Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  24 The Autobiography of Doris Lessing

  I

  PRESENTED WITH SNAPSHOTS of the Tayler family on their farm in Rhodesia and asked to pick out the artist or artist-to-be among them, one might at a pinch settle on the father, rather stiff and military but clearly not unintelligent. Certainly not on the daughter, pleasant-looking enough but ordinary as a loaf of bread. Yet the daughter had it in her not only to escape the future staring her in the face – marriage to a decent young fellow followed by a life of managing servants and having babies – but to become one of the major novelists of her time.

  Alfred Cook Tayler, Doris’s sad-eyed father, having lost a leg in the trenches of the First World War, married the nurse tending him and quit a native country whose manifold hypocrisies he could no longer bear. His wife, already in her mid-thirties, gave up her career to have a family. Their first child Doris – later Doris Wisdom, then Doris Lessing – was born in Persia in 1919.

  Following ideas about child-rearing fashionable at the time, Emily Maude Tayler imposed on her children a rigid schedule of feeding times and bowel movements, reproducing upon them her own upbringing at the hands of an unloving stepmother. Doris responded with deep anger against a mother who on principle refused to feed her when she cried, who made it clear that she preferred her son to her daughter, and who chatted openly to guests about ‘how the little girl in particular (she was so difficult, so naughty!) made her life a total misery’. No child could have stood up to such an ‘assault on [her] very existence’. ‘For years I lived in a state of accusation against [her], at first hot, then cold and hard.’1

  Since her mother would not love her, she turned to her father. ‘The smell of maleness, tobacco, sweat . . . enveloped her in safety.’ But there was a darker side to his love. The stump of his amputated leg poked out at her from his dressing gown, an obscenity with a life of its own. There was also the tickling game, ‘when Daddy captures his little daughter and her face is forced down into his lap or crotch, into the unwashed smell . . . His great hands go to work on my ribs. My screams, helpless, hysterical, desperate.’ For years afterwards she had dreams in which she struggled while brutal male faces loomed over her. ‘I wonder how many women who submit to physical suffering at the hands of their men were taught by “games”. by “tickling”.’ (pp. 28, 31)

  After Persia the Taylers moved to Rhodesia – a colony officially founded only thirty-five years earlier – drawn by the lure of quick fortunes to be made in maize farming. But their thousand-acre farm (‘It would not have occurred to [my parents] that the land belonged to the blacks’) was not large enough to be economically viable. Though her mother adapted well, her father lacked the doggedness needed for farming; they were always in debt. (p. 74)

  For the two children, however, growing up in the back country was a wonderful formative experience. From their parents they learned about geology and natural history; bedtime stories fed their imagination. Books were ordered from London, and devoured. (Books were cheap enough in the 1920s for a struggling colonial family to buy them in quantities; no Zimbabwean child of today, and certainly no rural child, could afford such a wealth of reading matter.) By the age of twelve Doris knew

  how to set a hen, look after chickens and rabbits, worm dogs and cats, pan for gold, take samples from reefs, cook, sew, use the milk separator and churn butter, go down a mine shaft in a bucket, make cream cheese and ginger beer, paint stencilled patterns on materials, make papier mâché, walk on stilts . . . drive the car, shoot pigeons and guineafowl for the pot, preserve eggs – and a lot else.

  ‘That is real happiness, a child’s happiness: being enabled to do and make, above all to know you are contributing to the family, you are valuable and valued.’ (p. 103)

  Later Lessing would indict settler society for its ‘coldness [and] stinginess of the heart’ toward blacks (p. 113); the charge would be fleshed out in The Grass Is Singing (1950), an astonishingly accomplished debut, though perhaps too wedded to romantic stereotypes of the African for present-day tastes, as well as in African Stories (1964). Yet Rhodesia was not a wholly bad social environment in which to grow up. Aside from the restorative power of the natural world (about which Lessing is unabashedly Wordsworthian), there reigned among the children of the settlers a strongly egalitarian spirit that helped her escape the class obsessions of her parents. And among the 10,000 whites in Salisbury, the capital, she would in time discover a sizeable contingent of refugees from Europe, most of them Left-leaning, many of them Jewish, who would exert a decisive intellectual and political influence on her.

  Meanwhile, to the confusing signals which her parents sent out, Doris responded with behaviour typical of the unloved child calling for love. She stole, lied, cut up her mother’s clothes, set fires; she wove fantasies that the Taylers were not her real parents.

  At the age of seven, ‘a frightened and miserable little girl’, (p. 90) she was packed off to a convent boarding school where the nuns – themselves the unwanted daughters of German peasants – frightened their charges with hellfire stories. There she spent four wretched years. After a further stretch in an all-girls high school in Salisbury, with weekly letters from her mother reproving her for the money she was costing them, she dropped out of the education system definitively. She was thirteen.

  Yet she had never been a poor student. On the contrary, if only to please her mother, she made sure she always came first in class. She was popular with the other girls, inhabiting a false self she calls ‘Tigger’ (after the A. A. Milne character), ‘fat and bouncy . . . brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability’. When later she gravitated into Communist circles, she was known as ‘Comrade Tigger’. She repudiated the nickname once she left Rhodesia in 1949; but, refusing to go away, the Tigger self mutated into what Lessing calls the Hostess self, ‘bright, helpful, receptive, attentive’, and disturbingly reminiscent of her mother. (pp. 386, 89, 20)

  Is this a clue to the title of the first volume of her autobiography: Under My Skin? In isolation the title gestures in conventional fashion toward self-revelation. But an epigraph reminds us of its context in Cole Porter: ‘I’ve got you deep in the heart of me / So deep in my heart you’re really part of me . . .’ The hidden addressee of the book, the ‘you’ deep in Lessing’s heart, under her skin, emerges all too plausibly as her mother, dead since 1957.

  Averse to any display of emotion, her mother had found a way of expressing tenderness toward her children by persuading them they were ill and then nursing them to health. Back at home, Doris played along, using illness as an excuse to spend days in bed reading. But she could not find the privacy she craved. When she began to menstruate, her mother trumpeted the news to the males of the household. When she tried to diet, her mother piled her plate. Her fourteenth year was spent fighting for her life against a mother who, as she had tried to control her infant bowel movements, now seemed to be asserting ownership over her body.

  To escape, Doris took a job as a nursemaid. Guided by her employer, she began to read books on politics and sociology, while nightly the same employer’s brother-in-law crept into her bed and ineptly toyed with her. Characteristically, she does not pretend she was a passive victim. She ‘[fought] the virginity of [her] placid suitor . . . in a fever of erotic longing’. ‘It is my belief’, she writes, that some girls – among whom she clearly includes herself – ‘ought to be put to bed, at the age of fourteen’ with an older man as a form of ‘apprentice love’. (p. 185)

  II

  Lessing’s precocious pre-school reading had included Scott, Stevenson, Kipling, Lamb’s versions of Shakespeare, Dickens. (In her time, she notes tartly, children were not ‘patronised’, but on the contrary encouraged to try things that were beyond them, p. 83) Now she began to read contemporary fiction, D. H. Lawrence in particular, as well as the great Russians. By the age of eighteen she had written two apprentice novels herself. She was also selling stories
to South African magazines. She had, in fact, slipped into being a writer.

  Of the three best-known women writers to emerge from southern Africa – Olive Schreiner, Nadine Gordimer and Lessing (who, though reluctant to accept the label ‘African writer’, freely acknowledges that her sensibility was formed in and by Africa) – none completed high school. All were substantially self-educated, all became formidable intellectuals. This says something about the fierceness with which isolated adolescents on the margins of empire hungered for a life they felt cut off from, the life of the mind – far more fiercely, it turned out, than most of their metropolitan cousins. It also says something about how desultory the pressure was on girls to proceed all the way through the educational mill, domesticity being their ultimate lot.

  Intermittent visits to her parents’ farm only confirmed to Lessing that she had done well to escape when she did. Her mother was beginning to conform to the worst of colonial stereotypes, complaining about the servants in a ‘scolding, insistent, nagging voice full of dislike’, while her father slowly wasted away from diabetes, a ‘self-pitying, peevish, dream-sodden old man talking, talking about his war’. When eventually he died, she had an urge to scratch out the words ‘Heart failure’ under Cause of Death on the death certificate and write instead, ‘First World War’. (pp. 157, 326, 372)

  Becalmed in what felt more and more like a backwater (this period of her life would be evoked in Landlocked [1965]), she wrote and rewrote The Grass Is Singing. ‘I was waiting for my future, my real life, to begin.’ (p. 418)

  III

  Lessing’s first marriage, at the age of nineteen, was to a man much older than herself – a marriage involving not the real woman but the Tigger self, the ‘jolly young matron’. (p. 207) Not yet ready for motherhood, she gave birth to a son, then neglected him. The child responded with anger and bewilderment uncannily like that of the young Doris.

  A second child followed. She was drinking more and more, having affairs, treating her husband badly (much of this material went into A Proper Marriage [1954], the second of the Martha Quest novels and the most directly autobiographical). The situation was clearly untenable. Vowing to herself that her children would one day inherit ‘a beautiful and perfect world where there would be no race hatred, injustice, and so forth’, she gave them into the care of relatives and began to make plans to leave the country. She bore within her, she felt, the same ‘secret doom’ that had ruined her parents’ lives and would ruin her children’s too if she stayed with them. ‘I was absolutely sincere,’ she records dryly. ‘There isn’t much to be said for sincerity, in itself’ (pp. 262–3)

  In the wake of the battle of Stalingrad, with the glory it brought to Russian arms, Lessing was converted to Communism. In her account of her Communist years a certain defensiveness is still detectable. In truth, she writes, ‘I was never committed with all of myself’. By the time the Cold War broke out and she and her comrades suddenly became pariahs to white Rhodesian society, she was already beginning to have doubts. By 1954 she was no longer a Communist, though for years she felt ‘residual tugs of loyalty’. (pp. 284, 397)

  Recruits tended to be people with unhappy childhoods behind them, looking for a substitute family; their own children they shrugged off as unwanted nuisances. As an enthusiastic newcomer (and as a woman), Lessing was assigned the task of peddling The Guardian, organ of the South African Communist Party, in the poorer areas of Salisbury. Of all her Party activities, this may in fact have been the most useful to her as a writer: it enabled her to meet working-class people and see something of working-class life (A Ripple from the Storm [1958] gives a fuller and livelier account than we get here).

  The activities of the Salisbury Communists, their loves and hates, take up much of the first three Martha Quest novels. Lessingjustifies the extended treatment she gives – in both autobiography and novels – to this politically insignificant clique on the grounds that it exhibited on a small scale ‘the same group dynamics that made and unmade the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’. (p. 292)

  One consequence of joining the Communists was that Doris met Gottfried Lessing, whom she married in 1943. Gottfried came from a prosperous Russian family of assimilated German Jewish descent, turned back into Germans by the 1917 revolution and then back into Jews by the Nuremberg laws. He was also, in his wife’s words, ‘the embodiment of cold, cutting, Marxist logic’, a ‘cold, silent man’ of whom everyone was afraid. (pp. 288, 301)

  Gottfried does not figure directly in the Martha Quest novels because he was still alive when she wrote them (he ended his career as East German ambassador to Uganda, where he perished during the coup against Idi Amin). Lessing does her best to explain and humanise this unappealing man, with whom she describes her sexual life as ‘sad’. What he really needed, she writes, was a woman kind enough to ‘treat her man as a baby, even for a few hours of the dark’. (pp. 303, 318)

  Gottfried encouraged her writing, though he did not approve of what she wrote. ‘What I liked most about myself, what I held fast to, he liked least.’ She had married him to save him from internment as an enemy alien; to strengthen his application for British citizenship she remained in an ‘unhappy but kindly marriage’ until 1948, long after it should have ended. (pp. 293, 358)

  IV

  Lessing has never been a great stylist – she writes too fast and prunes too lightly for that. The first three Martha Quest novels, or at least long stretches of them, go bent under the burden not only of prosaic language but of an uninventive conception of novelistic form. The problem is compounded by Lessing’s passive heroine, dissatisfied with life but unable to take control of her destiny in any meaningful way. But if these novels have not lasted well, they at least attest to ambition on a large scale: the ambition of writing a Bildungsroman in which the development of an individual will be followed within an entire social and historical context.

  Lessing was not blind to her basic problem, namely that the nineteenth-century models she used were exhausted. After the third volume she interrupted the series, breaking entirely new ground with the formally adventurous Golden Notebook. Landlocked, with which the series resumes after a seven-year gap, reflects in its stylistic experiments not only Martha’s impatience with a life without a future but Lessing’s own impatience with her medium; while The Four-Gated City (1969), with which the series closes, points forward towards Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) (which Lessing called ‘inner-space fiction’), Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), and the speculative fiction of the Canopus in Argos series, rather than backward to the early books. What Lessing was looking for, and to a degree found, was a more inward, more fully contemporary conception not only of character but of the self and of the self’s experience of time (including historical time). Once this had been arrived at, the nineteenth-century trappings fell away of themselves.

  Since the publication of The Golden Notebook in 1962, Lessing has had an uneasy relationship with the women’s movement – which claimed the book as a founding document – and a positively hostile relationship with the academy, which claimed her book as a prototypical postmodern novel. Between herself and her most enthusiastic feminist disciples she has maintained a wary distance; literary critics she has dismissed as fleas on the backs of writers. She has in turn been attacked by feminists (among them Adrienne Rich) for failing to conceive an autonomous feminist politics, and by the academy for trying to control the interpretation of her books rather than allowing them to spin off into textual space.

  In her autobiography she does not hesitate to let fly at ‘correct’ political attitudes, which she sees as little different from what in the heyday of the Party was called ‘the line’. Thus – despite her father’s tickling game – she labels the late twentieth-century concern with the sexual abuse of children an ‘hysterical mass movement’. She condemns ‘the avaricious or vindictive divorce terms so often demanded by feminists’. Ever since adolescence, she records, she has been more interested in the ‘amazing po
ssibilities’ of the vagina than in the ‘secondary and inferior pleasure’ of the clitoris. ‘If I had been told that clitoral and vaginal orgasms would within a few decades become ideological enemies . . . I’d have thought it a joke.’ As for the social construction of gender, she recalls the ‘ruthlessness’ with which she stole her first husband from another woman, a ‘basic female ruthlessness . . . [that] comes from a much older time than Christianity or any other softener of savage moralities. It is my right. When I’ve seen this creature emerge in myself, or in other women, I have felt awe.’ (pp. 313, 25, 404, 266, 206)

  On Western breast-beating about the colonial past, she comments, ‘[It cannot] be said too often that it is a mistake to exclaim over past wrong-thinking before at least wondering how our present thinking will seem to posterity.’ (p. 50) A Nigerian writer found one of her stories good enough to plagiarise and publish under his own name, she recalls: so much for the politically correct line that whites should not write about black experience. Her own fiction explores male experience, including male sexual experience, without reserve.

  As someone whose life has had a substantial public and political component, Lessing confesses a certain respect for people who don’t write memoirs, who ‘have chosen to keep their mouths shut’. Why then her own autobiography? Her answer is candid: ‘Self-defence.’ At least five biographers are already at work on her. ‘You try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography.’ (pp. 11, 14–15)

  But one suspects larger reasons too. Besides the epigraph from Cole Porter, her book bears another from Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufism have been important to Lessing since the 1960s. Shah links individual fate to the fate of society by arguing that no society can be reformed until its members can individually identify the forces and institutions that dictate and have dictated the course of their lives. Self-exploration and social progress thus go in tandem.