Tag Archives: Doris Lessing

Stating the Problem:  You’ve Lost Your Mind! 

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I admire Martha Quest, the heroine of Doris Lessing’s five-book Children of Violence series, one of the great thinkers of Lessing’s very smart fictional world.  In The Four-Gated City, the last volume in the series,  Martha and her employer, Mark, a factory owner and science fiction writer, read multiple newspapers to track world events on complicated maps and charts on the walls in the study. 

Lessing’s description of the maps fascinates me.  It goes on for pages, but here’s an excerpt.

One wall was soon devoted to atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, large bombs, small bombs (what one committee in the States had christened “kitten bombs”) and the establishments which developed them, made them, and sold them…  With black flags, on the same map, were marked the factories and laboratories which researched, made and sold materials for germ warfare, chemical warfare, and drugs used in the control and manipulation of the brain.  With yellow flags, on this map, were marked areas of air, soil and water contaminated by bomb-blasts…

This was published in 1969.  I can’t imagine that the maps would look much different today. And that’s very sad, isn’t it?  But on the bright side… we’re still here!

In The Four-Gated City, an American character, Brandon, questions the maps on the walls of Mark’s room. “Why do you fix your room up like this? Because the way it looks to me, it’s just stating the problem.” 

Mark asks him if it isn’t valuable to state the problem.

Brandon points out that protests, too, are just stating the problem, and that people seldom have the energy to take the next step.  And, I must admit, that was what I thought after protests on No Kings’ Day.  Great as far as they went. What next?

Before I go on, let me say that I, too, state the problem and take no action.  But then I operate on a much smaller scale..   

Here is the kind of problem that obsesses me.  Due to city budget cuts, the  local public library recently fired its last librarian.  

My first impulse was to protest at a City Council meeting.  As far as I’m concerned, the public library is a human right.  It provides books, books, books (that’s all I care about),  computers, meeting rooms, movie clubs, lectures, cooling centers in summer, and, for a while, social services for the homeless (but those were cut too.)

I expected rioting in the streets after the news of the firing.  Nothing.  A few letters to the editor. 

It hardly seems cost-effective to fire the librarian and social worker, and leave the management to the check-out clerks, who, though they may be lovely people and avid readers, are the equivalent of supermarket cashiers.  But there’s already an X on their backs.  Since most patrons use auto-check, the check-out clerks are next. Bets on?

A former librarian tells me she is glad she got out in time. Her gloomy prognosis?  The library schools are next. 

She was a cataloguer, and I must share this funny insight.  She said the the highlight of her career was “having catfights about whether to catalogue Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as science fiction or literary fiction.”

Waiting for the Biography: The World without Doris Lessing

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When Doris Lessing died in 2013, I had a hard time imagining a world without her. She was versatile and original and I always wanted to see what she had to say. Now there would be no new books.

She had a great influence on my generation, probably even more so on the Second Wave feminists, as if she were writing primers for women’s survival. I first read her in my teens: the characters Anna Wulf and her friend Molly in The Golden Notebook reminded me of the sisters Ursula and Gudrun in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. All four defy prescribed sex roles and are ambivalent about marriage. Lawrence’s influence on Lessing is clear, if fleeting.

It is not that we were at all like her characters: that’s not how we read. And yet we identified with them. These heroines transcend the conventions of women’s lives, finding love and sex outside of marriage, and working at jobs without clear demarcations, though happiness is not necessarily the result. These women are politically aware and empathetic, yet must guard themselves from the demands of others, which sometimes overwhelm them, as they do tend to overwhelm women.

And now that we live in a world without Lessing, I am happy to come across a Lessing sighting. The other day I read an Afterword she’d written for science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. She considered it a classic: she is not put off by genre categories. And her own science fiction series, the Shikasta books, were adapted by Philip Glass as an opera.

Sometimes I read Lessing for comfort, though that is not her forte. During a power outage after a storm destroyed our garage, I managed to read her autobiography by the light of a lantern. That I could read in such uncomfortable, dimly-lit circumstances says much for her style. Detractors call her style “flat-footed.” I find her writing compelling and urgent.

And I liked her personal insouciance. In a video on YouTube: she is filmed getting out of a taxi in front of her house and accosted by polite reporters with the news that she has won the Nobel Prize. “Oh f–,” she said. She added that “it” had been going on for 30 years, and they’d told her she’d never win. I’m sure she was pleased, but I like that initial response.

Since her death, critical studies and memoirs have been published, but no biographies to my knowledge. Patrick French was the authorized biographer, but I read that he died of cancer in 2023 at age 56. How very sad. Then I read that his biography, The Golden Woman, will be published in 2026. I look forward to it, but why must we wait so long? I’d like an advance copy – I mean way, way in advance – like now. But I’ll have to wait like other humans.

Doris Lessing’s “The Four-Gated City”:  Politics and the Old Woman

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Doris Lessing

Readers of this blog know that I am a Doris Lessing fan. Not all of her books are equally brilliant, but the best are classics. I recently reread parts of The Four-Gated City, the fifth in her Children of Violence quintet, which Lessing considered a bildungsroman. And yet I find that claim very strange. It is true of the first four books in the series, which follow the life of Martha Quest from her teens to the age of 30. But the  final volume is a novel of ideas that gradually abandons the semblance of a conventional narrative.

It is not, however, surprising that Martha, a former Communist, would become the subject of an experimental novel.  After moving to London in the late 1940s, she takes a  job as a live-in secretary-cum-editor-cum -housekeeper to Mark Coleridge, a factory owner and leftist writer of a best-selling utopian novel: 

In the course of the novel, Martha and Mark analyze post-war politics, the evolution of the extended family to gird up Mark’s floundering dysfunctional nuclear family, the Laingian theory that the mentally ill are psychic, and the unity of the Aldermaston marches against nuclear disarmament.

And in the final section, Lessing one-ups the level of defiant rule-breaking by embracing science fiction in the form of describing a world-wide disaster, documented by the surviving characters in the form of letters and other papers.

Lessing is best-known for her naturalistic writing about women’s lives, and, indeed,  one of the most interesting sections of of this novel is a portrait of  Martha’s unhappy mother.  Mrs. Quest, a widow who lives on an African farm with her son and his family,  has always disliked her radical daughter.  But suddenly she writes a letter to Martha announcing plans to visit her in London.  Martha promptly has a nervous breakdown. 

 Martha knows exactly what her relationship with her mother is like.  And Mrs. Quest has no conception of the changes in London:  she imagines the  England of her youth before World War I.  And who can she possibly imagine Martha to be now?  But in a way, Mrs. Quest knows the visit will be a disaster.  She keeps postponing the visit. 

The voyage to England is not the happy adventure Mrs. Quest had hoped for.  Her disillusion and disappointment on the the cruise ship is sad, even terrifying, because Mrs. Quest’s life is rather like this voyage, and she would rather not face it.  She perceives with dismay that the passengers drug themselves with food, sleep, silly games, and drinking.  And this is her first glimmering of the sadness that the trip will bring.

Lessing devotes some remarkable pages to Mrs. Quest’s old age as it is revealed to her on the ship.  She writes,

Mrs. Quest, an old lady among old ladies, all of them widows (for women live longer than men), sat in her deck chair, which had been placed well out of the wind.  She would much rather have been in it.  She had a rug over her knees, and she knitted something or other:  they all knitted or sewed, and they watched others at play. When Mrs. Quest had said how much she loved a voyage, a good deal of what she loved was the games….  She always had… but had she, she wondered?  Well, she had always been a good sort, of course.  Now a good sort, obeying, as she always had, she played whist and bridge.

And this is the fate of a certain generation of women. Mrs. Quest goes along with the games and even pretends to have rewarding relationships with her children and grandchildren, as do the other women of her age. In reality, her family tolerates but does not love her. And Mrs. Quest wonders if this is true of any of the other old women.

Mind you, not all old women in Lessing’s books are tragic figures.  In her 1995  novel, Love, Again, Sarah Durham, a vigorous woman in her sixties, is  a writer and director of a small, prestigious theater. Then one days she happens to read the memoirs of a society woman, written in old age.

A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up.  Once, she would never even have opened a book by an old person: nothing to do with her, she had thought.

Of course Sarah does not lead the life of an “old woman.” Over the course of a summer in France, where the theater is rehearsing a production of a new play, Sarah falls in love for the first time in years.  She had forgotten the bloom and intensity of love. But iove is a challenge. Love is mortal. Love is irrelevant, Sarah thinks at the end of the summer.

In short, Sarah is an old woman of Lessing’s generation, who believed in themselves but were faced with the knowledge of a sell-by date in the eyes of others.  But Lessing’s Martha Quests and Sarah Durhams have more freedom than the Mrs. Quests: let us pray in this strange age that freedom will continue.

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.

The Reinvented Bildungsroman: Doris Lessing’s “The Summer Before the Dark” & “Children of Violence”; George Orwell’s “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”; and Louisa May Alcott’s “An Old-Fashioned Girl”

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 Like many avid readers of the bildungsroman, I have noted that coming-of-age novels never go out of fashion.  Not a week goes by that there is not a review of a new coming-of-age novel.  I often reread my favorites, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Mill on the Floss. My preference is for the nineteenth century novel; perhaps they did it better. Yet as I grow older, I appreciate the modern reinvention of the bildungsroman as a form that focuses on a transitional period, such as the beginning of middle- or old age.  

So what exactly do we mean by this term?  Doris Lessing insisted that her five-volume Children of Violence series was a bildungsroman.  The first four are naturalistic novels minutely documenting the life of the heroine, Martha Quest, up to the age of 30. But the fifth is problematic.

Many 20th-century women readers  identify with Martha’s desperate struggle to escape the limits of the family and geography that defined their parents’ generation.  The last book in the series, The Four-Gated City, is so experimental that it stands apart as a separate entity, and redefines the novel:  I love it, some hate it. it is the story of Martha in London from age 30 to old age, set against the history of radicalism and sexual politics in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  Lessing also explores the wobbly definition and treatment of madness, and ends with the kind of apocalypse that will doubtless happen, where all is confusion, and no one knows the origin. So is this novel part of the bildungsroman?  I’m not sure.

Lessing’s short 1973 bildungsroman, The Summer Before the Dark, is much more conventional. She focuses on one summer, the transition in Kate Brown’s life from busy, youngish wife and mother to middle age and independence.

That summer, her husband and grown-up children will be out of the country. So Kate is coerced into taking a job as a translator.  Soon she is translating not only Portuguese into English, but the conference-goers’ needs and insecurities into information and services.  And so she is upgraded to a manager, and realizes ironically that she is making a living out of her mothering skills.

Lessing, as well as Kate, wonders, Is this how Kate wants to spend the rest of her life?  As a professional mother?  And after the conference, during a month in a rented room in a hippie girl’s apartment, she changes her expectations, reads, and experiments with clothes: how do her looks affect how people see her?

Most important, she learns how to be middle-aged:  you learn to adapt and move on or are trapped in a role that no longer fits.

Needless to say, George Orwell has little in common with Lessing. I recently reread Orwell’s novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, because I remembered that it is set partly in a bookstore. I did not recall, however, that the raging hero, Gordon Comstock, quit his advertising job to avoid the “money stink.” This novel is essentially a comedy, but it is also about working for poverty wages in a used bookstore and the demands of money in our materialistic culture.  

In this mini-bildungsroman, Gordon is confronting (or avoiding?) the crisis of turning 30.  What do you do when you quit your well paid job in your late twenties and take a job at a second-hand bookstore, because you are too idealistic for the “money stink”?  Now he can barely afford to go out for a drink with his editor friend, Ravelston,  or take his girlfriend, Rosemary, to dinner, and he refuses to let them pay his way.   

Gordon is also a poet, the author of a slim volume of poetry, reviewed by prestigious publications.  He glares at the bookshop’s poetry section.  “His own wretched book was there – skied, of course, high up among the unsaleable.  Mice, by Gordon Comstock; a sneaky little foolscap octavo, price three and sixpence but now reduced to a bob.”

Gordon has lost his inspiration, and his new manuscript is a crossed-out, inky mess. Orwell comically describes Georges desperation for cigarettes, his inconvenient lodgings, and a drinking spree that gets him fired. – so he falls down even lower on the social ladder.  The question is:  can Ravelston, Rosemary, and his sister Juilia, who lives in genteel poverty, persuade him to take a job that pays?  His biological clock, or do I mean time bomb, is ticking:  what does one do at age 30

And now I will end on a lighter note. I am a fan of a little-known bildungsroman by Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, which is a kind of unraveling of a Vanity Fair, which the heroine radically rejects and shoots down. (Gordon in Keep the Aspidistra Flying would approve.) Alcott, who had a contract to write girls’ books, is often criticized for her tendency to “moralize.” Yet this criticism  reflects either ignorance or denial of her upbringing and idealism.   Her father,  Bronson Alcott, a Transcendentalist philosopher who socialized with Thoreau and Emerson,  not only  founded a vegetarian commune but  started a radical school open to students of all races – which, alas, was shut down.  In An Old-Fashioned Girl, Alcott pits the values of friendship and hard work against materialism and slavery to fashion. 

The impoverished  heroine, Polly, a lively country girl, is used to hard work and is close to her family.  On a visit to  the the Shaws, a nouveau riche family in the city, she is appalled by her worldly friend Fanny’s affectations.  Money drives the family’s inappropriate actions and shallow manners, but Polly quietly smooths the relationships among Fan, her “fractious” younger sister, Maud, and their neglected grandmother, who has marvelous stories to tell. 

As you can imagine, the lives of Polly and Fan differ in adulthood.  Polly become a hard-working music teacher, while Fanny is still absorbed in parties, fashion, and love. Polly introduces Fanny to her bohemian circle of artistic friends, a struggling group of  New England women striving to be taken seriously.   And Fanny is impressed.

Becky Jeffrey, a sculptress, lives with an engraver, Lizzie Small, in a small studio; Kate King is an authoress, struggling with her new novel; and Fanny’s landlady, Miss Mills, a philanthropist,  instead of living alone, rents rooms at low rates to impecunious people.

And Polly and Fanny do have to struggle to survive: they undergo radical changes and unforeseen difficulty. There is also romance.

And of course Alcott moralizes, but that doesn’t bother me in the least.

The Invisible Woman: “The Summer Before the Dark” by Doris Lessing

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   At  the age of eighteen, one of my favorite novels was Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark.  I went so far as to type up my favorite quotes and tape them on the mirror. Looking into the mirror, the heroine, Kate Brown, tries to figure out who she is, under all the gloss and expectations.  It made sense to me to read her words on the mirror, because at that time, Lessing’s novels were a template for my life.

This short, intelligent novel is what I call “Doris Lessing-lite.”  She explored this material in more detail in her masterpieces, The Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence series.  Kate Brown wonders what the point is. Women get points for being a good wife. They get more points for being a good mother.  They still get points for being a bad mother. But what happens when no one needs her?

Things get dicey if you are not a wife or mother, Lessing knew.  Many  disapproved of Lessing for divorcing her first husband and leaving their two children with him.  After her death, many women writers raged about her allegedly unmaternal feelings   And even though Lessing married a second time, and had a third child whom she raised,  these women were still enraged.  Astonishing, isn’t it, that some of those women considered themselves feminists?

Over the years, I have internalized Lessing’s doctrines to the point that I see connections between The Summer Before the Dark (1973)  with The Golden Notebook (1962) and the last half of The Four-Gated City (1969).  In all three  novels, the heroines question stereotypes, not just gender stereotypes, but the intricate, yet senseless mechanical organization of society.  

Kate Brown is in her forties, a little older than the heroines of Lessing’s ’60s books. In her summer before the dark, she is torn from her suburban home by her  husband, Michael, a doctor who plans to spend the summer in some medical research exchange in America: and she knows that he  will be unfaithful. One of Michael’s friends needs a translator of Portuguese for a world food conference, so instead of spending a leisurely summer thinking about her future and keeping the house open for her four grown-up children, she finds herself working overtime as a translator, and becoming beloved of her colleagues.

Kate learns that looks – the way she presents herself – define who she is.  She gets an expensive, gorgeous haircut and has her hair dyed the dramatic red it was when she was a girl.  She buys beautiful, eye-catching clothes.  Suddenly she is not just a stand-in but has administrative potential:  she is promoted to help the conference-goers with everything from where to buy a certain shampoo to getting an immediate appointment with a top medical expert. Her decades of maternal skills ironically have landed her in a job that pays a staggering amount of money.

But does she want to be a professional? In August, she travels to Spain with a younger man, a dropout in his thirties, who gets very ill.   During this horrible vacation, Kate realizes that her flirtatious friend, Mary, would never so much as have looked at this particular young man.  Kate knows  she should be spending the summer figuring out who she wants to be, not as a mother-figure to a young man in his thirties who is ill but also having a nervous breakdown.

And then, not surprisingly, Kate gets very sick.   And she ends up in a very expensive hotel in London, having a breakdown, because she has nowhere to go:  her house is rented till the the end of October.  At this expensive hotel, a young woman whose role is very like Kate’s administrative role at the conferences is assigned to take care of her.  And Kate realizes that rich people all over the world can buy this expensive care and expertise.

Kate loses sense of time. By the time she is recovering, she has become an invisible woman. She loses so much weight that her beautiful dresses hang on her, and her hair has grown out, frizzy with gray roots.  People mistake her for a madwoman, and honestly she is a bit mad.   


She goes into a greasy spoon restaurant where she is ignored by the waitress.  And she is so outraged after years of being treated as that special person, Mrs. Kate Brown, that she spills a glass of water on the table;  the waitress says she will change the tablecloth after Kate finishes her meal.  Kate wants to cry and scream.

She realizes she needs to learn how to be alone.  She rents a room in a basement apartment where she can have her breakdown without expensive intervention.

The basement is the opposite of Mr. Rochester’s mad wife’s attic.  In The Four-Gated City, the heroine Martha Quest has a breakdown in a basement apartment, where her employer’s mad wife, Linda, lives.  Lessing read Laing in the ’60s, and Martha and Linda are not mad but in touch with other realities that could help mankind.  The basement is significant:  closer to the earth?  More escapable?

Kate’s breakdown is a source of pain and grief.  She may not have wasted her life, but she has painted by the numbers.  She has never lived alone.  As a young girl, she devoted herself to finding a man.  She dropped out of college to get married. 


And then there is the issue of invisibility.  In her billowing clothes, she is an old woman, a stick figure.  Men ignore her, and she has always been noticed.  But when she wears a tight sheath given her by her roommate, the men look and ask her out. 

Before the summer is over, Kate will have to decide whether to work or return home. And if she goes home,  she will win back her status, but will she be able to hang onto herself? The Summer Before the Dark is not quite my jam anymore. But Kate’s life is more ordinary than Martha Quest’s or Anna Wulf’s, so I think this novel would be more relatable to new readers than her 1960s classics.


                           

More Summer Reading: Doris Lessing’s “The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five”

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On a summer reading scale of 1-10, how would I rate Doris Lessing’s science fiction novel, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, the second book in the Canopus in Argos series? Lessing is my favorite writer and I view her as a goddess; yet the title is so portentous that I was apprehensive about rereading. And I have not even typed the entire title yet: in tiny print, it goes on to say “as narrated by the Chroniclers of Zone Three.”

This short dogmatic fable (I know not what else to call it) is, in a way, about utopia and dystopia. The planet is broken up into five zones, which the jacket copy calls “indeterminate lands.” Zone Three is inhabited by sophisticated artists, singers, farmers, and craftsmen who live in peace and beauty. Like old hippies and the characters of John Updike’s fiction, they do not have monogamous relationships. Zone Four is ruled by a war lord and hence is always at war; it is also very poor and narrow-minded. Inhabitants rarely go from one zone to the other, mainly because the air is different, and they need special shields to breathe. But they also do not care about people from other cultures.

So when the “providers” (vague god-like beings we never meet) send a message to Queen Al-Ith of Zone Three that she must marry the military King Ben-Ata of Zone Four, all is topsy-turvy. Neither Al-Ith nor Ben-Ata wants this marriage. At first Al-Ith laughs, but Ben-Ata’s army meets Al-Ith and guides her to Zone Four, where she must live in a special house, which, before she teaches the rudiments of good taste to her husband and women friends, looks a bit like a bordello.

There is much unhappiness as a result of this culture clash, as you can imagine. I am still not sure what the providers were thinking! Al-Ith and Ben-Ati do not want to be together, and neither understands the other. But gradually Al-Ith teaches Ben-Ata that there is more to life than war. She thinks they are together because both zones have experienced low birth rates and illness among humans and animals, and their procreation of a child must be the purpose. Al-Ith’s teachings about art benefit Zone Four, but it is difficult to see what Zone Four gives Zone Three. The rebellious women of Zone Four do introduce her to their secret festivals, which are reminiscent of the rites of Bacchus recast as a women’s music festival.

And yet the outcome of Al-Ith’s travel to Zone Four is sad. She becomes an outcast when she goes home to Zone Three…an outcast with a purpose. But it is still tragic. As for Zone Five, I have not the energy to describe it, but it plays a very small role.

This is a clunkier book than Shikasta, but I do recognize Lessing’s themes and repetition of character from earlier novels: the heroine Martha Quest can be clearly seen in Al-Ith, particularly when it comes to politics and sex. (Martha is intensely radical before and during World War II, but she doesn’t discover good sex until Landlocked, the fourth book in the Children of Violence series.)

Doris Lessing said that she found “space fiction” freeing. In the preface to the first book in the series, Shikasta, she wrote: “The old realistic novel is being changed, too, because of influences from that genre loosely described as space fiction. Some people [in academia] regret this…. Space fiction, with science fiction, makes up the most original branch of literature now; it is inventive and witty; it has already enlivened all kinds of writing…”

By the way, Philip Glass wrote an opera, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, with a libretto by Doris Lessing , translated into German. It premiered in Heidelberg, Germany on 10 May, 1997. (See photo below.)

Lessing wrote brilliant science fiction in the late sixties and early seventies. My favorites are The Four-Gated City (the last part of this realistic novel segues into SF) and Memoirs of a Survivor. But I must say The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is very slight. I read it quickly, and it went by like a summer breeze. I will have forgotten it by next week. If I were to give it a number…well, it would have to be Zone Three! No, really, did you think I would rate it with a number?

Doris Lessing Gets It Right: The Future of Earth (“Shikasta”)

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Doris Lessing

First, I must insist that Nobel winner Doris Lessing gets it right in her “space fiction.” In her neglected 1979 novel, Shikasta – the official title is unnecessarily wordy, Canopus in Argos: Archives Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta – she unflinchingly relates the history and the future doom of Earth ( Shikasta), borrowing freely from myth and the Old Testament. The hero, Johor, a quasi-angelic agent from the galactic empire Canopus, shapes human history at the Edenic beginning of Earth, and works even harder to correct its course after agents of Shamat, a criminal (quasi-devil) planet, corrupt the humans. And so, more or less, angels and devils, inhabitants of planets with different systems of belief, compete for the good and bad in Earth/Shikasta.

You’ve got to settle in slowly at first, but soon you’ll be turning the pages. The mythic and Old Testament origin stories, the versions of the flood myth and the Tower of Babel, are clever but can be monotonous; the pace picks up when Lessing reaches the twentieth century and then unfolds the drama of a future that we are beginning to experience. Many of the characters, who shudder at the prospect of returning to Shikasta after death but must line up to be reborn, become activists in their new lives and struggle to help the starving, uneducated, sickly masses.

You will recognize the problems killing this planet : climate change, melting polar ice caps, poisoned water, polluted air, droughts, epidemics, World Wars, overpopulation, dictatorships, famine, genocide, the dominance of the military, poverty, riots, bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. In fact, this is almost our present, and this future was already irreversible in 1979 when Shikasta was published. Certainly we were well- informed about the environment, but the culture of fossil fuels was out of our control – particularly because we could never, as Lessing says, quite “take it in.”

Shikasta was the first of five books in the Canopus in Argos series. In general the critics disliked these novels, especially Ursula K. Le Guin, who, having traversed the same territory in some of her anthropological science fiction, perhaps felt competitive: she complained that Shikasta read like a debut science fiction novel. George Stade of the New York Times mocked Lessing’s SF but said she succeeds when her storytelling trumps her rants. And then he adds that he prefers the theosophic rants of D. H. Lawrence to Lessing’s. (Oh my God, I wonder if he ever suffered the rants in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. And I’m a fan of Lawrence!)

Well, no one likes a doomsayer, and Lessing is hardly an optimist. In the Iliad no one likes the Greek guy who tells the ugly truth. And I wonder if Lessing’s thorough documentation, written in the form of official reports, documents, letters, and journals, might have not only have bored some readers but upset them. It was too literary for science fiction readers, and too SF-y for literary readers.

Lessing reworks some of the material from her 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City, which is three-fourths bildungsroman and one-fourth science fiction. One of the characters, Lynda Coldridge, who has spent years in psychiatric hospitals but actually has a kind of supernatural ability to know things others did not, appears in Shikasta. A psychiatrist asks Lynda to writer about her illness: her papers tell us that “hearing voices” was more of a sixth sense killed and distorted by psychiatric care. And so Lynda and the psychiatrist fight heir own underground resistance movement as they look for others like Lynda.

The most important character in the novel is George (the agent Johor, the being from a superior planet who has helped Earth for millennia). He has been painfully reborn into a human body, so that he may help the luckless, starving, and ignorant by telling them thing that matter, cheering them up and helping them survive. But on one of his many walking tours (fuel is scarce and so is transportation), he writes a letter to his girlfriend Suzannah about his qualms.

…and when talk starts about the awfulness, then it is as if people are not hearing. Not that they are not listening. Not hearing. They can’t believe it. Well sometimes I look back and it is such a little time, and I can’t believe it. I think that dreadfulness happens somewhere else. I don’t know how to say that. I mean, when awful things happen, even to the extent we have all just seen, then our minds don’t take them in. Not really. there is a gap between people saying hello, have a glass of water, and then bombs falling or laser beams scorching the world to cinders. That is why no on seemed able to prevent the dreadfulness. They couldn’t take it in.

Today there are many Shikastans suffering: that has hit home during the pandemic. As Johor says, we thought “that dreadfulness happens somewhere else.” This is not Lessing’s best book , but it is a very interesting one. And that is the reason to read it.

Two Depressing Novels: Dima Wannous’ “The Frightened Ones” & Doris Lessing’s “The Diary of a Good Neighbour”

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I cannot identify my favorite critics: I barely seem to register their names. That astounds me, and yet it must be common for those who read many book reviews.

For instance, The New York Review of Books recently published a review of Dima Wannous’ The Frightened Ones, a short, tragic Syrian novel which I would not otherwise have heard of – and yet I did not look at the name of the reviewer. In this delicate novel, two damaged people who have survived the Syrian revolution meet in a psychiatrist’s office. The sullen Naseem, a brooding writer who ought to have a DANGER warning on his lapel, wordlessly invites Suleima, a shy 40-year-old woman, out for drinks. Between drinks, they slice pills and pop them: these are prescription pills, not the recreational drugs of Bright Lights, Big City.

Identity becomes an urgent question for Suleima when she is unable to find Naseem’s books in a bookstore. He publishes under a pseudonym; his books are everywhere. He decides to leave Syria and gives her an unfinished manuscript of a novel – which is about her! If you’re depressed, like Suleima, you will soon descend into hell (and she’s already been there). In alternate chapters, we read Suleima’s narrative and Naseem’s book about her. The weight of history, her own, Naseem’s, and the country’s, is almost unbearable… And the two stories intertwine and get mixed up.

And so should I thank the critic, Lydia Wilson, a Research Associate at the Computer Laboratory and in Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge and a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford? (I looked her up.) It is a tribute to her that I read The Frightened Ones, but I must stress that I was not the ideal reader.

Then, as if I were not depressed enough, I picked up Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour. This smart, realistic novel is one of two she published under the pseudonym Jane Somers. It was an experiment: she wanted to see whether critics recognized her style without her name brand (they did not) and what reception they would give a “new” writer.

Lessing writes, “One of my aims has more than succeeded. It seems I am like Barbara Pym! The books are fastidious, well-written, well-crafted. Unsparing, unsentimental and deeply felt. Funny, too. On the other hand they are sentimental, and mawkish. Mere soap opera. Trendy.”

Lessing’s books are always remarkable, whether under her brand or not. So should I trust the critics? Apparently not!

Let me stress that I did not remember The Diary of a Good Neighbour was depressing until I embarked on it this week. It wasn’t depressing when I was younger! The Diary deals with the problems of old age, which became grim and apparent to me during my mother’s illnesses and at the end of her life. Lessing’s heroine, Janna, is a middle aged, glamorous assistant editor of a women’s magazine. Her husband died, and she regrets she never really tried to talk to him. She keeps her relationships superficial. She did not take care of her mother or grandmother when they were dying: that task was her sister’s. Janna’s whole life is work.

By chance at the drugstore one night, she meets 90-year-old Maudie Fowler, a bent-over witch-like woman whose nose practically hooks down to her chin. Maudie wants aspirin, rather than the prescription pills that “deaden” her, and charming Janna expedites the transaction. Then Janna accompanies Maudie home to her rent-controlled basement flat – which is filthy, cold, and has treacherous old electric fixtures, a coal fire, and an outdoor lavatory.

Maudie refuses to go to a nursing home, or to welcome volunteers called “Good Neighbors.” Doing good has fallen into Janna’s hands. She brings groceries, calls an electrician, buys her new underwear, nad chats for hours to Maudie. Both women genuinely enjoy their conversation, but when Janna returns home, she spends hours washing the terrible smell off her body and clothes. Maudie’s flat reeks of urine, unwashed clothes, and worse. And yet Janna is now responsible for her.

Perhaps what interests me most this time round is Janna’s personal experiences. When her only friend, Joyce, the editor of the magazine, decides to follow her unfaithful husband to America, Janna understands that she has unwittingly been part of Joyce’s marriage for years: without Janna at the office, Joyce would never have had the flexible hours to work at home , save her marriage (though it is very bad), and raise her (horrible) two children. The loss of Joyce is more terrible for Janna than was her husband’s death. Poor Janna grieves.

I look forward to moving on to Jane Somers’s more cheerful second book, If the Old Could, in which Jane falls in love. Love is more sprightly somehow, though this is not a happy book, either.

But it’s Lessing. I mean Jane Somers! And so I must read it.

Do you ever come upon a book that is almost too depressing to read? This seldom happens to me, but when it does…

Not a Covid-19 Dystopia:  Doris Lessing’s “The Memoirs of a Survivor”

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We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others.  Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared, and the repetition, the listening, is as if we are saying, “It was like that for you, too?  Then that confirms it, yes, it was so, it must have been, I wasn’t imagining things.”–Doris Lessing’s “The Memoirs of a Survivor”

This weekend I reread Doris Lessing’s  beautifully-written novel The Memoirs of a Survivor, because I needed to get my bearings in an increasingly unreal world.  I was in need of comfort, in fact in need of a “cozy catastrophe.” After rattling the pages of the daily newspaper and perusing the record number of Covid-19 cases, I was embarrassed by the government’s inability to protect us as numbers spike after a huge number of unwise state reopenings.  I was also embarrassed that we are practically a third-world country in the view of the world now, and banned from traveling to other countries. (Not a good time to travel, but still.)  I longed to escape into an alternate chronicle of the fall of civilization–which is and isn’t happening here and elsewhere.

Lessing gets everything right, on a metaphorical level.  In another way, she gets very little right.  Of course this is fiction, a kind of dream-like fable, in which it is possible to survive the fall of civilization and travel through walls to other times.  There are epidemics, but that is only one cause of the disintegration.

The narrator, a middle-class older woman who lives in a comfortable flat in London, describes the crisis known in her times as “it.” There are food shortages: people get tips from each other on where to get potatoes, imitation meat, and other necessities. Official sources of news are unreliable, though the government still exists in a talking-heads way.   Hardly anybody bothers with electricity, though the narrator has running water. Squatters move into empty hotels and houses in the narrator’s neighborhood, and gangs of young people, some of them cannibals, many of them armed, pass through and camp on the pavements, sometimes for days, finally leaving for the north.  And then the residents of the neighborhood sigh with relief.  But soon they, too, are thinking of joining the gangs and traveling with them.

And into the narrator’s life comes Emily, a 12-year-old girl dropped off at her flat one day by a strange man who says she is now the Emily’s guardian. Emily is inseparable from her pet, Hugo, which looks part dog, part cat, and which is really part of her personality.  Much of the book talks about the rapid coming-of-age of Emily:  soon she is known as “Gerald’s girl,” the girlfriend of one of the gang leaders who has a house in the neighborhood.  But just as easily Emily could have led a gang herself, the narrator muses, as she is the one  with the most information about where to get what.    And the narrator believes the catastrophe has crushed the years of the struggle for women’s rights.  Women are content to be in second place now.

Lessing tries to define the crisis she calls “it.”  She writes,

For ‘it’ is a force, a power, taking the form of an earthquake, a visiting comet whose balefulness hangs closer night by night, distorting all thought by fear–‘it’ can be, has been, pestilence, a war, the alteration of climate, a tyranny that twists men’s minds, the savagery of a religion.

And, much to our surprise, she explains the government is still at work. 

All this time, while ordinary life simply dissolved away, or found new shapes, the structure of government continued, though heavy and cumbersome and becoming all the time more ramified….  What government really did was to adjust itself to events, while pretending, probably even to itself, that it initiated them.

Although Lessing hated people to interpret her books as autobiography, I do recognize some scenes from her Children of Violence (Martha Quest) series  and her autobiography.   

But I agree that is the wrong way to read her books.  I’ve always loved this novel, but this time I was reading for directions.