Doris Lessing - The Sun Between Their Feet - Collected African Stories Volume Two

MODERN CLASSIC

DORIS LESSING

The Sun Between Their Feet

Collected African Stories

Volume Two

Cover

Title Page MODERN CLASSIC DORIS LESSING The Sun Between Their Feet Collected African Stories Volume Two

Preface

Spies I Have Known

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man

The Black Madonna

The Trinket Box

The Pig

Traitors

The Words He Said

Lucy Grange

A Mild Attack of Locusts

Flavours of Exile

Getting off the Altitude

A Road to the Big City

Plants and Girls

Flight

The Sun Between Their Feet

The Story of Two Dogs

The New Man

A Letter from Home

Hunger

Bibliographical Note

About the Author

By the same author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the Publisher

This collection has in it some of the stories I like best. One of them is the title story to this volume, The Sun Between Their Feet. It was written out of memories of a part of Rhodesia that was very different from the part I was brought up in, which was Banket, in Mashonaland, not far from Sinoia. But I used to visit around the Marandellas and Macheke districts, which are mostly sandveld, and scattered all over with clumps of granite boulders piled on each other in a way I haven’t seen anywhere else. These piles appear to be so arbitrary, so casual, that sometimes it seems as if a perched boulder may topple with a puff of wind. I spent hours, days, weeks sitting around, walking about, on that pale crusty soil, so different from the heavy dark soil of the district my father’s farm was in, examining the vegetation and the insects.

Here, too, is The Story of Two Dogs, which I think is as good as any I have done. And it is a ‘true’ story: at least, there were two pairs of dogs in my childhood, the first called Lion and Tiger, and the second Jock and Bill. I don’t know now which incidents belong to which pair of dogs; but it is true that Bill, or the ‘stupid’ dog, rescued Jock, the ‘clever’ dog, by gnawing through a strand of wire in which he was trapped – thus wearing his teeth down to stubs and shortening his life.

A Letter from Home seems to me to have in it the stuff of present-day South Africa. What sparked it off was hearing the account of a white friend, living in Cape Town with another – two bachelors in a small house – looked after, or nannied, by a large Zulu woman who treated them both like small boys. And then, as food for the same story, was my thinking about another friend, a marvellous poet, so I am told – but I don’t understand his own language – who writes his poetry in one of the very many languages of the world which ‘no one speaks’. Except the million or so people born into it. Which leads one on to the thought that if a poet is born into one of the common languages he can be a world-poet; but if he is, for instance, Afrikaans, he can be as great as any poet in the world but it would be hard for this fact to cross the language barriers.

Of the five long stories, or short novels in Five, Hunger which is reprinted here is the failure and, it seems, the most liked.

It came to be written like this. I was in Moscow with a delegation of writers, back in 1952. It was striking that while the members of the British team differed very much politically, we agreed with each other on certain assumptions about literature – in brief, that writing had to be a product of the individual conscience, or soul. Whereas the Russians did not agree at all – not at all. Our debates, many and long, were on this theme.

Stalin was still alive. One day we were taken to see a building full of presents for Stalin, rooms full of every kind of object – pictures, photographs, carpets, clothes, etc., all gifts from his grateful subjects and exhibited by the State to show other subjects and visitors from abroad. It was a hot day. I left the others touring the stuffy building and sat outside to rest. I was thinking about what Russians were demanding in literature – greater simplicity, simple judgements of right and wrong. We, the British, had argued against it, and we felt we were right and the Russians wrong. But after all, there was Dickens, and such a short time ago, and his characters were all good or bad – unbelievably Good, monstrously Bad, but that didn’t stop him from being a great writer. Well, there I was, with my years in Southern Africa behind me, a society as startlingly unjust as Dickens’s England. Why, then, could I not write a story of simple good and bad, with clear-cut choices, set in Africa? The plot? Only one possible plot – that a poor black boy or girl should come from a village to the white man’s rich town and … there he would encounter, as occurs in life, good and bad, and after much trouble and many tears he would follow the path of …

I tried, but it failed. It wasn’t true. Sometimes one writes things that don’t come off, and feels more affectionate towards them than towards those that worked.

Flight is, I think, a good story. But do I like it because I remember a very old man in a suburb in Africa, in a small house crammed with half-grown girls, all his life in his shelf of birds under jacaranda trees well away from that explosive house? In a green lacy shade he would sit and croon to his birds, or watch them wheel and speed and then come dropping back through the sky to his hand. The memory has something in it of a nostalgic dream.

I am addicted to The Black Madonna, which is full of the bile that is produced in me by the thought of ‘white’ society in Southern Rhodesia as I knew and hated it.

Traitors is about two little girls. Why? It should have been a boy and a girl: the children were my brother and myself. I remember there was a short period when I longed for a sister: perhaps this tale records that time.

I have only recently written Spies I Have Known and The Non-Marrying Man.

Which brings me to a question raised often by people who write to me, usually from universities. In what order has one written this or that?

This seems to be a question of much interest to scholars. I don’t see why. No one who understands anything about how artists work – and there is surely no excuse not to, since artists of all kinds write so plentifully about our creative processes – could ask such a question at all. You can think about a story for years and then write it down in an hour. You may work out the shape of a novel for decades, before spending a few months working on it.

As for the stories like these – which I always think of under the heading of This Was the Old Chief’s Country, the title of my first collection of stories – when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recogize it; it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the same time, which was once the Old Chief’s Country.

Doris Lessing

January 1972

I don’t want you to imagine that I am drawing any sort of comparison between Salisbury, Rhodesia, of thirty years ago, a one-horse town then, if not now, and more august sites. God forbid. But it does no harm to lead into a weighty subject by way of the minuscule.