*See below for explanation of this series*
All my life, I have genuinely and unforcedly enjoyed no writers so much as those who happen to be sarcastic, coldly ironical, bleakly sardonic British people. So much so that I am occasionally seized with panic at the thought that I may one day run out of them. After all, how many can there have been, in recorded history?
I take some comfort in the fact that, despite my stated preference, I have not yet chipped the merest shaving from the mordant iceberg that is Ivy Compton-Burnett. I seem, by a kind of subconscious prompting, to be saving her for later. When I know I will need it. Irony is a dish best served cold.
Oh, right, but I take even more comfort from the fact that, each time I think I may be approaching the bottom of the pile of ironical Britishers, I uncover another. And, strangely, it is lurid biographies of narcissistic male creative types that, in the most recent instances, always seem to yield these discoveries. Perhaps because to tolerate life with men fitting this description, it takes a certain coating of sarcasm.
Anyway, there was the Lucian Freud biography that pointed me toward the acid pen of Caroline Blackwood. And now, the tale of V.S. Naipaul’s (somewhat exaggerated) misdeeds, Patrick French’s The World is What It is, has introduced me to Diana Athill. And I want to read no one else again.
Diana Athill was V.S. Naipaul’s editor. And the editor of a lot of other famous people. And a wonderful and maybe more entertaining author in her own right. And as a result, it appears she knew everybody. Her short book Make Believe: A True Story – about her friendship with Hakim Jamal, a would-be cultist who believed himself to be God, and whom Naipaul also wrote about – can without effort be connected to just about any “Radical Chic” wacko of the Nixon era who achieved any degree of notoriety.
Did Hakim Jamal – like Jim Jones – try to build a commune in Guyana? Check! Was he eventually involved in sordid murders? Check! Did he have an affair with Jean Seberg? Check! A sort of Sixties degrees of separation.
(Side note: Seberg’s cuckolded French novelist husband, Romain Gary, would write a sensible and humane book, White Dog, about Seberg’s involvement with this cast of characters, which I read and loved in my tormented radical youth. I would recommend it to any young Leftist who is just waking up to the fact that people on their own side can be awful nutters too)
Athill’s book captures certainly the flavor of the age. It was a time when there was somebody so utterly awful in the White House, doing such terrible things to children and innocent people (napalming villages in Southeast Asia, in that case) that many started to falsely assume that the Left must be wholly virtuous and incapable of moral error by comparison.
Could we say that Athill’s memoir may still be a salutary one to read? Not, surely, that I see anything in common with our own time. Perish the thought.
It is slightly ironic, however (speaking of that trait), that the work of this great editor should be marred by typographic errors. What’s more, I hold in my hand a 2012 Granta reprint of the 1993 original, so it’s not like nobody has had a chance to notice and fix these things in the years since.
Thus, once again, I am forced to render my services free of charge. In the interests of literature.
p. 64. Okay, this one’s not an error, just wanted to quote this part: “[Romain] Gary came round to the house on several occasions, only to be confounded by Hakim’s ‘debating’ (a scene I could clearly envisage).” I have a vague memory from Gary’s White Dog of a scene where he crouches behind a door frame listening to some loud-mouth house guest and jotting down his increasingly outlandish utterances. Could it have been Jamal?
p. 95 “I’d seen for myself how calmly she had taking [sic.] his fucking Libbie[.]” A charged sentence, to be sure, but one still needs to proof read.
p. 96 “pulled the blanket back and [sic.] inch or two”
p. 118 “Halé and Charlie were staying with Herbert G. Herbert [Patrick French in the introduction describes this aptly as a wonderful “Nabokovian name”] was the drop-out son of a rich German family[.]” Should be a “who” before the “was.”
p. 122 “What I asked, was the latest shape taken by the Guyana project?” Missing comma.
p. 127 “Had he ever shown signs of wanted [sic.] to be rid…”
p. 134. “[N]o one could learn from what Hakim said the truth about…” Missing a “was” or something after the “said”
That is all. Otherwise, I love this book. And, in fact, I loved the errors. They gave me an excuse to write this tribute.
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