In the early nineteen-eighties, a literary agent in London sent the manuscript of a first novel titled “The Diary of a Good Neighbour,” by a certain Jane Somers, to the publishing company Jonathan Cape. Cape still maintained the old-fashioned practice of employing in-house readers, and the manuscript duly appeared in their office, on the shelf reserved for agented material, guaranteeing it prompt and serious attention. Of the half-dozen or so men and women paid to sit around in armchairs perusing new manuscripts, the one who plucked it from the shelf happened to be the youngest, an aspiring poet and fiction writer of twenty-three. He didn’t think much of it, and wrote a report saying so. After a brief discussion at the weekly editorial meeting, the book was turned down.
Some time later, it was revealed that “Jane Somers” was, in fact, Doris Lessing. She had written the book under a pseudonym, partly because she wanted it to be appraised purely on merit, partly out of solidarity with young writers, and partly to free herself from her own literary persona. (J. K. Rowling’s recent exercise in pseudonymity suggests that this may be a common yearning in famous writers.) The revelation caused a biggish rumpus in the U.K. press. Cape was considered to have egg on its face for failing to recognize the work of one of its most eminent authors. Publishing in general was deemed to have been shown up for the pusillanimous business that people had always suspected it of being, only interested in taking on books by the already well-known. And the reader’s report was excoriated by Lessing herself as a reminder of “how patronized and put-down new writers are.”
Reader, I was that reader. I don’t remember what I wrote (presumably my report is somewhere in the Cape archive), and I don’t remember anything about the book itself except that I felt completely unrepentant about not recommending it. Cape did, in fact, publish plenty of first novels by genuinely unknown writers, and as far as I was concerned the only reason they didn’t go for this one was that it wasn’t good enough. “Good” for me at that time meant tight and clever and stylistically showy. The idea that failing to see the merit of “The Diary of a Good Neighbour” might have been a reflection of my own limitations rather than the book’s had no resonance for me at all. My mechanism of judgment was as ruthless as it was narrow.
None of my bosses ever criticized me for my report, but occasionally at parties people would say, in scandalized tones, “Weren’t you the reader who….” I was arrogant enough to shrug it off, but I must have felt stung at some level because, consciously or not, I reacted by setting up an untraversable barricade in my mind against Doris Lessing. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—go near her work from then on.
It has taken me thirty years to recognize the magnitude of my loss. The strange thing is that I’ve often felt drawn to Lessing’s books, not just out of a sense that I might enjoy them but from a suspicion that I might have something to learn from them as a writer. “The Golden Notebook,” in particular, has haunted my reading life in strange ways. Writer friends have often raved about the boldness of its narrative technique. Civilians describe it as life-changing, consciousness-expanding. Both are the kinds of tribute that would normally send me racing to the bookstore, but the veto was too strong. For many years, I struggled with a novel of my own in which the characters were constantly pulled together and driven apart by political and emotional forces they couldn’t understand or control, and which drove them close to madness. I wanted it to be both dramatic and introspective, but I could never find a structure or a tone that worked. I had a vague idea that “The Golden Notebook” did something like what I was trying to do, and I’d heard that at least two of my own literary heroes—Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence—were among its influences. Obviously, I should have read it, but no: the book was in jail, and visiting was strictly prohibited. To cap it all off, by a ridiculous quirk of fate, the bookstore in the town I moved to in the nineties was called the Golden Notebook, so for twenty years I haven’t been able to buy a book without the sulky aura of my little tale rising up around me.
A few weeks ago, I was staying in Brooklyn. I went into the Greenlight bookstore one afternoon in the mood for something fast and dark: a black-spined NYRB Classics edition of one of Simenon’s romans durs, perhaps, or some narcotic Highsmith novel I hadn’t read, when what should greet me from the wall of staff picks but “The Golden Notebook.” It’s not a book I associate with the young and hip these days (I’ve taught creative writing on and off for twenty-five years, and not a single student has ever mentioned it). So it was a shock to see it on a plinth in Fort Greene, and the unexpectedness seemed to shift something inside me. Had the moment come? I vacillated: Narcosis or expansion? A one-night stand or—given its Tolstoyan girth and my own slow reading speed—a long-term relationship? I bought it.
I won’t try to describe the experience of reading it except to say that it is unlike any other book I’ve ever read. And that it contrives to make the most ordinary situations—a couple arguing, a woman cooking a meal—into epicenters of weather systems stretching from McCarthyite America to apartheid South Africa to Stalinist Russia. And that there is a vein of brilliant acid comedy flowing through it that nobody had warned me about. And that it is as great for its plainness of address—all the stylistic and vocal jigs it doesn’t dance—as it is for its structural originality and staggering psychological insight.
I massively regret that I didn’t read it when I was in my twenties. Even if it hadn’t helped solve the problems of my intractable novel, it would have shown me things—about life as well as writing—that I could have made much more use of at that formative age (to be crudely utilitarian about it) than I can now. On the other hand, it’s a thrill to be reminded that there are still books this grand and powerful waiting to be read.
I’ve ordered the Jane Somers novels (there was a sequel), and I await them with only slightly queasy eagerness. There’s a line in Lessing’s introduction to “The Golden Notebook” that seems to have been written expressly for me: “Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.”
I’ll be bearing that in mind.
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James Lasdun is the author of the novels “The Horned Man” and “Seven Lies.” His most recent book is a memoir, “Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked.”
Photograph by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP.
