Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives

Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing

Jenny Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639216
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since The Grass is Singing was published in 1950, Doris Lessing has commanded a widespread and heterogeneous readership. Written from a feminist political perspective, and employing diverse modes of critical analysis, the present volume, originally published in 1982, aims to combine detailed technical exploration of Lessing's work with a sense of this extraordinary writer's historical, political and personal development. The essays, placed in political and biographical context by the editor's introduction, span the entire length of Lessing's career, up to Canopus in Argos, and includes studies of A Man and Two Women, The Golden Notebook and The Children of Violence as well as an interview with David Gladwell, director of Memoirs of a Survivor.

1 Introduction:
situating reading

Jenny Taylor

I

This ‘Chinese box’ arrangement is similar to Brecht’s ‘alienation technique’ on the stage. Miss Lessing is struggling towards complete honesty through a thicket of stock reactions and counter-reactions, political, emotional and artistic. Only by removing herself by more than the conventional step away from her source material has she any hope of seeing it clearly. This enables her, too, to embody within a coherent fictional framework the sort of elements that are normally inimical to form: a critique of literature (partly through parody): of society’s reaction to literature and of the society that gave birth to it. In doing so she achieves precisely that ‘intellectual and moral passion’ that Anna named as the prerequisite of the only sort of fiction worth writing, and her fiction proves her to be, in my opinion, not only the best woman novelist we have, but one of the most serious and intelligent and honest writers of the whole post-war generation.

Here Jeremy Brooks, reviewing The Golden Notebook in the Sunday Times in April 1962,¹ hands laurels to Doris Lessing. This perceptive review draws out the different ways that The Golden Notebook confronted the situation of the post-war writer and the crisis of writing in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It suggests that the position of the novel – its production and its audience – was linked with the specific problems of realist writing at that moment. It connects this with the social position and political stance of the novelist herself and demonstrates how ideological questions about how and for whom one writes which face the committed writer cannot be separated from questions of form. It stresses that this involves a process of both personal and political self examination; that subjectivity is central to the novel’s aesthetic and political significance.

However, Jeremy Brooks’s review was not typical of critics’ response to The Golden Notebook when it first appeared. Many could get no purchase on the book at all, some saw it as a muddled failure, a sign of premature decline, a castrating threat – even Brooks’s favourable remarks suggest something about the author’s position by placing her ambiguously within a certain cultural formation and in a particular critical canon. Lessing had already become established as both a popular and serious writer by the time The Golden Notebook came out. Her reputation rested primarily on her status as a radical white Rhodesian exile and a committed realist writer. Her African writing offered both a satire of the crumbling Empire’s expatriate delusions and of the ‘sickness of dissolution’ of Rhodesian white supremacy to a liberal English readership. And it was seen to import into the decentred metropolitan cultural configuration of the 1950s a wild and exotic innocence and the experience of another world. It provided what Lessing herself ascribed to the Angry Young Men – ‘an injection of vitality into the withered arm of British literature’,² and though she was part of a wider movement from periphery to absent centre, promoted through a dominant realist tradition, she arrived by her own particular route.

Yet the critical establishment’s response to Lessing’s work was often uneasy – she was celebrated as a strong new talent, but with qualifications. The Grass is Singing, clearly a novel which typified the social relations of apartheid, was described as ‘a serious study of a woman’s moral disintegration set starkly down … a powerful and bitter book’, in the Times Literary Supplement, in April 1950,³ while the reception of Five in 1953 was more ambivalent. The New Statesman had Lessing clearly categorised as an anti-colonial colonial: ‘When she is writing of the subject that has claimed her, that of race relations in Africa, Miss Lessing often gives the impression that she is practising to write a masterpiece’⁴ – yet this was a state of becoming rather than being. But after a while, reviewers further to the right rather peevishly asked, didn’t this harping on about racial inequality become rather a bore? The Times included a discussion of Five in a review of new colonial novels entitled ‘Local Colour’, the critic remarking:

The market for books about the colour question is apparently still buoyant. Scarcely a month goes by without its account of life in the Caribbean or in various parts of Africa … Miss Doris Lessing still seems to prefer the drab fringes of squalor to the bright light which shone in This Was the Old Chief’s Country. The delight which she … took in the topography and climate of her native country is giving place to a thoroughly competent reporting of social evils of all kinds which comes near to journalism.⁵

While the following day, in the Sunday Times, J. W. Lambert took exception to:

Miss Lessing’s exceptional fondness for piling on the agony. As her earlier African books have made plain, Miss Lessing is a powerful writer, her narrative flows with such impetus and colour that it is never dull or gloomy, yet after a while her inexorable concentration on oppression, failure and weakness builds up resistance in the reader.⁶

Committed colonial writing, particularly when explicitly political, was only acceptable within certain limits. The mythic and allegorical ramifications of Lessing’s early work was recognised primarily as a form of defamiliarisation that revitalised realism.

Ambivalence over how to place Lessing’s writing emerged even more strongly when she was read as a woman writer who wrote about women. Here critics’ reactions were confused – often hostile. They cast around for points of reference: D. H. Lawrence being an ‘exemplar’ often invoked. C. P. Snow (a very prestigious reviewer) admired the implied author’s critical distance from her protagonist in his review of Martha Quest, ‘Frustrations on the Veldt’, in the Sunday Times, November 1952:

It is a truth of a young girl’s temperament; a girl clever, passionate, suspicious, shot through with resentment … Miss Lessing often plays down any glimmer of charity or tenderness … the reader has to supply much for himself in order to find out what [Martha] is really like.⁷

While in the same paper, in September 1954, A Proper Marriage produced the opposite reading from J. W. Lambert:

A rich crop of satirical sketches flower, but there is too much tea table gynaecology… The real failing of a book with so many excellent things in it lies at its centre … the episodic story is presented from Martha’s point of view, so much so that it could be told in the first person. And with Martha Miss Lessing is noticeably lenient; true, ironic comedy arises from her discovery that life seldom ratifies the theories that she is accustomed to take from books, but chips on the shoulder make poor substitute for prolonged acquaintance, she remains only a disagreeable young woman.⁸

Martha’s passage through the roles of young girl and mother produced the very attitudes in the critics here quoted that the narrative itself seemed to question; moreover, existential journeys didn’t often involve childbirth in the 1950s. By the publication of The Golden Notebook, in 1962, this ambivalence had crystallised into Brooks’s final clause – ‘not only the best woman novelist we have, but one of the most serious and intelligent and honest writers of the whole post-war generation.’ Here are two categories, defined by gender or generation; Lessing has transgressed the boundary between them but they remain differentiated. And Brooks made sense of the novel by placing it within an explicitly socialist aesthetic and political tradition. The alienation technique and the use of montage, the way in which the novel ‘lays bare the device’ of the conditions of its own production, recall not only the work of Brecht but the debates of the Russian Formalists, and the writings of Walter Benjamin. Yet at the same time the stress on ‘coherence’, the way that the novel works towards resolving contradictions, creating a totality out of juxtaposed and disjointed elements, places it within the Utopian humanist framework of Morris, of Belinsky, of Lukács. In the terms of this review, The Golden Notebook, paradoxically, both subverts its status as Literature while securing its author as Artist.

‘Not only the best woman novelist we have, but one of the most serious and intelligent and honest writers of the whole post-war generation.’ An ideal blurb for the back cover of a paperback edition. Lessing’s bulky novels and volumes of short stories were widely promoted through the 1960s and 1970s; they have now been gathered together into an oeuvre, achieving both international and classic status. With the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and the re-emerging Women’s Movement, a public, particularly of women, constituted itself around her work which was, and is, widely read and discussed. For women who found reading and discussing novels an important reference-point, often a crucial form of self-perception and analysis, Doris Lessing loomed up – wherever one looked, she seemed to be waiting. The first four volumes of The Children of Violence, structured around the homologous relation between individual and social identity, and uneasily combining critical realism (the historical relationship between the individual and the social collective), and allegory (the mythic relationship between the individual and the ‘collective unconscious’), was not simply promoted as the epic, archetypal story of our time, but was read, often compulsively, as prototypical. But what processes are explored? The Children of Violence sequence involves a range of fictional and ideological contradictions. The narrative clearly refers back to the conventions of nineteenth-century realism, a mode which Lessing herself linked both with political commitment and the ‘world-view’ of liberal humanism in the 1950s. Yet within those terms, the resources of those conventions cannot ‘transcend’ the experience of dissolution, exile and displacement which they represent, despite the implied totalising sweep of the narrative. There is a gap, which grows wider, between the presentation of the protagonist’s consciousness and the omniscient narrative persona speaking the ‘truth’ from the standpoint of wisdom. The concerns of critical realism are there: the individual moves through the social world, through prescribed roles, in the quest for an authentic self, for freedom and knowledge, and, in the process, particularly through the specific position of women, calls the power structures of that world into question – yet without being able to offer a personal or a political solution. This process is ambiguous – the liberal myth of the naturally free individual is doubly undercut. Both by social-historical forces of violence and power: in the family, in the divided, racist, disintegrating community, in the distant European war, and by a transcendent impersonal Nature – in Martha’s sexuality, in the landscape.

This tension is an extension of a familiar literary history. The motif of the marginal observer whose ambiguous and interstitial position foregrounds contradictions within both society and the self, and where power and desire are reinforced through absence, becoming transformed into mythic or transcendent forces, is certainly not unique to Lessing. The work of Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence, for example, in different ways suggest comparable concerns. And the Children of Violence sequence describes a process, though it’s presented as a product. The narrative traces the history of Martha Quest’s consciousness, and the progress of her soul, but within the sequence – published between 1952 and 1969 – the implied conceptions of history, consciousness and progress shift. It’s difficult to locate a precise moment of rupture though, as it’s bound up with the question of how to represent the ‘fantastic realities’ of the present. Increasingly, explicit forms of fabulation and manifestations of unreason and transgression – dreams, visions, a gamut of disturbed or violent psychic states – press up against the realistic narrative, but they never quite operate as a Gothic or uncanny subvers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Biographical notes
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: situating reading
• 2 Reading The Golden Notebook in 1962
• 3 Yesterday’s heroines: on rereading Lessing and de Beauvoir
• 4 Of mud and other matter – The Children of Violence
• 5 Towards a narrative analysis of A Man and Two Women
• 6 The more recent writings: sufism, mysticism and politics
• 7 ‘If you mate a swan and a gander, who will ride?’
• 8 Doris Lessing: exile and exception
• 9 Memoirs was made of this: an interview with David Gladwell, director of Memoirs of a Survivor
• Select bibliography of Lessing criticism
• Index