The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age

Some novelists take years to get into their stride, but it is true of Doris Lessing that if you want to understand her, and feel the full power of her imagination, you have to read her first book, which was published in 1950. The Grass is Singing is a story set in Africa, where she grew up, where she experienced unhappiness and political radicalization, and where she decided to be writer. More than half a century later Lessing had become a Nobel Laureate with dozens of books behind her, even an opera with Philip Glass.

The Grass is Singing takes you to the kind of rolling landscape and bush where her father farmed in Southern Rhodesia, a generation before it became Zimbabwe, and where she developed a passionate desire to see an end to colonialism. The novel is an uncompromising journey into a world of fear and racial segregation where violence is as familiar as the wind that makes the grass sing. It’s a story of murder – committed by a black houseboy on the white woman to whom he is in effect a slave, but who is so fascinated and drawn to him that it nearly becomes an obsession – and a sharp-edged picture of the world, which she knew, that made the tragedy almost inevitable. Moses, the murderer, and Mary Turner, his victim, are both destroyed by the way in which they have to live. The book trembles with passion, like this: ‘When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment, and he brings down the whip.’

Lessing had lived in Africa from 1925, when her father bought 1,000 acres in the bush and took his family from Persia, now Iran, where Doris had been born six years earlier. She experienced a childhood which she has often described as unhappy, and one of its main components was solitude. From an early age her life involved rejection, first of a community in which she watched people being demeaned and then of the Marxist solution which she thought, for a while, might be the answer. ‘What fools we were!’ she said long afterwards about her ten years or so in the Communist Party.

Her first marriage ended and she left her husband and two children for Gottfried Lessing, whom she’d met at a Communist book club. They had a son together but were divorced in 1949 when she decided to move to London to pursue her writing career, taking her son with her. The government of Southern Rhodesia would later accuse her of ‘subversive activities’ for arguing that the black population was being exploited, and she was labelled a prohibited immigrant. A phase of her life was over. It had begun in the shadow of the First World War, in which her father lost a leg: she saw him as representative of a whole generation who had been ruined by war. Africa also saddened her and made her angry. London was to be a new start.

As a writer, however, she continued to refuse to be confined, and that has been her spirit from the beginning. In The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, she wrote about a woman undergoing a breakdown – in a world that seems to be breaking from its moorings – and presented an unforgettable picture of her efforts to compartmentalize her life to deal with its disintegration. The novelist Margaret Drabble, one of the British writers from the sixties influenced strongly by feminist ideas, has said of the book: ‘Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos. She managed to make sense of her material, but at enormous risk.’ The unsayable, among other things, was to talk about menstruation in the way that James Joyce had talked of masturbation and shaken Ireland, and also to subject to meticulous scrutiny the pressures and desires, and the trade-offs they demanded, experienced by women of the early sixties. All that, and around them a world in which leftist progressives were having to cope with the Russians’ own revelations and denunciation of Stalinist terror. Bleakness unconfined.

Drabble pointed out that in The Golden Notebook Lessing was simultaneously progressive and conservative. When Anna, the main character, who is a writer, is discussing orgasm and the rights and wrongs of sex with a man whom she doesn’t love, her Jungian analyst promotes a view that is traditionalist about sexual loyalty rather than radically modern and free-thinking. The book’s power lies in its relentless, page-by-page denunciation of simplistic thinking. No doubt that is why it unsettled so many people who recognized it for the radical text that it was and then found it unexpectedly disturbing.

When Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook this novel was controversial, not least among women critics, for some of whom, in the course of a few years, it would become something of an inspiration and almost a fictional textbook for feminism. Just as she had refused to be confined by the effective apartheid of her upbringing, and then by too rigid a political reaction to it, she was not going to be turned into an icon, or even a heroine, by anyone.

Much later, in the nineties, she spoke in an interview about her regular arguments with feminists for whom she was an inspiration on the page but an irritation in the flesh. She caused a furore at the Edinburgh book festival in 2001 by suggesting that too many men were being given a hard time by women, and that they deserved less bashing: ‘I have nothing in common with feminists because of their inflexibility. They never seem to think that one might like men, or enjoy them.’ She came to believe that what she called ‘the rubbishing of men’ had become part of contemporary culture and she was having none of it.

Her refusal ever to be dragooned into a cause, or stuck in a rut, meant that she has never felt pressured to say ‘the right thing’. She was asked by Time magazine about Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and said she would never go back because he was ‘a monstrous little terror … who had created a caste, a layer of people just like himself who are corrupt and crooked’. And then, for good measure, explaining how she believed the country had been ruined, she said: ‘Under the whites it was an extremely efficient country. It could grow absolutely everything. We had railways and post offices and roads and water that worked. You can’t just put that back overnight.’

So the young woman whose first writing had revealed her horror was willing to reflect on the experience in a way that few others, radicalized in colonial Africa, would find it easy to do. Lessing’s mark has always been a refusal to follow a predictable line of argument, and not to care very much what others are making of it.

Just as she rejected the politics that first attracted her in forties Africa, where she thought everything hopeless under a status quo that couldn’t last, so she would not go down the road with some of those who used The Golden Notebook as an inspiration, as she once put it to the New York Times in a way that was semi-religious: ‘They want me to bear witness,’ she said. ‘What they would really like me to say is “Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle towards the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.” Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I’ve come with great regret to this conclusion.’

Although her antennae have retained a sensitive feeling for injustice – she has written of the uphill struggle of women in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example – she preferred, after the sixties, to shift her focus to a place that was mystical rather than part of the world. In The Golden Notebook, Anna, in the course of trying to sort herself out, expresses interest in mysticism, and it was a clue to the path that Lessing herself would follow. She became interested in the mystic Islamic practice of Sufism. More than 1,000 years ago it was practised as a way of counteracting what was seen even then – though not in these words – as a preoccupation with the material world, the here and now. So many of Lessing’s themes, in books set in different places, in different times, have concerned a means of escape (or self-realization) that it was, in retrospect, quite a natural thing, although surprising at the time. And few of those who were moved and inspired by The Golden Notebook would have expected its author, within ten years, to turn her attention to science fiction. That is what she did.

For twenty years she was writing books which touched on mystical ways of thinking, and in the middle of that period she published a five-book sequence – Canopus in Argos: Archives – set in a fictional galactic empire. In it she explored the idea which so attracted her: that individuals can find satisfaction and succour in working for a universal rather an individual good.

Lessing’s place in the novelists’ hall of fame – she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 – came about in part because of that ability to inhabit different fictional worlds with a surefootedness that seemed unique. She was capable of travelling back from the galaxy of Canopus in 1985, for example, to write The Good Terrorist, which explored the ambiguities of a middle-class woman, converted to terrorism. It was a book ahead of its time, dealing with subjects that would become near-obsessions of writers of fiction two decades later. That easy breadth, the ability to move from the mystical to the horribly rational, has always been her special power: in her eighties she was writing novels about a love of cats, in The Old Age of El Magnifico, and about the grown-up years of Ben, the social misfit, whom she had introduced in a book twenty years before.

Running through it all has been a commitment to the business of literature that has given Lessing a special status among other writers. She began to write in the forties, published first in the fifties, and has been moving and startling her readers ever since. It’s a trade she cares about. In the 1980s she wrote two books under a pseudonym – Jane Somers – to show how difficult it is to be published, and for unknown writers to start to do what she had done. They not only had difficulty being published, but didn’t sell well.

It’s maybe the mark of Doris Lessing that where other writers might have been embarrassed or irritated by that, she was pleased. In her nineties, after a lifetime’s work at it, she is still determined to resist group thinking, being drawn along. She remains her own woman, and has made her point.

Alan Sainsbury (#u8c93fdcf-8eee-535d-ac16-f601585f1fce)

When Alan Sainsbury walked into one of the first self-service shops opened by his family in Croydon, south London, at the start of the 1950s, a shopper, on being told who he was, threw a new wire basket at him in a fury. Not everyone wanted cheese wrapped up instead of being cut by a wire, nor their vegetables pre-packed. But Sainsbury knew that many did and that soon they would be the majority.

He’d been convinced in the United States. In 1949 he went there to look at the experience of shoppers in the lengthening chains of stores that were criss-crossing the country. Even before the war, 40 per cent of American shopping was self-service, the supermarkets having mushroomed through the Depression, giving people value for money and cutting out the frills, except for those sturdy brown paper bags that many of them are still reluctant to throw away. Sainsbury – ‘Mr Alan’ to the company board, which was still dominated by the family – argued that it was the future in Britain. There was scepticism. But he was given a chance to try.

Sainsbury’s had been started in 1869 as a dairy in Drury Lane in central London and had built up a big business with shops in many parts of the country. In the twenties it expanded into general groceries (and watched with interest when another company set up shop in 1929: Tesco). So the network existed. What hadn’t happened in Britain was the change to self-service. Customers still expected personal service from a person in a white coat, if it was a grocer’s, and perhaps a conversation about the apples, or an investigation into the age of a cheese.

Who owned the shop was less important. After all, about a quarter of shopping in the years immediately before the war was done in co-operatives, and another quarter in shops that were part of a chain. Small, independent retailers were cherished on every high street, but they were not the whole story. The big retailers were spreading their influence, and Sainsbury came back from America convinced that it was time for revolution: self-service shopping would take off. At that early shop in Croydon he was proved right. Despite having had to dodge the flying wire basket, he saw a shop that attracted customers like bees to a honeypot. Mr Alan had got it right, and he became the architect of the changing high street, and the retail parks that were still some way off but would change the landscape. He was the father of the British supermarket.

Sainsbury started serving as an apprentice in the family store in Bournemouth, at the Boscombe branch, keeping his name a secret. He did time in the dairy department, working for Uncle Arthur and Uncle Alfred, when it was still the rule that only members of the family could order the eggs and milk. Having known the founders – he was born in 1902, only thirty-three years after the first shop opened – he had an attachment to the firm as a family concern but made a connection between that inheritance and what would now be called social responsibility. He’d worked in a charity mission in the East End of London and in the thirties his politics were not conventional for a rising figure in a rich business family. He’d thought of committing himself to some kind of social work but eventually did the inevitable, saying his mother told him it would break his father’s heart if he didn’t.

He campaigned for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, making common cause with Conservatives and Communists in the process, and became a committed member of the Liberal Party (he would join Labour in 1945 and be a founding member of the SDP in the eighties). During the Second World War he represented the grocers to the Ministry of Food when decisions were being taken on rationing, arguing strongly for a points system, which he thought would be fair, though frugal. Everyone would be entitled to something.

That was characteristic of the opinionated zeal that Sainsbury brought to his business. There was no contradiction between producing good balance sheets for the firm and providing what he considered to be a kind of public service: decent provisions at a good price. There was always an idea around the corner that could make it happen, which is why he was so excited when he came back from the United States with his vision of aisles of deep freezers.

In 1950 the change hadn’t started. Marks & Spencer had done a trial of self-service a couple of years earlier, but was still very cautious. Shoppers, constrained by the surviving bits of the rationing regime, still preferred a butcher’s shop with sawdust and gleaming tiles, grocers who smelt of rennet and built pyramids of home-made butter on a wooden counter. Sainsbury, however, had seen the future and within a year he knew he was right.

There were about fifty self-service shops in business by the end of that year, and they spread like mushrooms – nearly 600 by the end of the decade, when Sainsbury’s had started to use the new medium of television advertising, choosing as its star product that strange new beast, the frozen chicken.

The transition had involved some risks. It was expensive to build new premises, and there was some resistance among shoppers who already started to fret about the loss of the special atmosphere in old-style stores, which they could see threatened. Perhaps there was an element of regret for the withering away of a deferential relationship between shop staff and customers, at a time when the growth in personal consumption – of greater choice – was equated with modernization and the new. Washing machines were in most homes, fridges in many kitchens, and habits had changed. In the late forties The Grocer magazine had said portentously: ‘The people of this country have long been accustomed to counter service and it is doubtful whether they would be content to wander a store hunting for goods.’ Well, now they were. Indeed, it seemed rather smart – a new way of doing things.

Looking back from a time when the wheel has turned, and supermarkets are often painted as the villains who despoil landscapes and homogenize the high street, it’s intriguing to remember how fresh and exciting the supermarket revolution once seemed. Fruit and vegetables began to appear all the year round, you could fill a freezer and live off it for weeks, like a camel and its hump. And for the supermarkets there was a bonus: not only shoppers with more money to spend, and a higher turnover in shops that could eventually sell anything, but fewer staff. They could make more money.

Alan Sainsbury was at the heart of one of the changes that made this even easier for the supermarkets. In the last of the Conservatives’ thirteen years in power, 1964, Edward Heath, as Lord Privy Seal in the government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, pushed through a measure that split his party and had caused almost as much trouble for Douglas-Home’s predecessor, Harold Macmillan, as the Profumo scandal which is so closely associated with his departure from Downing Street on health grounds in autumn 1963. That issue was the abolition of resale price maintenance, or RPM. Many Conservatives hated this decision.

RPM was a form of price fixing which meant that producers could set a price with the shops that couldn’t be undercut. Their income was guaranteed and small shopkeepers, without any of the advantages of economies of scale, could compete on level terms with the supermarkets that were now opening in every town. Ted Heath argued that competition was better and eventually got his way, in spite of the biggest backbench rebellion a Tory government had seen since the last days of Neville Chamberlain’s government in 1940. The wounds were raw, and didn’t help the party in trying to prevent the election of Labour under Harold Wilson, who squeaked in with a majority of four in October 1964.

For the supermarkets it was a godsend. They had the strength to sell more cheaply, introduce the era of the ‘special offer’, and watch the long, slow decline of the small family business that had to rely on the loyalty of customers who were willing to pay more for the privilege or convenience of walking round the corner, holding a conversation with a shop assistant and never having to join a queue of trolleys.

Within five years of the abolition of RPM, the number of supermarkets in Britain had reached 3,700 and the age of the battle between giants had begun. When Sainsbury retired as chairman in 1967, his business was established as the market leader. Tesco opened its first superstore in 1968 in Sussex, a harbinger of the future. It was nearly thirty years before it overtook its old rival, in 1995, and went on to claim a market share of more than 31 per cent. By 2006 it was able to use the extraordinary statistic that in that year Tesco’s tills swallowed up fully an eighth of all consumer spending in the whole country.

The supermarkets’ dominance had come about by the exploitation in the seventies and eighties of relaxed planning laws, which gave birth to the retail parks, and marketing techniques that allowed supermarkets to be sure that the bigger they got the more vigorously they could apply their power to keep producers’ prices down, give shoppers ever-better offers, and fill their stores with anything and everything. By the end of the century that power became controversial because it sometimes seemed to be untrammelled, sweeping away everything in its path, even infiltrating high streets with their own versions of ‘local’ stores to make life even more difficult, or impossible, for little shops without their power to sell in bulk, and cheaply. Planners, local authorities, family businesses, farmers all struggled with a balance that seemed to tilt decisively towards the big battalions. The story of the fightback on the high street would be another chapter, but the world that Sainsbury left behind when he died in 1998 aged 92 was one in which the supermarket was king.

He remembered a family firm started with capital of £100 that became the first of the giant supermarkets in Britain, and had seen a way of life transformed. He was proud of saying that part of him remained an outsider – he was the businessman who joined the Labour Party in 1945 and was never a Conservative – and he retained a strong belief that social responsibility should come with wealth. His family has continued that tradition with a notable commitment to arts and charities of all kinds. He always wanted to run a certain kind of shop. That often showed through. At the same time as he was campaigning for an end to RPM, knowing how much power it would give the supermarkets, he was fighting the introduction of trading stamps to lure customers into stores. In the early sixties he told a newspaper interviewer that Sainsbury’s wouldn’t use them. He told her, ‘You must go elsewhere for your temptation.’

Yet temptation had always been his business. More food, better quality, lower prices, and supermarkets everywhere – on every high street and in every open space that Sainsbury’s and its rivals could find, where they’d continue their endless battle for supremacy: a battle in which Mr Alan had been the first general on the field. He relished the fight, and, in his time, he won.

Alfred Hitchcock (#u8c93fdcf-8eee-535d-ac16-f601585f1fce)

Alfred Hitchcock was the fat man who wanted to make our flesh creep. Like Dickens’s fat boy, he could think of nothing better to do. Indeed, he devoted a lifetime to it and seemed never happier than when he was managing disturbance and alarm. That happiness, however, was never revealed: the bulbous, jowly, black-suited master of suspense never let the mask slip, and didn’t smile. The compact had to be secure: I scare you, because you want to be scared. And when I look for fear, I promise you that I will find it.

Whereas the Hammer horror films of the fifties and sixties camped up the gore and the cobwebbed coffin lids, and gave us a keyboard of vampire incisors, they hardly bothered with genuine terror. That was Hitchcock’s business, and obsession: a prairie cornfield with no hiding place from the buzzing aeroplane, a window that couldn’t keep out the prying spy, a murderer’s eyes that never blinked, the shower stall that promised relief behind the curtain.

Digging away at his past, people have found a solitary East London boy, born in the last year of the nineteenth century, who often felt alone, had an awestruck relationship with his mother, a father who once sent him to be locked up in the local police cell so that he would realize what it would be like if he strayed, and lots of Catholic guilt filtered through a Jesuit education. That is tempting material, of course. But remember the power of the early cinema, the movie business, which dragged him in like a magnet and gave him energy. By the time he was 21, having trained as a draughtsman, he had volunteered to work on silent movies in north London studios, and he was allowed to direct his first film within four years. Then he was off, working in Germany and absorbing expressionism, seeing the first directors working on sound stages, casting an eye over what the Russians were up to. He had grasped what film offered, and by 1929 he was directing the first British talkie, Blackmail. What else could the first Hitchcock film be called?

And so, by the last thirty years of his life – he was knighted in 1980, the year he died – he was inseparable from the idea of suspense. You might have thought that he’d invented the idea, because the portrayal of lonely terror seemed to come naturally. Take two of his last, best films, The Birds, released in 1963, and Psycho from 1960.

For a whole generation of cinema-goers, the jagged rhythms of Bernard Herrman’s score for Psycho take them back to the moment when they first saw the film – and, at Hitchcock’s insistence, had been there when the drapes were pulled back from the screen, because no one was allowed to come in after it had started. For it was then that they began the journey into a netherworld of fears, with the camera meandering and finally forcing its way from the sky towards a window for the first scene, and the set-up for tragedy. With Hitchcock there was never any doubt that the veneer of normality was a fake or a delusion: the interest from the first long, probing and inquisitive camera shot – some of them were astonishingly long – was in what it hadn’t revealed and what lay behind. He was naturally attracted to the idea that much of life was a deception. The excitement always lay in stripping away the layers, one by one, to show what lurked underneath. You knew before you started that the revelation was going to be troubling, and familiar.

He was attracted to Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds because he remembered a story of a bird invasion in California, and knew she shared his understanding of fear. Her novel Rebecca, replete with menace and lust in the shadow of Manderley, its encroaching gardens and the greedy sea, had brought him his only Oscar for Best Picture in 1940 (with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine). He got the writer Evan Hunter to write the screenplay for The Birds – in another guise he was the sublime American crime writer Ed McBain – and together they created a picture of horror. From the moment the first gull settles on a fencepost, through the relentless gathering of wings in the sky, to the desperate struggle against the coming disaster, Hitchcock spins out the panic, refusing to let it become overwhelming and resolve itself too soon. There’s always hope, which is the worst thing of all.

These films came after a few years in which he’d released, among others, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and North by Northwest. They all played with his knowledge that you could find fear in an open space as easily as in a locked room, and terror was never far away. For Rear Window he had thirty-one apartments built, into which Jimmy Stewart could spy from the wheelchair in which he was marooned. And before those, at the very start of the fifties, had come Strangers on a Train, where he’d explored guilt and responsibility between the two men who are drawn into a murder plot, an unconsummated homoerotic dalliance and an exchange of terrible intimacies. Who’s guilty? Hitchcock seldom says. He had Patricia Highsmith to thank for the idea, from her dark novella, and he repaid the compliment.

In the history of British film-making he commands a lofty niche. He was making celebrated thrillers in the thirties – The Lady Vanishes, The Thirty-Nine Steps – and certainly into the sixties (Marnie was released in 1964) he still cast his spell. You can’t imagine cinema in that period without him. Quite apart from his happy and very lucrative years introducing spine-chilling stories on American television, in which he revelled in the persona of the seedy purveyor of gloom, he had become for film-goers the guarantee of menace. As he well knew, people sometimes needed it. Although he had taken US citizenship in 1955, and had lived there since the thirties, he still had the echo of the streets of London in that gravelly voice, with a distinctive plummy cockney roll, and it spoke of an understanding of the dark side. He played on it, with the deadpan relish that he used when he did his silent walk-on parts, lasting only a few seconds, in most of the films.

He was one of the earliest heroes of the British film industry. In the post-war era there were many others. David Lean, too, began in black and white and made the dazzling transition to colour and the big screen with epics that became some of the most celebrated films of the age. The home-based industry repeatedly produced directors who belied the weary arguments over the lack of money and the draining effect on creativity. Mike Leigh and Ken Loach have carved out distinctive arcs; a host of other craftsmen drew on the European tradition to try to resist Hollywood. And others, to great acclaim, joined in with Tinseltown and quite often beat it at its own game: the Merchant Ivory school and the social comedies of the nineties had massive success that, whatever anyone said afterwards, wasn’t expected when they started out.

Hitchcock’s story takes us back to an earlier era. He learned his craft at a time when, to our eyes, the films were jerky and the cutting crude. Yet his daring mobility with the camera – a lens seeming to probe into every corner in search of the real story – was a technique that would remain an indelible part of his director’s personality a generation later, like his love of the sharp, edgy contours of a black and white set, straight from an expressionist drawing. That lasting quality also came from his belief, quite a rigid one, in how you scared an audience. He never wavered.

That made him difficult for some actors and writers to work with. Tippi Hedren played the female leads in The Birds and Marnie a year later, and she found it hard. Hitchcock, married contentedly to Alma Reville for thirty years, seemed to have a fascination with cool blondes as vulnerable characters: their accounts suggest that it puzzled them because it was never explained, not least because it wasn’t the prelude to the sexual invitations that were associated with some directors, and which they might have expected from anyone else. In an interview with the French film-maker François Truffaut, who probed this sensitive area, Hitchcock said that he was celibate and wondered aloud whether the simmering sexual tension in many of his films was how he allowed the frustration a way out.

The trouble was that cruelty was his business. In his meticulous shooting scripts – improvisation on set was never his style – he was setting scenes that would reveal vulnerability, expose emotional double dealing, and bring out moral ambiguity like some restless motif deep in the double basses of an orchestra that works its way through the woodwind until it reaches the first violins and becomes the dominant theme.

He’d ask his audiences: who is really guilty? The nightmare in Psycho is one that Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates couldn’t escape from, even if he wanted to. It’s beyond him. Solitude, in madness or in terrible sanity, is often inevitable. Hitchcock had no interest in indulging in discussions about how his Catholicism kept him wedded to the theme of fallen human beings who were forced to struggle for a path to redemption. But it’s hard to look at his heroes and villains, and their companions along the way, and not see something of that acceptance in their predicament: that it is not their fault that they are walking through a vale of tears. There is nothing else for us.

The moral Hitchcock? It’s easier to think of him as the man who said there was no terror in a bomb going off, only in knowing that the explosion was going to come. He understood that watching a man stepping closer to the edge is only terrifying if you can see into the chasm and he can’t; and, above all, that disaster usually springs from innocence. Think of the chase on the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (with the camera seemingly caught up in it), Cary Grant on the stone faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, the first glimpse of the Bates motel in Psycho. They never pall or fade away. Each time there’s a tiny spasm of recognition: that is fear, that’s what danger means.