Doris Lessing
b. 1919
An author who cast a new view of feminism and motherhood.
Roger Mayne/National Portrait Gallery, London
My interest in Doris Lessing — Nobel Prize winner and one of the most celebrated writers on earth — derives from a single book, the 1988 novel “The Fifth Child,” which has haunted me for more than 20 years.
The story concerns a young idealistic British couple, Harriet and David Lovatt, united in their desire to raise a large family. They quickly have four children and build what appears to be an idyllic life. Then, against the advice of relatives, Harriet becomes pregnant again. Almost at once, she feels poisoned by the being growing inside her; and from the moment he is born, Ben looks and behaves like a monster: violent, insatiable, without remorse. He is eventually institutionalized, but his guilt-stricken mother rescues him, an act that effectively destroys her family.
“The Fifth Child” is a work of horror that horrifies by subverting our most sacred cultural assumption: the innocence of children. It is also a story I knew in my bones. Monstrous children were, you might say, a dominant theme in my childhood.
My brothers and I were well-behaved suburban kids who savaged one another in private. We fought with fists and cruel taunts and occasionally cutlery. After we were grown, my mother, a psychoanalyst, wrote a book called “The Monster Within.” It’s about maternal ambivalence and, specifically, women’s fears of giving birth to monsters — a fascination, I’ve always suspected, that arose in part from her combative sons. My mother saw Lessing’s novel as a psychological parable about genetic greed. Harriet and David Lovatt want an unlimited number of children regardless of their ability to care for them. Their fifth child embodies this ruthless appetite.
As the father of two young children, I found this interpretation insightful but deeply unsettling — particularly after my wife announced last year that she was pregnant with another child. I couldn’t help feeling a spasm of dread. Had we taken on too much? Would we now be punished?
I’m relieved to report that our third child is perfectly sweet, at least so far. But the power of “The Fifth Child” remains undiminished. Every time I read it (and I have read it more times than I care to admit), I feel the same tangle of fear, despair, frustration and morbid exhilaration. This may seem an odd set of feelings to seek out. But Lessing was the sort of writer who understood that literature’s purpose is not just to entertain. It should make us feel implicated. We read, in part, to re-experience the wishes and regrets of our childhood.
The part of me that keeps picking up “The Fifth Child,” in other words, is the one perpetually yearning for that big happy family, knowing it will be undone by beastly impulses but helpless to surrender the dream.