Jenny Diski - Why Didnt You Just Do What You Were Told?

WHY DIDNT YOU JUST DO WHAT YOU WERE TOLD?

WHY DIDNT YOU JUST DO WHAT YOU WERE TOLD?

essays

JENNY DISKI

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in Great Britain 2020

This electronic edition published 2020

Copyright The Estate of Jenny Diski, 2020

Introduction Mary-Kay Wilmers, 2020

The Estate of Jenny Diski has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

The material in this book was first published in the London Review of Books , to which the publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce.

Lyrics from Somewhere (Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim) on p.427 Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-2190-0; eBook: 978-1-5266-2192-4

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ALSO BY JENNY DISKI

Fiction

Nothing Natural Rainforest

Like Mother

Then Again

Happily Ever After

Monkeys Uncle

The Vanishing Princess

The Dream Mistress

After These Things

Only Human: A Divine Comedy

Apology for the Woman Writing

Non-fiction

Skating to Antarctica

Dont

Stranger on a Train

A View from the Bed

On Trying to Keep Still

The Sixties

What I Dont Know About Animals

In Gratitude

CONTENTS

When you think of the 1950s and who was available in London and Paris to sleep with, you can only wonder that she made time to do any work.

Most of us were easier to take when we were young, especially if we were beautiful.

No one ever mentioned the possibility of a career as a mariner: hadnt Moses ordered the Red Sea to part rather than have the Children of Israel get their feet wet?

Death has a cachet which lends weight to even the featheriest of lives.

One of the pleasures of reading Jenny Diski, her essays especially, is that pleasure is such a large part of it. She wasnt vain, or no more so than average, and she didnt show off any more than other writers do but she enjoyed her own thoughts and her sentences as much as she enjoyed her own company, and she doesnt let that pleasure go to waste. She entered the life of the LRB in 1993. Karl Miller, the papers first editor, met her at a party and suggested that I get in touch with her I was Millers deputy. Youll get on with her, he said, shes a bit like you. By the time of her death she died of lung cancer in April 2016 she had written more than two hundred pieces for the LRB , reflections on the world and its stories for the most part. And Karl Miller was right: she and I were quite alike, in our manner and even to a degree our appearance, or at any rate the clothes we wore; in the things we found funny and the value we attached to that; in the words we used and how our sentences ran, and, yes, we became friends, very good friends. But there was also an enormous difference between us. Lets just say she was the writer; I was the fan.

Between September 2014 and the end of 2015 she wrote seventeen pieces about herself, her past and the progression of her illness, pieces that became a book called In Gratitude both the gratitude and the ingratitude addressed to Doris Lessing, whod invited Jenny, then still a schoolgirl, to come and live with her and her son. At the beginning of the new year, as she came to the end of what she had to say, diary and book completed, she started to die. It wasnt a coincidence. Some weeks later she lost the physical ability to write and would ring the LRB office to say, each time as if for the first time, that she was sorry but she didnt 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. A vital circuit had been cut and dictation couldnt fix it.

When she started writing for the LRB shed published five novels; she also wrote reviews for the Mail on Sunday and had a column in the Sunday Times . The column was about supermarkets and called Off Your Trolley. The first one was about death (her death), though tinned soup and brands of yoghurt came into it too. The second, more encouragingly, was about mayonnaise, and featured Roger Diski, by now the ex-husband: A handy ex-husband, just back from France, still with the taste of the real thing in his mouth, nominated himself to test my collection of mayonnaise. I would have double-checked his findings, but I decided against it after seeing him dip a well-sucked finger into each jar. As he was leaving, he told her that M&S had just started selling caviar and suggested she do a column about it. But the following week bad news for ex-husbands theyd sold out.

Her first piece for the LRB was also about exes: Moving Day. My ex-Live-in-Lover will come this afternoon to move his things out. Her daughter has gone to Ireland with her father (the ex-husband), where shell do rural things that Jenny, born and raised in the Tottenham Court Road, knows nothing about. The kitten is ill and at the vets. She will have the flat to herself:

It is a kind of heaven. This is what I was made for. It is doing nothing. A fraud is being perpetrated: writing is not work, its doing nothing. Its not a fraud: doing nothing is what I have to do to live. Or doing writing is what I have to do to do nothing; doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days:

I get on with the new novel. Smoke. Drink coffee. Smoke. Write. Stare at ceiling. Smoke. Write. Lie on the sofa. Drink coffee. Write.

On Monday a man came to talk to her about depression and the difference between clinical depression and melancholia (he was making a documentary). They dont disagree. On Friday she has an appointment at the zoo. A talking orangutan called Jenny is a character in the novel shes writing and there are one or two things she still needs to find out. From what shes told its clear she is pleased with her choice of primate to impersonate her. Orangs, the keeper tells her, are lazy, sullen and devious; unsociable animals unlike gorillas and chimps. Duty-bound to pay a visit to Suka, wholl be Jenny in the novel, she finds her as no doubt she expected to find her, as melancholic as you please, dropping handfuls of straw on to her head.

Jenny liked sleep and often took to her bed; she liked blankness of all kinds: white surfaces, uneventful days. Pointless activity, she said, was better than activity that had a point: no activity was better still. A place that had never been looked at and never would be was best of all. Hence Antarctica (other landscapes fidget), which she memorialises (we would now have to say) in a piece entitled A Feeling for Ice that would later become her book Skating to Antarctica (1997).