Memories times six

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs

Diana Athill published her first memoir in 1968, and has now written six. By age 89, a body has lived enough that one or two are just insufficient. Now she's 92; will there be a seventh? Let's give her a few years and see. In the meantime, I much appreciated reading Somewhere Towards the End, not so much for enjoyment, but for seeing how a very different person thinks.

Ms Athill was born in 1917, making her five years older than my father. While some of the anecdotes are timeless, some relate to a time I can hardly imagine, both her stories and my father's. Prior to WWII, the world on both sides of the Atlantic (Athill is British) was much different from the 1950s world I recall, though perhaps life in prewar London was more sophisticated and comfortable than life in most of the U.S. of the time.

Large Print editions typically have no jacket photo of the author, so I "had" to search one out. I see she has strong features with an intelligent look, even in old age. A formidable person, without doubt. The book makes that clear. She is a no-nonsense atheist who still enjoys many of the old Bible stories she heard as a child. She enjoys art for its own sake, written or visual, and whatever may have inspired it; the stronger the inspiration, even if religious, the more moving she finds the work to be.

She seems to have lucky genes. The women in her family all tend to live between 90 and 99 years. They also tend to be freethinkers, willing to truly think things through and even change their minds when it is warranted. For instance, she recalls at first disdaining free adult education opportunities, but later deciding to take a sewing class, which led to drawing classes, before the "free" part lost its government subsidy. She is little inclined to pay for a class that must support its instructor with tuition.

She also led a life I would call promiscuous, but which was perhaps only middle-of-the road for freethinkers of her generation. She freely chronicles her many lovers, most of them married, in three or four of the early chapters of the book. She never married.

I couldn't find a date for this picture, but I suppose it is sixty-some years ago. She had the same strong features as a young woman, though I would not call her pretty. Instead, she seems to have that strong-minded fascination that women such as Cleopatra put to good use. With the right kind of mind, a woman doesn't need more than "passable" looks. Thus, while not a great beauty, she was able to attract lovers over a more than fifty-year period of her life, until, as she puts it, "I just wasn't a sexual being any more." I learned much from her writing about what aging really has been like for her. It gives me much sympathy for my wife, some thirty years her junior, and what may lie in store for her.

This being a memoir so late in her life, the author writes much about death and dying, particularly her experiences during her mother's last days, at just about this age. As so many have said, it isn't death, but dying that is worth fearing. Dying, even if mercifully sudden, is no easy matter. Along the way she muses on what it is that is lost when one dies. She reasons this way: death is the payment for the blessings of life. Having outlived nearly all her generation, she finds herself paying the same coin as one whose years numbered too few, and counts herself lucky. I do not see here the aphorism, "It's the life in your years, not the years in your life"; perhaps it is too trite for her.

Among all the losses that accrue with age, what is gained? For one, people's expectations are lowered. It is almost like the joke about the dog that played poker. Nobody cared that he bid badly, they were so amazed he could play at all. I remember my own grandmother's great humor and wit, the year before she died. She could hold her own with any crowd, and many's the time someone would find himself wholly off balance, for she just did not think like people expect an old person to think. Why should she think "old"? She still knew everything the "younger her" had known, and more. And so it is with this author. While I might wish even a very old libertine could yet find the Redeemer, I take my hat off to an original thinker who has candidly and graciously offered these glimpses into her heart.