Genius Fan

Subject: Diana Athill, 21 December 1917 – 23 January 2019

• Diana Athill ‘s name is famous in the world of publishing. So when she says one of her two favourite writers is James Boswell (the other is Byron), it means something. In her book Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter Athill says she loves those two writers not for their artistry but for their personalities, and Boswell not for his Life of Samuel Johnson, but for his journals (that’s the Yale journals that I write about in this blog). Athill knows good writing and she recognises personality. After all, she worked with Norman Mailer, I mean Norman Mailer, for crying out loud. She worked with Jack Kerouac…I mean Kerouac for heaven’s sake. She worked with Mordecai Richler, John Updike, Philip Roth…Philip Roth!!! Huge names. In her Nineties she was facing downsizing her life. She said: “When I get rid of most of my books in order to fit in the little room that is now my home, there was never any doubt that Boswell and Byron would have to come with me.” And what does she like about Boswell? “What is irresistible about Boswell is his passionate intensity to be a good man and making stern resolutions to that end, almost never failing to break those resolutions, and then recording this process with fascinated honesty.”
• Her description of Boswell’s activities in Holland are delightful. After staying master of himself during his time studying law in Utrecht, “he managed (just) not to fuck whores, he very rarely made a fool of himself by talking too much at parties – and it brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown; he feared, in anguished passages in his journal, that he was going mad.” His reward for studying and staying in control, an agreement made with his father, was his own Grand Tour of Europe. Athill relishes the Boswell experience. “In Naples he likened himself to a lion ‘running after girls without restraint’, and in beautiful Sienna ‘to enjoy was the thing. Intoxicated by that sweet delirium I gave myself up, without self-reproach and in complete serenity, to the charms of irregular love’.” Classic Boswell. Athill knew what she was talking about concerning spirited personalities with great writing.
• Portrait: This watercolour sketch is copied from a photograph of Athill for the Costa Book Award, 2009.
• Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter, Diana Athill (2015)