Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney - Collected Stories Volume Two

DORIS LESSING

The Temptation of Jack Orkney

Collected Stories Volume Two

Cover

Title Page DORIS LESSING The Temptation of Jack Orkney Collected Stories Volume Two

Preface

Our Friend Judith

Each Other

Homage for Isaac Babel

Outside the Ministry

Dialogue

Notes for a Case History

Out of the Fountain

An Unposted Love Letter

A Year in Regent’s Park

Mrs Fortescue

Side Benefits of an Honourable Profession

An Old Woman and Her Cat

Lions, Leaves, Roses …

Report on the Threatened City

Not a Very Nice Story

The Other Garden

The Italian Sweater

The Temptation of Jack Orkney

The Thoughts of a Near-Human

Bibliographical Note

By the Same Author

About the Author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘Our Friend Judith’, together with ‘Each Other’ and ‘A Man and Two Women’, (the last two from To Room Nineteen, Collected Stories Volume One ) went to make a French film, A Man and Two Women, with the beautiful Valerie Stroh. This film got itself noticed at film festivals.

‘Our Friend Judith’ was based on an original and independent woman I knew, who lived as I describe. Such women are often almost unnoticed, and like it that way. Their views on their lives and times are often startling.

‘Each Other’ is about incest. More than once I have known a brother and sister who were lovers for years. It is no accident that this relationship is illegal, and frowned on, for, clearly, it can be so powerful that any subsequent loves seem thin and empty. If incest were permitted then ordinary loves and marriages might come to an end. This is not my personal experience, I must quickly add.

‘Homage for Isaac Babel’ was inspired by a young girl’s attempts to be literary and grown-up, but she only achieved the directness and economy she had been told to admire in Isaac Babel when she was in love, and then only in a literary postscript at the end of a consciously literary letter. The story is also about what some people feel to be the innocence of Britain, due to its sheltered and uninvaded experience, compared with the terrible knowledge of peoples exposed to the raw impacts of war.

‘Outside the Ministry’ I think is one of my better stories, with implications far beyond the small events described. Africans tend to like it – that is both, black and white Africans, and often write to me about it.

‘Dialogue’ is about mental illness, the experience that an ordinary sane person may have when with someone not sane, or struggling to stay sane. To spend time with such an afflicted one is to have all one’s assumptions about sanity, normality, life itself, challenged so uncomfortably that the questions may never go away.

‘Notes for a Case History’, like ‘England versus England’ (in Volume One) is another tale that seems to be liked more outside Britain than in it. Both are about the class system that afflicts this country.

‘Out of the Fountain’ was first published in a British Airways flight magazine. I like writing stories for newspapers and magazines, for it was in these, when the great mass-circulation newspapers were born, last century, that short stories of the kind we know were first born – Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekov, for instance, to my mind still the greatest of the short story writers. This tale makes use of that happy process when a sequence of events, or a person, appears in the talk of one person, and then in another’s, perhaps years later and in a different context. You realise you are the witness of an unfolding drama, and decide to wait patiently for the next instalment … this process, rather differently used, and extended into dreams and dreaming, is the basis of ‘Two Potters’ in Volume One. The immediate provocation for ‘Out of the Fountain’ was hearing how flower children, all the offspring of well-off parents, burned piles of dollars in Central Park, New York, to express their abhorrence of filthy lucre.

An Unposted Love Letter’ says something about the disciplines that go into writing, or into any artistic creation.

‘A Year in Regent’s Park’, and ‘Lions, Leaves and Roses’, and ‘The Other Garden’ were written because I lived for some months near that most charming of London parks. Every morning I got up early, to walk beside the lakes before people came and while ducks and geese were still in possession of lawns and shrubberies they clearly thought of as theirs, seeing humans as mere daytime usurpers of birds’ rightful territory. These three tales, or sketches, or impressions, I hope convey something of the pleasures of London parks. I no longer live near Regent’s Park. It is no longer ‘my’ park. At least, only in these three pieces.

‘Report on the Threatened City’ is a story that attracts letters from readers. I was thinking of San Francisco when I wrote, whose inhabitants always have an earthquake somewhere at the back of their minds, but they would not dream of moving away. I wouldn’t either, for it is surely one of the most beautiful of the world’s cities. This tale is sometimes classed as space fiction, or even as science fiction, but I see it as the starkest realism, for it is about our way of opening our hearts and minds to near and immediate dangers, but ignoring equally threatening long-term disasters. It appeared first in Playboy magazine, which in those days printed serious stories.

‘Not a Very Nice Story’ is another letter-attractor. This is because its ‘message’ can be taken to advocate immorality, and people either approve or disapprove. (I don’t like ‘messages’ in literature.) It certainly is about that side of our natures which has never heard of right and wrong. Once upon a time homage was paid to this anarchic area when they had days, once a year, when all morality and restraints were cancelled under a Lord of Misrule. Certain office parties carry on the tradition.

‘The Temptation of Jack Orkney’ is – like ‘The Habit of Loving’, and ‘To Room Nineteen’, and ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ (the last three are from Volume One) – a story with hidden depths. Often this happens without a writer knowing how she or he has tapped a deeper vein. The new way of education, which is often to omit any teaching of history, may mean that some young thing may enquire about the title, and then you have to spell out the irony, that Jack Orkney sees God (and the other hidden dimensions of life) as a temptation to compromise with the integrities of his stern atheism, whereas for many centuries, not to say millennia, temptations were to do with the flesh, and the lack of belief in God. A nice little version of the whirligig of time, this one. You may try saying to such a youngster, ‘Go to a picture gallery and see how the saints were tormented by visions of food and sex and happy disbelief.’ But they look at you, these infinitely indulged ones, with amazement, for it has never occurred to them to do without anything in the way of fleshly delights, unless it is for fear of AIDS, or because they are slimming.