Doris Lessing - Walking in the Shade - Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

I reviewed Leaves for the Burning somewhere, probably John O’London’s Weekly. Now, that was an interesting periodical. It was the product of a now defunct culture, or sub-culture. All over Britain then, in towns, in villages, were groups of mostly young people, drawn together by love of literature. They read books, they discussed books, they met in pubs and in each other’s houses. Some of them aspired to write, but that was long before the time when anyone who had read a novel aspired to write one. John O’London was not highbrow, it was nowhere near the level of, let’s say, The London Review of Books now. But it had standards and was jealous of them, printed verses, had literary competitions – a pity there is nothing like it now. Another periodical served the short story: The Argosy. It was serious enough, within limits. It would not, for instance, print a story by Camus or a piece by Virginia Woolf, but I remember enjoyable tales. This, too, had a readership far beyond London; its real strength was provincial literary culture. Another lost and gone magazine was Lilliput, a lively compendium of tales, odd pieces, pictures. It was edited for a while by Patrick Campbell, who will be remembered now as the man who in spite of – you’d think – an incapacitating stammer was on television, in panel games. A story of mine went into Lilliput. On the strength of it we had several lunches in L’Escargot, long and alcoholic lunches, as were then a perk for both writer and editor. L’Escargot has gone through several transmutations, even an unfortunate one as nouvelle cuisine, but it was a mystery then that often we were the only people eating there at lunchtime. In the evenings it was crammed.

A visiting American said, did I read science fiction? I offered Olaf Stapledon, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and he said it was a good beginning. Then he gave me an armful of science fiction novels. What I felt then I have felt ever since. I was excited by their scope, the wideness of their horizons, the ideas, and the possibilities for social criticism – particularly in this time of McCarthy, when the atmosphere was so thick and hostile to new ideas in the United States – and disappointed by the level of characterization and the lack of subtlety. My mentor said, But of course you can’t have subtlety of character, which depends on a cultural matrix, if the hero is pioneering engineer Dick Tantrix No. 65092 on the artificial planet Andromeda, Sector 25,000. Very well, but I have always felt that a sci-fi novel is yet to be written using density of characterization, like Henry James. It would be great comedy, for a start. But if what we do get is so wonderfully inventive and astonishing and mind-boggling, then why repine? In science fiction are some of the best stories of our time. To open a sci-fi novel, or to be with science fiction writers, if you’ve just come from a sojourn in the conventional literary world, is like opening windows into a stuffy and old-fashioned little room.

My new tutor said he would take me to a pub where science fiction writers went. He did. It must have been the White Horse in Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street. There was a room full of bespectacled lean men who turned as one to look warily at me – a masculine atmosphere. No, the word suggests a sexual lordliness. ‘Blokeish’, then? No, too homespun and ordinary. This was a clan, a group, a family, but without women. I felt I should not be there, though chaperoned by my American, whom they knew and welcomed. What they were was defensive: this was because they had been so thoroughly rejected by the literary world. They had the facetiousness, the jokiness, of their defensiveness. I babbled absurdly about Nietzsche’s Superman, and the Revelations, and they were embarrassed. I like to think the great Arthur C. Clarke was there, but he had probably left for the States by then.

My disappointment with what I thought of as a dull group of people, suburban, provincial, was my fault. In that prosaic room, in that very ordinary pub, was going on the most advanced thinking in this country. (The Astronomer Royal had said it would be ridiculous to think that we could send people to the moon.) What these men were talking about, thinking about, were satellite communications, rocketry, spacecraft and space travel, the social uses of television. They were linked with people like themselves across the world: ‘The Earth is the cradle of Mankind, but you cannot live in a cradle for ever.’ – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. ‘We are living,’ said Arthur C. Clarke, ‘in a moment unique in all history – the last days of Man’s existence as a citizen of a single planet.’ My trouble was that I didn’t have mathematics, physics – couldn’t speak their language. Because of my ignorance, I know I have been cut off from the developments going on in science – and science is where our frontiers are, in this time. It is not to the latest literary novel that people now look for news about humanity, as they did in the nineteenth century.

When lists are made of the best British writers since the war, they do not include Arthur C. Clarke, nor Brian Aldiss, nor any of the good science fiction writers. It is conventional literature that has turned out to be provincial.

And so I had made a life for me and for Peter. That was an achievement, and I was proud of myself. The most important part was Peter, who was enjoying this life, particularly the nursery school, in Kensington, and then the family atmosphere with Joan and Ernest. Never has there been a child so ready to make friends. Our days still began at five. Again I was reading to him and telling him stories for a couple of hours after he woke, because Joan’s bedroom was immediately below, and the floors were thin, and she did not wake till later. Or he listened to the radio. We have forgotten the role radio played before television. Peter loved the radio. He listened to everything. He listened to two radio plays based on novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, each an hour long, standing by the machine, absolutely riveted. What was he hearing? Understanding? I have no idea. It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults. At three or four, Peter understood everything, and at eight or nine read only comics. And I’ve seen this again and again with small children. A child of three sits entranced through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but four years later can tolerate only Rupert Bear.

I was writing Martha Quest, a conventional novel, though the demand then was for experimental novels. I played in my mind with a hundred ways of doing Martha Quest, pulling shapes about, playing with time, but at the end of all this, the novel was straightforward. I was dealing with my painful adolescence, my mother, all that anguish, the struggle for survival.

And now there arrived a letter from my mother, saying she was coming to London, she was going to live with me and help me with Peter, and – here was the inevitable, surreal, heartbreaking ingredient – she had taught herself typing and would be my secretary.

I collapsed. I simply went to bed and pulled the covers over my head. When I had taken Peter to nursery school, I crept away into the dark of my bed and stayed there until I had to bring him home.

And now – again–there is the question of time, tricksy time, and until I came to write this and was forced to do my work with calendars and obdurate dates, I had thought, vaguely, that I was in Denbigh Road for … well, it was probably three years or so. But that was because, having been returned to child seeing, everything new and immediate, I had been returned – well, partly – to child time. No matter how I wriggled and protested. No, it can’t have been only a year, it was a year before I went to Joan’s, and I had been there only six months or so when the letter came from my mother. Yet those months seem now like years. Time is different at different times in one’s life. A year in your thirties is much shorter than a child’s year – which is almost endless – but long compared with a year in your forties; whereas a year in your seventies is a mere blink.