RAW FEMALE: On Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin.
David Hackbridge Johnson
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To get
an idea of how Doris Lessing fills her memoirs with incandescent evocations,
one can do no better than settle upon just one of the many episodes of
aloneness with which she populates her first volume of autobiography, Under My Skin. She lies in bed at night, a young girl
bewildered by the sights and smells of Africa, her senses intensely acclimatised
to creeping and rustling noises above the mosquito net under which she tries to
sleep. The sudden realisation that it is
the rain drumming on the thatched roof, followed by the exalting chorus of
frogs, allows her to solve the mystery of sounds in the landscape hidden by
darkness.[1] Lessing writes in a way that makes the reader
hear those very sounds and feel the ‘Eureka’ moment of her solving nature's
secrets. Her sense of smell is so acute
as to constitute some sort of olfactory malfunction – she never shies away from
the sweet, sour and sweaty odours of human bodies, of the smell of dirty
clothes and the desperate attempts to launder them clean, the foetid dampness
lying around in the corners of dreary English bedrooms, or the acid sprays of
cologne used to mask unwashed bodies. Not
many pages pass before there is mention of armpits, sweating, squatting, someone's
crotch, urinous sheets. She counters
these mentioned unmentionables with almost cute-but-not-quite reveries about
her little grey cat, the likelihood of a snake slithering onto a floor mat,
views of orange bleeding sunsets, the spotting of fools gold or mica glinting
in outcrops of rock, and many other daily miracles of African life.
Lessing
isn't really interested in writing an autobiography as a perfect work of art in
the way achieved by Edmund Gosse in his Father
and Son, or E. H. Visiak in Life’s
Morning Hour, or in that remarkable short memoir of childhood by Adrian
Stokes, Inside Out. At some point in her writing life, Lessing
must have imbibed a methodology from George Bernard Shaw, since she cannot
resist a certain amount of social commentary, and interjections which show the
benefits of her hindsight. She might
have allowed her readers to judge for themselves the follies of the past, but
she won't allow herself to let go of the judgements she has formed in maturity
about such topics as marriage, child-rearing, sexuality and race
relations. If these passages were
chopped out it would be a glowing masterpiece of almost visionary appeal, such
is her eye, ear and nose for detail, but it probably wouldn't be the book she'd
intended, since it would be deprived of her insistent adult voice, her quietly
militant viewpoints, her antennae that are always tuned and ready to jump
decades back and forth in order to compare the foolish with the
enlightened. She herself is aware of the
danger – in discussing the world-view of the early colonisers of South Rhodesia
and the way they contrasted ‘civilization’ with ‘savagery’ she can say, ‘I do
not think it can be said too often that it is a mistake to exclaim over past
wrong-thinking before at least wondering how our present thinking will seem to
posterity'.[2] The constant contextualization of her memoirs
creates the impression that the older Doris Lessing is looking over the
shoulder of the younger, and in this way she falls into the very trap of
hindsight she seeks to avoid. In his
memoir, Visiak seeks to maintain at all costs the view of the child – a task
without possibility of success since to succeed would be to resort to giant
baby letters and constant misspellings, yet somehow we feel the child’s
experience. Gosse famously tinkered with
his own memories, yet his biographers oughtn’t to tut. Stokes filtered the child’s awareness of his
surroundings through an aesthetics of space.
Every autobiographer has their gambit.
At her least appealing, for example, the tetchy and very conventional
rant against television,[3]
one wants to skip paragraphs in Lessing’s work.
The contrasts between old and new are selective and narrow, and rather
state the obvious to anyone reading her book when it was published in 1994. It is somewhat trying to have her almost miraculous
descriptive powers clouded with irritable asides of an almost pop-psychological
nature. There is also the habit of
universalising episodes of childhood injustice into rather weak follow-on paragraphs
extrapolating these onto a global scale, with horrors perpetrated by a
take-your-pick recipe of tin-pot authorities, general wielders of power, and dubious
governments who can only ever be mired in corruption.[4] By doing this she actually belittles the
suffering of the child who cannot know of ghastly oligarchs and totalitarian
ghouls. Perhaps only the child Doris was
a genius, and grew up only to occupy a soapbox.
Gradually one learns to spot Lessing’s knee-jerk polemics and take them
in parenthesis.
The
overall impression of the book is of a life filled with sensuality and
alertness to surroundings both on the physical and mental plane. Lessing is aware at an early age that the
First World War, in which her father lost a leg, is a lingering shadow over
everyone's lives, including hers, even though she wasn't born until the year
after it ended. Her father calls the war
the ‘Great Unmentionable’.[5] There are moving passages relating to the
number of women bereft of their young husbands or fiancés, just as my Aunt
Cissie Loxham was left alone by the death of hers after his death in the Battle
of Passchendaele. Parents continue to
mourn the death of one, two, or even three sons, lost in the trenches. Lessing’s insistence on returning to the war
at regular intervals in her autobiography tallies with my own view of the war
as casting a psychic shock over many generations that came in its wake. A significant amount of my own reading matter
still hovers around those authors caught up and its broadcasts of bullets and
bursts of shell fire, its gas, mud and rats. Edward Thomas's poems are always within reach,
not because he wrote a great deal about the war but because his poems contain
the overwhelming freight of what lay before it, the wild flowers, the horses,
the holloways of his endless ramblings to escape melancholy – as if the
beauties of England had grown tired of themselves and wanted a conflagration to
shake them into renewed being. With such
a sense of duty and renewal did millions of young men – and some men like
Thomas, far too old – fling themselves into conflict. For Doris Lessing as a very young girl, the
lack of profit from this investment in flesh and blood was all too
apparent. In a sense, although her
father's wooden leg is real, it also becomes a symbol of European societies
fallen into crippledom, their crowns shattered and cast away, their class
systems overturned into the foaming sea of burgeoning proletariats, their
bankrupted ideals and aesthetics replaced with new systems seemingly armoured in
the impenetrable systemics of Socialism, Anarchy or Marxism. In announcing herself as a Communist later in
the book, Lessing is thus swept along on these tides of change.[6]
Lessing’s
fascination with uncleanliness and bodily fluids finds a new outlook in the
morbid self-scourging atmosphere of the convent school she is sent to at the
age of eight. In a reversal of the
desire for cleanliness, the nuns running the establishment see any obsession
with washing or changing one's clothes as a sign of vanity. Even at night the little girls in their
dormitory are subjected to lamentable sermons by a nun determined to gird them
about with their own revolting sins, and even when the lights are out they can
imagine the bloody hearts of the Jesus paintings oozing blood in the midnight
hour. The nuns desire the reek of unwash
in themselves and their young charges as confirmation of their repulsive and
lowly nature – a body-aversion that surely goes as far back as Origen. This warped form of self-abnegation chimes
with that perpetrated upon the young children in the boarding schools described
in Thomas Bernard's harrowing memoir Gathering
Evidence. In this regard, Lessing
and Bernard are right to speculate on the damage done to children: the
belittling, humiliating, the beating and bullying of their small bodies, all
taking place under the painted, loving eyes of Christ Crucified, the Blessed
Virgin Mary, and the Saints smiling beatifically under their Allotted Tortures. The message of Christianity could not have
been more distorted.[7]
Despite
the passing hatreds that a young child might be expected to hold against her
parents, the young Doris’ mother and father come over as remarkable
people. Her one-legged father takes up
the gruelling challenge of starting a farm from scratch upon land not even
cleared of forest. Her mother, a former
nurse with aspirations towards higher things, makes do in a country where there
are no higher things to aspire to – her beautiful dresses, hats and gloves hang
largely unused in wardrobes, as she sees assiduously to many a domestic task,
as well as undertaking to a large extent a rather open-air attitude to
education for her two children, involving drawing maps of countries in muddy
puddles and making family members stand in for the planets in a kind of human
orrery.[8]
Despite
her interruptions, it is Lessing’s extraordinary imaginative powers that win
out in the recollections of the minutiae of her convent days, her life on the
farm, and her burgeoning emotional and erotic life. She has a remarkable ability to draw the
reader into an anecdote as if they are living it in real time – perhaps the
best example being her meditation on chicken’s eggs, where the concentration of
her eye on the behaviour of a brooding hen leads us to imagine that a
relatively short passage of writing has been twenty-one days in the
making. We feel Lessing’s expectation as
she handles a warm egg and feels the body of the chick rotating inside it, manoeuvring
its beak to make the first chips from the inside of the shell. It is these moments of simplicity raised to
the level of magic that make Lessing’s writing so precious. If we can't have her without her opinions, we
surely need her for these semi-miraculous revelations – what she terms ‘the
precise timings of nature’.[9] Even with chickens however, we find Lessing’s
seeming fascination with the excremental, for in adjusting herself upon the
eggs the hen will ‘empty great gobs of hen dirt from her feathery backside’.[10] Thus we are invited into Lessing’s life and
experiences without the sanitation of propriety, with our minds opened to the
author’s unflinching and commendable sensuality. This truth-seeking quality of Lessing’s writing
is there at the very start, in that her desire to present the truth is
triggered by an attempt by older girls to censor a house magazine that she
edited at high school. It simply does
not occur to the young Lessing that there are subjects that could not be
written about, that could not be exposed to the laser of words: ‘the truth was
all, the truth had its rights, the truth must be told...but I took out the bits
they marked. My first experience of
censorship. Tyranny had won.'[11] This early defeat must have prepared Lessing
for a later armouring against those who determine that which can and cannot be
said. Lessing’s career of saying the
unsayable is seeded in a young girl barely into her teens.
The
young Doris Lessing is precocious in many ways.
She writes poetry and short stories, although later in life she will
destroy these when they are discovered, as objects shameful. In not too many pages, puberty and adulthood
are upon her, and she speaks frankly of early erotic experiences. She can't resist sharing with the reader some
unusual ideas consequent to her openness about sexuality – one distinctly
eyebrow-raising idea is that certain girls around the age of fourteen should
benefit from a liaison with a man at least ten years older than herself. Lessing’s early pregnancy and subsequent
marriage take much of the magic out of the book as she is fast tracked into
motherhood, rocking the pram back and forth while smoking endless
cigarettes. Everyone drinks too much in
the sports club where her husband meets all his cronies. There is boredom and frustration. The next war comes. Men like her husband, Frank, invalided out of
the army, would rather be up north getting shot by the Afrika Korps than
hanging around drinking endless gin and tonics after desultory days in civil
service offices. Interleaved with
stories of a maturity thrust upon her, are the inevitable asides about child
rearing, breastfeeding, contraception, and so forth. These make fascinating reading, since
although perfectly acceptable to 1990s readers, many of her descriptions and
opinions could hardly have been set in print in the late 1930s. With the adult world come
responsibilities. In a sense Lessing
gets a dose of her own medicine, understanding finally the difficulties her own
mother faced. Her carefree youth is now
filled with the business of motherhood and of running a house with a small
number of servants. The repetitious
lists of drinks mixed and meals prepared, no longer have the charm of her
mother's generous kitchen, but are merely there for the sake of form, as Lessing
seeks to write both an autobiography and a history of colonial life in Southern
Rhodesia.
But her
rich dream life does not abandon her. Particularly
interesting is the dream of an impossibly ancient lizard found at the bottom of
a deep pit, surely dead, but yet not so, as an eye blinks for the first time in
centuries: ‘but it wasn't dead, for its dust-glazed eye stared out at nothing,
then slowly swivelled up, like a chameleon’s, at me.'[12] This is interesting to me, since a number of
years ago in a weird story in my volume The
Night Plumbers, I conceived a landscape filled with an almost over-abundant
floral fecundity, inhabited by a giant eye that in closing and opening just
once, reduces this landscape to obscene desiccation and collapse. I am delighted to find not an entirely
dissimilar idea in Lessing's book. The
crux of her young life comes at the moment she decides she must leave her husband
and two young children. Her complex
feelings about this act, which she knows she must perform, is initially dressed
up in quotes from Hölderlin, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, delivered
to her delighted children in a kind of diversional game. Then she tries to use communism as a red
herring for her desire to leave her marriage, before finally revealing that in
reality it was an affair with an RAF sergeant.
Lessing’s insistence on truth allows her no get-out clause – neither
will she allow herself to succumb to guilt.
In fact she wriggles out of self-ensure by claiming that she was hardly
leaving her children to starve, and was sure that they will be better looked after
by the various women she and Frank had befriended. This sounds very much like the convenience of
hindsight. And would she really have
become a hopeless alcoholic had she stayed in the marriage, something she
claims as another reason for leaving? It
isn't the uniqueness of her situation that unsettles – hundreds of marriages
have surely ended for the same reasons – but it is her brazen honesty with
which she wrestles in her mind the necessity of leaving Frank, John and
Jean. Despite herself, she wants to persist
in her admiration of this young woman who she now wishes to exonerate from any perceived
wrong. She doesn't wish to suffer her insufferableness
as she confuses her husband by saying that surely he wouldn't want her around
as a Communist or as an irresponsible mother – this only a page after a lengthy
disquisition on the pleasures of the vaginal orgasm and her need for sexual fulfilment
as a thing in itself, beyond the marriage bed.[13]
We may now appear to be a long way from
the young girl who watched the brooding hen for twenty-one days, but in a sense
she is consistent in her revelling in the organic, the sensual, as opposed to
being persuaded by the social constructions of propriety and doing the ‘done
thing’. It is this personality of a
woman who will not be restricted, will never become hidebound, that gives
Lessing’s life its bones. After Frank,
sex and communism become her twin poles of attraction. She sticks with communism much longer than
she stuck with Catholicism when the convent girls had so impressed her with
their rosary beads. Her attachment to communism
she now feels was bound up with the idea of playing a part in the great political
turmoil of the time. But her early
awareness of its ‘vocabulary of contempt'[14]
made her a dissident almost from the start.
She was one of the many ‘puppets that mouthed the lines'.[15] I think Lessing is right to see politically
heated language as a form of virus, an ‘ugly lexicon'[16]
that invites the anointed to dehumanize their enemy, thus making their
slaughter more palatable. Patiently and
at some considerable length, Lessing lays out for the historian of Southern
Rhodesian politics, the structure of the Communist Party there – its
philosophy, its demarcation of enemies, the allocation of duties, the organising
of leaflet drops, etc. It must have had
a magic all its own to attract so many high-minded proselytisers of
Utopia. Lessing herself sees this, sees
herself as one who could indeed take a revolver and go out into the street in
order to kill – ‘the necessary murder’ of W. H. Auden’s poem, Spain. If this sends a chill down the reader's spine
it is a chill intended for the writer’s spine also. It is amid this atmosphere that she marries
the refugee Gottfried Lessing, a formerly wealthy inhabitant of Berlin although
born in St. Petersburg. Like many
converts to a cause he is more zealous than those born into their social or
political condition. He may have been
born pampered but he comes over in this memoir as steely and austere – he has
the language virus of communism on autopilot.
Somehow they fall in love, or rather not, since they agree that they can
always divorce after the war is over.
Although they produce a son, whom Gottfried adores, they are not well
matched physically, and eventually Doris wanders ‘onto the wilder shores of
love making'.[17] She plays out the loneliness of her two
failed marriages in melancholy quotes from popular songs. As one who wrote poetry herself, it is a
wonder Doris survived six years with this man who is able to dismiss the poetry
of W. B. Yeats with such cretinous philistinism. One only warms to Gottfried when he is
discovered with his head in his hands as the radio brings news of German cities
being bombed out of existence: ‘they deserve a good hiding, and they are
getting one I'm glad to say.'[18]
– yet he weeps in his sleep for these cities.
Eventually the ‘raw female'[19]
in Doris must have its outlet. Political
and sexual fantasies, realized or otherwise, take up much of the rest of the
book. We want to know as much as we can
about the people within communist circles that she paints so vividly, but as is
her habit we get long and not terribly interesting interruptions as her
memories are placed within the perspective of wider historical events. If she has originality in the poetic truths
of her memoirs, these comments are not much deeper than those voiced when putting
the world to right over a cup of coffee.
With judicious editing the essentials of her life as she lived it would
make an uneven book a great one.
The
connecting thread that runs through the entire book is not her politics or her
obsession with bodily parts, it is her deeply ambivalent relationship with her
parents. They come over as sympathetic
almost in spite of the harsh words she has for them, particularly for her
mother. Lessing’s perceptive ideas about
the long-range effects of the First World War stem from her father, the invalid
trying to make good on a colonial farm only to succumb to diabetes. Her mother, never achieving the social level
she felt was owed her, remains a bundle of contradictions – a tremendously
efficient farm worker, an overbearing mother, a woman whose true calling is
just out of reach. Try as she might to
mix with the right set, she is never invited to Government House. Amid her ambivalence towards them, Doris Lessing
paints a memorable portrait of her parents.
It is they that stand out in the book as examples of extraordinary
forbearance under tremendous money pressures, ill-health, and social
failure. Despite the censure of their
precocious daughter, they glow in the book somehow unscathed – enhanced rather
than humiliated by their many sufferings.
And Lessing is right, they are all to a lesser or greater extent victims
of the First World War. As her father
lies dying, he forever returns to the topic of the trenches. Upon seeing her father's death certificate, Lessing
wants to scratch out the cause of death – heart failure – and replace it with
the First World War.[20] She carries a deep anger on behalf of her
father for the rest of her life: ‘but any music from the First World War, or
scenes in a film, or those old photographs or shots from the trenches that we
see again... again – and up springs the anger as fresh as it ever was. But whose
anger is it?'[21]
As to
the combination of sex and politics, Lessing didn't really need feminism to
assert her individuality, neither is she an easy convert when it comes along in
the 1970s. If she mentions feminism at
all, she is hardly a conventional flag-waver, criticising what she sees as its
tendency to create battlegrounds between the sexes, particularly in relation to
adversarial divorces. Her own life could
easily be taken as a test case for feminism’s demands, yet she isn't to be
easily brought into the fold. Despite
two failed marriages and three children by the age of twenty-nine, she doesn't
view herself as a victim of patriarchal forces, rather she sees herself as an
individual working out her destiny. This
becomes clear by her decision to leave everything in Southern Rhodesia behind her
and to initiate a new trajectory for her gifts in England. Rather like with her communism, her feminism,
such as it is, allows her considerable room for dissent – as if she had a
tendency to join movements only to critique them. Looking beyond the pages of Under My Skin, beyond first wave
feminism and into its second wave, by that time Lessing had begun her long
retreat from politics into the nebulous zones of spirituality – some of her
later work approaches that of Kathleen Raine in its shunning of the material
world. Perhaps this was the only way she
could subsume her ego into something that might dissolve its conflictual
apparatus, a balm to her fractious contradictions.
I end
this short piece that hardly does justice to Lessing’s remarkable book by a
pair of anecdotes, one from her and one from me, that unite writer and reader. I was both an early and a late starter at the
piano. Every week during term-time my
mother took my brother, aged nine-and-a-half and myself, aged six, up to a flat
not far from Victoria Station for piano lessons. We took the blue-liveried slam-door Southern
Electric train that slid into platform 9, which being at one edge of the
‘Brighton Side’ had a magnificent Victorian brick wall as its boundary. We two small boys took lessons with Tessa
Nicholson, who was later to teach my friend the distinguished pianist, Mark
Viner. I suppose eventually the journey
became somewhat trying and my mother found a local teacher called Professor
Taylor, who lived in a large double-fronted property in Langley Road, Sutton,
now long-demolished. Heavy green velvet
drapes hung from the windows and the rooms smelt of cigar smoke. Professor Taylor was kindly and after too
many tears shed over the difference between B and D on the treble clef, he
suggested to my mother that I give up the piano for a while. Thus it was that I only took up the piano
again aged eleven, at which time I went to Martin Wilson, a Clifford Curzon
student. Thereby I became part of a
lineage stretching back through Liszt, Czerny and Beethoven, to Haydn himself,
my artistic father, as I like to call him. None of these past prodigies were of much help
to a meagre talent such as mine – in any case, why bother to practice the piano
when my brother was already playing the pieces I liked? Despite my halting progress and lack of
aptitude, word leaked out among my high school teachers that I played the
piano. So it was that my music teacher,
A. V. Mitchell prevailed upon me to take a slot in the rota of pianists
required to play hymns in morning assembly. I had a few days to prepare to hymns – one
would start the assembly, a second would round it off. I practiced well into the night and thought I
had mastered enough four-part homophony to see me through. Unfortunately when I sat at the piano that
Monday morning, my hands immediately started to shake and my mind went blank –
the serried ranks of crotchets wouldn't stay still, developing wobbly orbits as
they tumbled from the stave. After
making a solid start, soon the bass line dropped out. By the second verse there were considerable
lacunae in the alto and tenor parts. For
the last two verses I was reduced to pounding out the treble melody with a few
attempts at cadences, the last of which resulted in an unpleasant discord. Despite the known proclivity for spite to be
found among most schoolboys, when I turned to my fellow students there were
looks of alarm and pity on many of their faces – only a few adopted leers of
triumph and contempt. I pleaded with A. V.
Mitchell not to be subjected to this humiliation again. How extraordinary then to find that Doris Lessing
was put through a similar ordeal. It
sounds like she was a much more assiduous student than I was, practicing her
scales and exercises for up to two hours daily, nevertheless faced with the terror
of religious homophony due to a similar demand that she play hymns for
assembly, she fell apart: ‘yet when the time came I played the melody only. I simply could not make my hands make them
match. That I can't, I can't…as if my hands were stammering
like a tongue.'[22] To compound her humiliation, one of the skits
in the end of term concert consisted of someone imitating her playing hymns
with one hand. As Lessing relates, ‘I
was seared with mortification.' Such was
the trauma of this incident that Lessing gave up the piano forever. Contrary to this, somehow I kept going with
the piano, partly because I was rescued by jazz, whose improvisatory basis
spared me the struggle of reading music with my bad eyesight. One day I hope to have a dream where Doris
Lessing and myself are seated at the piano stool together, and between us we
manage to get through a hymn with treble, alto, tenor and bass all meshed in
glorious harmony. Thus the tremulous
phantoms of our fingers will be laid to rest.
But as we raise our eyes above the piano and look through the window of
the school hall, it isn’t the ‘red and rioting sunset' of her African
childhood'[23]
that we see, but the cold grey sky of a London suburb, hanging there like a
badly rinsed dishcloth.
It
wouldn't be quite right to end here with this whimsical vision. I must be had for a sentimentalist if I want
Doris Lessing’s autobiography to only capture the mysterious litanies of her
early years. Her intention is to be
taken as a whole – despite the beauty of her writing she doesn't sooth us with a
series of sepia photographs. Reading
closely, we see that her childhood was not lived out in silver-framed nostalgia
– again and again we come across the thrusting language of someone who won't be
pigeonholed, won't stay still, won't set down roots. It is this restlessness in Lessing that makes
her so compelling a writer, and despite passages that now sound peculiarly
dated, something she recognises herself, Under
My Skin takes us on her ever-swerving journey, and acts as an emotional
history of her unique time in Southern Rhodesia, a time that is now filled with
forgotten ghosts whistling through demolished verandas.
[1]
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin, 1994, p. 62.
[2]
Ibid. p. 50.
[3]
Ibid. p. 83.
[4]
Ibid. p. 85.
[5]
Ibid. p. 98.
[6]
Ibid. p. 259.
[7]
Ibid. p. 90.
[8]
Ibid. p. 68.
[9]
Ibid. p. 127
[10]
Ibid. p. 126.
[11]
Ibid. p. 149.
[12]
Ibid. p. 246.
[13]
Ibid. p.266-267.
[14]
Ibid. p. 275.
[15]
Ibid. p. 275.
[16]
Ibid. p. 275.
[17]
Ibid. p. 303.
[18]
Ibid. p. 317.
[19]
Ibid. p. 318.
[20]
Ibid. p. 372.
[21]
Ibid. p. 373.
[22]
Ibid. p. 151.
[23]
Ibid. p. 190.