[My mother, Elizabeth Maslen, passed away peacefully on the weekend of 27-28 September 2025, a little after her 90th birthday. Here’s a brief biography, supplementing the one you can find on the website of Queen Mary University of London, together with a number of recorded interviews which perfectly capture the passion of her teaching voice as I remember it.
Born in 1935 in Manchester, Elizabeth was educated at Manchester High School and Westfield College, University of London, from which she graduated with a first class Honours degree. She went on to earn a Postgraduate Diploma in Comparative Philology at Somerville College, Oxford, and afterwards became a well-known scholar in a remarkably wide range of areas, moving through every stage of English Literature from Old and Middle English to contemporary fiction and poetry. She was also a poet and translator, who worked on fiction in French, Polish, Czech and Turkish and remained attached throughout her life to colleagues and friends in the Universities of Warsaw and Singapore, at which she worked in the 1960s. She taught at Westfield College for over thirty years and was closely involved in the merger with Queen Mary in 1989.
In the course of her career at Westfield and Queen Mary, Elizabeth wrote many important essays and two books: Doris Lessing (second edition 2014) and Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction 1928-1968 (2001). After her retirement from Queen Mary in 2000 she was appointed Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, where she completed her highly regarded monograph Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography (2014).
In 2005 she moved to Tavistock, Devon. Here she took up a new role as counsellor to members of the congregation of Tavistock Parish Church, which involved regular visits and phone calls to distressed, lonely, bereaved and sick people; she only gave up this role six weeks before her death.
That’s the formal part of her biography. In addition to all this, Elizabeth was a mother, grandmother, aunt, cousin and friend, as well as an adviser – both academic and personal – to a vast variety of individuals in many different places. She lived a long and complex life, made up of many stages. Everyone who knew her will have their own particular memories of one or more of those stages. Elizabeth was fascinated by the ways in which memory works, and in her old age she took a lot of trouble considering the relationship between one person’s view of events and people and another’s. Here’s one of the ways she expressed this interest:
Human beings love stories, stories are so much more interesting than facts. The popular papers know this, they give us stories that will catch the eye, satisfy our sense of drama, and they mold the facts to meet our expectations or our needs. And as we all know, unless we choose not to know, we all do this: we weave a story out of what has just happened, and we weave stories out of our past, the past of our families, of our group, our tribe, our nation. Facts become flexible, even a matter of choice – we ease them into the contours of our tale, we erase or set aside what doesn’t fit. We may do this innocently. [But] Sometimes of course our shaping of a tale is not so innocent – especially when we want to present ourselves or some happening in a good light. And sometimes we try to make others admit that their memory is a false one […] So, memories are vulnerable things, open to manipulation, suggestion, correction, even erasure. If you have one memory of an event, and I have another, who is right? Or is there a simple right answer?
If you knew her and are reading this, I’d like to invite you to consider your own particular memories of Elizabeth, and to think about their relationship to her life story as it’s just been told. She’d also have wanted us to think about that life story in relation to the larger story of how the world has changed in her lifetime, how it goes on changing, and how the world itself is part of a larger story, whether you read it in terms of physics or spirituality. Let’s celebrate the rich diversity of our views of Elizabeth, and of each other, and accept them as part of a narrative we’re continuing to live and tell as well and truthfully as we can.
Before her death I asked my mother if she had anything she’d like me to put up on my blog. She sent me the following essay, which she published as a self-contained chapter in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945-1975, ed. Clare Hanson and Susan Watkins (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). The essay isn’t directly about fantasy; instead it interrogates the problem of writing realism at a time of radical social, political and technological transformation, a period my mother lived through and thought about in her capacity as an academic, a spiritual person and a citizen of the world. The two writers she chooses to discuss are people she knew intimately, in Storm Jameson’s case through research alone, in Doris Lessing’s through research and friendship. Both writers began their careers by being celebrated for their intensely realist, politically engaged fictions, but also chose to write (extensively, in the case of Lessing) in other modes: fantastic narratives, alternate history, science fiction, magic realism. Elizabeth’s essay charts their movement towards these other modes, and invites us to consider whether ‘realism’ as such is ever entirely possible. It’s therefore directly relevant to the essays on fantasy and the fantastic with which the bulk of this blog is filled.
I’m also glad to include it here because it addresses the experience of women like my mother as they negotiated the troubling strangeness of the twentieth century. Unlike Jameson, my mother went on to negotiate the twenty-first century too, moving into a new kind of life – that of a spiritual counsellor – while retaining close ties to the lives she had lived before the millennium. Like Jameson and Lessing she reinvented herself repeatedly right up to the end, in her final decade learning to readjust her expectations and activities, for instance, in response to her failing sight, to the effects of repeated strokes and to other symptoms of her deteriorating bodily health.
She found solace in reading, and much of what she read was fantasy. Her last weeks were spent rereading Philip Pullman’s two great trilogies, His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust, in preparation for the publication of the final volume in that series, The Rose Field, which is due to come out this Thursday (23 October 2025). She wanted to stay alive to read it, and would have been mildly irritated that she didn’t manage to do so. At the same time she was ready to go, and had been ready, I think, for years.
Her voice remains.]
The two novelists I am exploring are of different generations – Storm Jameson born in 1891, Doris Lessing in 1919 – but both share a commitment, in the aftermath of World War Two, to writing novels that engage with the sense of fragmentation, the tragedies and crises, that afflicted the postwar world in the wake of the traumas of trench warfare in World War One, the rise of totalitarian regimes in the interwar years, the scale of the holocaust, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Inevitably, all these events encouraged writers like Jameson and Lessing to reassess what Western society was about, both at home and abroad. Jameson grew up in the English provinces, Lessing in Southern Rhodesia, yet they share similar concerns. Both had family members who suffered the traumas of World War One: Jameson lost a brother and many friends, while her second husband was not only gassed but, like so many others, emotionally drained by his experiences in the trenches, while Lessing was brought up by parents who were both irreparably damaged by that war. Jameson was very much involved with refugees from Europe during the 1930s, World War Two and the Cold War; Lessing became increasingly aware of the tyrannies imposed by the white colonial powers on the black African communities. So both writers had direct personal experience of twentieth-century traumatic issues that exposed how Western society had mythologized its human image. As Tony Davies comments: ‘It is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in the name of humanity’; and he lists, among other splinter groups that have sought to justify their actions as humanist:
[t]he romantic and positivistic Humanisms through which the European bourgeoisie established their hegemonies[…], the revolutionary Humanism that shook the world and the liberal Humanism that sought to tame it, the Humanism of the Nazis and the Humanism of their victims and opponents.[1]
The acknowledgement of this fracturing meant that those, like Jameson and Lessing’s parents, brought up to believe in a supposedly unified humanist tradition, were traumatised by the revelations of its tarnished heritage, and suffered what Robert Jay Lifton calls:
an important break in the lifeline that can leave [a survivor] permanently engaged in either repair or the acquisition of new twine . And here we come to the survivor’s overall task, that of formulation, evolving new inner forms that include the traumatic event […] Formulation means establishing the lifeline on a new basis.[2]
Lifton rightly reflects that in certain historical periods humankind ‘has special difficulty in finding symbolic forms within which to locate himself.’ One could, he argues, even see this as humankind’s ‘natural’ state. But he also argues that ‘there are surely degrees in our sense that the particular time we live in is discordant and “out of joint”’ (BC 293). Which is why, for both Jameson and Lessing, the severity and range of the traumas which overshadowed their lives meant that both felt impelled to evolve such ‘inner forms’ as would constitute versions of ‘witness’ literature.
Defining what this undertaking means, Michael Levine builds on Shoshana Felman’s assertion that
To testify is […] not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative to others: to take responsibility […] for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the persona, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences.[3]
Inevitably, in accepting this responsibility, Jameson and Lessing confronted creative problems that faced many like-minded writers of that period. As the Jewish theatre director, Abigail Morris says, referring to the problem of articulating the legacy of the Holocaust:
there is a danger that we will imprison ourselves in a relentless, unconstructive pattern of repetition. And if we are not very sensitive to the danger of this treadmill, the images we create may be sentimental and thus actually lessen the importance of the event.[4]
Both Jameson and Lessing show themselves as fully aware of such dangers. The witness each offers in their different ways would be echoed in the revelatory symposium set up by the Swedish Academy in 2002 to celebrate the centenary of the first Nobel Prize.[5] Bringing together writers from many different cultures, the theme of this symposium was ‘Witness Literature’, underlining the global importance of such writing in the rapidly changing world of the twentieth century. Chinese writers, for instance, discuss the problems of writing ‘witness’ literature under a totalitarian regime, reminding readers that the ‘humanisms’ experienced in the West have not necessarily been shared in other places: Li Rui, citing Swedish academicians and Chinese peasants, challenges his audience to consider, ‘whether all mortal beings on this earth really live in the same world’.[6] It is in this context that Nadine Gordimer, drawing on her experience in the South Africa of apartheid, makes an important distinction between the reporter’s job and that of the novelist:
Meaning is what cannot be reached by the immediacy of the image, the description of the sequence of events, the methodologies of expert analysis… Kafka says the writer sees among the ruins ‘different (and more) things than others … it is seeing what is really taking place’.[7]
For her, therefore, the writer has a duty to strive for ‘the transformation of events, motives, emotions, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that has meaning.’[8] And this is the task both Jameson and Lessing set themselves from the late 1940s. Both would experiment with adaptations of realism, but in the process both would confront the problem facing any postwar writer ‘committed to realism, who must then wrestle with questions that anticipate poststructuralist notions of the interdependence of language, fictional form, mechanisms of power, subjectivity, and social reality.’[9] And so realism, the representation of reality, became for them a mode that must be reshaped from within, even as ‘reality’ was being redefined by the global traumas of their age.
For both Jameson and Lessing, given their experiences since World War One, there was, as for many of their contemporaries worldwide, a sense of ongoing crisis, on both a private and public level; there is a sense, in the novels both write in the aftermath of World War Two, that the twentieth century is deconstructing itself. As the political theorist, Waldemar Gurian, wrote in 1946:
We do not know the significance and the place in history of the second world war which ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945. We do not know if this end is a real end or only a pause. We know today that World War I ended only with an extended armistice – and even before the documents of unconditional surrender were signed, the feeling and fear spread everywhere that the series of world wars might be not over yet. All attempts to produce a general confidence in a lasting peace have until now proved vain. [10]
And he goes on to say:
The shooting war is over, but the humanitarian democratic ideology has not obtained a clear-cut triumph. We observe the old power conflicts reappear intensified by ideological and social differences, so that not a brighter world full of optimism, but a world full of conflicts, fears, and insecurity – even panic – is in the making (6).
Gurian was himself a Russian Jewish émigré, viewing the conflict from a European perspective, and so fully aware of the many faces of humanism; recently Furedi, also from an east European perspective, argues that the problem continues:
the failure to construct a positive worldview based on the affirmation of the virtues of liberal democracy [were] exposed in the late 1960s and continue to haunt society to this day (Furedi, 106).
And importantly, Jameson and Lessing are both writers whose experience goes beyond Britain itself: Jameson travelled widely in Europe and was closely involved, through her work for the PEN, with refugees from the Hitler War, Spain, and the Cold War, while Lessing brought her experience of life in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to bear on what she found in Britain and other countries. For them, as for Gurian and other writers, the postwar world reflected Sartre’s description of the existentialist world of the 1930s, where the fabric of society had been torn to shreds, and where each human being was ‘condemned to […] a freedom from all authority, which he may seek to evade, distort, and deny but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being’.[11] Any sense of shared values and principles was severely shaken, bringing with it a crisis in communication. This crisis is voiced early in Jameson’s The Black Laurel (1947).[12] At a Scottish prisoner-of-war camp, five German prisoners are to be executed for hanging two of their fellow inmates who had betrayed a planned escape. So the reader is faced at the outset of the novel with two opposing ‘just’ codes: prisoners-of-war had a duty to attempt escape, so betrayal amounted to a treasonable offence worthy of execution, while the British authorities invoke the death penalty for what was deemed to be, under their jurisdiction, straightforward murder. The camp commander recognizes the problem and its implications in a world where ‘justice’ may have no shared meaning:
Any bloody thing can be justified, gas chambers, cutting a schoolroomful of Bolshie children’s poor little throats, injecting poison into the veins of old girls of sixty or seventy – anything. Once you decide to call a private murder justice you’re done for – you and your country are going straight to hell (BL, 16).
This loss of a shared moral perspective lies at the core of Jameson’s novel, where at key moments various characters have a private agenda that they see as validating their right to choose a ‘just’ solution to the problem confronting them. And in Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), we find similar concerns about different agendas.[13] When a recent English arrival in Southern Rhodesia tries to voice his home-grown liberal criticism of the white community’s response to the murder of a farmer’s wife by her black house boy, he is given a sharp lesson about language and how to interpret it if he is to survive in this community:
When old settlers say, ‘One has to understand the country’, what they mean is, ‘You have got to get used to our ideas about the native’. They are saying, in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you’ (GS, 18).
The young man has to be groomed to accept what at first his inherent liberalism rebels against; he is under relentless pressure to conform to a different interpretation of what is acceptable.
So both Jameson and Lessing bring to their postwar writings profound concerns about humankind’s potential for violence and cruelty and about the undermining of any faith in shared values. As a result both are intent on bearing witness to a world changed radically by two world wars and the potential for more, and to what this means for the individual. And at the same time both are experimenting with ways to communicate their ideas to their contemporary readership.
***
Jameson had been honing her skills in her novels of the 1930s and 1940s. In a 1938 lecture, ‘The Novel in Contemporary Life’, she had insisted that writers must strive to separate the key issues in their contemporary world from what was ‘dead and done for’;[14] and if they could not encompass the whole in a novel, they must take ‘soundings’ (NCL, 24). She herself had developed this idea throughout the war, mirroring large issues of her time in the relationships and conflicts within small communities, so presenting her readers with situations they could readily comprehend. As the war ended she used this technique in two of her most powerful novels, Before the Crossing and The Black Laurel, where individual characters are both fully realized individuals and representatives of aspects of the society evolving around and through them.[15] Before the Crossing is set in the summer of 1939, just before war was declared; Jameson looks back from the far side of World War Two and its cruelties, taking characters she had already developed in her 1930s trilogy, ‘The Mirror in Darkness’, and showing how all too many of those who, before World War One, had been idealists, are now simply acting for themselves and their own private set of values.[16] But these are not simply acts devoid of context: Jameson shows the power of the Zeitgeist, something that Lessing also acknowledges through the experiences of her protagonist, Martha Quest, in the ‘Children of Violence’ series. In Jameson’s novel we are shown, for instance, a moment of partial insight given, ironically, to her ‘villain’, Hunt, as he contemplates his young victim, Marie: ‘He thought confusedly of life fitting its hand in [the girl] as if she were a glove, making its signs with her… And with me?’ (BC, 177). This image of both villain and victim as glove puppets, tools of the Zeitgeist, is of course both insightful and a way for Hunt to deny personal responsibility. But Jameson also shows how easily the passion for justice that drives Renn, her protagonist, as he pursues Hunt, the killer of his friend, can turn to ruthlessness, mirroring the fascism that he set out to oppose. In this he is not unlike Lessing’s young Englishman in The Grass is Singing, whose inherited liberal views have no chance against the racism and misogyny that surrounds and swamps him in the Southern Rhodesia of that time.
Jameson’s Renn is shocked when suddenly confronted with what he has become, and his long quest for personal redemption continues into Jameson’s next novel, The Black Laurel, where compassion above and beyond the self is constantly shown under siege. This novel takes Renn and other characters from Before the Crossing into a postwar Europe not yet at peace, where they meet up with a range of new representative ‘soundings’ of communities shattered and corrupted by the war: British, German and Jewish. In the ruins of Berlin little Kalb, a Jew returning to his former home, will become the victim sacrificed to the schemes of a group of British and German entrepreneurs: materialism as an ideology assumes the mantle of fascism in the postwar chaos. The novel as a whole embodies the dangers facing a Europe where war has left a legacy of self-interest and corruption, and where casual cruelties have become all too normal. It is worth noting that Jameson was writing this powerful novel even as Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work that contemporary critics from a range of cultures would insist was a realist work about their present, not a futurist fable.[17] It would be comfortable to see Orwell’s and Jameson’s novels as exaggerations, yet both writers were observing a world where abstract concepts like ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’ had lost a meaning that once at least seemed to be shared. Jameson would recall some years later a conversation in 1945 with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, in which he mocked the idea of abstract justice:
You have just been trying four of my fellow-countrymen; they have been slave-workers in Germany for more than five years, and they robbed and killed a German family. Terrible. They have become beasts. And now, after six years of this life that changed them from human beings into wild animals, you are going to execute them – because they have killed one or two German civilians. I don’t understand your people. You have hearts, yes, but do you think with them?[18]
Jameson’s two novels were written after visits in 1945 to Poland and Czechoslovakia, where she experienced both the physical devastation and the psychological damage that war inflicts on both society and the individuals who survive it.
Lessing too, in the ‘Children of Violence’ novels, shows how private and public worlds are interlinked as Martha seeks ‘self-definition’ in the context of her changing contemporary world. For example, in the second novel of the sequence, A Proper Marriage (1954), set in the Southern Rhodesian capital, Martha continues to fight, not only against the conservative pressure of her elders, but against the pressure on her to conform to the image that her generation – and especially the men – impose on her; throughout this novel, the image of a wheel keeps intruding, mirroring the mindless cycles of her society.[19] Yet in this novel, World War Two looms in the background, and the arrival of RAF personnel brings ideas that preoccupy war-ravaged Europe, chiming in with Martha’s growing sense of social injustice in her own country. As a result, in the third novel of the sequence, A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Martha tears herself away from her conventional marriage, seeing for a time her vision of a just society embodied in the Communist group she joins.[20]
The novels of ‘Children of Violence’ written in the 1950s have within them all the issues that will feed into The Golden Notebook, the work that Lessing now wrote, breaking off from the sequence. Here is the gap between what Martha dreams of and the pressures she finds it so hard to resist. Here we have her incoherent life, her need to rebel against family, the men she meets, even as she feels trapped, caged, like the Mary of The Grass is Singing. To contain Lessing’s sense of a fragmenting world, culturally, politically, and in the home, The Golden Notebook, written at the end of the 1950s, moves away from the conventional realism of the three earlier works to experiment with structure. It is still, like the Martha Quest books, set in historical context: this is the postwar world coming to terms with the Holocaust, atom bombs, and the depth of brutality inflicted on civilian populations. But The Golden Notebook is also a book written by a woman who, like Jameson, insists that we cannot separate the personal from what is going on in the world. It addresses the problem Jameson faced in 1938: for Lessing’s protagonist, Anna, is overwhelmed by the sheer scale of crises in the postwar world, and is finding her own way of taking ‘soundings’. The notebooks Anna keeps try, as Lessing herself says, ‘to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness – of breakdown’ (GN, 7). Like Jameson, Lessing shows her acute awareness of the critical dilemma facing the novelist who is trying to create fiction in a chaotic world of newsprint and ‘facts’, as well as of conventional relationships under pressure; she shows the hypocrisies and self-deceptions that exist within them. Importantly, her protagonist Anna asserts that:
the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism […] I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness […] Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness… (GN 75).
What is key here is that she envisages the novel as ‘an outpost of journalism’, not journalism per se; Lessing, in The Golden Notebook, demonstrates Kafka’s perception, quoted above, that the writer sees ‘different (and more) things than others … it is seeing what is really taking place.’[21] Like Jameson before her, Lessing strives for what Gordimer calls ‘the transformation of events, motives, emotions, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that has meaning.’[22] Lessing gives us an Anna struggling with the ways in which language can betray us; reading a political paper, she finds she can interpret it as:
parody, irony, or seriously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience (GN, 273).
Strikingly, despite the range of issues addressed in The Golden Notebook, it became a flagship for the reawakening women’s movement of the late 1960s, and it has continued to be claimed as a classic feminist text. However, Lessing’s concerns, while certainly embracing women’s concerns, are never solely feminist, any more than Jameson’s are. Both are primarily concerned with social justice, with the social constraints on both men and women – and with the responsibility, the inevitable involvement, of the individual with decisions and actions undertaken by their society. And they also show that old ideas of ‘progress’, even ‘meaning’ are very much up for grabs.
Jameson, in The Green Man (1952), for instance, has as her leitmotif characters haunted by the problem of justifying war to ensure a ‘just’ peace; for World War Two has done nothing to resolve the dilemma that troubled Adam Smith and David Hume in the eighteenth century, as they pondered what the attitude of civilized society to war should be. In Jameson’s novel we hear, for instance, an old intellectual debating with himself responsibility for the atom bomb. First he blames the scientists, but then:
his passionate belief in human freedom answered him that, since we are free, each of us is always responsible for his intentions: the intentions of the brilliant minds who planned a new form of death – I mean, of dying – are all theirs: but not only theirs: men created the instrument of a fiendish cruelty, men gave the order to use it, and used it. Therefore all men are responsible […]. All of us lie under the judgement reserved for hubris. (GM, 675).
This bleak awareness of a responsibility which is too often abused lies at the heart of many novels of the period dealing not only with world war, but with those violated by their families or by their own community; and it is also a major theme in Lessing’s work. In The Four-Gated City (1969), for example, Mark, the writer of a novel about his vision of a utopian city, covers his walls, like Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, with factual articles from newspapers and journals about happenings in the world outside, trying to make sense of, and to assume responsibility for, the ‘truth’ of what has happened and finding only divergent opinions. Then there is Jimmy, Mark’s scientific colleague, who has written two very successful works of science fiction about ‘people who had more senses than are considered normal’; Martha is intrigued by the potential for progress that this idea suggests, but ‘then [he] went on to describe a new machine which he was working on that could stimulate or destroy areas of the brain (FGC, 392). Jimmy, terrifyingly, has insight but no sense of moral responsibility. Mark uses his writerly skills to attempt to propose a positive human future: Jimmy’s failure of responsibility is set against Mark’s moral integrity. But Mark’s mission is not given ascendancy; like Jameson, Lessing shows her protagonists confronting the postmodern dilemma of soluble meanings.
The postwar period was a time when identity, who we are when set against a constantly shifting context of events and ideas, was a key issue for writers of ‘witness literature’. In A Ulysses Too Many (1958), for instance, Jameson explores the complex world of exiles with different experiences and expectations of their homeland, Poland: some have sought exile long before World War Two, some have escaped communist domination more recently, and Jameson shows how their different paths have shaped them as individuals and have coloured their perceptions of others of their countrymen.[23] The novel was of course based on Jameson’s long associations with refugees from Nazi persecutions, but it also owes a great deal to her close links with Czeslaw Milosz, the eminent Polish poet who defected after the Communist takeover of Poland. In 1951 she had comforted him over abuse he was suffering in Paris from fellow Poles whose allegiance was to various versions of a past Poland that had vanished for ever and which they accused him of betraying:
They have set up an imaginary Milosz, several imaginary Miloszes (since each of them has a different reason for abusing you), and by drinking his blood they come to life. But you are not any of their imaginary Miloszes (SJ to CM, 7.26.51).
This insight is at the core of A Ulysses Too Many. The novel is set in Nice, where Jameson and her husband had met a group of Poles. In the novel, a number of Polish and Russian exiles from before World War Two form a community in Nice; but gradually, as postwar exiles join them, their different experiences divide rather than unite them. It is the return of the writer Nadzin that stirs them up, each character eventually interpreting Nadzin’s life, work and therefore his allegiance differently, just as Polish emigrants had each constructed their own Milosz in 1951. Each needs the security of believing in his or her own version of the country they have left behind, and Nadzin’s capacity to perceive and comprehend the changes that have occurred throughout the interwar years, World War Two, and the Cold War threaten the mythologised country each holds dear. This is a deeply insightful work about exile from the past as well as from place. As Jameson, drawing on conversations with refugees, assured her literary agent, A.D.Peters, it was all too true that Nadzin was suspected by his fellow Poles: “I have been told such stories by sane people as I could never make feasible in writing” (SJ to ADP, 8.8.57).
Lessing meanwhile, in In Pursuit of the English (1960), presents a humorous but equally insightful work that explores, from an outsider’s perspective, the ways the English perceived themselves when she first came from Africa to England. This book deconstructs any idea of a shared ‘English way of life’ – that shared life that was such a comfortable propaganda tool in World War Two – very much as the Angry Young Men were doing in the 50s but in a lighter vein. 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, 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. This is no portrait of Englishness across the classes, but the complexities within one boarding house and its group of workers wittily show the impossibility of any satisfactory definition.
In many works of the postwar period, there are those for whom the postwar world is an alienating experience, where identity is permanently under threat. For instance, in Veronica Hull’s novel The Monkey Puzzle (1958), the protagonist, Catherine, has much in common with Lessing’s young Martha, since ‘to her, her existence was so tenuous that it needed the thoughts of others to confirm it’.[24] Both Jameson and Lessing explore some of the ways in which characters withdraw from a rapidly changing world that evades definition and challenges old ideas of progress. In Jameson’s The White Crow (1968), the grotesque figures largely, in both tragic and comic guise: [25] in the protagonist’s misshapen body, his view of the actual world, and his retreat into the medieval monastery of his inner imaginings. This is a work that responds to Angela Carter’s magic realism, and anticipates William Golding’s Darkness Visible.[26] In the late nineteenth century, a traveler takes on an orphaned baby with ‘two long puckers of skin stretching from the shoulder-blade so far as the third rib’ (WC, 9 -10), a sort of deformed angel. Gradually the novel develops this excursion into the grotesque, suggesting that the true grotesque lies at the core of society, for all are judged by how they respond to the appearance of this child. As he matures, Antigua (the nickname, significantly colonial, that the child is given) sees the changing Europe on the brink of World War One, but his observations are increasingly out of tune with “realist” interpretations of that world and culture, and his mind creates a medieval monastery where he can take refuge, evading the unanswerable questions his experience poses. This gripping work shows Jameson at home with preoccupations that absorbed younger writers: what exactly constitutes, for instance, madness and sanity, something Lessing was exploring in The Four-Gated City and Briefing for a Descent into Hell.[27] Aesthetically, too, Jameson was showing the grotesque as a way of presenting a Europe capable of Holocaust.
Lessing for her part explores the inner spaces of the mind as the place where humanity might break free from the crises affecting contemporary society. Jameson’s Antigua delved into inner space to find solace for the contemporary problems he could not hope to solve; for him, this was a retreat rather that an attempt to find a way forward. Lessing however, in the two final works of the ‘Children of Violence’ sequence, Landlocked and The Four-Gated City, explores the resources of the mind on a different, delicate trajectory between breakdown and breakthrough.[28] Inner space cannot be divorced from the outside world; Martha, for instance, sees a paradox in herself: ‘Martha did not believe in violence’, yet she ‘was the essence of violence, she had been conceived, bred, fed and reared on violence’ by her parents, both, ‘casualties’ of war (LL 22). Then The Four-Gated City, set in a realistic postwar Britain, pits the fragile potential of the human mind against the continuing crises framed in the languages of politics, science, psychology, and literary criticism. The final pages of the novel dare to envisage a post-apocalyptic future, where developments in the mind have ensured humanity’s survival. Yet this novel and those Lessing writes over the next decades show how easily idealism can be suffocated by regimentation and rules, how easily society can trap people into conforming, how easily they can be manipulated through shared prejudices and aspirations, so that they fail to develop insightful minds. These are the issues that preoccupied Jameson as well. Both she and Lessing, while engaging with their contemporary world and continually experimenting with ways to present their themes, bear witness to cultural, political and personal dilemmas that have a timeless appeal. What makes them stand out is their skill in creating variations on what Auerbach called ‘tragic realism’, a province that John Orr has claimed for many postcolonial writers; but, as I have argued elsewhere, what he claims is as applicable for Jameson as for Lessing, and indeed is another way of describing ‘witness’ literature:
The disclosures of tragic realism are both contemporary and prophetic, examinations of past and present […]. We are thus speaking of worlds where fiction gets there first, where it uncovers a world buried or repressed, but where it also imagines events and gives them fictive meanings before they are nailed to the mast-head of fact […] a close reading of tragic realism over the space of the last century offers little scope for liberal complacency. It reveals racism and fascism as the monsters of liberal civilization, just as it reveals Stalinism as the monster of a derailed revolution.[29]
And indeed the problems Jameson and Lessing confronted continue to haunt us today.[30]
NOTES
[1] Davies, Tony, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), 141.
[2] Lifton, Robert Jay, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster. 1979), 176-7. Lifton is chiefly known for his studies on the psychological causes and effects of war and subsequent traumas.
[3] Quoted in Levine, Michael G., The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 7.
[4] Morris, Abigail, ‘Beware the Treadmill’, Jewish Quarterly (Winter 1994/5), 5. And see Lassner, Phyllis, ed., Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocasut: Displaced Witnesses (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
[5] Engdahl, Horace, ed., Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium (Singapore: World Scientific, 2002).
[6] Li Rui, ‘Cloned Eyes’, Witness Literature, 77-83, 78. See also Herta Müller, ‘When We Don’t Speak, We Become Unbearable, and When We Do, We Make Fools of Ourselves. Can Literature Bear Witness?’ Witness Literature, 15-32.
[7] Gordimer, Nadine, ‘Witness: The Inward Testimony’, Witness Literature, 85-98, 87. See also, for the subject of ‘witness’, Rawlinson, Mark, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 11.
[8] Gordimer, 87.
[9] Schneider, Karen, Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 154.
[10] Waldemar Gurian (1946), Russian émigré political theorist at Notre Dame University (‘After World War II’, The Review of Politics. Vol.8, no I, pp. 3-11, 3, 6. See also Furedi, Frank, First World War: Still No End in Sight (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). See, for a recent perspective, Rau, Petra, Our Nazis: Representations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press, 2013).
[11] “Jean-Paul Sartre:Biography” nobelprize org.23jul2012. http//www.nobelprizeorg/nobel_prizes/literature/lureates/1964/Sartre-bio.html
[12] Jameson, The Black Laurel (London: Macmillan, 1947).
[13] Lessing, The Grass is Singing [1950] (London: Flamingo (HarperCollins), 1994; New York: HarperPerennial (HarperCollins), 1999).
[14] Jameson, The Novel in Contemporary Life (Boston, Mas: The Writer Inc, 1938), rpt with some additions in Civil Journey (London: Cassell, 1939), 277-309; see also “Documents,” in Fact, no.4, 7.15.37, pp.9-18.
[15] Jameson, Before the Crossing (London: Macmillan, 1947).
[16] Jameson, The Mirror in Darkness (I. Company Parade (London: Cassell, 1934); II Love in Winter (London: Cassell, 1935); None Turn Back (London: Cassell, 1936).
[17] Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd, 1949). See Maslen, Elizabeth, “One Man’s Tomorrow is Another’s Today: The Reader’s World and its Impact on Nineteen Eighty=Four,” George E Slusser, Colin Greenland, Eric S. Rabkin, eds, Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 146-158.
[18] Jameson, Journey from the North, vol., II, (London: Virago, 1984), 161.
[19] Lessing, A Proper Marriage [1954] (London: Harper Collins, 1993)
[20] Lessing, A Ripple from the Storm [1958] (London: Flamingo, 1993).
[21] Gordimer, 87.
[22] Gordimer, 87.
[23] SJ, A Ulysses Too Many (London: Macmillan, 1958).
[24] Veronica Hull, The Monkey Puzzle, 11..
[25] Jameson, The White Crow (London: Macmillan, 1968).
[26] Golding, William, Darkness Visible (London: Faber & Faber, 1979).
[27] Lessing, The Four-Gated City (Children of Violence, volume 5) [1969] (London: HarperCollins, 1969); Briefing for a Descent into Hell [1971] (London: Flamingo, 1995).
[28] Lessing, Landlocked [1965] (London: HarperCollins, 1993); The Four-Gated City [1969] (London: HarperCollins, 1993).
[29] Orr, John, Tragic Realism and Modern Society: The Passionate Political in the Modern Novel [1979] (London: Macmillan, 1989), 8-9.
[30] For fuller discussions of Jameson and Lessing, see Maslen, Elizabeth, Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2014), and Watkins, Susan, Doris Lessing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). See also Birkett, Jennifer and Briganti, Chiara, eds, Margaret Storm Jameson: Writing in Dialogue (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); Mackay, Marina and Stonebridge, Lyndsey, eds, British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 2007); Dowson, Jane, Women’s Writing, 1945-1960; After the Deluge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Piette, Adam, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); and Yuknavitch, Lidia, Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writing of War in Late Twentieth-century Fiction, Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory: Outstanding Dissertations series, ed., William E. Cain, (New York: Routledge, 2001).
