The two epigraphs come together and cohere in Lessing’s thinking in a surprising way. Through the music to which her generation danced, music of the Cole Porter variety, she says, there pulsed a deep rhythm promising sex and salvation. When this subliminal promise of the Zeitgeist was not fulfilled, a whole generation, including herself, reacted as if cheated of its birthright. ‘I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion’ – the illusion that everyone is entitled to happiness. (p. 16) (In contrast, she suggests, the deep rhythm of today’s cacophonous popular music sends people out to torture, kill and maim.)
As a child born in the aftermath of the First World War, Lessing is convinced that, through her parents, she too vibrated to the basso ostinato of that disastrous epoch. ‘I wonder now how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak.’ (p. 10)
The idea that the ship of history is driven by currents deeper than consciousness – an idea of which her deep-rhythm hypothesis is a slightly batty example – keeps coming back in Lessing’s autobiography. In fact, the turn away from a Marxist, materialist conception of history had already been hinted at symbolically in A Ripple from the Storm, in which Martha dreams of a huge saurian, fossilised yet still alive, staring dolefully at her from an earth pit, an archaic power that will not die. One of the problems with the present autobiographical project – a problem of which she is well aware – is that fiction has better resources for dealing with unconscious forces than discursive self-analysis. Her own previous most successful explorations of the historically embedded psyche have been in such works as The Golden Notebook and the visionary symbolic-allegorical narrative Memoirs of a Survivor (in which, incidentally, she attempts to reposition herself as mother of a daughter rather than daughter of a mother). It is as novelist rather than as memoirist, therefore, that, three-quarters of the way through the present project, she pronounces her succinct verdict on it: ‘There is no doubt that fiction makes a better job of the truth.’ (p. 314)
The best parts of the first volume are about her early childhood. To most of us, early experience comes as such a shock that we repress the memory of it – an amnesia, Lessing suggests, that may be a necessary protective mechanism for the species. Her own powerful (and powerfully rendered) first memories revolve with distaste around the ugliness and loudness and smelliness of the world she has been born into – the ‘loose bulging breasts . . . [and] whiskers of hair under arms’ of adults in a swimming pool in Persia, the ‘cold stuffy metallic stink . . . of lice’ in a Russian train. (pp. 19, 40)
Much effort has clearly gone into the first five chapters. In their clarity of recall (or of imaginative construction – it makes no difference) and cleanness of articulation, they belong among the great pieces of writing about childhood:
It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain. Because I understand, everything falls into its proper place about me, the thatch of the roof soaking up its wet from the sky, the frogs sounding as loud as if they are down the hill, but they are a couple of miles off, the soft fall of the rain on the earth and the leaves, and the lightning, still far away. And then, confirming the order of the night, there is a sudden bang of thunder. I lie back, content, under the net, listening, and slowly sink back into a sleep full of the sounds of rain. (p. 63)
Passages like this celebrate special moments, Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’, in which the child is intensely open to experience and also aware of heightened openness, aware that the moment is privileged. As Lessing observes, if we give time its due phenomenological weight, then most of our life is over by the time we are ten.
There are also fine passages later in the book where Lessing candidly re-inhabits her youthful narcissism. She pedals her bicycle ‘with long brown smooth legs she is conscious of as if a lover were stroking them’. ‘I pulled up my dress and looked at myself as far up as my panties and was filled with pride of body. There is no exultation like it, the moment when a girl knows that this is her body, these her fine smooth shapely limbs.’ (pp. 260, 173) There are also leisurely recollections of pregnancy, childbirth (trouble-free) and nursing, including reports on her babies’ feeding habits and stools.
The first volume is dominated by the figure of Lessing’s mother, who has also figured, either openly or in disguise, in much of what she has written during the course of a career now into its fifth decade. In this latest round, Lessing does her best to be fair to her opponent. For a page or two she goes so far as to hand over the narration to her – a half-hearted experiment soon abandoned. ‘There was never a woman who enjoyed parties and good times more than she did, enjoyed being popular and a hostess and a good sort, the mother of two pretty, well-behaved, well-brought up, clean children,’ she writes. (The hidden barb here, the barb Lessing cannot resist, is the code-word ‘clean’, which in the Tayler household referred to potty-training.) The trunks that accompanied them from Teheran to their mud-walled home in Rhodesia held silver tea-trays, watercolours, Persian carpets, scarves, hats, evening dresses – finery that her mother would never have a chance to show off. On the farm this ‘handsome, well-dressed, dryly humorous woman, efficient, practical, and full of energy’, found no outlet adequate to her ambitions. (p. 402) Her affections were transferred from her husband to her son as soon as he was born; he remained bound to her till he went off to boarding school, where, somehow, he learned to say No to her demands. ‘Now I see her as a tragic figure,’ Lessing writes; during her lifetime, ‘I saw her . . . as tragic certainly, but was not able to be kind.’ (pp. 33, 402, 15)
Yet despite a determined attempt to see her parents as ordinary human beings rather than as looming figures in the mind, the first volume repeats the pattern of blaming the mother familiar from earlier writings, and looks ahead to the return of the mother and a re-run of the mother–daughter quarrel in the second volume. There is something depressing in the spectacle of a woman in her seventies still wrestling with an unsubjugated ghost from the past. On the other hand, there is no denying the grandeur of the spectacle when the protagonist is as mordantly honest and as passionately desirous of salvation as Lessing.
V
Volume Two takes up the story with Doris arriving in London in 1949, a ‘forthright, frank young woman’, as she saw herself, blessedly free – thanks to her colonial upbringing – of the endemic English hypocrisy. She brought with her her young son and the completed manuscript of The Grass Is Singing.2
The novel soon found a publisher, and her career as a writer was launched. Through the 1950s, until the commercial success of The Golden Notebook (1962), her books sold steadily if not spectacularly. She did not need to go out to work. From them she earned about twenty pounds a week, she calculated – a working man’s wage.
The move to England – or, in the parlance of Rhodesian settler society, ‘home’ – proved permanent. Telling the story of those early days, she tries to recreate something of the texture of life in a country still suffering the aftermath of the war. Though her social circle tended to consist of left-wing artists and intellectuals, she allows fair space to the ordinary Londoners she met. But, as she frankly concedes, In Pursuit of the English, the memoir she published in 1960, gives a more vivid and more engaged sense of the times than she is able to provide here.
Repeatedly she remarks on the remoteness of Britain of the 1950s from the prosperous Britain of today; young people cannot understand, she says, how poor their country used to be. People cannot be made to understand: is that the fault of these heedless young folk, one might ask, or of the writer who at this moment quails before the task of overcoming their historical amnesia?
Despite the grimness of life in the 1950s, those are times for which Lessing clearly feels some nostalgia. She misses, for instance, the commitment
and sense of purpose she found in the ritual ban-the-bomb marches, with the opportunities they provided for easy contacts across class lines.
Involvement in the disarmament movement led her to pay a visit to Bertrand Russell and his secretary Ralph Schoenman. The memory of how the elderly philosopher was duped and manipulated by the younger man makes her determined not to be captured in her old age and turned into a ‘wise woman’ figurehead by feminist groups. (p. 302)
Looking back, she misses the excitement of a literary world in which publishing demanded a real enthusiasm for new writing and a readiness to take chances. By contrast, she condemns today’s publishing industry for its cynicism and philistinism, as well as for the pressure it puts on writers to promote their own work. She deplores the obsession of the public with the writer’s private life, and the humiliations that writers have to undergo in interviews with ignorant and indifferent interlocutors.
Now, as then, she detects in the British psyche ‘a smallness, a tameness, a deep, instinctive, perennial refusal to admit danger, or even the unfamiliar: a reluctance to understand extreme experience’. In literature this manifests itself in an enduring preference for ‘small, circumscribed novels, preferably about the nuances of class or social behaviour’. (pp. 96, 126)
The divisions of Walking in the Shade are based on the succession of apartments and houses Lessing lived in, always in search of an environment where she could get on with her writing in peace and at the same time bring up her child. She records two or three major love affairs, with men ever reluctant to take on the role of father to the boy. Her mother turns up again, demanding to live with her. She hardens her heart and refuses. Her mother returns to Rhodesia and dies there. Lessing is consumed with guilt, sympathising intensely with the old woman in her loneliness, yet creeping back regressively, despite herself, into the hard, selfish, self-protective shell she had grown as a child: ‘No, I won’t. Leave me alone.’ (p. 223)
VI
Walking in the Shade is short on dates, but it would appear that sometime in the early 1950s Lessing gave in to pressure from her circle (pressure which she now ascribes to mere envy) that she do more than merely write books and articles, and formally joined the British Communist Party. If a single question dominates the book, it is the question of how she and so many other intelligent, socially concerned, peace-loving people could, in effect, have given themselves as tools to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; and of how, even when they had lost faith in the USSR itself, they did not lose faith in the religion of world revolution.
In exploring her own motives, Lessing recognises that her first, depressing experience of the inflexible British class system played a part (although technically an outsider to the system, in practice she found she was excluded from the working class by her accent). And of course she believed in the anti-colonial struggle, the brotherhood of man and all the other stated ideals of Communism. But finally she has to see her motive for joining the Party as irrational: at a trans-individual level she was participating in ‘some kind of social psychosis or mass self-hypnosis’, while at a personal level she was being controlled by ‘a deeply buried thing . . . riding me like a nightmare’, a ‘continuation of early childhood feelings’ that she cannot get to the bottom of. (pp. 58, 89)
From the very obscurity of this explanation, it emerges that to the present day Lessing does not understand why she did what she did. Insofar as the puzzle she is trying to solve is at the heart of this second volume, the ultimate goal of the autobiographical enterprise itself, namely, to get to the truth of oneself by going back over the ground of the past, by telling the story of one’s life afresh, still evades her here.
This is by no means the first time Lessing has explored the mystery of the self and the destiny it elects. There is a strong autobiographical strain in her fiction, particularly the Martha Quest novels and The Golden Notebook, which cover the same decade of her life as Walking in the Shade. Did Lessing believe, when in the early 1990s she embarked on the autobiography, that it could yield deeper truths about herself than her fictions of thirty years before?
The answer is, very likely, no. Lessing has always been aware that the energies liberated in poetic creation take one deeper than rational analysis ever can. Something has changed, however, since she wrote the novels based on her Communist phase, namely, the terms of the enquiry itself. Time has passed; starting with the revelations of the 1956 Party Congress, the buried history of the USSR has year by year been emerging from the ice. Specifically, it has become more and more clear that Hitler was ‘a mere infant in crime’ compared with his exemplar Joseph Stalin, who was ‘a thousand times worse’ (Lessing’s words). (p. 262)
Communism calls to the nobler impulses of the human heart, yet in its nature there is something that ‘breeds lies, makes people lie and twist facts, imposes deception’. Why should that be so? Lessing cannot say. ‘These are deeper waters than I know how to plumb.’ (p. 65) What she does know is that she gave her allegiance to the Party. The Party chose her to visit Russia as a member of what was supposed to be a representative delegation of British intellectuals, and she went. Out of dedication to the greater cause, she did not afterwards publish the truth about what she saw in Russia, even though she (now) records that at least one ordinary Russian was prepared to risk his life to tell the delegation that what they were being shown was a lie. She was no mere rank-and-file member: she served on the committee of a Party Writers’ Group. (‘Accustomed as I am to being in a false position – sometimes I think it was a curse laid on me in my cradle – this was the falsest,’ she writes forty years later.) She even wrote fiction according to the Party’s prescription – for instance, the often anthologised story ‘Hunger’ (‘I am ashamed of it,’ she writes now). (pp. 95, 78)
Stalin was a thousand times worse than Hitler. If intellectuals like Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man have deserved to be investigated and denounced for the support they gave to Nazism, what do those intellectuals deserve who supported Stalin and the Stalinist system, who chose to believe Soviet lies against the evidence of their own eyes? This is the huge question that exercises Lessing’s moral conscience, coupled with a second and equally troubling question: why does no one care any longer?
Though Lessing must be admired for broaching these unfashionable questions, it cannot be said that she gives either of them a satisfying answer. In an odd way, her exploration of her past as a Party member parallels her exploration of her past as a daughter. In both cases, looking back, she can see that she behaved badly, even culpably. Furthermore, at some obscure level, at the time, she knew she was behaving badly. But, with the best will in the world, she cannot get to the bottom of why she did what she did, beyond concluding that she was in the grip of a compulsion, a compulsion that was not unique to her but afflicted hundreds of thousands of others. It was, as she puts it in the first volume, part of the Zeitgeist.
VII
‘You’d think my life was all politics and personalities, though really most of the time I was alone in my flat, working.’ (p. 249) Lessing does indeed spend a lot of time on politics and as much time on personalities from the literary and theatrical worlds whose paths crossed hers, many of them of no great interest any longer. Her second volume is in most respects a memoir, and a memoir of a rather casual, scattered, life-and-opinions kind; aside from her treatment of her Communist past, it lacks the thoroughgoing self-exploration, and the concomitant anguish of tone, that marks the first volume.3
As for her political life, the story Lessing tells here is not to be read as an apology – in the climate of the 1990s, it would be far too politically correct a step to take, and Lessing has nothing but scorn for correctness, whose genealogy she (correctly) traces back to the Party and the Party line. Nevertheless, she does describe her wilful blindness to the truth as ‘unforgivable’, and does affirm that she tells her story so that her readers may learn not to do likewise. (p. 262) It is clearly a history she has wanted to set down in full before
she dies. However one may qualify the term, it does, in the end, constitute a confession.
25 The Memoirs of Breyten Breytenbach
I
BREYTEN BREYTENBACH FIRST came to public attention when, from Paris, where he worked as a painter and poet, he sought permission from the South African authorities to bring his Vietnamese-born wife home on a visit, and was informed that as a couple they would not be welcome. The embarrassment of this cause célèbre persuaded the authorities, in 1973, to relent and issue limited visas. In Cape Town Breytenbach addressed a packed audience at a literary symposium. ‘We [Afrikaners]’, he said, ‘are a bastard people with a bastard language. Our nature is one of bastardy. It is good and beautiful thus . . . [But] like all bastards – uncertain of their identity – we began to adhere to the concept of purity. That is apartheid. Apartheid is the law of the bastard.’1
A record of that visit appeared, first in the Netherlands, then in the English-speaking world, in A Season in Paradise, a memoir interspersed with poems, reminiscences and reflections on the South African situation; it included the text of the address.
In 1975 Breytenbach was back, but in a new role: on a clandestine mission to recruit saboteurs on behalf of the African National Congress. He was soon picked up by the security police, and spent seven years in jail. Returning to France, he publicly cut the ties with his people: ‘I do not consider myself to be an Afrikaner.’2 Nevertheless, during the 1980s he paid further private visits, under police supervision. A 1991 visit gave rise to Return to Paradise, the narrative of a journey through the ‘reformed’ South Africa of F.W. de Klerk. As he explained, the book was meant to be read together with A Season in Paradise and his prison memoir The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist as an autobiographical triptych.
Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Page 29
