People talk about writing as though it were a mysterious thing. "When did you realise you were a writer? Where do you get your inspiration from?" These are not questions you ask your local butcher, though his work is also interesting. No one ever says: "How do you stop writing?" Perhaps they should. For Jenny Diski, writing, like smoking or seeking solitude, was just how she spent the day. It was a form of thinking. She just didn't see the gap between her brain and the page. In her last days she rang her editor at the London Review of Books to say "she didn't think she could write any more; she still had the words – and even the sentences – but they were no longer getting through to her fingers".
So when Diski was given a double diagnosis of lung cancer and fibrosis, in September 2014, she wrote about it; of course she did. “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer,” she wrote. “Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.”
Her prose was always salty. Diski resisted cant – and even metaphor, indeed – with the tenacity of someone who had fought for her sanity in her youth. Though you can hear her say “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I won a battle with depression”, not to mention psychosis, Victorian mental health institutions, chaotic and abusive parenting, the whole nine yards.
She is almost, at times, too dispassionate. At the age of 14, she was “embarrassed into” having sex with a strange man. “I had no sense that I was especially violated by the rape,” she wrote, putting the blankness of her response down to the fact it happened in 1961. “A different zeitgeist, luckily for me.”
Yes, so lucky. Diski was never a victim, and this put her at an angle to many memoirists of the past 30 years. Sometimes you wish she might afford herself some proper pity; the facts are pitiful enough. Her parents were – as they said in 1961 – completely bonkers. She was sent to boarding school for her own protection, and was subsequently expelled. When attempts to live with one or other parent failed, she took an overdose and ended up on a locked ward at 15, “the official baby of the bin”.
It was there that she received a letter from the mother of a school friend. Doris Lessing, apparently on a whim (she was trying to be a good Sufi at the time) offered her a home. In Gratitude finally tells the story everyone wanted to know: how did the great writer treat the troubled girl who would become a writer too? What mysterious theft or transference of powers went on in the kitchen at Charrington Street, King's Cross, a house bought on the proceeds of The Golden Notebook when Lessing was at the height of her fame?
The sad fact is that Lessing kept all the power for herself. She never owned to reading a book by Diski – who wrote 17 books – but she had no compunction writing a novel based on her own experience. Memoirs of a Survivor is about a woman driven to a "frenzy of irritation" by the foundling in her house, "a self-presenting little madam" who, as Diski describes, "spears passers-by and neighbours with her acid insights and cruel stories". Diski is intrigued by this description of her teenage self, because it felt so different to be her; she reserves the right to remember her life from the inside. But the thing she really wants to talk about, in her last days, is not the books; it is the love she needed from Lessing, and did not get.
There is no answer here, there is only Diski’s hurt and confusion, her endlessly circling sorrow. Why did Lessing want her as an object of charity, when she did not want her as a person, and what was wrong with Diski that she could not bridge this gap?
Lessing left two children behind in Southern Rhodesia in 1949. With her, she took her first finished manuscript and her youngest son, Peter, who was then two years old. Diski mourned for his life, even as she was losing her own. He was, she wrote, a man who “from 19 had never worked or had a proper job, no real relationships, sexual or otherwise . . . who lived alone with his mother, lay on his bed when he wasn’t watching television in the afternoon and evening and eventually became so gross, in the sense of fat and uncouth, that very few people could put up with it.”
Diski could be a bit funny about people getting fat, it has to be said, but the rest of the description seems to hold true. There he is on Youtube, getting out of a black cab behind Doris, the day she is doorstepped with the news that she has won the Nobel Prize. He has a string of onions in one hand and a big globe artichoke in the other. They have been shopping, but Doris had the sense to bring a bag. The hand holding the artichoke is suspended in a grubby-looking sling. He is clearly eccentric. And Lessing’s response to the news – fake dismay, dismissal, a little surge of glee – make her seem eccentric too. Perhaps it was just genetic. Is that too simple a thing to say about someone who wrote such complex books? That there was a disconnect in her mind when it came to real people – real people like Jenny Diski, who, with all her difficulties, managed to love people well, especially her own child.
The gratitude of the title is in part for the start Lessing gave Diski, the inspirational circle of bohemian friends, the money, the work ethic and good advice. It is also a forensic account of what it is to live through a terminal illness. Oblivion was something Diski craved, all her life – she travelled to Antarctica to find a place that was truly blank. Writing too was a kind of “nothing”. It was a way to be wonderfully alone. And so, she wrote. Of all the lonely things, your own impending death must be the loneliest of all – especially if you see it true, as Diski does here. A perfect space then, to fill with words.
The only problem is time. Diski writes against the clock, like a woman knitting faster because she is running out of wool. A controlled rush of thought, a good mind at full pelt. In Gratitude reminds us what pleasure, what company and nourishment there is in just thinking, especially if you do it well, as she does here.
Anne Enright is the Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest novel, The Green Road, last week won the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award at Listowel Writers' Week
