39 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Impeccable prose, prosaic content, May 25, 2008
I was disappointed by this book. I found nothing in it that was in any way moving or uplifting. It brought no tear to my eye, caused no gasp of shock or surprise, no smile, no chuckle. The author's stated intention was to write a book about falling away into old age, but much of it is concerned with her bedroom adventures, the famous authors she knew and the publication of her own books.
Athill reveals herself as self-centred and solipsistic. She is always right, and devoid of what Tolstoy called 'gentle enquiring doubt'. Although she refers to friends, relations and literary acquaintances, not one of them is described with any deep, human affection. This is particularly true of her male friends. Although over a long period of time (into her sixties) she needed to have men in her bed, she seems to have been unwilling or unable to take on board Kant's dictum that we should treat people as ends in themselves rather than as a means to an end.
Athill makes virtues of promiscuity and not watching television. She takes the naive consequentialist view that it doesn't matter if a woman has an affair with a married man provided the married man's wife doesn't find out. She tells us that when Paul, her first suitor, jilted her, the stuffing was knocked out of her - but it doesn't seem to occur to her, when embarking on an affair with a married man, that his wife might find out and have the stuffing similarly knocked out of her, or that what he tells her about his wife might not been completely true.
White men are written off quite early in Athill's life when she decides that she prefers black male flesh to white, the implication of which is that she knows what ALL white men are like and has decided that ALL black men are nicer than they. Such willingness to argue from the particular to the universal is common among girls of sixteen but unbecoming of a ninety-year-old doyenne of literary London.
At the beginning of the book, Diana expresses regret that she had never owned a pug dog, and that she will never live to see a potted fir tree grow to maturity. A Freudian psychoanalyst would make much of this. At the end of the book, she avers that there are `no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer'. She finds herself left with `nothing but a few random thoughts'.
The tragedy of Diana's life is that she seems to have missed out on that wonderful experience of bonding emotionally and being completely at one with another human being. Of her married West Indian boyfriend, Sam, she writes `We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed, because we had very little in common apart from liking sex [...] the really important thing we had in common was that neither of us had any wish to fall in love or to become responsible for someone else's peace of mind. We didn't even need to see a great deal of each other. We knew that we would give each other no trouble.' Lasting relationships, commitment, deep emotional attachment - all these apparently come under the heading Trouble for Athill. When Barry, her companion of forty years' standing, falls ill and becomes incontinent, she congratulates herself on being able to clear up the mess (did she really have to tell us all about that?), but gives no indication that she is glad to look after him out of love or human affection.
I found her reflections on what it is like to face up to death at the age of eighty-nine particularly irritating. Having myself faced death on a daily basis (as a Fleet Air Arm pilot), and having lost good friends in their twenties and thirties in air accidents, I was not impressed by Athill's pseudo-courageous comments about `coming to terms with death'.
Athill's prosaic attempts at poetry would not win prizes in a competition if she submitted them under pseudonym - but would no doubt win first prize and a column in the Guardian if it became known that they were by Diana Athill. And that, I'm afraid, applies to the whole book. Athill freely admits that had she been a publisher to whom someone had submitted her books Stet and Yesterday Morning, she would probably have rejected them. Her admission reduces her view of authorship to little more than an exercise in literary self-gratification. One is left with the impression that the person who enjoys her books more than anyone else is herself.
One would have thought that a book by a leading editor would have been better edited. While this Granta edition is beautifully printed with an excellently designed dust jacket, at least four printer's errors jumped out of the page at me (a couple of typos and two instances where square brackets were used) and a couple of passages would undoubtedly have been tidied up by Diana Athill had they occurred in one of the books I submitted to her. (Although the book is priced at £12.99, I was able to get it from Amazon for under £7.)
I have, finally, to declare an interest, for it was Diana Athill who accepted my first novel, The River Running By, which was published with fanfares and great enthusiasm by André Deutsch Ltd in 1981 (it was The Bookseller's book of the month). Diana was a superb editor and I can never thank her enough for what she taught me about cutting and polishing my work. When I submitted my second novel The Raging of the Sea, which ran to over 600 pages, Diana read it and accepted it within four days. It was published by Deutsch in 1984, and my third novel, The Believer, also edited by Diana, was published by Deutsch in 1985. However, I was then head-hunted by Felicity Bryan (she pretends not to know me now!), another doyenne of literary London, who took me away from André Deutsch and gave me to Weidenfeld & Nicholson, who commissioned me to write Armada. André was furious, and I suspect that Diana Athill's remarks about loyalty and André's anger about writers who left their list may refer at least in part to myself. André desperately wanted a knighthood or a peerage, but he only got a CB. Whether my novel The Raging of the Sea (which was most unpopular with the Royal Navy) had anything to do with it, I don't know, but there are indications that there may have been a link. For a while, I regarded Diana Athill as a true friend, unaware that loyalty was not one of her favourite virtues. Had I known that, perhaps I would not have been so surprised to receive her final letter to me, in which her parting shot was, `Sod him and all who sail in him' - a remark which seems to me to sum up her attitude to men.
If you need cheering up after reading Somewhere Towards the End (and perhaps reassuring that I am not a disgruntled, male chauvinist pig) I would recommend Fay Weldon's delightful Auto Da Fay, which I think is about as good as autobiography gets.
The River Running By
The Raging of the Sea
The Believer
A Good Boy Tomorrow: Memoirs of A Fundamentalist Upbringing
Jannaway's MutinyIota: God as Nature, Nature as God
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Contentment is a difficult subject, May 15, 2009
I have a soft spot in my heart for this author. I attended one of her author events in Hampstead once and enjoyed her musings very much. Yet I was so disappointed in this book that I wish I had left well enough alone and had only the Diana Athill of that evening in my memory.
Only if you would enjoy reading exhaustive accounts of the author's "friends with benefits" stories will you find this book engaging. Really, at the end of one's life is that all there is to talk about? If so, that's pretty discouraging.
I am glad the author finds solace in many facets of her life, such as gardening and reading, that are not hobbled by the physical limitations of advanced age. But the joy she finds in these pursuits didn't stir anything in me. Perhaps contentment is difficult to write about with passion.
The one thought I'll take away with me is that aging is not kind to your feet and walking becomes progressively more painful. I'll use her warning to more actively enjoy this ability now. And I hope to be able to put it to good use again on the Heath some day.
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