In Life’s Latest Chapter, Feeling Free Again

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON — Last year, when she was 91, the editor and writer Diana Athill moved from her beloved apartment into an “old person’s home,” as she calls it. It was the most painful decision she had ever made, and it might have been a terrible diminishment, the reduction of a long, full life into something small enough to fit into a tiny room off a communal corridor.

The writer Diana Athill, now living in a retirement home.

But it turned out not to be that way at all.

“You gradually become aware of how liberating it is,” Ms. Athill said. “Not a single domestic worry do I have.” That means no more shopping, no more electricity bills, no more laundry. And it means, she wrote recently in The Daily Telegraph, a rethinking of her relationship to her belongings.

“Everything, from the carpet to the biscuit tin and including of course the too-many pictures, ornaments and books, is here because, however uninteresting it might be to others, I love it,” she wrote. “It’s as though ‘possessing’ has been distilled down from being a vague pleasure to being an intense one. Less is more.”

Ms. Athill’s room turns out to be charming, with big windows through which the sun poured the other day. She has snow-white hair swept back from a broad, amused face; beautiful pink skin; and the plummy, proper voice of an old-fashioned aunt in a black-and-white movie, which makes a nice contrast to her sometimes wicked observations.

She holds a formidable place in the London literary world. Legendary for her ability to handle difficult manuscripts, not to mention difficult writers, she was one of the founding directors of the independent publisher André Deutsch (it has now been subsumed into Carlton Publishing Group) and worked for nearly 50 years with authors like V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Margaret Atwood.

She left the job at 75 and could have slipped quietly into retirement. Instead she found a second career, as a writer.

Since turning 80 Ms. Athill has published three memoirs about her life and her work, using crystalline, unflinching prose that seeks not to sugarcoat, but to get to the truth of things. All have drawn adoring reviews and good sales. The most recent, “Somewhere Towards the End” (W. W. Norton & Company), an unsentimental look at growing old that confronts issues like sex and dying and that came out when she was 90, was a best seller, winning both the Costa Biography award here and the National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography in the United States.

People tend to tell Ms. Athill that she is an inspiration, a word that gives her the willies. But her matter-of-fact, hopeful depiction of life as an elderly woman presents an encouraging antidote to the accounts of writers like Philip Roth, with their self-pitying fetishization of physical decline.

“I think getting old very often is horrible, really,” Ms. Athill said. “But if you’re lucky, if you keep your health, if your aches and pains are not too bad, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a perfectly agreeable life, in many ways, discovering new and nice things.”

Ms. Athill’s life has been unconventional, courageous, and for decades, she felt, clouded by shame. As she described in “Instead of a Letter,” which was published when she was in her 40s but recently has been reissued, she became engaged to her first love, a young man who went off to war and then, inexplicably, fell silent. She heard nothing from him for two years, feeling a pain like “a finger crushed under the door, or a tooth under a drill,” Ms. Athill wrote, until he announced that he was marrying someone else. He was killed soon afterward, consigning her to the peculiar humiliation of feeling both rejected and without the standing even to mourn properly at a time when marital status meant everything.

There followed years of misery, in which her “soul shrank to the size of a pea,” she wrote. She was saved by work; becoming an editor brought her a new kind of joy. And though she embarked on numerous love affairs, she turned down all offers of marriage, remaining faithful, really, only to her job. “I had been so damaged in my sexual self that if a man wanted to marry me, I thought there was something wrong with them,” she said during the interview.

Ms. Athill’s writing is characterized by an extraordinary generosity of spirit. She refuses to feel sorry for herself, always finding a way to redeem even the most distressing circumstance.

In reflecting on her life, she wrote that André Deutsch, her employer and friend, paid her a pittance, barely enough to live on. She took in a tempestuous, manic writer she calls Didi, who subjected her to the endless ups and downs of his paranoiac personality, recorded in his journal that he was disgusted by her (she reads the passage, in one of the more unsettling parts in her book “After a Funeral”), and then killed himself in her house.

Her longtime lover, the playwright Barry Reckord, moved in with her and then, their relationship having evolved into something more like friendship, brought his young girlfriend in too, for six years in the 1970s. They all got along famously. “He was very against possessiveness, and so was I,” Ms. Athill explained.

Ms. Athill’s gift is the ability to examine events and motivations in the round, to get to the heart of them without sparing her own feelings. Writing of “Instead of a Letter,” the British author Ian Jack said that “the reader feels that what he is reading is as true a portrait of the writer and her experience as any words on paper can achieve.” By using such precision, “by letting us see how she appeared to others,” Mr. Jack wrote, Ms. Athill “opened up what could have been a narrow story of injury and self-absorption into a book that takes pleasure in the world.”

Ms. Athill protests that she is not generous, but rather has what Graham Greene described as the “sliver of ice” that resides in the heart of writers, the thing that allows them to examine events with forensic analysis.

“I’m really very interested in what is happening, even when it involves oneself,” she said. “One’s watching all the time.”

And now Ms. Athill is watching herself live in a home for the elderly. She still writes every day and has an idea or two in mind for a book, though she is not sure she will write another one. She has friends, nephews, a car, an active life on the literary-festival circuit.

And she has enjoyed meeting the other residents. “One of the things about this place is that they’re not snobbish class-wise, but snobbish jobs-wise,” she said. “They choose people who had interesting careers.” Most of her neighbors, she said, “are pretty philosophical about dying, pretty well accept the fact that they won’t be here much longer.” As for herself, “I’d like another two years,” she said.

“One of the things I think I owe to that early unhappiness, it was a hard lesson, was that I learned that I could be alone,” she said. “I can. I like my own company.”

Original post http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/books/11athill.html?_r=2