The Diaries of Jane Somers

The Diaries of Jane Somers
Doris Lessing

First published in 1984, under a pseudonym, as ‘The Diary of a Good Neighbour’ and ‘If the Old Could …’, and now published as ‘The Diaries of Jane Somers’, this is in many ways classic Lessing.The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort. But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other – Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman.‘The Diary of Jane Somers’ contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.

The Diaries of Jane Somers

Doris Lessing

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u13b97b1f-7260-5574-a5e5-9a409dceab92)

Title Page (#u1023e56f-0932-55af-ab40-411477362405)

Preface (#u483a957a-2891-5d45-b3fd-05b37a9328c6)

I THE DIARY OF A GOOD NEIGHBOUR (#u7aebc173-e7be-56e5-9a37-c6013f130863)

2 IF THE OLD COULD … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)

The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)

The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)

Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Preface (#ulink_e7ef6476-ca9b-528b-a83d-3d9a99ab3aac)

I have been thinking about writing a pseudonymous novel for years. Like, I am sure, most writers. How many do? It is in the nature of things that we don’t know. But I intended from the start to come clean, only wanted to make a little experiment.

The Diary of a Good Neighbour got written when it did for several reasons. One: I wanted to be reviewed on merit, as a new writer, without the benefit of a ‘name’; to get free of that cage of associations and labels that every established writer has to learn to live inside. It is easy to predict what reviewers will say. Mind you, the labels change. Mine have been – starting with The Grass is Singing: she is a writer about the colour bar (obsolete term for racism) – about communism – feminism – mysticism; she writes space fiction, science fiction. Each label has served for a few years.

Two: I wanted to cheer up young writers, who often have such a hard time of it, by illustrating that certain attitudes and processes they have to submit to are mechanical, and have nothing to do with them personally, or with their kind or degree of talent.

Another reason, frankly if faintly malicious: some reviewers complained they hated my Canopus series, why didn’t I write realistically, the way I used to do before: preferably The Golden Notebook over again? These were sent The Diary of a Good Neighbour but not one recognized me. Some people think it is reasonable that an avowed devotee of a writer’s work should only be able to recognize it when packaged and signed; others not.

Again, when I began writing my Canopus series I was surprised to find I had been set free to write in ways I had not used before. I wondered if there would be a similar liberation if I were to write in the first person as a different character. Of course, all writers become different characters all the time, as we write about them: all our characters are inside us somewhere. (This can be a terrifying thought.) But a whole book would be a different matter, mean activating one of the gallery of people who inhabit every one of us, strengthening him or her, setting her (or him) free to develop. And it did turn out that as Jane Somers I wrote in ways that Doris Lessing cannot. It was more than a question of using the odd turn of phrase or an adjective to suggest a woman journalist who is also a successful romantic novelist: Jane Somers knew nothing about a kind of dryness, like a conscience, that monitors Doris Lessing whatever she writes and in whatever style. After all there are many different styles, or tones of voice, in the Canopus series – not to mention Briefing for a Descent into Hell and Memoirs of a Survivor – and sometimes in the same book. Some may think this is a detached way to write about Doris Lessing, as if I were not she: it is the name I am detached about. After all, it is the third name I’ve had: the first, Tayler, being my father’s; the second, Wisdom (now try that one on for size!), my first husband’s; and the third my second husband’s. Of course there was McVeigh, my mother’s name, but am I Scots or Irish? As for Doris, it was the doctor’s suggestion, he who delivered me, my mother being convinced to the last possible moment that I was a boy. Born six hours earlier, I would have been Horatia, for Nelson’s Day. What could that have done for me? I sometimes do wonder what my real name is: surely I must have one?

Another influence that went to make Jane Somers was reflections about what my mother would be like if she lived now: that practical, efficient, energetic woman, by temperament conservative, a little sentimental, and only with difficulty (and a lot of practice at it) able to understand weakness and failure, though always kind. No, Jane Somers is not my mother, but thoughts of women like my mother did feed Jane Somers.

I and my agent, Jonathan Clowes, decided in our plan of campaign that it would be fair to submit The Diary of a Good Neighbour to my main publishers first. In Britain these are Jonathan Cape and Granada. Cape (not Tom Maschler personally) turned it down forthwith. Granada kept it some time, were undecided, but said it was too depressing to publish: in these fallen days major and prestigious publishers can see nothing wrong in refusing a novel in which they see merit because it might not sell. Not thus, once, were serious literary publishers. I saw the readers’ reports and was reminded how patronized and put-down new writers are.

Michael Joseph, who accepted my first novel all those years ago, has now twice published me as a new writer. On taking The Diary of a Good Neighbour, they said it reminded them of Doris Lessing, and were taken into our confidence and entered with relish into the spirit of the thing. The redoubtable Bob Gottlieb of Knopf in New York said at once, Who do you think you are kidding? – or words to that effect. Interesting that these two great publishing firms, crammed with people and the possibilities of a leak, were able to keep the secret as long as they wanted: it was dear friends who, swearing their amazing and tested reliability, could not stand the strain.

Three European publishers bought Good Neighbour: in France, in Germany, and in Holland. My French publisher rang up to say he had bought this book, had I perhaps helped Jane Somers, who reminded him of me?

This surely brings us back to the question: what is it that the perspicacious recognize, when they do? After all, Jane Somers’s style is different from Lessing’s. Each novel or story has this characteristic note, or tone of voice – the style, peculiar to itself and self-consistent. But behind this must sound another note, independent of style. What is this underlying tone, or voice, and where does it originate in the author? It seems to me we are listening to, responding to, the essence of a writer here, a groundnote.

We – that is agent, publishers and I – believed the reviewers would guess at once. But not one did. A few people, not all reviewers, liked The Diary of a Good Neighbour. It was mostly women journalists in women’s magazines who reviewed it, because Jane Somers was described on the dust jacket as a well-known woman journalist. (It was enough, it seems, to say it for people to believe it.) This neatly highlights the major problem of publishing: how to bring a book to the attention of readers. The trigger here: the phrase woman journalist. (Some potential reviewers, male, were put off by it.) It is this situation that has given rise to all these new promotional schemes in Britain: The Best of Young British Novelists, The Best Novels of Our Time, the razzmatazz prizes, and so on. The problem can only exist, it seems to me, because so many good novels are being written. If there were only a few, there would be no difficulty. Ever more loudly shrill the voices, trying to get attention: this is the best novel since Gone With the Wind, War and Peace and The Naked and the Dead! Overkill earns diminishing returns and numbed readers return to former habits, such as relying on intuition and the recommendation of friends. Jane Somers’s first novel (first serious novel – of course she had written those romantic novels which were not reviewed at all, but sold very well!) was noticed, and got a few nice little reviews. In short, it was reviewed as new novels are. And that could easily have been that. Novels, even good ones, are being published all the time that have what publishers call ‘a shelf life’ (like groceries) of a few months. (Once they used the phrase as a joke, sending themselves up, but now they use it straight. ‘The shelf life of books is getting shorter,’ you’ll hear them say. ‘It’s down to a few weeks now.’ As if it all had nothing to do with them. And it hasn’t: the mechanisms for selling dominate their practices; the tail wags the dog.) A first novel can be remaindered and out of print and vanish as if it had never been, if unlucky enough not to win a prize or in some way attract a spotlight such as the admiration of a well-known writer who cries (see above), ‘This is the greatest novel since Tom Jones.’ Or, making accommodation to the times, ‘More exciting than Dallas!’

The American publisher was asked why more had not been done to promote The Diary of a Good Neighbour, which in the opinion of the enquirer, a literary critic, was a good novel, but the reply was that there was nothing to promote, no ‘personality’, no photograph, no story. In other words, in order to sell a book, in order to bring it to attention, you need more than the book, you need the television appearance. Many writers who at the start resisted have thought it over, have understood that this, now, is how the machinery works, and have decided that if – in fact, even if it is not acknowledged – they have become part of the sales departments of their publishers, then they will do the job as well as they can. It is remarkable how certain publishers wince and suffer when writers insist on using the right words to describe what is happening. In very bad taste, they think it is, to talk in this way. This attitude is a relic of the gentleman publisher, a contradiction which has bedevilled the publishing of serious (as distinct from commercial) books. On the one hand, a book has to be promoted: oh, but what a distasteful business it is! One of the problems of the (‘serious’ as distinct from the ‘commercial’) author is this attitude on the part of his or her publisher. You are pressured to do interviews, television and so on, but you are conscious that the more you agree, the more you are earning his or her contempt. (But looking back it seems to me that men publishers are more guilty of this hypocrisy than women publishers.) I have sometimes gloomily had to conclude that the only writer some publishers could really respect would be one who wrote a thirty-page masterpiece, reviewed by perhaps three critics, every ten years: this paragon would live on a mountain top somewhere and never, ever, give interviews. Now, there’s a real artist!

If Jane Somers had only written one serious novel, which sold, as first novels do, 2,800 copies in America and 1,600 copies in Britain, by now it would be remaindered and pulped, and she would be cherishing half a dozen fan letters.

But she wrote a second. Surely this time people must see who the real author was? But no.

Predictably, people who had liked the first book were disappointed by the second. And vice versa. Never mind about the problems of publishers: the main problem of some writers is that most reviewers and readers want you to go on writing the same book.

By now, the results of friends’ indiscretions meant that some people in the trade knew who Jane Somers was and – I am touched by this – clearly decided it was my right to be anonymous if I wished. Some, too, seemed inclined retrospectively to find merit.

One of my aims has more than succeeded. It seems I am like Barbara Pym! The books are fastidious, well written, well crafted. Stylish. Unsparing, unsentimental and deeply felt. Funny, too. On the other hand they are sentimental, and mawkish. Mere soap opera. Trendy.

I am going to miss Jane Somers.

Unexpected little sidelights. One review was a nasty little reminder of how many people reach instinctively for their revolvers at the mention of something they don’t like. From the hard left (and, perhaps, not so hard left: it is a disease that spreads easily), dislike of Jane Somers’s politics was characteristically expressed in the demand that such books should not be published. Just like the hard (and sometimes not so hard) right. ‘The publishers should be sued for publishing this book.’ (Not Jane Somers’s, one of Lessing’s.) Alas, poor Liberty, the prognosis is not very good.

Finally, a treasured memory, which I think is not out of place here. Imagine the book editor of a famous magazine (let us call it Pundit) standing in his office with books sent him for review stacked all over the table, on the floor, everywhere. He is harassed; he is desperate. He deals me out books to review, and mostly I hand them back again. Then he gives me another: ‘Please review this book,’ he cries. ‘No one wants to review it. What am I going to do? Please, please say yes.’

‘But it is a very bad book,’ I say, returning it to him. ‘Just ignore it.’

‘But we can’t ignore it. We have to review it.’

‘Why do you? It will take up the space that could be used for a good book.’

‘The Viewer has reviewed it, they gave it all that space, so we must.’

‘You must be joking,’ I said, thinking that he was, but he wasn’t.

Doris Lessing

July 1984

I THE DIARY OF A GOOD NEIGHBOUR (#ulink_f3017637-028d-5f16-93ef-2ff29b876903)

The first part is a summing-up of about four years. I was not keeping a diary. I wish I had. All I know is that I see everything differently now from how I did while I was living through it.