90+ | June 9th 2008

Jillian Edelstein

In our second instalment of "Bright Old Things", our feature on vibrant, contented 90-somethings, Maureen Cleave talks to Diana Athill, a publisher turned autobiographer. "Seventy is the beginning of being old," she observes ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

Diana Athill lives alone in London, very near Primrose Hill. "The only sound", she said, "is people talking to their dogs." There are books everywhere. She was a publisher all her working life, then took to writing herself: five volumes of memoirs that included some rather steamy affairs. They all made a splash, none more so than the latest, "Somewhere Towards the End", which is about old age and approaching death. "Reviews all over the place, including one in the Morning Star which ended: "It is sad to think that the secret of a spry and contented old age is selfishness.' I was rather put in my place.

"At first I thought there wasn't much to say about growing older except that it's bloody. Seventy is the beginning of being old, I felt really old when I was 80 and really really old when I was 90." What she calls the ebbing of sex comes in the late 60s. "Rather a relief, not going to bed with anyone any more. One has the chance to enjoy men for other reasons."

If she had one piece of advice it would be to get up in the morning. "What you must do is defy the languid movement, get out of bed and make yourself do something." She gets up, she gardens, she sews, she writes, sometimes she reads till 3am; often she drives to Norfolk at weekends to a house she shares with her cousin, finding driving easier than walking, which she does with a stick.

What does get better, she said, is not minding what people think. "Though I enjoy bothering about clothes and I don't like being seen without a good foundation to hide the veins and the shiny bits. My hair is very short because I've hardly any left, just a spider's web over a pink scalp, but my dear man in Regent's Park who cuts it agrees it's not wig time yet.

"It's false cheerfulness to say things get better because most things get worse, but occasionally things that are rarer in one's life can be more delicious: a recent visit to York, for instance-absolute heaven when I got there. Or seeing the Russians at the Royal Academy from a self-propelling wheelchair, or playing with little Alexander who's just moved in downstairs. One of the things that make me love writing or looking at pictures is that you become unconscious of yourself. Anything absorbing makes you become not 'I' but 'eye'--you escape the ego."

There's no point in worrying about the future because there's nothing to be done about it. "As Shakespeare says, 'The coward dies many times before his death.' I haven't gone gaga, I'm not lonely, I have friends who are great fun. The actual business of dying is pure luck, and when you're older your heart is more likely to just stop. I'm counting on that. My Uncle Billy fell off his horse in the middle of telling a story, out hunting with the Norwich stag hounds. It's always shocked me how quickly one gets used to the death of dear friends."

The fear of death, she said, is a profound instinct. "We're all afraid of it. We try to ward it off, make up stories about floating up to heaven. Then there are people like me who cheer themselves up by thinking that death is a part of life; everything that ever lived has died and will die. I suppose I want to be remembered as quite a nice person, but it doesn't really bother me." What about funerals? She'd go for the good old c of e: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust--it serves its purpose. I don't want someone who's never met me saying pious things about me."

In the meantime, the secret is to keep working. "I've got to the bottom of my personal experience and now I'd like to know more about my mother's generation. If you write as honestly as you can, it's most therapeutic. I think about the past quite a lot; I think about the good bits. This must depend on temperament--if you're naturally optimistic. I was born that way."

It surprises her that she's never much minded not having children. "I love playing with Alexander, but I'm glad I'm not his grandmother. Something in me didn't want to get involved in something that was more important than anything else." So had that reviewer discovered the secret of a contented old age? "Selfishness," she says. "A sobering thought--I think the bastard's probably right."

(Maureen Cleave was one of the first feature writers on the London Evening Standard. Her last feature was "Beggars can be orators" for the Spring issue of Intelligent Life. Jillian Edelstein, who took the portraits for this series, is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and Vogue.)