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.
* And this year the Nobellers proved me wrong. “Oh Christ,” was Lessing’s terrific bored-to-the-eyebrows response to the news. “And about time!” was mine, and my joy was unconfined.
The Life Wot I Had
Or was that someone else’s life altogether?
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 e
ven 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.
Although I remember quoting from Ulysses in a column once and I received a letter from a horrible woman accusing me of plagiarizing Tennyson. Imagine the sadness of not knowing that poetry is a common well and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s descendants aren’t due royalties and that quoting isn’t plagiarizing, I just assumed everyone would recognize some of the most famous lines in the English language not from Shakespeare.
Maybe everything is an immense misunderstanding. Layers of lies upon lies upon mistakes upon misunderstandings form over the years like a coral bed building itself up. This is what makes Google Earth so dangerous. I zoom around the planet revisiting places where I once lived. Places filled with memories perhaps best left alone.
I remember a scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where they sailed in the fog past a marooned man. The crew hastened to rescue him, but once on board he warned them to flee. This is the place where dreams come true, he said. Oh goody, they said.
You don’t understand, he said. Not daydreams. Dreams.
And everyone gasped and understood, hoisted the mainsail and hustled away.
Google Earth lets you travel with a terrible ease to places you left behind. Normally you would have to gird your loins, make plans, set aside money, make careful maps and then walk down the street past the house where you were abused or the alleyway where you did it standing up with a total stranger or the building where you were stuck in an elevator. That’s why you don’t go back. It isn’t worth the candle.
No rearview mirror, as S. always tells me.
But Google Earth makes it possible. You can do things like revisit everywhere in the world you ever threw up. I suppose that’s fun in a peculiar way. You can visit everywhere you ever had sex, if you can remember something resembling an address, or all the places where your girlfriends have been raped. I shudder to think of them ever coming up with this morbid idea, but then they probably feel they can leave it to me. You could visit every one of Barbra Streisand’s homes and puzzle as to why one person needs seven places, or in Ted Turner’s case, twenty-three and an airplane.
I can track down the Cambodian factory that is notorious for being the worst sweatshop on earth. It produces clothes for the British high street. It has made me very sarcastic about cheap clothes and even less likely to visit Britain, whether this is reasonable or not.
Worse, Google Earth confirmed for me that my childhood memories, unlike the gradually fuzzing memories I accumulate as an adult, are deadly accurate. On Google Earth, I revisited a city where I used to live as a child and tracked each step to school. It was the unhappiest time of my life. I had never thought much of it, and only mentioned it in passing to a therapist once. But I used the cursor to relive that square kilometre of misery, and it was all the same, as if it had been sprayed with a fixative.
It is a wonderful thing to stop painful memories in their tracks. The human mind can accomplish that. What Google Earth is doing is allowing you to return to the dream of childhood, not the lovely bits, but the nightmares. It’s like seeing your rapist in court. I have not been raped, but I can imagine that I would never wish to see him again.
Closed-circuit television involves the same traducing of human experience. A British woman was drunk. She was raped on a train platform, her rape filmed by cameras. A man was arrested and convicted even though she fortunately had no memory of the attack. But she was forced to see the video in court and she naturally fell apart. Her life was scarred from that moment on. Before, the alcohol had protected her.
So I don’t know about technological tracking devices intruding into my own life. Everyone else is enraged by the government’s use of these devices to spy on us. But what horrifies me just as much is that given the chance, such records would allow me to spy on my own past. And we should never be allowed to do that. We should have only our own memories to rely on, dead-on, faulty, whatever. My whole life is online in pictures for the world to see, if the world cared, which it doesn’t, and if it knew what it was looking for. Again, it does not.
But I’m naked. I’m stripped and shivering out on the headland.
We move out of small towns to the anonymity of cities to escape this kind of close scrutiny. With all our footsteps on film, we’ve made the planet not a kindly village but a hideous one.
McLuhan meant us to look at other people, not to neurotically and pointlessly track ourselves.
It is wrong. It is hateful.
How to Ignore Things
It’s cheaper than therapy
I’m very good at ignoring unpleasant things. I have to be; there’s always something fresh coming up.
But enough about me. Let’s talk about the champion of blocking it all out.
If you really analyzed the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, there’s no doubt that she was appalling. Part of it not her fault. It was the era and the social scene into which she was born. You came out of the appropriate vagina, i.e., one linked to a moneyed penis—and if something went wrong, such as your maternal vagina dumping the paternal penis, which is what Jackie’s mother did to her alcoholic philandering husband, you spent your youth feeling fragile. You had the name but the mansion only came on sufferance. Janet married an Auchincloss, a good name, but not terribly financially secure.
Basically, Jackie was Lily Bart, the heroine of that Edith Wharton novel that causes any woman without a job to have a mental and emotional collapse, and then go out and get a job.
So Jackie married a philanderer. Her revenge was justified overspending. She spent madly. Then she married Aristotle Onassis, an ugly man with a certain charm that vanished with old age and events such as the death of his son. Jackie spent madly to compensate for the abuse Onassis handed out.
She spent the latter part of her life with Maurice Tempelsman, who was in the diamond business. It isn’t the right business to be in if you object to hanging out with mad African dictators who flay the skin off their citizens’ backs to get the diamonds that are marketed as precious even though there is no logical reason for any decorative material to be more attractive than any other precious material. Diamonds? Screw it, I’ll take cubic zirconia. Jackie never hooked up with clean money (if such a thing exists) like that derived from winemaking or knitting little soft caps for babies. Every male-run fortune Jackie allied herself with was dirty money. If it wasn’t bootlegging, it was dodgy oil tankers or blood diamonds. Onassis was a thug. I loved the half-smile she wore at his funeral, not to mention the leather coat. Fashionable, yes, black, yes, but leather!
All these are unpleasant truths, and Jackie ignored them. She had a lot of stuff to ignore—various deaths and scandals in the various families she was linked to—but she had one major thing to ignore. I a
m not convinced any human has faced this before, but it is part of the modern, filmed world. She frequently had to see her husband get his head blown off via the Zapruder film, with the attendant bits of brain and blood on her face and body and brain matter of such a size that she had to hand a chunk to a doctor in the emergency room of Parkland Hospital.
Imagine that. The Archduke Ferdinand’s family probably ran across a few paintings of the event, Princip being the Oswald of his time, but then again, that situation was dwarfed by the slaughter of millions of humans that followed.
Jackie Kennedy coped very well, aside from her chain-smoking, but I do think everyone is allowed one bad habit. Her trick was to ignore. In restaurants she would focus so intently on her guest that the sideways stares of everyone else in the room did not exist for her.
She walled it off.
The problem with Jackie, I imagine, was that she lived in New York, a city she knew by heart so every street corner had its horrible reminder albeit not bits of a husband’s cerebellum. All the walled-up stuff she had to ignore—the blood and brain, the press criticism, the slavering public hunger, the studying of every inch of her appearance, the astonishing stupidity of her son as compared to the steadiness and wisdom of her daughter—took up more acreage than other stuff she could easily take in.
Just be thankful your life isn’t like that. Whatever happens to you isn’t rubbed into your face—Surprise! Assassination on the documentary channel! Watch a spattered Jackie chase Jack’s skull fragments!—and your brick wall is intact.
What I’m saying is that you can talk to a therapist and deal with the vile memories. Or you can steadfastly ignore certain events in your life and indeed the continents on which they took place. It’s your choice.
I do the latter and it has worked well for me. It has also encouraged a love of travel. Let’s go somewhere blank of painful memories! Of course you may build new and even more painful memories on that continent.
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