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AN extraordinary life of writing, publishing, love affairs and one shattering disappoin­tment was outlined by Diana Athill at a Lifelines evening at Burgh House on Thursday.

Miss Athill, now 93 and living in a retirement home in Highgate, was interviewed by former BBC producer Piers Plowright, and regaled the audience with reminiscences and her remarkably youthful attitude towards love, life and sex.

After reading English at Oxford in the 1930s, Miss Athill joined publisher Andre Deutsch in his new venture and became a director of the company and its chief editor. She worked with some of the most important writers in the English language, including Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and John Updike. But later in life she became an acclaimed author in her own right, publishing short stories, a novel and a series of autobiographical examin­ations of life and love.

She talked of her “idyllic childhood” in Norfolk: “It was the most perfect place for children to live,” she said. “There was space, ponies, farm­ing and freedom, water and trees, a wonderful wood coming down to a lake. It was exactly the sort of place as child ought to be living in.”

Even at a young age she was a rather outrageous figure. 

“I was in love with somebody since the age of five,” she admitted. “I made love to the gardener and other men. I was a terrible one for falling in love.” 

Her interest in sex dev­eloped very early: “In my grand­father’s library there was a lovely row of fat white books, en­titled Ballads. When I asked my grand­mother what these volumes were, she said: ‘Oh you wouldn’t be interested in those, darling’. So of course that evening I sneaked down and took one upstairs, and it was terrific. They were obscene poems of a very simple, rustic kind.

“There was practically nothing one didn’t learn from them, and I read them avidly from end to end, until they noticed I was reading them. Nothing was said, but when I went down to fetch the next volume, they’d all gone. 

“That was a very important step in my life. Another key book was Marie Stopes’ book about contra­ception: Wise Parenthood, and I’ve still got it. That was also very instructive.”

But her great love was for the man she calls Paul, who she met when he came to tutor her brother at home. “He lived with great intensity, and I realised quite quickly that I was lost,” she recalled. 

“I was in love with him. I said to myself: I’m going to get him in the end – which I did, just by sitting there with a fixed eye on him until he noticed me.”

They had some very happy years together and got engaged but both her time at Oxford and the Second World War delayed their plans to marry. He was posted to Jordan but after two letters he suddenly stopped writing to her. “I must say that was the most gruelling exper­ience, because if he’d written and said look, sorry, I’ve fallen for someone else, it would have been a hideous blow but one would have got over it. Instead of which one sat there thinking perhaps this and perhaps that for two solid years, not knowing what had happened, and that was very bad for the spirit.” 

He had, in fact, fallen for another woman and married her – but he was killed in action before their son was born.

She wrote about the affair in a book called Instead of a Letter. 

“It was a therapeutic exercise, which I didn’t realise at the time, but as I wrote it I felt that I had to get down what had really happened,” she explained. 

“When I finished it, I thought: I wonder what my mother will think! It made me better at once. It completely cured my lack of self-confidence. I put the ghost to rest.” 

Miss Athill said she was amazed by the reception of her book about ageing, Somewhere Towards the End, which won the Costa biography prize in 2009, the same year she was awarded an OBE. “I find it terribly funny,” she admitted. “The one book that has really made me big money is this little book about being old, which I wrote for fun.”

Asked about her attitude to death, she replied: “My view is, thank God that when I die everything will still be going on. “It’s a comfort to think that things will carry on. We might be old and boring, but there are so many people being young, starting out and still thinking that time is going to go on and on, and I like that idea.” 

Published: 14 July, 2011
by MATTHEW LEWIN