Here is a brief introduction to "The Fifth Child". I have written this in a hurry as I wanted to record my impressions, before I read its sequel -
This book is set in 1960s through 1980s in England. Harriet and David Lovatt, described by other people as conservative, traditional, meet each other in an office party and get married shortly afterwards. How the spirit of the times invades everyone, especially those who think of themselves as being out of it, has been brought out well by Doris Lessing in the case of the Lovatts. They think of themselves as being abstemious, emotionally fastidious . They plan to live in a small town, have a large family (Oh Yes, eight children, why not?). That "eight children" was to be the only recklessness in the lives of the Lovatts. Yet all their plans go awry as Harriet becomes pregnant the very day the Lovatts take possession of their large Victorian house. Now Harriet has to quit her job. David's one set of parents, chip in with money. Briefly, a kingdom of domesticity is established in their large house, as the family,(David's two sets of parents, Harriet's sisters and their families...), assemble there for the Christmas and Easter holidays. Of course, the money is discretely provided by James, David's father, and the house work is managed by Dorothy, Harriet's mother. The "recklessness" of the Lovatts continues as kids arrive with hardly any gap. Then arrives the fifth child, Ben- A neanderthal in a middle class family, - Unlovable even by his parents,- Strange. The story is told from the point of view of Harriet. The family is destroyed. Ben is briefly placed in an institution. from where he is rescued by his mother. Yet Ben finds acceptance as a mascot for a group of unemployed young men, even before he is old enough to attend a school.....And then "Ben Lovatt Gang" is the most envied in the school, and a lot of boys, not only the truants and drop-outs wanted to be part of it. Towards the end of the book, Ben is the effective Boss of a gang that graduates from muggings and holdups(?) to being at the periphery of riots to more center-stage. Comparison of Ben should be made with Alice Melling , the mad woman, who is the centre of her terrorist gang in Doris Lessing's "The good Terrorist". Very interesting commentary on what sort of people become the leaders of movements..
Below is a reproduction of the information from the book jacket, and whatever Doris Lessing wrote/spoke about this book online.
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http://www.dorislessing.org/thefifth.html
This book is set in 1960s through 1980s in England. Harriet and David Lovatt, described by other people as conservative, traditional, meet each other in an office party and get married shortly afterwards. How the spirit of the times invades everyone, especially those who think of themselves as being out of it, has been brought out well by Doris Lessing in the case of the Lovatts. They think of themselves as being abstemious, emotionally fastidious . They plan to live in a small town, have a large family (Oh Yes, eight children, why not?). That "eight children" was to be the only recklessness in the lives of the Lovatts. Yet all their plans go awry as Harriet becomes pregnant the very day the Lovatts take possession of their large Victorian house. Now Harriet has to quit her job. David's one set of parents, chip in with money. Briefly, a kingdom of domesticity is established in their large house, as the family,(David's two sets of parents, Harriet's sisters and their families...), assemble there for the Christmas and Easter holidays. Of course, the money is discretely provided by James, David's father, and the house work is managed by Dorothy, Harriet's mother. The "recklessness" of the Lovatts continues as kids arrive with hardly any gap. Then arrives the fifth child, Ben- A neanderthal in a middle class family, - Unlovable even by his parents,- Strange. The story is told from the point of view of Harriet. The family is destroyed. Ben is briefly placed in an institution. from where he is rescued by his mother. Yet Ben finds acceptance as a mascot for a group of unemployed young men, even before he is old enough to attend a school.....And then "Ben Lovatt Gang" is the most envied in the school, and a lot of boys, not only the truants and drop-outs wanted to be part of it. Towards the end of the book, Ben is the effective Boss of a gang that graduates from muggings and holdups(?) to being at the periphery of riots to more center-stage. Comparison of Ben should be made with Alice Melling , the mad woman, who is the centre of her terrorist gang in Doris Lessing's "The good Terrorist". Very interesting commentary on what sort of people become the leaders of movements..
Below is a reproduction of the information from the book jacket, and whatever Doris Lessing wrote/spoke about this book online.
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http://www.dorislessing.org/thefifth.html
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From an online interview An interesting thing about THE FIFTH CHILD. When I wrote it, it never occurred to me that young people would like it. For instance, in Italy the Italians set up a literary prize and called in novels from all over the world. The judges got it down to a final 20 and sent them to schoolchildren and asked them which they thought should win this prize. They chose THE FIFTH CHILD. Since then, when I go around lecturing and meet teachers and librarians, they always tell me how much the children like that book. .... Many people have said to me that my character Ben is evil. All I see is that he is a creature out of context, because he would have been perfectly all right on a hillside or in a savage group, but you put him in a middle-class family and he is totally destructed. So now I have become extremely sorry for this poor creature.
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From http://www.webofstories.com/play/53476?o=MS
From http://www.webofstories.com/play/53476?o=MS
Now I'm going to talk about the history of one book and how it ended up, because I can illustrate a lot about this kind of difference doing that. And there is another misunderstanding which is very common, and it's this – it's a letter which you get from a fan: 'I too am wanting to be a writer, Mrs Lessing. Tell me, how do you get your plots? Where do you get your ideas from? Where do you get your inspiration?' And you write back and say, 'Well, you see, it's not really something that happens once, it might take years'. And you know quite well that this person who is wanting some information from you... where do you get...? Or you might write and say, well, you see a face on a bus, you hear something on the Underground, and it sets up a whole string of memories, and you think, my God, that's a short story.
Now, this is how books and stories get written. It's not a sort of inspiration like a butterfly suddenly arriving on your head... so you say, my God, that's an inspiration! Oh, good! This is how the outsiders might see it, or hopeful neophytes might see it, but in actual fact it's probably years of memory and ideas of... and a lot of thought ... that's it, a lot of thought goes into this.
Now, I'm going to start off with The Fifth Child, which is a book... one of my books that's got a kind of life of its own. Not all books do, but this does, and it's always coming to life again and being reprinted and so on, and I get a lot of letters... a lot of letters about it.
What I wanted to write, and did want for many, many years, was to write about that folk story about the fairies, or the little people. They leave one of their children in a human cradle, and this child grows up as a human and never knows it's one of the little people, or a goblin or a dwarf or anything like that. But the little people know it, and this story, as... as it is told in folklore, is the interaction between the little people watching the growth of their child in a human cradle in a human house, and the humans not knowing it. And as a story it has infinite variations – it's in every culture – it's in Africa... various places in Africa. Anywhere you go, you say, 'Do you have this story?' and they do have it in one form or another.
Now, what interested me was the little people: who were these little people who leave their offspring in a human cradle? It is... are they... are they fairies, or gnomes? Are they dwarfs – who? Because again, these figures, these fairies and gnomes and dwarfs are in every culture – there are stories about them. Now, I thought for a very, very long time that they existed. Why should they not exist? We have people of all sizes – why should there not have been fairies and gnomes and dwarfs and so on, and so on?
Can I... can I remind you that in the Bible it says about – just thrown away, of course – that there were giants in those days. Well, maybe there were giants, we don't know that there weren't. We have occasionally come on... come on large skeletons, but is this what is meant? I don't know. But what they have recently come on – in Indonesia last year – they came on the skeletons of little people, that is, not human, but near human. Us, but small. Now, I thought, ah, there we go, you see. Now, needless to say, it... the academics, the scientists, are now arguing about it. They are saying, no, no, it's impossible, and the others say, no, it's not... it is possible, and here is the skeleton. And it's... it's in the papers, and it's a very interesting debate, this one. I think they're called the Flores... the Flores People... the Little Humans.
Now, a long time ago – does anybody here know the name Charles Fort... Forte [sic] the man who was always writing books about impossible events. What he would do – this is... we're going back to the 50s now – he would go through newspapers and any kind of magazine, and take out any improbable story and event and print it. It didn't matter what it was, it didn't matter whether it was true, possible, impossible, it was printed.
One of the stories he printed was of little people... little skeletons in the Alleghenies in America. And I thought, aha, there we are – he says it was years ago; I thought, there we are, it's there! And from time to time... and I believe in South Africa they've found little humans, and of course they debated were they really humans, were they...? I don't know what they were, but little skeletons. So there we are, you see – I start off with the idea that there were little people of some kind, we don't know what – they are in our folklore and our stories, but we don't know anything about them until we come on skeletons as the Flores People in Indonesia. And then we can say they were... they had brains as good as ours, apparently, these people, they were just as intelligent as we are, but they were smaller in scale. And there it rests at the moment.
Now, if you look at the world now, never mind about Charles Fort and 50 years ago in the Alleghenies or Indonesia... if you contrast the pygmies in Central Africa who might never get taller than three foot, three-and-a-half feet or four feet, with the people over on the East Coast who might easily be seven feet, seven-and-a-half feet, and where do you see them now? You see them in America as doormen in hotels, these enormously tall elegant men. Most men, as they come into the lobbies, they look up at these creatures – they are giants, according to our ideas, and they are... there they are over in the coast of East Africa; and you contrast them with the pygmies, and what do you have? We have giants and we have pygmies now.
Okay, so there's Loren Eiseley, who was once a very famous writer, now for some reason he's dropped out of sight, and he describes how he is on a seashore in the dusk on a track – a rough track – and he's going slowly up into the village, and in front of him he saw a Neanderthal girl. And as I say it, I feel my back going cold; as I read it, my back went cold and my hair stood up on the back of my neck. She turned her head and looked at him, and he said this girl had the eyebrow ridges and the back to her head, and she could have been a Neanderthal. And he said – now we turning to reality – he said, well, this is a remote place from any town, this girl could have grown up and no one would have said anything more than, oh, Alice does have a funny head, doesn't she? They wouldn't have even have noticed, probably. But for him, an anthropologist, she was a Neanderthal.
So I thought, hang on a minute – you know, suddenly it starts... it starts to work. I was reading around about then articles about the Neanderthals... do we have their genes, or don't we? And then I've noticed that it's back in the papers again – people are saying that we do have their characteristics. One of these people said... one of these scientists said, in America... if she... he stands in a crowd and looks around, and he says, yes, that one, that one, that one, that one; he says he can see the characteristics in a crowd. I'm not saying he did or he didn't, but that is what he said. And by now I'm getting really excited because of what I'm thinking – if Neanderthals, why not dwarfs and gnomes or whatever else? Why not?
Now, this is where it really started. I'm in a dentist's waiting room, and I'm reading – you know, you do in a dentist's waiting room – the letters to Auntie Gertrude, and the letter goes like this. The letter says: I have to write to you, I have to talk to somebody. I'm not expecting you to solve my problems or do anything like that, but I just have to tell someone. I have four children, and my fifth child was born a little devil. Now, please note, this is religious language she's using throughout. She obviously didn't think it was religious. My fifth child was born a little devil. Before she came, our home was happy and harmonious, it was a little heaven.And then she arrived, and everything became devilish – the other children suffered. Sometimes, says she, I go into her room at night and I see that lovely little face on the pillow, and I long to put my arms around her and pick her up. But I know what would come up into my arms would be a hissing, spitting little devil.
Now, this one got to me, as they say, and I thought, now look, now I have to write it.
So, now I've talked about what went into The Fifth Child, which includes emotions that have nothing whatsoever to do with The Fifth Child, and it's why it has this life. But when it came out, something quite different happened. I got letters by the shoal, and I still get letters by the shoal from people who have had defective children, autistic children, children with something wrong with them. They will say, you have written my experience. Now, you cannot write when you get the tragic letter like this back... you cannot write back and say, 'No, no, this is a goblin from the past; this is... this has got nothing to do with now, this is a throwback to the distant past'. You cannot do that when people... So you write letters saying, I'm terribly sorry that you have an autistic child or Asperger's syndrome or whatever – what a terrible thing, I really am so sorry. So you write these letters that have got... once again, you're off on the side, it's got nothing to do with the book, what you wrote. But I had a letter last week from a woman saying that she'd had two autistic children, one after the other, and reading my book she understood what the mother went through because she had this totally alien child – and a fifth child – and she had to bring it up as if it was normal, and she couldn't do it.
Now, the interesting thing about... just to return briefly... when I wrote the first version of The Fifth Child, it was interesting that I didn't write about the siblings much. I finished this book and I read it and I thought, my God, are you mad? Who would suffer from this child would be the brothers and sisters – they would suffer. The parents might have a bad time, but nothing to what the poor old siblings were having, so I had to rewrite it. So what it really is about now in its form is just as much about the mother and the child as the brothers and sisters and this child because they have to accommodate him in some way or another.
And I can't remember ever doing that –writing a book where I completely ignore the central theme. It just wasn't in my mind; I was so absorbed with the woman's experience with this child, that... because no one of course understood what was happening. Her husband didn't understand, nobody wanted to know what was going on. The doctors didn't want to know what was going on. She couldn't... what she really thought couldn't be said – that this is an alien child.
This book, as I discovered much to my surprise, is liked very much by adolescents. As I'll go to a school and I'll find a teacher saying, 'You know, the kids like this book very much'. I used to be surprised, and now I'm not. And I get letters from Germany and France, etc, saying, 'I teach The Fifth Child. It's always a great success, the children don't know what to think'. This has this quality. So I am... I never understood it... Ben is a very clumsy, awkward, unlikeable creature – if you take him as a member of a middle-class family. If you see him as someone who would be perfectly at home in a cave on a hillside 50,000 years ago, he's not peculiar at all; he's just in the wrong place. And when people said that Ben was evil, I've never understood it; he just was... he didn't belong, that's all. And we can't tolerate people who don't belong. We don't like them at all.
Well, so there I am in a North London school not very far from here... and what was interesting was that the pupils were all black and brown and Asian. There were about three white. Now this... if you're not used to this idea, it's quite... you have to get used to the idea – I was quite shocked. I thought, then what must this place be like to live in, where you have different cultures side by side? So there was a class – a literature class – and a teacher who said, 'The kids love The Fifth Child'. So there I am with the kids and they say they love The Fifth Child. And there is an extremely beautiful girl – and a plum-blossom fairy, I tell you, a most beautiful girl, who says, 'I love The Fifth Child – Ben is me! Ben is myself!' And I said, 'Now come on – Ben is not a beautiful girl, you know'. And she said, 'I am Ben!' And I thought, well, what are adolescents? They're clumsy, they're awkward, they can't get along. They know that they're... that they'll never, never grow up, they don't fit into anything, so they identify with Ben. And that is why, at last, I discovered why kids like Ben.
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