‘The thing is,” Jenny Diski tells me, with a smile about her eyes behind her round glasses, “nobody is better at having cancer than me, in the sense that I like nothing more than sitting on the sofa doing fuck all and trying to write.”
She is sitting on that sofa, in the front room of the terraced house in Cambridge that she shares with her second husband, Ian Patterson, a poet and teacher at the university, surrounded by her books, and his, sipping at a flask of green tea that is painful for her to swallow, by turns wrapping and unwrapping herself with a cashmere blanket. “No, honestly,” she insists, kidding neither of us, “I am probably the best person for this to happen to. I lose less of myself than most people because I am naturally solitary, I’ve never liked going out much, except to the odd party… ”
Diski is 67. As readers of her recent mordantly brilliant series of essays for the London Review of Books will know, she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August. The prognosis then was that if the grim treatment went well, she had “two to three years”. Never had the word “to” seemed more important. “Will the battery on the TV remote run out first?” she wondered. “How many inches will the weeping birch grow, the one planted by the Poet for my 60th birthday (soppy old radical versifier)?” On first hearing the odds-on death sentence she made the inevitable Breaking Bad joke: “So – we better get cooking the meth.” The oncologist did not smile. And on the way home she confirmed to Patterson the other cliche of her situation: she would have to write about it.
“I suppose I knew that the proper thing to do would be to be quiet and not mention it,” she says now. “But I also knew that would be silly because I write so personally anyway. I couldn’t see why it should be a big secret. Then I was concerned by the ‘Oh God, not another cancer diary’ thing. What could be worse? Only another ‘new father diary’ maybe… ”
Diski need not have had that concern. Nothing she writes ever sounds like it could have been written by someone else. She is the author of 10 novels that often seem capable of anything – ventriloquising Old Testament prophets, communing with orangutans, 16th-century love triangles, mining the deep psychology of motherhood and adolescence. For all these fictional gifts, though, the essay form – part digressive memoir, part journey of exacting critical discovery – has always seemed her natural home. She cites the essays of Michel de Montaigne and the fact and fantasy of Moby-Dick as her models (and you wouldn’t begrudge her either). She has an uncanny ability to connect wildly disparate ideas and make them spark, to take readers on vivid mystery tours along her own neurological pathways, authorial umbrella held aloft. Her essays are often survival stories. And Diski has survived a great deal.
She survived parents who abused each other and her, physically and emotionally; her father, a professional conman and womaniser, walking out when she was 11; her mother’s subsequent overdoses and hysterical self-obsession. She survived being raped by a stranger when she was 14. A boarding school, St Christopher’s – she was fiercely bright and Camden council thought that the answer – which she escaped from. She survived suicide attempts and various psychiatric hospitals. She lived to tell tales of the 1960s and 1970s and sometimes disastrous experiments with drugs, sex, feminism, politics, employment in a shoe shop, teaching and repeated bouts of depressive illness.
The one tale Diski hadn’t properly told though, not in detail, was perhaps the most curious story of all. That was the story of the years after which, aged 15, she was taken in by the future Nobel laureate Doris Lessing as “her waif”, an experiment, and the subsequent 50 years of their complex relationship.
In this sense, Diski says, to the writer in her the cancer diagnosis itself “wasn’t a devastating blow”. It was instead a kind of revelation. She realised quite quickly that the fact of it might give her the space, the structure “to write about Doris”, which she had been trying to work out how to do since Lessing died, aged 94, in November last year. “Once I had the writing in mind even the idea of the treatment was quite interesting to me,” she says. “At long last I would find out what they were talking about when they talked about ‘having chemo and radiotherapy’.”
The reality of the treatment has been worse than her imagining of course. It is, she says, “surprisingly clunky”, not hi-tech at all. “They are just banging in poisons really and hoping they kill off enough bad cells and enough good cells will recover,” she says. “And then for the radiotherapy you go in every single day – luckily Addenbrooke’s [hospital] isn’t far – and there is this ritual performance with a really mysterious machine.”
She finished her radiotherapy last Friday. Two weeks in, she got an inflamed oesophagus, so she can’t eat and drinking hurts – that will last for a few more weeks. “I can only eat custard and ice-cream – which I like, fortunately.”
She has been sustained through it by the challenge of the pieces she has been writing, the connections her chemo-brain has made. “I had the notion that it should be a book, a part-work that took in something more than my cancer goings-on,” she says. “The thing is, I haven’t ever written a book about only one thing. I saw immediately how this could be like Skating to Antarctica” – her memorable account of a journey to the southern icecap that allowed her to dwell on the mother she had no contact with after the age of 19. “Mothers, icebergs – I was sure I could write a book about those things. There is a sort of process,” she says, “however arbitrary it sounds; you sense when the parallels start forming between things.” It was something like the same with the looming prospect of cancer treatment and Doris. “I was terribly excited to think I had a subject, or a project,” she suggests, aware of how odd that sounds.
While Lessing was alive, the two of them had a deal: I won’t write about you if you don’t write about me. (Though, Diski says, with a quick laugh, that didn’t work out entirely because Doris was always writing about her one way or another, “giving interviews saying I was ‘the waif’ in this novel or whatever”.) Her illness, and the fact that Lessing was no longer around to object, made her want to tell her own story, despite Lessing’s best efforts to control it from beyond the grave. “She wanted to embargo all her private papers until me and my daughter Chloe were dead,” Diski says. “I had never heard of anyone making sure they got the last word so effectively. So I thought I would get my own last word in before I pop off.”
She has published four discrete chapters of the history so far, shifting gears between the radiotherapy room and reminiscence. They have dwelt broadly chronologically on the first weeks of her time with Lessing, the outrageous fortune of her being taken in by the novelist (who had, infamously, 15 years before, left her two eldest children back in Rhodesia when she escaped from a second unhappy marriage with her infant son Peter and her first novel – The Grass Is Singing – in her hand baggage, to recreate herself as a writer and activist in London).
Diski’s unspooling memory of that time suggests that the early days of their encounter have never been too far from her thoughts. From the moment she, “wearing an awful mustard yellow woollen coat with a velvet collar, and kind of pleated below a dropped waistline, which my mother thought was very grown-up and respectable, and which I would never wear again”, knocked on Lessing’s door in Mornington Crescent, it was, she says, “like being reborn at 15”.
Diski had, from an early age, always escaped into fiction to block out the violent tensions of family life in the flat in which she lived with her parents in Tottenham Court Road. Now she recognised herself as a foundling, just out of an asylum, having seen way too much of life already and still a child; she was like Alice in search of the potion to allow her to properly grow up. Did being taken in by Lessing, I wonder, at first just seem like an extraordinary stroke of luck?
“All my life up until then things had just happened,” Diski says. “Looking back, I see that they happened because I sort of made them happen. I was the agent of us getting out of some hole or other, because my parents had never been capable of it. After the bin [the Lady Chichester psychiatric hospital in Hove] I had got this job at Bourne & Hollingsworth in Oxford Street, a shop with a hostel attached. Moving in with Doris instead put me back into being a child when I was about to become an adult. Everyone said what a wonderful fairytale it was. All the people in the bin were really pleased for me. And because they knew I wanted to be a writer, doubly so.”
The second night Diski was at Lessing’s house, the writers Arnold Wesker and Alan Sillitoe came over. “I just couldn’t believe these literary monuments were sitting there,” she says. “It was a dream come true in some ways, but I had to work out how to live it.”
Like all dreams, this one was immediately compromised by the context of its creation. Diski had come to Lessing’s attention as a result of a letter sent to Lessing by her son, Peter, who had been a classmate of Diski’s at boarding school before she was expelled. “Peter and I didn’t get on at school,” she recalls. “I thought he was a pompous ass. He had been brought up by Doris, surrounded by Communist party members and literary people, and at 11 he was this faux adult. There was no love lost between us. The letter, which I still have, was typically patrician: ‘Mother,’ it began, and he told the story of me being in the bin, ‘she is quite intelligent and it may be worth your while to help her’, that kind of thing. It was embarrassing but really kind, in a way.”
Out of the blue Lessing wrote to Diski and asked if she would like to go and live with her.
Wasn’t it very out of Lessing’s character to do that?
“Well, yes it was,” Diski says, “but not at that moment. When I got there, Doris was just getting involved with the Sufis [Muslim mystical orders]. It was as if her previous communist period had never happened. She had become obsessed with the idea of inner growth and fulfilling difficult tasks. Part of the Sufi thing was that you had to respond to what was put in front of you. She didn’t have to like it or enjoy it – indeed it seemed that it would be better for growth if she didn’t enjoy it.”
In Lessing’s dystopian novel, Memoirs of a Survivor, the heroine is presented with a child on her doorstep and no choice but to care for it. That child was Diski. “Later on,” Diski says, “Doris suddenly surrounded herself with old ladies to look after. Two novels came out of that. She hated them, but she did it. This one particular old lady said to me one day, ‘What does Doris want of me? I have no idea what she wants of me.’” She laughs. “I have the sense that all over the world there are these baffled people who came into contact with Doris and wondered the same thing.”
Lessing’s book The Sweetest Dream was loosely fictionalised, she wrote in an epigraph, in lieu of her third volume of autobiography “because of possible hurt to vulnerable people”. She presented a woman much like herself in the bohemian 1960s deeply involved with young people she welcomed into her house. “And there were a lot of young people,” Diski recalls, “because Peter and I would bring friends back. She really believed that was how it was – I suppose I want to tell some kind of truth about the other side of that happily ever after.”
That other side, which is currently emerging monthly in the pages of the LRB, explores Diski’s experience of the complicated reality of Lessing’s welcome. “The thing was,” she recalls, “as soon as I arrived there I was always considered to be really badly behaved. Strangely, given my childhood, no one ever seemed to wonder why. I mean Ronnie Laing [RD Laing, the pioneering psychiatrist] was always round for lunch; they never stopped talking about theories of psychology, but then they never seemed in the least curious about what might be causing me to behave badly.”
Instead, Lessing seemed to develop the idea that the arrival of Diski marked the beginning of problems in Peter’s life. Peter failed all his exams, subsequently retreated from the world into her care, debilitated by illness and depression and never left – he died a few months before Lessing last year. “I think Doris just hoped Peter would become something,” Diski says, “but in fact he became the person who lived in his mother’s house the whole of his life. It was a sort of emotional catastrophe, decades of terrible tragedy. In the end it became a folie à deux, really. Peter was really ill, he had strokes and a weak heart and he was on antipsychotics and would sit around saying he had just got off Air Force One and all that. They were just locked together.
“When Peter was younger I would say to Doris, ‘Maybe if you bought him a flat?’ – and she would shout and scream and say I was just trying to get rid of him. I suppose Peter, presumably, and me, somehow, related to the children in Africa that she left behind. Anyway, I was, she told people later on, the reason why Peter was such a mess. I was the cuckoo in the nest. But of course Peter wasn’t my fault.”
Diski is currently writing an episode that marked the shift in her relationship with Lessing, three months into her time at Mornington Crescent. She had become quiet and withdrawn and Lessing kept asking her what was the matter. Finally, she says, she told her what she had been fretting about: “Given that you took me in without meeting me,” Diski said, “now I am here, what if you don’t like me? You can’t send me away again.” At which point, she recalls, Lessing stood up without saying anything and walked out of the house. It was about nine o’clock in the evening. She came back in the early hours and the next morning when Diski woke up there was the first of many typed letters left for her. The letter said Lessing had never been so angry in her life, that it was an unacceptable thing to have said and that the emotional blackmail had to stop.
“I didn’t know what emotional blackmail was for a start,” Diski says now. “And it just seems to me extraordinary looking back. I mean, she could have just said, ‘Yes, I like you’ even if she didn’t. A small lie wouldn’t have done any harm. But basically she instead said, ‘No, I don’t like you and no, I can’t get rid of you.’”
This placed Diski in familiar territory again. Arbitrary anger was what she had known from her abusive mother. “Doris felt I was making a demand on her – and that was intolerable to her. It didn’t occur to her that I might have felt insecure or anything. I find that so baffling. The more so because at the same time people were crossing continents to sit at her feet and hear her wisdom.”
It was never the same between them after that, she says, though they lived together for another three years and Diski saw Lessing almost every week subsequently until she died. “It took until my 30s when I was seeing a shrink that I could say that I actually found myself in almost the same situation with Doris as I had been in with my mother,” she says now. “Before that, I always tried to protect her, I suppose. And it was complicated, of course, because of what she had done for me. She used to say if she had been in my circumstance at 14 she would have been pregnant or dead, which in her mind were just about the same thing. The point about parents of course,” Diski says, “is that they are always supposed to forgive you. You do awful things, and then somebody says sorry and it all blows over. But I suppose I wasn’t a real child and she wasn’t a real parent.” She smiles a bit wearily. “If I finish my book,” she says, “I think I plan to call it Gratitude.”
I wonder what Lessing made of Diski becoming a writer. “She never said anything about it,” she says. “And she never read anything I wrote, I don’t think. It was like she was always going on about how interested she was in education, but then when I became a teacher she always changed the subject. My writing could never be mentioned.”
In the first of her pieces about her diagnosis, Diski concluded with thinking about the kernel inside herself – like a tumour – that was her need, despite everything she experienced growing up, to tell her story, to become a writer. She links that need, when I ask, to an inbuilt survival mechanism that has been often tested. “When I wrote Skating to Antarctica I went to the block of flats in Tottenham Court Road where I had lived with my parents and a few people who remembered us were still there. They remembered me when I was three or something – Jennifer, not Jenny – and I used to run around with the other kids and they were much older. ‘You never let them get the better of you,’ they said.”
Her writing carries an aspect of that determination. Was it liberating when she started publishing, late, in her 30s?
“Well,” she says, “I never felt anything I wrote was good enough. Still don’t. There are brief moments when you are doing it when you think, ‘God, I am a writer!’ But I still have to tell myself that. And I’m rarely convinced. Every time I sit down to do it I feel I don’t have a fucking idea of what I’m doing and it’s all awful. Keep having to prove it, I suppose.”
She fears in recent years that the publishing world has given up on her, certainly in terms of writing fiction. She has been reluctant to do any of the marketing stuff now required – readings and festivals. She won’t let her books be entered for prizes, doesn’t believe in them. “When I said that, all hell broke loose,” she says. “That was the end of it really.”
Last year, before her cancer diagnosis, she was writing a book on the subject of melancholia for Yale University Press. But unfortunately, ironically, that came “to a thundering halt” when she fell into an awful depression, the worst she had had since the early 1980s.
I guess it was always a danger given the subject of her book. “Always a danger. Period,” she says. What was her strategy against it? “Drugs. Lots of drugs. This was last December. And of course the deaths had been happening. Doris died. I felt suddenly old. I was very aware of that sense of which of Ian and I was going to have the heart attack first and which the stroke. Would I prefer to be the carer or the cared for? I couldn’t get out of that.”
Does she think that was some subconscious premonition of the cancer?
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s hard not to think that. But I had no symptoms. I had been on Prozac for 20 years, we tried two or three different antidepressants. And one worked and I felt OK again and that is when I had the diagnosis. Which of course clarified things. I realised for one thing I would much rather it be me having cancer, than me looking after Ian having cancer for a start.”
Now the worst of the treatment is over, she hopes she can have a period of working. She has lately been restricted to a couple of hours writing a day before she gets too tired. She plans, too, to see more of her one-year-old grandson, who has not been able to visit while she has been having chemotherapy for fear of infection. “It is a terrible cliche but he is completely wonderful and funny and lovable. Chloe [her daughter] and Olly bring him probably every other weekend. Now this part is over at least I can see him.”
Reading a lot of Diski’s work, not least the latest essays, you are struck by that sense that nothing is off-limits to her as a writer. I’m thinking in particular of the unforgettable, angry, heartfelt piece she wrote, in 2009, about being raped, at the time Roman Polanski was finally arrested for a similar historical crime. Was that hard for her to do?
“It was a hard thing to get right,” she says. “But I don’t think it is any more difficult to write about than, say, playing with a children’s tea set or something. It doesn’t matter what I write about, it just needs to work on its own terms.”
The question of people reading it is separate, she says, like a necessary evil. “I have to say I don’t like that idea much. I don’t want to know what people think about it. I never know what to say to people who say something I’ve written reminded them of their own experience or something. That is nice maybe, but it is not why I write it.”
I imagine, I suppose, that her life of unflinching self-awareness has been as good a preparation as any for the reality she has been living with since the diagnosis.
“Well,” she says, “There is of course nothing else to really think about except death. But that’s not a new realisation for me. I have always been perfectly aware that one could drop dead at any moment, and I have really tried to think myself into that idea since I was a child. Still, now it has more reality, I can’t see I will be skipping off with a hey and a ho and all that. I can, though, get behind the idea of not having to worry about anything any more. That is quite an appealing thought.”
Apart from writing her memoir of Lessing, Diski hopes to finish the melancholy book, and “the novel I have always tried and failed to write”. She is aware it may not all happen like that, but that’s nothing new. “I know people might think I have had a successful life, and I have written all these books, and so on. They sometimes write and tell me that. But I can’t imagine anyone getting to death and not feeling a bit disappointed in themselves.” She checks herself. “Actually, I don’t think that was true of Doris.”
For herself, she says, with a measure of defiance, “I am really interested in disappointment. The worst thing about the little world of cancer is this dreadful business of having to be positive. There was a fairy in the oncology department the last time I was there.”
Imaginary?
“No. Dressed up. Quite a stocky female fairy of about 15 with blue iridescent wings tied to her. God knows what she was doing there. She was wandering about while we waited for our appointments. I assumed she was the cancer fairy or something.”
Diski is extremely grateful for the small mercy of not having to go back to hospital for a while. “I have another scan in about three months and then that’s it for the treatment,” she says, “and we place our bets about when I am going to die.” She pauses, brightly. “But then, as they say, who knows?”
Habit being what it is, I search around for a more cheerful note on which to end our conversation: office gossip at the Observer, the state of British fiction, Christmas shopping. Diski laughs roundly at my efforts. If her wonderful career as a writer has taught her anything it’s this:
“There doesn’t always have to be one, you know,” she says.
One what?
“A happy ending.”
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