On Doris Lessing

I have talked about her before. I’ve quoted and re-quoted her throughout this blog. I was delighted when she won the prize. She is one of the greatest writers of our time.

A couple of days ago, during a comment-conversation with Ptitsa, I brought her up again. She asked me to elaborate. I made a clumsy attempt, as much as posting a comment would allow. And yet I know that even in a million years, no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to truthfully describe everything that her writing stands for. Partly because I’m no literary critic, partly because in “describing” something, one inevitably ends up caught in the process of “naming” – making whatever it is recognizable, familiar, safe. Ms. Lessing wasn’t quite fond of that and her writing is anything but “safe.”

No writer has influenced me as she did. No woman (except for my mother, perhaps) has taught me as much as she has. To me, she is the quintessential Mother Sugar (one of her own characters) – the witch-doctor, that voice of wisdom, painfully and blatantly honest and yet comforting at the same time. “My dear Anna, it is possible after all that in order to keep ourselves sane we will have to learn to rely on those blades of grass springing in a million years?”

So as promised, I am posting a few of my favorite passages from The Golden Notebook to let you be the judge.

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future […]. I don’t think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

…

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being “objective.” Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the “Anna” of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

…
Sometimes, when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship…

…
I put myself back into the state of mind I was in when I sent to Mother Sugar. I can’t feel, I said. […] When I left her I said: You’ve taught me to cry, thank you for nothing, you’ve given me back feeling, and it’s too painful.

In a world as terrible as this, limit emotion. How odd I didn’t see it before.

And against this instructive retreat into no-feeling, as a protection against pain, Mother Sugar – I remember saying to her in exasperation: “If I said to you that the H bomb has fallen and obliterated half of Europe, you’d click your tongue, tck, tck, and then, if I was weeping and wailing, you’d invite me, with an admonitory frown or a gesture, to remember, or take into account some emotion I was willfully excluding. What emotion? Why, joy, of course. Consider, my child, you’d say, or imply, the creative aspect of destruction! Consider the creative implications of the power locked in the atom! Allow your mind to rest on those first blades of tentative green grass that will poke into the light out of the lava in a million years time!” She smiled, of course. […] She said: “My dear Anna, it is possible after all that in order to keep ourselves sane we will have to learn to rely on those blades of grass springing in a million years?”

[…]
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only… or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything that the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences…

…

I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else. I don’t understand what happens at the moment Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella. No one does. It’s enough to call her Ella, instead of Anna. Why did I choose the name Ella? Once I met a girl at a party called Ella. […] She was small, think dark – the same physical type as myself. […] People were drinking heavily. The host came over to fill our glasses. She put out her hand – a thin, white delicate hand, at just that moment when he put an inch of liquor in her glass, to cover it. She gave a cool nod: “That’s enough.” […] She picked up the glass with just an inch of red wine in it, and said: “That’s the exact amount I need for the right degree of intoxication.” I laughed. But no, she was serious. She drank the inch of red wine, and then remarked: “Yes, that’s right.“ Assessing how the alcohol was affecting her – she gave another small, cool nod. “Yes, that was just right.”

Well, I would never do that. That’s not Anna at all.

….

I came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to turn it into a short story. It struck me that my doing this – turning everything into fiction – must be an evasion. […] Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? Why don’t I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself. […] I shall keep a diary.

Upon rereading her notebooks:

…I didn’t recognize myself. Matching what I had written with what I remembered it all seemed false. And this – the untruthfulness of what I had written was because of something I had not thought of before – my sterility. The deepening note of criticism, of defensiveness, of dislike…

It was then I decided to use the blue notebook… as nothing but a record of facts. Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc., etc., and it felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing…

[…]

I expected a terse record of fact to present some sort of pattern when I read it over, but this sort of record is as false as the account of what happened on 15th September, 1954, which I read now embarrassed because of its emotionalism and because of its assumption that if I wrote “at nine-thirty I went to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated,” this would be more real than if I simply wrote what I thought. And yet I still don’t understand why. Because although in life things like going to the lavatory or changing a tampon when one has one’s period are dealt with on an almost unconscious level, I can recall every detail of a day two years ago because I remember that Molly had blood on her skirt and I had to warn her to go upstairs and change before her son came in.

…
I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding , in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will not be part of me and I must deal with it.

It is easy now, looking back over my life, to say: that Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or “named” – yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: yes, that’s what I was. I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical, using femaleness as a sort of standard or yardstick to measure and discard men without even being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and become – but what?)