Photos from decades ago of Jenny Diski and Doris Lessing
Dear friends and readers,
Little is more central to a woman’s life, what she becomes, than her relationship to her mother. We see this from the first women writers who tell of something of themselves and their lives (Christine de Pisan) through Jane Austen’s letter and novels, to say Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun (daughter to mother) and Emma Thompson and Phyllida Lawson (the relationship moves back and forth). The book to read is Marianne Hirsh’s The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. We now know that Jenny Diski had two mothers: the abusive, half-crazed, abused woman who tramped the streets homeless with her daughter, and Doris Lessing who took Jenny in and put her in a decent grammar school, helped her go to university, and exemplified the know-how and gave Jenny the connections to start her career as a writer.
If you’ve been reading Jenny Diski’s columns in the London Review of Books some time after Doris Lessing died, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer which has jumped from lymph node to lymph node. She courageously but in character told her readership (September 2014) and proceeded not only to write columns about the experience but also to tell a story which may, must have been on her mind and conscience to tell for many years. Now that she assumed she was dying, she wanted to confess, to be found out: she is thanking Doris openly, in public, so others should know, for rescuing her from what probably would have been a life in asylum; she is also revealing the distance between the implied author of the realistic novels so deeply concerned and wise about women’s relationships (from lover to mother, wife to sister, friends to enemies) — and how in actual life Doris treated Jenny when Jenny asked for love or advice or badly misbehaved. How does a semi-withdrawn in the deepest sense unconventional woman cope with an understandably disturbed young woman? And how is Jenny coping with the grinding and deeply wrong-headed ways (from the standpoint of helping the person emotionally) cancer is treated and talked about in our society. Before this it seems it was known among those who knew them as people, for in a couple of the columns when Jenny fast forwards to well after Jenny left Doris’s home and purview and their relationship became attenuated, it seems people were chary to say anything to her about Doris and vice versa.
I’ve followed the columns almost religiously, intensely wanting to know how the chemotherapy was going, if when the series were finished, how she was doing. I found her refusal to talk in terms of battles, and triumphs and her refusal to compromise about her grief and terror of a piece with the candour and insight of her occasional diary pieces in the LRB where she told about how she was raped at age 14, about her wretched parents and early childhood, and her two travel memoirs, Skating to Antartica: Journey to the end of the World and Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America.
As the columns went on and she talked more and more about Lessing, I realized Jenny was also settling old scores. She was doing justice to what had been given, but also getting back. For those interested in interpreting Lessing’s fiction, we learned Emily, the adopted young girl of Memoirs of a Survivor was a portrait of Jenny. Like countless novelists, Lessing was willing to model central characters on people she knows — without asking permission because most people would not give it. Jenny was made very uncomfortable it seems. There were some funny moments early on where Jenny and her biological mother are in a kind of conspiracy as two deluded vulnerable people not coming up to the strong woman with her sensible advice, control, instructions and pocketbook.
But a couple of the columns took my breath away: sad experience has taught me that what I consider to be cold and mean behavior is by some interpreted as “setting bounds,” what I think to be understandable appeals for emotional support by some seen as emotional blackmail. So when I read a column (LRB, 37:1, 8 January 2015, “Doris and Me”) where Jenny tells of an incident that occurred between them shortly after she moved in with Doris, I asked on a listserv what other people thought. I was not surprised to get no answer. Jenny got herself to ask, Did Doris like her; if their relationship did not go well, what would happen to her? the teenager was clearly justifiably intensely worried and frightened and needed reassurance. Lessing’s response was fierce anger and an implied threat that she would eject Jenny back to the working class abyss she came from. As I tell it it’s obvious that to me Lessing acted with cold cruelty to the girl; Lessing’s interpretation of a natural need as trespassing emotional blackmail to me shows her unwillingness to be a secure friend, to commit. I was horrified. Diski does seem to suggest that it was Doris’s son, Peter, who first proposed to take Jenny in, but how that happened, how he met the girl and told his mother and how it all came about not told. Perhaps because the people involved are still alive, read the LRB, and would not want to be named.
To me this kind of encounter is at the core of women’s novels: the opening of the inner heart to the woman reader about things never discussed openly except with an intimate friend (here on the Net it’s become otherwise because the writing self is a different one from the physically social self plus the kind of accountabilty and detail that is part of life off the Net is often not here); a chance for the woman reader to plug into that and live through it, learn, and a need be satisfied — women’s psychologists argue repeatedly women are relational people, especially needing a woman friend or a companion.
Some of the columns which combined what she was going through as a cancer victim (it is victim) and what she knew in her original home and then what she experienced in Doris’s were painful to read. Diski made no concession whatsoever to what’s called normality or sane perspectives. She stays with what she was and repeats what people said of her: she was a “horrible girl.” It’s very strong of her to present herself that way, make no excuses and show the world from her point of view: the problem with it for her was what was wrong was the way other people acted and thought and what they demanded of her without telling her what they wanted. She was supposed somehow to know (LRB, 37:11, 4 June 2015, “What was wrong with everything was people”). There was an intertwining of what Jenny was observing in the upper middle class so-called bohemian circles of Lessing and what she observed in the upper middle class medical establishment today.
One early one turned hilarious at the close (LRB, 36:23 December 4, 2014) where she shows us how lunatic are our social relationships if you ask that they derive from a level of real understanding of one another. No one screams but one gynaecologist when maybe we all ought to be screaming, or scream at least once. Their first criteria is to protect themselves and so won’t tell Diski anything. The column is deeply critical of the cancer establishment as well as showing how they know nothing helpful fundamentally which is what is desperately needed by hideously growing numbers of people on this polluted earth.
Some are poignant. She says it’s like she is alive and dead at once (LRB, 36:21, November 6). That’s what Jim said it was like: being on the other side of a wall only those living with death can understand. There was a column about lullabies and how they are needed to soothe. One of the last was poignant: she has begun to hope she has a future; she tells us she was told that she had two years probably — unless the cancer went into remission was implied, or the treatments did something to extend that time. You see it in the last paragraph.
But it seems now she may die of the treatment (this reminds me of the movie, Wit, where Emma Thompson plays a woman diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer). Her tumor has stopped growing, but the chemotherapy and radiotherapy have done hideous damage to her lungs which had been scarred by pulmonary fibrosis. She has bad trouble breathing, falls and breaks bones (is very weak), was in hospice for a week but then sent home (as not about to pop off for sure any time now). When will she died? no one knows but 1-3 years is still what she’s given. The appearance of calm with which she describes recent weeks is stunning (LRB, 37:13, July 2015, “Spray it Silver”).
Well last week I read a column in mirable dictu which attacked Diski full front: Jenny Diski’s year of bashing Doris Lessing. I answered on the blog a couple of days later, and here extend my reply into a fuller argument. I admit I am not an unqualified admirer of Lessing much as I loved her Golden Notebook until the last one, and have read and admired a number of her novels, memoirs and criticism. I want to come to Diski’s defense because I’ve had the idea all along that just the ideas developed in mirable dictu are those that might be used once the period is over where people feel they must not “speak ill of the dead.
First there are two elements one must begin with. the homelife Diski came from. Nor the state Diski was in. What Lessing did was take responsibility for an abused child in a nearly catatonic state. In one of the essays we are shown that as the adolescent came out of her state (partly due to simply being away from her parents but also in the quiet stable house Lessing provided, with its routines, school, normality of friends), she was frightened. Who would not be? who could endure to go back? One must look at how Jenny is a child with what would be called a major depressive disorder whom Lessing had taken in. She wanted to now if Lessing could get rid of her, did she mean to keep her, and asked Lessing for reassurance that she would and a statement of love. Lessing became deeply angry and refused to say the situation would be at all permanent. In another the adolescent asks for advice about sex, and is given a flippant guarded answer and again told she has no right to ask for such advice.
What are the responsibilities of a caretaker-guardian? It’s true that Lessing did not adopt the girl. In a third Diski runs away and Lessing does not look for her; only when an agency discovers the girl liviing in filth somewhere back to her state, and phones Lessing does Lessing come and try to help. It’s not clear that Peter was responsible for Lessing take Diski in; it seems that Lessing was attracted to the girls’ gifts and felt for her but did not fully imagine what taking such a young woman on would be. Kat leaves out that the Emily a central character of Memoirs of a Survivor is a portrait of Diski. Diski was very hurt by this. And I agree that the series of column comes out of Diski’s anger too. But Jenny needed help desperately. Jumping out of a window, sleeping in stinking rotting wasteland, these are frantic calls for help and Doris had come forward. Jenny needed more than Doris’s cats.
Mirable dictu also misrepresented Diski’s presentation of Peter. Diski does not slam or despise Peter. She feels for him; she does not understand how Peter came to be so dependent. She is suggesting the portrait of the boy in The golden Notebook is Peter. I remember that portrait best of all and that the heroine could not cope with her son. Myself I think the GN is badly flawed because the great solution of the heroine’s life is to throw herself into orgasmic enthrallment in the last notebook. Up to then the book had been brilliant. Diski does not blame Lessing for leaving South Africa and two of her children; she suggests that this reality shows that Lessing was a woman who felt she had to make a choice like this to have a writer’s life — so in Lessing’s own life is a variant on her heroines.
Diski also includes how Lessing remained connected to her when she married and to her daughter (in a way a grand-daughter to Lessing) and that there was a relationship of support and affection there (perhaps publishing help?).
The series of columns has been not only about Lessing but Diski’s inoperable cancer. Diski has been told the probabilities are she will be dead in 2-3 years. She had undergone horrendous treatments and she discusses how all this feels, her fear of dying. In fact the first few columns where she “came out” and for the first time made widely public that her whole career would not have happened but for Lessing seemed to me a tribute, wanting to tell Diski’s life for the first time. She can’t tell her childhood or adolescence or the time in schools without telling about Lessing. I agree that she is getting back and exposing but she’s been hurt and hurt bad. At the same time Diski means to show the goddess has clay feet.
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Jenny recently but before chemotherapy; Doris in 2006
Diski is one who writes autobiographically and if there is anyone she has exposed over the years it’s been herself. She is doing to (or for) Lessing what she has done to or for herself. I have read enough criticism of Diski to know that quite a number of women writers take advantage of what Diski tells of herself to write snark at her books. I’ve not read any of her novels but I have her two travel books and regularly over the years her criticism. I don’t always agree with Jenny, and some of her columns were written with less thought and too much convention. She has a knee-jerk reaction against BBC costume dramas, her mockery (politically astute) of Downton Abbey failed to account for why it stayed popular. But speaking overall, superb, worth reading.
Yes this last End Notes is problematical. She is dying. I thought of the last two that the LRB editor is finally being too soft and should be editing Diski more — asking for cuts or where she is beginning to lose control. But a long time dying contributor can be given slack. I’ve seen what cancer does to people’s brains and their bodies and give credit to Diski that she has been able to write despite the deterioration and pain she has known. Perhaps writing helped to absorb her mind and enable her to forget or transcend her pain while writing.
I gather from what she writes in these columns that all literary London who knows one another knew about this relationship. It was a secret everyone knew — there are anecdotes where others are careful what they say around each about the other. I surmise if was Lessing who forbid the telling in public because Diski waited until she was dead for some time and then told. I surmise Diski agreed not to tell or acquiesced.
It is important to know about Lessing’s private life to understand the flaws in her books — and the distance between the presentation of her persona and what she really was Now I understand the Diaries of Jane Summers. There the central character resents the woman who turns to her for help as well as being a version of the central characters. I was not as stunned by her revelation of Lessing’s behavior (especially the one where she refused to reassure the girl and refused to say she loved her) because it fit into what I feel is part of the person behind the books. I respect Lessing enormously, especially her Grass is Singing, Summer before the Dark, Golden Notebook and Nothing Remains the Same — and just as much some of her critical essays and memoirs.
There are other relatives in England who come out and write about one another to some extent. A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drable, the Amises. It’s not always a comfortable thing to watch. Diski’s columns are not a Mommie Dearest. She says repeated that Lessing rescued her.
As to Lessing’s writing, there is the problem (as I see it) of Lessing’s two identities, the one who writes the science fiction and fantasy and the one who writes the realistic depressed books. I find very great her The Grass is Singing; her On Cats is a work of strong genius. The latter dialogue with women, though Lessing denies she is a feminist. I regard it as a problem as I see much in the former that at strong variance with the latter, and what Diski has to tell us can explain perhaps some of these gaps. One self of Lessing wanted to mother Diski and the other did not.
What I regret is that Lessing did not tell when she herself was still alive, that in her memoirs she left this important relationship out as she did the connection between her son and the son of the Golden Notebook. Had Lessing told too then we would have had her point of view.
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Doris at home, middle-aged with one of her cats
We now know that What I Don’t Know About Animals is in dialogue with On Cats!
I’m a person who writes openly about myself. People are shocked by what I say sometimes and I’ve been told that I’m risking retaliations of people who feel threatened or resentful or who want happy stories. I say they should not bother read me. I have never been close to a famous person but I have named names and told of all those who hurt and damaged Jim as he lay dying. No one will care about the people who hurt me, and I don’t even know the names of the boys who once gang raped me. But I understand the impulse to tell.
I feel a destruction of Jane Austen herself was done when the majority of her letters were destroyed, three packets between her and Francis, what was left censored and abridged. On Austen-l and Janeites we are still making our way though the Austen papers and eventually I will find a way to make blogs from our readings of these letters in an effort to call these papers t the attention of people and hope some scholar will want to produce an annotated contextualized edition.
Ellen
Anne Deppe: “This was particularly interesting to me, Ellen. Thanks so much for your thoughts.”
Thank you for voicing appreciation.
Thank you for this, I feel it was very important for you to get all your thoughts down this way and I appreciate it all. I’ve been following the Jenny Diski columns too and been pretty appalled by what could be interpreted as callousness from DL to a most insecure and damaged child. JD’s intelligence got her through some of it partly I suppose. I also wonder at DL taking on such a damaged child, did she know what she was doing? And maybe if she had an inkling the emotional distance she created between them (not being mother while also standing in that place) was her emotional/psychological survival mechanism??? The whole thing is of deep interest with probably no final answers.
I for one will wait for more.
And I’ve since gone on to read the blog you responded to and posted my own response as I didn’t think the writer had taken in JD’s situation at all
Thank you. It upset me that she deleted my comment. It was not at all an attack on her or her blog. She has a readership and so I felt something should be said.
Apologies for typos in the last sentence produced in the emotion of the moment
Not a problem. I’ll edit the corrections out.
PS My comment to the blogger you’ve referred to is still awaiting moderation. I’ve never had this experience before. Maybe she is on holiday. I certainly wasn’t rude, I expressed another perspective. I’m a bit puzzled..
I can’t explain it beyond that she has many fine blogs on Doris Lessing and perhaps has a great deal invested in Lessing — who did win a Nobel, but then that is a politicized prize and goes to certain “high” genres. She also writes sentimentally about her mother (it may be here we find her reason.) I’ve been candid and said I don’t care for the “other” Lessing; find a flaw in her most admired or best known work by the general public (Golden Notebook); I don’t think Diski is one of the writers of masterpieces in our era but she is a human being and good writer and these columns important — more because she is being as frank as she can get herself to be about her cancer, treatments and so on.
Let me add this writing about mother-daughter is significant for women’s literature — that’s why I put it under Austen Reveries.
Agree re DL, JD’s writing and the huge importance of these issues
Diana B: “I am interested in the Diski story but don’t know where I stand on it quite. Somewhere between Kat and you I suppose. I actually like Diski’s writing more than Lessing’s, and I can understand her anger, but I think she’s forgotten that Lessing did not owe her anything parental, was not the cause of her troubles. Shocked that Kat removed your comment.”
In way Lessing did owe her once she signed the documents and took Diski into her home. If she wanted to get rid of her, she could have, agreed. But she might not been able to have faced this reaction in herself so she did kind of half-way house.
Diski does not say anywhere that Lessing is the cause of her troubles. She makes the point several times that Lessing rescued her and her intervention, simply being her and able to put her in the right school, get her to university, help her at first was everything.
She also shows the woman did not understand what she was getting herself into; she did agree to be the girl’s foster mother. She must have. English people don’t hand children to adults unless the adults agree to take care of the child. What Diski shows is gaps in Lessing’s willingness, ability to relate to other people — she did really prefer cats. In three of the columns she shows Lessing to have been cruel — unable to reassure, advise, give comfort, be affectionate.
This tells us about the sensibility behind the stories. Truth to tell, I like only one half of Lessing’s oeuvre and even that is problematic. I think the more we know about an author the more the works light up. I wish (as I said) Lessing had been willing to tell, for it seems their relationship carried on for years — as a sort of foster grandmother too. Diski was apparently the only child coming out of Lessing’s life who went on to lead a fulfilled life; Peter did not. Diski does not despise Peter but feels for him.
One gap in the telling: if it was Peter who got his mother to become a foster mother, then he was reaching out to try to have someone in the house who could provide a bridge (to use the phrase here) for him to his mother. The Golden Notebook shows a son cut off from the mother but makes the son narrow minded, petty, egoistic, not smart. I wonder if her son read that portrait .The portrait of Emily was much kinder – -Julie Christie played the role.
The Diski-Lessing relationship hit more of a chord with readers than her telling of her cancer. Only those who’ve had cancer or seen a beloved person die care or are willing to let the dominant theme of the columns into their psyche. It is too frightening — like widows are to most nonwidowed.
Hirsh’s book has struck me as about something hugely important – the mother-daughter plot for women’s lives and books.
More on the mother-daughter plot: Hirsh’s book on the mother-daughter plot includes a section on how many women readers don’t want to acknowledge their place in it. They’ll say so-and-so portrays mothers as a pernicious group — Austen fits in here (as ever mutedly). In Deborah Philips’s book on Women’s Fiction 1945-2000 she finds varieties of mother-daughter plots central to a number of women’s subgenres in the 20th century:
http://www.jimandellen.org/feministblog/512.html
Writer who write as mother tends to be very conservative and portray daughters as women who are themselves deeply wanting in emotional reciprocity.
Readers rarely say where they stand nor do writers acknowledge this alignment: Hirsh says many or most women readers identify either as daughter or mother and write as daughter or mother. I thought Strayd’s Wild was a mother-daughter story from the daughter’s point of view and what was beautiful was the daughter’s attempt to love her mother fully and understand her thought the mother let her husband and then her son abuse her, and what Americans would call fail in life (made no money, no career, worked in supermarkets). Yet I admit in the criticism online that was not discussd much – -I like to think a more considered academic article would bring it out centrally. The woman who played the mother was nominated for some award as supporting actress.
Anyway again this blog I wrote struck a chord because Diski’s did. Diski writes as a stray daughter; Doris as a guarded mother.
I bring this out because how can women’s literature be valued if women don’t value what’s there or are embarrassed by it and how can we learn from it. Remember the fuss made over Mommie Dearest to the point I need only refer to it and readers know the territory.
Ellen
[…] for myself, an exponential increase since Jim died. Since I’ve also became interested in Jenny Diski’s writing in the last two years, I noticed her What I don’t Know About Animals. Billed a serious philosophical essay, I […]
[…] for myself, an exponential increase since Jim died. Since I’ve also became interested in Jenny Diski’s writing in the last two years, I noticed her What I don’t Know About Animals. Billed a serious philosophical essay, I […]
Dear all,
It is true however (for me and some others coming to my blog) understandable Jenny Diski’s deep hurt and rage at Doris Lessing, Diski cannot let go contemplating how Lessing treated her at times with cool disregard and then “furious” anger when Diski tried to get Lessing to say Lessing liked her and would not abandon Diski. This week’s LRB (9/10>2015) has a shorter column than usual where Diski quotes a note to one of Lessing’s more obviously autobiographical fictions or one of her non-fictions where Lessing denies the book is Volume 3 of her autobiography, says she would not write such a book about her later life because then she would hurt “vulnerable people,” tat she is not novelising autobiography, and anyway there are no parallels in this book to real people, “except for one, a very minor character.”
As the prose goes on, we see that “very minor character” was Diski herself. It becomes obvious that shortly after “taking in” (as a sort of boarder from Lessing’s first point of view) Lessing began to put Diski into her fiction. So not just Emily from Memoirs of a Survivor is Diski. Also that Lessing (like many novelists, probably just about all) put into her fictions portraits of “vulnerable” people she knew. What incenses Diski most of all is who is not vulnerable. What is bottomless about the paragraph is that Lessing uses words to define people in ways that exclude all people — who is not vulnerable? In this column Diski is probably reaching out to others who were as hurt as she by the portraits and manipulative disregard done in a way that disabled people from protesting unless they broke through to be blunt.
Diski does not say how she is doing: the last time she mentioned her cancer and coming death was to say the dreadful treatments she had had ruined her lungs and other essential organs and she had spent a week in hospice where the staff thought she was going, but she survived it. A survivor as Doris said.
From the LRB, 9/10/2015
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/jenny-diski/my-word-untangling-machine
My Word-Untangling Machine
Jenny Diski
I am not writing volume three of my autobiography because of possible hurt to vulnerable people. Which does not mean I have novelised autobiography. There are no parallels here to actual people, except for one, a very minor character.
Doris Lessing, The Sweetest Dream
I can’t get away from that paragraph. It feels like a well, bottomless; time to hold your breath before you hear the distant splash of a coin somewhere down there. It’s the careful donation of kindness. The passage is a kind of labyrinth. Not to hurt ‘vulnerable’ people. They must be real, they must be alive, or why bother with it? So we know that what follows is a sort of non-fiction. That wouldn’t surprise us: Doris often used people and situations in her writing without feeling the need to alert readers. Even those not particularly vulnerable might still have cause to feel upset, since no one is named yet anyone could be implicated. Doris is protecting some people but giving them due warning, and warning others who are real and might take it that they are included. Could there be a more a simple way to warn certain people, and cause many blameless others distress, than these three sentences?
What judgments are being made about whom? Here is a sticky business. She is protecting some (real-world) people by not writing about them. But by saying that she is not writing autobiography she is telling us that something happened. (What kind of something? What is she telling us about? Sex, politics, her version of some truth that has been confabulated?) Only when they are dead are the letters allowed to be read. That is the meaning, the weight of having the last word. Something happened, or someone did something – and those of us who are innocent will have to remain in ignorance, never knowing who did what. The accusation doesn’t go away. Nor can the magnitude of the ‘truth’ contained here now be known, or checked and then questioned.
I can’t help comparing the author’s note in The Sweetest Dream to the letter I found on the table that morning, for me, furiously accusing me of emotional blackmail for wondering whether she liked me, or even wanted me in her house. But what is to be done? If fear or abandonment are arresting your heart, can you forever live without an answer, pretending it doesn’t matter? Or in a multiple blindness, can both parties know the question and the need but never speak of them? Apparently they can. That is what’s so odd about the author’s note. For one particular person it has only one meaning. But its tentacles of worry reach out to include everyone. When a child is accused of something they haven’t done a fountain of guilt springs instantly from the vastly overstocked pressure cooker – god, the relief and terror – and whether or not you are guilty (and sometimes I was), the spume rises up from the passive wicked place inside you. There’s always more, of course, the dark deep place being fathomless, but this release is some lightening of the load both for the genuinely guilty and for those merely with free-floating anxiety that longs to be locked within the innumerable tentacles. Who did it?
Another ‘sufi’ story comes to mind that Doris used often. A bowl of rice has been stolen and the possible culprits are made to stand in a line. ‘We shall see who took the rice.’ There is a silence and then the Mullah speaks and points to the villain. ‘It was you.’ But Master, how did you know? Only you touched your beard for fear that some rice might have stuck to it. Not a really convincing story. All the components must be in place already: rice, thief, beards, knowledgeable Mullah. Good thieves would not touch their beards. It’s a poker story: watch out for the tell. But those loaded with free-floating guilt will touch their beards too. Injustice is written into the story. Someone stole the rice, someone was hungry, they all had beards. A wisdom story must do better than that. Doris’s author’s note declares: I will tell the world who the guilty ones are, but not until they are safely dead and cannot answer back. And then there is that single ‘very minor’ character.
E.M.
There are no easy answers here are there? Jenny Diski’s continuing writing, her brave exploration of her situation, of her teenage experience, the revisiting of her memories is raw and as truthful as she can make it. Practically skinless.
Yes. What a movingly appropriate metaphor for Diski’s revelation of herself too. Ellen
[…] have asked me (well one person) what is gained by telling of Doris and me, well the same thing that is gained by her telling of these dreadful symptoms, her pain, her […]
Her latest entry:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/jenny-diski/promises-arent-always-kept
Her cancer is for now (what a sardonic joke in such words) in remission, for how long (ditto) the doctors can’t say (as they know nothing). Like the heroine in Wit, she is dying in immiseration because of the effect of the treatments on her, her lungs gone, she has (like Hilary Mantel) been made to look awful so that she is alienated from her body. at once feeble, unable to walk steadily and fat. Why should she care say the heartless neat doctors and nurses. She opens with talking of letters she has received; I was almost tempted to write. We learn in this one she has two grandchildren and we know the father of her daughter, once her partner-husband died a couple of years ago. So her daughter parentless.
People have asked me (well one person) what is gained by telling of Doris and me, well the same thing that is gained by her telling of these dreadful symptoms, her pain, her feebleness, how others will not help except for the Poet. Insofar as you can stop people from mouthing nonsense about triumphs, conquests, and bravery and instead tell what cancer is, you help a little in the pressure to do fundamental research. The research that is done is expensive surgery to prolong life and pills that cost huge sums — all garnering profit. What they discover fundamentally is a bye-product and not much sought. The TTP was signed yesterday: a key provision fought over was the US on behalf of the pharmaceuticals (like the fascist gov’t it is) to give them the right to charge outrageously for 5-8 years; 12 was what was wanted and the “balance” is it’s just 6-8 and uncountable thousands excluded because of the price at least until then.
I omit all the provisions which supercede workers’ rights and hand a good deal of the world over to corporations (with military backing) to exploit and immiserate everyone who is not in the elite genuinely rich and well connected.
Cancer is our great and ever spreading plague — like the engineered (in effect) famines and mass diseases of early times — India, Ireland.
Diski speaks for us all — she says don’t talk about bravery so instead I’ll say she writes what she does because she cannot help herself and thinks truth has a function in the world that helps others– if only by saying see here I am, is this the way you are? if so, we are not alone. She is my model.
Thank you for all this well expressed deep thoughtfulness, this telling it how it is. Mammon rules.
It helps me too. Two years ago on October 9, 2013 my beloved husband (44 years married that year) died of esophageal cancer; he had been diagnosed on April 28, 2013; the interim is analogous to Diski’s experience.
More on Jenny Diski:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/07/jenny-diski-interview-mediocrity-fiction-to-do-with-feeling-cosys/2015/nov/07/jenny-diski-interview-mediocrity-fiction-to-do-with-feeling-cosy
From the Guardian: At least there is no condescension or correction of her views. You learn more objective facts about her (her real last name, her husband’s) and something of her career as a whole. There is the most recent prognosis.
I am now and again aware that one of these days I’ll put on my computer and see her death announced. Will I cry? As I said, I finished not long ago her What I don’t know about Animals. Her love of cats is a symbol of Lessing’s presence in her life. I now have her Apology for a Woman Writing and am now into her Stranger on a Train. I do too much and don’t have enough time for friend-author reading. I will though in two weeks have time until March when the teaching starts again.
I notice she is to be on a R4 programme next Tuesday, 17th November at 9.30 am. David Schneider is confronting his thanatophobia and talking to her about her terminal diagnosis
Ah. I have an iplayer that connects me to the BBC now. Thanks for telling me. I will try to connect that day or so. You get some 24 hours plus to listen to or view a program.
I just listened. I don’t know if this will get people to where on the Net and the connection they need to listen but it’s the URL that appeared on the page as I was listening to a 13 minute interview on BBC 4 of Diski:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pb54l#play
For the first time I feel an impulse to write. Since I don’t know where to write to, it’s okay — meaning I can’t send this thought I have: she suggests that dying by cancer is sexy, that is it allures people to come and ask about you, to pay attention, it sells books. I doubt that — since again and again most people with cancer or dying of it are presented so falsely (all about how brave they are) or as if they are not deadly sick (the writing or interview is all about how well they are doing), and when they die, it’s common not to tell what they died of. On rare occasions that the cause of cancer is mentioned, you are told very little — I can count on one hand how many obituaries I’ve seen where you are also told something of what the experience of cancer was.
She shows herself to be solipsistic in that she seems to say that what bothers her (and by extension she thinks others) most about this dying is she’s not told where she is on the curve, how much time she’s got. Many people simply up and die: sudden death it’s called. Or they get into a horrible accident. (Or someone bombs them to death.) So I have to say she’s wrong there too.
Her context is in a way not the best: she’s being interviewed by someone who does interviews on death and dying and he begins with the idea it’s possible there’s life after death or heaven and he doesn’t give it up until he sees she really is having none of this myth even if she agrees that those who can believe such things might be better off.
She did have a good joke: she said that she’d better be dying (but I felt as she said that just that sliver of hope) or she’ll be like Clive James who is still with us and people have apparently begun to say to him, when are you going already? She also told that her husband of 16 years cries a lot. I used to cry when Jim was dying and was criticized for this so I was glad to see she did not criticize or try to stop her husband from crying.
She also told us that her project of writing about Lessing came as a direct result of having been told she was dying. She said it came to her she is the only person who knew Doris Lessing intimately in the 1960s — trouble with that is she really does not present any kind of full portrait of Lessing but only as Lessing was interacting with her as a foster, semi-adopted teenager.
So I got that off my chest even if I can’t send it to her — good thing,
Ellen
I read Diski’s “Who’ll Be Last” last night, and realize I never sent along the URl to it
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n22/jenny-diski/wholl-be-last
Her ironic situation now is that she’s not died; she’s in the position of uncertain life, and the emphasis in the piece begins on the un-funnyness of that, and she uses some ideas that turned up in her interview, but then she turns to describe what it’s like to be alive for her now.
It’s powerful writing and made me remember the Future Learn 3 week course (a MOOC) on WW1 — most writing about WW1 is on how many died, the sheer numbers, maybe how, the battles, and who was left behind and what happened to them. This Future Learn was about the millions maimed, crippled, destroyed, traumatized for life. Cancer-speak does not begin to talk about this – we are told so-and-so survived with the implication they are just fine now. They’re not Had Jim lived, before the cancer metastasized we had learned he had crippled his eating capacity for life, could not eat right at all, and has lost much of his voice and upper body strength. Now I wonder if her meditation on the “sexiness” of cancer — how as an illness it attracts attention — was ironic in a way I hadn’t realized.
I haven’t conveyed just how original her Apology for the Woman Writing is. Unlike almost all historical novels, and some of them, a lot, we get no whiff of the inkpot, no sense of these archaic details and language carefully rewoven in — Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has a lot more of this than people admit (it’s called pastiche), her _Bring Up the Bodies_ less so as it’s more subjective, shorter.
Well there is no sense of inkpot in Diski’s Apology. I think it’s the use of modern language and the subjectivity of the approach. She not only personates Marie le Jars de Gourney, but Marie’s servant and Montaigne too. I suddenly thought trust her to do a Tudor matter novel that does not feel like one and is off at a tangent, the way her travel books are not travelogues at all, and her animal study begins with cartoons and the zoo and only turns out to be serious animal and philosophical examination as you go along.
I did say she was enacting her own way of getting through life, her outsider status in the book. I didn’t mention how it’s also about grief and loss — the way books by widowers’ are. Montaigne’s retirement to his tower and his begnning his Essais are bound up with the death of his beloved friend, Estienne de La Boetie
It’s one of the books that got me through Thanksgiving day and will help tomorrow too: as I say it’s a historical novel where Diski re-enacts Marie le Jars de Gournay who became a pupil, friend, amanuensis to Montaigne (16th century philosopher). It’s from the chapters where Diski personates (in effect) Montaigne. The last 30 or 20 years of Montaigne’s life he retired to a kind of tower where he read and wrote — the book became the famous Essais (I”ve read them in the Florio translation — early 17th century). No one wrote anything like these Essais before — modern essays where he is subjective, tells you about himself but also just writes on anything that comes into his mind.
One contributing cause for this retreat was the death of his beloved friend, Etienne de Boetie. Montaigne in Diski’s formulation was all his life on a “soul-search, born of desperation.” This is state of mind before he loses his friend — what made him read a lotand make many of the decisions of his life. He was a wealthy man of the later 16th century, French, spent time in Paris, was at one of the universities, became a local landlord — think of Mr Knightley. But then Montaigne met this friend and they loved one another and were together for a few years and then the friend died.
The passage doesn’t really apply to me because I don’t like to live in loneliness; indeed it drives me into a kind of desperation; I just do since Jim has died — but as Montaigne Diski does talk of the effect of the loss of a beloved on a person for years to come:
Only once had he known complete companionship, a camaraderie of the spirit, the love of and the experience
of fully loving another human being, and it was long ago, brief as a single sunrise and sunset in the eternity of the world. Oh my friend.
Since then he’d lived in loneliness – the special kind of loneli-ness that came from having once known what it was to have another you with you on the earth. With the passage of time, it had become a treasured solitude, painful, certainly, always, but special, because it recalled constantly the unique communion that had been lost. …
But to have no one with whom you can sit in comfortable silence, to whom you can talk and be certain of their understanding, whom you can trust with your deepest thoughts and fears without hesitation .. but special, because it recalled constantly the unique communion that had been lost. He would not have given it up, now that his beloved friend was beyond reach. It was all he had left of him, that loneliness. Perhaps it was more even than having him alive and with him. But to have no one with whom you can sit in comfortable silence, to whom you can talk and be certain of their understanding, whom you can trust with your deepest thoughts and fears without hesitation, whose advice is as wise as any good father and who forgives, like any good father, your hesitation in taking it – to have had and lost such a friend, that is hard. No father, no friend. Not even a son, though a son could hardly play the part of a lost friend, but a son would have been something. His daughter, Leonor, was no son. She was her mother’s child. A nice enough girl. Perhaps he once had unfeasible hopes in spite of her sex, but at sixteen her intellect was no more than ordinary and her soul was already moulded and content with itself. He smiled to see her frowning over her lessons and sitting like a lady at the dinner table, but there was nothing more than a distant affection in his heart for her. She would, of course, be his heir, but in spite of the careful instructions in his will, he feared for the fate of his library and his work after his fast-approaching end. He had friends, of course. But they were elsewhere, and though he enjoyed their occasional visits and the chance to get away and see them, they never came close to filling the empty place in him that Estienne de La Boetie left behind.
The story or history as it’s told is that Marie became this second friend — though many years younger than him,she called him her “adopted father,” he called her his “fille d’alliance” . My advisor used to call my his daughter too – he had some phrase which referred to our shared love of epistolary novels and especially Clarissa — he’s dead now too, died suddenly at age 62, Prof Day — due to him I wrote my dissertation on Clarissa and became an 18th century scholar.
I have only friends at a distance, ones I see once a year at most, or on the Net. Not all that different from Montaigne except he used letters and had many more, and some long-time relationships of physical contact.
She’s back on track. I found it interesting that as Lessing and her son, Peter, lay dying Diski is regarded as the next of kin and one of those at the bedside.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n03/jenny-diski/mothers-prettiest-thing
It’s the LRB for 4 February, 2016, pp 21-22.
I particularly enjoyed her comments to hospital people over her own case. She is a woman after my own heart. The way to get out of a hospital and make them stop doing whatever it is they are imposing is to let them know I know they are doing and why doing it from self-interested motives, and that I am not having this. If I am not hooked up to anything I can’t pull off myself, I pull it out and off and begin getting dressed. The problem is sometimes when I’ve been asleep they take advantage of me and put something into my body I can’t remove on my own. Then I have had to keep up ceaseless nagging to demand they take it; it usually works. And then I proceed as I outlined above.
I feel it is so unfair how they use sleeping. I’ve tried to stay up in hospitals so as to prevent their taking this kind of advantage and when I have caught them at it, stopped them by yanking out whatever it is they put in before it’s too late (if I can).
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