Diana Athill
Acclaimed memoirist and editor who promoted the careers of writers including V S Naipaul and Jean Rhys
DIANA Athill, who has died aged 101, was one of the most revered editors in publishing, and a notable author in her own right about the wrecking effects of love.
During her 40-year partnership with Andre Deutsch, Diana Athill helped promote the careers of writers like Jean Rhys, V S Naipaul, Brian Moore, John Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Margaret Atwood. She encouraged her authors to “try to write the truth, however indecent”, a precept she adopted herself in a series of autobiographical memoirs.
The writer Timothy Mo remarked of Diana Athill that “she doesn’t write well, she writes wonderfully well, rather better than most of her writers”. She had a gift for identifying and expressing disagreeable truths about herself, and in her painfully candid accounts of her numerous and mostly disastrous love affairs, she became a favourite author for those who have loved unwisely but too well.
Diana Athill was born in Norfolk on December 21, 1917, the daughter of an officer in the Royal Artillery. Her parents’ finances were often uncertain, but her mother’s family had a bit of money — her maternal great-grandfather had been Master of University College, Oxford — and much of her childhood was spent in the comfort of her grandmother’s 18th Century manor house at Beckton, Norfolk.
The idyll of her early years was, however, blighted by the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage. Her mother found her husband physically repulsive and after bearing him two children, she began an affair with someone else and gave up any pretence at married happiness.
During the ensuing quarrels, the children usually took their mother’s part against their undemonstrative father. It was only after her father’s death that Diana Athill learnt from his letters to his wife how sad and patient he had been.
Young Diana read voraciously, but became “obsessed with sex” after finding Marie Stopes’s Wise Parenthood at the back of a bookcase. Her first love was the gardener’s boy, who came to the house every day to pump water from a well to provide the family with bath water. One day she went into the lavatory to lean out of the window and watch him “until I became unable to resist the longing for communication, collected a mouthful of saliva, and spat. He felt it, looked up, those beautiful brown eyes met mine — and I shot out of the lavatory, scarlet and breathless with excitement. After which I was never, so far as I can remember, out of love.”
She was educated at home by governesses until she was 14, finding when she eventually went to school that the only thing she was good at was composition. Despite this, she went on to study English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. It was there she met Tony Irvin, the great love of her life.
They got engaged, but when the war started, he went off to Egypt as a pilot, and his letters stopped coming.
When at last he communicated, it was with a formal note asking her to release him from their engagement because he wanted to marry someone else.
Two months after his marriage, he was killed, leaving his new wife pregnant with their son.
It took Diana Athill many years to recover from his desertion. “I believe I owe to Oxford much of the stability and resilience which enabled me, later, to live through 20 years of unhappiness without coming to dislike life,” she wrote in Instead of a Letter (1963), her account of the relationship with Irvin.
After his desertion, she took refuge in promiscuity, out of “a catlike impulse to poke my nose round the next corner, combined with the emptiness of my emotional life at the time”. None of her affairs gave her any happiness, though one would change her life.
In 1943, she met Andre Deutsch when he turned up with her flatmate’s lover, George Weidenfeld, at a party they were giving. Deutsch was a Hungarian-Jewish refugee who had landed a sales job in publishing. Two days later, she ended up in bed with him, though “without much excitement on either side”.
It was soon apparent they would not be lovers for long. Deutsch was an insomniac and “his bed was not wide”. Their affair lasted a dozen or so nights and when he moved on she did not hold it against him. Instead they became friends, and when Deutsch scraped together enough to start his own publishing house, Allen Wingate, in 1945, he asked Diana Athill, then working as a researcher with the BBC, to join him. When, six years later, he set up a company under his own name, she followed him.
Deutsch and Diana Athill had their first big success with Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead, which had been rejected by six other British publishers despite the stir it had caused in America. The book was notable, among other things, for its liberal use of the “f-word”, which, hoping to avoid the Censor’s attention, they changed to “fug”.
Review copies sent round three weeks before publication elicited a furious outburst from the editor of The Sunday Times against its projected publication on the grounds that “no decent man could leave it where his wife or children might happen to see it”.
The next morning Deutsch was deluged with orders from eager customers but served with an injunction against publication until the Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross had considered the case. After a considerable time, Deutsch persuaded an MP he knew to ask whether the Attorney General was going to ban the book or not. The answer was a grudging “no”.
Overnight they became seen as a brave and dashing little publishing firm, worth serious attention from agents handling interesting and controversial new writers. They went on to publish Philip Roth’s first books and all of John Updike’s.
Diana Athill herself brought Mordecai Richler and Brian Moore into the limelight, and, with difficulty, revived the career of the drunk and demanding Jean Rhys, becoming midwife to her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea.
One young writer led her to another; Richler helped her find both Moore and (indirectly) V S Naipaul.
Andre Deutsch published 18 books by Naipaul, building its own reputation as well as his, but Diana Athill discovered that he was a classic case of a “high-maintenance” writer, requiring the sort of indulgence one might expect from a full-time psychiatric social worker. Naipaul seemed to regard the publication of each of his books as a tragedy, sending him into depressions from which Diana Athill had to rescue him.
Rather against her inclinations, she got to know him extremely well, but, as she recalled in Stet (2000), her memoir about publishing, it was some time before she discovered he had a wife. “Vidia doesn’t like me to come to parties because I’m such a bore,” his wife, Pat, told her. “From that moment on whenever I needed to cheer myself up by counting my blessings,” Diana Athill recalled, “I used to tell myself ‘at least I’m not married to Vidia’.“
The relationship with Naipaul came to an end in 1975 after Diana Athill read the manuscript of his 13th book, Guerrillas, which concerned political psychopaths in Trinidad. She did not feel the book rang true and with characteristic honesty told him so. The next day his agent called to say that he would be leaving the firm.
For a while she seethed, “and then it occurred to me that never again would I have to listen to Vidia telling me how damaged he was; and it was as though the sun had come out. I didn’t have to like Vidia any more”.
Diana Athill’s own breakthrough as a writer came when she submitted a story to an Observer writing competition under the pseudonym Mr What, the name of that year’s Grand National winner.
When she later got a call from the literary editor, she assumed it was about a book she had sent for review. Instead he tentatively asked: “Are you Mr What? If so, I’ve got some good news for you.” She had beaten 2,000 other entries and had won £500.
Love was never easy for Diana Athill and, after Instead of a Letter in 1963, she went on to write two more raw memoirs about failed love affairs. During the 1960s she began a complicated relationship with an Egyptian Communist novelist, Waguih Ghali, a charming man, but a drinker, a gambler and a manic depressive.
In After a Funeral she explored, with painful honesty, the three years they spent together, a period that culminated in Ghali’s suicide in her flat on Boxing Day 1968 — an event he described in the journals he left as “the one authentic act of my life”. Within a year, she had met a black American Muslim called Hakim Jamal, who, after being salvaged from heroin by the black power leader Malcolm X, was brought to England by the theatrical Redgraves and signed up by Andre Deutsch.
Diana Athill, then in her 50s, became his a substitute mother, occasional lover, analyst and editor. It was only when he began to reproach her for refusing to accept the fact that he was God that she began to wonder about his sanity.
Eventually he disappeared with his girlfriend, who was later found murdered — having been buried alive — in Trinidad. Hakim, who fled to America with one of her killers, was murdered a year later. Diana Athill gave an account of their relationship in Make Believe (1993).
She wrote several more books including Yesterday Morning (2002) about her childhood, and a novel, Don’t Look at Me Like That (1967), about a daughter of a dismal country parsonage who is introduced to what seems to her the disreputable, exciting life of a school friend, whom she later betrays.
In 2008, she won the Costa Book Award, followed by the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, for her memoir Somewhere Towards the End, an honest but amusing book about the tribulations — and comforts — of old age. In 2011 Granta Books published Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend, a collection of her letters to the American poet Edward Field.
In later life, she found domestic happiness with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord, with whom she had an eight-year affair, though he shared her flat for 40. He died in 2011. Two years earlier, in 2009, she had moved into a retirement home, where, in 2010 she was interviewed by Alan Yentob for a BBC documentary, Growing Old Disgracefully, part of the Imagine series.
In 2015, Granta published Alive, Alive Oh!, a collection of her essays, and the following year published her playful diaries of a two-week trip to Florence in 1947.
Diana Athill was 75 when she retired as editor and director of Andre Deutsch in 1993.
She died on January 23.