Will the Real Saul Green Please Stand up?

Abstract

Two important distinctions between the literary methods of Doris Lessing and Clancy Sigal are their approaches to the subject of their relationship and the time periods during which they drew on and adapted details about each other. Lessing fictionalized Sigal primarily in the play and novel she wrote and published during the active years of their liaison (1957–60) — although Sigal has hinted that he recognizes versions of himself in one or two of her short stories. Unless evidence exists in Lessing’s unpublished writing that is not currently available for scholarly scrutiny, after The Golden Notebook and Play with a Tiger were published in 1962 Lessing did not write again about Sigal or their relationship until the second volume of her autobiography, published 35 years later in 1997, by which time she had acquired considerable distance, both emotionally and temporally, from their emotionally and artistically complicated liaison. By contrast, for Sigal the relationship continued to have a literary half-life for a number of years, beginning with his opening parry in a long-running imaginary literary dialogue between himself and Lessing: “Now it’s my turn” (“The Sexual History of Jake Blue” 1). Conversations, ideas, and scenes drawn from autobiographical experience made their way into his unpublished sketches, stories, and plays and eventually into his published works, including two novels, a play produced by BBC Radio, and several stories that feature thinly fictionalized and occasionally parodied characterizations of Doris Lessing and himself. To borrow a phrase from the title of the first volume of Lessing’s autobiography, Doris apparently remained “under his skin” for many years.

“It was like taking a postgraduate course in Creative Writing.” Clancy Sigal (“How to Live with a Lady Writer”)

“‘So you believe everything you read in the papers? Why take as God’s truth what’s in a novel?’” Clancy Sigal (“In Pursuit of Saul Green”)