Revered editor known for her painfully honest memoirs
Diana Athill 1917-2019
One of the most revered editors in British publishing, Diana Athill, who has died aged 101, helped her friend André Deutsch found his company in 1951, and proceeded over the next 40 years to nurture the talents of a roster of authors, from Jean Rhys to V.S. Naipaul. Beady-eyed and unsentimental, she urged her writers to be as honest as possible, “to write the truth, however indecent”. Then, in the 1960s, she picked up a pen herself to produce the first in a series of acclaimed memoirs in which she chronicled, with painful candour, her many and often catastrophic relationships, and exposed the “wrecking effects of love”, said The Daily Telegraph.
The daughter of an officer in the Royal Artillery, Diana Athill was born in 1917. Her parents were unhappily married (her mother found her father sexually repulsive, though he adored her) and their finances were unstable, but she was mainly brought up in the comfort of her grandmother’s home, Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk. Her concerns, she said, were “falling in love, riding and reading”. Aged 15, she fell for a handsome Oxford undergraduate who was tutoring her brother. They began an affair, which carried on when she went up to Oxford. They became engaged in 1938, but soon after he was posted to Egypt with the RAF, his letters stopped coming. Finally, she received a telegram from him, telling her he’d met someone else. He was killed in action not long after. It took her 20 years to recover from this abandonment. “My soul shrank to the size of a pea,” she said. After that, she sought distraction in loveless affairs that brought her little joy, though one changed her life.
Having been informed that she’d need to support herself, Athill moved to London on graduating and found a job with the BBC. In 1943, she met Deutsch at a party thrown by her flatmate’s lover, George Weidenfeld. They had a fling, which developed into a lasting professional relationship in 1945, when he founded his first publishing house, and asked her to join him. In 1949, they took the controversial decision to publish Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Laden with expletives, it was almost banned – and Deutsch was hailed as a bold new figure on the publishing scene. Among Athill’s achievements were persuading Rhys – a tormented alcoholic – to finish Wide Sargasso Sea, and rediscovering Molly Keane. Her relationship with Naipaul was tricky: she admired his writing, but he was moody, depressive and demanding, and over time she began to dislike him – particularly because of the way he treated his wife, Pat. “Vidia doesn’t like me to come to parties because I’m such a bore,” Pat once told her. Athill recalled: “From that moment on whenever I needed to cheer myself up by counting my blessings, I used to tell myself: ‘At least I’m not married to Vidia.’”
Athill’s work brought her into contact with a range of people – including many of the “damaged and oppressed foreigners” for whom she had a weakness. Her lovers included the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali, who took his own life in her flat in 1968; and Hakim Jamal, a mentally unstable member of the Black Panther movement who was later murdered, said The Herald (Glasgow). Her happiest relationship was with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord; they were lovers for only eight years, but they lived together for decades (for a period, she shared her small flat with him and his girlfriend). Her first volume of memoir, Instead of a Letter, came out in 1963. Her last book, A Florence Diary, was published in 2016. Still being commended for her frankness about sex aged 92, she never married and had no children. “I quite liked children, but I was never motherly,” she said. “And nor, I realised, was I wifely. The role I was most comfortable with was that of the Other Woman, and I was good at it. I never wanted to wreck anyone’s marriage.”