Book of the Month: After A Funeral (Diana Athill)

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.

V.S. Naipaul, Diana Athill and a Lot of Tosh

V.S. Naipaul, my most favourite writer, seems to be in the news these days for all the wrong reasons.

Naipaul hasn’t published a novel since Magic Seeds (which wasn’t received well), came out seven years ago.

Last year was published Masque of Africa, Naipaul’s first travelogue in a decade, this time on Africa (which, like some of the other vast continents he has visited in the past, Naipaul found appalling), and that was panned by the critics (although many of them seemed to be more interested in venting their bile about what an awful man Naipaul was than reviewing the supposed deficiencies in the book).

So how does Naipaul manage to muscle his way into limelight, albeit intermittently?

It works like this. Naipaul gives an interview. In the interview he makes statements that are very obviously politically incorrect and controversial. These statements are quoted (usually out of context) in newspapers, which then becomes a license for the outraged offended party to call him gross, delusional, narcissistic, overrated etcetera etcetera.

Last week, the Guardian quoted (selectively and out of context, needless to say) from an interview Naipaul gave to the Royal Geographic Society.

In the interview Naipaul replied to the question whether he considered any women writer his literary match with the answer ‘I don’t think so.’

In the same interview Naipaul claimed that he couldn’t possibly share Jane Austen’s ‘sentimental ambition, her sentimental view of the world.’

Naipaul further claimed that women writer were ‘quite different’. ‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph I know whether it is written by a man or a woman,’ he said. ‘It is,’ he added (just in case he hadn’t made himself clear), ‘unequal to me.’

Finally, without actually taking her name, Naipaul dismissed the writing of Diana Athill, his former editor at Andre Deutsch, as ‘feminist tosh’, adding (the Naipaul touch) ‘I don’t mean this in any unkind way.’

Athill, 93, responded thus: ‘It seems very odd. He doesn’t realise what a monkey he is making of himself.’ 

Athill went on to give her view as to why Naipaul might have dismissed her writing as ‘feminine tosh’. ‘I was a “sensitive editor” because I liked his work, I was admiring it. When I stopped admiring him so much I started being “feminine tosh”. I can't say it made me feel very bad. It just made me laugh ... I think one should just ignore it, take no notice really.’

Finally, Naipaul’s former editor had the following to say: ‘Naipaul has always been a testy man and seems to have got testier in old age. I don't think it is worth being taken seriously ... It's sad really because he's a very good writer. Why be such an irritable man?’

                                       

I tried to find the original Royal Geographic interview on the net, but couldn’t find it, so I will have to go by what was published in the Guardian.

It is difficult to see what Naipaul was trying to achieve here other than attracting wholly negative publicity and hostile criticism towards him.

Is it possible that Naipaul made an off the cuff remark during the interview that was latched upon by the newspapers seeking a juicy story? That does not seem typical of a man who is known to rarely forget and never forgive (unless, nearing eighty, Sir Vidia has gone a bit soft in the head).

What has (understandably) raised the hackles of some women writers is Naipaul’s description of women’s writing as ‘sentimental’ and ‘narrow’. I must say that this seems like sweeping (and inaccurate) generalization to me. If I take a look at the novels I have read in the last eighteen months, there were many novels written by women writers (Monica Ali, Barbara Kingsglover, Hilary Mantel to name just three) that were anything but sentimental. I am currently reading Jane Gardam’s The Man in the Wooden Hat, and it has, so far, not struck me as sentimental (although I haven’t found it particularly gripping either). 

It is possible—I haven’t done a PhD on this, so I wouldn’t bet my mortgage on it—that women writers as a group are more likely to be more aware of the emotional aspects than male writers, and Naipaul was probably making that point in a manner that was not helpful.

It’s all down to semantics and implied connotations. Naipaul chose the word ‘sentimental’ to describe women’s writing. If we suppose that the word was chosen carefully, then the implication is that Naipaul thinks that women’s writing is swayed more by emotions rather than reason. Mind you, Naipaul is not saying it in so many words; however, the context in which the word was used has a pejorative connotation.

I have read all but one of Naipaul’s novels, none of which has struck me as sentimental; his later novels, in particular, are devoid of sentiments altogether.  That makes me think that Naipaul does not view sentimentality (or excess of it) in a novel as a good thing. He believes women writers (as a group) overdo sentimentality in their work, which he doesn't; ergo, no woman writer is his equal.  Everyone is entitled to his views; but when you are a well-known figure of some standing in the literary world and express views that are so obviously non-PC (and likely to be viewed as incorrect by many), you have to expect flak; and that’s what has happened here. You also run the risk of being labeled cranky, eccentric (or a kook, as Jenifer Egan described him in her interview—I had to look up a dictionary to find out its meaning), sexist, irascible, and pompous.

Naipaul does not help the matter by refusing to elaborate further once he has fired his salvo. The Pulitzer winning American writer Jenifer Egan reacted strongly to Naipaul’s comment (although judging from the report of Egan’s reaction, it wasn’t clear to me whether she had actually read Naipaul’s interview; it seemed that she was, in a telephonic interview, told about the comments published in the Guardian, and she gave her response). 

When requested to give his reaction to Egan’s comment, Naipaul’s spokesperson said, ‘Sir Vidia said what he needed to say and is not interested in further dialogue on this matter.’

You see what is happening here? Naipaul made comments (probably) calculated to inflame emotions; and when the predictable happened, he haughtily declared that he was not interested in a debate, evincing that he considered it beneath him to engage in a dialogue or a debate on the matter with the other person.  Not a strategy that will win you many friends. But perhaps Naipaul does not care about these things.

I do share, however, Naipaul’s dislike (if that is the correct word) of Jane Austen. I don’t know what ambitions Jane Austen had when she wrote those dreadful novels. Naipaul thinks she had sentimental ambitions; I think she had ambitions to render the reader catatonic with ennui. Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s most famous novel, is not oozing in sentimentality in my humble opinion; it is still a crap novel—more dreary than Norfolk county council meetings and more irritating than an Alex Ferguson interview. Also, Naipaul is not the only one who does not hold Austen in high regard: Jeremy Clarkson, that great wit in British journalism, does not waste any opportunity to tell the world his low opinion of Austen (that makes at least three people in the British Isles who think Jane Austen is overrated: myself, Naipaul, and Clarkson).

Are women writers 'quite different' from men writers as Naipaul claims? It is a view; not a very fashionable view these days, but a view that has been expressed, from time to time, by other authors, including women authors. Some time back I read a novel entitled Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. This novel, written by the British novelist Winifred Watson had become very popular when it was first published in the 1930s (and was recently made into a Hollywood film). The novel was recently reissued by the Persephone Books, and included a biography of its author. Winifred Watson firmly believed that women read women's novels and men read men's novels. (This of course does not mean that men can't write novels that women will read and vice versa, but does suggest that Watson felt that men and women appreciate different things when they read novels.)

I also found Naipaul’s comments about Diana Athill, and Athill’s response interesting.

In his interview Naipaul describes Athill’s writing as a ‘feminist tosh’. I do not know which book of Athill Naipaul had in his mind when he said that—Athill has published one novel (which I haven’t read) and a few memoirs (of which I have read three: Stet, Somewhere Towards the End, and After A Funeral). 

Note that Naipaul is not making an attack on Athill’s character; he is passing his judgment on Athill’s writing, which, in his view, is ‘feminist nonsense’.

What is Athill’s response? She says (according to her comment attributed her in the Guardian) that she finds Naipaul’s ‘attack’ ‘laughable’. She declares that ‘no notice’ should be taken of it; it was not worth taking seriously. After saying all this Athill goes on to offer her insight into why Naipaul has made this remark about her writing. We are told that it all goes back to the 1970s when she was Naipaul’s editor at Andre Deutsch and expressed her reservations about Naipaul’s novel Guerrillas. Naipaul, if Athill is to be believed, did not take kindly to her criticism; he withdrew his novel from Andre Deutsch, and never worked with her again.

This happened, if it happened (i.e. Naipaul’s reason for severing ties with Andre Deutsch and jettisoning Diana Athill), more than 35 years ago.

In giving her response to Naipaul’s ‘laughable attack’, which was not worth taking ‘seriously’, Athill felt the need to disinter this dreg. ‘When I stopped admiring him so much,’ Athill remarked, ‘I started writing “feminist tosh” [according to Naipaul].’

What this suggests to me is that Athill is unable to get past the idea that the only reason Naipaul has described her work as ‘feminist tosh’ is his grudge against her for daring to criticize his novel several decades ago.

You can’t help feeling that despite her loud protestations to the contrary, Naipaul’s dismissive remark has hurt Athill.

Athill thinks it is sad that Naipaul is being such an irritable man (even in his old age, presumably). I think it is equally (if not more) sad that someone at the age of 93, when very few years are left on this earth, is still unable to look beyond petty personal dustups that happened years ago. A really mature response might have been to simply acknowledge what Naipaul said and even accept that he might have had literary reasons for not taking her writing seriously, instead of whining about some incident that happened in another century. True serenity of mind, it seems, is not an easy thing to achieve in a lifetime.

(As an aside, in her memoir, Stet,—which, I should point out, I thoroughly enjoyed, not least because it had a gossipy feel to it—published almost a decade ago, Athill devotes a chapter to Naipaul. The picture Athill paints of the Nobel Laureate—although he wasn’t that when the memoir was first published— is not endearing. She describes Naipaul as haughty, prickly, difficult, and having enough demons to fill up Buckingham Palace. She indicates that she found his company oppressive; she hints that he treated his wife (his first wife, Patricia) with contempt; and finally, she tells the story of Naipaul’s departure from Andre Deutch and records her reaction: ‘It was as though the sun came out [after Naipaul left]. I didn’t have to like Vidia any more.’ This, one might say, is very personal criticism; and Naipaul, as far as I am aware, never responded to it. At least not with personal mudslinging. That is not his style. He has, instead, more than ten years after Stet was first published, made a ‘passing remark’ about Athill’s writing that has hit the target.

As a further aside, in all three memoirs of Athill that I have read (two of which—Stet and Somewhere Towards the End—I have liked), I have noted (with a degree of admiration) Athill’s unassuming style of writing in which she somehow manages to be a quiet, almost self-deprecating, heroine of her stories—the ultimate conceit of a writer, you might say. This is particularly evident in the third book of Athill which I read recently.  In this memoir, After A Funeral, Athill recounts the story of her doomed relationship with the Egyptian writer Waugih Ghali, which ended with Ghali committing suicide in Athill’s flat. Athill tries hard—too hard, you suspect—to project herself as an open minded, generous and tolerant woman. Ghali—who was dead for eighteen years when the book first came out— based on Athill’s account, comes across as a cross between Caligula and Margaret Thatcher. As I read the book I found myself becoming increasingly irritated, as yet another incident of the caddish, ungrateful behavior of the unreliable Ghali (who is referred to throughout the book by his nickname ‘Didi’) was recounted, to which Saint Diana responded with supreme forbearance. And it was done very cunningly. Scratch the patina of pseudo-honesty and faux-introspective insight, and you find that awful things were written about a man who could not defend himself because he was dead.

When Naipaul described Athill’s writing as ‘tosh’ he might have been very harsh, unfair, even, but, having read three of Athill’s books, I can’t say he didn’t have a point.)

As I have said this on this blog before, the trouble with Naipaul is that he says as he sees things and does not care for niceties or political correctness. This is not to say that I find myself in agreement with everything he says, great fan though I am of his writing. But he is nothing less than totally honest (at least that is how he comes across to me—both in his fiction and non-fiction writing).

And that is a quality I admire a lot in a writer.