought to be grateful for our condescension in joining it”. But she is, for all that, a child of her time, crediting imperial propaganda - a “childhood schooling in feeling proud” – with having strengthened her character. In this respect she embodies a historic ambivalence at the core of modern English liberalism: it remains tethered, on a profound psychological level, to the chauvinism of the past.
This book’s primary preoccupations are, however, of a more personal nature. Its most striking chapter is a poignant account of a pregnancy and miscarriage in the author’s early forties. Athill, who maintains she has never had a strong maternal instinct, recalls feeling a remarkable oneness with nature in the immediate wake of finding out she was pregnant.
It was, she recounts, “a particularly ebullient, sun-drenched spring … I was flowing with it, in it, at the same rate.” There follows a rather harrowing description of the miscarriage, which she handled with characteristic stolidity. For all the horror of the experience, she is to this day disconcerted by the speed with which she got over it.
‘Other woman’
Athill has led a colourful personal life, having eschewed the humdrum of a conventional marriage for the freedom to explore herself and the world. She has had a number of affairs with attached men, and admits to feeling more comfortable in the role of “other woman” than that of partner.
“What I was really happy with,” she proclaims, “was a lover who had a nice wife to do his washing and look after him if he fell ill, so that I could enjoy the plums of love without having to munch through the pudding.”
Though intended as ironical self-deprecation, this jovial pronouncement seems a little narcissistic. One needn’t be rabidly priggish to find something distasteful in the blithe belittling of those “nice wives”.
On the other hand, perhaps this kind of unapologetic esprit is the key to longevity. The overall tenor of this memoir is of satisfaction in a life lived to the full, with few regrets. Athill is determined to take pleasure in her twilight years. "Nothing could be more deliciously luxurious," she insists, "than being pushed around a really thrilling and crowded exhibition in a wheelchair."
The move to a retirement home, which for many can trigger despondency, is embraced with relish. Athill relates a lovely anecdote about a group of residents getting together to cultivate a patch of garden on the nursing home grounds: being mostly in their nineties, several of them plain forget to turn up on the appointed day; but they ultimately succeed, despite their physical frailty, in transforming a neglected space into a smart bed of rose bushes.
These days we hear a lot of gloomy talk in the media about ageing populations, predicated on the assumption that old age is an ineluctably lonely purgatory. As Athill’s example so hearteningly demonstrates, it doesn’t have to be like that.
Houman Barekat is a writer and critic
