On a blanket on the lawn under a cedrillatoona tree, in Southern Rhodesia, in 1942, a young woman sat explaining to her two children why she was leaving them. The boy was three years old and the girl not yet two, but she believed that they would understand someday, and thank her. She was going off to forge a better world than the one she herself had grown up in, a world without race hatred or injustice, a world full of marvellous people. She later admitted that she really hadn’t been much interested in politics; what had drawn her to the local Communist Party was the love of literature that she’d found she shared with its members—some twenty mostly well-off, young white people who formed a self-designated Party branch in nearby Salisbury—and the sense of heroic expectation that surrounded their lives. They were eagerly awaiting the revolution that they believed would end the hateful white regime, and, if their activities were principally confined to meetings and disputes and love affairs with one another, their goals were undeniably noble. The newest comrade had not yet begun to consider the disparity between their professed goals and their actions, possibly because she could not afford to consider the disparity between her own.
Doris Lessing’s stingingly self-mocking account of her escape from maternal to global responsibility appeared just a few years ago, in the first volume of her autobiography, “Under My Skin.” Now the second volume, “Walking in the Shade” (HarperCollins; $27.50), carries her story up to its political and emotional climax, twenty years later, with the publication of her most celebrated novel, “The Golden Notebook”—which has been in print since 1962 and become a fixture of the social history it helped to shape. Many of the scenes in these memoirs are already familiar, since Lessing has drawn on the particulars of her experience throughout the broad reaches of her fiction, characteristically joining the daily realities of life on the veldt or in a London flat to the biggest political issues of the age.
“After all, you aren’t someone who writes little novels about the emotions. You write about what’s real,” a Party comrade assures “The Golden Notebook” ’s emphatically autobiographical heroine, Anna Wulf. A fully self-conscious specimen of the “position of women in our time,” Anna is also an individual of high neurotic distinction, the very model of the modern madwoman who has found her way down from the attic to the bedroom only to stand fumbling for decades with the next set of keys. It is Anna—an earnest revolutionary with a weakness for scarred and brooding men—who patiently writes and assembles the many parts of “The Golden Notebook” itself: an old-fashioned baggy monster of a modern novel, at once didactic and feverishly intense, thick with sermons and stories about African racial policy and Soviet Communism and the modern male’s inability to love and the vaginal orgasm and the question of whether women can ever be free. Anna’s goal is to write a book that will change the way people see the world, and many readers of “The Golden Notebook” claim that Lessing herself accomplished something remarkably like that.
“Walking in the Shade,” which begins with Lessing’s arrival in England, in 1949, just after the end of her second marriage, takes a far more caustic view of these goals and possible accomplishments. A blunt and hasty book, it provides a less compelling—even a less convincing—version of Lessing’s life than the complex novel whose themes it shares. Yet the memoir is a valuable guide to the equally complex human being who now questions whether that novel was worth writing, and a portrait of the artist as a woman and a thinker which is as troubling as it was evidently meant to be.
“I was free. I could at last be wholly myself” the gay divorcée exulted as she caught sight of London from the ship she’d boarded in Cape Town. “A clean slate, a new page—everything still to come.” Readers’ expectations of a triumphant resolution to “A Doll’s House,” however, are quickly smashed. Looking back, Lessing is sardonic, even accusing, as she marvels at what she terms her adolescent sense of self-possession. In the modern self-experiment of a life she had begun, freedom would turn out to be much harder to use than it was to win.
She was nearly thirty; and had brought with her the manuscript of her first novel and also a son, aged two and a half. Her second marriage had been no more than a wartime arrangement made to avail a German lover in Rhodesia of her British citizenship. To her surprise, she’d found that she yearned for another baby—a yearning that she now accuses Mother Nature of having aroused in order to make up for the war’s wounded and dead. Against such a force she hadn’t a choice. And so her account of her early London days becomes a catalogue of the hardships of single motherhood, what with getting up at five, working for too little money, feeling ever duty-bound and exhausted. Then, there was the tremendous loneliness and exclusion from adult society. London was still a dark and blinkered city, a barely recovered war casualty itself. She describes walking the empty streets alone at night, and the tantalizing glimpses of fellowship in the lighted pubs she sometimes passed. And one feels that if only these pubs had been a little less beery or more welcoming to a foreign woman Lessing might not have committed “probably the most neurotic act of my life,” about a year after her arrival, by officially joining the Communist Party. She writes:
If this lends some limited clarity to her reasons for joining, a good deal of the book is spent anxiously trying to explain why she stayed on past so many protests of her conscience. Riddled by doubts from the start, she was increasingly dismayed by the petty corruption of the British Communist bureaucracy and by evidence of the deadly Soviet variety, impossible for even the most faithful to ignore after Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations of Stalin’s atrocities and the military suppression of Hungary later that year. In fact, she was sufficiently outraged about Hungary to write a “passionate letter protesting about it” to—astonishingly—the Union of Soviet Writers. Perhaps no one has taken the power of the pen more literally; one longs to have witnessed the bleakly Gogolian farce out of which a “conciliatory letter” was produced for her edification and sent by return post. And still she struggled with turning in her Party card. In her memoirs Lessing often blames the undertow of history itself: if her feelings were neurotic, her thinking belonged to the “Zeitgeist.” What she was always secretly hoping for, she writes, was the emergence of a few pure Russian souls to put the system back on its true path.
The most perplexing and dispiriting of her adventures, however, occurred when she came upon just such a soul, and the message was not what she wanted to hear. In 1952, while she was visiting the Soviet Union and touring a collective farm, a classic Tolstoyan old farmer in a white peasant smock stepped forward to cry out that everything the foreigners were being shown was false, that life under Communism was terrible, and that they must go back to Britain and tell the truth. Lessing now calls this the bravest act she had ever witnessed, since the old man had to know that “he would be arrested and disposed of.” It is unclear how much she herself knew or was willing to know at the time. After a banquet and a viewing of “presents to Stalin from his grateful subjects,” she went to sit outside, alone, and brood. And it was apparently her shame over her aesthetic revulsion at those hideous presents—mostly boxes and rugs featuring Stalin’s carved or woven face that led her to the macabre conclusion of this episode: her decision to write a story “according to the communist formula.”
Insisting on one’s belief in the face of all evidence; seeing and hearing what you need to be true instead of what, horribly, is; hanging on to what you know you cannot live without. And then letting it go. This memoir—like “The Golden Notebook”—is about the admission of colossal, sickening error and defeat. “All around me,” Lessing recalls, “people’s hearts were breaking, they were having breakdowns, they were suffering religious conversions” over the collapse of Communism as a moral force. She points almost gratefully to one of the century’s awful paradoxes: that, while the politically negligent helped make Hitler possible, it was “the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people” who did the same for Stalin. This is not offered as a defense, exactly, but as evidence of a kind of mass delusion, in which the only imperative was to believe in something larger than the single self.
“Losing faith in communism is exactly paralleled by people in love who cannot let their dream of love go,” Lessing writes. For her, the comparison is not abstract. She suffered two disastrous love affairs during the years covered here, long affairs that were more marriages than her marriages had been, and that left her feeling misused, empty, and nearly out of her mind with misery. In fact, she was misused, as she reports it—both here and, in far more excruciating detail, in “The Golden Notebook.” She was lonely and in need and had read far too much D. H. Lawrence. But she was also a modern woman: she wasn’t going to ask for anything that would make her seem wanting or weak. And the very modern “men-babies” that the age was producing certainly weren’t going to give anything—there were now spoken rules about this—even as they pillaged her emotional store and absorbed all the loving and the cooking and the nursing and the sex that any sensible Victorian woman would have set at a far higher market price. No wonder she felt empty by the time they were sated and moved on.
“Sometimes I think we’re all in a sort of sexual mad house,” one of the shell-shocked women in “The Golden Notebook” remarks. “My dear,” a friend replies, “we’ve chosen to be free women and this is the price we pay.” As it happens, “Free Women” is the title of a book that Anna Wulf begins writing, and it is meant to be ironic. Lessing’s women are not only willfully blind in their romantic delusions but—and this is the price they pay—deprived of any further use of their corrupted and exhausted wills. Like Lessing in her memoir, they have descended to the level where accepting pain is easier than taking responsibility.
What is most ironic of all, perhaps, is that “The Golden Notebook” has entered literary history as, in Lessing’s words, the “Bible of the Women’s Movement”—the novel that introduced the subject of women’s liberation to American society. Lessing herself seems torn between laughter and tears at the thought. It is clearly her searching, shameless honesty that readers responded to so avidly; women had never talked like this in print before. But as a document of liberation her book may be classed with Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (which in 1949 announced the “free woman” as a type just being born) and with Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” All three are works in which the angry subject is such a crippled specimen that hope and progress can be detected primarily in the sheer, howling relief of the author’s declaration: If I am a monster, it is because you have made me one.
Lessing’s heroines tend to break down completely before they are able to put themselves back together—perhaps on the Marxist model that revolution must precede utopia. The author informs us that she herself managed to escape real breakdown through writing about it. Through psychoanalysis, she came to understand that even her support of the Soviet Union was “only a continuation of early childhood feelings,” primarily suffering and identification with pain. In Africa, in a house with mud walls and Liberty curtains, her mother had complained bitterly of the sacrifice of her own talents to the raising of two children. Lessing’s strikingly exact reversal of that sacrifice did not ease the weight she carried. In her earlier memoir she skips ahead to let us know that her firstborn son, when a middle-aged man, told her that he understood why she’d had to leave his father, but that he still resented it. Her need to save the world—so much better an excuse for running off than domestic restlessness or the desire to write stories and novels—is not mentioned. Both this crusade and its failure, however, may help to explain why her stories and novels had to take on that moral burden.
But this isn’t why they are worth reading. For all her theories and her ethics and the range of her literary personae—the African realist, the London scene painter, the anguished psychologist, the science-fiction galaxy roamer turning out volumes on “the fate of the universe”—Lessing’s rarest gift is for getting characters on their feet and setting the wind stirring the curtains with language so apparently simple it betrays no method at all. Many of the short stories, in particular, seem to have written themselves. “Homage for Isaac Babel” renders adolescent tenderness and the psychology of literary style in three perfect pages; “The Day Stalin Died” and “How I Finally Lost My Heart” divide the weighty themes of “The Golden Notebook” and release them like birds into the air. The classical concision of the form seems to induce in Lessing a kind of clear-eyed mental energy, an urge to pick the locks of the elaborate cages she builds in her novels.
It’s possible that what makes Lessing so fascinating a writer is the skewed alignment of her vision and her gifts. Here is a utopian humanist who cannot help seeing into the mixed and muddled cores of actual people; an apocalyptic town crier who is also one of modern fiction’s most precise domestic realists—a Pieter de Hooch who can suddenly flare into Bosch. True, it can sometimes seem that apocalypse is merely her requirement for making a decision. (When a world is ending, it is surely time to pack your bags.) But the woman who now claims in her memoirs to have been borne through much of her life upon the tides of history, helpless and passive, has written a stack of books that entirely contradict this notion—books that are nothing if not the product of a hugely stubborn and struggling soul.
“I have to conclude that fiction is better at ‘the truth’ than a factual record,” Lessing surmised in a new introduction to “The Golden Notebook,” in 1993. As is true of most writers’ memoirs, Lessing’s are secondary events, their unvarnished truths of special interest only because of the beautifully painted half truths that have gained a hold on our imaginations. But with Lessing the usual paradox only begins here, for the fiction that details her personal and political failures also embodies her creative triumphs. “The Golden Notebook” may be a monument to disillusion and despair, but it remains a monument—one that stands for an era of formidable transition. At its end, Anna Wulf pulls herself together, joins the Labour Party, and begins to do volunteer work to ease her need to make all things better than they ever can be. Her steps seem small, sad, and honest. At the same point of emotional recovery in “Walking in the Shade,” Lessing announces a newfound allegiance to Sufism, and the reader almost sighs at the sound of the authorial boots tramping off uphill again, in this spiralling Pilgrim’s Progress of a life.
In a time with so little faith in the achievement of higher destinations, it is surely Lessing’s ability to hold fast to her goal even as she records every stumble and collapse along the way which has made her work of near-inspirational value to so many. Oddly, Lessing the memoirist is unable to acknowledge this dual aspect of her appeal, and ends by belittling her own contribution. In “Walking in the Shade” she pronounces “The Golden Notebook” to be a failure, on the ground that even this most influential of her books hasn’t really changed the way people think. Characteristically, the standards of judgment expressed in her fiction are more reasonable, even more forgiving.
In a slender novel called “The Memoirs of a Survivor,” written in 1974 and called by the author “an attempt at autobiography,” Lessing fused all her visions and gifts into a single ravishing fable. Set on several levels of reality, it tells of a woman who is mysteriously entrusted with a child to care for just as the civilization around her crashes down. Despite its fantastic elements, the tone is natural, the people are true, the language is taut and glowing. Near the end, the woman sits in the ruins of a London-like city and pictures a garden that is now out of reach, a place she visited briefly and believes that people will return to someday. “It was hard to maintain a knowledge of that other world, with its scents and running waters and its many plants, while I sat here in this dull shabby daytime room,” she recalls. But then she goes on to assert, with quiet pride, just what Lessing might rightly claim for herself: “I did hold it. I kept it in my mind. I was able to do this.” ♦
