The Diaries of Jane Somers
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.
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The Diaries of Jane Somers
Doris Lessing
Table of Contents
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.
