Tag Archives: Doris Lessing

Alfred & Emily–Doris Lessing (2008)

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I came to Doris Lessing’s final book, the genre-defying Alfred & Emily, through Roberta Rubenstein’s consideration of it in her recent book Literary Half-Lives. Rubenstein rightly praises the generosity of its depiction of Lessing’s parents, who, in their different ways, made so much trouble for her in life. Alfred & Emily (shelved in the biography section of my local library) includes a novella-length treatment of what her parents’ lives might have been like had WWI not happened, and had they not married, as well as a series of little essays, vignettes really, about different aspects of Lessing’s childhood. There are also pages of intriguing family photos to pore over. But the vignettes and photos are ancillary to the novella or whatever it is—counterfactual biography, perhaps? Its power stems from the blow it deals to its author’s narcissism. To write about one’s parents as they might have been but were not is to imagine a world in which one couldn’t have appeared. Perhaps only someone at end of a long, productive life—Lessing was 89 when the book was published—could have the equanimity needed to efface herself so thoroughly.

It helps, perhaps, that Lessing has documented her life extensively elsewhere. She wrote two volumes of autobiography and miscellaneous bits of autobiographical writings (Going Home (1957) is particularly interesting). In the five-volume Children of Violence series Lessing worked through her relationship to her parents, especially her mother. The facts, briefly, are these: her father, Alfred Tayler, was badly wounded just before the battle of Passchendaele and met her mother, Emily McVeigh, in hospital in England where she nursed him after his leg had to be amputated. After the war the young couple moved to Persia, where Lessing was born, and then in 1925 to Rhodesia, where her father pursued his life-long dream of becoming a farmer, with very middling results, and her mother wilted and hardened in the absence of the cultured, convivial surroundings she considered her due.

Twice in Alfred & Emily, Lessing presents the Great War as the great trauma in her life, even though it happened before she was born. The first time, the war is a malevolent, threatening blot:

That war, the Great War, the war that would end all war, squatted over my childhood. The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me. And here I am, still trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.

The tone here is angry, the irony bitter, the spirit fighting—these are the notes we hear over and over again in Lessing’s remarkable oeuvre. (And the qualities that connect her to the writer that was most important to her as a child, D. H. Lawrence.)

The second time, the war is just as inescapable, but Lessing’s response to it is more embittered:

I think my father’s rage at the Trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents’ emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my memory, my own consciousness.

What touches me most in this passage is not the unnatural burden of a child taking on her father’s pain, but that little shift to first person plural in the third sentence. (Here, as so often, grammar creates pathos.) Lessing asks, Do children feel their parents’ emotions? I expect the answer to be: Yes, they do. No matter how many times I read it, that we catches me off guard. It makes the rather abstract claim about what the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call trans-generational haunting as visceral as a sob in the throat. It makes us feel that Lessing still is that child.

None of us ever escapes the child we once were. But if we are lucky we learn what our adult self can do to make the child inside feel safe enough that it no longer need act out its anxieties and insecurities. That makes our lives easier on our loved ones and ourselves. In Alfred & Emily Lessing is done fighting with her parents through herself. She has realized that their problems were not hers. In the process she releases herself, and, posthumously, them too. She gives them the gift of imagined, happier lives. At the end of a short introduction, she writes: “I hope they would approve the lives I have given them.” Surely they would, not least because of the surprising twists their lives, and the world they live in, take in Lessing’s telling.

The fictional Alfred and Emily are connected not through marriage but through a shared maternal figure, Mrs. Lane. Emily is a friend of Mrs. Lane’s daughter Daisy. Emily and Daisy leave their village in Sussex to train as nurses at the Royal Free hospital in London. The decision is particularly consequential for Emily: her distant father disinherits her because he believes nursing is beneath her. In the years to come, Emily will return to Mrs. Lane, and her cozy home, whenever she feels overwhelmed. Alfred is a kind of adopted son to Mrs. Lane; she has taken him under her wing as compensation for his own mother’s obvious lack of interest in him. Alfred apprentices to a local farming family, the Redways; he is a friend of their son Bert, a moody, difficult young man with a tendency to drink.

The world of these Edwardian years (we can’t say pre-war, since war never comes, at least not the Great War) is the world of Lawrence’s early fiction, The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, even bits of The Rainbow. It’s a world in which town and country are not readily separated, a world in which communal agricultural labour is important even to those who don’t dedicate their lives to it, a world in which young people thing nothing of walking or cycling five miles to a dance. (I’m fascinated by how much walking people used to do. It’s nothing for Paul Morel, in Sons and Lovers, to walk several miles to the Leivers’s farm nightly. Lawrence’s letters are filled with invitations to friends to visit him and Frieda in whatever isolated place they happened to be living, always with cheery instructions about how he will meet them at the station to walk the four miles home for tea.)

At one point it seems as though Alfred might settle down with Daisy. But then he meets Betsy, an outgoing and nurturing woman even more like Mrs. Lane than Daisy is. Alfred, helped by Betsy, tends to Bert, who manages a shaky recovery from the alcoholism he has begun to slide into; throughout Alfred continues to manage the Redways farm which everyone assumes Alfred will inherit on the sickly Bert’s death.

Emily, meanwhile, rises through the nursing ranks to become Head Sister. She marries a doctor, the respected but desiccated and thoroughly conventional William Martin-White. (In real life, Lessing’s mother’s first, great love had been a doctor who drowned at sea.) She is saved from the life of glittering society woman that she helplessly pours herself into, since she can no longer work once she is married, by her husband’s sudden death. Thanks to the efforts of a sympathetic nephew, a lawyer, Emily sets up and manages a charitable trust that runs schools for poor children. She meets a Scotsman whom she nurses when he falls ill with cancer, realizing only after his death how much he loved her. A controversy over a pregnant unmarried teacher at one of her schools, in Alfred’s village, leads her to set up refuges for unmarried mothers. Alfred and Emily occasionally run into each other; they respect each other. But they are not important to each other. A postscript tells us that Alfred Tayler lived to a great age while Emily McVeah died at age 73 when some boys she remonstrated for tormenting a dog attacked her.

It’s a funny little book. A bit rough and ready, a bit abrupt. But it stays with you. I’ve mentioned Lawrence as a literary influence. But another influence is more important, especially in the second half: Virginia Woolf, especially the Woolf of Three Guineas (1938). That intricate work, perhaps Woolf’s most interesting, attacks, among other things, militarism, patriarchy, and exclusionary models of education. It criticizes the fascism it sees ascendant not just in Italy and Germany but at home in England too. But its criticism of violence and aggression is accompanied by its clear-eyed recognition of the persistence, perhaps even inevitability, of those instincts.

Thus, although England never goes to war in Lessing’s alternate history, war is never far away. There is a longstanding conflict between Turkey and Serbia that young people in England take violent sides in. (Allegiances are displayed through differences in hair styles and clothing; supporters of one side frequently attack those of the other.) With the entry of women into the workforce, many young men find themselves without an obvious place in society. Many travel abroad to fight as mercenaries, including Alfred’s two eldest sons. Those who have been spared a war claim to miss it. As Alfred puts it,

“‘This is a silly, pettifogging little country, and we’re so pleased with ourselves because we’ve kept out of a war. But if you ask me I think a war would do us all the good in the world. Were soft and rotten, like a pear that’s gone past it’s best.’”

Given Lessing’s description of how the Great War ruined her father, this is an ironic speech to say the least. But Lessing doesn’t condescend to her father. She pays discrete homage to the man who spent much of his life obsessed with the war, partly in rage at how callously his generation was destroyed, but partly in the certainty that nothing so exciting would ever happen to him again. Like Woolf, Lessing hates war, especially the way its dehumanization snakes across society. But also like Woolf she respects the power of the aggression that fuels war. By recognizing the power of war, violence, and aggression, Lessing gives us something more than a mere fantasy of reparation, in which everything that was bad in real life is made good. (I’m struck by how Jo Walton uses war in a similar way in her recent novel about counterfactual lives and world histories, My Real Children.) After all, no matter how difficult her childhood was—and it was pretty difficult, with a sick, disaffected father and a disillusioned, spiteful mother—it’s still the only one she ever had, and there had to have been value in it, too. Another way to say what I mean is that although Lessing no longer needs to settle any scores with her parents her literary preoccupations haven’t changed. She is still fascinated by the double-edged qualities of violence and power, the way they break things (especially women’s lives) but also the way they make things (especially women’s lives). Her books are remarkable studies of this ambivalence; The Good Terrorist (1985) is maybe the best.

I’m glad to have read this strange, generous, and wise little book. But I’m also glad that even though it was Lessing’s last, it’s not mine. There are still lots of her books for me to enjoy.

The Summer Before the Dark–Doris Lessing (1973)

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I first tried this book a couple of years ago (apparently on a trip to Chicago—the boarding pass was tucked after p 46). For whatever reason, it didn’t take. But I returned to it much more successfully last week because I’d an inkling it could be interestingly compared to one of my favourite novels, Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), in a way that would fit a call for papers for a session at next year’s MLA. (Here’s hoping the organizers agree.) I’ll leave the comparison itself aside for now, and instead take it on its own merits. Although I’ve only read a fraction of Lessing’s vast corpus, I rank Summer as one of my favourites, alongside The Grass is Singing (1950) and the puzzlingly underrated The Good Terrorist (1985). It gives us so much to think about that it really deserves to be better known.

I love Lessing because she is one of those writers who so easily wrong-foot me. I don’t find reading Lessing an easy or always pleasant experience. (Pleasure is a great virtue in reading, but some things are great because they refuse us pleasures we might unthinking expect.) I’m always tense, reading Lessing, because she’s always on the verge of being clumsy and obvious, but actually rarely is. (In this she is like my absolute favourite writer, D. H. Lawrence. Lessing has written about his influence on her.) (That this should make me tense is odd, isn’t it?) Lessing is often taken to be strident and humourless, a reputation based, I would say, on ill-informed ideas about feminism (ideas she rightly rejected) and plain-old misogyny. (The outspoken female writer is a harridan; the outspoken male writer is a visionary.) As I’ve written in a different context, one of the things I most admire in Lessing is her uncanny play with realist literary conventions, which she never quite abandons in the literary thought experiments that make up her work.

The experiment in Summer is to explore what happens to a person who has the chance to stop serving others, even living for them, after a lifetime of doing so. As its title suggests, the novel is set over the course of a single summer. (Like Engel’s, incidentally. And if you haven’t read that book, I suggest you do so right away.) That quasi-Aristotelian constriction only adds urgency to the events of the plot, which comprise a voyage of discovery that can only end, as the title also suggests, in obscurity.

The novel’s protagonist is Kate Brown. (Various references to her as “Mrs. Brown” remind us of Virginia Woolf’s great essay “Character in Fiction” (1924), in which Woolf imagines a character that literature has had no time for, one Mrs. Brown, based on a woman Woolf once saw on a train, a character that she urges modern novelists to pursue at all costs.) Kate is the middle-aged wife of an eminent neurologist and the mother of several almost grown children. The title thus also refers to the period in Kate’s life, with the coming darkness being old age, even late middle age, and, more pertinently, the time when women stop being meaningful to contemporary society, the time when they literally become invisible. In some justly famous scenes near the end of the book, Kate experiments with her appearance and its effects on others: when she does not fix her hair and makeup or dress a certain way, she becomes invisible. Walking past a construction site, she realizes that the workers have taken no notice of her:

The fact that they didn’t suddenly made her angry. She walked away out of sight, and there, took off her jacket…showing her fitting dark dress. [The comma after “there” brings me up short. There’s a kind of stutter in the prose, like the larger existential stutter Kate experiences in the book.] She tied her hair dramatically with a scarf. Then she strolled back in front of the workmen, hips conscious of themselves. A storm of whistles, calls, invitations. Out of sight the other way, she made her small transformation and walked back again: the men glanced at her, did not see her.

More interesting than Kate’s sociological experiment is her reaction to it: her anger. The passage I’ve quoted continues: “She was trembling with rage: it was a rage, it seemed to her, that she had been suppressing for a lifetime.”  How best to express rage is one of the central questions of the book, how hard it is to express it at all one of its central observations.

The build-up to this expression of rage begins when Kate is given an opportunity. Her husband is about to leave for several months’ work in America. The children are about to scatter across the globe on various expeditions. A friend of her husband, an American come to London to attend a conference on global food production, particularly coffee, asks her to help the conference organizers. They need simultaneous translators from Portuguese, which Kate speaks fluently; her father was an English-naturalized Portuguese. (A handful of beautifully sketched out scenes describe Kate’s year in Lorenco Marques—now Maputo, Mozambique—with her grandfather in 1948.)  Kate agrees, with some reluctance. The house is hastily shut up and let until the end of September, when the children will return from their various pilgrimages. Kate settles quickly into her new job, enjoying the anonymity, the relative ease of the work, and what she thinks of as the preposterously large salary. But the break from family life isn’t suitable to introspection. And she will soon have even less time for herself—greater responsibilities await. The organizational flair she has developed running her busy, graceful household over the years translates neatly into a larger role with Global Food. She becomes the chief factotum, seeing to, even anticipating, the needs of the ministers, secretaries and other dignitaries. She arranges hair appointments, knows where to buy the best British woolens, ensures that refreshments and supplies are always ready to hand. She is a nurse, a nanny, in short, a mother once more.

After organizing a second conference in Istanbul, Kate leaves the organization. She is afraid of how easily she has replicated her role as housewife, almost as afraid as she is of what she will do next. The novel brilliantly depicts how frightening it is to leave established patterns of behaviour, even dangerous or oppressive ones. Kate resists the introspection that freedom from responsibility will force upon her, even as she is moving in that direction. That resistance is one way to explain her sudden decision to travel to Spain with a younger American man that she becomes involved with in Istanbul.

At this point the book really gets good, becoming increasingly strange and compelling. Kate and the American, Jeffrey—pretty much an irredeemably tedious character—arrive at the Costa del Sol. His disgust at its tourist economy leads him to take Kate first up the coast and later inland. The journey is increasingly feverish, not least because Jeffrey is literally so; he is only to be stopped when he is delirious and nearly unconscious. Kate finds herself marooned in an impoverished, isolated village several hours inland from Alicante. Jeffrey is taken to a monastery, where the nuns look after him until the only doctor in the area returns from a call in another valley. Jeffrey’s illness is as much psychological as physiological. At 32 he is at a crossroads of his own, unable to decide how to live his life. He rejects the life of responsibility that awaits him in the US (he comes from a family of means) but no longer able to drift in the (post) hippie lifestyle that we glimpsed in the brief section set on the Spanish coast. But the book isn’t interested in his dilemma, only in Kate’s struggle to resist mothering him, cooing over him, offering advice and a comforting shoulder. We never find out what happens to him. Before long Kate herself falls ill. She takes the bus back to coast, then a fevered, dazed flight back to London. Jeffrey is abandoned, returning neither in the plot’s events nor Kate’s thoughts.

The return to London is another surprising and interesting choice on Lessing’s part. The book is highly attuned to global capital, and it never glamourizes non-Western or third world countries (rural Spain under Franco seems to count as both) as exotic repositories of authenticity and value.  Indeed, Kate is only too aware, based on her experiences in the Spanish village, where the peasant women look up from their incessant labour with expressions of hatred at and contempt for her leisure, how difficult and not to be idealized life is for women who aren’t white and middle class and sheltered. So the “voyage out” that Lessing sketches here (and she must also have in mind Woolf’s novel of that name, with its own fevered and feverish female protagonist) isn’t really a geographic one. Lessing is famous for saying that in order to break through (to something like psychic health) one has to break down (via something like madness). But Lessing’s psychological exploration is always a material one, too. She repudiated the Communist party already in the 1950s but certain insights of Marxism, based on her experiences growing up in a colonial society, Rhodesia, never left her.

Kate can’t go home when she returns to London because her house is still let. She checks herself into the only hotel available in the summer tourist season, a posh one where she is coddled by a series of excellent caretakers until she recovers, if that is the right word, from her own mysterious illness.  But this reversal of affairs (the mother now gets mothered) doesn’t suit the novel’s purposes, for the reversal doesn’t negate the central problem (are there any roles for women that don’t involve being a mother of some sort?). The literal, physical fever finally breaks, but the figurative, existential one persists.

We see this in a wonderful scene that left me squirming. Just before leaving the hotel, the Global Food money nearly spent, she attends a sold-out production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Kate finds herself talking aloud about the ridiculousness of the situation of the female characters, to the point of heckling the production. She doesn’t mean to do this, part of her doesn’t want to. Here’s how Lessing starts the scene:

A woman sat prominently in the front row of the stalls, a woman whom other people were observing. Some were looking at her as much as they did at the play. She seemed quite out of place there, an eccentric to the point of fantasy, with her pink sacklike dress tied abruptly around her by a yellow scarf, her bush of multi-hued hair, her gaunt face that was yellow, and all bones and burning angry eyes. She was muttering, ‘Oh rubbish! Russian my aunt’s fanny! Oh what nonsense!’ while she fidgeted and twisted in her seat.

The disorienting thing here is that the woman is Kate—we’ve shifted from the close “she” or “Kate” of the previous paragraph, and of most of the novel, a position closely aligned to Kate’s consciousness, to one that is distanced from her.  This split in point of view echoes the split in Kate’s self-understanding. The “eccentric” is rebuked in the best passive-aggressive English way by other audience members, every one of them a version of her former self. Kate has only contempt for their contempt:

Oh for God’s sake, though Kate—but alas, had said it, too, for a woman several seats down leaned forward to give her a contemptuous stare. The woman looked like a cat, an old pussycat that has gone fat and lazy; but enough now, stop it, she should keep her attention well away from the stage since she couldn’t behave properly—really, why was it that no one but she could see, couldn’t anyone see that what they were all watching was the behaviour of maniacs? A parody of something. Really, they all ought to be falling about, roaring with laughter, instead of feeling intelligent sympathy at these ridiculous absurd meaningless problems.

Lessing makes us feel the ambivalence of the moment: we want to side with Kate here, but it’s hard to know exactly what that means, since Kate doesn’t even side with herself, part of her is mortified by what she’s doing even as most of her could not care less. The novel is fascinated by laughter—indecorous, gut-busting, unseemly, anything-but-prissy laughter. Such laughter would be revelatory, would shake this tight-assed world with its ridiculous conventions. But this laughter is more often imagined in the book than realized. And what exactly would it achieve? The string of unpunctuated qualifiers in the passage’s last sentence makes me think the book is taking some distance from Kate. These are her thoughts, not its. To be sure, the more embarrassed and uncomfortable we feel, though, the more Lessing indicts our own bourgeois complicity, not least as readers of novels who have certain expectations of characterological decorum. But I’m unconvinced the book thinks it would be best for Kate simply to howl out her rage and disgust, and for us to follow suit. It isn’t easy to escape social life, which we could rephrase in the terms of the book by saying it isn’t easy not to be domesticated, not to be a mother. Maybe these are roles we don’t want to escape, or oughtn’t want to. The dilemma is further dramatized in the book’s last act, in which Kate takes a room in a flat owned by a young woman, Maureen, a hippie drop-out type who finds herself choosing between a series of suitors, none of whom she much likes. This is the period when Kate performs the experiment with the workingmen quoted above. She learns what it is to be an old woman, which seems to consist of a fundamental shapelessness. She visits her old street, sees her house, where she is ignored, unrecognized by her neighbours.

Like Maureen Kate sleeps a lot of the time, sometimes she wanders the streets. She resists mothering Maureen, refuses to be her confessor. We could think of this part of the book as a dramatization of Alison Bechdel’s celebrated test of a text: do two women have a conversation about anything other than a man? We could read the novel as asking: can there be a relationship, across generations no less, between women that don’t revolve around the care-giving roles established by the patriarchy? Both Kate and Maureen want to resist, but they’re scared, too, because they don’t know what would come after that resistance. What would the darkness be like, other than dark? The book never tells us. It ends at an impasse, deciding to emphasize the enormous difficulty of escaping a certain way of thinking rather than to describe a solution to that difficulty. If there is a way to live in the dark that isn’t effacement, the novel doesn’t show it. It’s significant that one of the last locales in the book is the London zoo, where the ones who are really imprisoned are the people visiting it.

I haven’t mentioned an important character, one that appears frequently but only indirectly, in Kate’s thoughts, her neighbour Mary Finchley. Kate admires her je-m’en-foutisme but cannot duplicate it. I can’t tell whether the novel thinks of that as a failure on Kate’s part. It seems to me that if Lessing wanted Mary to be the book’s ultimate heroine she would have given her a larger role. On balance it seems Lessing looks a bit askance at the almost comical absence of repression in Mary’s life. Here Lessing distances herself from any Reichian idea that we should simply ignore or liberate ourselves from oppression.

The Summer Before the Dark is mostly concerned with (middle-class) women, but the rather terrifying vicissitudes of identity that it studies will speak to anyone who is—whether through the vagaries of individual psychological makeup or, in more properly Lessing-like fashion, through the structural imbalances, especially economic, that characterize lived reality—defined by their complicated need to live for and through others. In this way it continues to be relevant, assuming that’s even something we want from books. A blurb on the cover tells me The Economist thought it her best book to date. I don’t know whether to chide myself for an evidently narrow minded sense of its values (and I say that as a subscriber) or to laugh at the fundamental misreading that could make that publication say such a thing about this book.