A writer's life: Jenny Diski (Filed: 19/04/2004)

The solitary and uncompromisingly clever novelist tells Helen Brown she is trying to re-trieve the Bible from stupidity.

Everything about Jenny Diski is crisply cut. The sentences, the hair, the amount of time she is prepared to spare. As she opens her front door to me, I feel the shambolic drift of a Cambridge afternoon repelled by her blunt forcefield. Stepping into her smart, right-angled terrace house, I ask if she would like me to take my boots off. She looks faintly appalled, as if I’ve offered to strip naked on the doormat. "Why would you want to do that?" I’m about to speak of mud and her very tidy house, but it occurs to me that Diski might prefer the impersonality of street dirt on her polished wooden floors to any particles of my individual human skin invading her home. She
has written often and probingly about her discomfort around people. Cats, she gets. Diski feels honoured, awed, even - by the relationship she is privileged to share with her pets, relish-ing both the simple physical contact and the bridging of inter-species psyches. But she has been mainly unable to translate that state of awareness to her contact with her own kind. In her award-winning travel memoir, Stranger on a Train, she explains that: "What I experience with most people is my estrangement from them, the distance of mutually unique separation that words or touch never quite bridge. Unlike cats, people interfere with my apprehension of reality, they muddy how I can know myself, confuse my understanding of how I am, which is centred around the notion that solitude is a state of perfection."
She knows what the psychologists would say about that. They would direct her back to a painful childhood dominated by a hysterical mother, while the young Jenny craved only the love of the conman father who walked out when she was a girl. Analysts would - and have - invited Diski to talk about the early institutionalisations. Her expulsion from school. Her suicide attempts. The crystal meth - in medical and "recreational" contexts. The period during which she was fostered by Doris Lessing (they now have an agreement not to discuss each other publicly). The pecu-liarly binding attachments formed on mental health wards. Sex. Motherhood. The "scratchy feeling" that compels her to write. The mild scandal of her first novel, about a sadomasochistic relationship. The fear of attachment and rejection… But Diski has given up on therapy and, she has said, it has given up on her. That’s just who she is, how she is. Capisce? Coffee?
As I sit (probably too close) to this uncompromisingly clever writer on her sunlit sofa, I do not ask much about her past. She’s already published what she feels (and doesn’t feel) about that in her books. And while Diski is entirely in command of this awkward interviewing situation ("Interview me, then"), I am intensely aware of skirting the radioactive sense of restrained emotion she emits. Her manner is at once businesslike and anarchically offhand. We laugh. She’s funny. She reminds me of a grieving friend who once said: "Don’t you dare touch me, because if you do I’ll cry, and one thing I already know is that crying doesn’t help." So, crisply, as I sip my coffee, we discuss her excellent ninth novel, After These Things, a reinterpretation of the biblical lives of Isaac, Jacob and his weak-eyed wife Leah. She had tackled Abraham in Only Human (2000) and usually moves on fairly briskly after each book. Yet this time she felt compelled to take on the story and polish off the patriarchs.
" I had absolutely no interest in the Bible as a child," she says. "My parents were pretty secular Jews. I remember Passover in Hebrew. My father read it, but he didn’t understand a word. I remember the stories from Ladybird books quite well because of the hideous pictures of people with towels on their heads. The colours were incredibly memorable." She believes that the stories of the Bible "only get good when you read them as an adult. Samson is such a static story when you read it as a kid, but as an adult I find him much more interesting. I mean, he’s just a klutz, the town yob, the Bible’s Schwarzenegger. He does everything wrong and is always in trouble. Just an ordinary bloke who’s been promised to God."
Beyond character, Diski was drawn to the patterns of the Hebrew Bible. "I was intrigued about it as a narrative, put together from three strands of writing and edited into a single text by Ezra. Some people say that’s why you get repetitions. Other people say you get repetitions because it’s a work of art with a beat to it. I was interested in it as an edited work… the essence of all novel writing is editing."
In Diski’s work, the editing is right there on the surface. Is God an editor, she asks in After These Things, or do we edit God as we go along? Do we edit our own lives as a linear process or do we pivot unto death around one self-defining moment, like Abraham and Isaac on the moun-taintop? She shuffles and deals chronology with the cards face up. Let’s not be coy, she seems to be saying, about the fact that none of this really makes any sense. Yet because she doesn’t see much connection between reading and writing, Diski admits to enjoying a "rattling good tale", although she prefers it on television. And once we move on to the subject of cinema, she talks of directors who subvert linear expectation. "I love Tarantino’s films. I loved the total nothingness of Kill Bill. It was just one damn thing after another. I laughed a lot. It’s morally empty and I can appreciate that. Although I feel slightly guilty about it, the way I feel guilty for finding Nabokov a great writer. There’s something cold there that I seek and respond to."
Didn’t she feel any sense of guilt, as a non-believer, about messing with a sacred text? Was she trespassing on other people’s territory? "If it’s all right for the rabbis to reinterpret it, it’s all right for me. Books are available for us to play with. I wanted to retrieve the Bible from stupid-ity, to take it back as an essentially human story."
After These Things is impeccably human. After his father has shown he’s willing to sacrifice him, Isaac’s life is all blind appetite. His tricksy younger son Jacob echoes "like an empty jar". Neither man experiences God as directly as Abraham, shortchanged instead with dreams and doubt. In Diski’s cool prose, they are each locked into a hypnotic formal dance around their frustrations. "I am moved by them all as characters," she says. "I don’t think things are interest-ing unless they have an emotional component. It’s just that when I write I don’t writhe around in the emotions. And Leah? I think the notion of the unloved - unlovable - individual is a powerful and painful idea. The terror of that… that there was nothing she could have done. That seems very much like life to me."
We laugh. I like Diski. Her frankness. For a moment, I really want her to like me too. And then I spill coffee on her dead-square rug. Another line blurred, a thread corrupted, an encounter spoiled. Just another clumsy invasion of Diski’s perfect solitude. "It doesn’t matter," she says, as I run for a cloth.
'After These Things' is published by Little, Brown

Jenny Diski has used her life on the edges of insanity to great and frightening effect in her novels. Ajay Close finds her only need now is for a good degree of solitude.

Interviewing Jenny Diski is a bit like getting to know someone in reverse. You start by reading her books and journalism, full of the funny-sore self-analysis women go in for once they have taken the decision to become lifelong friends. Then you actually meet her, spend a couple of hours in her home and, on leaving, feel it would be presumptuous to reach out and shake her hand.

I knew it would be like this, of course. I’d read Stranger on a Train, her memoir of two rail trips across America - though the real journey is into Diski’s personal heart of darkness. She could have stayed home and written essentially the same book, albeit without the gigolos, missionaries, transvestites, models and drunks. Both journeys were packed with incident. She was propositioned four times, twice with lifelong commitment in mind. Her train hit a car, killing two of its passengers. Yet the biggest drama in the book is a paranoid fantasy inside her own head: a kidnapping which never happened and was never likely to, but which had her utterly terrified. The trigger? Accepting an invitation from an acquaintance she met on the train, and spending five days at her home in Albuquerque.

"I’d stopped moving, meeting and withdrawing from people," she writes. "Just five days, not even a week, and I was beside myself with terror that I was trapped, that I would never get away from people ... To be staying in a house with a family was to be engaged in a way that I found nearly intolerable, actually dangerous."

Intimacy problems are a cliche of the 21st century. We all know someone who has trouble with commitment, we’ve seen the talk shows and the episodes of Ally McBeal. But Jenny Diski is in another league. She calls it "separateness" and, one way or another, it has furnished her life’s work. Not that you’d guess it, meeting her socially. She can do parties, engaging conversation, laughter - then she’ll come home and go to bed for two days, stricken with self-disgust. She’s the perfect interviewee: candid, humorous, relentlessly intelligent, highly likeable. But not warm.

Diski lives in Cambridge, but really she’s a Hampstead intellectual. She tries to get away with the label "Hampstead frock-shopper" instead, but concedes: "I’m a sort of liberal lefty wet human being who thinks things ought to be quite nice in the world." There’s more to her qualifications than that. Not every liberal lefty has Diski’s hyper-articulate fluency. Not every liberal lefty has written eight novels, a book of short stories, two book-length memoirs, a collection of essays, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books. Not every liberal lefty had Doris Lessing as a foster mother and lived in a household where RD Laing was a regular dinner guest. "We were all sent round to the Tavvy," she says at one point, referring to Hamsptead’s famous centre of Freudian analysis, the Tavistock Institute, in the careless way that Glaswegians speak of "the Co".

But that was in her teenage years. What came first was much less comfortable.

She was the only child of a Jewish couple in the East End of London. Her father, whom she loved, was a black-marketeer during and after the war. Later he made a living by seducing women who had money. A real con-man, she assures me, matter-of-factly: "He’d gone to prison at some time." Her voice rises into the register of wonder. "He had an office." When reviewing Diski’s early life, it’s the touches of normality which surprise.

She would lie awake at night, listening to her parents’ screaming matches, hearing knives being taken out of the drawer. When she was 11 her father walked out for the last time. Diski was left with her mother, whom she hated. Though hate may be too weak a word. "I only have a kind of monster mother, really. I’ve done that thing: trying to think about the good things about her. She had a story she used to tell me, she had a joke - only one, but she had a joke. She was terribly concerned about me, as it were …" She gives up. "I find it so hard to really accept anything positive about her."

She must have had all sorts of nice qualities, but her daughter just can’t imagine them. A couple of people who met her have told Diski they found her completely terrifying and crazed. "She was really quite unpleasant to me." "Unpleasant" means ranting and raving, a woman with a history of mental instability who blamed her many disappointments on her daughter and told her she was just like her father: bad through and through. "But what I knew, and I’m talking about six or seven years old, was that I wasn’t bad. I had this little place," she points to a spot in her solar plexus, "it was a little nugget and I could dive down and check it out and it wasn’t bad, it was good." Kids have these funny little things, she shrugs. By the time she was 11 or 12, this secret kernel of goodness was gone. "I resolved then to be what I was supposed to be, I guess."

It’s hard to say which is the more upsetting: this vignette of the 11-year-old brainwashed into "badness", or the Ken Loach drama of the mad mother who, on being deserted by her husband, refused to claim social security because it smacked of the workhouse. They ended up in an empty flat with one bed and one chair, everything else having been taken by the bailiffs. The mother was not capable of resolving the situation, so the daughter took action. "I freaked out and they sent the social workers in." She got what she wanted: away from mum. Having a high IQ, she was sent to a progressive co-educational boarding school.

Being bad wasn’t all bad, it was also exciting - climbing out of her dormitory in the middle of the night, going to parties, drinking poteen - but it led, predictably, to expulsion. She went to live with her father and his new lover. They too threw her out. She ended up, at the age of 15, in a psychiatric hospital, not because she was mentally ill, but because nobody knew what to do with her.

Being in the bin was fun in a way, she says. She’d go for her sessions with the shrink and they’d sit in silence. "He’d say ‘have you got anything to tell me?’ and I’d say ‘no’." Out of the blue, she was fostered by Doris Lessing, whose son had been a fellow pupil at the boarding school. It should have been happy-ever-after, but the very randomness of the rescue was a source of stress. On the ward she had experienced for the first time a qualified sense of belonging. Plucked out of hospital, she suffered from survivor guilt. In 1966 her father died unexpectedly. She left school without sitting her A-levels, went to live in a bedsit and spiralled into depression. Her late-adolescence is a harrowing chronicle of drug-taking (with and without prescription), spells in and out of psychiatric hospital, and suicide attempts.

And then the drugs and the madness came to an end. "I just decided that I probably ought not to spend the rest of my life being a nutcase - though it was a close decision," she says. She took a secretarial course, found she resented making tea for her male bosses, retrained as a teacher alongside Ken Livingstone, taught, got married, had a baby …

Hang on, what about her terror of being trapped, the conviction that she can only truly be herself in solitude? "I wasn’t brilliantly good at being married," she admits. They bought a house and turned it into two flats: Roger lived upstairs, she lived downstairs. "As marriages go, it was well-organised." Then they separated, amicably, and cared for their daughter Chloe on a two weeks-on, two weeks-off basis. Diski always had time to herself. "Had we stayed together it would have been catastrophic," she says. "My solution to life is to get divorced."

Her first novel Nothing Natural, about a sado-masochistic sexual affair, was published in 1986. It was a mildly scandalous success. The critic Anthony Thwaite called it "the most revolting book I’ve ever read" and she was banned by the Islington-based feminist magazine Sisterwrite, but mostly the novel was well-received as a timely exploration of a taboo subject. She received a few salacious enquiries as to whether it was autobiographical - which it was, in the sense that its central character had profound difficulties with love and trust. Isolation, emotional emptiness, fear of intimacy, a fragmented or non-existent sense of self: these are Diski’s perennial themes. In Like Mother she used the disturbing conceit of a baby born without a brain, a child its mother christens Nony, short for "Nonentity". The novel, which recycles much of Diski’s angry childhood, is a bleak, blackly humorous work. Or at least the first 50 pages are. I started reading it after meeting Diski, went to bed, had nightmares, woke up, threw up, and have not been able to touch the book since.

I can imagine the author’s sardonic reaction to this news. Even as she places the most painful material on the page, she remains at one remove from it, a dry, often ironic voice. "I write cold," she said once. And at times she reads cold but, at her visceral best, the reader can only wonder "why isn’t she screaming?"

The answer is, occasionally she does, but never unreservedly. Not long ago she was watching the movie Now Voyager, in which Bette Davis plays the ugly duckling daughter of a monster mother. Diski started crying. It’s a three-hankie movie anyway, but her weeping went over the score. "Suddenly I was completely distorted with tears. I couldn’t stop. It was another sort of crying altogether," she recalls. "I suppose you’d like to think that something very deep was being touched in me about deprivation and madness, but what was also being touched might have been something very sentimental and corny."

She was brought up in a welter of hysterical emotion. "My mother was a kind of joke hysteric, so presumably I withdrew and became a critic. ‘This is a cheap shot’ I’d think, as she said ‘you should have been strangled at birth’." She’s allergic to easy feelings, what she calls "banality". Or else she’s so susceptible that she never drops her guard.

Maybe the critic in her senses her interviewer’s latent sentimental streak, for she starts to argue against the line of her own book: it’s not so awful, not fitting in. Separateness has its consolations. "Maybe in the end I’m so narcissistic that I prefer my own lack of belonging. That’s where I belong: my own exclusive club." Even if it means not trusting others? "People are immensely dangerous, they walk away, say no, betray. There’s part of me that says that’s true, and another part that says ‘what a nuisance it is that I think like that, but there it is’."

But recent events suggest there is also a third, less resigned part of her. Within the last two years she has uprooted herself from London to be nearer the poet and Cambridge don Ian Patterson. She couldn’t quite bring herself to move in with him, but she did buy a house directly across the street. Does this not indicate a radical change of heart? She is quick to stamp on the idea. "I don’t think I’ve changed since I was three-years-old - I might have a bigger vocabulary, but not much bigger. I just think I’m me with the added anxiety of having a relationship. I worry all the time: I think it can’t be right not to have days and days and days when I don’t see anybody, but it’s remarkably easy."

Let’s leave her there. I’m corny enough to prefer a happy ending and - who knows? - somewhere under her hardboiled, hyper-articulate, critical exterior, maybe Jenny Diski is too.

Puffing her way around a continent (Filed: 01/09/2002)
Mark Sanderson reviews Stranger On A Train by Jenny Diski

In 1960, when Jenny Diski, the novelist, was a troubled 13-year-old, she spent her holidays riding round the Circle Line on the London Underground. A difficult home life prompted her to follow the yellow-track road - a warm, dry train compartment was one of the few places she could read in peace (if she ignored the odd flasher) - but it was an illusory escape route because, instead of leading to the Emerald City, it always brought her back to where she had started. Her new work reveals that, even at the age of 50, Diski is still going round in circles.
Stranger On A Train, as its title suggests, is no ordinary travel book. Although it recounts two eventful journeys round the perimeter of the United States - from Savannah, Georgia to Phoenix, Arizona and a complete, anticlockwise, round-trip to and from New York - it also describes "a sentimental, celluloid journey" through American movies and a trip into the interior of Diski's mind. The result is more like a memoir than a travelogue: a magical history tour.
Diski confesses that her "ideal method of writing a travel book" would be "to stay at home with the phone off the hook, the doorbell disconnected and the blinds drawn". A sleeping compart-ment on a train is a pretty good compromise. The home-from-home allows the writer to venture out in search of colourful material safe in the knowledge that she can always return to her bolt-hole. She usually finds what she is looking for in the smoking carriage where the oddballs seem to congregate and are only too keen to tell their "tedious, stunning, cliched, sentimental, heart-rending, banal" life-stories.Amtrak, the national train company, generally ensures the smoking car is a squalid "sin bin". And in the one on the Sunset Limited, for example, Diski encounters an Irish drunk discoursing on the difference between pixies and leprechauns, a 15-year-old Mexican who begs to listen to the heart in every female chest and two black transvestites who pick up an unwitting white boy. Diski, for her part, is chatted up, accused of being a Commie and dubbed a sexist by a trio of vitamin-pill-selling lesbians.
Most Americans prefer to fly. They believe Amtrak trains are "dangerous, dirty and full of dreadful people". The precedence given to profit-making freight trains means that those carrying passengers are often hours behind schedule. However, when the Sunset Limited smashes into a car in Mississippi, the dead and injured only delay the train for 45 minutes. Diski, shocked, stares out of the window and smokes. The scenery is more interesting on a train even when there is "nothing" to see. The vast prairies of the Midwest, for instance, display "endless variations on the theme of orange, ochre, yellow and gold".
Diski's childhood memories of the movies - westerns (High Noon), musicals (Oklahoma!) and Hitchcock thrillers (Strangers on a Train) - are played out on the flickering screen of the win-dow. The flashbacks, though, are often unhappy. Diski writes just as vividly about the times when she was "expelled from school, alienated from her parents and in the loony bin". She felt she "had always been in the wrong place, with the wrong people", a feeling that has never en-tirely left her. Even so, her desire to connect prompts her to step off the train.A five-day stay in Albuquerque with Bet - whom she meets on her first trip - her Viet-vet hus-band Jim and brain-damaged son Mikey, an ex-cop, turns into a disaster when she fears that, as in the film Misery, they plan secretly to keep their writer guest for ever. Even after she has made her escape, it overshadows the rest of the trip and makes her impatient to fly back to England.