Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend
Diana Athill
Granta Books, 352pp, £20

Diana Athill is now in her eventful nineties. Quite late in life she became an admired auto­biographer, but was already respected for her work as an editor at the publishing house set up by André Deutsch, with an eye for literature and a pastoral concern for her authors. The "coldness" (not to be mistaken for unkindness) that Kingsley Amis considered one of Jane Austen's virtues was apparent in Athill. Literary journalists of the Sixties sat down to invigorating lunches with this handsome, somewhat military person, who would talk about life and love, and rise above mere matters of publicity.

The doyenne of the English literary world, as she has been seen, has struck again, this time retrospectively. In the summer of 1981 she became a penfriend of the New York poet Edward Field and his partner, Neil Derrick, who had lost his sight. The correspondence is still going, and the New Yorkers coaxed her into making a book of her side of it, one that amounts to a further instalment of her autobiography.

Books aspire to address many readers, while collections of letters are apt to be full of loved ones, raw domesticity and references intelligible to comparatively few. There is a small apparatus here which deals with that by explaining what might otherwise be cryptic. It consists of supplementing the brackets of the original letters with square brackets containing her afterthoughts. A mild traffic jam of parentheses and asides occurs when she buries "poor old George Mikes, whose rather unfunny funny books (largely written - hush! - by me) [a gross exaggeration!] we've been publishing for forty years".

This is a correspondence with a "both" at both ends - a couple at both ends, and a need for care. Diana's goodbyes can read like those of love
letters: "Oh darling, I'm so miserable about it I can't tell you . . ." But she has a partner of her own at the London end in the shape of a former lover, now her companion and concern, the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord, whose health is poor. He lies in bed reading about murders and watching football on television. On their rare joint excursions from the house, "I hate him and he hates me, and then we feel sad and sorry." He is bad at looking at things, and at doing things. And yet "poor old Barry" is a marked presence in the letters, functioning as a kind
of negative capability. The Sixties disbeliever in "possessive" sexual relations, the bohemian, the gentlewoman, the colonel's lady, the self-confessed egotist and atheist, the believer in a "ridi­culous" royal family, share their nature with an intrepid tender of other people, not every one of them benign, for all that she once disowned any "bent" for nursing. The "female fate" she speaks of is, in her case, a complex one.

She has also said in the past, with equanimity, that sex had "fallen right away" and been replaced, as here, by the adventures and afflictions of old age. The fall in question released an access of "clarity", and there is a good deal of that in this bright book. Its aches and pains, colds and catarrhs, hardness of seeing and walking, are made as bright as they could well be. Her car and computer are an ache and pain that fascinate in the telling. She can read at moments like an expert in mischance.

She cared for that "old monster", her employer André Deutsch, when he was old and ill, minding and not minding that he had received "all the acclaim for a publishing career which was, after all, our joint achievement". Having given an interview in which he blamed his successor for throwing him out on the street, he asked her: "You don't think that I had anything to do with that article, do you?" "Of course I do. Every word of it sounded like your voice, and anyway I've been told that you did." "Are you calling me a liar?" "Yes, I am." That certainly sounds like Diana's voice.

Her father advised her: "Never write a letter which you would blush to see published in the correspondence columns of the Times." Not many of the present letters would be entirely at home even in the less punctilious Times of the present day. A nursery argot crops up, and now and then yields to tough talk of the present day. "Yummy", "yuk", "wobbly" (in two senses), "dear heart", "what the fuck", a "beautiful beautiful burgomeister" spied in Hungary - such expressions in no way detract from the book. Her family also advised her not to show off, and she was impressed by that. Having found that she excelled on the platforms that came with fame, she conveys that she has lost the zest for describing these occasions in the letters. (She does sometimes manage it, though.)

Both Athill and her American poet have an advanced distaste for obscurity in poetry: "The purpose of language is communication." Her letters communicate. "How good they are!" she felt when she reread them. And she was right.

Karl Miller's latest book is "Tretower to Clyro: Essays" (Quercus, £20)