Editorial by Jennie
One of my greatest pleasures over the past few years was to visit David Daiches on occasional afternoons while the artist Joyce Gunn-Cairns drew him. He died in July aged 92 and after his funeral I went for the last time to his flat in Belgrave Crescent, this time with family and friends to remember this wonderful man. He could hardly have lived a fuller life or reached a greater age, but the comforts such observations are meant to bring are fugitive.
On the cushion of David's chair by the bay window, I noticed a penny which must have slipped out of his pocket, and which nobody had had the heart to move. The sight of it gave me one of those moments when the whole curve of a relationship conflates into a feeling that I can best describe as the equivalent of a musical note, in this case a very sweet one.
Joyce would sit and draw, her pencil making permanent those nuances of mood and expression that comprise the facial register of our fleeting humanity. I sometimes recorded our conversations. David had no great desire to extemporise at length, preferring to share jewels of anecdote, often illustrated with snatches of song and humorous verse. At this stage of his life, the man who had put his stamp on twentieth-century literary studies on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to appreciate lively conversation and human warmth over disquisitions on literature. After all, his views on the respective merits of Stevenson, Burns, Woolf, MacDiarmid et al had been expressed in the boundless volumes of his published critical output.
I know I was privileged to have had this opportunity to spend time in his company. He had a serenity that brought me into tune with my more contemplative and receptive self. He told me that he would sit at the window every day looking out over Belgrave Gardens and that this absorbed and sustained him. And indeed, in moments of silence, his attention would be drawn to the green vista outside, with the city torrent pouring down to the Water of Leith Ð and an expression would come over his face, an expression that I will never forget. I knew it myself, as it were, from the inside, although it took me a while to identify it. He looked out on the changes on the face of nature with the attentiveness of a parent tenderly engrossed in their baby. I am sure that he would have been revered as a sage in certain countries, and that people would have made what would effectively be a spiritual pilgrimage to sit quietly in his presence.