“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.
