Two Memoirs
In memoriam Diana Athill & Russell Baker.
On January 23 of the new year, the renowned editor Diana Athill died at the age of 102. Two days earlier, the acclaimed New York Times columnist Russell Baker passed away at 93. While Athill came to prominence as an author in her own right with the 2000 publication of her memoir Stet: An Editor’s Life, it’s her earlier and less well-known work of reminiscence, Instead of a Letter (1963), that I especially treasure. What follow are tributes to both that book and Baker’s 1982 autobiography, Growing Up, adapted from my book 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die.
The Detours of Disappointed Love
There are many pleasures to be found in the pages of a memoir: the achievements of the author, if they be splendid; his or her sophistication, intellect, or humor; the insight that comes from sharing one person’s perspective on a particular time or place. What is rarer, and what one gets from Athill’s Instead of a Letter, is the alternately uncomfortable and exhilarating revelation of another’s experience in all its day-by-day, year-to-year uncertainty.
Written in the author’s mid-forties, it tells a story of childhood in the English countryside, high times at Oxford during the 1930s, bleak times during the war; of adolescent romance imagined into being, carried to the brink of adulthood, then lost with crushing effect. The ensuing sadness shadows Athill’s emerging career at the BBC and in the book world — she was one of the founding members of the distinguished publishing firm André Deutsch — until she learns, through the wisdom of work and words, to conjure something like happiness from the vagaries of love and the verities of time.
Beginning with an evocation of her grandmother’s last days, Athill’s narrative unfolds within the worrying embrace of that matriarch’s memory: “What have I lived for?” the dying woman asks the young Diana. Asking the same question of herself in these pages, the author answers with startling alertness to the equivocations of emotion and intention that shape the weather of our waking hours. Beautifully honest in its self-portrait, Instead of a Letter captures, with paradoxical exactitude, the tentative aura every pilgrim bears on her progress toward maturity.
A Satirist Comes of Age
In 1979, Russell Baker won the Pulitzer Prize for his Times “Observer” column; three years later he won another for his autobiographical book, Growing Up. As its title suggests, it focuses on his childhood during Depression-era years spent in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore, under the watchful influence of his mother (his alcoholic father died when Baker was five). Lucy Elizabeth was
“a formidable woman. Determined to speak her mind, determined to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. In that time when I had known her best, my mother had hurled herself at life with chin thrust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made her seem always on the run.”
She couldn’t stand a quitter and wouldn’t be one, even when her husband’s death meant giving up one of her children to the care of relatives.
As much as this is a book about the author growing up, it is also a book about Lucy growing old, and the son frames the bulk of the chapters — vibrantly drawn, good-humored scenes of hard times, adventures with the extended family of aunts and uncles, boyhood and adolescent antics, and eventual graduation to college and the military — with affecting portrayals of his aged mother adrift in senility. The clear-eyed honesty of the opening and closing pages does not disguise the enduring love he feels toward the woman he remembers so vividly throughout the book, “a warrior mother fighting to protect her children in a world run by sons-of-bitches.”
She was determined that her son Russell would make something of himself, as indeed he did through every stage of his distinguished career as a writer, which reached a culmination of sorts in Growing Up. In his apprenticeship as a newspaper reporter, he learned how to find a story and tell it; in his heyday as a satirist, he perfected the ability to illuminate the private and public vanities of the tumultuous times in which he lived; as a memoirist, he added a new dimension to his already considerable skill set. It’s best called wisdom, and it makes this generous remembrance of things past a delight from start to finish.
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