SOURCE: Miller, Jane, and Elaine Showalter. “Doris Lessing and the Millennium.” Raritan 18, no. 1 (summer 1998): 133-51.

[In the following review, Miller and Showalter compare Walking in the Shade to Under My Skin, examining Lessing's literary achievements, particularly her contribution to feminist scholarship.]

Doris Lessing was born in 1919, so she will soon be eighty. It is hard to believe. She is the author of at least forty-five books: novels, stories, plays, poems, and nonfiction, and in just the last three years she has published a novel and two volumes of autobiography and is rumored to be enthusiastically working on an adventure story at this very moment. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which she brought with her to London from Southern Rhodesia, where she grew up, was published in 1950, so she has been a well-known and active writer for forty-seven years.

You have to start from this productiveness, energy, longevity, not only because these are impressive in themselves, but because they may explain the uneasy relations some readers have with her work. Few of us have stayed the course; and we have often found ourselves admonished as readers for this failure to comprehend the integrity and continuity of her work and for various kinds of partisan misinterpretation which may follow from that failure. Those who admired her wonderfully intelligent first novel and who read and reread the first “Martha Quest” novels and her African short stories have not always managed to stay loyal to her science fiction of the 1980s, for instance. And then The Golden Notebook, which was published in 1962 to massive approval (though Lessing remembers it differently), must have lost some of her original readers through its elaborate and programmatic structure, even as it collected huge numbers of new ones, who inevitably ignored the way in which this novel drew on and developed the material of the earlier work. Some readers must have dropped out just as she and Anna, the heroine of The Golden Notebook, left the Communist Party (for Lessing has been a passionate anti-Communist for a great many more years than she was ever a Party member) rather than following her into her “systematic search for something different,” which issued in her space fiction and then, finally, the more didactic novels of her old age, some of which deal fiercely and openly with the agonies and exasperations of being old, which include the waywardness of the young.

Under My Skin, the first volume of her autobiography, was published in 1994. It would be surprising if it had not attracted thousands of new young readers for Lessing as well as pleasing a lot of her old ones. And though there are moments in it when we may find ourselves agreeing with its author that “there is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth,” there are also passages and episodes of remembered childhood and youth which are as good as anything in those of her novels and stories which draw most directly on the same times in her life.

It begins with the two Victorian families that “produced” her: one from the well-off London working class, the other small farmers from Essex, each a guarantee of Englishness. Both her parents were permanently though differently damaged by the First World War, marked by a lifelong incredulity at what had been done to their generation. The mostly unacknowledged legacy of that damage for their descendants has been a preoccupation in much of Lessing's work. She even speculates here whether all those unborn children might not have delivered Europe from its (presumably recent) descent into mediocrity. Her mother was a nurse, capable and ambitious, who lost her one true love in the war and then married her soldier patient as he recuperated from an amputated leg and from the finally incurable horror of what he had endured in the trenches. Both of them ended the war and entered matrimony in a state of breakdown. Doris and her younger brother were born in Persia, where her father worked for a time in a bank, and the family enjoyed a degree of comfort which her mother treasured for the rest of her life like an ancient and reassuring dream. The journey across Russia to England, and then, some months later, the family's emigration to Southern Rhodesia, are told through the vivid glimpses supplied by Lessing's actual memories. By 1924, when the family arrived, a small number of white settlers, who had been in this relatively empty land for no more than thirty-five years or so, lived alongside fewer than half a million black people.

Until she was nearly thirty, Lessing inhabited this beautiful and boring British colony, dotted with farms more or less like the one she grew up on: first as a girl “formed by literature” and by her intense feeling for the countryside she grew up in, always desperate for a life that would be as different as possible from her parents'; and then as a young woman in Salisbury searching in what came to seem more and more of a cultural desert for a possible life for herself. This included two brief and somewhat careless marriages, the birth of three children, and the tying up of her fallopian tubes (a fact which explains an apparent reticence on the subject of contraception in The Golden Notebook). It also included a most thorough investigation of the social worlds available to a young woman still in her teens in Salisbury: the lumpen jeunesse doree of the Sports Club giving way in her twenties to members and hangers-on of the local Communist Party. It is a period of her life which is brilliantly revisited in Martha Quest and the next two novels in the “Children of Violence” sequence. The autobiography's first volume ends with her divorce from her second husband, the German Communist Gottfried Lessing, and her departure for London with their small son. Her two older children stayed behind with their father and his new family: an event whose painfulness (she didn't see them again for something like ten years) the reader is likely to infer from how little Lessing says about it—itself perhaps some sort of rebuff to further questions on the subject.

“Women often get dropped from memory, and then history,” Lessing reminds us early in her autobiography as she explains what inspired this new project and what its scope will be for telling the truth and keeping her counsel. An at least rhetorical “honesty” is an essential element of the robust Lessing style, coupled with a perpetual distrust of other people's truths, particularly when they are the truths that might be expected from the five American biographers she has been hoping to beat at their own game. Her own memory is remarkable, especially in the first of these volumes, and it is something she is ready to trust “partly because I spent a good part of my childhood ‘fixing’ moments in my mind. Clearly I had to fight to establish a reality of my own, against an insistence from the adults that I should accept theirs.” Her own life and the stories she comes to tell about it began and continued in this state of resistance to everyone and everything intent on containing her or explaining her to herself. Yet there is also a recurring motif of passivity, of letting herself be dragged along against her will. It is as if flight from her unhappy parents, and particularly from her mother, who “never lost an opportunity for instruction,” supplied the impetus to think, to read, and then to write, while also seeming intermittently to put a brake on all that. Yet it was dearly a fruitful tension. Defying her mother, evading her, these were early and rooted habits, which became the source and model for patterns of escape, creativity, independence, recovery, while simultaneously furnishing the guilt which always—and always recognizably—complicates her female characters' mental lives. There were times, it seems, when these impossible feelings about her mother brought her to depressed inertia and even standstill, though such moments appear to have been rare.

Her childhood was in fact often blissfully happy, and she conveys this too, even as it was shot through with rebellion, disgust, a fiercely self-protective separateness from other people. The child Doris Lessing gives us in these early chapters is alive with contrariness: adventurous, bookish, delighted by her own competence, beside herself with hatred for her mother, but “sick with pity for her” too. Living in her head meant learning to “fix” memory and to ward off nightmares. Most of us remember our childhoods as a staccato sequence of separated moments. This girl changes slowly and invisibly, growing up before our very eyes; yet whole periods—months, years—seem also endlessly drawn out, just as they were when we were young. The writing here is as good as anything Lessing has ever done. The paradoxes that have shaped her work are already there: a fierce self-sufficiency and a romantic longing for comradeship, company, conversation, sex. Skepticism and distrust of other people are already matched by the beginnings of a search for a teacher, a guide, a path. She is wary of ideologues, but also drawn to them. Her delight in her own body goes with a guardedness and even disgust at the manifestations of other people's squalid physicality. She has not been benevolently forgetful of that snot on an old man's moustache.

There are several reasons why the second volume of the autobiography, Walking in the Shade, is disappointing compared to the first, despite its lively portraits of people she knew like Ken Tynan, John Osborne, Edward Thompson, Tom Maschler, Arnold Wesker. Its least satisfactory element is also the one for which the largest claims are likely to be made, have already been made: its public face as an account of left-wing politics in England during the 1950s. This recalls and even mimics the dilemma for many readers of the ambivalence at the heart of The Golden Notebook, which simultaneously argues for its entirely idiosyncratic truthfulness and its general validity for the times. And at the center of that is what Lessing calls, with uncharacteristic modesty, the “strange business” of changing your mind: something she has done on a grandish scale and in full public view. What was experienced by some as the “indescribable blow” of Krushchev's speech is pre-dated by her writer's discomfiture at the totalizing ways of the Party. Yet this record of a life lived as honestly, as seriously, and as independently as seemed possible for this particular woman of the twentieth century is also fractured by the sheer scale and centrifugal thoroughness of its recantation, and there are sometimes difficulties in making sense of it. Several of her recent reviewers have expressed relieved pleasure that this gifted writer is now so critical of her earlier involvement in the Communist Party. For those of us who were ourselves involved in left politics, whether outside the Party or inside it, her wholesale rejection is harder to accept as recognizable or characteristic of the time or even as generally fair to that history; though it is also bound to be read with fascination as Lessing's own sense of it all.

Here is one version of the story she tells, taken from the second volume:

All over Europe, and to a much lesser extent the United States, it was the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people who became communists. (Among these were a very different kind of people, the power-lovers.) These decent, kind people supported the worst, the most brutal tyranny of our time—with the exception of communist China. Hitler's Germany, which lasted thirteen years, was an infant in terror compared to Stalin's regime—and yes, I am taking into account the Holocaust.

Lessing's initial involvement in Communism began in her twenties in Salisbury and is presented as one (though an important one) of a series of youthful “crushes” (the Virgin Mary was briefly another), inspired by a desire to belong to something, perhaps anything, that was not her family.

I knew that I had accepted the Marxist package for no deeper reason than that the communists I met in Southern Rhodesia had actually read the books I had, were in love with literature, and because they were the only people I knew who took it for granted that the white regime was doomed. But if I had been born in another place, at another time, I would with equal ease have accepted whatever “package” was the correct one there and then.

This is typically forthright and disingenuous, and probably, as an account of her political beginnings, no more than the truth. She knows and knew that that small group of Communists she belonged to between 1942 and 1944 in Salisbury were quite unable and not, in fact, especially eager to change the conditions of life for the black majority or even to recruit very many of them. This Communist Party was separate and different from the South African Party and unaffiliated with any European Party. These Communists were, however, the only people she knew who were even embarrassed by the wholesale exploitation of the black population. They were not, though, except in a theoretical sense, much concerned with the lives or the politics of the working class, white or black, though she writes mockingly now that their hearts were “permanently swollen with compassion.”

Belonging to the Communist Party continued to be for Lessing about belonging to a group of like-minded people, and by the time she had reached London, these were mostly writers and artists. She seemed already to be straining at the bit when she embarked on a love affair with Clancy Sigal, the American Trotskyist and writer, whose romantic, swaggering brand of socialism appealed to her and maddened her and certainly served to remind her what it was that she found so unbearable about the Party. In remembering the fifties, Lessing uses “we,” “all,” even “Everyone was a communist” in this context without a trace of irony, and she seems still to believe that there was absolutely no alternative political position for anyone on the left in this country at the time. The Labour Party, for instance, which formed the government between 1945 and 1951 and was the main opposition party through the rest of the 1950s, is scarcely mentioned. Nor does Lessing seem to have worried very much about right-wing politics and a dominantly right-wing press in those days or, indeed, these. The curious fact that emerges from her autobiography is that for all her breast-beating about those anyway rather moveable years of her membership in the Party (somewhere between three and six years in the first half of the 1950s), she seems never to have thought very much about working-class life or politics, despite a bravura evocation of her working-class neighbors in Camden Town at the end of the book.

Socialism as a class politics disappears in favor of what are presented here as the larger debates: most especially, of course, those about the British Communist Party's blindness to what was going on in the Soviet Union, or its willful refusal to admit to it. So that the issue for Lessing and for Anna in The Golden Notebook is whether she and her friends can be said to have courted or avoided by the merest whisker complicity in Staling murders. It may even be that the terrifying implications of that sort of complicity provided a pull or glamour for those who remained in the Party until the bitter end or nearly so. This must have seemed to matter more than the wrangles over local housing policies or schools or wages or social services, substantial and pressing though these questions were in the discussions and political battles of the time.

There can be no question that Lessing's membership in the Party made her unpopular with some people in the fifties, and that there are those and others for whom Lessing's work is still contaminated by these affiliations. Yet it is also possible to feel that her treatment of that period of her life is lopsided and overgeneralized, on the one hand, and unfair to the large numbers of people who worked and wrote from a variety of positions on the left, on the other. Her passionate disavowal of her own Communist past, often vague as to dates and detail—as if it were not shared with other people, whose presence would make such things at least checkable—had more to do with the Party's puritanism, philistinism, and authoritarian notion of the writer's role than with current political needs and priorities. There is some conflation in her book between giving the Party its cards and sending her mother packing back home to Southern Rhodesia. If Communism originally attracted her because Communists read books, her rejection of the Party was also partly because she wrote books and wished—understandably—for some peace in which to do so.

It also seems likely that the character of her revulsion has unsettled her political judgement ever since. It has produced a predictably personal and partisan picture of the 1950s and then of left politics generally, encouraging her to extrapolate from her present contempt for her own relatively youthful enthusiasms to impugning the motives and intelligence of her contemporaries. It has also allowed her to lament the degradation of most aspects of social and cultural life since then on the basis of wholly anecdotal evidence, almost as if the adducing of more substantial kinds of evidence would in itself taint the veracity of her ease. In her readiness to admit to a mistaken political past she casually and, I think, unhelpfully blurs both the divisions within British political life on the left in the 1950s and the coalitions and alliances which were famously crucial to the left: claiming for the British Communist Party a unique national and international role it had really ceased to have by then.

For instance, she now regards her own and other people's involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1960s, in its “Aldermaston” marches and its disputatious Committee of a Hundred, presided over by Bertrand Russell, as irresponsibly meddlesome. Demonstrations and marches were occasions, she now remembers, for picnics and public outings with her fashionable friends, who, she now thinks, believed foolishly that “The Bomb” would produce a single big bang and instant Armageddon. But surely this is fantasy. Those who were seriously intent on nuclear disarmament were as likely as anyone else to be aware of the delicate tightrope they were walking in a world where some people were also threatened daily by the proliferations of conventional war. Few, if any, of those on either side would have been certain what the effects of a single dropped bomb might actually be. Many intelligent and unfashionable people believed that nuclear disarmament was essential to the world's survival. It is surely still impossible to determine whether they were right or wrong in that. They too must often have felt that demonstrations were not effective enough as a means of achieving disarmament. It was the best they could do. And if they felt solidarity with their co-marchers that was partly because for them politics was never a single-issue affair, but a long process of arguing for change on a wide front and on behalf of other groups in the society besides the one to which they in some narrower sense belonged. Doris Lessing has often wanted to belong, but it may be that she has not felt that kind of solidarity with other people, though she has been fond of her friends. Solidarity, indeed, as part of a political agenda, is by now automatically suspect in her eyes. It stinks of the masses, of mindless mobs and crowds, of people who don't think for themselves or read books.

The character of Lessing's involvement in the Communist Party meant that she kept her distance from questions of education, health, the welfare state, though she occasionally applauds its offerings rather as she applauds the new appetite for French food which came about apparently with no help from Elizabeth David (who published her first book in 1951, not a decade later, as Lessing maintains). She felt under pressure as a writer on her own to send her own son to a boarding school, and she appears still to believe that most, if not all, Englishmen are educated in boarding schools from the age of seven.

This second volume of the autobiography takes her to 1962, the year when The Golden Notebook was published. Her conversion from communism and, indeed, from politics, towards ways of valuing individual choice and conscience and the sanctity of the inner life, was already in progress and is signalled at the end of the novel in the “breakdown” experienced by Anna and the unspeakable Saul. Lessing tells us that she read widely and excitedly in Christian mysticism, in Buddhism and in Hinduism at that time and that she embarked on a psychoanalysis. It is easy enough to see that these interests did not chime with the edicts from King Street, the headquarters of the British Communist Party, and that the dislocations apparent in the structuring of the novel and its notebooks originated partly in this conflict. Indeed, the allegedly “experimental” organization of the material into its color-coded versions and alternatives could be understood as a naturalistic expression of the separations enjoined on her by the Party. It has also been read, of course, as more than that: as reflecting the difficulties of constructing a narrative out of her life as a woman and a writer of fiction, who was drawing on her past and present existence and also speculating about alternative choices within the possibilities of the time and the place she inhabited.

She was tempted for a moment, she tells us in volume two of her autobiography, to write a chapter called “Politics,” which could simply be skipped by readers who find the subject boring. She resisted that temptation because she believed that her own particular “lunacy” might provide illustration, illumination even, of the “social psychosis or mass self-hypnosis” characteristic of the political culture of the time. And perhaps it does. What it is more likely to represent, though, is something less general than that: the temporary and even local appeal of Communism for otherwise relatively unpolitical people in the 1940s and 1950s, in a world where religion was coming to be associated with conformity and sexual constraint, and which was also visibly lumbering towards new forms of global homogeneity, which might well prefigure denial of individual experience, difference, voice. Anna of The Golden Notebook joins the Communist Party in 1950, already beset by misgivings. Lessing tells us that she joined in 1951 (“probably the most neurotic act of my life”) and that she left the Party in 1954, though she did not feel totally free of it until 1960. As a member of the British Communist Party she railed against King Street whilst also performing some of the duties they asked of her: she represented the Party on the Committee of the Society of Authors until 1953, and she went on a strange writers' jamboree to the USSR with Naomi Mitchison, Arnold Kettle, and others.

The irony is that it is she who has become bored by politics, not her readers, or not by any means all of them. Those of us who read The Golden Notebook when it came out and again, in my ease, in the early eighties and then in the late nineties, responded especially to the way in which politics figured in these women's lives, as it did in ours. Politics and sex and work and children and memory as separately discussed and categorized, yet merged in our everyday lives: that was what some of us took from the novel, along with the spasmodically marvellous writing, like those startlingly memorable weekends in wartime Mashopi which have made the Black Notebook the one I've always wanted to get back to. Lessing's repudiation of her political youth may, of course, speak less rebarbatively to a younger generation than hers or mine. She is certainly right to remind herself and us that all political commitment and activity must be susceptible to revision, to the admission of mistakes and wrong-headedness, and that it seems right to start from your own mistakes and wrong-headedness. But to gather retrospectively an entire generation's ideological commitment into a single, idiosyncratic mea culpa smacks of another kind of ideologue, even a scourge.

And Lessing can be a bit of a scourge at times. She is not above some pretty indiscriminate ranting against a whole roster of “nowadays” offenders. Women “complain and nag” and assume their children are “without ears.” Teachers “fail” to get husbands just as they fail to prevent bullying because they actually “like the idea.” Bangladeshi children in East London do badly at school, unlike their Jewish predecessors. Young mothers sleep for hours through the cries of their babies as they did not in the past, a calumny she wittily if perilously caps with the words, “Autre temps, very much autre meres.” And feminists. Well, feminists are “cruel sisters” without names or morals or any sense of justice, who talk foully about men and accept alimony from their divorced spouses as no woman of Lessing's generation ever did. One editor in a well-known feminist publishing house repeatedly stamped on the toes of a respectable Muslim husband and father as an expression of her rage at Islam's treatment of women: a story which lacks precisely the kind of bodily credibility we expect from Lessing. And so on. These are huffy, irritable moments, uncharacteristic of Lessing at her best, but they suggest an odd view of history as no more than a backdrop to individual experience rather than the sum of it, and as always and hopelessly downhill all the way. Journalism and publishing may be “worse,” for instance, than they were in the 1950s, but I seem to remember that we didn't think they were all that terrific even then. Indeed, Lessing herself remembers that her first publishers, Michael Joseph and Robert Lusty, did not read books.

Lessing has vociferously deplored the acquired status of The Golden Notebook as “a tract about the sex war.” She had assumed, she wrote in 1971 in her rebuking preface for a later edition, that “that filter which is a woman's way of looking at life has the same validity as the filter which is a man's way.” A bold assumption to make in the late 1950s. Feminism was envisaged by her as no more than a fraction of what she was up to in giving “the ideological ‘feel’ of our mid-century”: the novel had “to be set among socialists and marxists, because it has been inside the various chapters of socialism that the great debates of our time have gone on.” She has rarely taken kindly even to appreciative reviews of her work, and particularly those of The Golden Notebook, whoever they were by; but above all she has resented those by “feminists.” She is probably right when she says that the most appreciative readers of the book in its very early days were men: there were so many more of them writing reviews at that time, anyway. Let's hope that her apparent approval of the reviews given her play Play with a Tiger at about that time was in fact ironic, for they included encomia of the “ought to be seen by anyone interested in the contemporary theatre and indeed in contemporary living” kind.

If feminists have claimed Doris Lessing for themselves it may be because she has written three or four novels which are amongst the best in English of this century. She has also interested both men and women in how a woman experiences herself and the world. As one (male) reviewer of The Golden Notebook put it at the time:

Simply as a record of how it is to be free and responsible, a woman in relation to men and to other women, and to struggle to come to terms with one's self about these things and about writing and politics, it seems to me unique in its truthfulness and range. Its interest will certainly be felt; it is the sort of book that determines the way people think about themselves.

That reviewer went on to prefer the novel to those of Simone de Beauvoir, as well he might. He might also have pointed out how very much better it is than any of those by Jean-Paul Sartre, and I say that as someone who has never thought The Golden Notebook so much better than the novels Lessing had written before it. Neither in her fiction nor in her autobiography has she shown any particular sympathy for other women, and she has never suggested that she wanted to join them either to improve their lot or anyone else's. She has been as honest about this as about most things, and I can't imagine that anyone has objected very strongly to this disposition. No one can ever have turned to Doris Lessing for declarations of warmth towards other women (we are all her mother in some degree) or, indeed, any other group, though like many of us she is readier to trust children than their elders.

It is still too soon to decide on Lessing's final place in the millennium championships. She has not been a great cracker of jokes over the years (though her characters go in for arpeggios of laughter in all sorts of circumstances), and she has spent too long (for my taste) in futures of her own imagining. But she has always wanted to tell the truth about what it's been like for her in a long life as a woman and a woman writer, and she has written some wonderful stories and novels and now some outstanding passages of autobiography.