Twelve Years Away, Actually

Somewhere Toward the End a memoir by Diana Athill.  Norton.  182 pp.  $13.95

The good news about Somewhere Towards the End is that, at the age of 89, Diana Athill still had all her marbles and wrote as well as ever, perhaps better.  Her prose seemed to gain in confidence through the years.  The bad news is that not a whole hell of a lot was going on.  Taking care of her diabetic roommate, taking art classes, gardening, reading books.  This isn’t quite her adventurous sex life, which she wrote about in other books.

One thing Athill talks about is her (lack of) religious convictions, a subject that naturally comes up toward the end.  She contrasts herself with John Updike—a writer she worked with—when he made the rather odd statement, “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.  Where was the ambiguity, the ingenuity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the world just happened to happen?”  Athill, on the other hand, decided when she was a student that she was an atheist, and that decision was liberating at the time, freeing her from the constricting religion she’d been raised in.

I’m all for freedom.  The thing that bothers me about atheists is that they reject the most primitive conceptions of God, and don’t examine deeper and more subtle views.  I felt the same constriction Athill felt, but didn’t—so to speak—want to throw the baby out with the bath.  When I read the Taoists, later the Christian mystics, I saw there were deeper ways to look at the whole mystery, more in line with the way I saw things.

What she felt as she approached death—though she was further away than she thought; she died early this year at age 101—was what I would call a religious feeling.  It has nothing to do with the doctrine of a religion.  It’s a process of asking the big questions.

A primary activity for Athill—as it certainly is for me—is her life as a reader, and I was surprised, after she had worked with so many novelists, that she found herself shying away from novels as she got older.  I understand that in a way, because I have a greater love of biography and memoir as I get older, reading about things that actually happened[1].  I’m certainly not interested in mediocre novels.  One pastime Athill took up toward the end was reviewing books for important British papers, and that’s something I long since gave up.  I don’t want to read what some newspaper wants to give space to.  I want to choose what to read.

But to give up on great fiction seems like a mistake.  It’s life-diminishing.  I can re-read the great novels I read in my youth and, if they really were great, they’re completely different books now, often greater than I once thought.  And I’m just as interested in new novels if they’re at a certain level.  There are plenty of reviews around, not as many in papers and magazines, but in places like Goodreads.  I get the opinions of real readers there.

Athill had a lifelong ambivalence about marriage and children, finally decided to have a child in her early forties and had a terrifying miscarriage that almost killed her.  But she continued to live with her last lover, just as roommates, and wound up caring for him as if he were a husband.  He was a fascinating person when he was younger, but in old age developed type two diabetes and stopped taking care of himself, lay around dozing in bed and sneaked off to eat sweets when Athill wasn’t around.  The woman who avoided commitment all her life wound up with a roommate who was as difficult as a husband.  There’s a mild irony here.

People her age have a certain fascination.   We’re fascinated that they’re still alive, that they still have all their marbles, that they still have the interest and energy to write a book.  It’s like what I’ve often said about Bukowski: we’re fascinated by his books because we haven’t read books by other people like him.  This book is what it’s like to be 89, if you’re really lucky.  Her final book—I can see it on the horizon—is about life in a nursing home.

[1] So to speak.  Ultimately, everything’s a story.