Somewhere Towards the End
Diana Athill
182 pp. W.W. Norton & Company (2009). $9.99
If young adults can have a genre of books to call their own, why shouldn’t old adults? We need stories to carry us through to the end as much as young adults need YA books to mark the paths their early steps on a life’s journey.
Frankly, I’ve never cared for genre labels that publishers, critics, and list-makers slap on categories of books. It’s as if crime stories, thrillers, and sports books are somehow substandard and can’t be true literature. That’s diminishing the work of writers who are as capable as those recognized as members of the literati. It’s presumptuous.
What I have in mind, having been enthralled with Diana Athill’s memoir Somewhere Towards the End, would not be considered self-help or how-to, though they might be that as well as what they are: Reflective, hard looks at lives that can inspire because they do not shy from the messes everyone makes of it at one time or another.
Athill struggled more early on in her life, something she confronted in her previous books of a multipart examination of what it is to live, love, work, get old, and die. For someone regarded as “the doyenne of English book editors”—so she knew something about words and how to make them behave on the page—Athill seemed surprised to discover that she herself could write. She only began to believe this when she was in her forties and then to finally accept it when she wrote Somewhere Towards the End, arguably her best work, at almost ninety. Though I have somewhere on my shelves or piles of books Stet: An Editor’s Life, an earlier (2000) memoir, it was to Somewhere Towards the End that I wanted to turn first. It seemed a more opportune work for a man of a certain age, nearly 75, in a time of a new killer of the old, coronavirus.
And I was right.
The old libertine and atheist can raise a laugh from a guy as she lays out a way to look at life’s final and greatest mystery—death. Religion offers reassurance to believers. But what of us skeptics who have noticed that the Second Coming which Jesus, according to the New Testament, assured his followers was imminent remains on a hold of thousands of years. How do we view the end? “There are no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to be offered,” Athill concluded. “I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts.” Yet the random thoughts of some, and Athill is among their number, can be profound with their understated, self-effacing wisdom.
When Diana Athill did finally reach the end in 2019 at the age of 101, The Guardian’s Polly Pattullo called her “clear-sighted” and properly concluded that she “touched readers because she dealt with old age and death in a forthright way, musing on subjects that if no longer taboo are rarely written about, at least not with such aplomb.” Sex, religion, marriage, motherhood, obligation, regret . . . there was a lot of the first and very of the last. The New York Times acknowledged Jenny Diski’s take on the value of Somewhere Near the End in The Sunday Times of London: “Such a book is in itself a rare enough thing, but a book about old age written by a woman with a cold eye for reality and no time for sentimental lies is as rare as—well, as rare as a thoughtful discussion about a woman’s sexuality after the age of 60.”
It would not have seemed possible that a girl born in 1917 to upper middleclass parents, father an Army colonel and mother the daughter of a family with a large estate where Diana was educated at home by governesses before boarding school and Oxford, would prove so liberated and unconventional. But Athill recognized duality. “One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving . . .” Yet she had few regrets. Regrettable events, yes. True regrets, no.
Such a fine difference between the two can be difficult to impossible to achieve. At least, I have found it so. Fifteen-year-old Diana fell in love—“adult love”—with an Oxford undergraduate who was tutoring her brother. By 19 she and “Paul” were engaged. Sent overseas by the Royal Air Force, Paul corresponded faithfully and passionately with Diana. Then, to air force terminology, he disappeared from the radar. The next Diana heard from him came in a letter seeking an end to their engagement. She was crushed, like a finger in a door, she would write 20 years later, in her first memoir volume. Instead of a Letter proved a catharsis that set her free from a series of meaningless affairs.
As she established herself after an Oxford education reading English, Athill ended up at Allen Wingate, a publishing house established by Andre Deutsch, and followed him to the house bearing his name but, over the years, her imprint. She coaxed greatness out of the alcoholic Jean Rhys and put temperamental authors such as V.S. Naipaul in his place. As her career took off, her personal life continued from one disaster to another.
Live-in Egyptian novelist Waguih Ghali, who found her physically repulsive she discovered in his diary, committed suicide in her home (After a Funeral), and lover Hakim Jamil, an African-American nationalist writer, was murdered in Boston by the De Mau Mau, a militant black group (Make Believe). Her books came with great pain. That, I understand. My memoir Football, Fast Friends and Small Towns grew out of a need to write about a childhood friend killed during the Vietnam war. Complex regret fueled it.
When finally Athill settled in with married Jamaican playwright for 40 years, first as lover and then as caregiver, a task she had attempted to dodge, she had come full circle. She preferred married men because someone else had to take care of them. Ironically, one of the sweetest periods of their long relationship occurred when Barry took a younger lover, Sally, and Diana, open-minded person she was, liked Sally, too, and they lived together for six years.
As the years passed, Diana’s life changed in profound and even hilarious ways. She lost her driving privileges, necessary to visit her beloved gardens. I worry about such specific loss. Yet I am reassured, because Athill never lost her way.
