In Gratitude Read online

  Praise for In Gratitude

  Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2016

  A New York Times Notable Book 2016

  ‘Diski was a spare, beautiful, economical writer … In Gratitude is the book of a born fighter that will last far beyond 2016’ Ruth Scurr, Wall Street Journal Books of the Year

  ‘She remembers her adolescence with a miraculous fidelity of present to past feeling, but the view is from outside too: she was a tough customer, a precocious pest, and lucky to get out alive. Accurate memory here resists every temptation of pride; and because she has no interest in charming the reader, Diski is equal to her great subject’ David Bromwich, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

  ‘As the scenes of her traumatic and chaotic childhood pass she reminds us, sentence by sentence, not only that she emerged to become every bit the writer she always dreamed of being, but also that, despite everything, along the way she learned a great deal about love’ Observer

  ‘She was original, opinionated and wayward … She knew how to use her life as copy, and her self-commentary had a gallantry to it’ Guardian

  ‘Mordant and talon-sharp … With In Gratitude, she has written a different kind of cancer memoir, and an almost entirely platitude-free one, simply by writing a typically sui-generis Jenny Diski book’ New York Times

  ‘One of the most inventive, original and disturbing writers of her generation’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘She is prickly, difficult, irascible, contrary, detached … It is a troubled, complex relationship between two maddening, brilliant women and the central conundrum of Diski’s life, which, as we leave her, sipping liquid morphine, very near to the end, she is still trying to figure out’ The Times

  ‘Jenny Diski was as fearless as she was frank. No subject was off limits … Unsentimental and unapologetic’ Daily Express

  ‘Really, what is different and moving about In Gratitude is not Diski’s refusal of cancer’s clichés so much as the way that she chews on them, wincing, until she finds the unknown in “the too well known.” … In writing about herself, even in writing about her own death, she was also writing about writing’ New Yorker

  ‘The manner of Ms Diski’s style and expression alerts the reader immediately to the extraordinary person – and writer behind them. Her bravery shines through, but also the unsparing attitude to herself and others … Only the most stony-hearted of readers could fail to admire her’ Washington Times

  ‘Few authors were better at combining the personal and political (or Twitter) than Jenny Diski. She is sorely missed, but at least she finished In Gratitude’ Juliet Jacques, Guardian

  For Louis and Rosie with love

  In Gratitude

  JENNY

  DISKI

  CONTENTS

  Praise for In Gratitude

  Foreword

  Diagnosis

  PART ONE: DORIS AND ME

  PART TWO: CHEMO AND ME

  PART THREE: SPRAY IT SILVER

  Afterword

  A Note on the Author

  FOREWORD

  by Anne Enright

  For Jenny Diski, writing, like smoking or seeking solitude, was just how she spent the day. It was a form of thinking. She didn’t seem to worry about the gap between her brain and the page. And though she found it hard to write her first novel, she was, by the middle of her writing life, pretty much indifferent to the distinction between memoir, fiction, travelogue and review. ‘It is all “writing”,’ she said. This impatience with category helped her to move out of the shadow of Doris Lessing, the great fiction writer who took Diski in as a troubled teenager, where she was impressed and overwhelmed by all Lessing’s clever, critical friends. Their dinner-table conversation terrified her, especially when talking about books or films: ‘I couldn’t understand how it was so easy for them to have a point of view, to know how and why things “worked”.’

  Shifting between genres helps a writer dodge judgement; it also confounds some sense of authority, especially authority that proves disappointing or false. Keep moving, keep talking; stay witty, precise, light on your feet. As the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, Diski didn’t know ‘where she was’ in London, being ‘sort of Jewish and English’, so the discovery that she could move between genres made some sense of that too, perhaps. But her restlessness was more than geopolitical. As a girl she was moved from one house to another in order to protect her from useless and abusive parents, and she was, in these new spaces, always unsure of how to fit in. ‘Was it OK to use this or that bathroom, which things were special to whom? I never knew the rules of each family or group, the systems, what is and isn’t done in other people’s houses and when.’

  It was not just the invisible boundaries of English life that confused and interested Diski, or the boundaries in the houses of strangers where she was expected to live, but not to belong, Diski’s own physical boundaries were ignored or breached at a very early age. It is hard to forget the image of her mother stroking between her teenage daughter’s legs when they were reunited in a bedsitting-room in Brighton. Or the image of Diski as a young child, playing the usual game with her parents after a bath, ‘running away from one, whose fingers tickled their way between my legs to my vulva, to the other, just a few feet across the room, gesturing at me, waiting impatiently to do the same thing’. This was the closest the three of them got to playing Happy Families, and though Diski recognises the ‘torment’ of the tickling, ‘The adult me raises her eyebrows slightly, but makes no further comment.’

  This slight lift of the brow is the option Diski chooses. Better than howling, perhaps. Certainly better than spending years in one mental institution or another (it didn’t work, she says, nothing worked). It is her life – she can respond to it in any way she likes. The reader, meanwhile, reels back in incomprehension. What were they thinking? Diski does not tell us. She describes it as: ‘the more or less unconscious behaviour of my parents towards me’, and she forgives them, or seems to, in a way she could never manage to forgive Lessing. The need to understand can be an additional burden for the victim, though ‘victim’ is not one of Diski’s words. It was not that bad, she says about her appalling parents. It was not that bad, she says about her first experience of sex at fourteen. ‘I had no sense that I was especially violated by the rape’, putting the quietness of her response down to the fact it happened in 1961. ‘A different zeitgeist, luckily for me.’

  Well, yes. The ‘zeitgeist’ seeps into the body’s interior, of course it does, and somatic experience changes with the language we use to describe it. (Hysterica passio, down!) But there must be some term for this kind of fallacy: if the world says you have not suffered, then you will not have suffered (luckily for you). It is not the man who hurt you, but making a fuss about the man, making a fuss about yourself. Sometimes, when I read Diski, I get a flash of real madness in there – by which I mean complete irrationality – and sometimes, or most of the time, I agree with every single word she says.

  As so often with memoir, critics describe Diski as being free of embarrassment, probably because she writes with such clarity about shameful subjects like madness, poverty and bad sex. Diski did not fuss about the line between private and public: ‘I’ve never had a sense that privacy has anything to do with people knowing things about you,’ she said in an interview, though it is hard to think of another definition for the word. ‘I start with me, and often enough end with me.’ The world is not a problem because, on the page, the world and the self are both contained.

  In fact Diski only describes sexual encounters in order to declare them uninteresting, and I find her work to be full of embarrassment, suffused with it, both for herself and others. ‘He only shuffled on his knees across the room
to ask if I would kiss him,’ she says of a rabbi ‘with Humbertian hankerings’, who helped find her accommodation at the age of twelve. At fourteen, she was ‘embarrassed into’ having sex for the first time with a strange man who followed her in the street. Two years later, in Doris Lessing’s care, despite the fact that she didn’t have ‘much interest in sex’ she is sent to a gynaecologist for a Dutch cap. The doctor screams at her and she flees ‘shaken and embarrassed’, as well she might. Her desires have been ascribed and then denied by someone else, who then shouts that it is all her fault. This incident seems to sum up something for Diski, who makes it clear that she wanted nothing. In the circumstances, wanting nothing is the only possible choice.

  More than fifty years later, when she receives a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis and lung cancer, Diski experiences ‘Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings’. What is there to be embarrassed about? This is not social unease so much as mortification; the shame that kills you or makes you laugh. Diski chooses the latter, of course. A few moments later, ‘I got a joke in.’

  Diski was, as a foundling child, always ‘wrong’. She did not fit – except, on occasion, into some wonderful clothes – so there is a constant wriggling out from under embarrassment in the scenes she describes. She does not claim to be right, or in charge, but she does claim a seat at the table, she insists on her right to a point of view. Writing is where this happens and she was never so much at home as on the page. Her great facility with sentences left a slight anxiety about structure – the shape she found most natural, or available, was that of the essay and she thrived in the London Review of Books, a place like Lessing’s dinner table (but much better), where people say the most interesting things and women seldom complain.

  It seems to work, this trick with the eyebrow. Pain is a bit of a blank, and though Diski loved blank spaces and sought them out – as in her trip to Antarctica – she also went there to generate words, to say what blankness is like. A writer with such an appreciation of nothing – who wants nothing, or would like to want nothing – is the best, most contradictory guide to the encroaching nothingness of death. Her final book is, in places, difficult and sad, but it is also full of gratitude for the way things turned out. Given the start she had in life, the end of it was amazing: productive, settled, full of love for her husband, the Poet, for her daughter and grandchildren, and all of this a surprise to her, all of it important. The pain and sadness she feels when she thinks about her husband’s distress when she is dead is a ‘mirroring of another soul’. This astonishing empathetic leap is, perhaps, ‘an exercise in the reality of love’.

  It is more than moving – this late love over which death has no dominion – it is a statement about how to be a proper human being. It also begs many questions about the kinds of love offered and withheld in her childhood. A terrible, small sadness runs through this book and it is not about being born to a couple of freaks, or about dying away from the people you cannot bear to lose. At the end of her life, Diski finally writes about the most difficult and inspiring relationship of her adult life. Before she goes, she turns to take one good, last look at Doris.

  There is no answer here, there is only Diski’s hurt and confusion, her endlessly circling sorrow. Why did Lessing want her as an object of charity, when she did not want her as a person, and what was wrong with Diski, that she could not bridge the gap?

  In a way, their dysfunctions slotted together perfectly: the abandoned girl is taken in by an abandoning mother. Lessing left two children behind in Southern Rhodesia, when she left in 1949, taking with her her first finished manuscript and her third child, Peter, who was then two years old. A mother’s love did not seem to do Peter much good, and Diski picks, fretfully, at his wasted life. He was, she wrote, a man who ‘from nineteen had never worked or had a proper job, no real relationships, sexual or otherwise . . . who lived alone with his mother, lay on his bed when he wasn’t watching television in the afternoon and evening and eventually became so gross, in the sense of fat and uncouth, that very few people could put up with it’. Diski could be a bit funny about people getting fat, it has to be said, but the rest of the description seems to hold true. There he is on YouTube, getting out of a black cab behind Doris, the day she is doorstepped with the news that she has won the Nobel Prize. He has a string of onions in one hand and a big globe artichoke in the other. They have been shopping, but Doris had the sense to bring a bag. The hand holding the artichoke is suspended in a grubby-looking sling. He is clearly eccentric. And Lessing’s response to the news – fake dismay, dismissal, a little surge of glee – makes her seem eccentric too. Perhaps it was just genetic.

  If not love, then literature – surely Lessing gave this brilliant girl the gift of books, and is this not the same thing? Diski made a life’s work of what she learned in Charrington Street: a house bought on the proceeds of The Golden Notebook, when Lessing was at the height of her fame. Some mysterious theft or transference of writerly power must have happened at the kitchen table, over the boeuf stroganoff and Mateus Rosé.

  The sad fact is that Lessing kept all the power for herself. She never owned to reading a book by Diski – who wrote seventeen books – but she had no compunction writing a novel based on her own experience. Memoirs of a Survivor is about a woman driven to a ‘frenzy of irritation’ by the foundling in her house, ‘a self-presenting little madam’, who, as Diski describes, ‘spears passers-by and neighbours with her acid insights and cruel stories’. Diski is intrigued by this description of her teenage self, because it felt so different to be her; she reserves the right to remember her life from the inside. But the thing she really wants to talk about, in her last days, is not the books; it is the love she needed from Lessing, and did not get.

  The gratitude of the title (or InGratitude – the pun was surely intended) is in part for the start this woman gave Diski, the inspirational circle of bohemian friends, the money, the work ethic and good advice. It is also gratitude for the love she found in later life – or stumbled upon, and had the wit to see. Happy endings are the hardest. Diski writes against the clock, like a woman knitting faster because she is running out of wool. In her last days, she rang her editor at the London Review of Books to say, ‘She didn’t think she could write anymore; she still had the words – and even the sentences – but they were no longer getting through to her fingers.’ She was still writing in her head, she was still living in the words, she was still alive.

  DIAGNOSIS

  The future flashed before my eyes in all its preordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises.

  I got a joke in.

  ‘So – we’d better get cooking the meth,’ I said to the Poet, sitting to one side and slightly behind me. The Poet with an effort got his face to work and responded properly. ‘This time we quit while the going’s good.’ The doctor and nurse were blank. When we got home the Poet said he supposed they didn’t watch much US TV drama. It was only later that I thought that maybe, ever since Breaking Bad’s first broadcast, oncologists and their nurses all over the Western world have been subjected to the meth-cooking joke each time they have applied their latest, assiduously rehearsed, non-brutal techniques in 2014 for telling a patient as gently but honestly as possible, having first sized up their inner resilience with a few apparently innocent questions (‘Tell me what you have been expecting from this appointment’), that they have inoperable cancer. Perhaps they failed to laugh at my – doubtless evasive – bid to lighten the mood, not because they didn’t get the reference, but because they had said to e
ach other too often after such an appointment: ‘If I hear one more patient say they should start cooking meth, I’m going to wrestle them to the ground and bellow death into their faces – “Pay attention, I’m fucking telling you something important!”’ I was mortified at the thought that before I’d properly started out on the cancer road, I’d committed my first platitude. I was already a predictable cancer patient.

  Then again, what if I had taken the other option, and sat in dignified silence for a moment collecting myself, which I’m sure is how one would describe the short hiatus, and then asked serious, intelligent questions about the nature of the treatment the Onc Doc was suggesting, not to ‘cure’ me (he had slipped that in right at the start for me to run with or blank out, as I chose), but which had a 20 to 30 per cent chance of producing a remission for an unguessable period? After listening as carefully as my muddled head could manage to his answer (three cycles of chemotherapy, a scan, a course of radiotherapy, taking us up to Christmas, almost, then we would see), I would then be obliged to ask the next, inevitable ‘how long’ question, hedged about with all the get-out clauses for Onc Doc, who after all wasn’t to blame for my cancer.

  ‘Of course, I understand it would be unreasonable of me to expect you to know, with any certainty, when I’m likely to die if I have the treatment. I’m sure it’s different for everyone, and only based on statistics, but could you perhaps give me a general idea: years. . . months . . . weeks?’

  The print size in my mind decreased with time’s incremental decline, and as I arrived at the last word – weeks – it suddenly struck me, with all the force of the fullest sense of the word ‘struck’, that this could actually be his answer and not just the logical next time period in my sentence. Every cell in my body, except those responsible for maintaining a reasonable, calm exterior, was now lindy-hopping at that possibility, the only one that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment. Weeks. Still, the question itself was there waiting in line for me in the ready-made scripts file, for this unique to me but culturally familiar diagnostic moment, just after the Contemporary International Smart Cancer Joke.