NF (1957) Going Home (31 page)
But—the fare. I had it, or almost. When I came back I wrote a lot of articles and posted them off to Moscow. Now comes the really unforgivable naïveté. It never occurred to me, since the conditions I was describing were so black a case against ‘imperialism’ they could not be worse, that there was any need at all for them to gild their lily. But then I got a letter from a friend in Moscow saying why had I written this and that? But I hadn’t written this and that. It appeared that the articles had been edited, cut and bits put in. This is why it is not advisable to write for the Russian press until it modernizes itself: until the rights of an individual journalist, an individual point of view, can be guaranteed.
The individual—democracy, liberty—I am concerned now with these more than with anything. One has to choose one’s battleground, limited for every one of us. The individual is threatened, now more than ever, by the increasing poverty of the world which spends money on armaments rather than development; by the mass hunger that is approaching so fast; by the wars being fought—and every time a war is fought anywhere the individuals concerned cease to matter until it is over.
The price of liberty is, more than ever, eternal vigilance, which is why I think the most valuable citizens any country can possess are the troublemakers, the public nuisances, the fighters of small, apparently unimportant battles. No government, no political party anywhere cares a damn about the individual. That is not their business. So I believe in the ginger-groups, the temporarily associated minorities, the Don Quixotes, the takers-of-stands-on-principle, the do-gooders and the defenders of lost causes. Luckily, there are plenty of them. So—to the barricades, citizens! If we don’t fight every inch of the way, we’ll find ourselves with our numbers tattooed on our wrists yet.
L
ONDON
,
May
, 1967
A new reprint, and I have just finished checking for errors that may have crept in. I have been forced to read, then, the record of my changes of mind about communism. Embarrassing. I would prefer not to have them exposed, because like others of my kind, the former reds, I wonder how it was possible that I held such views. I tend to minimize both what I believed then, and for how long I believed it. The fact that there were so many of us does not make things any better. I said as late as 1967 that I believed the communist countries were getting more democratic.
I did?
I did. How could I have conceivably believed such nonsense? How does it come about that people who are quite insightful and sensible about some aspects of politics are so silly about others? For it remains true that on the whole socialists and communists were more far-sighted about the nature of white rule than other people, no matter how wrong they were about communism. This is a paradox that continues to fascinate me. I am now particularly interested—because I know how easy it is to delude oneself when it is a question of some faith, religion, doctrine—in the research that goes on everywhere into the character and structure of mass movements, indoctrination, beliefs.
Looking back, I say to myself that ideally I would like to have been a communist for let’s say two years, because of what I learned about the nature of power, power-lovers, fanatics, the dynamics of groups and how they form and split, about one’s own capacity for self-delusion. Of course this is impossible. I am wondering if there is some psychological law that dictates the length of time it takes to recover from the effects of a submission away from commonsense, to a faith, whether political or religious. There must be stages of this, like an
illness; a slow recovery from absolutism, through degrees of agnosticism. It is unfortunately true that one may be cured of a faith in communism; but scars remain, and it takes time to recognize them. The apocalyptic mode of thinking for one; the patterns of hell, purgatory, paradise, heaven; redemption and sacrifice, which originated in religion to become the structure of socialism.
I see that I described a successful revolt against white rule in Southern Rhodesia as a possibility. There has been a successful revolution, and there is a black government; so one has to examine the apparent impossibility of a revolution in South Africa with different eyes.
In the last paragraph of the 1967 afterword, I stated my preference for small ginger-groups, pressure groups, people temporarily associated for definite and limited ends. Yes, I haven’t changed my mind about that.
L
ONDON
,
March
, 1982
When I was writing this book and the postscripts that I added almost in desperation to try and keep up with events, I don’t think anyone believed there would be a black government in Zimbabwe so soon—in 1980. This was partly because the national movements developed later in Southern Rhodesia than in Northern Rhodesia and Malawi, and partly because of South Africa. When I became ‘politically conscious’—as the phrase then was—Africa stood four-square and dominant to the south, a bastion of everything bad and brutal. This was before the Nationalists came to power in 1949: they did not invent the repressive structure of the South African state, but built on foundations laid down by Smuts and others. From the time I became aware of anything, it was South Africa that had to be understood first of all. And the people (not many in those days) who studied the facts and not the rhetorics of South Africa repeated: ‘It is such a cruel and ugly state that it has to collapse. It cannot possibly go on.’ Well, it did go on—and on—and on, until a great many people were hypnotised by its success. It was believed that a tyranny bolstered by an efficient secret police and modern armies had to be invulnerable. Besides there were other exemplars: Spain, that also went on and on, and Portugal, and of course the Soviet Union, and the Colonels in Greece. Tyranny seemed to succeed. This was why it was hard to believe that the white regime in Southern Rhodesia must fall, and so soon. I remember as late as the mid-seventies being asked, Did I think the white government would be overthrown, and replying, No, look at South Africa, where apartheid ruled. I was wrong.
This book ends roughly at the time when I discovered I was a Prohibited Immigrant. This condition did not end until the
coming of Robert Mugabe’s government in 1980. I returned to Zimbabwe in 1982, when it was still war-shocked, and then again, and again—and finally this year, 1992, four visits in all.
The story of these visits is told in
African Laughter, Four Visits to Zimbabwe
. It is a tale not without its ironies.
L
ONDON
,
October
, 1992
Acknowledgements and thanks to the Editor of the
African Weekly
, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, for permission to quote letters and features from his newspaper.
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on
October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris’s mother adapted to the rough life of the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a “civilized” Edwardian life among “savages,” but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. 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 terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, from which she soon
dropped out. She was thirteen, and it was the end of her formal education.
But like other women writers from southern Africa who did not graduate from high school, such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. “Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn’t apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn’t thinking in terms of being a writer then—I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time.” The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing’s early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, and Kipling; later she discovered D. H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth; her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris’s formative years were also spent absorbing her father’s bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of “poison.” “We are all of us made by war,” Lessing has written, “twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.”
In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, “in a fever of erotic longing.” Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.
Lessing’s life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. “There is a whole generation of women,” she has said, speaking of her mother’s era, “and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic—because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually hap
pened to them.” Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of “setting at a distance,” taking the “raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.”
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists “who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read.” Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel,
The Grass Is Singing
, and began her career as a professional writer.
Lessing’s fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual’s own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing’s courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
In 1952, Lessing published
Martha Quest
, the first of five novels that would form her Children of Violence sequence. The other titles, published over the next seventeen years, are
A Proper Marriage
(1954),
A Ripple from the Storm
(1958),
Landlocked
(1965), and
The
Four-Gated City
(1969). The first four books are set in an African colony called Zambesia (a composite, Lessing says, of “various white-dominated parts of Africa”) and the last in London. While many of Martha’s experiences parallel those in Lessing’s own life—including her two early marriages and her departure from Rhodesia—Lessing has emphasized that the series is a “study in the individual conscience in its relations with the collective” and any one-to-one comparisons made between her and Martha miss the writer’s larger intentions.
Taken as a whole, the novels make up a formal
bildungsroman
(novel of education), more than 1800 pages long, about the developing consciousness of the heroine, Martha Quest. Coming of age in the first novel, Martha bridles at the stifling institutions and conventions of the white society in colonial Africa, most particularly the unjust treatment of the native population. She leaves her childhood farm and a conventional marriage for life in the city—a life of political rebellion and sexual discovery. Finally, in the wake of World War II, Martha leaves Africa for London. While Lessing completed the series with
The Four-Gated City
, critics often have remarked on how different this fifth and final volume is from the other four. Moving beyond straightforward realism in the portrayal of Martha’s life, Lessing offers a powerful apocalyptic vision of the post-nuclear world, circa 2000
A.D.
that presages the experimental fiction she would write in later years, including her 1999 book
Mara and Dann: An Adventure
.
Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century—their “climate of ethical judgement”—to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. The first three Children of Violence books helped establish her as a major radical writer, but Lessing broke new ground with
The Golden Notebook
(1962). This novel was a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.
Attacked for being “unfeminine” in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.” As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf “tries to live with the freedom of a man,” a point Lessing seems to confirm: “These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of
The Golden Notebook
. Her “inner-space fiction” deals with cosmic fantasies (
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (
Memoirs of a Survivor
, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (
Canopus in Argos: Archives
, 1979–1983). These reflect Lessing’s interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.
Lessing’s other novels include
The Good Terrorist
(1985) and
The Fifth Child
(1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
, 1983, and
If the Old Could…
, 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. In the last decade of the twentieth century, Lessing has published a variety of books including
The Real Thing
(stories, 1992),
African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe
(reportage, 1992),
Love, Again
(novel, 1996), and two superb volumes of autobiography,
Under My Skin
(1994) and
Walking in the Shade
(1997). Her most recent book is the novel
Ben, In the World
, a sequel to
The Fifth Child
, which was published in 2000.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
