When I suggest that the heroine of Jenny Diski’s new
novel is insane, or close to it, Diski crows with laughter.
It’s a smoky cackle, the infectious, mocking, back-row
bark of the school rebel or heckler. “Difficult is a
good word to describe her,” Diski conceded of Marie de
Gournay, her latest subject. She licks chocolate biscuit off
her fingers as she sits at her kitchen table in Cambridge,
a cat-like smile setting her eyes alight. What next, she seems
to be wondering, crouching at the mousehole of this conversation,
tail swishing.
Difficult is a word that has, one suspects, often been used of
Diski. Brought up in east London, she was the daughter of a volatile mother
and charming, feckless father, whom she describes as a conman. This tempestuous
marriage finally ended when her dad left for his mistress. Subsequently, Diski
went a bit wild. Put into a mental asylum at the age of 15, she later tried
to commit suicide. Even though she became a protégé of Doris
Lessing, whose son was a school chum, for some years she seemed hellbent on
self-destruction.
Now an elegant, handsome fifty-something, with sleek silver hair, she
looks precisely as you’d imagine the owner of a narrow brick house in
a quiet Cambridge terrace. There’s no trace left of that painful adolescence.
Until you look into her eyes, that is. There, you’ll find a sort of fierce,
amused intelligence that s anything but cosy. She may be the very best of company,
but there’s no doubting that given the choice, Diski would rather not
have to spend the afternoon talking. Being sociable is really not her thing.
This is the writer, after all, who once travelled to the land of the
penguin (Skating to Antartica), and didn’t want to leave her cabin when
the ship berthed; who crossed America by rail (Stranger on a Train) and would
have stayed cocooned in her own thoughts had the craving for cigarettes
not driven her to the smoking car. For some time after moving to Cambridge
to be close to her new partner, the poet and don Ian Patterson, she lived in
the house across the street from him. A few years ago she took the plunge and
crossed the road (2the cats were getting confused”), but the top part
of the house has been converted to her own private space, with study and bathroom.
Given the urge, and a few tins of beans, she could isolate herself up there
for weeks.
Many aspects of Diski are echoed in her new heroine. In her absorbing,
questioning novel Apology for the Woman Writing – a title taken from
one of de Gournay’s own works - Diski offers a glimpse into the
life of this feisty French bluestocking at the turn of the 16th century. De
Gournay was an ungainly girl who exasperated her mother by refusing to learn
any domestic skills. Wholly uneducated, she hid in her step-father’s
library and only devoured every shelf, but made herself fluent in Latin and
Greek in the process.
There were two turning points in de Gournay’s life. The first
was when, as Diski writes, “she resolved to be neither nun nor a wife.
She could see nothing wrong with just reading books. But could a grown woman
have a life that was devoted to reading?” Her ambition to earn a living
through literature was remarkable for her times and her sex. The second life-changing
event was reading a collection of essays by Michel de Montaigne, now widely
regarded as the father of the modern essay. Montaigne’s work struck such
a chord with the girl that she fainted with excitement.
Living testimony to the power of self-belief, de Gournay made Montaigne’s
acquaintance, and so badgered the poor man that he felt obliged to name her
his “fille d’alliance”. Appointed his editor after his death,
de Gournay thereby achieved her aim of surviving by her pen.
Diski admits that envy of Marie was one of the spurs for this novel. “I
think Montaigne is completely wonderful, and completely complicated and difficult,
and I like him very much. He’s so comprehensible. He’s just a bloke,
in many ways, and that’s what he was trying to achieve as well, and I
think that chimes awfully well. I hate the business of things having to be
relevant and contemporary, but it strikes me that Montaigne is always contemporary.”
Like Marie, Diski had an intense response to Montaigne’s work. “There
always was this sense that he was whispering in your ear, that he was terribly
close. I didn’t need to be revived,” she adds, in a voice dry as
toast. “I coped all right … There are some writers you come across,
and it’s as if you’ve found your best friend. You know. You pick
up Dostoevsky when you’re 18, you pick up Nabokov when you’re 14,
you pick up Hardy. There are people who you read - you might read them
quite differently as the years go by – but you and they are passionately
involved when you first read them because you are passionately involved in
writing. And some kinds of writing or writers just click, and its so understandable
what happened with Marie de Gournay.”
Sadly, however, it appears that de Gournay was not much of a writer.
Diski’s disappointment is tempered by wry realism. “It’s
the business of not being the best. Now that is also central to the book, because
actually most of us aren’t the best. Hardly any of us are the best. And
there is also that thing that every writer must have which is, what’s
the point of writing if im not Joyce, or Beckett or whoever floats your boat?
“And that’s unanswerable. At some level there is no point
in writing, I’d say. There’s a part of me that still feels that
quite powerfully. The world really doesn’t need more half-good books … im
totally arrogant, but im not arrogant enough to think im good enough. And in
a sense that’s what keeps me writing. Every book I write is a failed
book. I feel that very strongly. Otherwise why write another one?”
Diski’s constant questioning of her vocation is unexpected, given
that she has wanted to write since she was a child. She talks to the “huge
hiatus from the wanting to write to the writing”, her life as teacher
and mother intervening until she finally got started at 36 with a novel about
sadomasochistic sex, Nothing Natural. Yet despite the late start, her teenage
experience of the Lessing household was instructive.
“The thing about living with Dorris,” she says, “there was
this feeling of a serious writer. It wasn’t about glamour, it was about
going upstairs every day and shutting your door and work, work, work, work,
work. I got a very non-glamorous view of being a writer from being there. What
you did in order to be a writer was to write.”
Diski has taken that lesson further than most, since her books
are, as she happily admits, almost entirely about the business
of writing. The notion that a good idea would be sufficient
reason to start another book earns a look that would wither
a triffid.
“They’re all the same bloody ideas. What’s interesting
to me, why I wrote a novel about her [de Gournay], is the whole incredibly
difficult thing of why on earth I ever started writing. Which is pretty much
what all the books are about. They’re about being a writer. I mean, there
are some stories there, but I don’t think ideas are interesting. There
are no really original ideas … So my sense with every single book is, ‘Oh,
that’s not what I meant, that’s not really worked.’ So you
get on and write another one. Partly that, and partly I have to pay the gas
bill.”
The kitchen is growing darker as rain clouds gather over the garden.
Diski leans forward. “And that’s the essential compromise. I want
to be a professional writer like Marie de Gournay wanted to be a professional
writer and therefore I write for money. On the whole I don’t write for
as much money, or the way people want me to particularly, or the way that would
make me a best seller. Certainly not in the way that would make WH Smith jump
up and down in excitement.” (That thought seems to please her.)
Apology for the Woman Writing, she says, “is a book for readers”,
by which she means those fascinated with the act of reading. “The question
that hovers over the whole thing is: does the quality matter?” Diski
looks quizzically across the table. “But I don’t need to answer
that, do I?”
She knows full well she doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t
want to do. It’s one of the things that makes her “difficult”.
Fascinating and admirable, too.
Rosemary Goring
The Herald 15.11.08
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