9 - Non-fiction

Summary

The same capacity for modulating between tragedy and comedy, for shifting perspective from story-telling to minutely observed description, from narrative to reflection can also be found in Lessing's non-fiction. Indeed, there is no technical demarcation line between fact and fiction in her work, any more than in the writings of D. H. Lawrence or George Orwell; and this is hardly surprising in a writer who has frequently commented on the way people make stories out of what they observe and experience, and on the way memory edits what we remember. There are, for instance, clear affinities between The Diary of a Good Neighbour, the early chapters of The Four-Gated City, and a work presented as non-fiction, a ‘documentary’, In Pursuit of the English (1960). Years later, in Walking in the Shade, Lessing acknowledged that In Pursuit of the English is more like a novel, having the shape and pace of one – ‘It is too well shaped for life’, she says (WS 3). Yet she found it accurate in one respect: newly arrived in England, she had a ‘child's way of seeing and feeling’ (WS 4), as she sought for a definition of Englishness.

In the end this book deconstructs any idea of a shared ‘English way of life’, very much as the Angry Young Men were doing in the 50s. Lessing brings a fresh perspective to the idea by showing how Englishness was viewed in the colonies and dominions of the time; if the term ‘English’ is tricky in England, she asserts, ‘it is nothing to the variety of meanings it might bear in a Colony’ (PE 9). The behaviour of the English whom ‘Doris’ meets is defamiliarized, since it is seen through the eyes of this outsider; she either misinterprets or interprets in ways not accepted by the particular person or persons she is with. When she takes up Rose's introduction to Flo's family and their house, Lessing sketches in vignettes, anecdotes, and revealing dialogue. We see the people and their behaviour through the narrator's eyes, but also through Rose's: so Flo, according to Rose, is not really English because she had an Italian grandmother, Dan is not really English because he comes from Newcastle, while Rose is a Londoner rather than English.