Other literary forms
Doris Lessing’s (DAW-ruhs LEHS-ihng) many books include poetry, memoirs, reportage, plays, essays, and reviews. She is best known, however, for her novels, particularly The Golden Notebook (1962) and the five-volume Children of Violence series, which includes Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965, 1991), and The Four-Gated City (1969). She explored the genre she terms “space fiction” in the volumes Shikasta (1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments (1980), The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight (1982), and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), as well as “inner space fiction” in novels such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). In the mid-1980’s, she returned to more realistic fiction, publishing, among others, two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers. In the 1990’s Lessing published the novels Playing the Game (1995), Love, Again (1996), and Mara and Dann (1999), as well as the dramatic Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays (pb. 1996) and the autobiographical Walking in the Shade (1997).
Achievements
Doris Lessing was a finalist for the Booker McConnell Prize for Briefing for a Descent into Hell , The Sirian Experiments , and The Good Terrorist (1985). She was nominated for the Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award in 1982 for The Sirian Experiments . The Good Terrorist earned her the W. H. Smith and Son Literary Award, the Palermo Prize, and the Premio Internazionale Mondello. In 1995, the nonfiction Under My Skin (1994) earned the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Walking in the Shade received a nomination for the 1997 National Book Critics Award in the biography/autobiography category. In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the highest literary honor.
Biography
Born to British parents in Persia, where her father, Alfred Cook Tayler, worked in a bank, Doris May Lessing moved to southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925, when she was five. There she lived on a remote farm, south of Zambezi. “Our neighbors were four, five, seven miles off. In front of the house . . . no neighbors, nothing; no farms, just wild bush with two rivers but no fences to the mountains seven miles away.” In her teens, she moved to a “very small town that had about ten thousand white persons in it. The black population did not count, though it was fairly large.” This was the Africa of apartheid; Lessing would later chronicle its horrors.
While still in her teens, Lessing married and had two children. She later married again and, in 1949, left her second husband to go to England, bringing her son with her. The emptiness of the African veld and the life of small African towns are the themes of much of her earlier work, including the early volumes of the Children of Violence series. The scene then shifts in her fiction, as it did in her life, to England, and particularly London.
Lessing was a member of communist groups in both Africa and England. In Africa, she describes the group as “having no contact with any kind of reality. . . . I found this when I came to England and had a short association with the British Communist Party.” Lessing’s disillusionment with the difference between the official Communist Party and the “beautiful purity” of the ideas that lie behind communism is an extremely important theme in her fiction. For many of her characters, disillusionment with the possibility of a political solution to the inequities and horror of modern life leads them to madness, suicide, or acquiescence. Later, beginning with The Four-Gated City , it leads them to visionary solutions. Once her characters give up politics as a solution, they come to accept the mystic resolutions of the Eastern traditions, especially those of Sufism, an ancient form of Islamic human-centered mysticism. In Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), a series of lectures she gave for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she reaffirms her view that the survival of the human race depends on its recognizing its connection to all nature rather than stressing a sense of separation.
In 1995, Lessing returned to South Africa to visit her daughter and grandchildren. It was her first trip to the country since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. The same year she also received an honorary degree from Harvard University and collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to publish the novel Playing the Game . In 1996, she published Love, Again , her first novel in seven years. In 1997, Walking in the Shade , the second volume of her autobiography, was issued.
Analysis
Doris Lessing engaged in a lifelong process of self-education, becoming involved with all the important intellectual and political movements of the twentieth century: Freudian and Jungian psychology, Marxism, feminism, existentialism, mysticism, sociobiology, and speculative scientific theory. All these interests appear in her fiction, which consequently serves as a record of the changing climate of the times. She has also displayed in her writing an increasing anxiety about humanity’s ability to survive.
In Lessing’s short fiction, the reader meets characters remarkable for their intelligence, their unceasing analysis of their emotions, and their essential blindness to their true motivations. The people who move through her stories, while vividly placid in the details of their lives, are in essence types. As Lessing says in her preface to The Golden Notebook , they are “so general and representative of the time that they are anonymous, you could put names to them like those in the old Morality Plays.” Those whom the reader meets most frequently in the short fiction are Mr. I-am-free-because-I-belong-nowhere, Miss I-must-have-love-and-happiness, Mrs. I-have-to-be-good-at-everything-I-do, Mr. Where-is-a-real-woman, and Ms. Where-is-a-real-man; and there is one final type Lessing names, Mrs. If-we-deal-very-well-with-this-small-problem-then-perhaps-we-can-forget-we-daren’t-look-at-the-big-ones. This last type is the character so often met at the beginning of Lessing’s stories, the character who has become uneasily aware of a discrepancy between intention and action, between the word and the deed, but who would prefer not to take the analysis too far. Lessing is inexorable, however, and in story after story characters are driven to new, usually unpleasant knowledge about themselves and their motivations. Typically, the stories end with the situation unresolved. The reader sees the awakening but not the translation of new knowledge into action. For Lessing, the jump from dealing well with small problems to looking at the big ones is the jump from History to Vision, which lies beyond the scope of short fiction.
The great obstacle facing Lessing’s characters in their movement toward self-knowledge and toward vision is emotion—particularly romantic love. Lessing sees romantic love as essentially egocentric; people love what they wish to see in the beloved, not what is really there. They love so that they will feel loved in return. They love, in the terms of the title story of one of her collections, from “the habit of loving.” This, Lessing insists, is nothing but masochistic self-indulgence. Love robs people of their ability to reason clearly, diverts their energy into useless and potentially harmful channels, causes them to agonize over choices which make, in the end, little real difference.
Worse, in terms of her visionary philosophy, romantic love, by keeping people focused on the particular, prohibits their making the necessary connections between the individual and the collective consciousness. In story after story, readers watch people live out the same patterns, search for love at all costs, focus on the small problems, the matter at hand: Does he love me? Readers watch them try to believe that this is fundamentally what matters, that there is meaning in the small patterns of their lives. Lessing would deny that this is so. There is meaning, she seems to say, but it lies beyond these insignificant details. One must break through them, destroy them, in order to find it.
Some of her characters, although by no means all, do so. Anna Wulf, the writer-heroine of The Golden Notebook , succeeds in first dismantling the old patterns and then in synthesizing new ones, as does the anonymous narrator of “How I Finally Lost My Heart.”
“How I Finally Lost My Heart”
An uncharacteristic story in its resemblance to fable, “How I Finally Lost My Heart” is fascinating in its diagrammatic exposition of Lessing’s views on romantic love. The story opens as the unnamed “I,” a woman, awaits the arrival of her escort for the evening, a man designated only as C. The narrator explains that C is the third “serious” love of her life, the first two being A and B. Earlier in the day, the speaker had lunch with A and tea with B and is pleased that she was able to enjoy their company with equanimity; she is, finally, “out of love” with them. Recognizing her sensation at this discovery as one of relief, the speaker begins to question her exhilaration at the thought of spending the evening with C, “because there was no doubt that both A and B had caused me unbelievable pain. Why, therefore, was I looking forward to C? I should rather be running away as fast as I could.”
Her questioning leads her to a new recognition of what lies behind the human desire to be “in love.” It is not, she concludes, that “one needs a person who, like a saucer of water, allows one to float off on him/her, like a transfer.” It is not, then, that one needs to “lose one’s heart” by blending with another. Rather, “one carries with one a sort of burning spear stuck in one’s side, that one waits for someone else to pull out; it is something painful, like a sore or a wound, that one cannot wait to share with someone else.” One needs to “lose one’s heart” literally, to get rid of it by giving it to someone else. The catch is that one is expected to take the other’s heart in return. Lessing envisages a grotesque sort of barter, two people demanding of each other to “take my wound.”
Moving to the telephone to call C and suggest that they agree to keep their hearts to themselves, the speaker is forced to hang up the phone:
For I felt the fingers of my left hand push outwards around something rather large, light and slippery—hard to describe this sensation, really. My hand is not large, and my heart was in a state of inflation after having had lunch with A, tea with B, and then looking forward to C. . . . Anyway, my fingers were stretching out rather desperately to encompass an unknown, largish, lightish object, and I said: Excuse me a minute, to C, looked down, and there was my heart, in my hand.
There her heart stays, attached to her hand, for four days, growing to the flesh of her palm. She cannot remove it by any “act of will or intention of desire,” but when, distracted by events outside her window, she temporarily forgets herself, she feels it begin to loosen. One can “lose one’s heart” only by forgetting about it, but it is still attached, and who is one to give it to?
She has previously covered the heart with aluminum foil, in part because it is messy and in part because, unaccustomed to the air, “it smarts.” Now wrapping a scarf around her hand, heart and all, she walks about London, finally taking the underground. In the train, she sits across from a woman maddened by love, who ceaselessly, jerkily, accuses her lover or husband of giving his mistress a gold cigarette case. The woman is on the verge of total breakdown, of lapsing into total immobility, and, watching her, the narrator forgets herself. She feels the heart loosen from her hand, plucks it off, and gives it to the madwoman:
For a moment she did not react, then with a groan or a mutter of relieved and entirely theatrical grief, she leaned forward, picked up the glittering heart, and clutched it in her arms.
The woman has “taken heart”; she now has the energy of the heart and the “theatrical” grief it brings. She can once again play love as a game, insisting that her husband or lover “take her wound.” The narrator, finally, is free. “No heart. No heart at all. What bliss. What freedom.”
“How I Finally Lost My Heart,” although uncharacteristic in its style, can serve as a paradigm for most of Lessing’s stories on the relations between men and women. It is valuable because it points out so clearly her vision that the important choice is not among A and B and C, but it is rather the choice of freedom or bondage. If people choose freedom and break out of the patterns of romantic love, they are then able to see clearly and can move on to new ways of loving. This will necessitate new forms of the family, which Lessing sees, in its traditional structure, as the institutionalized destruction of its individual members. If, however, they remain convinced that the important choice is that of who to love, not how to love, they remain in delusion.
“A Man and Two Women”
This same lesson is exemplified in the more traditional story “A Man and Two Women,” one of Lessing’s many explorations of the strains and restrictions of marriage. The plot is simple: Two couples, good friends, arrange to spend some time together in a country cottage. The couple who owns the cottage, Dorothy and Jack, have recently had a baby. Of the visiting couple, Stella and Paul, only Stella is able to come. The story is impressing in its precise delineation of the relationships among the members of the quartet and in its explorations of Dorothy’s languor and withdrawal after childbirth. The real excitement, however, lies in Stella’s slow examination of her own marriage in light of the situation she finds between Jack and Dorothy. Both marriages are perceived by the couples to be extraordinary in their strength and exuberance, yet both are strained. The connection between Jack and Dorothy is threatened by Dorothy’s attachment to her new son. In addition, Stella realizes that her connection with Paul has been more strained by their occasional infidelities than she had realized.
In the final scene, Jack begins to make love to Stella, something Dorothy has goaded him into, declaring that she does not care what he does; he has become insignificant to her. At first, Stella responds:
She thought: What is going to happen now will blow Dorothy and Jack and that baby sky-high; it’s the end of my marriage. I’m going to blow everything to bits. There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it.
Remembering the baby, however, Stella pulls back and waits for Jack to drive her to the station, making the final comment, “It really was a lovely night”—a mundane comment for a return to the usual.
Using the paradigm of “How I Finally Lost My Heart,” readers see that the story ends with Stella’s struggle over choosing A or B, Jack or Paul, and with her desire to abandon herself to love. “There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it.” She agonizes only over whom she will ask to “take my wound.” Although she perceives that both her marriage and Jack’s marriage are failures, she leaves with her heart in her hand, carrying it back to Paul. She sees more clearly than she did at the opening of the story, but she is not yet able to act on her perceptions. She has not yet lost her heart.
“A Man and Two Women” ends, then, in ambiguity but not in pessimism. Stella may not yet be able to act on her perceptions, but she is admirable in her willingness to reexamine her life. Readers should consider emulating her. They are left not with a blueprint for action but with feelings and emotions that must be examined. It is typical of Lessing’s short fiction that they, like Stella, are awakened to reality and then are left to take their own directions.
“The New Café”
In her collection The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches , Lessing offers glimpses of life in her hometown of London in the 1980’s, played out in a series of everyday human experiences. As usual, Lessing’s stories on a surface level are simple enough, common to even the most detached observer of urban life. However, her aim is much deeper, as demonstrated in “The New Café,” the story of a woman entranced by the conduct of a fellow customer who appears at once distant and interested in his flirtatious banter with female acquaintances, but whose charms suddenly disappear during a mysterious encounter with a young mother and her child on a London street. In recalling the story, Lessing’s narrator notes that
here, as in all good cafés, may be observed real-life soap operas, to be defined as series of emotional events that are certainly not unfamiliar, since you are bound to have seen something like them before, but to which you lack the key that will make them not trite, but shockingly individual.
“Sparrows”
With “Sparrows,” set again in a café, the trite once more becomes the profound, as a series of diners react to a family of sparrows who persist in feeding off scraps of food thrown by guests or left at tables. The seemingly innocuous behavior of the birds elicits reactions ranging from outright indifference to the intrigue expressed by members of one family who see in the sparrows’ actions a lesson that applies to their own personal situations.
“Casualty”
In “Casualty” matters of life and death are clearly distinguished, as Lessing relates the tale of a group of hospital emergency room patients and their reactions not only to their own plights but also to the hysterics of an elderly woman who feels her condition warrants immediate attention, despite being deemed minor by the head nurse. Only when a critically injured young workman is rushed into the room do the others give pause to their situations, and then only temporarily in the case of the older woman, who appears to the reader to be a casualty of another kind.
“Storms”
Lessing’s love of London comes through clearly in “Storms,” the story of a woman’s encounter with a cranky old taxi driver with whom she is paired upon her return from a visit to Frankfurt. Adding to the driver’s dim disposition is the debris covering the streets, through which he is attempting to maneuver following an overnight storm. With each compliment the woman expresses for her hometown on the drive back, the driver immediately counters with an invective. By journey’s end the woman comes to the realization that the litany of complaints she was hearing was born of sorrow, not of age.
“Two Old Women and a Young One”
“Two Old Women and a Young One” explores the seemingly unlimited capacity of people to deal in delusional thoughts, particularly when engaged in social intercourse with the opposite sex. Beginning with the two women of the title who grossly misinterpret the charms of their young male host at a business luncheon, to the host himself, who later mistakes the attentions of an attractive young woman at the same affair, there is little but empty rhetoric. The conversations reflect neither the personal needs nor the identities necessary to build a human connection. This rampant self-absorption afflicts many of Lessing’s characters throughout her work, no matter the setting.
”The Grandmothers”
In this title story of the 2003 collection The Grandmothers , love is the customary central focus, but unlike in Lessing’s earlier stories, in which romantic love is presented as a problem to overcome, Lessing presents love as a weapon used by older women to oppress the younger. Two older female friends develop romantic and sexual relationships with the other’s teenage son and are blissfully happy for years. Finally, they decide they are too old and thus end the relationships and encourage the now-adult sons to marry and have children, which they do. One wife, though, learns the grandmothers’ secret and suffers the insight that she has lived in deception for years with her husband, whose true romantic and sexual love is his mother’s friend. Thus, Lessing captures how older women can and do oppress the younger by their greater knowledge of love and thus their greater power. As in “A Man and Two Women,” the younger female awakens to reality and is left informed enough to finally live an aware life.
“A Love Child”
Even more indicative of evolution in Lessing’s attitudes toward love is “A Love Child,” the final story in The Grandmothers . Here, romantic love and sexual love are presented as the highest values in life, illustrated by a World War II soldier on his way to India who meets a married woman in Cape Town, South Africa, lives with her for four days, falls deeply in love, and produces with her a “love child.” He must leave for India after the four days, and it is years later before he can get back to Cape Town. Once back, he discovers his lover and child have moved, but her friend gives him a photograph of the child, now age eleven, and although he never gets to see his son, he comes to love other children because of his love for his son and his son’s mother. Although he continues his life, marries, and has a daughter, he never forgets his “love child” or the child’s mother. At the story’s end, he hugs his wife for her kindness, loyalty, and love, but thinks to himself, “If you want to call that love.” Thus, in her eighties, Lessing presents four days of love as the essence of life, all else secondary, a pale imitation. As in Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595-1596), referenced in the story, and as in Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County (1992), Lessing has come full circle, to present love as all that is valuable in life, as all that is worth living for, even if it is fulfilled for only four days. Those love days make bearable all of the rest of life. The presence of the “love child” broadens the vision of the benefits of love, elevating it beyond the masochistic self-indulgence of early Lessing stories to ennobling connectedness to others, which is Lessing’s fundamental hope for humanity’s survival and is the prime mover of the collective consciousness underlying Lessing’s spiritual vision. In her old age, Lessing has realized, almost in the terms of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand” (1850), that loss of the human heart would mean the loss of humankind.
Bibliography
Brewster, Dorothy. Doris Lessing . New York: Twayne, 1965. The first book-length study of the fiction. Provides a good general overview of Lessing’s work up to the fourth novel in the Children of Violence series, Landlocked . Includes a brief biography and a discussion of the early novels, including The Golden Notebook , a chapter on the short fiction, which analyzes stories published up to 1964, and a concluding chapter on attitudes and influences. Select bibliography, index, and chronology.
Butcher, Margaret. “‘Two Forks of a Road’: Divergence and Convergence in the Short Stories of Doris Lessing.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 55-61. Asserts that “Homage to Isaac Babel” provides a rebuttal that Lessing’s later stories move away from her early concerns with moral and political issues and retreat into a feminine world of social satire. In her appreciation of Babel’s detachment and control, Lessing has at last learned that mannerism and a directness in writing are neither mutually exclusive nor antithetical.
Halisky, Linda H. “Redeeming the Irrational: The Inexplicable Heroines of a ‘A Sorrowful Woman’ and ‘To Room Nineteen.’” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Winter, 1990): 45-54. Discusses the inexplicable behavior of the protagonist of Lessing’s story by comparing it to Gail Godwin’s “A Sorrowful Woman.” Argues that the heroine of “To Room Nineteen” is inexplicable only if one is locked into a belief that reason is the only integrating, sense-making force. Discusses the redemptive force of mythic truth in the story.
Harris, Jocelyn. “Doris Lessing’s Beautiful Impossible Blueprints.” In The British and Irish Novel Since 1960 , edited by James Acheson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. A discussion of Lessing’s discarding of political and social blueprints, such as Marxism and sentimental idealism about the brotherhood of man, and her moving in her later fiction to mystical solutions and interventions.
Lessing, Doris. A Small Personal Voice . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. This collection of interviews and essays by Lessing gives the reader an insight into the novelist’s constantly expanding consciousness and agenda.
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women Writers . Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Helpful study of the older female characters in Lessing’s fiction, although lacks discussion of The Grandmothers , a regrettable omission.
Pickering, Jean. Understanding Doris Lessing . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. A brief, clear overview of Lessing’s work. Begins with a chapter providing a biographical and analytical look at Lessing’s career, then continues with a short but sharp analysis of her fiction through The Fifth Child (1988). Includes an index and an annotated bibliography of books and articles about Lessing.
Seligmann, Dee. Doris Lessing: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Because of the massive amount of literary scholarship on Lessing, this is a useful guide; includes annotations.
Taylor, Jenny, ed. Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. A collection of essays by British women, mostly from a political standpoint defined in the introduction, which looks at Lessing and Sufism, mysticism, and how she compares with Simone de Beauvoir. Supplemented by a select bibliography of Lessing criticism and a complete index.
Thorpe, Michael. Doris Lessing . Essex, England: Longman, 1973. A good general introduction that is thorough, including a select bibliography, with an emphasis on the short fiction. Although only thirty-five pages in length, this volume includes a biography, discussion of Lessing’s life and attitudes, and a sociopolitical analysis.
Tyler, Lisa. “Our Mothers’ Gardens: Doris Lessing’s ‘Among the Roses.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Spring, 1994): 163-173. Examines the mother-daughter relationship in Lessing’s short story “Among the Roses”; argues that the breach between mother and daughter suggests a division between two worlds—one of female community and another of heterosexuality.
Waterman, David. Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction . Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2006. Insightfully discusses Lessing’s “outer space” and “inner space” fiction, including “The Reason for It,” from The Grandmothers .
Whittaker, Ruth. Doris Lessing . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. A short but excellent overview of the fiction through The Good Terrorist . Ideal for a first reader of Lessing or to clarify points for those familiar with her work. Includes background and influences, the colonial legacy, in-depth analysis, an index, and a select bibliography that lists all Lessing’s work and the major books, articles, and interviews published to 1988. Also includes reference to the Doris Lessing Newsletter , published by the Brooklyn College Press.