Memoir: Somewhere Towards the End By Diana Athill Granta Books, 182pp. £12.99A woman publishes a short memoir - 183 pages to be exact - and it turns out she's all of 89, so should we pat her on the back, exclaim at how clever she is, say "well done, who'd have thought?".
Or do we treat her like the rest of us, admiring her literary achievements while stifling a yawn when she chunters on a little too long about taking up gardening, going to evening classes and having to care for an increasingly infirm companion?
The latter, definitely, otherwise we would be doing her a great disservice.
Diana Athill was born in 1917 and reached her 90th year on December 21st last year - an auspicious day. Until she retired at the age of 75, she worked as a publisher's editor, and a pretty renowned one at that, going into partnership with her one-time lover André Deutsch and working with him for 49 years. During that time, she published, among others, Jean Rhys, Norman Mailer, Brian Moore and Timothy Mo, rejected Lord of the Flies and lost Portnoy's Complaint to another publisher. An eventful life, but reading Somewhere Towards the End, you realise that publishing was only the half of it.
Born into a military family, Athill was educated at home until she was 14, gained a degree at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, met Deutsch when they were both 26, fell into his bed the same week, fell out of it again a few weeks later to become his work partner, and the rest is publishing history.
Deutsch was single but on the whole she tended towards relationships with married men because they weren't likely to lead to anything permanent.
THIS LATEST MEMOIR - there have been two others - examines her views on ageing, hence the title. Does she have any regrets, she asks herself, and the answer is no. Well, not really, but there is the fact that she never had any children and at one time had wanted, quite badly, to become a mother. Instead, when her erstwhile lover took up with Sally - inevitably, a younger woman - she found a place for Sally in their home. "Quite soon," she writes, "it occurred to me that, since she was spending almost every night in Barry's bed, keeping on her bedsitter was a waste of money, so I suggested she move in with us . . . I know that people thought our ménage a trois odd, though whether I acquired undeserved merit for generosity or disapproval for loose morals, I could never tell because no one was ever impolite enough to comment."
It was, after all, as she says, the 1960s, when possessiveness was usually condemned. In any case, Sally moved out and on, marrying and having children and keeping in touch so that her children, now adult, are Diana Athill's family. So it all ended happily, except that the wandering Barry - still with her after some 50 years - is now very much in decline and is characterised by prostate problems and grumpiness. Oddly, having to clean up after him following a bout of what-I-won't-go-into - though she does, and graphically - she found that she had reached a state of what she calls wifehood and we hear a note of triumphant acceptance.
Her mother lived to be 96, and if all goes well she will also, but, not surprisingly, death is there, waiting. What comes afterwards is "nothingness". She sometimes wishes she believed in God, not for the usual insurance-policy reasons, but because "I shan't, in fairness, be able to quote 'Dieu me pardonnerai. C'est son metier,' words that have always made me laugh and which, besides, are wonderfully sensible."
An astute editor, she writes with precision and clarity, using one word to convey an idea that a lesser writer might expand into a paragraph. Describing an affair she had with Sam, who "accompanied me over the frontier from late middle-age and being old", she writes of her joy at being brought alive again. He wanted her urgently, she writes, and it's the choice of adverb that is so perfect.
There's a fair bit of padding in this book, and not surprisingly, since not a great deal has happened since the last memoir, Stet, published in 2000, so that when she expounds a few more of her theories you fall on them hungrily. She lays no store by loyalty, partly because André Deutsch used to accuse his writers of disloyalty when they looked like moving to another publisher. Why should loyalty come in to it, she writes, when the publisher is in the business of making money out of an author? Fidelity in a relationship is fine, but she regrets the fact that it is so often tied in with sex. " . . . kindness and consideration should be the key words, not loyalty, and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out." An enlightened woman.
Mary Russell's most recent book, the memoir Journeys of a Lifetime was published by Townhouse/Simon & Schuster