It is simply unconscionable that, when the New York Review of Books recently elected to republish two books by Diana Athill, After a Funeral wasn’t one of them. Easily Athill’s best work, After a Funeral recounts her relationship with Waguih Ghali, an Egyptian writer who committed suicide inside her London flat in 1968. Ghali lived with Athill intermittently for five years, and the tragic, untenable intensity of their relationship resulted in the memoirist’s masterpiece, her prose economical to the point of whiplash. It’s a hypnotic, unforgettable book that typifies what Athill was all about: using language to get to the bloody heart of an experience, leaving no mess behind. From the first word of After a Funeral, the surgeon enters the operating room, snaps on her gloves, and performs the first incision. Athill shames the solipsism of what passes today for autobiography. “I knew that feeling—most writers know it—of having ‘something dazzling’ inside,” she wrote. “It is illusory.”
Athill is less well-known in America than in her native UK, where her career as a memoirist remarkably eclipsed her earlier career as a founding member of Andre Deutsch, the press where she was a legendary editor for nearly fifty years. Though she wrote prolifically—eleven books in all—she didn’t publish a word until well into middle age, and following a burst of energy in her forties, she put out the rest of her work over the age of sixty. Before that, she edited many of the most famous writers of the age, with a list of authors like Norman Mailer and V.S. Naipaul that put her, in the world of London publishing, on a similar plane with Nan Talese or Vicky Wilson in the United States. She came from the sort of well-bred, cash-poor English stock for whom education meant picking apart Pre-Raphaelite paintings with a governess, and for whom university meant Oxford. Even if she had never written a word of her own, she would always be considered literary royalty as the editor and confidante of the famously impossible Jean Rhys. Without Athill, Wide Sargasso Sea would never have seen the light of day.
Editing was an ideal career for a woman who, as she once put it, was more comfortable being interested than interesting. She had the ability to all but disappear in her descriptions of others. She wrote with compassionate frankness about the men in her life—most of whom were racial minorities—but never used them to push empty political points about gender or identity. As Lena Dunham, an Athill fanatic, said: “She wasn’t playacting as a political dissident then running home to daddy. She was simply living her life with the people who interested her, who inspired deep thought and that ineffable necessity—awe.” Her peculiarly confident brand of self-effacement, juxtaposed with a self-professed inability to write about anything besides her own life, made for a delightful, wise body of work. Few memoirists have left behind such a record, one of a glamorous yet quietly productive life, their writing purged both of self-pity or self-aggrandizement.
Practically everything ever written about Athill frames her work as a kind of Blue Guide to aging gracefully. Certainly this was the image duly reported in the obituaries following her death at 101, and not for no reason: she won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography for Somewhere Towards the End, a book about waiting for death (which was still over a decade down the road, and another book away). By the time she was ninety, she’d developed an impossible-not-to-like brand: narrating, with the breezy lexical acumen of the English gentry, her century of shirking convention and seeking pleasure, much of it sexual.
But I prefer her early and mid-career writing, which risks unlikability in exchange for more surprising, less crowd-pleasing disclosures. Though The New York Review ignored After a Funeral, it gets credit for republishing her most underrated work, 1967’s Don’t Look at Me Like That. It’s a book about being the other woman, a role that Athill made no secret of enjoying throughout her life. The speaker baldly discovers the joy of sex through an act of repeated betrayal, of sin: “I have behaved as though it were freakish and I were ashamed of it. But the truth is I have never been so happy as I was in bed with him.”
Don’t Look at Me Like That stands apart from the rest of Athill’s oeuvre. For one thing, it’s fiction, a form she would never return to again. While all her books, as many have pointed out, are editor’s books, pruned to perfection, the novel brought Athill to her highest prose register, resulting in her most stylistically excellent work. It’s also her only book wholly devoted to young adulthood. In Athill’s actual life, these were years plagued with depression, but here they are full of all the glorious highs and lows of starting life on one’s own terms. You want to be twenty-three again when you read it. Even sadness sheens with the luminousness of the author’s prose: “I would wait to feel his hand going limp and to hear his breathing change as he fell asleep. When I remembered that in the morning he would have to go away I used to stop thinking, because it seemed, quite literally, impossible. One can’t be anything but silent about failure.”
Athill almost never mentioned her lone novel. When she did, it was with reservations. “It was such appallingly hard work that I swore never again. I felt detached from that book because I had not really wanted to write it.” Her publisher had nagged her until she banged out a novel, since all writers in those days were expected to produce one. Almost anyone who lives their life guided by art and literature believes, at least for a time, that a novel is in there somewhere. Though the book shows no sign of the frustration Athill felt while writing it, it may be coded in the protagonist Meg’s profession. After studying painting at Oxford, Meg accepts the limits of her talents and becomes a commercial illustrator, designing book jackets for authors like Ronald Firbank. If anything stops the novel from being perfect, it’s that it is, finally, a perfect exercise in style.
Prior to Don’t Look at Me Like That, Athill had her literary breakthrough with Instead of a Letter in 1963. Also republished by NYRB, it’s the opposite of the novel in every way. While writing the first of her nine memoirs, Athill raced home in excitement every night from the Andre Deutsch office to pick up where she’d left off. She said she never knew what would come next each time she sat down to work, and it shows: unlike her novel’s scrupulously scaffolded structure, Instead of a Letter has essentially none, save for chronology. Mid-life, Athill asks: what have I lived for? It would be two decades before she released another memoir, and she wrote her first as if it would be her last. All her subsequent books concern narrow periods of time, but Instead of a Letter spans all of her then forty-odd years: childhood, Oxford, the second world war, establishing Andre Deutsch, travels in Greece and Yugoslavia. Writing it, she said, was the most extraordinary experience of her life.
Though she packs as much of her biography as possible into just over two hundred pages, just one event moved her to write it: the brutally abrupt end of her engagement to Tony Irvine, called Paul in the book. Athill met him in 1932 when he was an Oxford undergraduate and she was fifteen. They soon became lovers. Irvine represented a different way of life than the country manor mentality she was raised in, and she was dying to join him on the other side: “[He] made me anxious to meet people as people, regardless of class or race.” For someone of Athill’s upbringing, this was enormous: “The first time I stayed with his family . . . I ate almost nothing for three days, nor could I sleep. This sensation is one that I have not experienced, now, for many years and will almost certainly never experience again, for what could be exciting enough to send my nerves into such a state?”
By the time she’d reached nineteen, they were engaged. He went to war, sent love letters, then for two years went silent. Eventually she received a curt note asking to call off their engagement so that he could marry someone else. The gesture eradicated Athill’s self-worth for the next twenty-years, separating her from the pulse of life even as she built a massively successful editorial career. For readers born in another age than Athill, the blow is hard to fathom: a woman of her upbringing was simply meant to marry—and a terrible failure if she didn’t. Her career triumphs and buzzing bohemian social life failed to protect her from this festering wound. Believing Irvine to have rescued her from outmoded values, Athill discovered that she’d merely allowed her identity to become contingent on a man’s approval. Instead of a Letter is a record of a woman learning to derive her dignity from the act of writing, an act of self-birth that freed her to pursue the unconventional sexual arrangements for which she became famous. The title alone is brilliant: writing her own life replaces the letters she had waited for him to send.
The novel that followed her first autobiography was a one-time miracle, probably to her mind just the fat in the milk of Instead of a Letter. From then on, real life was her subject. We’re lucky to have the later memoirs, but it’s hard not to wish she’d tried fiction just once more. From Don’t Look at Me Like That, here is, sentence-for-sentence, the most perfect writing of her career:
When he came back he had a bottle of yellow liqueur on a brass tray, with two small glasses in gilt filigree holders and two paper napkins. We didn’t drink anything because he started to kiss me as soon as he had put down the tray, and when we were in his bedroom I saw why the sitting-room was so unused. The bedroom was where he lived. It was his mother’s flat, he told me later (she was away staying with her brother), and he kept all his records and books in his bedroom. Because of his mother’s absence there were dirty coffee cups and full ashtrays all over the room, and this embarrassed him, but he didn’t seem to notice that the bed was unmade and the sheets needed changing.
It has always been the flat I have remembered, rather than the man. Sometimes when I have looked out of a train when traveling in unfamiliar country I have glimpsed people talking in a doorway or workmen eating their lunch in the shade of a hedge or children chasing a dog, and have had an intense longing for the train to stop so that I could get out and become part of that scene; a feeling that there I would get it, would be in this foreign life, not just looking at it. Finding myself in Luigi’s flat—that was his name, Luigi—made me feel it had happened for once. Even those dirty sheets, smelling of his sleeping (he didn’t smell disagreeable), which were the kind of thing from which I usually shrank, added to the illusion that I had “surprised” this man’s life.
Athill’s sexuality was more complex than has been acknowledged. The New Yorker recently speculated that Irvine’s rejection “fast-tracked Athill to a free and easy relationship with sex.” This bizarre assessment glosses over her most powerful writing, parroting the cool grandma script that journalists planted around Athill in her later years. Athill possessed an engulfing maternal instinct that, without a child, expressed itself sexually. Here is her description of the first time she slept with Hakim Jamal, a Black Panther and distant associate of Malcolm X:
The fucking hadn’t made me come, but the tenderness of this did . . . For an instant I had felt piercingly something which I suppose men to feel more often than women: the alarming power of beauty. It was a physical sensation, as though a floor under my heart had given way and it was about to drop into a gulf of excruciatingly intense longing for this magical creature. Once my eyelids shut the image out, the feeling stopped. Afterwards I was pleased that I’d had it, but even more pleased that it had only lasted a few seconds: how appalling to be lastingly the victim of such a feeling simply because of how someone looked! I also thought afterwards that incest must be delicious, because it seemed very much that it was my motherliness he was embracing so tenderly, and that I was exercising with so much pleasure in my return.
Not exactly “free and easy.” This astonishing paragraph comes from Make Believe, a book about her relationship with Jamal, who became a schizophrenic. It goes even further than the mother-son dynamic she had earlier portrayed in After a Funeral, where, writing of Ghali, she said, “I understood . . . that I mustn’t murmur in return the words which would have come out if I had opened my mouth: ‘My little one, my baby.’” These admissions make those of her prior books feel almost dim in comparison.
Athill suffered a violent miscarriage in her early forties, with such loss of blood that it nearly killed her. One could cheaply psychoanalyze here: these troubled lovers represent the child she lost. Even if accurate, it feels absurdly unnecessary next to Athill’s own material. Like literary fiction, strong memoir towers over psychological readings: interpretation is impotent and redundant when the subject sees herself in focus. She’s at the height of her literary talent, yet at her most detached: “I am one of those people who are hardly ever totally involved in an emotion. There is almost always a ‘watcher’ in the back of my mind, and a pretty beady-eyed watcher at that.” This is a different writer than the woman still dusting herself off in Instead of a Letter. She did her best writing for no reason other than to put memories to bed: Make Believe sat in a drawer for sixteen years before friends convinced her to publish it. “Neither of those books [After a Funeral and Make Believe] meant a great deal to me after they had served their purpose,” she said, and yet they are her most significant achievements.
Sadie Stein writes: “[Athill’s] narration has self-respect.” Yes, it does, but not the whispery, quivering self-respect of her fellow memoirist Joan Didion, whose essays (including “On Self-Respect”) continue to prompt anyone who’s ever spent a mopey afternoon under the covers to seek an MFA. Mercilessly trimmed of dead language and self-delusion, Athill’s very syntax is self-respect—a tool honed by a woman who learned to love life through the act of writing. Athill wrote to heal pain, not wallow in it, to speak frankly of feminine desire vis-á-vis men, but not victimize herself, to dissect the troubled characters who fascinated her, but not exploit them to mythologize her life. In her best work, Athill looked in the mirror with the tough love of a great editor. In an age that’s still somnambulating its way out of autofiction, she’s worth reading. To know only her more publicized work on old age risks reducing Athill to a guru, which would be a shame. Don’t look at her like that.
Ben Shields is the Managing Editor of Grand Journal.