Monthly Archives: January 2024

In Which Doris Lessing Plagiarizes Herself:   “The Sweetest Dream” and “The Four-Gated City”

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“Oh, how hard it is to be a middle-aged woman, who has to stand in for everyone’s difficult mother, and who has to take (and return) looks from younger women examinng their futures, exactly as one u



Oh, how hard it is to be a middle-aged woman, who has to stand in for everyone’s difficult mother, and who has to take (and return) looks from younger women examining their futures, exactly as one used to do oneself… – Doris Lessing’s The Four=Gated City

I was awed when I first read  Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

I had never read anything like it. There are echoes of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, particularly in Lessing’s opening section, Free Women.  In Women in Love, the Brangwen sisters struggle to be free, especially in love, and are unsure whether they want to marry.  Ursula successfully establishes a  love relationship, but Gudrun cruelly destroys her lover.

In Lessing’s Free Women in The Golden Notebook, two women in their thirties, best friends, address similar problems in love. The heroine, Anna Wulf, a blocked writer, and her close friend, Molly, an actress, commiserate about being  viewed as “free women,” independent,  sexually available, but not wife material.  Both are divorced, both are single mothers, both have lovers who eventually leave them.  Molly is funny and bitter, Anna tries to move beyond humor and examine herself truthfully.  She no longer writes novels. She writes in four notebooks: diaries, autofiction, and autobiography.  But these are fragments:  she must unify them. She is afraid to unify them.

Lessing is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.  Yet there was a dramatic period of Lessing-bashing after she died, sparked by Jenny Diski’s memoir of living with Lessing and her son as an adolescent and loathing her as an adult.  Suddenly Lessing was the “bad mother” who had left two children to be raised by her husband in Africa when they divorced. This accusation seemed very sexist to me. And Lessing did take Peter, her son by a later husband, with her to London. 

I am a long-time fan, of course. I especially admire  the Children of Violence series (the Martha Quest books), The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor, The Summer Before the Dark, and The Diaries of Jane Somers.  But I find her later work problematic and uneven.  Mind you, I liked the books at the time.  She experiments with science fiction (not her forte), writes a handful of realistic novels, and two volumes of autobiography.

I recently decided to reread The Sweetest Dream (2001), one of the better novels of her late period. It is an odd book , a simplified version of her 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City.

In the Author’s Note, Lessing does not link the two novels.  Instead, she both half-admits and denies that The Sweetest Dream is autobiographical. 

I am not writing volume three of my autobiography because of possible hurt to vulnerable people.  Which does not mean that I have novelized autobiography.  There are no parallels here to actual people, except for one, a very minor character. I hope I have managed to recapture the spirit of, particularly, the Sixties, that contradictory time which, looking back and comparing it with what came later, seems surprisingly innocent.  There was little of the nastiness of the Seventies, or the cold greed of the Eighties.!

Autobiographical or not, The Sweetest Dream shadows the earlier novel. In The Four-Gated City, Martha Quest leaves the Communist party and a Communist husband – whom she married so he could get papers to stay in Africa – and moves to London.  She is the mother of one child, whom she left years ago to be raised by her first husband. 

She loves London.  She quashes her “Mattie” persona, the likable clown, and becomes a more serious version of Martha.  She explores the city,  converses with working-class Londoners, and has incredible sex with a squatter who is refurbishing a once-elegant house partially demolished in the war. When she runs out of money, she reluctantly takes a job as a “secretary” to  Mark Coldidge, a rich factory owner, a utopian novelist, and an amateur political analyst. During the ’60s, they participate in the Aldermaston marches and other protests. They are leftists, but not communists.

The house is full of unhappy people.  Martha must be the stable person, the one to hold the house together. Mark literally has a mad wife in the basement.  His son, Francis, is sweet but neglected and love-starved, and his unstable nephew, Paul, is shattered by his mother’s suicide. Martha is at the center of the hive, coping with the boys, cooking dinners, and she becomes a “house mother” or an “earth mother” to their friends, some of whom come to dinner and crash for days, weeks, or months.

Frances Lennox, the heroine of The Sweetest Dream, has much in common with Martha. Frances, deserted by her irresponsible Communist husband, moves into her mother-in-law’s enormous house because she and her son are living in a squalid apartment she is barely able to afford.  One son is able to go to Eton, the other to a progressive school.   Frances, an actress, has to turn down roles to work as an  “Agony Aunt” columnist for a newspaper, a job which pays better than acting and which she can do from home.  And since she is at home, she cooks delicious, nourishing meals for her sons and their friends, who often have problems, hate their parents, and spend most of their time at the house.   She is an unofficial “earth mother.”

And she learns that there are many “earth mothers” like her.  When the kids travel, they stay with nurturing women and their families in France, Hungary, the U.S., Canada, everywhere.  She corresponds with some of them.  All lament the shoplifting, moodiness, and insatiable cravings for the latest record album or stylish haircut. The kids are unhappy, yet  there has never been a richer, more privileged generation of young people.  They are “screwed-up,” the children of violence, of two world wars.

The Four-Gated City is a classic, which in the last fourth rolls into a dystopian future.

But honestly?  I think The Sweetest Dream is a book for our times. People are looking for entertainment, for simplicity in the presentation of ideas. This is “Doris Lessing-lite,” and yet it is a good, solid novel by a Nobel-winning author.

Indexers in Love:  Barbara Pym’s “No Fond Return of Love”

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Happy New Year of Reading Dead Writers! 

Let us begin with my favorite Barbara Pym novel, No Fond Return of Love.  I adore this book, set on the fringes of the literary professions in London in the late ’50s or early ’60s.  In a pulp paperback edition, the blurb on the cover would say  INDEXERS IN LOVE!, perched above an illustration of two buxom women gawking at a handsome man.

But this is not the real story, of course.  Pym did not write romance novels; she did not even write romantic comedies.  Her quirky comedies are gently satiric. Her heroines wear sensible shoes.

Pym’s wry sense of humor about the nature of love highlights the heroines’ whimsical quotations of poetry.  No one is very young; no one falls desperately in love.  Love is a relationship based on sex, common interests, and often convenience.  In reality, the two indexers, Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace, are not romantic:  they are lonely women who meet at a conference for editors, indexers, and proofreaders.  Dulcie attends to meet new people and recover from her broken engagement to a younger man, Maurice.  Viola, a black-clad bohemian, takes one look at Dulcie’s sensible shoes and knows it was a mistake to attend.

But was it a mistake?  As at all academic conferences, people devote much time to socializing.  And the stunningly handsome, middle-aged editor, Aylwin Forbes, is an object of attraction.  Viola attended purposely to be near him after hearing that his wife left him.  And  Dulcie becomes mildly interested after Alwyn faints at the podium and she sensibly applies smelling salts to revive him. 

Viola and Dulcie run into each other in London and bond over Aylwin. Dulcie is not seriously interested, but she does idle “research “on Alywin at the Public Records office, the  public library, and perhaps the British Museum in her free time.  She and Viola walk in Aylwin’s neighborhood at night, because his house is near Viola’s bed-sit, and when they run into him, all three are embarrassed. But that is not all:  they also attend Alywin’s brother Neville’s church. There is, unfortunately, a substitute clergyman: Neville has gone home to Mother for Easter because, most inconveniently, Miss Spicer has fallen in love with him.  He has problems with women in every parish. The two brothers are too good-looking.

Dulcie’s whimsy and insatiable research are hilarious. She and Viola invite her former fiance, Maurice, her neighbors, and Aylwin to a dinner party, and she and Viola manage to be charming. But Aylwin is interested in neither Dulcie nor Viola. He prefers Dulcie’s 18-year-old niece, Laurel, though he is almost fifty. 

At the end, allusions to Mansfield Park charmingly sum up the not-quite love story.  It ends most satisfactorily, though not quite as one would expect. Pym, in my opinion, mockingly tweaks the marriage plot, though there is usually at least one marriage in her novels, and the couples seems happy enough. Dulcie spends a lot of time making marmalade and doing other domestic tasks. She would welcome love, but does not actively pursue it, despite appearances. Whether there is any fond return of love is not entirely clear

And that’s the inimitable Barbara Pym.

Light-and-Book Therapy: “The Lady Investigates” & “The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor”

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Now that the dark days have stalked and superseded the winter solstice, I turn all the lights on while I read on the comfy sofa. 

I call this book-and-light therapy, and it goes well with a hot cup of tea or coffee. This weekend I have been perusing two comfort books under bright lights, The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor (1996), edited  by Regina Barreca, and The Lady Investigates:  Women Detectives & Spies in Fiction (1981) , by Patricia Craig and Mary Codogan. 

First, let me say that The Lady Investigates is the better of the two books.   In fact, it is an exceptionally smart literary history.  Craig and Cadogan are a mother-daughter team who  have written a fascinating study of Miss Marple and her predecessors and descendants.

The book begins in the nineteenth century with Mrs. Paschal in The Revelations of a Lady Detective ( anonymously published in 1861 and later attributed to W. S. Hayward). Then they move on to the brilliant Valeria Woodville in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875).  I took notes as I read, because there are so many mysteries I’d never heard of. The history extends to the late 1970s,  featuring  Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books (1960s and ‘70s), Joyce Porter’s The Hon Con series (beginning  in 1973),  Amanda Cross’s Kate Fansler series (also beginning in the 1970s), and P. D. James’s incomparable mysteries. 

And then there’s The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor, edited by Regina Barreca. I wanted to love it. I loved parts of it. There are passages from Cynthia Heimel’s humor columns, the playwright Jean Kerr’s domestic humor columns, Lynda Barry’s cartoons, and and Lisa  Alther’s witty novel, Kinflicks. But Barreca also includes – hold your breath – scenes from the Brontes’ novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Villette, and  Jane Eyre.

What was Penguin thinking?  The  Brontes are witty and not without humor, but that is not humor writing.  I was equally astonished to find scenes from Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall  and a weak story by Doris Lessing, “How I lost My Heart.”   Do the poems by  Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore fit with Irma Bombeck and Anita Loos?  No. Gentle wit?  Yes.  Great literature? Yes.  Humor writing?  No. 

Still, there are some gems.  The columns from Cynthia Heimel’s  If You Can’t Live without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? and Enough about You still make me laugh out loud. I am also a great fan of Roz Chast. I had forgotten about the brilliant, funny Mimi Pond. And I discovered some new-to-me humorists: Anne Beatts, Serena Gray, and Libby Reid.

There’s something for everybody here: comfort books for dark days.

The Rediscovery of Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Wheel of Love”

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A recent profile of Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker sent me to our “O” shelves to look for her collection of short stories, The Wheel of Love.  I loved reading this brilliant, moving collection.

Oates is the American Balzac: she dose not hesitate to delve into the muddier depths of American life, which makes for fascinating, if uncomfortable, reading.  She is one of our most brilliant, eclectic writers, who, since the 1960s,  has minutely examined class, sex, race, violence, academia, social issues, dysfunctional families, politics, post-industrial cities, and industrial pollution in her fiction.

Oates is perhaps our most versatile writer :  she has written brilliant novels about Marilyn Monroe, Chappaquiddick, the Love Canal, fundamentalist religion, and abortion.  But despite her broad perspective and pitch-perfect writing, she is underappreciated, perhaps because  of her enormous output.  One often hears this complaint:  “Another book by Oates!”  The critics’ annoyance may be rooted in sexism:  women should not write as well as she does, as much as she does, nor should they explore the horror and violence beneath the bread-and-butter blandness peddled as the good life.

In her poignant collection, The Wheel of Love, she depicts characters who are adulterous, amnesiac, mad, dropouts, drug users, celebrities, academics, shoplifters, and alcoholics. Some of the stories are conventional,  others are “experimental.” Characters see themselves as trapped or terrified, survive car accidents and lose their memory,  worry about their shoplifting daughters or feel trapped in suburban Detroit.  

Several of the stories are set in Detroit. In her superb epistolary story, “Unmailed, Unwritten Letters,”  set in Detroit, an adulterous housewife composes  letters that will never be sent to her parents, husband, lover, and his family.

She often uses the word “terrified.”  In the shattered Detroit of the ‘60s, she has become obsessed with ownership and hidden relationships. In a letter to her parents, she wonders why they have moved to the Southwest. Does it have something to with the burden on her father of the huge house and the lawn? “Even with workers to help him it was terrifying, all that space, because he owned it.  Maybe that was why he it terrified him, because he owned it.” 

The narrator has had three miscarriages, and her infertility is a one reason for her infidelity to her husband.  In a letter to her husband, she says that he is more competent and reliable  than her weak, angry lover, a married professor, and she and her husband have “bumbled” along for years. Again she uses the word “terror.” “I am a woman trapped in love, in the terror of love.” 

In a letter to the editor, she writes, “Anonymously and shyly I want to ask – why are white men so weak, so feeble?”

The narrator is a mad housewife, a feminist bursting with anger and emotion.  But perhaps at the center of her terror is the crumbling city of Detroit, its race riots and political wrangles.  She is appalled by the debris, blowing paper, and empty cans in the streets .  She writes to her husband. “Three years you’ve been working for the Mayor, His Honor, dodging reporters downtown.  Luncheons, sudden trips, press conferences, conferences with committees from angry parts of Detroit, all of Detroit angry, white and black, bustling, ominous…. Your people are rewriting history as fast as history happens.”

The narrator receives mail from her lover’s wife and daughter, but does not send replies.  She gets lost in the airport parking lot, is annoyed by her lover’s vauguenesss about the effect of Vietnam on the presidential election when he appears on a TV program. She does not want to marry him, is burdened by the complexity of relationships, and yearns for freedom. Is she in love?

I also enjoyed the beautifully-written, conventional story, “In the Region of Ice.” Sister Irene, a nun in her  thirties, is  nervous about her new job teaching at a university, but proves to  be an excellent professor.   All is going well, until her class is disrupted by a brilliant, intense student who has been kicked out of the Ph.D. history program.  He is so insightful and intellectual that Sister Irene is both thrilled and nervous, but, safe in her convent world,  she  knows she is not equipped to save this disturbed young man. . “She was only one person…  Was she safe in this person, or was she trapped?  She had only one identity.”  The routine of the convent confines her, but perhaps she has unconsciously learned about her limits.

All of these stories are brilliant, and we understand why she has won so many O. Henry Prizes for them.  If only her novels got the same acclaim.  She won the National Book Award for them, but surely she should also have won the Pulitzer by now. And there has been talk for several years about the Nobel. Perhaps this will be the year.

Anthologies of the 1970s: Which Would You Prefer?

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Happy New Year!  I’m wearing librarian glasses and the sort of dowdy clothes worn by Barbara Pym’s indexers and anthropologists. The glasses help me focus while I catalogue our dusty mass market paperbacks.

What I like about these old editions: the ads on the back page. In a 1970 edition of an Updike book, four anthologies are listed under the title, “Also of Interest”: Contemporary American Short Stories, Counterparts: Classic and Contemporary American Short Stories, The Naked I: Fiction for the Seventies, and The Best Short Stories of the Modern Age.

I noted the scarcity of women included in these anthologies because, for the first time ever, my New Year’s stats showed that in 2023 I read more male writers than women. I was astonished.

In The Naked I, no women are listed. The others do include women. In Contemporary American Fiction, the editors have an excellent line-up : Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Georgia McKinley, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Canfield, Tillie Olsen, and Katherine Anne Porter. In Counterparts, which gives us a partial list, the editors include Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter. And in The Best Short Stories of the Modern Age, Katherine Mansfield and Shirley Jackson impressed the editors.

And so this is a historic ad to celebrate the New Year. It reminds me, too, that books cost only $1.25 back then – less if bought used.

John Gardner, Stupid Times, and “Jason and Medeia”

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“These are stupid times, intertwined bombast and bullshit whipped to a fine fizz.” – John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia

What could be more pertinent to our times than this bitter quotation from John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia (1973), an epic novel in verse?  Gardner’s retelling of the classical myth reflects the politics, literary eclecticism, and feminist issues of the 1960s and early 1970s – and now our own. As a power couple, Jason and Medeia are a failure.  Jason is a brave hero and a spellbinding storyteller; she is a powerful witch, an adoring wife, and devoted mother. Madly in love with Jason, Medeia committed nefarious deeds, including murder, to  help Jason achieve his questionable heroic goals.  Without her magic, it could not have been done. And she has not wavered in her love for him.

Jason is now an ambitious politician having a midlife crisis. Midlife crises come earlier in antiquity, with a shorter life span: Jason was perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties when he decided to leave Medeia to marry a princess in a prestigious family. This power move was a very bad idea, because men and women have equally bad ideas, and few couples make worse decisions than these two. 

Poetry is not Gardner’s forte, and this novel is far too long , but that quotation haunts me. It is just one damned stupid thing after another in the 2020s.  In the twenty-first century, the greatest challenge is climate change, which is barely addressed, despite the rising temperatures, pollution, wildfires, droughts, storms, and water shortages that will eventually kill the planet.

Politics is not my field, and I read as little about it as possible. But here are some amateur observations:  the red states are like mini-republics, with an agenda to ban books, cut funds to education, promote guns, even recommend that teachers arm themselves, and ignore an uptick in Covid cases (the evidence is found in the waste-water).

Some of the censorship issues are almost too cartoonish to believe:  two Moms for Liberty in Florida  called the police to report “porn” in a  high school. The porn proved to be  a Y.A. fantasy novel by Jennifer Armentrout, Storm and Fury, in the school library. Since the fantasy novel is about gargoyles, it is impossible to take this incident seriously.  But one of them  compared the book to Playboy, and demanded the arrest of two school librarians.  No arrests were made that day.  

Now if they could harness that energy to ban guns, I’d join them.

As Donald Barthelme said, “Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.”