Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (68 page)

So this leaving did not make me angry, or surprised, or even sad, except for André’s sake. Vidia was doing what he had to do, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that we had enjoyed the best of him, anyway. And when many years later Mordecai Richler (in at the story’s end, oddly enough, as well as its beginning) told me that he had recently met Vidia with his new wife and had been pleased to see that he was ‘amazingly jolly’, I was very glad indeed.

I
KNOW THAT I
have sometimes been described as ‘one of the best editors in London’, and I can’t deny that it has given me pleasure; but I also know how little I had to do to earn this reputation beyond routine work and being agreeable to interesting people. And another example of this is my dealings with the person I liked best among those I came to know on the job: the Irish novelist Molly Keane.

It is common knowledge that after establishing herself in her youth as a novelist and playwright, Molly went silent for over thirty years and was ‘rediscovered’ in 1981 when André Deutsch Limited published
Good Behaviour
. Because I was her editor I was often congratulated on this ‘rediscovery’ – which is nonsense. We got the book by pure luck.

The person who persuaded Molly to offer it for publication was Peggy Ashcroft, who had remained a close friend of hers since acting in one of her plays, and who said one day, when staying with her, how sad it was that she had stopped writing. Molly told her that she had recently started again and had a novel which she was unsure about tucked away in a drawer. Peggy insisted on taking it to bed with her that night, and as a result of her enthusiasm Molly sent it to Ian Parsons of Chatto & Windus. That was where our good luck began: Ian didn’t like it. Worse mistakes have been made – publishers often used to console themselves by remembering that André Gide, reading Proust’s
Remembrance of
Things Past
, turned it down … although if you envisage that enormous manuscript, and discovering that many of its sentences are as long as most people’s paragraphs, that mistake was perhaps less odd than failing to respond to a novel as accessible as
Good
Behaviour
.

Our next stroke of luck was that Molly then chose Gina Pollinger as her agent. Gina had been an editor before she married into agenting, and her last job as such had been with us. When she called me to say that she had just read something she loved, and felt sure I would love it too, I was hearing from someone whose taste I knew and respected, rather than listening to a sales spiel, so naturally I read the book at once – and it happened that I, unlike Ian Parsons, had not fallen on my head. So much for being Molly’s rediscoverer.

Molly did usually need a little editing because she could get into muddles about timing – make, for instance, an event happen after an interval of two years when something in the text revealed that at least three years must have passed – and she had little tricks of phrasing, such as describing a person’s interests as her ‘importances’, which she sometimes overdid. (Such tricks are part of a writer’s ‘voice’, so it is usually best to leave some of them in – but not enough of them to be annoying.) She was always glad to have such things pointed out, and she was equally co-operative over the only big question that needed solving in the course of her last three novels.

This occurred in
Good Behaviour
, at a point where a small English boy is discovered hiding up a tree in order to read poetry, which causes his extremely upper-class parents to go into paroxysms of dismay. At that point Molly’s sense of comedy had taken the bit between its teeth and bolted, carrying the story off into the realm of the grotesque. It was wildly funny, but funny in a way at odds with the rest of the book so that it fractured its surface. I asked her to cool it, which she did. She was always ‘splendidly cooperative to work with’, as John Gielgud was to say in a letter to the
Daily Telegraph
after her death, remembering the days when he directed the four plays which she wrote in the thirties.

He also paid a warm tribute to her charm and wit, adding that ‘she was endlessly painstaking and industrious’ – slightly surprising words applied to someone as sparkly as Molly, but they do catch the absence of pretentiousness in her attitude to her work. Her background was that of the Irish landed gentry, whose daughters were lucky, in her day, if they got more than a scrappy education. Not that most of them, including Molly, were likely to clamour for more, since horses and men interested them far more than anything else; but Molly had come to feel the lack and it made her humble: she needed to be convinced that she was a good writer.

She was well aware, however, that
Good Behaviour
was different from the eleven early novels which she had written under the pen-name M. J. Farrell – a pen-name because who would want to dance with a girl so brainy that she wrote books? (You probably need to have had a ‘county’ upbringing fully to feel the withering effect of that adjective: ‘You’re the brainy one, aren’t you?’ It still makes me flinch.) Molly always said that she wrote the early books simply for money, because her parents couldn’t afford to give her a dress allowance – though the verve of the writing suggests that she must have enjoyed doing it.
Good Behaviour
, on the other hand, had insisted on being written. She described it as a book that ‘truly interested and involved’ her: ‘Black comedy, perhaps, but with some of the truth in it, and the pity I feel for the kind of people I lived with and laughed with in the happy maligned thirties.’ She said that she dropped the pen-name because so much time had gone by; but in fact she took a lot of urging, and left me with the impression that she finally agreed because she had allowed herself to be persuaded that this one was the real thing.

The reason why
Good Behaviour
is so gripping is that Molly brings off something much cleverer than she had ever attempted before: she manoeuvres her readers into collaboration. Her narrator, Aroon St Charles, the large, clumsy daughter of a remote and elegant little mother who finds her painfully boring, tells us everything she sees – and often fails to understand what she is telling. It is up to us, the readers, to do the understanding – most crucially concerning Aroon’s beloved brother Hubert and the friend he brings home from Cambridge, Richard Massingham (once the little boy who read poetry up a tree). Aroon has never heard of homosexuality, because the rules of Good Behaviour are the rules of behaving ‘as if’. You may be afraid but you must behave as if you were brave; you may be poor but you must behave as if you can afford things; your husband may be randy but you must behave as if he wasn’t; embarrassing things such as men falling in love with men may happen, but you must behave as if they don’t. How could Aroon, who doesn’t read and has few friends, know anything about being gay? But in spite of all the ‘as iffing’, her father starts to feel uneasy about the two young men, they become alarmed – and Hubert has a brilliant idea: Richard must start behaving as though he were courting Aroon. He must even go into her bedroom one night, and make sure that her father hears him leaving it … We hear nothing of all this but what Aroon tells us: that Richard does this, and Richard does that, so surely he must like her – must even be finding her attractive – must
love
her! After he has been to her room we see her half-sensing that something is wrong (his Respecting her Virginity is acceptable, but there is something about his manner …). And we see her, very soon, working herself into a blissful daze of happiness at having a lover. And all the time, as though we were observant guests in the house,
we can see what is really going on
. It is powerfully involving, and it continues throughout the book: at one point thirty pages go by before we are allowed a flash of understanding (the family lawyer has made a tentative pass at Aroon, which seems a bit odd – until the times comes, as it would do in ‘real life’, when one exclaims ‘But of course! He knew what was in her father’s will!’).

Molly called this book ‘black comedy’, and comic it often is – brilliantly so. She is studying tribal behaviour, and no one could hit off its absurdities to better effect. But its strength comes from her fierce, sad knowledge of what underlies Good Behaviour, and is crippled by it; and she once told me something about herself which struck me as the seed from which this novel’s power grew.

Molly’s husband Robert Keane died in his thirties, with appalling suddenness, when they were visiting London with their two little daughters, having a very good time. He became violently ill so that he had to be rushed to hospital, but once he was there everything seemed to be under control, so she went back to the children for the night, worried but not really frightened. During the night the telephone rang. It was the hospital matron, who said: ‘Mrs Keane, you must be brave. Your husband is dead.’ Molly had friends in London, but they were busy theatre friends, and she was seized at once by the thought ‘I must not be a nuisance. I must not make scenes’ – the quintessential Good Behaviour reaction. And some time during those terrible first days her eldest daughter, Sally, who was six, clutched her hand and said: ‘Mummy, we mustn’t cry, we mustn’t cry.’

And Molly never did cry. Forty years later, telling me that, her voice took on a tone of forlorn incredulity. There was, indeed, nothing she didn’t know about her tribe’s concept of good behaviour, in all its gallantry, absurdity and cruelty.

The part of the novel which calls most directly on her personal experience of clamping down on pain is so quietly handled that I believe it sometimes escapes quick readers. On their way back to Cambridge in Richard’s car the boys are involved in a crash and Hubert is killed. It is easy to see that when the news comes his stricken parents behave impeccably according to their lights: no scenes, not a tear – the deep chill of sorrow evident only in the rigidity of their adherence to the forms of normality. But there comes a day when Aroon can’t resist pretending to her father that Richard truly was her lover and he says ‘Well, thank God’ which puzzles her a little; but his leaving her rather suddenly to visit the young horses down on the bog (so he says) ends their talk. And on that same day her mother has gone out, carrying a little bunch of cyclamen, and Aroon has wondered where she is off to. And it never occurs to her that both parents are slipping off to visit Hubert’s grave in secret; that only guiltily can they allow their broken hearts this indulgence. That her father is felled by a stroke in the graveyard, not the bog, and that her mother, who comes screaming back to the house in search of help, was there with him … in the commotion and horror of it all Aroon makes no comment on this, and again it is left to the reader to understand.

It is impossible for someone of great natural charm to remain unaware of the effect he or she has on others, which makes the gift a dangerous one: the ability to get away with murder demands to be exploited, and over-exploited charm can be less attractive than charmlessness. Molly Keane was remarkable in being both one of the most charming people I ever met, and an entirely successful escaper from that attendant danger.

Of course she knew how winning she could be. She once said to me: ‘When I was young I’m afraid I used to sing for my supper,’ meaning that when she first met people more interesting and sophisticated than her own family she won herself a warm welcome, in spite of being neither pretty nor well-dressed, by her funniness and charm. She needed to do this because she was too intelligent for her background and her mother had made her feel an ugly duckling, and a delinquent one at that (probably, like many unloved children, she did respond by being tiresome from her parents’ point of view). Being taken up by people who were charmed by her was her salvation, and winning them over did not end by making her unspontaneous or manipulative because her clear sight, sensitivity, honesty and generosity were even stronger than her charm. By the time I knew her, when she was in her seventies, she would occasionally resort to ‘turning it on’ in order to get through an interview or some fatiguing public occasion, and very skilfully she did it; but otherwise she was always more interested in what was happening around her, and in the people she was meeting, than she was in the impression she was making, so even on a slight acquaintance it was the woman herself one saw, not a mask, and the woman was lovable.

In spite of liking her so much I have to consider my acquaintance with her as less than a friendship, properly speaking. Someone in her seventies with two daughters to love, a wide circle of acquaintances and an unusually large number of true and intimate friends of long standing, hasn’t much room in her life for new close friends. I see that only too clearly now that I have overtaken the age Molly had reached when we met: one feels almost regretful on recognizing exceptionally congenial qualities in a newly met person, because one knows one no longer has the energy to clear an adequate space for them. When Molly and I exchanged letters about her work I was always tempted by her image in my mind to run on into gossip and jokes, while hers were quick scrawls about the matter under discussion; and enjoyable though our meetings were when she came to London, they didn’t much advance the intimacy between us, and I sometimes thought I discerned in them a courteously disguised distaste for an important aspect of my life: the fact that I live with a black man. Molly was well aware of how others could see attitudes belonging to her background and generation, such as disliking left-wing politics and mixed marriages; but an attitude is not necessarily
quite
expunged by knowing that it is not respectable.