Doris Lessing

Lorna Sage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367336639
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Doris Lessing was one of the most impressive, prolific and vital of twentieth century writers. Her fiction is obsessed with the workings of cultural change and she radically extended the novel's scope – most famously and influentially in The Golden Notebook – by questioning the realist tradition she inherited and the wider social beliefs about self, sexuality and authority which that tradition symbolized.

This study, originally published in 1983, surveys her epic output from her early, African writings to her later experiments with space fiction. It traces her struggles to decentre imaginative life and to erase and to redraw the boundaries of our mental maps in favour of values on the margins of the official culture.

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AFRICA

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in ‘Persia’ (now Iran) and grew up and lived in ‘Southern Rhodesia’ (now Zimbabwe) until 1949, when she came to London. Or, rather, ‘London’: since for her being a colonial has meant that names, places, the colourings of the map have always had something provisional – something arbitrary and ominous – about them. The British colonial society in which she developed her distinctive vision, and where her first novels and stories are set, was marginal and embattled and gruesomely suburban. As she wrote, sardonically, looking back:

Not long ago people set foot for the colonies – the right sort of people, that is, in a spirit of risking everything and damning the cost. These days, a reverse immigration is in progress. The horizon conquerors now set sail or take wing for England, which in this sense means London, determined to conquer it, but on their own terms. (IPE, p. 13)

However, the London she eventually arrived and settled in seemed to her hardly less precarious than the society she had left. Her world is one of violence and change. ‘All the stories here are set in a society which is more short-lived than most,’ she wrote in the 1972 Preface to Volume 1 of her Collected African Stories: ‘white-dominated Africa cannot last very long. But looking around the world now, there isn’t a way of living anywhere that doesn’t change and dissolve like clouds as you watch.’ She too has changed a great deal since her first novel The Grass is Singing came out in 1950, but the colonial situation has left its mark on all her writing. Her very openness to change seems, paradoxically enough, to spring from her experience of the entrenched mythologies of white domination.

A 1956 piece she wrote for the New Statesman (‘Being Prohibited’) contains an anecdote that nicely measures degrees of displacement. She is recalling the first time she crossed the border between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, when she was 16:

I was not, as one says, politically conscious; nor did I know the score. I knew no more, in fact, than on which side my bread was buttered. But I already felt uneasy about being a member of the Herrenvolk. When the immigration official reached me, I had written on the form: Nationality, British, Race, European; and it was the first time in my life I had had to claim myself as a member of one race and disown the others. …

The immigration man … looked suspiciously at my form for a long time before saying that I was in the wrong part of the train. I did not understand him. (I forgot to mention that where the form asked, Where were you born?, I had written, Persia.)

‘Asiatics’, said he, ‘have to go to the back of the train. …’

‘But’, I said, ‘I am not an Asiatic.’

The compartment had five other females in it; skirts were visibly being drawn aside. To prove my bona fides I should, of course, have exclaimed with outraged indignation at any such idea.¹

This time she was allowed in; in 1956, when she revisited Southern Rhodesia and once more attempted the South African border, she was not, and on her return to London found she was banned from Southern Rhodesia too.

She toys, in the New Statesman piece, with the irritating suspicion that perhaps, after all, it was her Persian birth rather than her ‘red’ anti-racist politics that made her a prohibited alien. Race is compounded of hallucinations and fictions (including one’s own); later in London a rejected landlady, hearing that Lessing comes from Africa, mutters darkly, ‘I’ve known people before, calling it sunburn’ (IPE, p. 41). The major irony in all this, though – as her book on the 1956 African visit, Going Home (1957), makes clear – is that the bureaucratic ban, whatever its motive, merely confirmed her own self-banishment. Africa itself, as opposed to its colonial regimes, was for her a vital source of imaginative food – ‘This was my air, my landscape, and above all, my sun’ – but ‘Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better’ (GH, p. 12). Reviewing other (white) African writers, she has always recognized the same nostalgic taste in the head, and always jealously denied them what she denies herself – belonging, possession. Thus Karen Blixen (‘Isak Dinesen’, whose Out of Africa first came out in 1938) strikes Lessing as almost ludicrously ‘feudal’ in not being able to see that, for all her ecstasy among ‘rivers, hills, plains, creatures’, ‘her 6000 acres were not hers’. Laurens Van Der Post’s travel books, excitedly penetrating the dark continent, provoked yet a meaner rebuff: ‘The African landscape is still, thank God, impersonal and indifferent to man’.²

Africa struck Europeans as, simply, space. Lessing recalls from her childhood a passing wanderer, an old prospector, shouting angrily: ‘Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in’ (GH, p. 13). Such figures retain an equivocal innocence – they wander into her fiction too, and when they do it is with a background sense that fiction is where they belong. One of her latest and best African stories, ‘The Story of a Non-Marrying Man’, first published in a 1972 collection, glimpses such a character in Johnny Blakeworthy, who alternates tragicomically between domestic space and ‘going native’ in the wild landscape. Johnny’s dubious trail of bigamous marriages (is the missing husband always the same man?) leads from one town/job/set of china and cushions and curtains to another; we track him through gossip, a magazine story, recollections of recollections:

Then he drifted North, out of the white man’s towns, and up into those parts that had not been ‘opened up to white settlement’, and where the Africans were still living, though not for long, in their traditional ways. And there at last he found a life that suited him, and a woman with whom he lived in kindness. (CAS 2, pp. 43–4)

The cadence of ‘settling’, coming at last to rest, is a deeply ironic one – not least because it is precisely the presence of Johnny’s shadow half (the settler) that has already largely destroyed the ‘traditional ways’ that seem so spacious.

Settling is, for Lessing, displacement mystified and disguised. Her most ‘African’ stories (those that encounter the empty landscape most directly) are about coming to a dead halt. The two stories she placed first in Volume 1 of Collected African Stories perhaps act this out most clearly. ‘The Old Chief Mshlanga’ traces a white child’s ‘naturalization’ in Africa. To begin with, she sees the landscape through the images of English fairy tales; only gradually does it become familiar, hers, and then she arrogantly possesses it. Her right seems, indeed, guaranteed (and her arrogance diminished) when she encounters the old chief, the first African she learns to respect:

it was as if I stood aside to watch a slow intimate dance of landscape and men, a very old dance, whose steps I could not learn.

But I thought: this is my heritage, too; I was bred here; it is my country as well as the black man’s country; and there is plenty of room for all of us … (CAS 1, p. 17)

The narrative has moved by now to the first person, as if to underline the self-knowledge its heroine is growing into, but actually to prepare for a very opposite end. Ego accepts no bounds: the girl searches out the unsettled land where Chief Mshlanga still rules, and finds herself first lost and seized with panic, and then, when she reaches his village, baffled in the face not of emptiness but of another society where nothing about herself is welcome. Nothing happens, or can, except that as she walks home ‘there was now a queer hostility in the landscape … as strong as a wall, as intangible as smoke’ (CAS 1, p. 22); and that, before long, the chief and his kraal are moved to ‘a proper native reserve’.

Like ‘The Old Chief Mshlanga’, the second story, ‘Sunrise on the Veld’, is an anti-fable that traces a blocking of romanticism, a shrinkage of space. The adolescent boy protagonist leaps and yells his way through the dawning landscape to confront a scene that seems to come from ‘a dream’: ‘a strange beast that was horned and drunken-legged. … that had black ragged tufts of fur … with patches of raw flesh beneath (CAS 1, p. 29), which he recognizes with sickening slowness as a buck being eaten alive by ants. His euphoria drains into another feeling – stoicism: ‘this is what happens, this is how things work. … the ants must eat too’ (CAS 1, pp. 30–1). But this also is too spacious, too distant a perspective, and, as the heat of full daylight grows uncomfortable and the buck’s white skeleton is picked clean and visible, he shrinks into himself. The buck’s leg, he sees, was broken somehow: the thought that the same fate might have befallen him is so obvious and terrible that he can’t think it. He thinks instead of the bucks he has ‘missed’ with a careless shot, and plods wearily home through a maze of responsibilities.

There isn’t ‘room for all of us’. The landscape is almost claustrophobically crowded: one is neither free nor fated in it, but meshed in complexity. And yet the myths are so simple. Lessing, looking for analogies, finds ‘European’ colonial myths ‘American’ (another displacement):

They are of the frontiersman and the lone-wolf; the brave white woman house-making in primitive conditions; the child who gets himself an education and so a status beyond his parents. … Yet these images have no longer anything to do with what is going on now in Central Africa. (GH, p. 58)

Her accounts of her own family stress the sheer unreality in which they lived. The fullest is ‘My Father’, and the story it tells is one she had already touched on many times in her fiction. Her father, crippled in the First World War, had married her mother (his nurse) in 1919. He ‘could not face being a bank clerk in England … after the trenches … went off to the Imperial Bank of Persia’, but was still ‘longing for something freer, because as a bank official he could not let go into the dream-logged personality that was awaiting him.’ On leave in 1925 in London, he visited an empire exhibition, and ‘on an impulse’ emigrated to farm in Southern Rhodesia:

Soon, there was my father in a cigar-shaped house of thatch and mud on the top of a kopje. … a couple of hundred miles south from the Zambesi, a hundred or so west from Mozambique. … Logamundi – gold country, tobacco country, maize country – wild, almost empty. (The Africans had been turned off it into reserves.) Our neighbours were four, five, seven miles off. In front of the house … no neighbours, nothing …

Her mother

After a period of neurotic illness … became brave and resourceful. But she never saw that her husband was not living in a real world. … We were always about to ‘get off the farm’. A miracle would do it – a sweepstake, a gold-mine, a legacy.

Her father’s dreams, over the years, grew wilder: ‘It could be gold divining. … It could be the relation between the minerals of the earth and of the moon.’³

The long story ‘Eldorado’ links this special brand of madness with the figure of the old prospector, ‘an old weather-stained man’ whose life story, like one ‘from a child’s adventure book in its simplicities of luck and bad fortune’ (CAS 1, p. 296), fires an unsuccessful farmer, Alec Barnes, with the glamour of the search for gold. Little by little, the ‘settler’ Alec is transformed into a crazy wanderer, zigzagging across his farmland ‘divining’ gold with a rod. His new vision of ‘the reefs and shales and silts and rivers of the underworld’ (CAS 1, p. 300) is full of vivid details but fatally askew – as, we realize, his picture of the farm has always been. Clearing new bush every year, and eroding the soil, was just as crazy, if more discreetly so. His whole relation to the landscape is vitiated by his dreams of freedom and space:

He used to stand at the edge of a field, gazing dimly across it at a ridge of bush which rose sharp to the great blue sky. … He would stand on a moonlight night staring across the fields which now appeared like a diffusing green sea. … Distance – that was what he needed. It was what he had left England to find. (CAS 1, p. 291)

When his son Paul, goaded into practicality, finds gold on the farm without the least aid from his divinations, Alec’s madness comes full circle and closes round him. And yet, we’re meant to feel, Paul is old and weary before his time, impoverished by not being able to believe in the ‘childish’ adventure story, knowing himself an alien, and responsible.

Lessing often treats the fruitless yearning for space as a peculiarly English neurosis. Stories like ‘The Second Hut’ and ‘The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange’ contrast the English in Africa with ‘poor white’ Afrikaners, who are portrayed as indeed almost African, inhabiting the space, their Dutch ancestry bred out. In Going Home the Afrikaner is ‘the original; something new; something that cannot be seen in any other continent. … as indigenous as the Africans’ (GH, p. 20), and thus set on a tragic collision course. The English, however, remain unrooted: ‘My parents were English because they yearned for England, but knew they could never live in it again because of its conservatism, narrowness and tradition’ (IPE, p. 12). The colony – its British part at least – is populated by refugees from history who, having mislaid ‘their’ England, are fatally adrift, even while they appropriate the land, and become more and more determined on a ‘white’ Rhodesia.

*

We begin, then, from displacement, from an inability to accept the frontier myths. The closest Lessing comes to spelling out the effect of a colonial family background in the making of a writer is not in any of the personal interviews but in her 1968 Afterword to Olive Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm (1885):

To the creation of a woman novelist seem to go certain psychological ingredients; at least, often enough to make it interesting. One of them, a balance between father and mother where the practicality, the ordinary sense, cleverness, and worldly ambition is on the side of the mother; and the father’s life is so weighted with dreams and ideas and imaginings that their joint life gets lost in what looks like a hopeless muddle and failure, but which holds a potentiality for something that must be recognized as better, on a different level, than what ordinary sense or cleverness can achieve.⁴

This Schreiner family scenario is recognizably also that of Lessing’s autobiographical pieces, and of much of her African fiction, and it belongs not only to psychology but to (colonial) psycho-history. When the old male adventure story turns to ‘dream’ (leaving women to cope, as in so many of her stories, with daily living and planning), a new and problematic imaginative horizon opens up for a daughter. The very failure of ‘settlement’, for her, may be a clue to rewriting her world, transcending ‘ordinary sense’.

Certainly, Lessing’s rejection or perversion of her part in the scenario (‘the child who gets himself an education and so a status beyond his parents’) did make her encounters with ther people’s books parti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editors’ preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• A note on the texts
• 1 Africa
• 2 England
• 3 New Worlds
• Notes
• Bibliography