To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One. Doris Lessing

Kong’s Chinese University the professor who was teaching it wanted me to explain to his students - and, clearly, to him - the point of the story, which to him was that a woman needed privacy so much that she died for it. This need for privacy, said he, is foreign to their culture. (But perhaps not for long: a woman in Beijing recently wrote an applauded novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.) The famous culture gap, in this discussion, proved unbridgeable. I myself have never understood this story. I do not believe for a moment that Susan Rawlings knew what it was she wanted. She was driven, but by what? She was in love with death, that is certain, but why, when she had everything any reasonable person could want. A couple of German students in Berlin asked why these intelligent and socially responsible people did not go to a marriage counsellor. The storyteller’s riposte, that then there would be no story struck me, as well as them, as frivolous. Yes, they were raising literary questions rather more fundamental than they seemed to know. But the story comes out of some hidden place not only in me, but in many women of our time, otherwise it would not have proved so popular with them. My association is with Hardy’s heroine, Sue Bridehead, who said that there would come a time when people would choose not to live, or with Olive Schreiner’s heroine who said, ‘I’m so tired of it, and tired of the future before it comes.’ A kind of moral exhaustion. I believe we do not understand the reasons for these tides of feeling as well as we think we do. And sometimes I wonder if our clever methods of birth control have not struck deep into both men’s and women’s belief in themselves - into regions much deeper and more primitive than are amenable to sweet reason.

      ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ is saturated in the atmosphere of the sad and frightened time after World War Two, in Europe. I was in Germany, and I did see and experience people and places that went into the story. I visited a mental hospital, like the one I describe - and one ward in it later went up to make a scene in The Fifth Child. But that it is set in Germany is not the point at all. It is about the under-soul of Europe, the dark side where wars and killings and perversions are bred.

      ‘England versus England’ is often printed in magazines and collections outside this country. Other people look at us, and see what I saw when I wrote it: the depredations of our class system. I was in a mining village near Doncaster for a week, in a miner’s family, and I saw a good deal of what is described.

      ‘Between Men’ made a very funny half-hour television film. Television companies took more risks then than they do now.

      ‘A Woman on a Roof’ is liked by young people. It would make a half-hour film, and it nearly did.

      ‘The Day Stalin Died’ is appreciated by old Reds everywhere. When I wrote it, so I was told, the Communist Party high-ups laughed, but in public had to disapprove of it. It was the tone that was wrong: it does not do to treat serious matters lightly.

      ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’ is one of my favourite stories, but not necessarily other people’s.

      ‘Two Potters’ has never been one of my best-liked tales, but authors have to resign themselves to having unloved favourites. Another tale - this time a novel, also had as a basis or theme a serial dream - The Summer Before the Dark - and both have for me the attraction and curiosity due to the hidden sides of ourselves. The continuing dreams of the vast dusty plain, the fragile and mortal mud houses and the old potter, went on for a decade or so, and were as interesting to me as an old and much-loved tale. Or visits to a country one has known well and left.

      ‘A Room’ has the same quality - for me - of a world as real as our daytime world, where time slips and slides, and people we have never met are as familiar as old friends.

      ‘Wine’, a very short story, is a distilling of a four-year-long love affair.

      ‘He’ has sometimes annoyed feminists, but I think it tells the truth about many women’s feeling for men.

       Doris Lessing, 1994

       The Habit of Loving

      In 1947 George wrote again to Myra, saying that now the war was well over she should come home again and marry him. She wrote back from Australia, where she had gone with her two children in 1943 because there were relations there, saying she felt they had drifted apart; she was no longer sure she wanted to marry George. He did not allow himself to collapse. He cabled her the air fare and asked her to come over and see him. She came, for two weeks, being unable to leave the children for longer. She said she liked Australia; she liked the climate; she did not like the English climate any longer; she thought England was, very probably, played out; and she had become used to missing London. Also, presumably, to missing George Talbot.

      For George this was a very painful fortnight. He believed it was painful for Myra, too. They had met in 1938, had lived together for five years, and had exchanged for four years the letters of lovers separated by fate. Myra was certainly the love of his life. He had believed he was of hers until now. Myra, an attractive woman made beautiful by the suns and beaches of Australia, waved goodbye at the airport, and her eyes were filled with tears.

      George’s eyes, as he drove away from the airport, were dry. If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye. George dismissed the taxi early and walked through St James’s Park. Then it seemed too small for him, and he went to Green Park. Then he walked into Hyde Park and through to Kensington Gardens. When the dark came and they closed the great gates of the park he took a taxi home. He lived in a block of flats near Marble Arch. For five years Myra had lived with him there, and it was here he had expected to live with her again. Now he moved into a new flat near Covent Garden. Soon after that he wrote Myra a very painful letter. It occurred to him that he had often received such letters, but had never written one before. It occurred to him that he had entirely underestimated the amount of suffering he must have caused in his life. But Myra wrote him a sensible letter back, and George Talbot told himself that now he must finally stop thinking about Myra.

      Therefore, he became rather less of a dilettante in his work than he had been recently, and he agreed to produce a new play written by a friend of his. George Talbot was a man of the theatre. He had not acted in it for many years now; but he wrote articles, he sometimes produced a play, he made speeches on important occasions and was known by everyone. When he went into a restaurant people tried to catch his eye, and he often did not know who they were. During the four years since Myra had left, he had had a number of affairs with young women round and about the theatre, for he had been lonely. He had written quite frankly to Myra about these affairs, but she had never mentioned them in her letters. Now he was very busy for some months and was seldom at home; he earned quite a lot of money, and he had a few affairs with women who were pleased to be seen in public with him. He thought about Myra a great deal, but he did not write to her again, nor she to him, although they had agreed they would always be great friends.

      One evening in the foyer of a theatre he saw an old friend of his he had always admired, and he told the young woman he was with that that man had been the most irresistible man of his generation – no woman had been able to resist him. The young woman stared briefly across the foyer and said, ‘Not really?’

      When George Talbot got home that night he was alone, and he looked at himself with honesty in the mirror. He was sixty, but he did not look it. Whatever had attracted women to him in the past had never been his looks, and he was not much changed: a stoutish man, holding himself erect, grey-haired, carefully brushed, well dressed. He had not paid much attention to his face since those days many years ago when he had been an actor; but now he had an uncharacteristic fit of vanity and remembered that Myra had admired his mouth, while his wife had loved his eyes. He took to taking glances at himself in foyers and restaurants where there were mirrors, and he saw himself as unchanged. He was becoming conscious, though, of a discrepancy between that suave exterior and what he felt. Beneath his ribs his heart had become swollen and soft and painful, a monstrous area of sympathy playing enemy to what he had been. When people made jokes he was often unable to laugh; and his manner of talking, which was