Interview: Diana Athill, editor

Published on Friday 30 October 2009 18:22

AT 92, legendary editor Diana Athill tells DAVID ROBINSON what it takes to write a frank memoir

AT THE start of her award-winning memoir Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill mentions her disappointment at opening a parcel containing a tree fern that she had ordered. Instead of the sizeable plant she had imagined from the catalogue, it consisted of a tiny pot with three or four fragile leaves. She would never, she realised, live to see it anywhere near the size she had envisioned.

Such are the slights that life deals to those already in their tenth decade (Athill is 92). Right now she's facing an even bigger one: sorting out which of her books and possessions she wants to take with her when she moves in to a care home "for the active elderly" near the flat in which she's lived for the last 50 years in London's Primrose Hill.

With most people in this situation, there are certain emotions that one might expect to be able to detect. Self-pity perhaps: all those memories to be boxed up and put away. Resignation at the inexorably narrowing confines of extreme old age. Frustration. Rage at the infirmities that are forcing her to make the move in the first place. Fear of loneliness, no matter how subtly and stoically masked.

Talk to Diana Athill – grande dame of London publishing, legendary editor for 50 years with Andr Deutsch, and brilliantly cold-eyed memoirist – and none of these emotions, even in microscopic quantities, are on view. But that's no surprise: one has only to read Life Class – in which four of her six volumes of memoirs appear, slightly edited down, between the same covers – to realise that her obsession with emotional accuracy takes her far beyond any kind of stereotype.

Every one of those books proves the point. Even in Yesterday Morning, her account of an idyllic-sounding privileged childhood in Norfolk, there's a certain detachedness about her observations. "From the beginning, I was always the questioner in my family," she says.

But being the questioner, as she shows in Instead of a Letter, doesn't mean wallowing in egotism or self-indulgence. That's the normal danger in an account such as this of her emotional derailment on being abandoned, just after she'd finished her studies at Oxford, by the man who had promised to marry her, who then married someone else before being killed in the Second World War. Instead she somehow writes about the humiliation of being dumped and the shattering blow to her self-confidence without wallowing in her hurt, as though only by being ruthlessly honest with herself could she recover her poise.

In Somewhere Towards the End she muses briefly on whether, looking back across 90 years, she has any regrets and concludes that she has only two: "that nub of coldness at the centre (of my character] and laziness". The laziness we'll come to later, but surely, I ask, the "nub of coldness" she refers to is an essential ingredient in any writer's emotional make-up?

"I think of it now as having a rather beady eye, and yes, it is part of being a writer. I always had it. I can remember before I went up to Oxford, saying to a friend, 'I wonder if anyone ever gets so involved in anything that they forget themselves and stop looking at it.' I was aware even then that I was a watcher, an observer – of love, of anything – and now I see that it is part of the temperament that people do have if they are writers."

A questioner, an observer: already the seeds were sown for writing such defiantly honest memoirs. She'd already written a handful of short stories, but inspiration had dried up. In 1962, however, she suddenly found herself writing the book that became Instead of a Letter, almost as if on automatic pilot.

"It was extraordinary. I'd get back from work each evening and start writing and it would just come. Although the book looks quite planned, it just seemed to write itself. And it was an extraordinarily therapeutic exercise. It got rid of this sense of failure I'd had all my working life. Even though I enjoyed my job, I'd always had this lurking sense of failure. I'd been in love and thought I was going to end up happily married with children – a very simple wish, but I'd failed to make it and that was more spirit-weakening than I realised. When I got rid of it in my early forties by writing it out, it was like a new life. I felt like a new person and I've felt like that ever since."

While Stet, her memoir about life in publishing (at Andr Deutsch she'd worked with all the greats, from Philip Roth to VS Naipaul, John Updike to Jean Rhys) was enthusiastically received, none of her books has had the impact of Somewhere Towards the End, with which she won the Costa Biography of the Year Award in 2008. It's not surprising, I say, somewhat ungallantly: in the literature of extreme old age, you've got the field to yourself. She laughs.

"When my publisher suggested I write about being old, I thought he was M-A-A-A-D. But yes, very few things are written about it and on the whole people expect it to be a miserable subject, so it cheers people up a lot to realise that it is actually quite possible to have a very pleasant old age. I do say that it's not relevant to a lot of people – you've only got to be a bit ill and you can have a horrible old age – but over and over again, people have found it an inspiration."

So great is Athill's candour on all kinds of subjects (her past love life, her attitudes to sex, the tragedies in her life) that interviewers find themselves readily broaching, as she does in her own writing, topics that are normally taboo in casual conversation. Death, for example. Her brother once said that after 80 nobody has a right to complain about dying. Did she, I hear myself asking, feel the same about her own death?

"He was quite right. He and I at some level were very much alike. The last time I saw him at home, he was dying. He was aware that he was very near the end. I went upstairs to say goodbye to him. I gave him a hug and he looked at me and I looked at him and we didn't say anything but we both knew that this was the last time we would say goodbye. There was a wry smile on his face. He was accepting. He knew he had no right to complain, though actually he did. He was furious about dying. But he knew he was."

Does awareness of how little time she might have left herself make her less lazy than she once thought she was? She hesitates. "To tell the truth, once you've reached this stage ... I think when you're younger it's quite important to think about death, to get it into your head that every damn thing in the world dies, there's nothing special about it. But once you've got quite comfortable with that idea, you really stop thinking about it. I don't waste time thinking about it. If it happens, it happens."

Isn't she sentimental about anything that she'd leave behind? She laughs out loud. "Not at all really. I'm not sentimental about anything. I'm very unromantic too. I think there's more trouble caused in life by romantic attitudes ... Of course, I've grown far too ancient to worry about it now."

Right now, but probably not for much longer, she lives three floors up (there's a stairlift) in a cluttered attic flat owned by her cousin. "It's got one of the nicest views in London, and it's so quiet that the only sounds you hear are people talking to their dogs," she says. She'll clearly miss it, but she's moving to the care home because she hates the idea of being a burden on her friends.

I mentioned earlier that I didn't believe her protestations of laziness. Here's why. Athill admits that there are days when she'd rather stay in bed but "you must be quite stern with yourself and get up". For a few days before the interview, that's exactly how she'd been feeling: a sinus infection had forced her to cancel her appearance at the Cheltenham Book Festival and she thought she'd also have to cancel a visit to Canada, where she was due to open the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

But on the day we talked she'd woken up feeling a bit better, so she decided she'd fly to Canada after all. She was due to interview Alice Munro, one of her favourite writers. She'd postpone the visit to the care home to check on the room they were allocating her. She'd drive round a week later when she got back from Canada. If things worked out, she'd almost certainly write about sorting out the accoutrements from her long life and work out which she could bring with her. None of this, I would suggest, is the portrait of a lazy 92-year-old.

One last question. Where is the tree fern she mentioned at the start of Somewhere Towards the End?

"The tree fern! Oh, don't talk about the tree fern! I thought it would see me out. But I left it out on the windowsill and there were a couple of days of frost. And so it's dead!"

She sits back and screeches with laughter. She's wonderful.

&#149 Life Class by Diana Athill is published next week by Granta, price 25.