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Instead of a Letter: A Memoir (1963)

di Diana Athill

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2721196,834 (3.9)12
"Diana Athill's childhood was idyllic, brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Aged only fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They travelled to Oxford, engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. In this classic modern memoir, Diana Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness. Yet for all its unhappiness, Instead of a Letter remains a story of hope, written with the frank intelligence and lack of self-pity that have become the hallmarks of Athill's writing."--… (altro)
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Excerpt that I can relate to as a serial procrastinator.

"I was considered a clever girl, but lazy. It takes the form of an immense weight of inertia at the prospect of any activity that does not positively attract me: a weight that can literally paralyse my moral sense. That something must be done I know; that I can do it I know; but the force which prevents my doing it when it comes to the point, or makes me postpone it and postpone it until almost too late, is not a conscious defiance of the 'must' nor a deliberate denial of the 'can'. I slide off sideways, almost unconsciously, into doing something else, which I like doing." Instead of doing what she has to, she does what she enjoys doing..."So often have I proved that this form o self-indulgence ends by making my life less agreeable rather than more so that my inability to control it almost frightens me; but that I should ever get the better of it now seems, alas, most unlikely." - Anita Athill

( )
  KarenDeLucas | Nov 13, 2023 |
Among many other things, Instead of a Letter vividly describes the end of a relationship and the sense of loss that can drain away all pleasure from life for a long time afterwards. Diana Athill was editor to many famous writers, including one of my favourites, Jean Rhys, and is also the author of several other memoirs (I also like Stet, her memoir about her publishing career, particularly the section describing how she worked with Jean Rhys and helped her to finish and publish Wide Sargasso Sea). Instead of a Letter, though, is about her happy childhood and the sad ending of her engagement, and how she eventually found meaning in her life.

What I find interesting about this book is that Athill very unflinchingly and self-critically looks at herself, concluding ‘I have not been beautiful, or intelligent, or good, or brave, or energetic, and for many years I was not happy’. When she asks herself what the meaning of her life is, her attention is drawn by a quotation from Ruskin, ‘The greatest thing a human soul does in this world is to see’. Athill has a gift for observation and she says that ‘seeing things remained, through the dreariest stretches of my life, a reason for living’. [2011]
  papercat | Jul 1, 2017 |
Instead of a Letter, Diana Athill’s first work of autobiography was written when Diana Athill was only in her 40s, published a year after her first volume of short stories. Since then, she has written several more volumes of memoir, including one quite recently. Considering that Athill didn’t write these in any kind of chronological order I can’t see it matters which order one reads them in, as each book does seem to have a different focus. Born in 1917 – she will be celebrating her 99th birthday just before Christmas.

Diana Athill was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, and brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Having worked for the BBC before the war, she later worked in publishing and as an editor, working with many very famous literary greats.

In writing this memoir when she did, Diana Athill, was trying to discover something about herself, and crucially about what her life had been for. It was a question which had been prompted by the memory of her maternal grandmother.

“By the end, pain and exhaustion had loosened her grip on life so that when she ‘recovered’ yet again from a heart attack she would whisper, ‘why doesn’t God let me die?’ but for a long time she was afraid of what was happening to her. She was afraid of death, and she was sorrowful – which was worse – because she had much time in which to ask herself what her life had been for, and often she could not answer.”

She is, as ever, uncompromisingly honest. This is a woman, who the reader instantly feels right at home with, someone will a brilliant understanding of herself, and the ability to examine herself with unflinching honesty.

Although this memoir begins when Diana is a child, it is not a childhood memoir (Yesterday Morning is her childhood memoir – and is brilliant). Instead of a Letter takes us from those years when Diana was living in the country with her family, to her happy times at Oxford in the 1930s through to those darker days after the Second World War, as she recovered from a terrible heartbreak. It is this relationship which is at the heart of the novel, and which was brought suddenly and unexpectedly back to her on a chance visit to an Oxfordshire village.

“ ‘Good evening… Oh, my God, it’s Paul’s girl!’
‘Maggie, you recognised me!’
Maggie held my arm for a moment after kissing me, looking as though she might cry, while I stood there feeling a curious internal vertigo. It was almost twenty years since I had last gone through the narrow door into the taproom of the Plough at Appleton, a small village about ten miles from Oxford; almost twenty years since Maggie and I had seen each other.’

When she was in her teens, a young man named Paul was brought into her home to help tutor Diana’s brother for his public-school entrance exam. Paul was only four years older than Diana, though the age gap never seemed very big at all. Diana fell in love with the mere idea of him. When the real Paul turned up Diana found in him all she could have dreamed – and more.

“I wrote to a friend of mine: ‘The tutor’s come and he’s a perfectly marvellous person. He’s got brown eyes and fair hair and I suppose he ought to be taller really but he has got broad shoulders and a good figure, and he’s country and London at the same time. He would be at home anywhere. He’s very funny and reads a lot, but he isn’t a bit highbrow. We took a boat up the stream yesterday, through all that tangly bit beyond the wood, like going up the Amazon, and he made up a tremendous story about who we were and what we were doing. He knows more about birds than anyone I know, but he dances well, too.’ ”

Paul, first more like a brother, eventually became the centre of her world, and she invested almost everything in him. The war separates them, and Diana must content herself with infrequent letters and a long-distance relationship before she becomes an RAF wife. Paul’s dissertation of her is devastating, more so perhaps as she never gets the chance to forgive him.

This memoir perfectly evokes the times in which Diana Athill lived as a young woman, the people she writes about emerge from the pages fully formed. Athill beautifully recreates her greatest love story from which she seemed to emerge a wiser, sadder woman, but one who knew herself, in a way, perhaps not all of us do. She writes in a very un-embarrassed way about her various brief sexual relationships and the abortion she felt she had to have. After the war, saw her begin working with André Deutsch with whom she was to have a long and successful association. Later Diana was to find true happiness when she discovered writing for herself.

This is a wonderful book, in which we see the devastation of a loss, and the redemptive power of finding one’s true self in creative work. ( )
1 vota Heaven-Ali | Nov 20, 2016 |
I'm starting a project to read down my many unread biographies and memoirs. I'm not familiar with Athill but will read just about any memoir that looks interesting and am enjoying it a lot. She writes about her family and the privilege in which she grew up with an awareness of how lucky she was both to be unaware of poverty till her family's fortunes changed (and it was genteel poverty at that) and to have had the memories of time spent at her grandparent's estate.
  piemouth | Mar 30, 2016 |
Read 2014 ( )
  SaftaBC | Jul 29, 2014 |
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It was at school that my secret sin was first brought into the open: Laziness. I was considered a clever girl, but lazy. It has been with me ever since, and the guilt I feel about it assures me that it is a sin, not an inability. It takes the form of an immense weight of inertia at the prospect of any activity that does not positively attract me: a weight that can literally paralyse my moral sense…. I slide off sideways, almost unconsciously, into doing something else, which I like doing.... So often have I proved that this form of self-indulgence ends by making my life less agreeable rather than more so that my inability to control it almost frightens me; but that I should ever get the better of it now seems, alas, most unlikely.
It is broken by a small promontory within it, and goes from navy blue near the open sea, through every shade of aquamarine, with depths of pure emerald under its cliffs and chunky emerald patches where a boat throws a shadow. Its depth and the nature of its sandy bottom combine in a ratio perfect for transparency, sparkle and movement – I have never seen it when it was not netted with light…. Beyond that, cliffs … above the cliffs steep, olive-fleeced, cypress-punctuated mountainside, rising to an abrupt escarpment with a sheer rock-face which turns apricot-coloured in the evening sun and is rimmed by the rapid, stumbling line of the mountain’s profile, plunging out and round to one’s right to hit the sea on the far side of the bay.

"All this is bathed in light and silence….I once spent four hours alone on that terrace with an unread book and untouched writing-pad, turned by the spectacle into nothing but eyes, with no idea of the time that was passing until the sun went down.
No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object.
- Thomas Carlyle
The greatest thing a human soul does in this world is to see.
- John Ruskin
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"Diana Athill's childhood was idyllic, brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Aged only fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They travelled to Oxford, engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. In this classic modern memoir, Diana Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness. Yet for all its unhappiness, Instead of a Letter remains a story of hope, written with the frank intelligence and lack of self-pity that have become the hallmarks of Athill's writing."--

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