Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (42 page)

And now something which did not go against my grain, something which was as natural to me as love, had worked. I believe that even had I never written another word, the success of that story alone would have begun to dissolve the lumps. Bury me, dear friends, with a copy of the
Observer
folded under my head, for it was the
Observer’s
prize that woke me up to the fact that I had become happy.

It is surely important to make a few notes on that rare condition, happiness, now that I am in it. It began when I started to write, was fanned into a glorious glow when I won that prize, was confirmed when, soon afterwards, I began to love, and it shows no sign of altering.

A symptom of life: opening my eyes in the morning to wakefulness. The long hours of unconsciousness which I used to treasure are now meaningless. Even on Sundays I will sleep for no more than eight hours unless I am unusually and genuinely tired.

A symptom of life: not caring much where I live. Single women can root themselves in their rooms, their furniture, their ornaments, so that not to have the right things about them in the right order becomes intolerable to them. I love rooms and objects and materials; I love to choose them and to arrange them, and when – rarely – I have done it well, I am snug and satisfied. But I attach less importance to it now than I used to. Recently, being between flats, I have been camping here and there with friends, and once in a place which was everything I dislike. I expected to be uneasy and discontented, but found that while there was a table to write on, a stove to cook on, and a bed, I was at home.

A symptom of life: people saying ‘What has happened to her? She looks so well,’ or ‘She looks so young.’ My own sensation of physical well-being is perceptible to other people. ‘She might be twenty-five,’ said a woman in her seventies, and even allowing for the telescoping of the years when seen from that age, which would make thirty-five more accurate than twenty-five, some degree of physical rejuvenation is suggested. If it exists, it corresponds to an inward change towards the years. I was twenty-three when I began to be aware of ageing as something sad. While I had Paul every year passing carried me towards something better than I had hitherto known, possibilities proliferated, anything might happen to me. When I had accepted his disappearance the years became slow steps downhill. Common sense forbade me to consider myself old while still in my twenties, but I felt old, and once past my thirtieth birthday I began to accept the feeling as rational. Most of my thirties were overshadowed, when I allowed myself to notice it, not only by my forties but by my old age: by a sense that there was nothing ahead but old age, by an awareness of the disabilities of old age, a shrinking when I watched an old person stepping carefully, painfully on to the curb of a pavement, or noticed the round, puzzled eyes of old-age pensioners sitting on a bench in the sun, looking baffled by what had happened to them. Now that I am, in fact, several years nearer to them, have my first grey hairs, a neck less smooth and a waist considerably less slim – can observe in my own body the clear indications of time passing and know that they are there for good, not as a sign of a physical condition that could be cured – I have, perversely, stopped feeling old. The process of ageing is undeniable, but it no longer touches an exposed nerve. Being happy has made it unimportant.

This is because the present has become real. No one can be detached from his past, but anyone can come to see it as being past, and when that happens one is partly liberated from its consequences. I cannot only see mine as being past, but have become indifferent to it.
Then
is less real than
now
, and
now
has become potent enough to shape the future, who knows how, so that the future is no longer an immutable threat. Nothing is immutable: that is the thing. My condition has changed – even, to a small extent, my nature has changed – so possibilities exist again.

The sensation of happiness itself is one for which I have only a physical vocabulary: warmth, expansion, floating, opening, relaxation. This was so from its beginning, and has become more so with its confirmation in love. Unintellectual, unspiritual as I am, I have always identified closely with my body: for most of the time I am it and it is me. What happens to me physically is therefore of great importance to my general condition – a disposition threatening serious problems in illness or old age, but conducive to an especial happiness in love. To split the relationship of love into ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ is something which I cannot do. Making love is not a fugitive good, contained only in the time in which it is being done: it is, each time, an addition, an expansion of a whole happiness. I have never in the past known it to be quite wiped out by subsequent events, and I know that it will not be wiped out now. This final way of communication is one of the things which, like my feeling for Beckton and Oxford, I know to be stored in me: a
good
which I have experienced, which enters into and is entered by everything I see and hear and feel and smell, and of which I can only be deprived by the decay of consciousness. That when two people have lived together for several years their lovemaking loses its value is, in most cases, obvious, and I should expect it to do so with me: I should expect that only if the man I was living with and I were really as well suited as we had first believed would the habit of companionship and interdependence successfully supersede physical delight. But I do not see that this would discredit physical delight. If it exists, it will always
have existed
. Now, therefore, that it exists again for me, I am by that much richer to the end of my days.

So happiness, followed by love and increased by it, has for me the colour of physical pleasure although it embraces many other things and although it seems to me to mean something larger than my own emotions and sensations. This is a period in which many people are concerned with the difficulty of communication. Poetry, novels, plays, paintings: they emphasize this theme so constantly that anyone who feels that human beings
can
communicate is beginning to look naïve. But what is meeting a man from a different country, a different tradition, a different social and economic background, and finding that you and he can both speak about anything exactly as you feel, in perfect confidence of understanding even if not of agreement, if it is not communication? The discovery of trust and easiness which comes with such a meeting is another, and greater, enduring good.

On the face of it this love is of the same kind as others I have known and is no more likely to lead to a permanent companionship. I must take my own word for it that it is not the same. It does not feel the same.
Then
, with a sort of despairing joy, I used to jump off cliffs into expected disaster;
now
, hardly knowing what I was doing, I slipped off a smooth rock into clear, warm water.

I have come to have a horror of many of the states to which human beings give the name of love – a horror at the sight of them, and at the knowledge that I have been in them. I feel like André Gide, when he wrote in
So Be It
, ‘There are many sufferings I claim to be imaginary … few things interest me less than so-called broken hearts and sentimental affairs.’ Gide, poor man, was not well equipped to talk about love, split as he knew himself to be between physical and mental to such an extent that both were crippled. (I know of no more striking example of the dependence of style on honesty than his descriptions of relationships with boys. Trying to write most honestly, he is betrayed by the sudden, tinny ring of his words because he is not writing honestly. He is persuading himself that a sick greed had beauty. I would have been prepared to believe that it
did
have beauty if it were not for the timbre of those sentences.) But the old man’s impatience with sad love stories contains much truth. Hunger, possessiveness, self-pity, the stubborn obsession to impose on another being the image we ourselves have fabricated: good God, the torments human beings are impelled to inflict on themselves and each other!

I am frightened by my own arrogance in saying that now, because I had stopped expecting to love and had therefore almost stopped wanting to love, I love; but that is what it feels like. I do not want the man I love to be other than he is; I want more of his time and presence than he is free to give me, but not much more. I want him to exist as himself, without misfortune or unhappiness. Perhaps this is because I am too old and fixed in my habits to want anything more, or perhaps I am deceiving myself. If I am telling the truth – I must reread this in ten years’ time! – I shall have been justified in calling my present condition happiness.

I do not think that I have become more agreeable for it. My relationship with other people has changed: they have, with one exception, become less important to me. In a sad or neutral condition I pored over my friends’ lives almost to the extent of living them vicariously, whereas now I am more detached, particularly from their misfortunes. I have one friend, a woman, who is bound by some flaw in her nature to uncertainty and confusion so that she has rarely been able to know the rewards which her beauty, intelligence, and generous ways ought to have earned her. There have been times in the past when I was so concerned for her that I would lie awake puzzling her problems in real distress, but now, although I am still sorry for them, they no longer attack my own peace of mind. This increased selfishness both dismays and pleases me: dismays, because it is disagreeable to see in oneself so clear a demonstration of the limitations of sympathy; pleases, because I have suspected the motives of the concern I used to feel. A fictional character who has always made me uneasy is Sonia, in
War and Peace
– humble, unselfish Sonia, abdicating from her own claims on life, identifying so thoroughly with the Rostovs that their lives were substituted for hers. Tolstoy need do no more than present Sonia without comment to show that in spite of her virtues he dismisses her as a person incomplete, a failed human being. His attitude towards her has always made me wince: it is the right attitude, and there have been times when I myself was near deserving it. To grasp greedily is detestable; to abdicate is despicable. When unhappy, I have veered towards the despicable rather than the detestable, and if vanity must choose between the two evils, whose vanity would not prefer to be detested rather than despised?

In these circumstances happiness will, of course, end, in so far as it depends on a relationship. Or if not ‘of course’, then ‘probably’. I have been puzzled because, in foreseeing this probability, I remain sure that I am not ‘expecting disaster’ as I used to do when I fell in love. If the man I love were to stop loving me, or were to go away, there would certainly be an eclipse of joy at first total: I should have a bad time to go through. Am I so far from being frightened by this only because I can see no reason why such a thing should happen
soon
? Is it because, growing old, I am used to the thought of the losses which come with age, so that I would see such a loss as just another of them? Or is it because I happen to trust the relationship as one in which no mystification is likely to enter (the worst part of Paul’s disappearance was the silence)? No doubt these things contribute to my lack of ‘disaster-expectation’, but there is something else as well. It is embarrassing to revert to my writing when it still amounts to so little – to hardly more than a private satisfaction – but I believe that it is the impulse to write which underlies my peace of mind. If I ask myself, ‘So what will become of me if
that
happens?’ the answer is, ‘I will be all right after a time. I will go on writing.’ And because I can say that, I can live in the present with nothing but gratitude for and joy in what it offers.

It is now midnight, early in December. From this table, with this white tea-cup, full ashtray, and small glass half-full of rum beside me, I see my story, ordinary though it has all been and sad though much of it was, as a success story. I am rising forty-three, and I am happier in the present and more interested by the future than I have ever been since I was a girl: amused and delighted, too, because to find oneself in the middle of a success story, however modest, when one has for so long believed oneself a protagonist of failure, is bizarre. But is it a story which will seem worth having lived through, of value in itself, when I come to die? Will the question my grandmother asked – and I shall have no grandchild of whom to ask it – overshadow my last days?

T
HE THINGS WHICH
I will not be able to claim for myself are easy to list.

I have not been beautiful. Looks do not matter, I was taught; indeed, handsome looks are even bad, tempting to vanity and silliness. This, for a woman, is a lie. If I had been beautiful I would not necessarily have been happier, but I would have been more important. Perhaps if I had been ugly I would also have been more important, an awkward body forced to build an awkward personality to protect grief. But my kind of looks – someone may say, surprised, ‘How pretty you look in that colour,’ or, if in love with me, ‘You have lovely eyes’ – that kind of looks cannot be accounted even momentarily a reason for existence, as beauty, so confusingly and sometimes so fatally, can be.

I have been intelligent only in comparison with dull people. Compared with what I consider real intelligence I am stupid, being unable to think. I do not even know what people do in their brains to start the process of thinking. My own brain has a door which swings backwards and forwards in the draught. Things blow into it – a lot of things, some of them good but none of them under my control as I feel they ought to be. I have intuitions, sympathies, a sense of proportion, and the ability to be detached, but nothing which goes click-click-click, creating structures of thought. In my work I am often humiliated by this inability to think. I do things, or leave them undone, purely through stupidity, and this hurts and puzzles me, so that each time it happens I turn quickly to something unconnected with the organization of facts or ideas. I am good at liking or not liking somebody’s work or, at understanding what somebody means, or is trying to mean. If I am wrong about such things, it is for reasons other than stupidity. But because I see the ability to organize and to construct as something which it should be possible to learn, and I have not been able to learn it, I am more oppressed, in my work, by my lack than I am comforted by what I have. Outside work, in life, I do not mind being stupid in this way; it is sometimes inconvenient but that is my own business, and I get pleasure and interest enough from the blowing about of feelings. But clearly I shall not be able to claim intelligence of a high enough quality to justify a life.

I have not been good. My ‘good’, partly a legacy of my Christian upbringing and partly arrived at empirically, is one which centres on selflessness. I have seen few evils, and few ills, which could not be traced to the individual’s monstrous misconceptions of his own value in relation to that of other individuals. But people are what they
do
more than what they believe; and over and over again my actions have been those of a woman who values things as trivial as her own comfort or convenience above another person’s joy or sorrow.

I have not been brave or energetic. To push back the frontiers of experience is an activity which I believe to be essential, but lethargy and timidity have prevented my doing it to anything like the extent to which it would have been possible. For political engagement I have been too lazy; for exploratory travel I have been too unenterprising, fearing the insecurity in strange places which it would entail for someone with no money. My sympathies are with the hipster, but when I consider his techniques of broadening experience I can see myself in comparison, as square as a cube from a child’s set of bricks: to me excesses bring discomfort and fatigue rather than freedom.

So I have not been beautiful, or intelligent, or good, or brave, or energetic, and for many years I was not happy: I failed to achieve the extremely simple things which, for so long, I wanted above all else: I found no husband and it is not likely that I shall ever have a child.

There is plenty of evidence, then, that my existence has been without value: that if, like my grandmother, I approach death slowly and consciously, I shall be driven to ask the question she asked: ‘What have I lived for?’ All that I shall be able to answer is that I have written a little, and I have loved, and if I do not die until am old, those things will have become too remote to count for much. I shall remember that they once seemed worth everything, but quite possibly the fact that by then they will be
over
will appear to have wiped out their value. It ought to be a frightening thought, but I am still not frightened.

I was looking through a dictionary of quotations in search of a title for a friend’s play when I chanced on Carlyle and Ruskin, both saying something which caught my attention. Carlyle: ‘No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object.’ Ruskin: ‘The greatest thing a human soul does in this world is to see.’

Eyes are precarious little mechanisms, lodged in their sockets as though that were that. When I was living at Beckton we used to buy the heads of sheep for our dogs, boil them, then strip or gouge the meat from them. It was a horrifying job until you became used to it, then almost fascinating: the brain, the tongue, the eyes became meat of different textures. It was hard to believe that the rubbery globes of the eyes had ever been able to receive impulses and turn them into images; still harder to believe that when they had done that, they had filled even a sheep’s head with the world. To me the mechanism of sight is the principal wonder of conscious living: the mechanism which, more than any other, brings into the mind that which is outside. Sight brings in objective reality. Sight is the proof that you are as real as I am, that a pencil is as real, that a tree, a bird, a typewriter, a flower, a stone is as real; that each object is as much the centre of its universe as I am, and that conscious, human objects have each a universe as enormous as my own.

‘
You are not the only pebble on the beach
’ was often said to me during my childhood: words with the force of the metaphor still strong in them, since the East Anglian beaches I knew were composed almost entirely of pebbles. I used to spend hours searching among them because I collected cornelians and amber, which I kept in a jam jar, with water to make them gleam. I knew pebbles well: the different shades of grey, the almost white, the mottled, the porous, the ones with microscopic sparkles in the graining of their surfaces, the flat, the round, the potato-shaped, the totally opaque, the almost translucent. It was obvious that there was an infinite number of them, and an infinite variety, and that they were all equally real. I handled them, but more often I looked at them. It was by looking at pebbles that I began to feel their nature, and it is by looking that I feel the nature of people. ‘What are you thinking?’ my lover asks, and often I am not thinking, I am looking. The way the hairs of an eyebrow grow along the ridge, the slight movement under the thin skin beneath the eyes, the folding of the lips, the grain of the skin behind the ear: what I am learning from them I am not sure, but the need to study them is imperative. No doubt I should still love if I were blind, with only my reason and my hands, but could I recognize a man’s separate existence in the same way?

Marcel, the diamond-polisher whose recall by Mustafa Ali released my first story, did not find objective reality a comfort. Once he leant out of a window in the Savoy Hotel, looked down on trees in which starlings were bickering their way to bed, and pavements over which people were hurrying, then slammed the window shut and exclaimed, ‘I can’t bear it!’

‘What can’t you bear?’

‘The thought that I might die in the night, and next morning everything would
still be going on
. All those bastards trotting up and down the street, and those silly damned birds chirping … It’s horrible! Sometimes, when I’m at home, I wake in the middle of the night and start thinking about it, and then I have to telephone my sister.’

‘What does she do?’

‘She comes over and makes tea for me, and talks. Sometimes I keep her there all night.’

He walked up and down the room, splashing whisky out of his glass in his agitation, his mouth twitching, his eyes bilious: a sad little figure for whom the world would not come to an end.

To me, on the other hand, the knowledge that everything will
still
be going on
is the answer. If I die with my wits about me, not shuffled out under drugs or reduced to incoherence by pain, I want my last thoughts to be of plants growing, children being born, people who never knew me digging their gardens or telephoning their friends. It is in the existence of other things and other people that I can feel the pulse of my own: the pulse. Something which hums and throbs in everything, and thus in me.

Reading Aldous Huxley’s account of his experiments with mescalin, I caught myself thinking that this exceptionally intelligent man was naive. The crease in his trousers, the chair and the bunch of flowers in which he discovered the vibrating truth of being: had he not known that they contained it? That every object contains it? It is true that one does not usually see it with the intensity he describes, but it is not necessary to see it in that way to know that it exists. Chemical vision-sharpeners are a luxury, not a necessity. My own (I have not seen this remarked by anyone else, but it cannot be a unique experience) comes with whatever change in glandular activity it may be that heralds menstruation, so that almost every month I have a day or two of heightened vision, a delicious spell in which to see things living.

This ‘isness business’ – what smartypants called it that? – is, to me, too obvious to be chic. Only the gifted mystic, in whom the necessary disciplines channel a power which already exists, is likely to get further in it by studying Buddhism: indeed, I suspect that in the East, as in the West, only the rare saints have gone beyond the man-invented paraphernalia with which the rest tag along in their wake for comfort and reassurance. It is the obviousness – the obviousness of the quiet throbbing of life in every object – which has filled for me the silence that should have been left by non-belief, and which makes me question whether I did, in fact, stop believing. Believing in what? God, I suppose, knows – if knowledge in a human sense is an attribute of whatever lies behind the throbbing, and I do not see why it should be. My senses tell me, not that ‘God exists’, but that ‘it is’.

The test for anyone whose balance depends on messages received through the senses will come when the senses begin to atrophy. When I can no longer see (my grandmother had not seen the stars for ten years before she died), when I can no longer hear (larks dwindled away first, she said, then all other birds), when my body, which has not only given me all my most reliable and consoling pleasures but has also helped me to go out of its limits into other people and into things, becomes no more than a painful burden – and think only of what it can do to one under the influence of something so trivial as indigestion! – what will happen then? It may turn out that the throbbing was no more than the sound of my own blood in my ears. What I hope is that even if it does I shall not be afraid, because why should that blood have throbbed so steadily, for so long, in spite of so many reasons why I need not have lived, if it were not that I too have
been
, with the same intensity as any flower or matchbox or dog or other human being: all part of something which can only be expressed in the words ‘I am that which I am’, and which needs no further proof or justification?

I should like to appoint someone younger than myself to be a witness at my death: to record my success or lack of it in coming to terms with death, as I mean to do if I can, by simultaneously remembering the pulse in my self, and defeating the passion for self-preservation which makes death seem an outrage (easily said! Let the hum of an aeroplane’s engine turn to a whine and my body stiffens, my stomach chills: ‘Not
yet
!’). To die decently and acceptingly would be to prove the value of life, and that, in spite of limitations and inadequacy, is what I have felt inclined, still feel inclined, and have a hunch that I will always feel inclined to do.