by Jenny Diski
I remember a row she had one lunchtime with an American lesbian couple, about a woman in similar social and financial circumstances to Doris’s before she left Frank Wisdom. The visitors were wondering why on earth the woman didn’t just up and leave. Doris had, after all. Eventually she exploded, talking to the women as if they were children who knew nothing about the world and its difficulties. She spoke as she gathered and clattered plates and made her way to the kitchen, where the last word was kept. Her voice, harsh, barely controlled, told you she had now lost patience with you and your ignorance. ‘You can’t just up and leave when you’ve got a house and two children and no money of your own. How stupid can you people get? Most people aren’t rich and privileged like you.’ Unhappy women were all over the place, stuck in suburbias all over the world; but they couldn’t just leave, with nowhere to go, no money, no support. The women were silenced. Doris took a moment in the kitchen preparing the pudding and rearranging her furious expression. When she returned to the living room no one mentioned the subject of women leaving their unsatisfactory men, or the fact that Doris’s argument, if that was what it was, was made without any reference to her own very real experience.
Outbursts of this kind (not all of them shouted) were generally known to those of us who were close to her as ‘being told off by Doris’. They were received in silence, no one took or was invited to take a different position. They silenced the company, who quickly started talking about something else. Asked what I thought about her novel Love, Again, I said I found it improbable, given that it was posing as a realistic novel, that the man and woman who had fallen in love in middle age refused to have sex with each other because each had a husband or wife they didn’t love but who needed them in some way. I wasn’t arguing that they should leave their spouses, but that their affair should have continued through the years unconsummated suggested an unnecessary sort of morality in a modern, grown-up, realist setting. Doris gave me one of her looks. The several other people in the room hushed their conversation. ‘Well, it’s a good thing, Jenny, that there are some people still left who, unlike you, take sex seriously.’ Again, Doris hoisted herself up from the carpet in mid-sentence, and went to fetch another plate of biscuits.
With increasing impatience over the years, Doris rejected the idea that The Golden Notebook was intended to be a work of feminism. It’s hard to see why, unless she wanted to make the point that writing of any kind is always a private, autobiographical affair even if it isn’t only that. By the end of her thinking life she got very angry at the suggestion that she was a feminist icon. In the 1990s and later, she was writing and talking about the damage that ‘radical’ feminism was doing to the spirit of men who were becoming wimps as a result. In that interview in 2001 with Barbara Ellen, she is quoted as saying: ‘It’s become absolutely automatic. If it was some polemical crusade, it might be something, but it’s like young women have got ten minutes to spare, so they may as well spend it rubbishing men. It’s part of the culture now. There’s an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.’ And here, I suspect, was another reason Peter was as he was that had nothing to do with Doris’s parenting skills.
Many of her later books (for example, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five; The Making of the Representative of Planet Eight; The Cleft) are hymns to atavistic battles; they describe trysts between men and women experiencing uncommon ecstasies of love and necessary separations, all unsullied by picking children up from school, or paying the gas bill late. Women with flowing hair familiar from Middle Earth and suchlike fantasy fiction are followed by white horses whose manes they stroke and into whose ears they whisper. The Cleft is actually a prehistoric tale of the muscularity of women discovering their creative reproductive powers while the men break away to make discoveries and have adventures by sea and on foot.
Doris wrote to John and Jean, and they came to London to visit as children a few times. Jean came for a couple of months when she was in her late teens or early twenties, and I was living in Charrington Street. Like many other visitors who came from all over the world to sit at Doris’s feet and gather wisdom (in Jean’s case, a late-flowering mother/daughter relationship), she was given to me to take care of because Doris was in the middle of an especially difficult bit in the current book. ‘Take her shopping. Show her around. Let her meet your friends,’ were her instructions. But our worlds were so different, Jean’s and mine, and so unimaginable each to the other, that the visit could only cause pain, and I think perhaps was intended to. This was a thing about Doris: it was never clear whether she knew how painful or disastrous her actions or pronouncements could be. Was it just carelessness, a desperation to get back to her typewriter, or did she know perfectly well the anguish she would cause these former fans or relatives?
Jean and I went wandering around the centre of what was thought of as London in full swing. We visited boutiques, where Jean tried on clothes she couldn’t imagine wearing at home, and bookshops whose books would not get through customs; she sat in an agony of shyness in the pub with old men and drunk poets. I recently had an email from someone who remembers Doris ‘trying to palm off ’ a young woman ‘barely out of her teens’ on him at a party, and the excruciating embarrassment the girl showed at the whole incident. He wondered in his email whether it had been me. I don’t remember, but I’m fairly sure it was Jean, very far from being comfortable with casual meetings and beddings with strangers.
Wilfulness? The necessity of art? The pain that others have to tolerate so that art could be made? I don’t know. I know about feeling trapped and that sometimes you have to be somewhere else in order to do what you need to do, but I couldn’t imagine leaving my daughter Chloe permanently in order to fulfil my promise. Perhaps that’s just cowardice and Doris would say, I think, that I was lucky I didn’t have to. I was in the privileged position of having enough money to live on from teaching, and then when I had a breakdown and actually started to write my first novel she gave me an allowance. And I had a husband committed to our daughter and to sharing the childcare. I hadn’t grown up in the boondocks, where one wrong footfall caused an avalanche of disapproval. For all the misogyny that exists even now, as bad and perhaps worse than in my childhood, I never felt that I was held back by being a woman. But I knew that others were. In any case, she wasn’t alone; she had support from friends and comrades, and from Joan Rodker, whose flat at the top of her house Doris rented. And there was Peter, there was always and would always be Peter, the chosen one; Peter would be there for Doris and he would certainly be there for the Wisdom children who had been left behind. There is a cruelty there (is it possible that it was ‘just’ thoughtlessness?). There is self-justification that can make some sense to one’s own conscience. But it’s very hard to buy once you put Peter into the equation, and then on top of that add me, both of us at the high point of adolescence. I think I know something of the power of the necessity to write, and the importance of finding a place to do so. But however highly you value Doris’s wisdom in her books, what is happening here? I can’t speak of the two older children and the ways in which they managed to cope with their abandonment, but at Doris’s funeral, Jean (John having died of a heart attack) stood and spoke of being glad that Doris had left her and let her (Jean) have a life of her own.
It was something that Peter never had. Peter had no life of his own, ever. No life at all, except perhaps an exotic inner life. And I have doubts even about that. He and I didn’t like each other from the start, but even though we didn’t have a good relationship, we were engaged in each other’s lives for much of our own. He had the self-important but kindly thought of helping me out when he heard of my troubles. He was sixteen. There wasn’t much chance of his understanding how dangerous or painful this was for him to do. Peter’s existence was the saddest and emptiest I can imagine. His funeral gave those of us choosing its form a probl
em. What kind of eulogy could be written for a man who from nineteen had never worked or had a proper job, no real relationships, sexual or otherwise, who had barely gone outside for the last half of his life, who lived alone with his mother, lay on his bed when he wasn’t watching television in the afternoon and evening and eventually became so gross, in the sense of fat and uncouth, that very few people could put up with it? How much he knew of how the world saw him is another mystery. It seemed that his life had effectively stopped at around nineteen, but then we found a drawing done by a friend of ours from school at around that age which showed a strikingly good-looking young man, smoking a cigarette with his head lolling back, as if waiting for us all to come and find him his place in the world. But it was there, in the inviting drawing, full of confidence and promise, that Peter’s world came to a stop. His friends from St Christopher’s came and we remembered the fun we sometimes had at Charrington Street, sitting around the kitchen table, or gathered up in Peter’s room. While I listened on my Dansette to Bob Dylan’s first album (1962 – with Doris, along with a million other parents or surrogate parents, bellowing from downstairs: ‘Turn that noise off. He can’t even sing!’), Peter was grabbed by the surreal, and the big, emotional choral anthems. We talked to people who knew and remembered those days, hard as it was.
His funeral included the Goons’s song, ‘Ying Tong Idlle I Po’, which he used to sing far too often; there was a reading about Eeyore being stuck in the river expressing his deep conviction that no one would rescue him; the Red Army Choir singing ‘Kalinka’ was another song Peter belted out and sang along with during the holidays; another A. A. Milne, this time written for Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘The More It Snows (Tiddely-Pom)’; and finally, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, the music by Hubert Parry, and sung at the end of every school year at St Chris with unthinking gusto. The old days. People left smiling. I couldn’t have imagined it possible when we started to plan it. But there was nothing I knew of any evident pleasure or fun later than the early 1970s. After that he was more or less a prisoner, aiding and abetting his warden in a world that grew smaller and smaller. When you tried to describe it, people narrowed their eyes in disbelief, trying to imagine the life I was clearly exaggerating; no one could live such a non-eventful existence for decades, let alone someone with so many advantages. Peter’s life, to people who were not familiar with it, was a made-up tale; an impossibility. That’s not to say that things didn’t sometimes happen to Peter, at least in those youthful days when generosity, solemnity and thoughtlessness could go hand in hand.
One thing that happened was me. If there is only so much social energy to go round in any given group, you could say that I elbowed in, loud, loving argument and discussion, and took Peter’s portion. Being there was my good fortune, perhaps, but I also know how hard it was to extract oneself from Doris once she had decided you were ‘one of hers’. Peter wrote a letter that allowed a voluble teenage girl into his house, to live with his mother while he was away at boarding school. It might have been some kind of gift (conscious or unconscious) to his mother, or a way of telling her that he needed more or less from her, or better attention. Years later, a friend told me that in the past Peter had said to him that ‘the worst thing that could happen to me would be if Jenny became a successful novelist’. It wasn’t my fault that I was, as papers and magazines have suggested, a cuckoo in Peter’s nest. I know that I was, even if I was not directly responsible. But that became one of the stories explaining Peter’s ‘oddness’. Journalists came up to me at parties, sometimes when Doris was there too, to check whether what Doris had just (or recently) told them was true, that Peter’s life was ruined and he was made sick by my going to live with them, and taking his space in the household. I had no way of denying it. It’s very possible that I helped sink Peter, by taking his place in ‘his’ house and by getting on with a regular sort of life. I was Peter’s shadow, as Doris and, I suppose, Peter saw it, who had taken his place in the light. So I just replied: ‘If she says so.’
Still, few people could believe that a person of sixteen could have his life ruined that way, without there being something else that had been going on for much longer to cause what almost seemed a lifelong catatonia. I didn’t swallow Doris’s story. But I didn’t deny it, and I didn’t ask Doris why she was saying these things to journalists at parties. Healthy people don’t lie down in the middle of the road and allow a bus to roll over them – not unless something in them is acting out damage done long before. I was not a gift from Peter to his mother, but a curse. I could see that. Peter had perhaps despaired of Doris giving him what he needed, even if he didn’t know exactly what that was. I was a gesture, a question, a conversation he wasn’t able to start with Doris. Perhaps, without mentioning the children back in Africa, he had tried to rebalance the family. Or he was hoping to deflect something on to me. Or he was just having a kind moment and didn’t think hard enough about the possible consequences. I was a disaster for both of them. Doris, however, was forty-four when she got Peter’s letter and wrote to me. Another generous act. A kindness almost beyond measure. And she added to it by telling me that there was no need to be grateful. Someone had helped her, I would help someone . . . But she was a grown woman, taking on damaged goods that Dr Watt had warned her about. I don’t know what, if any, precautions she took; essentially I think she thought she could manage without them. What was Doris thinking of? As the beneficiary of all this kindness, and as a person now in my late sixties, I believe Doris took a grave risk with three people’s lives, and I can’t really untangle the strands that might tell me why.
Almost every day since I began writing about my cancer I have received a letter or an email from someone who has read or remembered and liked my work; they talk about the recent pieces about my cancer or my memories of my teenage years and my relationship with Doris Lessing, my older books, fiction and non-fiction, something they’ve read or remembered. They’re remarkably kind (my paranoia wonders, but I fight back the idea that the London Review of Books’s editors hold on to the ones that are not so positive). They are well meant, offering as solace the people ‘out there’ in the real world who have enjoyed my work, and they hope that I will be well and that I will continue writing. One or two suggest I prostrate myself (an inevitable image here of Audrey Hepburn face down in the stone-paved aisle) and pray to the Holy Mother of Jesus, who will cure anyone who asks and believes in her. Even a Jew? Why? A gratuity. A gift given freely, regardless. And yet Mary Mother of Christ doesn’t really give freely – she wants you to ask and for you to believe in her. Not quite gratuitous. Others offer pills or potions that the medical establishment has overlooked, but which in the right doses (always either huge or minute) are KNOWN to cure all kinds of cancer, as attested by people whose lives have been saved by enough fresh carrot juice to sink a submarine. There aren’t any negative or abusive messages. That rather alarms me. I’d be sick to death of me by now. The weird medicines are all offered with the best of intentions, though best of all are emails that simply say: ‘No need to write back, I just want to say I hope you stay well as long as you can, and that your writing has meant a lot to me.’ Of course I reply and say thank you as often as I can, because I’m genuinely grateful to receive such messages from strangers.
But, in all honesty (which always seems to trump good manners), I’m not genuinely grateful at all. Not in that dark place where I am a naughty, angry child. I can’t feel genuinely anything much because that train left the platform before I knew it was there, or I slept, as it stopped then started off again without a thought for its sleepy passenger. There is supposed to be a psychological state at which we all have to arrive and where we rest or make a final effort before we can receive our certificate for having done right. Perhaps I was asleep when the shards of glass dropped from the playful cherubims’ hands and fell arbitrarily into the eyes or hearts of some, but only some. Broken mirrors falling through the sky, to change the hearts and minds of a few people so that they can se
e only the bleak side of anything good or innocuous. I really can’t get away without finding myself in the fairy or hobgoblin stories. That must be my sliver of looking glass, reflecting a place where everything is not what it seems, a world of my own making, of tickling death and then hiding between my own legs, as one hid behind one’s mother’s in shame or anxiety. Goblin. Hobgoblin. There once was an ugly duckling. There was a promise for those who saw the world as it really was. But promises aren’t always kept and I can’t tolerate unfulfilled promises. My head is full of dark, terrorising tales, you will have noticed. Collected or made up on the spot. Can there be any more stories left? Always, into perpetuity. The stories never run out, especially the ‘real ones’, the ones that actually happened and press forward impatiently awaiting their turn, like elephants’ teeth. When the teeth run out – the ones planted before birth in the world – the elephant starves to death. The wicked cruelty of nature. Always another trick up its sleeve. Some of us will suffocate, some will starve. Some will spend their days waiting for the end of the story. I guess some people don’t. Certainly, I doubt that elephants fret about the way the end will come.
And then, after the daily busyness of radiotherapy, there was nothing. Or at least it was amazing busyness for me, who can remain contentedly indoors, staring, for weeks on end. Now there was nothing else on the menu. Nothing new, anyway. Food still tasted foul and bitter, I was still tired enough to sleep an extra four hours a day. But the treatment was over. It would take three months to finish its work inside my body, then a scan to see if anything had happened. If the placebo effect works for one in three people (there’s that ragged seaman again, his bird rotting, rotting, rotting around his neck; why won’t someone do something?), the odds were good for me, though better if I had received a non-placebo and perhaps I had. I just had to trust my luck. There’s the problem. I don’t trust anyone, not their shy words of good intent, not their commiserations, not their active and proven medication. I know too about the nocebo effect, where medically active drugs don’t work on a third of patients who are told they are taking cornflour. What could anyone give me that could definitively improve my health? And what is my health when most of the unwellness came from the treatment? I’ve got the place surrounded, Mr Earp. And there’s only one piece of magic left if faith is left out. Love, there’s love. But if I arrived on earth without a capacity for faith, when right now, with a death sentence tattooed on me, I simply can’t find this faith they talk of, that easy answer to the terror of death and dying, how the hell am I going to place my trust in love, mine, his, the spirit of the planet? ‘Whatever love means’ to each entity that uses it, it’s time they used it. Or teach me how. See, as soon as you slide off towards the easy answer – trust in me – you start to sound like a feeble-minded prince with nothing to do. Anyway, it’s a little late at sixty-eight. Quality of life. Well, of course there is. But right now I can’t see them holding me down like ballast. I could even take a small lie or two at the moment.
