Issue 40 / January 2012
Tales from a Bookshop - Write to Remember
Anna Goodall was lucky enough to meet two great literary ladies in just one week ... both of whom have put memories of their extraordinary lives on the page.
I attended two events last week: historian and novelist Lady Antonia Fraser discussing the memoir of her marriage to Harold Pinter, Must You Go? at the Free Word Centre on Tuesday, and great editor and renowned memoirist Diana Athill, whose collected memoirs Life Class was published in late 2009, talking to Ian Jack at the Savile Club on Friday.
Must You Go? is currently perched atop of my substantial to-read list, so I am ignorant of the book's style and content, but the talk was hugely enjoyable and often funny as Fraser spoke very well and was not short of amusing anecdotes about her life with Pinter... such as when Pinter mentioned to Beckett that he was feeling rather gloomy about the world, and Beckett retorted, 'Well, you can't feel more gloomy about the world than I do'.
Having left a marriage and six children to be with Harold, the couple enjoyed thirty-three years of happiness before Pinter's death in 2008 and this memoir is clearly a celebration of this love: she half-jokingly complains of the letters from readers saying they never knew Pinter was so different from his public persona, and when the chair of the evening, PEN president Lisa Appignanesi, mentions that one of the things she loved about the book was that she would never otherwise have guessed that Pinter was such a romantic and sensitive lover, Fraser is wittily quick with her repost: 'I should hope not!'
Interestingly, Lady Fraser revealed that Pinter was an excellent editor with great concentration and attention to detail. He read her work chapter by chapter and she too read his work as he went along, each occasionally making suggestions. One feels that here was a relationship whose initial attraction and unexpected love was shored up by the respect for and deep interest each took in the other's work.
I can't quite leave the subject without mentioning that in person Lady Fraser was utterly engaging and still very beautiful. It would be easy to see how anyone could fall in love with her now, let alone thirty-five years ago, and she is one of those people that others flock to be around. It is a delight to have met her.
Diana Athill is a very contrasting person but equally charismatic, and in this case I have read her new collection of memoirs - and with great enjoyment. As I said I am entirely ignorant of Fraser's memoir, but one feels from the discussion that the book is a eulogy to her beloved late husband. Athill on the other hand is famous for her writing mantra that she learnt from one of the authors she worked with, Jean Rhys: to 'get it as it was, as it really was'. Indeed, at one point in Somewhere Towards the End when she is carefully considering death and dying, she writes of her thoughts on it that they are, '- not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true'. In a sense this is the essence of the collection.
Life Class follows Diana from an idyllic childhood, to Oxford and debilitating heartbreak, to the publishers André Deutsch which she helped found with the eponymous André and where she worked (outrageously underpaid) for over forty years editing the work of authors like Rhys, VS Naipaul, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, to her meditations, wonderfully frank and bold, about old age and facing death - not a subject easy to make enjoyable. In fact, to make over 650 pages of highly personal memoir interesting you have to be a very assured writer - and she is.
Strange as it sounds, I found Stet - her tales of being an editor, which I expected to love - somewhat dryer, although there are wonderful moments, than her brilliant account of her early life and the engagement that ended in heartbreaking rejection, Instead of a Letter.
Written when she was forty-six the most striking thing about the work is the clarity of her memories of childhood which are so vivid that they remind you exactly of the feeling of being a child and tug at the essence of your own hidden childhood experiences.
She is also frank about her obsession with sex from being quite a small girl (how many people have written about this?) and a significant discovery she made - she finds a very educational and rather saucy tome in her late grandfather's library and makes sure she reads every line! In fact, she is completely open and matter-of-fact about relationships and sex throughout her memoirs, though they have often brought her disappointment - an aspect that must have been, if not shocking, then highly unusual, especially from a woman, in 1963, and possibly is still unusual now.
Her description of her depression when her engagement ended in a most hurtful manner is perhaps her greatest triumph from this collection. Although Athill does think about why she might have been so predisposed to lose her confidence, she tries to reason it out and she is still thinking openly about it, she does not clamp down on or restrict her version of events. A less self-pitying account it is impossible to read. She is very exact about her sorrow, but her memories as she writes them are not set in stone.
Memoirs, however, are inevitably a way of trying to make sense of the past, but refreshingly both women seem to have fallen into memoir-writing almost by accident and both for cathartic reasons. Fraser recounts how her friend and publisher George Weidenfeld suggested to her that she write about Pinter over lunch about a year after his death, and that she found going over all the diaries she'd kept during their life together, on which the book is largely based, was a way of coming to terms with her grief; similarly, Athill's penning of Instead of a Letter was a new beginning for her, a way of leaving her old self behind, and something she wrote very naturally without really knowing why.
It's lucky for us that they both decided upon this method - if written with skill and for the right reasons memoir can be a most engaging and intimate form of prose writing, and both authors are tough but engaging women who have lived fascinating lives.
To finish, Peter (owner of Clerkenwell Tales), experienced a significant literary meeting of his own last week (although it is unlikely to end in marriage): one of his literary heroes Peter Carey made a special trip to Clerkenwell Tales to sign copies of his latest novel Parrot and Olivier in America for the shop... but better than that, the great man gave Peter a hug! Sadly, I was not there to witness it, but it is possibly Clerkenwell Tales's most exciting literary moment to date - one for the memoirs.
ACG
What's hot?
Whoops! - Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester
On Love by Stendhal
The Exclamation Mark by Anton Chekhov
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne
Who did we spot?
Peter Carey - of course!
Friday, 19 February, 2010
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