Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, (b. Doris May Tayler) was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 of British parents. Her father, Alfred Cook Tayler was crippled during World War I, and he met her mother Emily McVeagh when she nursed him at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Emily and Alfred married in 1919 and had Doris the same year after they emigrated to Persia, were Alfred remained “not the only soldier never, ever, to forgive his country for what he saw as promises made but betrayed: for these soldiers were many, in Britain, in France and in Germany, Old Soldiers who kept that bitterness till they died” (Under My Skin 7). Alfred thus was to work for the Imperial bank of Persia, to get away the country which he now felt bitterness against. They stayed in Persia till 1925, when Alfred, Emily, Doris and her younger brother Harry moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where Alfred wanted to try his luck at maize farming. His attempts failed, as he knew very little about farming, and the family lived in poverty in a mud and thatch hut. Emily in a way managed to adapt to life on the farm, trying to reproduce the lifestyle which she was used to from her own upbringing, but she was often depressed, feeling deprived of the social middle-class she was accustomed to from England. Although happy living close to nature, Lessing was a lonely child, as the neighbours were miles away, and Lessing spent most of her free time reading and exploring the surroundings. Lessing’s relationship with her mother was complicated, as Emily wanted and expected a boy rather than a girl, and Lessing was left feeling unloved: “What I remember is hard bundling hands, impatient arms and her voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, shewanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me” (Under My Skin 25). Furthermore, her mother leaned on the controversial methods of Dr. Truby King3, and according to Lessing “Truby King was the continuation of the cold and harsh discipline of my mother’s childhood and my father’s childhood. [...] The baby must learn what’s what and who is the boss right from the start, and this essential instruction must be imparted while the infant is lying alone in a cot, in its own room, never in the parents’ bedroom. He, she, must learn its place, understand its position in the universe –alone” (Under My Skin 23). Her relationship with her mother colours Lessing’s work as an adult, as we will see when we study Memoirs, where the matter of mother and daughter relationship is one of the central issues. In 1926 Lessing was sent to a convent school in Salisbury (now Harare), where she experienced extreme homesickness; “I was at the Convent for four years. Or for eternity. I used to wake up in the morning with the clang of the bell and not believe that I would live through that interminable day until the night. And, after this endless day would be another. Then another. I was in the grip of homesickness like an illness” (Under My Skin 96). At the school, the Roman Catholic teachers perpetually tried to convert the girls of the Protestant faith. Lessing went through rapid changes concerning her own faith:I had a sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism. This was regarded by all theProtestant girls as bound to happen at some point [...] My submission was sudden and total. [...] my mother saw the holy water and the rosary under my pillow and exploded into reproaches. This marked the beginning of a rejection of my mother [...] [she] began on a history of the crimes of Roman Catholicism. The inquisition figured as the chief wrong, but others were cited, for instance the way Catholic missionaries converted the Africans they thought to their religion. [...] listening, full of cold loathing for what I saw as illogic masquerading as virtue. I lost religion in a breath; [...] I had become an atheist; (Under My Skin 123-125) Due to the convent school and her mother, Lessing removed herself from religious beliefs, but in the 1960’s Lessing is yet again drawn to another religion, and she becomes a Sufi.4 Doris Lessing dropped out of an all-girls high school in Salisbury when she was fourteen; “My fourteenth year was a make or break year, a sink or swim year, a do or die year, for I was fighting for my life against my mother. That was how I saw it. That was how it was”(Under My Skin 155), and she moved away from home at the age of fifteen to get away fromher mother, to work as a nursemaid, a telephone operator and clerk. She continued to read and write, and at the age of seventeen she tried to write a novel: “my first novel, on the mountain ofwrite, and at the age of seventeen she tried to write a novel: “my first novel, on the mountain of a typewriter sent all the way from Johannesburg. It was a short satirical novel, mannered, stilted, making fun of gilded youth, Their pretensions, their privileges were contrasted with the lives of the blacks. This production too was later torn up in transports of embarrassment” (Under My Skin 191). Although Lessing’s first published novel did not appear until 1949, she made numerous attempts beforehand to become a published author: “I was also writing short stories, and sold two to smart magazines in South Africa. Coming on these in some drawer years later I so burned with shame that I had to tear them up on the spot. I had written to suit a market. I had succeeded. But later I could not do it, even when I badly needed money” (Under My Skin 181). At nineteen Lessing married Frank Wisdom and had two children, John and Jean, but they divorced in 1943, and the children stayed with their father. Lessing became increasingly involved with the formally banned Communist Party in Sothern Rhodesia, and in an interview made by Lesley Hazelton for The New York Times in 1982, “Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and ‘Space Fiction’”, Hazelton writes that “”When I became political andCommunist,” [Lessing] later wrote, “it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in lives”. In 1945 she married her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, who was a German political activist and a member of the inner circle of the RhodesianCommunist Party. They had a son together, Peter, but also this marriage failed and Lessing divorced again in 1949, and Lessing never remarried. The same year after the divorce Lessing moved to London together with Peter, leaving John and Jean behind in Rhodesia, and with the manuscript of The Grass is Singing in her luggage. Doris Lessing has received a number of prizes for her works, and in 2007 Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After the publication of her first novel in 1949, Lessing has published more than thirty books, the latest one being Alfred & Emily in 2008, a retelling of her parents’ story, in addition to collections of short stories and poems. She has also published two volumes of her autobiography; Under My Skin in 1995 and Walking in the Shade in 1998. Under My Skin – Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 deals with Lessing upbringing in Persia and Southern Rhodesia, her relationship with her parents and her own children, her failed marriages and her involvement with the Rhodesian Communist Party. In Under My Skin Lessing gives an account for why she wanted to write the autobiography: “One reason for writing this autobiography is that more and more I realize I was part of an extraordinary time, the end of the British Empire in Africa, and the bit I was involved with was the occupation of a country that lasted exactly ninety years. People no longer know what that time was like, even those who live in Southern Africa” (160). I have used this autobiography throughout the thesis as background for autobiographical issues in Memoirs, and also to emphasise certain views that Lessing shares about communism, relationships and memory, that concern the novel. Walking in the Shade – Volume Two of my Autobiography, 1949-1962 deals with Lessing’s life after she has moved to England with Peter; “As for me, real London was still ahead, like the beginning of my real life, which would have happened years before if the war hadn’t stopped me coming to London. A clean slate, a new page – everything still to come” (Walking in the Shade 3), her involvement with the British Communist Party and the withdrawal from it and her rising career as an author. Since I believe that Memoirs autobiographical traits derives from Lessing childhood and adolescent years, which I will argue below, Walking in the Shade may not be as valuable a source as Under My Skin in that sense, but it is still useful as a reference of Lessing’s point of view on writing autobiographies. In addition to the fiction and the autobiographies, Lessing has published several nonfictional books, including Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, henceforth Prisons, a collection of 5 essays from 1987. The essays deal with the notion that we constantly let our past dominate us in the present, as we are unable to free ourselves from history, and that these restraints resemble a prison. Lessing believes that we have been controlled by different societies and their leaders throughout the history of mankind, and in Prisons she dwells on how our past dominates us today, and how history has a tendency to repeat itself. In the collection of essays Lessing also focuses on social structures in our society, how we tend to behave within a social structure and on how most people seek to groups rather than being on their own. She elaborates on our ability, or inability, to look at ourselves from a detached point of view, both as individuals and as members of a society..When Memoirs was published in 1974, Lessing called it “an Attempt at an Autobiography”, a matter which I will elaborate on below, but also much of her other works are considered autobiographical as she has drawn upon her own experiences in Africa, her childhood and her social and political engagement. Memoirs is one example, as I will argue in my thesis, and the series Children of Violence is another. In Under My Skin Lessing writes about her experience of autobiography in relation to Martha Quest, part one of her 5 book series Children of Violence, published in 1952: “Readers like to think that a story is ‘true’. ‘Is it autobiographical?’ is the demand. Partly it is and partly it is not, comes the authors reply, often enough in an irritated voice, because the question seems irrelevant: what she has tried to do is to take the story out of the personal into the general. ‘If I had wanted to write an autobiography then I would have done it, I wouldn’t have written a novel’”(160). Lessing does not dismiss the notion of autobiography in the novel, as she admits to draw upon her personal story, but she refuses to call the novel an autobiography as such. In Walking in the Shade Lessing continues to elaborate on the matter concerning Martha Quest and why she wrote it: “There was a point when it occurred to me that my early life had been extraordinary and would make a novel. I had not understood how extraordinary until I had left Southern Africa and come to England. Martha Quest, my third book, was more or less autobiographical, though it didn’t start until Martha was fourteen, when her childhood was over. First novels, particularly by women, are often attempts at self-definition, whatever their literary merits” (14). During her authorship, Lessing has also explored her beliefs within Sufism, the spiritual movement which Lessing has embraced since the 1960’s, and Memoirs appears to be no exception. According to Nancy Shields Hardin in her article “Doris Lessing and the Sufi Way”, “For a non-Sufi to understand what it means to be a Sufi is perhaps impossible. What is possible and permissible is to endeavour to enlarge one’s understanding of the term “Sufi” (566). According to Hazelton in The New York Times “The Sufis believe Sufism to be the teaching within all religions. It is a mystic philosophy whose quest is to achieve universal harmony with the spirit of the Absolute Being; but to do this, unlike most other mystic philosophies, Sufism maintains involvement with this world.In the first part of her memoir, Under My Skin, Doris Lessing talks about the violence she suffered from, as a child, due to her parents and the upbringing she was subject to. She made it clear it was not physical violence, but an abuse to her innocence that was extremely cruel and stifling, because it did allow her the freedom to unfold her personality the way it should have been, it did not give her the assertiveness and clear mind that she would have needed and most of all it did not make her feel she had the emotional or the intellectual support she desperately craved for. It was an indirect abuse to her persona, a young girl eager to read and know more, free herself from the British stiff principles that, promoted by her mother, tried to pre-order for a her a life she did not want to live. Martha Quest is the first volume of Lessing's collection, Children of Violence, where the author used her own childhood and parents to depict her upbringing and coming of age while living in Africa. Her parents keep their original names here, whilst Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia) where she grew up, is now a fictional country on the same continent full of colonies that impose their European manners, considering themselves civilized and respectful, while denigrating and exploiting the local population. The book starts with Martha trying to read while her mother is talking to a Dutch woman, from the Afrikaans colonies. It is all fake, for they are not friends: Martha's mother finds her companion beneath her, one priding herself with having her daughters married, while Martha's mother expects hers to have a career. Martha is watching them resentful. She wants to read and their talk is disturbing. She resents their hypocrisy and how they talk about her in her presence. In the end she takes her book (that was meant to outrage the mother who instead did not even pay attention to it) and blurts out how she despises them. Martha is defiant, self-conscious and resentful of her parents first, who confine her to a suffocating space, and then of all the others, who ask her about school, education or simply marriage. She needs to break away, she needs her freedom, her space to read to be herself, away from her rigorous mother who has imposed on her an Edwardian upbringing, cold and stubborn (actually very much in her attitude the way Martha herself behaves in the presence of others) and a father who is trapped in his memories of the World War I (just like Alfred, in the story of Lessing's parents and what would have happened, had they not gotten together). This is again an intense book, with Martha coming of age, leaving the farm when, she notes, childhood had long left her before she managed to move away from her parents. She is going now to live in town in a rented room, and work as a secretary in a lawyer's office. She reads, she dates men, she is eager to become a woman, she works much less than she expected, struggles with a lack of food, to keep her figure. Yet the social influence on her is still there, coming from what others expect her to do, from her continuously nagging mother who tells her what to do and how to behave, from the others in her office. But not in the least is she able to lower the pressure on herself, always trying to be better, always wanting to be in control, striving to be different than her mother but in the end never capable of relaxing. She is still too young to get to know herself better, to cut off from all the others and think of herself, how she feels, what she wants, whom she wants to become. She has mood fluctuations, she meanders a lot between what she thinks from one moment to another and, aware of her instability, she has the tendency then to cling to momentary things in the hope that they will stay with her forever, disregarding thus doubts and other hesitations. This is how she decides to marry Douglas, who is a respectful man, who can handle her parents, and yet she is aware that she is not getting from him the real fulfillment that she has been yearning for.  Feminism is again very prevalent, as in most books of Doris Lessing. Martha Quest lives in  a country that is constantly being told to be a foreign one. Yet, it is her home. It is like with her body, that keeps developing, becoming ever more mature, while her mother wants to dress her like a child, refusing to see its own natural emancipation. Martha is a symbol of a new woman. Victorian age was long gone, and now the Edwardian so-called emancipation is also outdated, for it involved the emergence from the previous social constraints without letting one's soul develop into what it really needs and wishes for. Martha's parents look after her, but in a way that her own persona cannot unfold freely when having others planning for her, when being repressed by social expectations that never look into individuals but only at them and their external behavior. She instead is sensitive, passionate and profound. She needs to nourish her own thoughts and mind, to sink into herself and discover her own cravings and sexuality, her freedom and her talents, her curiosities and her passions, freed from values that make no sense to her but that must be followed blindly.  This first part of the collection ends with Martha marrying Douglas. A simple marriage on a Thursday without any church and formalities, just like Doris Lessing's marriage with her first husband. Upon the ceremony, the honking cars hit a black person who eventually is able to get up, wipe his clothes and move forward, whilst the white mob from the colonies comment on the black person's lack of respect and responsibility. It is the irony and the hypocrisy that characterizes her wedding at that given moment too.  In the autobiography as well as in Martha Quest she calls them "spineless Social Democrats" (199), yet in the intellectually barren colonial Africa this "Book club" offered some activity which was highly appreciated by intellectuals like Lessing. The other alternative in the colony for young people was to meet, drink, make merry, marry, and settle down into a drab middle class existence of children and servants, gossips and parties.Lessing was attracted to Marxism due to various reasons. The existence of double standards in the colony, the oppression of the black by the white and the self imprisonment of the whites under the code of white superiority are some of thefactors that compelled her to search for a remedy and she found Marxism as a highly promising philosophy designed to eradicate the ills of the world. Lessing's romance with Marxism is the theme of her political novels written between the years 1952 to 1969. She has written seven novels during this period. They are the Children of Violence series ,consisting of five novels - Martha Quest (19521, A - Proper Marriage (19541, A Ripple from the Storm (1958) , Land Locked and The Four Gated City (1969) . The other two novels are Retreat into Innocence(1956) and The Golden Note Book (1962) which has been highly praised for its technical innovationsand thematic contentsIn The Children of Violence series Lessing attempts to express her experiences of Africa, and her growth and understanding of life in its complexities through her autobiographical heroine Martha Quest. Lessing shares with Martha her quest for freedom, hatred of oppression, sensitivity of mind and the visionary spirit. Dorothy Brewster sees much more similarity between the two. She says : The young woman named Martha Quest in the series 'Children of Violence' grows up, like her creator Doris Lessing, on a farm in central Africa, has a father and a mother with some traits resembling those ascribed elsewhere by Doris Lessing to her own father and mother, goes at eighteen or so to earn her living in the capital of the colony, as Doris and stimulated by new ideas and new relationships in the rapidly changing conditions of the years before and during world war 1. We must assume that Doris Lessing in tracing Martha's development, has not forgotten her own (cited by Clare D Kinsman.511,12). The similarity again is most striking in their marriages and divorces, i'n their migration to England and in the sharing of their talents. Hence Martha's interest in Marxism, and her deep involvement with it is only a reflection of her creator's interest and involvement The novels unfold for us Martha Quest's life from 1936 to 1997, taking us through her restless adolescence, eventful and mature adulthood and to her prophetic death in 1997 in a nuclear holocaust,which destroys the entire world. Since the novel series open for us the entire life and experiences of its heroine the series it should rightly be called as, Sydney Janet Kaplan says, her "Bildungsromann though Lessing applied the term only to the final volume of the series, The Four Gated City Lessing is a product of the British colonial system. From the day of her birth in Kermanshah in 1919, to the day she left Southern Rhodesia in 1949, she has experienced, the stifling influence of colonialism, in its worst forms. She detested it and wanted a way out of it. She found the philosophy of Marxism most appealing because it promised total liberation for the colonial situation, both personal and social and even international. Yuri Sdobnikov remarks: Communism would put an end to exploitation once and for all, together with every type of social enslavement and the parasitic existence of some men at the expense of others. National oppression would be eradicated. Colonial oppression and bloody wars would disappear forever. (Yuri Sdobnikov, 152). Lessing saw the Children of Violence as "the study of the individual conscience in its relation to the collectivef1 (Personal Voice, 18). This statement made by Lessing, calls for an understanding of the international situation which coincided with the adolescence and growth of Martha Quest. Martha's adolescence is marked on the international level, by the preparation for the second world war and the spread of communism beyond the boundaries of Soviet Russia. In Central Africa however these had very little effect because the country was not drawn into the political situations of Europe and was still following the capitalist mode of exploitation and oppression. Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain .Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter ,enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home ,then installed Doris in a convent school , where the nuns