Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (67 page)

In 1975 we received the thirteenth of his books – his eighth work of fiction –
Guerrillas
. For the first time I was slightly apprehensive because he had spoken to me about the experience of writing it in an unprecedented way: usually he kept the process private, but this time he said that it was extraordinary, something that had never happened before: it was as though the book had been
given
to him. Such a feeling about writing does not necessarily bode well. And as it turned out, I could not like the book.

It was about a Trinidad-like island sliding into a state of decadence, and there was a tinge of hysteria in the picture’s dreadfulness, powerfully imagined though it was. A central part of the story came from something that had recently happened in Trinidad: the murder of an Englishwoman called Gail Benson who had changed her name to Halé Kimga, by a Trinidadian who called himself Michael X and who had set up a so-called ‘commune’. Gail had been brought to Trinidad by her lover, a black American known as Hakim Jamal (she had changed her name at his bidding). Both of the men hovered between being mad and being con-men, and their linking-up had been Gail’s undoing. I knew all three, Gail and Hakim well, Michael very slightly: indeed, I had written a book about them (which I had put away – it would be published sixteen years later) called
Make Believe
.

This disturbed my focus on large parts of
Guerrillas
. The people in the book were not meant to be portraits of those I had known (Vidia had met none of them). They were characters created by Vidia to express his view of post-colonial history in places like Trinidad. But the situation in the novel was so close to the situation in life that I often found it hard to repress the reaction ‘But that’s not true!’ This did not apply to the novel’s Michael X character, who was called Jimmy Ahmed: Jimmy and the half-squalid half-pathetic ruins of his ‘commune’ are a brilliant and wholly convincing creation. Nor did it apply to Roche, Vidia’s substitute for Hakim Jamal. Roche is a liberal white South African refugee working for a big commercial firm, whose job has involved giving cynical support to Jimmy. Roche was so evidently not Hakim that the question did not arise. But it certainly did apply to Jane, who stood in for Gail in being the murdered woman.

The novel’s Jane, who comes to the island as Roche’s mistress, is supposed to be an idle, arid creature who tries to find the vitality she lacks by having affairs with men. Obtuse in her innate sense of her superiority as a white woman, she drifts into such an attempt with Jimmy: an irresponsible fool playing a dangerous game for kicks with a ruined black man. Earlier, Vidia had written an account for a newspaper of Gail’s murder which made it clear that he saw Gail as that kind of woman.

She was not. She was idle and empty, but she had no sense of her own superiority as a white woman or as anything else. Far from playing dangerous games for kicks, she was clinging on to illusions for dear life. The people she had most in common with were not the kind of secure Englishwomen who had it off with black men to demonstrate their own liberal attitudes, but those poor wretches who followed the American ‘guru’ Jones to Guyana in 1977, and ended by committing mass suicide at his bidding. She was so lacking in a sense of her own worth that it bordered on insanity.

It was therefore about Jane that I kept saying to myself ‘But that’s not true!’ Then I pulled myself together and saw that there was no reason why Jane should be like Gail: an Englishwoman going into such an affair for kicks was far from impossible and would be a perfectly fair example of fraudulence of motive in white liberals, which was what Vidia was bent on showing.

So I read the book again – and this time Jane simply fell to pieces. Roche came out of it badly, too: a dim character, hard to envisage, in spite of revealing wide-apart molars with black roots whenever he smiled (a touch of ‘clever characterization’ which should have been beneath Vidia). But although he doesn’t quite convince, he almost does; you keep expecting him to emerge from the mist. While Jane becomes more and more like a series of bits and pieces that don’t add up, so that finally her murder is without significance. I came to the conclusion that the trouble must lie with Vidia’s having cut his cloth to fit a pattern he had laid down in advance: these characters existed in order to exemplify his argument, he had not been
discovering
them. So they did not live; and the woman lived less than the man because that is true of all Vidia’s women.

We have now reached the second of my two shocking failures as an editor (I don’t intend ever to confess the other one). From the professional point of view there was no question as to what I ought to do: this was one of our most valuable authors; even if his book had been really bad rather than just flawed we would certainly have published it in the expectation that he would soon be back on form; so what I must say was ‘wonderful’ and damn well sound as though I meant it.

Instead I sat there muttering: ‘Oh my God, what am I going to say to him?’ I had never lied to him – I kept reminding myself of that, disregarding the fact that I had never before needed to lie. ‘If I lie now, how will he be able to trust me in the future when I praise something?’ The obvious answer to that was that if I lied convincingly he would never know that I had done it, but this did not occur to me. After what seemed to me like hours of sincere angst I ended by persuading myself that I ‘owed it to our friendship’ to tell him what I truly thought.

Nothing practical would be gained. A beginner writer sometimes makes mistakes which he can remedy if they are pointed out, but a novelist of Vidia’s quality and experience who produces an unconvincing character has suffered a lapse of imagination about which nothing can be done. It happened to Dickens whenever he attempted a good woman; it happened to George Eliot with Daniel Deronda. And as for my own attitude – I had often seen through other people who insisted on telling the truth about a friend’s shortcomings: I knew that
their
motives were usually suspect. But my own were as invisible to me as a cuttlefish becomes when it saturates the surrounding water with ink.

So I told him. I began by saying how much I admired the many things in the book which I did admire, and then I said that I had to tell him (
had to
tell him!) that two of his three central characters had failed to convince me. It was like saying to Conrad ‘
Lord Jim
is a very fine novel except that Jim doesn’t quite come off’.

Vidia looked disconcerted, then stood up and said quietly that he was sorry they didn’t work for me, because he had done the best he could with them, there was nothing more he could do, so there was no point in discussing it. As he left the room I think I muttered something about its being a splendid book all the same, after which I felt a mixture of relief at his appearing to be sorry rather than angry, and a slight (only slight!) sense of let-down and silliness. And I supposed that was that.

The next day Vidia’s agent called André to say that he had been instructed to retrieve
Guerrillas
because we had lost confidence in Vidia’s writing and therefore he was leaving us.

André must have fought back because there was nothing he hated more than losing an author, but the battle didn’t last long. Although I believe I was named, André was kind enough not to blame me. Nor did I blame myself. I went into a rage. I fulminated to myself, my colleagues, my friends: ‘All those years of friendship, and a mere dozen words of criticism –
a mere dozen
words!
– send him flouncing out in a tantrum like some hysterical prima donna!’ I had long and scathing conversations with him in my head; but more satisfying was a daydream of being at a huge and important party, seeing him enter the room, turning on my heel and walking out.

For at least two weeks I seethed … and then, in the third week, it suddenly occurred to me that never again would I have to listen to Vidia telling me how damaged he was, and it was as though the sun came out.
I didn’t have to like Vidia any more!
I could still like his work, I could still be sorry for his pain; but I no longer faced the task of fashioning affection out of these elements in order to deal as a good editor should with the exhausting, and finally tedious, task of listening to his woe. ‘Do you know what,’ I said to André, ‘I’ve begun to see that it’s a release.’ (Rather to my surprise, he laughed.) I still, however, failed to see that my editorial ‘mistake’ had been an act of aggression. In fact I went on failing to see that for years.

Guerrillas
was sold to Secker & Warburg the day after it left us.

A month or so after this I went into André’s office to discuss something and his phone rang before I had opened my mouth. This always happened. Usually I threw myself back in my chair with a groan, then reached for something to read, but this time I jumped up and grabbed the extension. ‘Why – Vidia!’ he had said. ‘What can I do for you?’

Vidia was speaking from Trinidad, his voice tense: André must call his agent
at once
and tell him to recover the manuscript of
Guerrillas
from Secker & Warburg and deliver it to us.

André, who was uncommonly good at rising to unexpected occasions, became instantly fatherly. Naturally, he said, he would be delighted to get the book back, but Vidia must not act too impetuously: whatever had gone wrong might well turn out to be less serious that he now felt. This was Thursday. What Vidia must do was think it over very carefully without taking action until Monday. Then, if he still wanted to come back to us, he must call his agent, not André, listen to his advice, and if that failed to change his mind, instruct him to act. André would be waiting for the agent’s call on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, hoping – of course – that it would be good news for us.

Which – of course – it was. My private sun did go back behind a film of cloud, but in spite of that there was satisfaction in knowing that he thought himself better off with us than with them, and I had no doubt of the value of whatever books were still to come.

Vidia never said why he bolted from Secker’s, but his agent told André that it was because when they announced
Guerrillas
in their catalogue they described him as ‘the West Indian novelist’.

The books still to come were, indeed, worth having (though the last of them was his least important):
India, a Wounded Civilization, The
Return of Eva Perón, Among the Believers, A Bend in the River
and
Finding the Centre
. I had decided that the only thing to do was to behave exactly as I had always done in our pre-
Guerrillas
working relationship, while quietly cutting down our extracurricular friendship, and he apparently felt the same. The result was a smooth passage, less involving but less testing than it used to be. Nobody else knew – and I myself was unaware of it until I came to look back – that having resolved never again to utter a word of criticism to Vidia, I was guilty of an absurd pettiness. In
Among the Believers
, a book which I admired very much, there were two minor points to which in the past I would have drawn his attention, and I refrained from doing so: thus betraying, though luckily only to my retrospecting self, that I was still hanging on to my self-righteous interpretation of the
Guerrillas
incident. Vidia would certainly not have ‘flounced out like some hysterical prima donna’ over matters so trivial. One was a place where he seemed to draw too sweeping a conclusion from too slight an event and could probably have avoided giving that impression by some quite small adjustment; and the other was that when an Iranian speaking English said ‘sheep’ Vidia, misled by his accent, thought he said ‘ship’, which made some dialogue as he reported it sound puzzling. To keep mum about that! There is nothing like self-deception for making one ridiculous.

When Vidia really did leave us in 1984 I could see why – and even why he did so in a way which seemed unkind, without a word of warning or explanation. He had come to the conclusion that André Deutsch Limited was going downhill. It was true. The recession, combined with a gradual but relentless shrinkage in the readership of books such as those we published, was well on the way to making firms of our size and kind unviable; and André had lost his vigour and flair. His decision to sell the firm, which more or less coincided with Vidia’s departure, was made (so he felt and told me) because publishing was ‘no fun any more’, but it was equally a matter of his own slowly failing health. The firm continued for ten years or so under Tom Rosenthal, chuntering not-so-slowly downwards all the time (Tom had been running Secker’s when they called Vidia a West Indian, so his appearance on the scene did nothing to change Vidia’s mind).

A writer of reputation can always win an even bigger advance than he is worth by allowing himself to be tempted away from publisher A by publisher B, and publisher B will then have to try extra hard on his behalf to justify the advance: it makes sense to move on if you time it right. And if you perceive that there is something going seriously wrong with publisher A you would be foolish not to do so. And having decided to go, how could you look in the eye someone you have known for over twenty years, of whom you have been really quite fond, and tell him ‘I’m leaving because you are getting past it’? Of course you could not. Vidia’s agent managed to conceal from André what Vidia felt, but André suspected something: he told me that he thought it was something to do with himself and that he couldn’t get it out of the agent, but perhaps I might have better luck. I called the agent and asked him if there was any point in my getting in touch with Vidia, and he – in considerable embarrassment – told me the truth; whereupon I could only silently agree with Vidia’s silence, and tell poor André that I’d been so convincingly assured of the uselessness of any further attempt to change Vidia’s mind that we had better give up.