Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski review – supremely sharp
When the novelist Jenny Diski was diagnosed with cancer, she wrote in an essay in the London Review of Books (A Diagnosis) that her first feeling was of embarrassment: she did not want to join the herd who had already written about cancer; and yet she recognised that, as a writer, she could not avoid the subject.
If you knew nothing of her, you might assume this to have been the disdainful shunning of what she seemed to see as a cancer club, but it was more that apartness was key to the way she wrote. Debating in another essay (The Natural Death Centre) a friend’s proposal that they jointly buy a plot in Highgate cemetery, she envisaged her possible headstone: “Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” Solitude being her thing, she decided against the grave share, but her DIY epitaph remains appropriate. For in these brilliant, singular, posthumously published columns from the LRB, she writes in an adjacent way: the truth is “over there”.
Diski does not strain to engage with writers; she is more likely to ask why it was necessary for their books to exist in the first place. She inquires of Jeremy Treglown’s biography of Roald Dahl: “What is the function of an adult biography of the man?” before interpreting the poisonous pull of Dahl’s stories on children: “They speak to the last overt remains of the disreputable, unsocialised, inelegant parts of themselves the grownups are trying so hard to push firmly underground.” She knows herself all about the feral child-within-the-adult, as The Friendly Spider Programme – about overcoming her arachnophobia – reveals, ending with a hairy inspiration to out-Dahl Dahl.
Sometimes, Diski writes loftily: she seems to float above her subjects – writing as weightlessly as a bather in the Dead Sea, buoyed up by salt. In Did Jesus Walk on Water Because He Couldn’t Swim? she is especially entertaining and erudite (she worked so hard at all these pieces). This is a review of The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times. And again, she is incredulous at the book’s existence, remembering how, growing up, even as a non-practising Jew, the sea ”didn’t seem kosher”.
Her skill as a novelist assists: an invented exchange between Morgan and Rupert Murdoch is priceless
In her introduction, Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB, writes: “One of the pleasures of reading Jenny Diski, especially the essays, is that pleasure is such a large part of it.” Diski was worth hiring on any subject: feed her base metal, she turned it into gold. When not writing about herself, she is at her best considering the nasty and/or nondescript. Her subjects include Jeffrey Dahmer, Howard Hughes and Richard Branson, and she does not let Christine Keeler get away with a stuffy, faux-respectable take on her past. It is only because she has forced her way through “every damn word” of Keith Richards’s coarsely self-serving autobiography (in which he reveals Mick Jagger has a “tiny todger”) that she is determined to go ahead with her review. She is the most undeceived of writers – and surprising. Who else would combine reviewing a biography of Denis Thatcher with a reading of Melville’s Moby-Dick?
In Mirror Images, a review of Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade, the pleasure is in the power-play: Blair and Morgan become diminutive figures, dwarfed by Diski’s writing. Her skill as a novelist assists: an invented exchange between Morgan and Rupert Murdoch is priceless. She is adversarially entertaining rather than belligerent. Why fight when – if you have the skill – you can arrange for writers to fall on their own swords?
Related: Jenny Diski remembered by Ian Patterson
Wilmers writes: “Jenny liked sleep and often took to her bed; she liked blankness of all kinds: white surfaces, uneventful days.” The question arises: how much did depression feed her writing? In these essays, her gloom is steadying, her melancholy cheering. In the entertaining Moving Day, her “live-in lover” moves out: “It feels like sadness, but not mine; or rather, not a personal sadness, but one of great immensity, and slightly up and to the left of me, where I lie saturating the pillow.” Here, once again, is that sense that what matters is an aside.
Other autobiographical essays are superb: A Feeling for Ice, about whiteness, psychiatric hospital and an estranged mother; Fashion As Art, about her relationship with clothes; and Staying Awake, in which she describes sleep beautifully. And I love her perkily comfortless piece about old age, However I Smell, in which she lets it be known that her hairdresser keeps saying to her: “Ah bless.” She writes: “There are other signs that I am no longer young, but the ah-bless is the most open and public.” Blessing Diski was an impertinence – little did these innocents know upon whom their blessings were landing. Her writing will forever remain young, funny and rebellious. And her essays – dare I say it – earn a blessing even when what they consider is cursed.
• Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski is published by Vintage (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
