The White Album (15 page)

The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves
.
The bitter fancies assumed their own logic
.
To ask the obvious—why she did not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why she did not get out of bed and turn off the television set, or why, the most eccentric detail, she stayed in hotels
where only doughnuts
could be obtained from room service—was to join this argument at its own spooky level, a level which had only the most tenuous and unfortunate relationship to the actual condition of being a woman
.
That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package
.

But of course something other than an objection to being “discriminated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role
.
Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children
.
One is constantly struck, in the accounts of lesbian relationships which appear from time to time in movement literature, by the emphasis on the superior “tenderness” of the relationship, the “gentleness” of the sexual connection, as if the participants were wounded birds
.
The derogation of assertiveness as “machismo” has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal at any level with an overtly heterosexual man
.
Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the “terror and revulsion” experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too “tender” for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too “sensitive” for the difficulties of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality
.
The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened, because a male-chauvinist psychiatrist told us so
.
No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should
.
The power of sex is just an oppressive myth, no longer to be feared, because what the sexual connection really amounts to, we learn in one woman’s account of a postmarital affair presented as liberated and liberating, is “wisecracking and laughing” and “lying together and then leaping up to play and sing the entire
Sesame Street Songbook
.
”
All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared invalid, unnecessary,
one never felt it at all
.

One was only told it, and now one is to be reprogrammed, fixed up, rendered again as inviolate and unstained as the “modern” little girls in the Tampax advertisements
.
More and more we have been hearing the wishful voices of just such perpetual adolescents, the voices of women scarred not by their class position as women but by the failure of their childhood expectations and misapprehensions
.
“Nobody ever so much as mentioned” to Susan Edmiston “that when you say *I do,’ what you are doing is not, as you thought, vowing your eternal love, but rather subscribing to a whole system of rights, obligations and responsibilities that may well be anathema to your most cherished beliefs
.
”
To Ellen Peck “the birth of children too often means the dissolution of romance, the loss of freedom, the abandonment of ideals to economics
.
”
A young woman described on the cover of
New York
as “The Suburban Housewife Who Bought the Promises of Women’s Lib and Came to the City to Live Them” tells us what promises she bought: “The chance to respond to the bright lights and civilization of the Big Apple, yes
.
The chance to compete, yes
.
But most of all, the chance to have some fan
.
Fun is what’s been missing
.
”

Eternal love, romance, fun
.
The Big Apple
.
These are relatively rare expectations in the arrangements of consenting adults, although not in those of children, and it wrenches the heart to read about these women in their brave new lives
.
An ex-wife and mother of three speaks of her plan to “play out my college girl’s dream
.
I am going to New York to become this famous writer
.
Or this working writer
.
Failing that, I will get a job in publishing
.
”
She mentions a friend, another young woman who “had never had any other life than as a daughter or wife or mother” but who is “just discovering herself to be a gifted potter
.
”
The childlike resourcefulness—to get a job in publishing, to become a gifted potter!—bewilders the imagination
.
The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real generative possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words
.
“It is the right of the oppressed to organize around their oppression
as they see and define it”
the movement theorists insist doggedly in an effort to solve the question of these women, to convince themselves that what is going on is still a political process, but the handwriting is already on the wall
.
These are converts who want not a revolution but “r
omance,” who believe not in the
oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life in exac
tly
the mold of their old life
.
In certain ways they tell us sadder things about what the culture has done to them than the theorists ever did, and they also tell us, I suspect, that the movement is no longer a cause but a symptom
.

1972

to read
A great deal of Doris Lessing over a short span of time is to feel that the original hound of heaven has commandeered the attic
.
She holds the mind
’s
other guests in ardent contempt
.
She appears for meals only to dismiss as decadent the household’s own preoccupations with writing well
.
For more than twenty years now she has been registering, in a torrent of fiction that increasingly seems conceived in a stubborn rage against the very idea of fiction, every tremor along her emotional fault system, every slippage in her self-education
.
Look here,
she is forever demanding, a missionary devoid of any but the most didactic irony:
The Communist Party is not the answer
.
There is a life beyond vaginal orgasm
.
St
.
John of the Cross was not as dotty as certain Anglicans would have had you believe
.
She comes hard to ideas, and, once she has collared one, worries it with Victorian doggedness
.

That she is a writer of considerable native power, a “natural” writer in the Dreiserian mold, someone who can close her eyes and “give” a situation by the sheer force of her emotional energy, seems almost a stain on her conscience
.
She views her real gift for fiction much as she views her own biology, as another trick to entrap her
.
She does not want to “write well
.
”
Her leaden disregard for even the simples
t rhythms of language, her arro
gan
tly
bad ear for dialogue—all of that is beside her own point
.
More and more, Mrs
.
Lessing writes exclusively in the service of immediate cosmic reform: she wants to write, as the writer Anna in
The Golden Notebook
wanted to write, only to “create a new way of looking at life
.
”

Consider
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
Here Mrs
.
Lessing gave us a novel exclusively of “ideas,” not a novel about the play of ideas in the lives of certain characters but a novel in which the characters exist only as markers in the presentation of an idea
.
The situation in the novel was this: a well-dressed but disheveled man is found wandering, an amnesiac, on the embankment near the Waterloo Bridge in London
.
He is take
n by the police to a
psychiatric hospital where, in the face of total indifference on his part, attempts are made to identify him
.
He is Charles Watkins, a professor of classics at Cambridge
.
An authority in his field, an occasional lecturer on more general topics
.
Lately a stammerer
.
Lately prone to bad evenings during which he condemns not only his own but all academic disciplines as “pigswill
.
”
A fifty-year-old man who finally cracked, and in cracking personified Mrs
.
Lessing’s conviction that “the millions who have cracked” were “making cracks where the light could shine through at last
.
”
For of course the “nonsense” that Charles Watkins talks in the hospital makes, to the reader although not to the doctors, unmistakable “sense
.
”

So pronounced was Charles Watkins’ acumen about the inner reality of those around him that much of the time
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
read like a selective case study from an R
.
D
.
Laing book
.
The reality Charles Watkins describes is familiar to anyone who has ever had a high fever, or been exhausted to the point of breaking, or is just on the whole only marginally engaged in the dailiness of life
.
He experiences the loss of ego, the apprehension of the cellular nature of all matter, the “oneness” of things that seems always to lie just past the edge of controlled conscious thought
.
He hallucinates, or “remembers,” the nature of the universe
.
He “remembers”—or is on the verge of remembering, before electroshock obliterates the memory and returns him to “sanity”—something very like a “briefing” for life on earth
.

The details of this briefing were filled in by Mrs
.
Lessing, only too relieved to abandon the strain of creating character and slip into her own rather more exhortative voice
.
Imagine an interplanetary conference, convened on Venus to discuss once again the problem of the self-destructive planet Earth
.
(The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers
.
) The procedure is this: certain superior beings descend to Earth brainprinted with the task of arousing the planet to its folly
.
These emissaries have, once on Earth, no memory of their more enlightened life
.
They wake slowly to their mission
.
They recognize one another only vaguely, and do not remember why
.
We are to understand, of course, that Charles Watkins is among those who have made the Descent, whether literal or metaph
orical, and is now, for just so
long as he can resist therapy, awake
.
This is the initial revelation in the book, and it is also the only one
.

Even given Mrs
.
Lessing’s tendency to confront all ideas
tabula rasa,
we are dealing here with less than astonishing stuff
.
The idea that there is sanity in insanity, that truth Ues on the far side of madness, informs not only a considerable spread of Western literature but also, so commonly is it now held, an entire generation’s experiment with hallucinogens
.
Most of Mrs
.
Lessing’s thoughts about the cultural definition of insanity reflect or run parallel to those of Laing, and yet the idea was already so prevalent that Laing cannot even be said to have popularized it: his innovation was only to have taken it out of the realm of instinctive knowledge and into the limited context of psychiatric therapy
.
Although Mrs
.
Lessing apparen
tly
thought the content
of Briefing for a Descent into Hell
so startling that she was impelled to add an explanatory afterword, a two-page parable about the ignorance of certain psychiatrists at large London teaching hospitals, she had herself dealt before with this very material
.
In
The Golden Notebook
Anna makes this note for a story: “A man whose ‘sense of reality’ has gone; and because of it, has a deeper sense of reality than ‘normal’ people
.
”
By the time Mrs
.
Lessing finished
The Four-Gated City
she had refined the proposition: Lynda Coldridge’s deeper sense of reality is not the result but the definition of her madness
.
So laboriously is this notion developed in the closing three hundred pages of
The Four-Gated City
that one would have thought that Mrs
.
Lessing had more or less exhausted its literary possibilities
.

But she was less and less interested in literary possibilities, which is where we strike the faultline
.
“If I saw it in terms of an artistic problem, then it’d be easy, wouldn’t it,” Anna tells her friend Molly, in
The Golden Notebook,
as explanation of her disinclination to write another book
.
“We could have ever such intelligent chats about the modern novel
.
”
This may seem a little on the easy side, even to the reader who is willing to overlook Anna’s later assertion that she cannot write because “a Chinese peasant” is looking over her shoulder
.
(“Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters
.
Or an Algerian fighting in the F
.
L
.
N
.
”
)
Madame Bovary
told us more about bourgeois life than several generations of Marxists have, but there does not seem much doubt that Flaubert saw it as an artistic problem
.