by Sue Corbett
Her radicalism ensured that she was regarded with caution by the literary establishment, for which, it should be said, she had little respect. In 2007, however, when she was 88, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. If she sometimes lost direction, it was because she remained ready to shock, was often carried away by rage or hope, and wrote with an implacable, heroic thoroughness which some found unwieldy. She referred caustically but without rancour to the categories “that every established writer has to learn to live inside. Mine were… communism, feminism, mysticism”.
She outgrew categories, however, and later she came to distrust and even despise the kind of crutch that they had offered: “Oh, I do loathe groups, clans, families, the human ‘we’. How I do dread them, fear them, try to keep them well away. Prides of lions or packs of wild dogs are kindly enemies in comparison.” She was sui generis. Yet she was always generous with her time and her compassion, and she had friends all over the world.
Doris May Taylor was born in Iran in 1919, the daughter of Captain Alfred Taylor, who shortly afterwards bought a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia. Money was always tight, her father had lost a leg in the First World War, and her mother had been denied the social life she felt was her due. For the child the freedom of the bush and the companionship of animals was some compensation.
She remembered the closeness to nature in intimate detail — “mud squishing through my toes” — and years later she would write a diary of a year’s close observation of Regent’s Park.
Necessarily she became self-reliant at an early age and adept at every practical skill, and from then on nothing could daunt her. “I was equipped with a fine organ of self-preservation,” she remarked. Yet her greatest adventure was reading, which she did voraciously, with few of the modern distractions (she was old enough to remember the coming of the talkies in Africa).
Many of her stories and her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), describe growing up with parents who never doubted their right to employ black people in slave-like conditions. The young girl, all energy and observation, thought very differently. “I wandered about the bush or sat on an antheap, angry to the point of being crazy myself, seeing my parents as they were now and what they ought to have been — and from here it is only a step to the thought, If we make war impossible the world will be full of whole and healthy and sane and marvellous people… In my mind I lived in utopias, part from literature and part the obverse of what I actually lived in. Into these lovely and loving societies I had begun to fit black people, particularly black children. Kindly, generous, happy people in cities where no one went to war, black, brown, white people, all together…”
She was in a hurry to do it all: to escape, to write, to travel, to marry, to have children, to change the world. She struck out on the first stage of her journey by moving to Cape Town University, and married at 19, just before war broke out.
With two children promptly born, she tried the bourgeois life with Frank Wisdom, but war and a political conscience led her into a communist cell among other dissidents and refugees. Though always an individualist, she was drawn to ideals of co-operation. “The fact that human beings, given half a chance, start seeing each other’s point of view seems to me the only ray of hope.”
These experiences of revolutionary spirit, and her second marriage, in 1943 to one of the refugees, Gottfried Lessing, appear thinly disguised in the middle volumes of her great fictional memoir Children of Violence, the story of Martha Quest — and it was as Martha Quest that Doris Lessing became famous.
Characteristically honest, the five-volume sequence depicts an egotistical, independent and stubborn young woman prone to be the victim in passionate entanglements. One of her most remarkable achievements, the sequence took Lessing 17 years, from Martha Quest (1952) through A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and Landlocked (1965), to The Four-Gated City (1969). As well as colourfully evoking the period and place, it gives a thorough and complex analysis of the individual conscience at odds with the collective, as Lessing so often was. Yet she understood supremely well how to write about people behaving politically without herself trying to make political arguments.
The marriage to Lessing was a temporary arrangement from the beginning. “We knew we were not well suited. We said, It doesn’t matter, we will just get divorced when the war is over.” They did, and her former husband went on to become president of the Board of Trade in East Germany. In the meantime their casualness about the marriage did not prevent them from having a child, informing their friends: “We’re going to fit in a baby now, because we’ve got nothing better to do.” In retrospect she may have agreed with her mother that this insouciance was negligent and selfish — most probably she did — but her autobiography offers no judgment, recording only her impulses of the time. What she did concede was that she was “deeply in the wrong” to allow her first two children to be utterly confused by seeing her at this time with her new husband and baby.
Separating once again, and arriving with a small son and no money in the frugal London of 1949, she earned a precarious living by odd pieces of journalism and by publishing stories. She described the cheerful, generous expatriates’ bedsit world in a documentary, In Pursuit of the English, in 1960. A lifelong devotion to cats, about which she often wrote, first surfaced in that charming book.
In 1953 she won the Somerset Maugham Award with Five, a volume of stories, and in 1957 The Habit of Loving confirmed that the short story was one of her most effective forms. Some might say that the discipline of brevity and singularity were just what her untidy fictional style most needed. She continued writing short stories, often about eccentrics, well into her seventies.
The arrival of Clancy Sigal, a “lonely cowboy” American and her lover for three years, caused, she wrote, “as severe a dislocation of my picture of myself as ever in my life. I had always been seen as a maverick — tactless, intransigent, ‘difficult’ — and now, all at once, I was accused of being an English lady.” A Trotskyite from a poor family, he taught her about jazz and the blues, but could not prevent her growing doubts about the dangerous sentimentalism of the Left.
Hers was, in Samuel Beckett’s phrase, “a mind on the alert against itself”: “Sometimes I survey my current thoughts,” she wrote, “and wonder which of them — some of them new, with the overemphasis of outline that befits an untried idea, not worn into shape by events, some astounded at their own effrontery — will turn out to have been the ones I should have been listening to, developing. Which of them will seem absurd, and even pathetic, in a decade or so?” With her emotional acuteness enhanced by such conscientiousness, she was a reporter not only of experience, but from inside experience. As well as investigating the life around her — pacing the streets at night, for instance — she experimented with experience, as when she tried living without sleep or enough to eat.
In 1956, by now established as a politically influential writer, Lessing paid a brief visit to South Africa and Rhodesia, reported in Going Home, which led to a permanent ban on entry. When Hungary was invaded by the Soviet Union that year, she left the Communist Party.
The invasion was one of many signs that the revolutionary doctrine in which she had invested so much was not worthy of her faith. In retrospect, there were many reasons to escape from what she called “a mass social psychosis”, but it was an enormous emotional effort to do so, and she often felt that she was caught with only a choice of betrayals.
She remained politically active, however, going on the Aldermaston marches and being present with Bertrand Russell and Canon Collins at the meeting which brought into being the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Her first proto-family in London, who appear in the Quest series as the Coldridges, prefigure much of what came later to be Sixties culture. Drugs, divorces, dabbling in extrasensory perception, left-wing politics and ecology had by now been replaced for her by the more solitary — and liberated — life that appears in the mamm
oth novel The Golden Notebook (1962), which was perhaps her greatest success and which associated her forever with the feminist movement.
Anna shares her one-parent world with a series of lodger-lovers, and longs for freedom to write. Her experience, in five overlapping notebooks running to nearly 600 pages, is related in kaleidoscopic detail. As she struggles with stormy private problems (and tries to become a good novelist along the way), dreams are roughly destroyed, lovers and friends prove broken reeds, and money and time run out.
This theme, and some characters, re-emerge in one of her dramatic pieces, Play with a Tiger (1962), which disappointed the critics and was described by one as “the epitaph of a generation which expected to die at 30”. Being part of the circle of young writers associated with the Royal Court and Tony Richardson in the 1950s and 1960s, Lessing wrote several other plays, but one way and another all were dogged by bad luck and she gave up the theatre.
Lessing remembered the 1960s differently from most commentators. The things that were often thought to be new, she wrote, such as free sex, idealism and popular political activism, had mostly been features of the 1950s.
“But there was one thing that did start in the Sixties: drugs.” And, having acted as a housemother for six years, looking after adolescents and young adults who were in trouble or disturbed, she remembered much about the decade that was grim — suicides, madness, the imprisonment of friends — as well as the optimism and the anthems.
In 1976 a French translation of The Golden Notebook won the Prix Médicis. The remainder of that decade was productive for Lessing, but it ended in a breakdown which she preferred to call a rebirth. Strongly influenced by the work of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, she published Briefing for a Descent into Hell in 1971. In it, an amnesiac describes his visionary adventures before being reduced, with electro-convulsive therapy, to limp apathy. Rage against such treatment blazes on every page.
This was followed in 1973 by The Summer Before the Dark, in which a middle-aged, middle-class woman abruptly abandons security for freedom. In a kind of sequel, Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), the narrator identifies with a simple girl and both regress through a mystical infancy. As well as giving a memorable account of her suffering, Lessing looked ahead to a fearful Armageddon; our universal imagined future was to preoccupy her for a decade.
Shikasta (1979), The Marriages between Zones Three Four and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982) and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983) were ambitious science fiction experiments, with galactic empires dominated by Queen Vashti and the devilish Shamat, and Johor (who sometimes becomes George Sherman) as an explorer examining the morality of human society. Some readers felt the ingenuity of these books was more apparent than the purpose, but Lessing was obviously happy writing in this form, and there was the bonus of teasing her usual public. This series of cosmic novels was a serious attempt to look at the grand questions of life from an original standpoint. It also enabled Lessing to escape the categorisation of “radical” and “campaigner”. Her dislike of conformism extended to the kind of conformism even of her own social circle, which she diagnosed in the story The Temptation of Jack Orkney:
“They were journalists and editors, actors and writers, film-makers and trade unionists. They wrote books on subjects like Unemployment in the Highlands and The Future of Technology. They sat on councils and committees and the boards of semi-charitable organisations, they were Town Councillors, Members of Parliament, creators of documentary film programmes. They had taken the same stands on Korea and Kenya, on Cyprus and Suez, on Hungary and the Congo, on Nigeria, the Deep South and Brazil, on South Africa and Rhodesia and Ireland and Vietnam and… and now they were sharing opinions and emotions on the nine million refugees from Bangladesh.”
Their names, she wrote, “appeared continually together on dozens, hundreds of letterheads, appeals, protests, petitions: if you saw one name you could assume the others”, but Lessing did not like to be assumed. And furthermore, they were finding more and more often “that their views were identical with the conventional views put forward by majorities everywhere”. Lessing’s liberalism was winning, and she was not sure it was having the effects she had hoped for. She wrote in 1994 that her lifetime had seen “a general worsening of conditions”.
Although she claimed to be a writer before anything else, she did not move mainly among writers, and although widely read was not a very good judge of writing itself, for she was always distracted from it by questions of personality. Surprisingly, she had no sense of poetry, and when she misquoted Larkin (“Sex began in 1963”) she referred to him as “the poet Philip Larkin”, as if reminding herself who he was.
Disrespect for authority led Lessing to play a famous practical joke on publishers and critics in the early 1980s by submitting a novel, The Diary of a Good Neighbour under the pseudonym Jane Somers to test the power of literary reputations. The novel — and its sequel If the Old Could… (1984) — dealing with the relationship between an old derelict and the menopausal editor of a chic magazine, did not approach Lessing’s sales.
The critics were not amused by her ploy. She refused ever to join their ranks, delighted schoolchildren by telling them to avoid studying English literature, and thought literary prizes were “just part of the selling mechanism”. But the WH Smith Award in 1985 for The Good Terrorist was a sign of the literary establishment’s regard for her, and in the same year she was shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread prizes. The novel describes a terrorist cell in London deciding how to blow up a large store, and was almost uncannily prescient: the Harrods IRA bombing happened shortly before the book was completed.
In matter-of-fact style, Lessing demonstrates how Alice, middle-class and lonely, gravitates to the IRA, where she finds that her domestic drudgery is only just redeemed by the feeling of self-importance arising from the risk and dedication. Horror, inadequacy, farce and satire make a strange but convincing compound, a telling and all too believable assessment of the way disillusion can slip into moral dissolution.
Lessing’s interest in the macabre appeared again in another exceptionally fine novel, The Fifth Child (1988), in which a decent, kindly mother finds she has given birth to a monster over whom she has no control. The child is eventually dispatched to a containment institution, which Lessing describes in horrifying detail. Writing powerfully about deformity, exhaustion, threat, resentment and siege, she was asking urgent questions about how society deals with its misfits.
In 1994 Lessing published the first volume of a magnificent autobiography, Under My Skin, pre-empting, she claimed, five rival biographers. It was one of her finest books, setting a standard that its sequel, Walking in the Shade (1997), taking the story to 1962, could not maintain, bogged down as it was, as her life had been, in the endless wrangles of communist correctness.
Further novels included Mara and Dann (1999), Ben, in the World (2000), The Sweetest Dream (2001), The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005), The Cleft (2007) and Alfred and Emily (2008).
Lessing never condescended to those who believed in ideals, though her own subscriptions may have lapsed. She sided with the down-and-out against the do-gooder, but remained loyal to the older socialist tenets (including the State of Israel) rather than the tough pragmatic Left. She hated publicity and remained quite unspoilt by success, joining polytechnic students to learn Russian in her late sixties “to keep my brain busy”.
She had friends of all ages, who enjoyed the warm, gentle voice and sense of humour that lit up a somewhat solemn and austere countenance, which was made the more severe in later life by a geometrically central parting.
Flaws in her writing matter little beside the grand attempt; the occasional clumsiness is forgotten amid the accuracy of her observation. If ever a novelist was committed, not just to ideas and moral truths, but to the refractory business of communicating everyday concerns in the light of passion
ate involvement, that novelist was Doris Lessing.
She was made a Companion of Honour in 2000 and a Companion of Literature (the Royal Society of Literature Award) in 2001.
She is survived by a daughter.
Doris Lessing, CH, novelist, was born on October 22, 1919. She died on November 17, 2013, aged 94
SHIRLEY TEMPLE
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ANGELIC CHILD STAR WHO BECAME A US DIPLOMAT AFTER HER SCREEN POPULARITY WANED
FEBRUARY 12, 2014
“When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, “it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.”
Shirley Temple in her prime was a bit bigger than a baby and considerably more than a smiling face. With her dimples, golden curls and winning smile she was undeniably cute, but with a knowingness that cut across the sentimentality of her films, and she had a precocious natural talent as actor, singer and dancer that could make seasoned professionals look awkward beside her.
For millions of American cinemagoers during a bleak period in their history, she offered optimism and reassurance. Not for nothing did the plots of her most successful films cast her as a saviour and a healer, softening the hearts of grouchy grandpas, comforting the luckless and persuading divided families to set aside their feuds. For four years running during the 1930s she was the most popular film star in America.
Temple’s time at the top was brief. She did not have the same appeal as a teenager that she had had as a toddler and was finished with films by the age of 21. However, she made a happy second marriage and spent contented years bringing up her children before returning to public life in Republican politics.
