Cake or Death (17 page)

My favourite of her novels is
The Summer Before the Dark
, as I find books about chosen solitude very interesting. There is also a passage where the woman protagonist, Kate, stands on a balcony in Spain. Lessing’s description of the quality of the darkness makes me shiver. Shakespeare would envy it, and yet Lessing is a writer said not to be a prose stylist, whatever that is.

Then there is the wonderful
The Good Terrorist
, which everyone should read for a level view of oneself when young. I think this last one got her in trouble with the Nobel people. Criticize the young revolutionary at your peril.

But it would never have occurred to Lessing to soften the truth or her own reaction to it.

In Lessing’s three-volume autobiography—the third of which was written as a novel in order to spare the feelings of the living, an un-Lessing-like sentiment—she is frequently astonished. And she admits it.

Nothing is more unfashionable than this. I find it astonishing that it is unfashionable to be astonished, but Lessing and I are as one on this, even if we are astonished by different things.

Writing about Lessing offers a wonderful clarity, like a broad sunlit upland where everything is as it seems.

She always aims for honesty and very much resembles Woolf, whom she admires, in her effort to pin the feeling or the reason to the page with her pen. Never pretend that something isn’t worth having simply because you can’t have it, Woolf wrote. That’s a Lessing sentiment.

Now eighty-seven, she can shrug a little. But she is still astonished at the cruelty and self-deception of people. And she is still outraged.

Outrage is not allowed.

I am frequently outraged. The outrage is followed by shock when people “tsk tsk” me as though a woman should not be angry about social injustice or some political grotesquerie, some spectacular hypocrisy of the moment. I hate being told to tamp down my voice. This has happened to me a great deal in Canada, where most people are polite and obedient and oblivious and like others to be that way too. So I have often not spoken when I am outraged. This makes me ashamed of whatever editor has shut me up, and it has made me dislike being female.

Lessing wrote a short book in 1987 about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the Mujahedin resistance and the resulting flight of four million Afghans to refugee camps on the Pakistani border. The book’s title was
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
and every word is written with despair that it will do any good. Lessing begins with a short essay on the lessons of history and how we fail to learn them. And then she tells us about the Afghan people whom she loves and who don’t deserve their fate, as if anyone did deserve such horrors.

She writes of her frustration with the ill-informed, shallow, often hopelessly stupid questions of the journalists who interview her. But this has long been a source of complaint for Lessing, that journalists frequently write things that are wildly untrue, not just about her but about everything. Yet they easily could have been fact-checked. Even biographers do this—how could the woman who wrote Lessing’s biography without permission have got her daughter’s name wrong?—and it is a constant complaint.

That’s why Lessing wrote her autobiography, feeling that everyone else could have a go after her death. It is rather exhausting to contemplate Lessing’s huge output of novels, short stories, political writing and then expect her to write memoir because someone else would do it so badly, but that is what she did.

In the second volume of her memoirs, which covers her arrival in London from South Africa and the drab fifties, a decade in British life that has been largely ignored, she despairs of reviewers who said she hadn’t openly wailed over her decision to leave two children behind with their father and take her son Peter (son of Gottfried Lessing) with her to London. Lessing is astounded. She didn’t write about it because to her it is obvious that a woman would suffer over abandoning her children, so much so that she didn’t want to waste time on what the reader could take for granted and readily imagine.

This kind of thing doesn’t win you points with women-haters, and the press is packed with those. It sometimes does surprise me that Lessing is astonished.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that children need to be with their mothers. In my experience, they would be better off with other children and supervisory adults; what if the mother does not wish to spend every day and every night with her children? Children and parents can bore each other; what if another adult might do a better job?

But I know this is heresy, and Lessing should know that it is heresy, even if it is true. My mother was temperamentally more suited to older children; we lived in isolated towns. My sister once casually said to me that they should have stopped with her and not continued with me, the youngest. I could only agree. Young mothers are handed impossible burdens. Why romanticize them? But that’s another heresy.

Lessing has fought the received wisdom all her life. For instance, she came to be interested in science fiction and eventually wrote a wonderful group of science fiction novels. But to this day, they are largely ignored because the received wisdom is that science fiction is an unworthy genre. But bad writing exists in every genre; why the snobbery this time?

She wrote an extraordinary novel about a fashionable woman taking an old woman under her care. It was
The Diaries of Jane Somers
. I shall not forget the scene where the woman screws up her courage and removes the old woman’s weird, multi-layered collection of ancient garments and bathes the accumulated dirt off her body, with warm water and care. It was a heresy itself to write a novel about the old. The received wisdom is that old people are not interesting. But her other heresy was to test the
quality of publishing in the early eighties and submit the manuscript to publishers under an assumed name.

She faced rejection after rejection, only a few clever editors noticing that her style had a Doris Lessing air to it. Finally, she declared herself. This heretical test (how dare she play tricks on an industry that has been kind to her?) wasn’t aimed at mental laziness or the traditionally sorry state of publishing. Lessing believes what every publisher knows, that there are some books that do not sell many copies, yet their influence is immeasurable. Somehow they set the tone for how people in a country or a culture are thinking about the world. They do this in some magical subterranean way. Yet they matter. Publishers have to fight for such writers and such books.

Someone had to make the point that some books should be published even if they aren’t going to make any money. Naturally, only Lessing has the gall.

I suppose here I should provide examples, since Lessing has not. I’m not schooled in this, I think frantically. But I do think that critics rarely refer to the poetry of Margaret Atwood. Yet she is arguably an even greater poet than she is a novelist. Her poems are of a certain style. They resemble those of the great Anne Sexton, for instance. They are very female. They are extremely precise in their language; you could almost call them strict.

But I think they set the definition of what a new kind of poetry by women could be: not obscure, although obscurity is fine; carefully defined, although a wildly flailing poem can be wonderful too; and with an attention to detail that is feminine and often ends in shock.

Lessing is very good about the courage of the young. She began a 1992 short story collection,
The Real Thing
, with the mundanely titled “Debbie and Julie.” The runaway Julie gives birth in a dank hut in a back alley in London, following the instructions given to her by a prostitute friend Debbie who took her in. She is kept company in the shed by a tethered starving dog, who scarfs down the afterbirth, Julie’s reward to him for his not having bitten her. She then leaves the towelled infant in a phone booth where it is rescued, and returns to her parents’ home. Her secret is safe.

Who gives a moment’s thought to the Julies of this world? Londoners go about their business, metres away from scenes like this. Urban life has changed little over the centuries.

Lessing can be counted on to be surprising, whatever she reaches for. I have yet to meet a reader who doesn’t speak of
The Fifth Child
with awe. A woman and her husband have a perfect family of four. She is pregnant with her fifth. She knows even then that something is very wrong. And she gives birth to Ben, who is strange and unknowable, feral and frightening. Her life is ruined. Her family is fractured. You see this happen in everyday life, but no one writes about that last, single mistake, the child who should not have been, who will not be coped with, who cannot cope with himself.

At the moment, Lessing is unfashionable. She may return to fashion in the way Barbara Pym did in the seventies, named in a list of Britain’s most underrated writers. Pym had been brutally discarded in the sixties, but
her tragicomic post-war novels of sensible, prudent women have been revived.

I suppose Lessing will become fashionable again when readers realize that
Mara and Dann
, written in 1999, is an accurate prediction of the future as our climate changes according to what poisons we have inflicted on the planet. Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale
and
Oryx & Crake
predict a political future; Lessing’s novel is all about water and heat.

Though I don’t know that Lessing wants to be fashionable again. She will be profiled, interviewed, poked and prodded at, and it won’t add to the sum of human knowledge. Just read the books. That is all she ever asked, aside from expecting people to be rational, and they won’t be, and that’s all she wrote.

Someone very clever—I no longer recall who—has this theory that there is no such thing as fixed memory. She says that time changes our memory of events considerably. We must accept this and agree that our memories are the sum of the actual event plus the spin we added as the years passed. She says memory is a collection of versions, and since what we recall now, in light of our experiences, is arguably as respectable as our interpretation at the time, why not accept memory as a plastic, not a rigid, thing?

Normally I wouldn’t accept this. It happened, it hurt, I built a brick wall around it and I never considered it again. This is the sensible and less painful way to cope with the memory of a bad event.

The problem arises, though, when we study eyewitness testimony in murder trials. As we gain more scientific tools to prove guilt or innocence, eyewitness testimony has become about as respected in a courtroom as phrenology, which was a twentieth-century fad for discovering truths by analyzing the bumps on people’s heads.

It turns out that the testimony of even well-meaning white eyewitnesses cannot be relied upon when it comes to identifying an accused person who is black. Whites can’t recognize the subtle differences of the black human face. Crudely put, blacks look pretty much alike to them. The same goes for all cross-race identification.

But I’m as convinced as any white granny pointing her shaking finger at the young black man facing her in the courtroom. It was him! Naturally, she is pointing at the Crown attorney.

I can’t remember people’s names. I can’t even remember their faces. Their character and sense of humour are things I recall in a general way. And I can’t quote poetry correctly. I could swear that the poet who said we had no time to stand and stare and who was standing on London Bridge saying “Dull would he be of soul” was W.H. Davies. Why would I get that wrong? There’s no time crossover between W.H. Davies and Wordsworth.

In a speech I mentioned that the playwright Dennis Potter wrote a play with the wonderful title of
Blue
Remembered Hills
, but an audience member later corrected me. Potter didn’t come up with the title. It was Housman. Furthermore, it wasn’t about his childhood in the Forest of Arden; it was of course the Forest of Dean, and anyway it was all about an awful childhood sexual memory that doesn’t match the beauty of blue remembered hills at all.