Letters
Vol. 12 No. 2 · 25 January 1990
From C.N. Gilmore
I presume that Doris Lessing’s piece (LRB, 11 January) is intended as a challenge. I’m therefore submitting just three titles. London Blitz novel: Strike the father dead by John Wain. Burma War novel: A Soldier Erect by Brian Aldiss. Business novel: The Admen by Shepherd Mead.
C.N. Gilmore
Bedford
Vol. 12 No. 3 · 8 February 1990
From Jean MacGibbon
Doris Lessing wonders why World War Two produced so few novels, such a sparse literature, as she sees it (LRB, 11 January). Where, she asks hypothetically, is the novel about the battle of the Atlantic by ‘the sensitive young officer … sunk in the Repulse in the Pacific, and picked out of the water to fight again in the Med? Where the novel, rather than the memoirs, of the POW camps in Germany?’ A crowd is not company and its sequel, The Impossible Shore, by Robert Kee, are about a bomber pilot shot down and imprisoned for the duration. No ‘memoirs’ these, but, taken together, a small masterpiece written with a novelist’s shaping spirit. And there are a number of novels written during or just after the war by novelists like Colin MacInnes (To the victors the spoils), Geoffrey Cotterell, R.C. Hutchinson, to name a few that come to mind. Women novelists too; Virago recently republished three. And Life in Our Hands, by Pamela Bright, a novel about nursing on the Western Front, graphic, tender-hearted and horrifyingly authentic, deserves republication. Add to this Inez Holden’s Night Shift about the Blitz.
Miss Lessing’s own reading is sporadic. ‘Let’s look at what we have’: she cites Evelyn Waugh’s and Olivia Manning’s trilogies, Alexander Baron’s From the City, from the Plough, The Cruel Sea. No word of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, or of Henry Green’s Caught and Back. Of New Writing she is dismissive: ‘Sharp, sardonic sketches, Shaving through the Blitz, by one Fanfarlo’. But almost every contemporary writer, known and unknown, appeared in New Writing. They mostly wrote, as might her prototype young sailor, in short bursts, in the little time left to them – for none of us, as Henry Green observed, whether soldier or civilian, expected to survive. As to poetry, she believes that ‘fragments of verse survive.’ But the war was a stimulating time for poetry. Alun Lewis and his fellow combatant poets left more than ‘fragments’. Roy Fuller, still with us, incorporated his years on active service in a verse sequence, part of a continuous work extended throughout his life (New and Collected Poems 1934-1984).
Jean MacGibbon
Manningtree, Essex
From Nicolas Walter
There are two obvious answers to the question asked by Doris Lessing. One is that the sort of people who write novels tend not to know much about the sort of subjects she mentions (radical politics, poverty, war, industry and trade), so that they tend not to write about them – and when they do they tend to write badly. The other is that, if one looks carefully enough, many if not most of the ‘unwritten’ novels she mentions have in fact been written – on the Chartists, the Marxes, the early Marxists, people at war and, above all, business (even in Britain). Anyway, an obvious reply to her assertion ‘that it is literature, not history, which has created a map of this or that society,’ is that it isn’t – or that if it is, the map in question tends to be very inaccurate.
An easy test is to look at literature about subjects one knows: almost all the many plays and novels I know about the extreme Left or the free-thought movement give ludicrous versions of these things.
Nicolas Walter
London Nl
From Henry Stoll
The striking thing about Doris Lessing’s article on ‘Unwritten Novels’ was that she is, broadly speaking, correct – it’s difficult to deny that large areas of experience are being left unaddressed by contemporary fiction. It often seems that the only novels which actually have a subject – the only novels which have any informational content, which take the reader to a place he or she hadn’t been before – are what Lessing calls ‘bad literature, comics, airport literature’. Take airports themselves. Why hasn’t anyone other than Arthur Hailey ever written about them? All that fear, all that variety, all that material. Or consider Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, an enormously entertaining read and a novel that deserved its popular success, if only because Wolfe bothered to go out and do some research – why hadn’t anyone else ever written about the justice system in New York, for instance? In fact, Wolfe has recently, in an article called ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, been proselytising to just this effect, arguing for the obligation of the writer to go out and report. He also makes the claim that ‘every writer over the age of forty’ knows that ‘90 per cent’ of a book’s interest comes from its material: only 10 per cent of a book’s claim on our attention has to do with its author’s talent. There can’t be all that many subjects on which Wolfe and Lessing agree, so perhaps the similarity of their views on this means that we are about to witness a change in the fiction-writing Zeitgeist.
Henry Stoll
Ipswich
From Roger Gard
I expect that Doris Lessing will find herself being offered a fairly heavy reading list. Perhaps to provoke this was part of her intention. If so, she will be pleased to know that she can find in The Daughter (Harper and Row, 1979) a touching study of Eleanor Marx and her awful marriage by one of the most amusing and thoughtful of contemporary novelists, Judith Chernaik.
Roger Gard
London SW1
Vol. 12 No. 4 · 22 February 1990
From Peter Alderson Smith
May I point out that the obvious novel about foreign revolutionaries on the loose in Victorian London, though not the only one, is Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (Letters, 25 January)? A more accurate, and less hubristic, title for Doris Lessing’s article might have been ‘Unread Novels’.
Peter Alderson Smith
Dublin
From Angela Mungrove
Roger Gard (Letters, 8 February) cites Judith Chernaik’s novel about Eleanor Marx, The Daughter, as one of the novels Doris Lessing missed. What about Piers Paul Read’s more striking novel on the same subject – Games in Heaven with Tussy Marx?
Angela Mungrove
London NW6
