Athill

A is for Athill

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I thought I’d start a little alphabetical series, where I pick an author for each letter of the alphabet – sharing which of their books I’ve read, which I own, how I came across them etc.

IS there an author for each letter of the alphabet that I can do this for? No, of course not, but we’ll cross the bridge when we get to the back end.

I’m starting with Diana Athill, largely because everybody has all of Jane Austen’s books.

How many books do I have by Athill?

According to a quick sweep of my shelves, I have seven – which is a pretty high percentage of them, I think. One is fiction (the short stories published by Persephone), most are forms of autobiography, and there’s a collection of letters in there too. I used to own Alive, Alive Oh! but I think I gave it away after I’d read it.

How many of these have I read?

I have definitely read three – Stet, Somewhere Towards the End, and Midsummer Night in the Workhouse. There’s a real possibility that I’ve read Instead of a Letter too, but I’m not sure – she covers the main events of it in several of her other books, so the blurb might just be telling me things I already know.

How did I start reading Athill?

According to the notes in the front of these books, I bought Yesterday Morning in 2009, though I still haven’t read it. Most of the others came in some sort of Athill spree in 2013, which must have followed me reading my first Athill – the wonderful Stet. More on that in a mo.

General impressions…

Stet is the best book I’ve read about the publishing industry, though I haven’t read an enormous amount. It tells of Athill’s time working as an editor, and is a wonderful insight to that process – and, in the second half, she details her experience working with authors including Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, and Brian Moore. It’s a delicious, fascinating, intelligent book.

I’ve had less success with her other memoir-driven books – largely because they are often about how she slept with married men, and wasn’t the wife silly and irrational to get upset about it. Obviously it takes two to tango, but it doesn’t feel like very edifying reading.

She is still a wonderful writer (or was, I should say, having died last year) – and I’ll keep reading these. I do find that a memoirist has to have an element at least of connection with the reader – you have to like them, in essence – and I deeply admire Athill, but don’t always like her. With those glasses on, I’ll keep reading. (As for her fiction – I remember enjoying the stories but they were a bit forgettable; it was not her metier.)

Next time – B is for…

I shan’t be deciding them in advance, but I suspect any long-term reader of Stuck in a Book will have no difficulty guessing where I’m leaning.

Somewhere Towards the End – Diana Athill

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I’m over at Vulpes Libris at the moment, with a review of Somewhere Towards the End (2008) by Diana Athill.  It does fit in my new century, but I actually finished it at the end of 2013.  I did like a lot of it, but struggled with some of it, and my review is mostly about what I struggled with… which I found difficult to explore and express properly, but valued trying!  Head over and read it, if you so wish, here.

Diana Athill and Susan Hill

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These two books (Midsummer Night in the Workhouse and other stories by Diana Athill and Black Sheep by Susan Hill) have very little in common, other than that (a) the authors have ‘hill’ in their name, and (b) they are the final two books for my Reading Presently project and this is the last day of the year.  So I shall consider them in turn, and only if I’m very lucky will I find anything to link them…

Mum gave me Midsummer Night in the Workhouse as a cheer-up present a few months ago, and a Persephone book is (of course) always very, very welcome.  One of my very favourite reads in 2013 was Diana Athill’s memoir about being an editor, Stet (indeed, I claimed in Kim’s Book Bloggers Advent Calendar that it was my favourite, but while compiling my list I remembered another which beat it – full top ten to be unveiled in January, donchaknow) so I thought it was about time that I read some of her fiction.  Turns out there isn’t that much of it, and she speaks quite disparagingly of the whole process in Somewhere Towards The End (which I’m reading at the moment; spoiler alert, it doesn’t compare to Stet in my mind).

As my usual disclaimer, whenever I write about short stories – they’re very difficult to write about.  But they do seem the perfect medium for the expert editor, depending – as they do, more than any other fiction – upon precision and economy.  And I thought (says he, being very brief) that Athill was very good at it.  My favourite was probably ‘The Return’, about a couple of young women who are taken to an island by local ‘tour guide’ sailors – it was just so brilliantly structured, managing to be tense, witty, and wry at the same time.  But the last line of ‘Desdemona’ was exceptionally good (and you know how I like my last lines to stories…)

My only complaint with the collection is that they are a bit too samey occasionally – which might be explained by the new preface, where Athill explains that she mostly wrote from her own experience.  And her own experience seemed to be observing a fair amount of unsatisfactory marriages, and having a rather casual attitude towards marital fidelity (more on that when I get around to writing about Somewhere Towards The End.)

Her character and voice seem better established in her non-fiction, but this collection is certainly very good – and Persephone should be celebrated for collecting and publishing something which had been largely ignored in Athill’s career.  Hurrah for Persephone!

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Colin (yes, he blogs too, and apparently will be doing so more regularly in 2014) gave me Susan Hill’s latest novella, Black Sheep (which was on my Amazon wishlist) for Christmas, and I read it on Boxing Day while laid up with that cold.  I’m always so grateful that I gave Susan Hill’s writing a second go, after being underwhelmed by the children’s book I read first – and I have a special soft spot for the novellas which have been coming out over the past few years.

Those of you who follow Hill on Twitter, or remember her erstwhile blog, will know that she seems to finish a book in the time it takes most of us to boil a kettle.  Well, more power to her, say I – and I’ve been impressed by The Beacon and A Kind Man.  I hadn’t realised that I read those in 2009 and 2011 – well, time flies, and perhaps Hill does pause for breath between books.  Black Sheep is not only being marketed in a similar way, with equally lovely colours/image/format, but does – whether Hill has done this deliberately or not – belong in the same stable.  The three novellas have definite differences, and possibly started from very different inspirations, but they also share a great deal – all three concern remote, almost isolated communities, the complicated lives of simple folk, and (it must be conceded) a fair dose of misery.  Or perhaps just a dose of hardship, because the three novels all seem to come near to gratuitous misery, and then duck away.

Black Sheep takes place in a mining community in the past… I’m not sure how far in the past, or if we’re told, but definitely an era when people rarely left their village and almost no outside-communication took place.  The village (called ‘Mount of Zeal’) is divided into the pit, Lower Terrace, Middle Terrace, and Upper Terrace (known as Paradise).  We follow the fortunes of one overcrowded family home as the children grow up.  Who to marry, whether or not to get a job in the mine, how to cope with illness and grief – these are the overriding concerns of the different children and their parents – but these topics are less important than the way in which Hill writes about them, and the community they live in.

It is such a brilliant depiction of a village.  Setting the community on the side of this hill, leading from Paradise to the hell of the mine, may seem like a heavy-handed metaphor – but more significant is the claustrophobia of the village from any vantage, whether in the pit or in the fanciest inspector’s house.  We follow perhaps the most important character, the youngest boy Ted, when he emerges from the village into the sheep-filled fields above – a journey seldom made by anybody, for some reason – and there is a palpable sense of narrative and readerly relief.  Even while giving us characters we care about, Hill makes the whole atmosphere suffocating and, yes, claustrophobic.

Of these three novellas, I still think The Beacon is the best – but the setting of Black Sheep is probably the most accomplished.  It lacks quite the brilliance of structure which Hill demonstrates elsewhere, and comes nearest to a Hardyesque piling on of unlikely misery, but that can’t really dent the confident narrative achievement readers have come to expect from Hill.  As a follow-on read from Ten Days of Christmas, it was a bit of a shock – but, if you’re feeling emotionally brave, this triumvirate of novellas is definitely worth seeking out.

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And there you have it.  No noticeable link between the two – but my Reading Presently challenge is finished!  I realise it isn’t as interesting for vicarious readers as A Century of Books, because (presumably) it makes no difference to you whether a reviewed book was a gift or a purchase, but I’ve enjoyed seeing what people have recommended over the years.  At the very least, it has assuaged a fair amount of latent guilt!  I still have at least 30 books people have given me, and I’ll be prioritising a few for ACOB 2014, but I’ll also enjoy indulging my own whims to a greater extent.

Appropriately enough, five of my Top Ten Books were gifts, and five were not – considering this year I read 50 books that were gifts and just over 50 that were not (finishing, because of DPhil, headaches, and new job, rather fewer books than usual).  All will be revealed soon, as promised…

Diana Athill… on two types of readers

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I couldn’t find an apt place to include this quotation in my review of Diana Athill’s Stet yesterday, but it’s so wonderful a quotation that I had to put it up somewhere:

People who buy books, not counting useful how-to-do-it books, are of two
kinds. There are those who buy because they love books and what they
can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment
among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on
reading, if not for ever, then for as long as one can foresee. The
second group has to be courted. It is the second which makes the
best-seller, impelled thereto by the buzz that a particular book is
really something special; and it also makes publishers’ headaches,
because it has become more and more resistant to courting.
How simply this clears up my confusion over ‘Why did that become a bestseller?’ – or even the concept of the bestseller at all.  The second group, as she details later in Stet, would just as happily turn to music or television or cinema for their entertainment.  Those of us in the first group (though of course we might well enjoy music, television, and cinema) cannot imagine a substitute for books.  Nothing comes close.

Stet – Diana Athill (and a giveaway)

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42. Stet – Diana Athill

I’ve been savouring the all-too-few pages of Stet (2000) by Diana Athill, and now it’s going into my 50 Books You Must Read – and it was so good that I had to go and buy another copy to offer as a giveaway (to anywhere in the world.) Just pop your name in the comments, along with the author you most wish you’d been able to edit. (You can interpret that in a positive way – how wonderful to get to see their drafts! – or a negative way – my GOODNESS they needed editing!)  I’ll do the draw next weekend on 20th April.

Right, now I’ll write my review and tell you why I think you should enter to win! I bought Stet a year ago, adding it to my little pile of unread Diana Athill memoirs, knowing that at some point I would read it and love it.  What’s not to like about a memoir by one of the most famous editors in the world?  I was saving it as a treat, when I saw that various bloggers were posting reviews, since the Slaves of Golconda were reading it (there’s a sampling of those reviews at the end of mine.)  What better excuse to dig out my copy, and indulge?

Although Diana Athill now seems famously chiefly for being old (she is 95), she is also recognised as one of the country’s best editors, having worked as one for five decades under the auspices of André Deutsch.  Her reason for writing Stet also explains it’s title, so I’ll hand over to Athill to explain:

Why am I going to write it?  Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too – they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in my squeaks “Oh no – let at least some of it be rescued!!”.  It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that.  By a long-established printer’s convention, a copy-editor wanting to rescue a deletion puts a row of dots under it and writes ‘Stet’ (let it stand) in the margin.  This book is an attempt to ‘Stet’ some part of my experience in its original form.
This explanation, though both moving and understandable, is also an example of the extraordinary modesty which Athill demonstrates.  Not a false modesty, or even a polite modesty, but a genuine refusal to believe how brilliant she is.  She occasionally quotes people’s praise of her – which is not (in this instance) the action of the immodest, but the grateful incredulity of the humble.

Stet is divided into two sections.  The second, which I will come onto, looks in detail at her relationships with various authors whom she edited.  The first deals with her career in publishing in a fairly fast-paced manner (she covers 50 years in 128 pages – that’s a few months per page, folks) and has a great deal of common sense to say about the practice of editing, as well as lovely gossip about what a controlling – though somehow lovable – monster André Deutsch was, and various illuminating revelations about how scattergun their policy for accepting submissions was in the early days.  Basically, everything they liked was accepted – from cookbooks to travel books to experimental short stories to children’s books.  Quite how they described their list, I can’t imagine.

Anybody interested in the process of how a book goes (or went) from a manuscript clutched in an author’s hand to a copy on Foyles’ shelves will inevitably find Stet interesting, but what carries it from being an interesting discussion of ‘an editor’s life’ (the subtitle) is Athill’s wisdom, warmth, and wit.  As an example of the latter, here’s her brief account of working with an author on a book about Tahiti which was interesting but appallingly written:

I doubt if there was a sentence – certainly there was not a paragraph – that I did not alter and often have to retype, sending it chapter by chapter to the author for his approval which – although he was naturally grouchy – he always gave.  I enjoyed the work.  It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained (a good deal more satisfying than the minor tinkering involved when editing a competent writer).  Soon after the book’s publication it was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement: an excellent book, said the reviewer, scholarly and full of fascinating detail, and beautifully written into the bargain.  The author promptly sent me a clipping of this review, pinned to a short note.  “How nice of him,” I thought, “he’s going to say thank you!”  What he said in fact was: “You will observe the comment about the writing which confirms what i have thought all along, that none of that fuss about it was necessary.”  When I had stopped laughing I accepted the message: an editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but they must always be seen as a bonus).  We must always remember that we are only midwives – if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.
(Which, of course, is what Athill has done.)  Although Athill admits that editing the competent writer is a less interesting activity, what I admire about her editorial eye is the willingness, often expressed in Stet, to do minimal work.  It takes a humble and wise editor to resist using her own taste as a benchmark, and looking, instead, for ways in which the author can express theirs.

The first half of Stet is filled with lively and observant accounts of her colleagues and friends, and is certainly very far from dry – but the second half is more overtly about the characters she met.  I shan’t go into depth about this section; I’ll just let you know the people to whom chapters are devoted: Jean Rhys, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, V.S. Naipaul, Molly Keane, Alfred Chester.  I’ve only read two books by all these authors combined, but I still found her portraits touching, intelligent, and (above all) observant.  The length of these sections, and the accounts she gives of these authors’ personal and professional lives, are perfectly judged.

Hopefully that is enough to tempt you to read Stet.  I’ve barely covered the second half of it, but that means there is even more to discover for yourself!  So… if you have been tempted, pop your name in the comments, and that author whom you wish you’d edited. Stat!


Others who got Stuck in this Book:


“Athill is that very rare thing, a shrewdly selfish spectator. She’s quite unlike anyone I’ve met before, either in person or on the page.” – Alex in Leeds


“I have this feeling that if you are lucky enough to be seated next to Athill at a dinner party, it would be an evening filled with sparkling conversation.  Reading Stet is (almost) the next best thing.” – Danielle, A Work in Progress


“Athill has the gift of cutting through the complicated tangle to the simple heart of the issues that publishers face.” – Victoria, Tales From The Reading Room