KEY POINTS:
It is the unrelenting honesty of Diana Athill that makes this book so absorbing. As she approaches 90, she soberly discusses her earlier life, tracks the changes time has wrought on her, and coolly "investigates" her present feelings and attitudes - not a fashionable exercise in an age of the triumphant Me.
Athill was an editor for the literary publisher Andre Deutsch from the time the company was set up until the death of Deutsch. Her work was handling others' writing, which left her, she says, with little motivation to write herself - until she became a septuagenarian. Since then she has published several well-received books. They are tidily written in that traditional English way: precise and rhythmical, never sentimental, often satisfyingly cerebral, as well as amusing and moving.
She plots the changes affecting women's lives, recalling the days when women over 70 "adopted what amounted to a uniform", black or grey clothes, only without any gesture to fashion.
Moving into her 70s, she lost what was "once the most important thing in life", her sexuality. She had many lovers, some of them married, with never an uxorial urge herself. Her last lover stayed on as a friend and she was trapped into caring for him in serious illnesses, and did so with resignation.
And just when I was thinking to myself her flaw is selfishness in her relationships, lo and behold she admits "that central selfishness in me" as one of her regrets. She claims, at first, to have none - until further discus
sion with herself uncovers laziness to go along with selfishness. Otherwise, she says, the "invisibility" of regrets "may be partly the result of a preponderance of common sense over imagination".
She confronts her atheism without demur and without anxiety. She writes: "Many an unbeliever is as scrupulous as any religious person in acknowledging the restrictions and obligations laid on us by sharing the world with others."
But she acknowledges her Christian upbringing with: "No honest atheist would deny that in so far as the saner aspects of religion hold within a society, that society is the better for it. We take a good nibble at our brother's cake before throwing it away."
This is not a book that will at all interest the young, who remain convinced for most of their lives that age is some kind of self-inflicted infirmity; just as marketers ignore the growing number and well-being of people who only a generation ago would have been decrepit and parked somewhere aside from real life.
Or perhaps they sense that the aged are smart beyond over-hyped persuasion.
Many members of Athill's extended family, especially women, reached their late 80s and moved into the 90s, and most were able to look after themselves until the end. This she attributes as much to good luck as to genetics. Her legs are failing her and confining her movements as she writes, and she certainly is aware she is Somewhere Towards the End. But if this book is as true as it certainly seems, she contemplates that end with elegant equanimity.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in one of his greatly under-rated essays: "All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age." Well, Athill remains enchanted; and if self-knowledge is the key to wisdom, then she is certainly, at least in this late stage of her life, wise. o
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
Somewhere Towards the End
By Diana Athill
(Granta Books $40)
