REVISITING DORIS LESSING
It probably goes without saying that extraordinary writers lead extraordinary lives, often before they published their first book – sometimes because of it. I cannot think of a better example when re-reading Doris Lessing. She turned into fiction the facts of her life that were stranger than fiction. From this perspective her two volumes of autobiography, Under my skin and Walking in the shade, covering her life up to 1962 – although volume two reaches forwards to her time of writing it, i.e. into the 1990s – invite the gaze of the literary voyeur. An author who fictionalizes her life to great effect will always be asked, as she acknowledges disdainfully, who the protagonists are in real life, when one should know as a sophisticated reader that the characters in her novels are composites of the multitudes of people that wandered in and out of her life. That is what good fiction is all about, so why the fascination as to who is who? Why not read her autobiography as much as fiction as her novels? Life, and matter from which it arises, after all, is only a story told, be it from a scientific perspective – as Nietzsche pointed out – or from a materialistic one – as Marx wrote. That Lessing embraced in the latter as a sometimes unorthodox communist but ultimately rejected it vehemently in favour of a spiritualist world view, is one of the most intriguing aspects of her life. Herstory as much as history blend as vital ingredients in a primordial soup, dished up as a British working-class broth in one moment and as a French delicacy in the next, literally so as a woman cooking up a storm. While the width and breadth of her two-dimensional mapping, at least up to 1962, encompasses mainly London and the former Salisbury, one has always the impression that most of the world is interacting by way of her fellow travellers, African, European, Russian. Geprägt – a German word that her husband Gottfried Lessing might have used – by the two world wars, there is trauma to be escaped but cannot be escaped. Her father as a WWI returned services soldier, having lost a leg, and her mother who seemed to live a life of incomprehension, as a couple setting up a farm out of bare land in what was then Southern Rhodesia, they did what seems so essentially British if not European, namely to colonize vast stretches of the world, being part of an empire that dwarfed any empire before that. While their individual efforts may have been negligible, the collective drive to Rule Britannica was doomed like any other empire before (and after), to be reduced to sand:
Tell us what you've seen in faraway forgotten lands
Where empires have turned back to sand
I quote these lines from the Moody Blues song Lovely to see you as a reminder that Lessing was fond of the blues – and that the titles of her two volumes of autobiography are quotes from song lyrics. That Lessing, even as a child, could see the doom ahead, was one of her defining attributes. The absolute will to tame the foreign soil by way of subjecting the natives to the status of slaves – or at least very cheap labour – was anathema to her even if the noblest of motivations were used as justification, like to raise the natives to the status of the colonisers, to educate them, to civilise them, to turn them into good Christians and honest entrepreneurs, and most of all into good democrats of the Westminster system. While on the other hand the internal contradictions of the capitalist enterprise were as much evident in the colonies as much as in the motherlands, white colonial unionists and communists did, by and large, not include the natives as comrades to be educated accordingly. Communists like Gottfried Lessing only predicted a bloodbath, or at least proposed to give it all back to them without any preconditions. Doris Lessing made attempts to include the natives but without much success, for so deeply ingrained was the insult of her being a kaffir-lover that even progressives like her husband found it hard to see the natives as equals. The terrible irony is, of course, that Gottfried in his last incarnation seemed to have fallen for the geopolitical farce in that the Soviet Bloc supported the likes of Idi Amin while the West was busy assassinating the likes of Patrice Lumumba. That the predicted bloodbath did not eventuate in South Africa is cited as evidence by Doris Lessing that not all doom and gloom stories are necessarily chapters of class warfare or the revolutions eating their children – what with the latter sadly played out in Russia (of that more later). That Doris absolutely treated the African native as her equal was such a radical trait that it absolutely alienated her from her family and friends. Her childish will was not to be like her mother who perceived the African natives as unknowable aliens – while her father did not treat his ‘boys’ so badly – and not to succumb to her mother’s dream of having little England as her backyard, if not returning to England for good. By way of contradiction upon contradiction, her mother does eventually return to England, but the move is unsuccessful, and she returns to Rhodesia to live out her life there. Doris of course escapes to London for good. It is difficult to imagine what life must have been like on their farm even though her vivid descriptions paint a picture, both surreal and real. As a painter she would have defied all styles and genres. As a writer she conforms to the basics of English grammar but with innovative punctuation and sentence structures. She drives home a point with a single word. She is stylish like a Nietzsche, embedding phrases into phrases into phrases like a Russian doll, never losing the thread. As all good writers derive their craft from extensive readings, and she has read more widely than can be imagined, even as an adolescent. Literary works as well as communist pamphlets provide a rich mixture of styles, from working class polemics to high-brow erudition. The odd thing about her parents is that they valued books even though they do not descend from a literary background other than their English-ness that is cognizant of a select tradition of reading as a national pastime, if not for them but certainly for their daughter who shows a remarkable interest in such matters – while her brother does not. Reading, like travelling, broadens the mind and it doesn’t take long before Doris is seduced by a wilful determination to experience this wide world for herself, if only to escape this narrow and often miserable, isolated life on the farm. Not that she doesn’t find solace in the surrounding bush, the red earth of Africa, the flora and fauna, a sort of Eden, both beautiful and brutal, expert in shooting fowl for the pot and pocket money. Catholic boarding school in Salisbury is an odd choice for strict Anglicans but Doris’ mother has always been a contradictory character, perhaps with the underlying idea that the catholic teachers will instil in her wilful daughter a sense of pious behaviour, at least to prevent her from her tomboyish excesses that might lead her to a life of not lady-like destiny. The idea being that Doris will eventually marry an English gentleman who will whisk her – and her mother – away to a nice estate in England. While Doris is fascinated by catholic rituals and idols – like the virgin Mary – there comes the day when atheism knocks on the door, thanks to the social circles she encounters outside of boarding school. With the crisis brewing in Europe, there are a variety of newcomers in Salisbury, left-wing intellectuals on the run, not to speak of the British government’s idea to use the environments of Salisbury as RAF training camps. Quite a number of the trainees were left-of-center as well, and tolerated, because after all the threat of fascism to take over England – now associated with a peculiar German and Japanese genocidal racism – was opposed mainly by left-wing, working-class Englishmen, ready to defend Britain. Hitler and his cohorts forced their opponents to examine their own racist histories, with the realization that racism as an ideology is the worst of all the murderous political movements – with attendant military forces – that the world has ever seen. As such Salisbury was a fertile ground for anti-racist movements however small in their inception. For Doris this was not an intellectual idea but a deeply felt reality of the brotherhood of man. As such she was a minority of one, or at least of the very few, having to keep these emotions to herself, for the vast majority around her were still racist, if only for economical reasons, i.e. colonial farming practices could only be sustained by cheap native labour. So, while a broad section of the English colonial population opposed Hitler’s racism, they were still in two minds about their African workers. Best to keep the status quo. Even the deeply racist South-African regime could be counted to be on Britani’s side if war broke out - and it did. In this climate of a sort of cosmopolitan liberalism that swept across Salisbury, there were any number of young English civil servants who espoused anti-fascist ideas while at the same time keeping to the traditional methods of native subjugation. The English country clubs in Salisbury now entertained a rowdy clientele, heavy drinking, bawdy licence, with a few political arguments around the perimeter. Doris who had left the farm aged 15, now working in odd jobs in and around Salisbury, joined the fun as best as she could. Vivacious and still tomboyish with strikingly good looks, she found her liberal civil servant who promised to be a modern husband. Married in 1937, she aged 18 or so, was torn between being a modern wife with babies and a being a more radical anti-fascist, anti-racist activist and socialist that perceived marriage as yet another way of enslavement. She kept the latter emotions under control and proceeded with the former: by the time she had her first child in 1940, the war in Europe had turned the whole world up-side-down, and life in Salisbury became more and more unhinged. The Wisdom – her husband’s surname - family moved from flat to flat, always with a black servant or two in tow, hosting any number of friends and hangers-on, the in-laws included, a seemingly bohemian life-style tinged with a conservative baseline. Boozing at the country clubs and bars that were frequented by ever more RAF personnel was the buzz of the town. Continental refugees found shelter in the most unlikely places and jobs. When the second child arrived a year later, the somewhat chaotic family life continued to expand. Doris more and more excused her from familial duties – a relatively easy thing to do as there were always women around who adored her children, competing to look after them – what with Doris going off to and later join the Left Book Club where the more radical left began to organise what was later to become the Communist Party. Doris’ husband, Harry Wisdom, did not approve. They drifted apart and the marriage ended in 1943 with the unthinkable decision on Doris’ part to leave her children with Harry. This is often construed as a truly monstrous decision by a wife and mother, and yet there are at least two good reasons for doing so: one, the purely practical one, as mentioned above, namely that there were any number of women who already had looked after the children as surrogate mothers and were eager to take over the job in an official capacity, i.e. to marry Harry Wisdom after his divorce with Doris; the second reason being that in socialist thinking – as well as in native African traditions – children belong not so much to the parents as they belong to the community around them. From these perspectives it was a pragmatic decision for Doris, but not at all understood by both her conservative and liberal friends and family. For reactionaries of all sorts this is of course a welcome target of denouncing Doris Lessing. Given the propensities for human contradictions, we note that Doris’ third child to Gottfried Lessing, born in 1946, was to be her life-long companion.
So, who is this Gottfried Lessing that sweeps Doris off her feet? As one of the luminaries of the Left Book Club transforming itself into the Communist Party of Southern Rhodesia, he is undoubtedly one of the sharpest minds known to mankind in Salisbury, and as a bonus: very good-looking, with a continental sense of dressing up in suits, with a Russian-German aristocratic background who turned his bourgeois upbringing into a Stalinist conviction, as total as Stalin himself. What a man! As a trained lawyer he finds a low-paying job with a local law firm that exploits his knowhow. Both Doris and Gottfried have something in common: they both are determined to end up in London after the war. A marriage certificate will make this easier for Gottfried even though, quite unbeknown to Doris, she will lose her British citizenship by marrying a German national (she later gets her British citizenship back though). So, is it a marriage of convenience? Since they continue to live in Salisbury in the meantime, they are a scandalous couple, and even more so when they have a child together, a love child? What is going on? Gottfried treats Doris as his disciple. They live in various flats and accommodations, sleep in separate beds in the bedroom. They talk politics deep into the night, smoking incessantly. Occasionally they make love. Gottfried’s only solution for Africa is for Africans to take over – it will be a bloodbath. He is not interested in helping the Africans to get organised in achieving this. On occasion Doris brings along some African activists but they are baffled by Gottfried. African Stalinism is not yet on the horizon. The white Stalinists resident in Africa – mainly in South Africa – look upon the communist movement in Salisbury with some sort of amusement. Cannot be the real thing. They do sell the South African communist papers quite well in Salisbury though. Doris cycles all over the place to distribute the pamphlets. Doris reads all the associated literature and follows the news from Moscow. Gottfried explains what is what. They tow the party line, as Doris so bitterly will reflect in later life. There is nothing more incongruous than to imagine a communist cell in Salisbury in in the late 1940s. And yet, there it was, with Doris and Gottfried Lessing as the movers and shakers. During the war, Uncle Joe was of course an ally for Britain and the USA, and as such it was perhaps no big deal to have avid supporters of Stalin in the most unexpected places on earth. It was a necessary military strategy to defeat the Axis powers as much as it was a progressive stance that would usher in a socialist utopia, Workers of the World Unite. While British and American secret services began to monitor the reds under the beds, there was as yet no official policy to denounce communist parties or to outlaw them. This is the story of the Cold War, yet to come. Perhaps there was some begrudging admiration for Gottfried and Doris as they put into personal practice what they preached. The lived and breathed politics. All the while they worked in some ordinary and extraordinary jobs, what with Doris’ increasing reputation as a writer becoming a sought-after adviser-secretary to local politicians and other luminaries. In terms of her theoretical communism that was based on reading Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, as prescribed by Moscow and Gottfried, there was the practical side of fairly benign communist agitation that consisted mainly of helping anyone in difficulties, financial or otherwise. Doris was good at referring people in need to relevant aid organisations what with Gottfried’s legal advice on how to access state agencies. These good works endeared them not only to the recipients but also to local politicians who dabbled in mildly socialist causes. Charitable organisations, churches even, valued the work of these communists who in every other aspect were highly suspect of subverting the colonial status quo. Gottfried even managed to raise the standards of the law firm he worked for, turning it single-handedly into a successful business. As such he debunked the myth that communism will reduce everyone to proletarian misery. The noble aim of communism has always been to raise the living standards of all the workers. Of course, it was always easy for Gottfried to accuse reactionary detractors of bourgeois decadence – and that it must be rooted out. Whatever happened on the ground in the Soviet Union was a necessary process of the great revolution. The small bunch of communists in Salisbury had no power but to do good. In any case, when WWII ended in 1945, with their son Peter some 2 years old, Salisbury and the rest of the world had to come to grips, first of all, with what transpired from the remnants of the Nazi regime: the Holocaust, the Nuremburg trials, the occupied zones of what remained of Germany, the refugees, the war dead, the rise of the US as the sheriff of the world, in short, the New World Order in which the Soviet Union (and China) were relegated to play second fiddle. Communists in the Western World – the free world – were at loggerheads as to what to do next: wait for instructions from Moscow or else establish a new wave of intellectual cum academic communist schools of thought, independent of Moscow but still supportive of its noble aims. Others still reverted to Trotskyism, especially when tales of murder and mayhem under Stalinist totalitarian rule emerged (but were first dismissed as Western propaganda but increasingly there were doubts about what was going on in the Soviet Union). Doris read about it and wondered but Gottfried remained a staunch Stalinist while Doris became a sort of Trotskyist without realising it – or at least hiding it from Gottfried. In the meantime, there were other emotional concerns for Doris: her father became increasingly frail – having given up the farm some years ago – now also living in Salisbury. He disproved of Gottfried for obvious reasons but became unable to argue the point, lapsing into semi-unconsciousness and finally dying in 1947. Her father had been a major influence on her in his disdain for the British governments that had neglected the WWI soldiers, had cast them aside, paid a miserable pension for those disabled, like him, having lost a leg. On the farm he tempered his wife who treated the African servants with impatience, scolding them for their lack of dexterity when handling the dainty English teacups, and the like. He philosophized with his African foreman. He treated his African workers fairly. He worked hard trying to make the farm a success, battling against the heavy odds, having to beg for loans from the banks. He did his best to turn the ramshackle farm into a home for his family. Now Doris’ mother became ever more irritable, accusing Doris of failing her daughterly duties, not to speak of abandoning her husband and children, and then marrying a German madman. Doris had not lived up to a single expectation her mother had had for her. Her brother had gone off into the navy and came back to marry a respectable daughter of a well-off farmer: they never again saw face to face. To top it off, her brother and his new wife refused to have their mother living on the farm. All the more reason for accelerating the plans to move to London. The necessary paperwork was hard to come by in those days of the disintegrating British empire, as was the money needed for such a major dislocation, what with Doris determined to take her son Peter with her. Gottfried planned to set off by himself with a more uncertain plan of living together in London, the only motivation being that Peter needed a father. They divorced in 1949, the year they moved to London. As such this marriage of convenience had served its purpose.
Such arrangements are not that uncommon: I knew an academic, originally from Czechoslovakia, who had studied in Canada and Hawaii, landing a job at the University of Auckland. In Hawaii he knew a Japanese woman who wanted to migrate to New Zealand but could not get the necessary papers; so they married and it worked. They lived together in Auckland and as fate would have it, they had a child. Eventually they divorced and she took the child back with her to Japan.
Gottfried did not care too much about his fatherly duties. He was more concerned about a legal career in London; after all he had done well in Salisbury. Doris on the other hand had high expectations of Gottfried being the father figure even if they did not live together, expecting Gottfried to do well in London and provide generous financial assistance as well. Sadly, things did not turn out well as far as Gottfried was concerned. London’s legal fraternity did not welcome him with open arms despite Gottfried having various family connections. There were no job openings. The only occupation offered was to work, poorly paid, for the British Communist Party. Unlike in Salisbury, Gottfried was not hot property in the CPGB, being a minor wheel in a big machine. Gottfried was contacted by his sister who lived in East-Germany, the new home of the communist GDR, inviting him to move to Berlin (East). He accepted and never looked back, making a career as a diplomat. Contact with Doris dried up even though she did her best to remind him of his fatherly duties. She even went to East-Berlin to find him but she was received coldly. Peter had a few holidays in East-Berlin with his father but that too came to a halt when Gottfried had postings overseas.
So, Doris Lessing – the name she kept – was alone in London with her son Peter. Ironically, or shall we say, ‘contradiction upon contradiction’, she eventually joined to CPGB in 1952, albeit somewhat reluctantly but doing well in the party hierarchy, culminating in trips to the USSR, representing the literary wing of the CPGB, having by then established her literary reputation based on her first novel The Grass is Singing, published in 1950. Gottfried had installed in her an emotional intelligence that recognized the potential of communism even if the practice of it fell short on several fronts – with a sort of strange belief, common at the time, that if communism cannot be achieved in Britain/Europe first, then all other attempts elsewhere in the world are doomed. Marx & Engels, after all were an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon while harking back to the French Revolution. As such, Doris could educate the Russians to get it right. They never did, and by the time they invaded Hungary the CPGB lost a lot of its members, including Doris Lessing. Not that she gave up left-wing causes, for example becoming a prominent member of the CND, with the likes of Bertrand Russell who, by the way, she did not get on well with.
I have known a few communists in my time as a student at LMU in the late 60s, early 70s, not members of the established Party/Parties but radical offshoots that morphed into the APO and Red Brigades. Many years later, in New Zealand, I got to know – on the periphery – a few communist unionists, notably Bill Andersen. A notable meeting was with the GDR ambassador (to Australia, NZ not having any diplomatic relations with the GDR) who made a fiery speech and handed out GDR flags and other memorabilia (which I still have). Other than that, I can only report my current association with Noam Chomsky – left-wing but not a communist by any measure. As such, I have a rough idea what Gottfried Lessing was all about, and I can follow Doris’ youthful rush into communism. However, as various other critics, I cannot understand Doris’ later, bitter resentment of communist parties, be it of the USSR, China, Britain or elsewhere. Some of her pronouncements are outrageous: I was particularly offended by her writing that Stalin was a thousand times worse than Hitler and that of the 20 million Russian war dead, actually only 8 million died in the war and 12 million were murdered by Stalin. There is absolutely no historical evidence for such a claim. However many perished in the Gulags and however many were murdered as opponents of Stalin, there is simply no comparison with what Hitler did: packing women, children and men into cattle trains and take to camps, the entrance emblazoned with ARRBEIT MACHT FREI, order them to take off all their clothes to be ‘de-loused’ in communal showers and then rain Zyklon B on them, killing them all. Inmates left alive for the following purpose: to take the corpses out and burn them in the ovens. There is not much point in adding up the numbers, be they 6 million or whatever. There is no comparison to Stalin.
One of the ‘communist’ critics of Doris Lessing, Paul Foot, was aghast at what Lessing wrote in Volume Two of her autobiography:
‘This (Communism) was a religious set of mind, identical with that of passionate religious True Believers ... we inherited the mental framework of Christianity.’
Foot then gets the wrong end of the stick when he comments:
This is demonstrable drivel. Pretty well everyone who joined the Party at that time or any other were non-believers, secularists, humanists, people who rejected and argued passionately against religious superstition and a substitute for independent thought ...
https://cpiml.net/liberation/2013/12/lessing-legend
Lessing is not saying that communists ‘believe’ the same as blind-faith Christians do but that communists are LIKE Christians in their dogmatic beliefs, e.g. she would claim that Marx’s ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is as dogmatic as the Bible’s ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word is God’. What is ‘drivel’ is that Lessing uses this old ruse that ‘extremists’ on either side are as evil as each other, even though they have totally opposed beliefs. That fascists and communists are on the extremes of the political spectrum and are therefore to be treated the same, has been used as an argument ever since the capitalist West – read the USA – sought to dominate the world. Given that Lessing denounces capitalism as well, one wonders why she is unable to solve the equation, i.e. that communism/socialism remains the only credible alternative to the odious combination of capitalism and fascism. As Foot points out, Lessing’s generally sympathetic descriptions of communists and ex-communists of her personal acquaintance seem to contradict her condemnation of ‘communism’ as an ideology, e.g. her statement:
All over Europe, and to a much lesser extent the United States, it was the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people who became Communists …
Why, asks Foot, why her condemnation cited above:
Why? Her answer nowhere reflects that sympathy and concern for former Communists which is so central to The Golden Notebook.
It would be easy to say that Lessing is yet another example of a turncoat who does seem to verify the common suspicion that leftists turn rightists in an opportunistic ‘change of heart’, and that Lessing was rewarded with the capitalist Nobel Prize for turning on her former colleagues’ ideology – and not reject the Prize like a tougher Sartre did.
Foot offers her an explanation, a redemption, an ‘unless’:
In October 1956, at the height of the crisis of Stalinism, she wrote to Edward Thompson, ‘Unless a communist party is a body of individuals each jealously guarding his or her independence of judgement, it must degenerate into a body of yes men.’ And yes women too, of course, which Doris Lessing has never been.
So, if ‘a communist party is body of individuals each jealously guarding his or her independence of judgement’ then communism as an ideology within an organised party is the way forward.
A nice thought.
Literary critics tend to categorize Lessing’s oeuvre in three consecutive phases: communist, psychological, and Sufi. The latter is perhaps the most baffling one. While it is not uncommon for progressive people to convert to Islam – take black American activists like Malcolm X – there is Lessing’s seemingly contradictory statement quoted above, namely:
‘This (Communism) was a religious set of mind, identical with that of passionate religious True Believers …
Sufism strikes me as a religious belief that requires a pretty passionate mind set. Lessing writes that on the route to discovery – which ultimately led her to Sufism – she came across various Eastern candidates, like Zen Buddhism. Since I dabbled in Zen myself in my youth, ‘believing’ it was not a religion but a ‘way of life’, as promulgated by Lao-tse in ancient times and by D. T. Suzuki in modern times, I was disappointed when in Kyoto, I visited the Zen temples with their Zen gardens, noting they were no different to the Shinto Imperial Palaces. In a similar vein I was seduced by TM for a while as a student (in Munich) and when visiting Rishikesh and Maharishi’s Ashram of Beatles fame in 1970 – the Maharishi was in California at the time – his German chief of staff initiated me on HIS behalf, giving me a ‘secret’ mantra that is as common as any, and noting that the Ashram housed the rotund Brahmins in flash houses while the Tamil workers slept in tiny shacks, working 12 hours a day or more. Not a good experience and I abandoned TM forthwith. I don’t know much about Sufism but it could be similar to Zen-Buddhism as a ‘way of life’ rather than a strict religion, and maybe that is what Lessing saw and experienced via her guru, Idries Shah. On reading a fairly long piece on Idries Shah on Wikipedia – excuse my sloppy scholarship – I do get the impression that one, he was a funny guy not adverse to do a few magic tricks, and two, a profound thinker of the Western tradition who saw in his Eastern ancestry a sort of psychological gold mine that could and would transform Western culture of the 60s into a youthful counter-culture that nominally treasured the ancient wisdom of the East. Sufism, perhaps like Zen-Buddhism, was embraced as a new-wave psychology of intense individualist aspirations to achieve Satori-Nirvana-Jannah in a fast-forward way. Indeed, Shah is quoted as saying:
"What I would really want, in case anybody is listening, is for the products of the last 50 years of psychological research to be studied by the public, by everybody, so that the findings become part of their way of thinking (...) they have this great body of psychological information and refuse to use it."
Like many of the superstars of this new esotericism, Shah seems to have depended on his charisma and charm, not as ostentatious as the likes of the Maharishi, rather chiming in with the Gurdjieffs and Ouspenskys of this world. Anti-psychiatrists like RD Laing opened the way for Eastern-style remedies what with LSD guru Timothy Leary and the Tibetan Book of the Dead expanding the horizons further into the rock’n’roll mystics. Doris Lessing was not exactly a counter-culture child of the 60s, as she explains in the last pages of her autobiography:
So many people landed in mental hospitals and prisons, and there are sudden silences in talk when someone who committed suicide is being remembered, and every week comes news of a far too early death.
Having taken in many of a ‘troubled’ adolescent at her Charrington Street house, those who had been seduced by drugs, or were alcoholics, Lessing saw the dark side of the 60s. She cannot help herself though to end with the old joke of ‘if you remember it, you weren’t there’ linking it to a line from a poem she wrote when she was very young:
“When I look back I seem to remember singing.”
Now this is true literary genius.
