In Pursuit of the English

Think of the person who moves into a new city and, instead of seeking out the landmarks or the trendy cafes, rents a room in a boarding house. A sprawling, chaotic establishment crammed with the city’s flotsam: the retired music-hall singers, the petty criminals, the lonely clerks, and the perpetually hopeful immigrants. This person shares the cramped kitchen, listens to the arguments through thin walls, and navigates the unspoken rules of a house that is less a home and more a living, breathing organism of human struggle and strange alliances. They are an apprentice to life itself, learning the true character of a place from its messy, vibrant, and often contradictory heart.

This was the exact position Doris Lessing placed herself in after arriving in London from Southern Rhodesia in 1949. Feeling like a foreigner in a country she had been taught to see as the motherland, she was driven by a powerful curiosity to understand what being 'English' truly meant, beyond the staid facade. She took a room in just such a boarding house and began to meticulously document the lives swirling around her. "In Pursuit of the English" is the vivid, deeply personal record of that immersion. It was her way of getting underneath the skin of her new home, capturing the raw, unglamorous, and profoundly human reality of post-war London.

Module 1: The Myth of Englishness

Lessing’s journey begins with a simple, almost naive, quest. She wants to find the "real" English. But every time she thinks she has cornered her subject, it slips through her fingers. This pursuit reveals a core truth about national identity. It’s a fluid, contradictory, and deeply personal construct.

Her first lesson is that English identity is a performance, not a fact. In the colonies, the label "English" was thrown around sentimentally. It described people who missed a home they'd never return to. It was even used as a subtle insult. At a tennis club, a Scotswoman calls a reserved lady "real English," then immediately apologizes. The word carries both pride and prejudice. Back in London, the performance continues. Lessing meets a man in a pub who seems to be the perfect archetype. He is tall, melancholic, and withdrawn. Delighted, she tells him she's finally met a true Englishman. His response is swift. "I am not English," he says with condescending pride. "I have a Welsh grandmother." The "real" English, she finds, are a persecuted minority. They vanish into camouflage at the first sign of a stranger trying to define them.

This leads to a second insight. Eccentricity is central to the English character. Lessing’s own father, an Englishman in Rhodesia, provides the template. He was a man of bizarre health rituals. He drank water charged by the sun. He aligned beds with the earth’s magnetic currents. But his eccentricities extended to a fierce, personal moral code. He once slapped an African worker for cruelly killing a mouse, declaring he couldn't stand cruelty. Yet, he physically assaulted a man twice. The first time for theft. The second time for the greater insult of turning himself in to the police, which implied the father would be an informer. This was a private, unshakeable, and often contradictory system of honor.

Ultimately, Lessing realizes that the pursuit of an "authentic" identity is often a chase for a phantom. Her parents were "grail-chasers." They idealized an England that never existed. They criticized the Rhodesia where they lived. Their perfect home was an impossible fantasy. Lessing sees this same pattern in herself. She is in pursuit of "the working-class." But her mentors constantly disqualify every group she meets. The miners aren't the real ones. The communists aren't the real ones. The "real" working-class becomes a platonic ideal, forever out of reach. This reveals a powerful psychological trap. When we idealize a group or a place, we are no longer seeing reality. We are chasing a mirage of our own creation.