DORIS LESSING
547
Englishmen don't have to fear losing them to another woman nearly so
much as to the club or the companionableness of the office or any place
where men are in groups. This is because no romantic or sentimental or
domestic love can ever come up to the intensity of those years at school,
like the companionship of soldiers. By now we all know that painful and
unpleasant experience impresses itself, that we are taught masochism in a
thousand ways.
It
is a horrid fact that soldiers may adore cruel command–
ing officers: ''I'd follow the brute to hell and back." What they are adoring
is the intensity of the experience. "The best years of my life," old soldiers
will say, looking back at the horrors of war, but they were fiercely alive and,
above all, in the close and undangerous companionship of men.
But you are talking about public school boys, surely a minority, readers
may complain. True. But it is not only the upper classes; far from it. The
most revealing clue to the dark depths of the English male psyche, a little
fragment of evidence, is that perennial British comedy situation: an imper–
vious, or unnoticing, or--and here is the essence of
it-serious
male is being
pursued by a woman or a girl, and she is in love with him or fancies
him.
This can be good-humored, or it can be cruel, but she is a figure of fun, she
is ridiculous. It is a ritual humiliation, and it recurs again and again, and
again and again; you can scarcely have a British comedy without it. Or
there is this upright Englishman, and he finds himself in a harem or a group
of sexy women, but he is sturdily indifferent to their absurd wiles. And sure–
ly it is not an accident that "Not tonight, Josephine," is a favorite and
perennial joke. Only in Britain-or perhaps I should say England ... And
yet, now, I must say that there were two men I could have married or lived
with happily ever after, and they were English.
There is a complaint by women, I think a new one, a concomitant of
the sexual equality, and it goes like this: Here I am, an attractive woman, I
cook like an angel, I am good in bed, I am self-sufficient--surely I am a
pretty good bet for any man. But while they fall for me in droves, they go
off and shack up with some green girl.
When that hopeless and helpless laughter overtook me, the best of it
was because of this; and it was a long-overdue seeing of an absurdity. As one
of our most famous poets puts it, with a wondering awe at the plentitudes
of Nature, "Every year they come tumbling out of their schools, these love–
ly girls, as certain as flowers in spring, and I always wonder, what have we
done to deserve them?"
A sad little tale apropos: A certain friend, in her late forties, attractive,
clever, competent, well-read, knowledgeable about politics, and financially
independent, thought it unfair that a woman like herself was not valued
above some nymphet. After too many unhappy experiences, she
announced to her friends that she had seen the light. What she wanted was
