The Memoirs of a Survivor | Thornfield Hall

One of these days crying may be forbidden. Good girls don’t cry. Survival will depend on the politics of water.

I used to cry a lot when I was very young. Red, swollen eyes the next day. Calling in sick, because who can go to work looking like that? But I’m in a different phase now. Menopause was a gift: I rarely cry anymore. Was it all hormones?

But I wept a bit after beginning Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, the first of a trilogy. In the postapocalyptic future, the narrator, Snowman, recalls that they used to have fall.

That broke me up. I’ve been thinking a lot about fall. Will there be a real autumn this year?

Fall comes later and later. The leaves didn’t change till November last year.

“It’s not effing Vermont, but I expect something,” I commented.

The world’s on fire. It’s hot: 95 degrees. No smoke from the wildfires this week, but it might be back.

“If you’d read science fiction, you wouldn’t be surprised, ” I said to a friend. To tell you the truth, I am surprised, though. But many SF writers, especially those of the ’60s and ’70s, were able to make sense of what makes no sense. They were imaginative, but they also seemed to have special knowledge. They put together politics with technology and climate change.

And so I’ve been thinking about favorite dystpian novels. I highly recommend Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune (1965), set on a desert planet. Herbert focuses on the politics of water. The rich colonists enjoy the luxury of abundance of water, but the Fremen, the natives, must wear special “stillsuits” that recycle their bodily fluids. Paul, the son of a Duke who is assassinated by invaders, joins the Fremen, learns how to survive in the desert, and helps them fight. There is also an ecologist who has plans to “green” the planet by scientifically growing certain plants.

My favorite SF novel, and one of my favorite novels, is The Sheep Look up (1972), by John Brunner. I also recommend this to fans of literary fiction. This postmodern classic focuses on the politics of water, the toxicity of the contaminated food chain, and the rise of illness and epidemics. Lakes, rivers, and seas are contaminated, there are Don’t Drink the Water Days, fines for not washing your hands, and a water shortage in Denver, where the the water level of lakes and rivers has dwindled. (That is happening now in Colorado.) Brunner’s style is brilliant and the structure of the novel is experimental. He’s living in the world of John Barth and Frank Herbert.

I always go back to Doris Lessing’s beautifully-written novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), set in London in a near future, or perhaps a parallel present. Society is breaking down, but the newspapers publish little information. People chat in public and share what they know about where to buy potatoes and other necessities. No one has a clue what kind of disaster has happened, but people are leaving the city.

Parts of this are surreal. Sometimes the narrator senses a life beyond the walls of her flat. And then one day a man enters the flat and tells her she must take care of a young girl, Emily, who is brittle, anxious, and too vivaciou. Yet she knows more about this new world than the narrator. Gangs of dangerous young people camp in the streets before going north. All the residents in the neighborhood are terrified. .The narrator knows she and Emily must leave the city, but where should they go? No one ever comes back. Emily becomes involved with one of the leaders of the young people, and gradually switches roles with fthe narrator. She is now the adult with access to information and supplies. There is a happy, surreal ending. There’s no way out without the surreal.

Paradoxically, dystopian novels can cheer us up. It’s because these brilliant writers see a complexity of politics and ecology that we could not unravel on our own. Not that I can unravel it! But without these books I’d be terrified and in dystopian denial.

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.