Diana Athill and Molly Parkin: Two legends nowhere towards the end



Molly Parkin (left) and Diana Athill. Pic © Laura Lockington

 
Here's a very special and exclusive picture of two legends who met last week for dinner in London: Molly Parkin, close on 79, and retired premier UK literary editor and latterday celebrated memoirist Diana Athill, 93 in December.

I shall be reviewing Molly's extraordinary memoirs Welcome to Mollywood next week. Diana - who is an honourable exception to my general bar against Dianas - won the Best Biography of the Year at the Costa Book Awards 2008 for her frank memoir Somewhere Towards the End at the age of 91. The judges described the work as: 'A perfect memoir of old age – candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and above all, beautifully, beautifully written.'

Both Molly and Diana represent an amazing (re-)flowering of talents at ages usually treated as infirmity. Molly is writing at the height of her powers; her erotic novels will be reissued next year; and she's putting on her one-woman show at Ronnie Scott's on November 24 (on stage at 8pm).

In Somewhere, Diana reveals, among other things, that she preferred black men as lovers (least boring...): and for more details you'll have to buy her book. She describes atheism as, 'vastly more exciting and beautiful than any amount of ingenuity in making up fairy stories', a thought that went down well with fashionable secularists of the British intelligentsia raised on science drip-feeds.

Well, I didn't say Diana was wise. But at least, and unlike a lot of other Dianas, she does not whine.

Molly Parkin savaged by the Dowager Melly: Oh Diana!

The patron saint of Dianas

A most brutal attack in yesterday's Mail on Sunday by the Dowager Diana Melly on my glorious fiancee Molly Parkin.

Through the mediumship of the journalist Moira Petty, she challenges Molly's story in her memoirs Welcome to Mollywood that Diana's late husband and jazz star George Melly invited his former sometime lover Moll into his bed as he lay dying for a final cuddle. 'Shameless lies!' the dowager hollers before making all sorts of scandalous allegations against Molly that can only serve to boost Mollywood sales.

Reprints!

Darling Molly is more than capable of dealing with Diana. But I would point out that the TV cameraman who Diana says failed to record Moll and George's non-under-the-duvet swansong had left the room when George felt poignantly cuddlesome. Molly politely declined his invitation, incidentally.

I think the problem here lies in the dowager's name, Diana. Ever since the late sainted Princess Di made a martyr of herself in various ways, the name has taken on the mantle of suffering, whingeing and attention-seeking. I believe the very name Diana has assumed an infectious personality of its own which bestows upon all its incarnations called Diana a querulous and whiny disposition. I may be wrong, but I have noticed this about Dianas. Frankly I won't have them in the house. I caution you against anyone called Diana.

For this reason then I cannot be angry with the dowager. Like all Dianas I am prepared to blame someone else for the fault. In this case Princess Diana.