The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

propitiate. He behaved, in fact, as if he were about fifteen, a boy newly defending his manhood against his family.

      And Margaret complained to Martha that Mark was as stubborn as a mule, as close as a clam. No, she had no intention of putting Martha in any false positions, but that reviewer had put his finger on it – dear Bertie. Martha knew Bertie Worth perhaps? No? He used to visit the old house before it was sold. But Bertie had said in The Times that Mark had no moral sense. He lacked a feeling for essential values. And she departed, emphatically.

      To return, less emphatically, indeed, with a curious evasiveness, to say she had just the right person to live in the basement. She was a Mrs Ashe, the widow of a Major Ashe, ex-Indian Army. It turned out she was nearly seventy and difficult. The right person to run that house, to give Francis what he needed? Put thus, Margaret cried out that she was really such a dear old thing. She looked quite extraordinarily guilty. She’s up to something – again. Mark said. What?

      Margaret retired. Temporarily. Telephone calls and visits pursued the cause of Mrs Ashe. Why? There was something odd about it, something wrong. They could not define it. Particularly as everything, the texture of life itself seemed wrong, ugly, with so much hinted at and hidden – waiting to explode. Yes, they were waiting. They were sitting time out. Or, Mark was: Martha only until she must leave.

      Before she left, she could at least try and do something about Mark’s finances: he asked her to ‘make suggestions’. Mark’s father had left money, but not much. The upkeep of this house, which belonged jointly to the three brothers, was paid by Mark, who lived in it. He spent nothing on himself, but Lynda and Francis cost a great deal. And so did Martha and her salary, as she pointed out. But that would not be for long.

      The publisher who had been a friend of the family had signed with Mark a contract that conceded nothing to friendship. There had been an advance of one hundred and fifty pounds and he had earned not much more than that on the war novel before it had stopped selling. He had contracted for three more books on the same terms. A ridiculous contract, which he should not have signed. But he had no agent. A second novel had been begun and abandoned: he had ideas for others. He said he was not particularly interested in writing another book. He was not a writer, he said. He supposed, one day, he would write another book.

      The factory made money on the machines for hospitals. It could make more. But Mark said he was not interested in the business from that point of view. If he could not use the profits for what he called ‘having fun with new ideas’ then he wouldn’t bother with the factory at all.

      If he were able to sell the war novel in America?

      An American agent arrived to see Mark, who received her in his study. She was a woman of about thirty-five, well turned-out, full of professional friendliness. For her benefit (indeed, one could do no less) Mark offered ‘the writer’ and ‘the writer’s secretary’ – Martha.

      Miss Sayers sat at ease, conducting with relaxed efficiency this interview which was only one, after all, in a tour of British writers. She said she liked Mark’s novel, for what it was, but that kind of thing, the protest novel, was dated.

      She saw his novel as a protest novel?

      War was not a good thing, and therefore a novel about war was a protest novel – her mind seemed to work in this way. Or perhaps she had not read it? At least she was able to use with familiarity the name of the chief character.

      Perhaps she was one of the people who don’t know how to read. Very few do, after all.

      However that was, she explained that the war novel was hard to sell in her country at that time. But she was interested in Mark’s second. That was why she was here: she would be so very privileged to think she could handle Mark’s second book which she was sure would be an advance on his first. And what was his new book about?

      ‘Life,’ said Mark, bland, intending to be rude. ‘Well,’ she cried, gaily, ‘of course, it is bound to be.’ But if Mark could give her some idea, she would then be in a position to … ‘You are an agent, you say?’

      ‘Yes, that is so. And I think you’ll find one of the best known.’

      ‘I see. Well perhaps it would be better to wait until the book is finished? Otherwise I might find myself altering it in the hope that you might handle it?’

      ‘Well, now, Mark. I really wouldn’t like you to think that I’d be capable of putting any pressure at all on my authors, but it is true that I feel myself a friend to my authors, I do like to think they take my advice.’

      ‘And what might that be?’

      Here she began a short lecture, frowning, like a teacher concerned to remember words from notes made. It was a lecture given, that was clear, many times already.

      What Mark should understand, said she, was that only second-rate writers dealt with social conditions, or politics, or concerned themselves in any way at all with public affairs or …

      ‘Oh I don’t know … there was Tolstoy, and Balzac, and Dickens and …’

      Her face glazed, at the effort of associating these names, ‘classics’ (she had read them?), with her subject.

      ‘All that kind of thing,’ she insisted with authority. ‘The real great artist creates truth and beauty from within himself, he deals with the eternal truths …’ And so on.

      It took about fifteen minutes. Mark and Martha listened, in silence, fascinated, to the opinion currently in vogue in America, being put so trippingly in this alien tongue.

      Finally she asked if Mark would be prepared to sign a document giving her first refusal of his new book, when finished. She was not prepared to pay anything for this: his return would be, that he had an agent and a friend.

      She left, having asked if she could use the telephone: she needed to check if her interview with her next author, a young man from Wales about whom she asked if the opinion (it was Mark’s opinion too, she supposed) that he was the finest poet since Auden, was still viable.

      This visit raised interesting questions … One was: if Mark’s novel had been published now, instead of 1948, what reception would it have got? Two, three years, had changed the climate completely. ‘Out’ was the humanitarianism, warmth, protest, anger. What was ‘in’ was the point of view put by the able Miss Sayers. Why? Very simple indeed. The ‘cold war’ was spreading, had already spread, from politics, to the arts. Any attitude remotely associated with ‘communism’ was suspect, indeed, dangerous. Few intellectuals had not been associated with the left, in some form of it, during the ‘thirties and the ‘forties. Precisely these intellectuals were now running, in one way and another, the arts. Tom, Dick and Harry, they were now peddling, for all they were worth, a point of view summed up by the slogan: The Ivory Tower. This was admirable, subtle, adult, good, and above all, artistic. Its opposite was crude, childish, bad, inartistic.

      In America a period of political reaction can be foretold as much when publishers and agents and editors, those most sensitive of barometers, talk about Art in capital letters as when panels of psychoanalysts issue statements that political rebellion on the part of the youth is a sign of emotional immaturity. In Britain hard times are on the way when there are rashes of articles on Jane Austen and Flaubert. ‘Jane Austen vs. Thomas Hardy’; ‘Flaubert the Master, Zola the Journalist.’

      ‘Besides Sappho, Jane Austen and Firbank, who could be deemed fit inhabitants of that Ivory Tower which …’

      If the war novel had been published now, it would have fitted neatly inside the Ivory Tower.

      It might even have made some money?

      As things were, Mark had an overdraft of a thousand pounds, his bank manager protesting; and large unpaid bills for Lynda’s hospital and Francis’s school.

      Something ought to be done.

      Not knowing what, they talked. To good effect, so it turned out.

      On a crucial evening they were in his study. It was after