Falling in Love with Everyone: Lessing’s Letters to Smithie at the Keep, University of Sussex

Falling in Love with Everyone: Lessing's Letters to Smithie at the Keep, University of Sussex 'I do like you Smithie, because I can always say what I like to you.' 1In 1944, Leonard Smith, a 19-year-old cadet pilot in the Royal Air Force, posted to Salisbury (now Harare), Southern Rhodesia, crossed paths with the 24-year-old Doris Lessing.Lessing was then uncomfortably married to the German political activist and lawyer, Gottfried Lessing, involved in local left politics and in the midst of experimenting with her first novel which would eventually become The Grass is Singing.Along with two other close friends from this time period, Coll (Coll MacDonald) and John (John R.M. Whitehorn), Smithie (as he was always called) became an important friend and interlocutor for Lessing -a combination confidante, lover, gay best friend-part of a kind of communal identity.This group would later be fictionalized in the early sections of The Golden Notebook, as three young Air Force pilots who had known each other at Oxford: Paul, Jimmy and Ted, John Whitehorn roughly corresponding to Paul, Coll MacDonald to Jimmy, and Smithie