Doris Lessing: "One off the Short List," "The Story of Two Dogs," and "The Sun Between Their Feet"

In early 2016 I went to a poetry reading in Pittsburgh and, while in the City of Bridges, I purchased a boxed set of Doris Lessing paperbacks.  I kind of bought it because I liked the design of the box and the cover illos of the four books, and kind of because it seemed like the stories might be full of sex.  Unpacking and shelving a box of books in MPorcius Fiction Log's new HQ earlier this week, I came upon the set and decided to read a few stories from the collection A Man and Two Women, which was first printed in 1963.  Having no clues about any of the stories, I just decided to read the first three.  

"One off the Short List" 

This is a feminist story in which a middle-aged guy who has failed to fulfill his potential pursues a young woman who is achieving her potential and she shows contempt for him, humiliates him.  He hovers and zig zags between desiring her and hating her, between jealousy because other men have had her and envy because she is living the life he might have lived but couldn't quite grasp.  

Graham Spence is a writer who had a successful book but has been unable to replicate that success; now he writes book reviews and interviews people on the radio--he is essentially a journalist, but finds that fact degrading and tries not to think about it.  His marriage is similarly of mediocre quality, at least from his perspective; he and his wife have cheated on each other and come near to divorce, but stuck it out and stuck together.

The literary and artistic set of London is a small world, and at parties Spence often sees, from across rooms, Barbara Coles, a set designer for the theatre.  His feelings for her fluctuate over the years and over the course of the story, with him sometimes finding her attractive and other times finding her plain and uninteresting.  He tentatively decides he will seduce her, not because he is in love with her or finds her particularly sexy--he isn't and he doesn't--but, I guess, to prove something to himself or just add interest to his unsatisfying life.  Over time he learns more and more about her from mutual acquaintances and from the press, as her career progresses and she becomes more famous and successful.  

Finally a chance to get into close contact with her arrives--he is to interview her for the radio.  When he goes to the theatre to collect her to take her to dinner before the interview there comes the scene I consider pivotal.  Spence is a lonely self-contained individualist who has become jaded and cynical about life and his creative work, and at the theatre he witnesses Coles with her colleagues, working on the set design for a play, and is thrown for a loop by how passionate everybody is about their art and how comradely they all are to each other, showing each other good-natured and light-hearted respect as they work as one in pursuit of their noble goal.  (Lessing was, I guess in the early 1950s, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and her description of Coles's workplace and relationships with her colleagues is like a Bolshie's propagandistic dream of what life will be like after the revolution has achieved utopia.)  Coles has the kind of attitude about art and is enjoying the kind of career and friendships Spence wishes he could have, and, like in that Cure song, he not only desires Coles he, in a sense, desires to be her, and both desires are driven by hate and envy more than anything else. 

Most of the 25-page story's text consists of a blow by blow description of their evening together as Spence pursues his campaign to have sex with Coles.  I think we are supposed to think Spence has seduced many women, and he certainly has lots of tactics and strategies and assesses his advances and reverses with a cold eye, but Coles is much smarter than Spence, and at times Spence's emotions get the best of him, and he is humiliated by Coles again and again, who sees through all his maneuvers and treats him as a pathetic nuisance, an exasperating child who must be indulged so he'll stop being such a pain in the neck.  In the last scene of the story Coles is back at the theatre with her comrades, acting as if Spence's outrageous treatment of her has had no effect on her whatsoever.  To the tight-knit democratic group of successful creative people, Spence, the artistic failure, is as nothing.

If you think your work life is more important than your sex life and you want to see a man humiliated by a woman, here is your story.  People with particular fetishes might enjoy the scenes of Spence kissing and licking Coles as she stands there limp, totally uninterested but not actually putting up a fight because she doesn't consider him any kind of threat, and in which Coles, because Spence is determined to fuck her but can't maintain an erection because he doesn't really find her attractive, squats beside him and "administers" to him, "like a bored skilled wife...or like a prostitute" in an effort to get it all over with so she can sleep so she'll be in tip top form tomorrow at the theatre.

"The Story of Two Dogs" 

As the title indicates, this is a long (like 23 pages) series of anecdotes about two canines; it is also a story about freedom and perhaps heredity.  Our narrator, a white woman, grew up on a farm in Africa, and tells us all about the two dogs her family had while she was a kid, living sometimes at home and sometimes at a boarding school, and the dogs' relationships with each other and with people.  

In theory, farmers have dogs to help them hunt and to protect the farm from criminals, but in practice the dogs in the story are useless at these tasks or actually a hindrance; their true role in the family is to be the objects of the love of the narrator and her mother, and so, as a result of what observers might consider negligence, the dogs are not well-trained and are totally ill-disciplined.  The older dog is babied by the narrator's mother, and the young dog is specifically selected by the narrator when she is a little girl because of his charming misbehavior, like barking at the moon for hours, night after night.  This little puppy is the offspring of a dog that went feral, and is thus said to have "bad blood," a phrase repeated throughout the story.  From the word go this younger dog is always getting into trouble, eating the eggs from the chicken run or breaking into the storage and eating preserved food, for example, and it is even suggested by some characters that this young dog corrupts the older.  Both dogs take to leaving the farm for days at a time, killing wild animals, running afoul of the traps set by blacks for catching small game, interfering at other farms, etc.  Eventually the risks the dogs take catch up to them and they suffer painful injuries and eventually get shot.

The tone of "The Story of Two Dogs" is sad, and relationships among people and between people and animals are all described in ways that highlight their inherent asymmetry.  The mother smothers the older dog because her children don't give her the attention she wants, and the freedom-loving dogs don't return the (possessive) love the human women feel for them.  There seems to be no middle ground between stifling a dog by keeping it disciplined and making it contribute to the farm, and letting the dog roam free to steal from other farmers and face a multitude of dangers.  Maybe this is all a metaphor for the relationship of the individual to society; the life of love and security is stifling and emasculating, while the life of freedom and adventure turns you into a thief and a trespasser and leads to injury, illness, and an early violent death.  

Perhaps significantly, the only relationship in the story that "works" is that between the two dogs, who work together as a team to bring down game, save each other's lives when they get into scrapes, and care for each other when one or the other is sick or injured.  Like Barbara Coles's theatre crew in "One off the Short List," the two dogs together form an oasis of comradeship in the world of loneliness and exploitation created by the white man.

"The Sun Between Their Feet"

Another African story about animals, this one a description of dung beetles trying, and failing, to push a ball of dung up a slope.  Perhaps a reflection of the futility of life meant to remind you of Sisyphus.  The narrator tries to help the beetles, tries to nudge them into following an easier path, but they always return to the insurmountable slope.  Perhaps a metaphor for the impossibility of middle-class people to teach poor people to change their apparently self-destructive behavior or colonizers to do the same of the colonized. 

This one borders on the tedious; fortunately, it is only like six pages long.

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So there we have the first 55 or so pages of A Man and Two Women.  These stories are more or less what I would expect of mainstream literary fiction; they are well-enough written, full of psychology and descriptions of colors (a woman's green eyes, the sun and sky of Africa, etc.), and remind you that life is crummy.  "The Sun Between Their Feet" is sort of a waste of time, but "One off the Short List" and "The Story of Two Dogs" are engaging and have an obvious appeal to certain audiences.  I may read more stories from A Man and Two Women in the future, but it's back to SF for a while here at MPorcius Fiction Log.