It is books that are central to Doris Lessing’s life and in an essay called ‘Books’ she discusses what a curious yearning it is, the hunger for books. Not many centuries ago books were rare as jewels. Millions had never seen a book. Now a letter from Zimbabwe, whose schools and libraries have been starved of books for 20 years, reads, ‘Books are our water and we drink from this spring.’ And though Animal Farm is the book in most demand there, it is its story, written from the gut, that grips harder than the political message. Libraries in Africa, she says, cry out for romances, detective stories, poetry, adventure, biography, novels, short stories, and for ‘world tales’ with learned footnotes that show ‘we have these stories, too’. In ‘Jane Austen’, the first piece in the book, Lessing points out that Pride and Prejudice is a Cinderella story of which there are over 400 known versions.

The bias of the book, then, is rather surprisingly away from politics. After a blazing, not to say dangerous youth, for she was forbidden to return to South Africa, her life now seems mellow. Yet ages ago, after the Golden Notebook, in Bayswater where brilliant young idealists came to her for political guidance, she says she knew she was ‘bound to disappoint’. She was so glad to ‘throw off the murky bundle of tricks that was communism’ that ‘she had gone into extreme reaction’. ‘A plague on both your houses! Leave me alone!’ She quotes (earlier) from Ecclesiastes: ‘In much wisdom there is much grief and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.’

But what remains unchanged is her belief in the individual. She tells the girls of Exeter school:

Don’t feel insignificant. You are not ineffective. When I was young there was the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini of Italy, the British empire, White supremacy in South Africa, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain. They seemed immovable. Now they are all gone … It was individuals who in fact changed things.
The jacket of this book has a new photograph of Lessing in a pretty sitting-room on a silky sofa, a rose in a glass vase on a glass table. Lovely black pearls. The face is that of some Turgenev or Chekhov woman — peasant or princess — smiling but lined (‘Of the making of books there is no end and in much study is a weariness of the flesh’), a face that has been avid for knowledge and justice since the thatched hut of her childhood.

Jane Gardam’s Old Filth is published next month by Chatto & Windus at £15.99.

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