WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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and polemical zeal-for banal evils. As I recall, we made up when
I suggested that we meet and talk about the whole business.
We both stuck to our views, but we agreed that there should be a
statute of limitations on feuds of this kind, particularly one that
arose out of a single incident. We both seemed to feel we were
taking the more difficult course in making up, for it was easier
to fight than to be friends.
•
•
•
I met Doris Lessing at the home of Wayland Young, now
Lord Kellet, a very able English critic and journalist. The
occasion was a party where I was to get together with the British
new left, which meant most of the people around the
New Left
Review,
plus some literary fellow-travelers. As I said in the open–
ing of a London letter I started to write but was never able to
finish, the new left in England fitted into a large living room.
Stuart Hall, the editor of the
New Left Review,
Janet Hayes,
the managing editor, Charles Taylor, Mervyn Jones, Arnold
Wesker, and Doris Lessing were among those who were there.
Doris was shy and self-effacing, but she was the most magnetic
figure. She was short, slightly plump, plainly dressed, with long
black hair flowing down behind a soft, mobile face. Her eyes,
which missed nothing, seemed to contain the strength of her
person. I was particularly struck by her modesty, her apparent
lack of any desire to display herself, and by her very un-English
flat, low-keyed talk. Most English writers I had met were either
themselves upper class or had adapted to the light, witty conver–
sational manners of the aristocracy. Doris, on the other hand,
perhaps because she had come from Southern Rhodesia, played
up her plebeian personality and made clear her aversion
to
the
gay, party-going literary life of London.
Doris Lessing was also more like writers who came from the
working class in her directness, in the nakedness of her ambition,
and in her radical views, which were uncharacteristically lacking
in ambiguity or irony. For a writer of her intelligence and inde–
pendence, she was strangely literal-minded in her leftism, which
echoed the more fashionable European radical attitudes, particu–
larly the anti-Americanism in European intellectual circles.
Once I had a knockdown quarrel with Doris about
