More bons mots from Diana Athill

The great London editor Diana Athill (think Jean Rhys, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Norman Mailer, Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Philip Roth, VS Naipaul, Simone de Beauvoir) was also a talented writer. Her first book, a memoir, came out in the 1960s under the title Instead of a Letter. Fifty years on, Granta published her correspondence with American poet Edward Field as Instead of a book: Letters to a friend.  

Here are some of her epistolatory gems:

"I don't see the singingness of words entirely as an evil, although it can certainly lead writers astray."

In reference to the Fellows' Common Room at All Souls: "an exquisitely comfortable book-and-print-lined room, marinated in centuries of intellectual privilege."

Aging Fellow John Sparrow's little verse (quoted below) struck her as being "like a spell against decay:"

I'm accustomed to my dentures
To my deafness I'm resigned
I can cope with my bifocals --
But oh dear! I miss my mind.

Reading a book about postwar economics, she comments that although "one never ...had much time for politicians, but the extent of their idiocy when fully revealed is gobsmacking."

Delighted at Edward's having dedicated a book to her, she comments, "poems, like short stories, are difficult to read...because you read one and go greedily on to the next one, and the next and the next, until you realize that your eyes have started bouncing off them without taking them in."

The Hay Literary Festival, held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales she calls "much the nicest of all the literary festivals." This year it goes from May 23 to June 2, and Anna Burns will be there.