Cataloging the Insults (and Joys) of Old Age

[groovedaddy]

One of the drawbacks of old age, the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s final novel, “Ravelstein” (2000), declares, is that gaps begin to open in your life, “and these gaps tend to fill up with your dead.”

One of the many excellent things about Diana Athill’s previous memoir, “Stet” (2000), about her long and storied career as a book editor in London — she worked with V. S. Naipaul, John Updike and Norman Mailer, among others — was that she allowed the gaps in her story to fill, like frosting layered onto a cake, with fulsome memories of her own cherished dead.

Some of the writers she celebrated in her witty, cantankerous style are all but forgotten now. Does anyone read the Irish novelist Molly Keane or the Brooklyn-born experimental writer Alfred Chester any longer?

Ms. Athill sent you scurrying to catch up. Here she was, for example, on Mr. Chester: “First impressions? The very first was probably of ugliness — he wore a wig, his brows and eyelids were hairless, his eyes were pale, he was dumpy — but immediately after that came his openness and funniness. It didn’t take me long to become fond of Alfred’s appearance. He also inspired awe, partly because of his prose and partly because of his personality.”

Two other memorable things about “Stet” were its punchy title — publishing speak for “let it stand,” penciled in the margins of a manuscript when deleted words need to be saved — and (why not admit it?) its cover upon which the young Ms. Athill, in a photograph, bore an uncanny resemblance to Cate Blanchett. Ms. Athill was and is, not to put too fine a point on it, a knockout in every respect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/books/14garn.html?th&emc=th