With Somewhere Towards the End, which recently won the prestigious (but then, aren't they all?) Costa Prize for Biography, Diana Athill in all likelihood completes her metamorphosis from one of the most significant editors in the 20th-century literary world of London to one of its best memoirists.
Over five previous memoirs, perhaps most memorably Stet, an anecdotal and incisive account of the publishing world, Athill has been a delightful and observant escort through the public perils of British publishing, and a private life (though no longer so) cleanly and cannily observed.
Befitting her age — 91 now, 89 when she wrote this — this one is about the various losses we sustain as we approach and contemplate the end. But far from being depressing, the book is rendered charming by Athill's consistent candour and her unsentimental, though often almost amused, attitude toward aging and its indignities.
Athill plunges immediately into those losses. She wants a dog, a pug, but cannot buy one because it is unfair to be unable to take it for walks (she later confesses that her legs are failing her). She can no longer fully indulge her very English passion for gardening, to which she devotes an entire wistful chapter.
She unblushingly discusses sex, geriatric style, and allows that the waning of desire is not an unmixed curse: "An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became more interesting." On the subject of sex, which arises regularly, Athill is candid without any hint of salaciousness. If there is such a thing as chaste discussion of extramarital affairs (never married, she has always been more comfortable as the "other woman") and a preference for black men, with one of whom she had a relationship of more than 60 years, Athill has mastered it.
Then it's on to God, in Whom she does not believe, though she admits to retaining the moral traces of her religious upbringing, and glories in the unsolvable mysteries of being. And so winningly on, through consideration of the process of dying in her long-lived family and what it might portend for her, the loss of independence that giving up driving (which she has not done) means, her passion for art and gardening et al.
On reading, Athill interestingly says that she no longer has much taste for fiction, especially of the domestic or romantic-entanglement variety, though she still loves the classics and finds much to savour in the — to her — exotic likes of V.S. Naipaul and Philip Roth. But her preference is for non-fiction, in which it's subject, not story, that attracts.
The one armorial chink seems to be Barry, her Caribbean companion and former lover, who still lives with her in her somewhat straitened circumstances and who, by dint of being old and frail and not having attended to his diabetes properly, must be cared for. That's no easy task for an 89-year-old and, despite a lifetime of deep affection, a bit of humanizing resentment creeps in.
A tiny flaw, and not Athill's fault: Now that British publishers seem no longer to employ copy editors, books from the font and origin of our Mother Tongue contain an alarming number of typos. Admittedly, cases such as "that" instead of "than" and "or" rather than "of" are minor and unconfusing, but they are still irritating pebbles in an otherwise immaculately constructed shoe.
Diana Athill has enjoyed a good life, a lucky life by her own reckoning, in both career and relationships (though she does frequently note her absence of children, especially of a daughter). But not everyone who has enjoyed such a life can write about it from a great age with such dispassionate clarity and charm.
And certainly not everyone possesses the same generosity of spirit that is a clear hallmark of the still remarkable and fearless Diana Athill. Instead of raging at the dying of the light, she continues to bask in its remaining rays.
Globe and Mail Books editor Martin Levin is a great admirer of those who toil in the vineyards of literature and those who face their end with fortitude.
