Diana Athill is perhaps best known for her memoir Somewhere Towards the End, but Letters to a Friend could eclipse it. It's a collection of letters written between 1981 and 2007 to the American poet Edward Field. Athill was introduced to him through their mutual friendship with the eccentric American author Alfred Chester, whom she published in the 1950s and '60s as an editorial director at the London publishing house André Deutsch, a position she held from 1952 to her retirement four decades later. Athill, now 94, is happily living in an "old people's place," as she calls it.
Each letter is an unalloyed delight; articulate to the point of eloquence, and candid, even about the naughty bits and her frustration with her long-time lover, Barry Reckord (a Jamaican playwright now deceased). They were together for years, in a relationship so open that, at one point, Athill invited one of his girlfriends to live with them.
Field reads Athill's letters to his partner of more than half a century, Neil Derrick, who was blinded by an operation for a brain tumor. Athill cheers the couple when they decide to write a commercial novel, and revels in their success when they pull it off. In France for Princess Di's funeral, Athill mixes her compassion for Di's boys with her contempt for the royal family. She has little sympathy for Di, a "foolish, flighty, unhappy girl being turned into a saint just because she was pretty, and affectionate to children and sad people."
Every letter in Letters to a Friend is a small masterpiece; chatty, companionable and very, very intelligent. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.