Sporting Print
In Pursuit of the English. By Doris Lessing. (MacGibbon and Kee, 21s.) NOTHING delights the imperious and deeply theatrical English more than to be told by an alien, as we regularly are, that our nature is un- assertive and opposed to exhibitionism. One imagines that a lot of people who make up the backbone of Albion will approach this book with relish, possibly further heartened by the sporting note in the title. What an affront lies ahead. The specimen English described by Mrs. Lessing wreck the propaganda version of ourselves by being, among other things, combative, dishot' able, good at cooking, and sexy. (Cf. the r4 acceptable view in that best-selling sop to Br l,1, self-regard, George Mikes's How to be an Alg Mrs. Lessing came to England from her hot Rhodesia, partly out of a wish to understandF) English blood that runs in her own veins firstproblem lay in finding anybody °I; admitted to being English at all. She would 56 likely-looking man: At first glance I knew he was the real Ell Tall, asthenic, withdrawn; but above all lie b`c. all the outward signs of the inward, intet twisting prideful melancholy. . . . His
flashed at last. am not,' he said, with a but basically forgiving hauteur. 'English. a Welsh grandmother.'
She had made the hunt-rules even more ditfil by choosing to pursue the working-class Engli„. with post-Orwellian insight, she knows in heart that for a middle-class intellectual like I; self the idea of the working class is essentistIir talismanic and unattainable. Her opening chap o contains a wry record of the admonitory baro of London Leftists when she claimed now 3ie then to have been in contact with working Pc°P..; Twenty years in the company of labotird': Africans did not count : 'Not working-class I: the true sense. They are semi-urbanised peas'il,t;?' Her Communist friends were 'the vanguard °t 01 working class .and obviously not typical.' A si,,0 in a mining village and a New Town were 31.s dismissed as too specialised. and therefore a°,.,t correctly quintessential. Finally she was told 15°. the working class of Britain had been ruined capitalism and become petit bourgeois to a r93 and that she had better go back to Africa wb' the black masses were still untainted
In the interim that occupies this book she li01
loh
—for the unmisty reason that she was hard-or:t in a London house full of working people. 11,11, most digs, the place was organised on the Pry; ciple of the honeycomb, intricately divided St,) to protect its members' taste for single-cell while still permitting the community spirit sary to preserve this discrete ideal against versive strangers. Mrs. Lessing took a long ti" to learn the strange, stately quadrille of acuusii; tance between co-diggers, slipping formal little invitations to coffee under the doors of Pe°Pe ,l,e whose every snore and coital exclamation s"i knew. Her closest friend became Rose, a sad. tars pragmatic virgin who worked in a tobacconist shop. Rose's views are the chief socioloeica matter of the book : her canny resistance to seicd and her eventual beguiled fall; her frugality, cal at the same time her willingness to waste Wilo' on pleasure, because pleasure is something you have to pay for; her attitude to leisure, a CO111' modity whose value she knew but did not claial as her right; and her quizzical .abstention fr°1 politics, Labour and Tory allegiances to her min amounting to whether you remembered tin,: employment or whether you were 'doing all rigb Churchill she favoured partly because he Inc her remember the war. 'With his dirty V-sign an everything, he enjoys himself, say what you likejf
This shrewd and unsentimental book is ha'
novel, half subjective documentary, like Clarlq Sigal's Weekend in Dinlock. Mrs. Lessing 11,3: the proper sociologist's tenacity, but none of 01'; occupational doggedness gets through into he,'' swift barbed style. In the culminating scene tn. court, with her landlord attempting to eject two old squatters, who, besides allowing their rooms I° sprout fungi from neglect, have nastily becri, shaking red pepper on to his tulips, she achievP. a kind of high, hard farcical writing that 19 eruptively funny.
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