I'm still steadily reading the second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, and am now about 100 pages from the end. It feels as though she has been at my side for some time now, although my reading journal tells me I only started the first volume, Under My Skin, in late August. If I'm honest, I'm both hungering for and dreading that last page. Hungering, because I'm desperate to pluck down any one of half a dozen new non-fiction treats from the shelf; and dreading because I know that there is no third volume and no prospect of there ever being one. Since volume two only brings the story up to 1962 and the publication of The Golden Notebook, there is a lot of life left unexplored. I suppose I'll just have to make do with a biography.
What is it about these books that I have loved so vehemently? I find it hard to quantify. Of course there is the excitement of Lessing's life. Born in 1919 and raised in the colonies, she has witnessed and been a party to all sorts of historical enormities. The first volume of the autobiography covered her childhood and early life in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) up to 1949, taking in her education, her conversion to communism, her two disastrous marriages and the births of her three children. It was a delectable feast of incident and otherness - the second world war, the rise of Stalin, the growing racial tensions in colonial Africa. The second volume picks up where we left off, with Lessing's departure to London in 1949 (leaving two of her children behind with their father). This represents a break with her old life, and a shift in the narrative thrust of the autobiography. For a start it is the beginning of her career as a writer - she glibly reports that, on arrival, she had only £100 and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, to her name. For another, it is the catalyst that rapidly expands her social circle so that by the early 1960s she is at the centre of a network of authors, poets and journalists that charactered the age. She poo-poos the labelling of these groups by critics and historians (and particularly dislikes the idea of the 'Angry Young Men') but that isn't to say she didn't know many of them intimately. It was an era of rapid expansion for publishing, and of experiment in art and writing, and there was Lessing, riding the front of the wave.
As well as the artists, there are the political activists. One of the themes of Walking in the Shade is the slow, gradual loss of Lessing's political faith. Once an ardent communist, she is increasingly a sceptic of any political creed. (Her cynicism leaps off the page: In politics, she sighs, virtue has to be its own reward, and anyone who expects justice and even gratitude is as stupid as a soldier risking his life in war who expects his government to do right by him or women who stand by struggling young artists and poets.) But that doesn't stop her playing host to political ferment in the 1950s and 1960s, either in the evening soirees she holds for exiled black African revolutionaries or in the trips she makes to the Soviet Union with Naomi Mitchison as part of the Communist Writer's Group. From the perspective of the 1990s, she continues to reflect ruefully on some of her ideas at the time:
I am shocked at myself. I wrote nonsense about China and the Soviet Union. I am appalled at my sentimentality when I said that I had never met anyone who would throw the switch that would unleash what we then thought of as The Bomb. It seems to me now that anyone would, given the right programming.
But... these happenings aren't the attraction of the autobiography, and nor is the general social history Lessing spins around her life. No, it is something else. It is her honesty, both about herself and her failings, and about her time. I can't stress her dastardly forthrightness enough. I wonder how many old acquaintances were quaking at the prospect of this volume's publication? She certainly takes no prisoners. I've noted before her complete lack of sentimentality and, to an extent, sympathy, and it is on show as much in volume two as in volume one. But you musn't think this makes her an unsympathetic character, although she does occasionally appear cruel (as, for example, in the treatment of her elderly mother). It is just that her opinions, her emotions are pared down to their barest essentials, and in being so are utterly and absolutely compelling. Because Lessing isn't given to outpourings or explosions, when she does make a show of feeling it bears true force. As, for example, when she examines her feelings after her mother's premature death in 1957:
I was grief-struck, but this was no descent into a simple pain of loss, but rather a chilly, grey semi-frozen condition - an occluded grief. As usual I pitied her for her dreadful life, but this rage of pity was blocked by the cold thought: If you had let her live with you she would not have died. I drifted about the flat, returned to my earliest self, the small girl who could see how she suffered but was muttering: No I won't. Leave me alone. ... I was thinking, At what point during this long miserable story of my mother and myself could I have behaved differently? But I had to conclude that nothing could have been different. And if she returned to life and came to London and stood there, brave, humble, uncomprehending - 'But all I want is to be of use to others' - they I would say, and be, exactly the same. So what was the use of grief? Pain? Sorrow? Regret? It was a bad, slow time...
You can imagine Lessing asking herself variations on these questions all her life: what is the use of regret? False sympathy? Chit-chat? Polite interest? Humility? And deciding that there was no use to any of it and deciding to be the woman on display in Walking in the Shade. Eye-wateringly truthful and headstrong, prickly with integrity and determined never to be taken for a fool. There is a sharp kindness there too. Although it isn't always clear in the tone of her voice, it shows in many of her actions, in the people she chooses to take in and feed, and the friendships she maintains with neighbours and fellow artists. The fact that she has little truck with her family - a hundred pages to go and she has yet to mention the children she abandoned in Southern Rhodesia in 1949 - is merely a sympton of her decision to choose her emotional dependencies for herself.
Then, there is the fascination Lessing has with her parents. I'll admit that this theme holds special significance for me; I'm not sure why. I too am fascinated by my parents. (Aren't we all?) What makes them tick, as individuals and as a couple, why are they do different to me and how have they contributed to the way I am? How could they have been different, if there lives had been different? If they had been born when I was born, or thirty years earlier? Lessing is also fixated on these questions, both psychologically and as a writer. There are echoes of Virginia Woolf. I am reminded of those diary entries from around the time she was working on To The Lighthouse. By then Woolf's parents were over 20 years dead but she recognised the parts played by their ghosts in the writing of Mr and Mrs Ramsay. I'm paraphrasing from memory (because my copies of the diaries are, ironically, still at my parent's house) but she admits that she was unnaturally obsessed with them both, and that writing about them was 'a necessary act'. She goes on to say that after writing To The Lighthouse she was finally able to lay them to rest, that she had excised them from her soul and she no longer dreamt of them as she had done. It strikes me that Lessing is forever trying to do the same. It seems fitting that her most recent book, Arthur and Emily (which she also says will be her last) is about them, their real lives and also the lives they might have had. I hope she has finally laid them to rest in it.
I fear I'm rambling now. What else can I say about Walking in the Shade? I haven't mentioned that Lessing is charming - as when she writes about her first cat, whom she underestimated - or that she is funny, in a delicious scathing sort of way, as when she takes journalism to task for being so damned predictable:
An astonishing phenomena, journalists: you'd think they would sometimes try for a little originality. Recently we have seen the same thing with John Major, who was described early on in his premiership as 'grey'. For years, and until recently, John Major has inspired journalists to add the word 'grey' to every report about him. Like so many programmed rats. Mrs. Thatcher = handbag, etc.
If there were any question still in your minds: yes, the autobiography has persuaded me to give Lessing's fiction another try. This time I'm going to start where I should have started originally, with the early novels like The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook. I shall try very hard to pretend The Cleft never happened. And I have high hopes that I shall succeed; I have the feeling that I had to get to know Lessing a little before I could appreciate her writing. We are so different, she and I (we would never, never get along in the real world!) that crossing over from my side of the literary and ideological river (instinctively liberal) to hers (unforgivingly realist) could never have been accomplished without some sort of raft or bridge. Which only goes to show that if at first you don't succeed with a universally acclaimed author, you should try and try again.
~~Victoria~~
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