I started reading the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography yesterday, quite by accident. In other words, I picked it up at work and then couldn't put it down. Readers of this blog will remember that Lessing and I have proved somewhat less than compatible in the past and that, as a result, I have felt a certain disappointment. But just 47 pages into this book and I feel that she and I are finally on the same wave-length: Under My Skin is just delicious. It covers the early years of Lessing's life, from her birth in Kermanshah (in what was then Persia) in 1919, to her childhood in the veld of Southern Rhodesia, through her first marriage in 1939 to her second in 1946, and ending with her return to England in 1949, aged 30. How can I begin to describe it thus far? Blunt. Angular. Cantankerous. Deliberate. Self-aggrandizing. Yes, all those things. But also: sensual and illusory, fascinating, even poetic in Lessing's understated way. It is not so much a careful narrative as a free-association monologue, ranging through memories of early childhood but constantly changing key and tone to embrace her later life and the writing present (1992), as well as issue of social science and politics. The free-fall of her writing, the colloquial tone of it (as though you're sitting in her living room, receiving the lecture of a life-time), is at once homely and daunting. Already there are too many quoteable passages to mention.
The second chapter she devotes entirely to musing on the problems and potentials of writing autobiography, which she admits is 'self-defence' against the numerous biographies being written by others. She feels, no doubt correctly, that only she has a handle on the truth about herself, and the drawn-out patterns of her long life. Equally, she understands that she has a lot of explaining to do about her past beliefs, and the actions they precipitated - and that it may be impossible to justify herself fully: 'When journalists and historians come to ask about something in the past the hardest moment is when I see on their faces the look that means, But how could you have believed this, or done that? Facts are easy. It is the atmospheres that made them possible that are elusive.'
She knows, however, that no matter how honest and open she tries to be, she will inevitably 'lie'. The memory is such a fickle thing, a mess of shifting perspectives and landscapes that flicker in and out of being: 'a careless and lazy organ, not only a self-flattering one. And not always self-flattering either.' She warns us that we 'make up our pasts':
'You can actually watch your mind doing it, taking a little fragment of fact and then spinning a tale out of it. No, I do not think this is only the fault of story-tellers. A parent says: ' We took you to the seaside, and you built a sandcastle, don't you remember? - look, here is a photo.' And at once the child builds from the words and the photographs a memory, which become hers.'
But this is a smoke screen of a warning, because Lessing knows that the tricks our minds play on us have as much to tell and reveal as our real memories. Because she is writing an autobiography of a self, and not the distanced biography of a person, she is at liberty to let her imagination roam freely. She is safe in the understanding that everything she writes is truly about her, because it comes from her, whether she has made it up or not. In this way she elides memory and fiction, forgiving herself the sins of the novelist. I admire her honesty and her lies in equal measure.
From the beginning her memories are unrealistically vivid, like this one from when she was just two years old:
'A swimming bath, a large tank, full of naked pallid people shouting and laughing and splashing me with hard slaps of cold water. The naked bodies were my mother, rowdy and noisy, enjoying herself, my father holding on to the edge of the tank, because that pitiful shrunken stump of a leg with its shrapnel scars, waving or jerking about in the water, made it hard for him to swim. And others, for the tank is crowded with people. They are not naked, for they wear the serious swimming costumes of the time, but it adults are always dressed in the day-time...when in bathing costumes they seem all pale flesh and unpleasant revelation. Loose bulging breasts. Whiskers of hair under arms, matting or streaming water like sweat. Sometimes snot on a face that is grinning and shouting with pleasure. Snot running into the water that already has dying or rotting leaves in it, as well as the broken reflections of clouds, down here, not up there in the sky.'
But, of course, we are to understand that they are not just the rememberings of a child. The first part maybe, the swimming pool and the impression of the near-naked adults, but the rest is an extrapolation, an interpolation of knowings by the adult Lessing. Here is an aggregate of innumerable memories of swimming pools and the people in them, of how breasts and hair look in water. It is at least partly 'lies' about the experience of her childhood self. And there is something else interesting and symptomatic in the passage: Lessing's propensity to invoke sudden physical disgust. The snot, the rotting leaves. I have already seen this again and again in the book - she likes to underpin her narrative with intimations of the vaguely sinister, I assume so that we do not read too much nostalgia into her story.
There is more to say than I can fit into this post, especially about Lessing's fixation on her parents (I must definitely read her most recent fiction-cum-memoir about them, Alfred and Emily), but I will end here by noting that, while I obviously admire what I have read of the book so far, I sense the Lessing that troubles me under the surface. She is a tetchy writer and, I intimate, a reactive, difficult personality. Possibly I have the wrong impression, but she strikes me as aloof, someone easy to respect but difficult to love, a high-functioning intellectual who denies too much emotionality in her writing. But perhaps this is because the breadth of her experience is so great, and the emotions in hand so shockingly strong, that muting them is the only way to safely express them. There is a terrible moment in the first chapter about her parents, where she baldly states: 'She [my mother] did not love her parents. My father did not love his.' Firmly, simply, she is implying that they harboured a gaping wound and, really, she need say no more. She has said quite enough for us to understand the magnitude of her point.
~~Victoria~~