BOOKS
30]
Lawrence's themes, motifs and vocabulary, when she preaches his
doctrine, she often seems simply derivative and occasionally she sounds
false. But when she almost unconsciously imitates Lawrence's everyday
methods, her stories can be as good as his minor ones, which is to say
that they are very good indeed.
It is primarily a matter of the swift directness and the generalizing
intelligence of the voice itself. Mrs. Lessing's voice has the Laurentian
confidence that one can manage the language of fiction by counting
the dollars instead of the pennies. This works because she grasps the
story as a whole :and because it is usually a big story, not in the number
of its words but in the number of its events. Here is the beginning of
"Old John's Place":
The people of the district, mostly solidly established farmers
who intended to live and die on their land, had become used
tp
a certain kind of person buying a farm, settling on it with a
vagabond excitement, but with one eye always on the attrac–
tions of the nearest town, and then flying off again after a year
or two, leaving behind them a sense of puzzled failure, a desola–
tion even worse than usual, for the reason th:at they had
taken no more than a vagabond's interest in homestead and
stock and land.
"A certain kind of person" and "a vagabond excitement" and "a
desolation worse than usual"-what do these words mean? Whose sense
of failure is it and why? Nothing is rendered-yet. But you could say
the same of many of Lawrence's beginnings. A voice is rapidly and
surely sketching in an action about a whole "district"; it is dividing
people into large generalized "kinds" .; it is inviting us
to
trust that some–
thing interesting can still be said on such a large scale and in such
large terms. The invitation is attractive but we are likely to be distrustful
and the big question is how Mrs. Lessing rewards our trust; for more
often than not she does.
It is not because the "district" is African, though the collection of
all of her African stories into one volume might suggest th:at it is. Much
of Mrs. Lessing's
n~s
from Africa seems authentic but one cannot
honestly say that it seems really new. This writer's special gift, here
as
in
The Golden Notebook,
is to be remarkably interesting without
being very original. Sometimes she achieves this against recklessly (or
even naively) dangerous odds. When I first read
Five
(a collection of
long stories, four of which are included in
African Stories)
I didn't
finish one called "Eldorado," for when I glanced back at the story's
title
after my first glimpse of its subject--'an impractical pioneer farmer
