Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

CONTEMPORARY WORLD WRITERS

SERIES EDITOR JOHN THIEME

ALREADY PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES

Peter Carey BRUCE WOODCOCK

Amitav Ghosh ANSHUMAN MONDAL

Maxine Hong Kingston HELENA GRICE

Kazuo Ishiguro BARRY LEWIS

Hanif Kureishi BART MOORE-GILBERT

David Malouf DON RANDALL

Rohinton Mistry PETER MOREY

Timothy Mo ELAINE YEE LIN HO

Toni Morrison JILL MATUS

Alice Munro CORAL ANN HOWELLS

Les Murray STEVEN MATTHEWS

Michael Ondaatje LEE SPINKS

Caryl Phillips BÉNÉDICTE LEDENT

Amy Tan BELLA ADAMS

Ngugi wa Thiong’o PATRICK WILLIAMS

Derek Walcott JOHN THIEME

Salman Rushdie ANDREW TEVERSON

R. K. Narayan JOHN THIEME

Doris Lessing

SUSAN WATKINS

Copyright © Susan Watkins 2010

The right of Susan Watkins to be identified as the author of this work has

been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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ISBN 978 0 7190 7481 3

First published 2010

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Contents

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHRONOLOGY

1 Contexts and intertexts

2 Going ‘home’: exile and nostalgia in the writing of Doris Lessing

3 The politics of loss: melancholy cosmopolitanism

4 The voice of authority?

5 Writing in a minor key: Doris Lessing’s late-twentieth-century fiction

6 Sweet dreams and rememories: narrating nation and identity

7 Critical overview and conclusion

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Series editor’s foreword

Contemporary World Writers is an innovative series of authoritative introductions to a range of culturally diverse contemporary writers from outside Britain and the United States or from ‘minority’ backgrounds within Britain or the United States. In addition to providing comprehensive general introductions, books in the series also argue stimulating original theses, often but not always related to contemporary debates in post-colonial studies.

The series locates individual writers within their specific cultural contexts, while recognising that such contexts are themselves invariably a complex mixture of hybridised influences. It aims to counter tendencies to appropriate the writers discussed into the canon of English or American literature or to regard them as ‘other’.

Each volume includes a chronology of the writer’s life, an introductory section on formative contexts and intertexts, discussion of all the writer’s major works, a bibliography of primary and secondary works and an index. Issues of racial, national and cultural identity are explored, as are gender and sexuality. Books in the series also examine writers’ use of genre, particularly ways in which Western genres are adapted or subverted and ‘traditional’ local forms are reworked in a contemporary context.

Contemporary World Writers aims to bring together the theoretical impulse which currently dominates post-colonial studies and closely argued readings of particular authors’ works, and by so doing to avoid the danger of appropriating the specifics of particular texts into the hegemony of totalising theories.

Acknowledgements

I read my first Doris Lessing novel, Martha Quest, in the third year of my English degree at Liverpool University. It was a set text on a course called ‘The Art of the Novel’, taught by Simon Dentith. I continued working on Lessing’s fiction as part of my PhD thesis and in my first single-authored book, Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice (2001), included sections on The Golden Notebook and the short story ‘To Room Nineteen’. I have taught Lessing’s work often and continue to think that her writing is ambitious and thought provoking, if often misunderstood. Students’ reactions to her work have often endorsed this perception and I would particularly like to thank the students on my MA Contemporary Literatures module – ‘Doris Lessing: Narrating Nation and Identity’ – for their insights and open-mindedness.

My motivation for writing this book was to try to understand Lessing’s writing as part of a continued engagement with colonialism, decolonisation, race, nation and empire; I also wanted to consider how Lessing’s work connects these ideas with concepts of gender, class and age.

This book was finished during a period of research leave funded by the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in semester 2, 2008–9 and I would like to thank the School for supporting the project. In 2004 I gave a paper at the First International Doris Lessing Conference in New Orleans and met several US Lessing scholars: Judith Kegan Gardiner, Debrah Raschke, Roberta Rubenstein, Phyllis Perrakis, Sandra Singer and Christine Sizemore have all been particularly supportive of my work and I would like to thank them here. I would also like to thank the School for funding my attendance at the Conference.

In 2007 I organised the Second International Conference on Lessing’s work at Leeds Metropolitan University. The School of Cultural Studies hosted this event and supported it financially, as did the Doris Lessing Society. The Conference was a wonderful creative and intellectual spur for this book. I would like to thank several people for their help during the Conference: Pat Cook and Elaine Newsome provided invaluable administrative support. All the members of the steering group of CWWN (Contemporary Women’s Writing Network), particularly Professors Lucie Armitt, Mary Eagleton and Clare Hanson and Dr Alice Ridout, gave of their intellectual input, time and moral support during the stressful period of the Conference itself, as did the members of the English Literature team at Leeds Met. I would particularly like to thank Mary and Alice for their friendship and for many interesting discussions about Lessing, and also John Thieme, series editor for Contemporary World Writers, for his enthusiasm for Lessing’s work and this book. Lastly, I want to thank Ian Strange for his support and encouragement always.

Earlier versions of particular sections of chapters 2, 4, 5 and 6 previously appeared in the following places: Susan Watkins, ‘Going Home: Exile and Nostalgia in the Writing of Doris Lessing’, in Women’s Writing 1945–60: After the Deluge, ed. Jane Dowson, 2003, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 191–204, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; ‘The Jane Somers Hoax: Aging, Gender and the Literary Marketplace’, in Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, eds Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins, London: Continuum, 2009, pp. 75–91, reproduced with permission of Continuum; ‘Writing in a Minor Key’, Doris Lessing Studies, 25, 2, 2006, 6–10; ‘Writing in a Minor Key: Doris Lessing’s Late Twentieth-Century Fiction’, in Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times, eds. Phyllis Perrakis, Debrah Raschke and Sandra Singer, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010, reproduced with permission of Ohio State University Press; ‘Grande Dame or New Woman?: Doris Lessing and the Palimpsest", LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 17, 3–4, 2006, 243–62, reproduced with permission of Taylor and Francis; Susan Watkins, ‘Remembering Home: Nation and Identity in the Recent Writing of Doris Lessing’, 2007, Feminist Review, 85, 97–115, reproduced with permission of Palgrave.

Chronology

1

Contexts and intertexts

Doris Lessing’s In Pursuit of the English (1960) provides an excellent point of entry into the extensive body of her work. It also allows us to begin to understand some of the contexts and intertexts that have been important in her writing. Issues of exile and migration are at the centre of this text and her work as a whole, suggesting the importance, but also the instability, of identity. Lessing is interested in ideas about class, nation, ‘race’ and gender, but, more importantly, in the links between these concepts and in the ways they overlap with and merge into one another. The generic indeterminacy of In Pursuit brings to the fore Lessing’s critical relation to the constraints of genre and her qualified suspicion of categories like realism and experimentalism, fiction and autobiography. Her constructive and complex use of autobiographical material also creatively interacts with, indeed generates, her interest in the writer or artist both as figure in and producer of the text.

In Pursuit is based on Lessing’s experiences on first arriving in England from Southern Rhodesia and trying to find somewhere to live. She also writes about this period of her life in the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997) and in The Four-Gated City (1969), the final novel in the five-volume Children of Violence sequence (1952–69). However, unlike official autobiography or fiction, In Pursuit is generically rather indeterminate. Originally subtitled ‘a documentary’, the text is part memoir, part autobiographical essay and part fiction. Lessing describes it variously as ‘biography in a comic mode’¹ but also as ‘more like a novel’.² It is written in the first person and on occasion the narrator is referred to as ‘Doris’; however, in Walking in the Shade Lessing describes the text as ‘true … but not as true as what I would write now … it is too well-shaped for life’.³ In Pursuit is, as Louise Yelin makes clear, rich in intertexts. In its focus on one London house as a microcosm of English society it draws on and also satirises a long-established literary convention whereby the well-to-do country estate encapsulates English values and customs. It also alludes to the tradition (variously philanthropic, documentary and critical) of writing about the working class represented by works as various as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861), George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957).⁴

Events in In Pursuit take place in 1949–50, the period of ‘austerity Britain’,⁵ characterised by dependence on food imports (leading to continued rationing), economic hardship and a housing crisis in London as a result of the Blitz. The third Labour government (1945–51) undertook a significant programme of nationalisation of British industry, created the National Health Service and introduced national insurance. The Labour government is unpopular, however, with most of the characters in the text. Doris’s landlady, Flo, is equivocal about free-at-point-of-need medical care because it brings with it women from ‘the Welfare’, who snoop on her parenting skills. The foreman repairing bomb damage to Doris’s rooms thinks that things are no different under a Labour government and that ‘what the Government gives with one hand … it takes back with the other’.⁶ However, by the end of the text, ‘austerity Britain’ gradually begins to give way to 1950s culture, which is signalled by the coming of television and the era of the teenager. The communal warmth of the kitchen-dining room, where enormous Italian meals were served and suggestive banter was rife, is replaced by ‘food that could be eaten off people’s knees as they watched’ and ironic teenage backchat ‘from the telly’ (224) that the older generation doesn’t understand.

The title of the text suggests that ‘Doris’ is looking for ‘the English’ and she admits that she also wanted to write a piece called ‘In Pursuit of the Working-Class’ (6). What Lessing does not pursue explicitly, but is in fact preoccupied with, is the other women renting rooms in the house where she is living. ‘Doris’ is a single mother who initially needs a job in order to survive: issues of work outside and inside the home are at the forefront of the lives of all the women characters. Mrs Skeffington, for example, is a victim of domestic violence who is exhausted by her daughter’s night-time crying and is desperate enough to abort her unwanted pregnancy. She works full time outside the home. The landlady, Flo, neglects her daughter Aurora because she wants to return to restaurant work. Rose, who becomes the narrator’s close friend, has an unsatisfactory on–off relationship with Flo’s brother-in-law Dickie and is uncertain about the impact of agreeing to pre-marital sex on her chances of marriage. She works outside the home in a shop, does unpaid housework for Flo and teases ‘Doris’ for her slovenly domestic ways, which are the consequence of her privileged colonial background, where housework was done by servants. Miss Privet, who is befriended by the narrator at the end of the text, is a prostitute who believes that her job is the only one with real security for women (218). The narrator never really finds the English working class that she is in pursuit of; instead she finds a community of women who are all, in their different ways, trying to negotiate different kinds of work: emotional, sexual and domestic. Maybe these women are the ‘working class’ that Doris seeks? The transition from post-war austerity culture to the 1950s is also marked clearly in terms of gender. Doris’s landlady asks ‘Welfare’ if her daughter could go to a council nursery: ‘But the reply was that Flo had a nice home and it was better for small children to be with their mothers. Besides, the council nurseries were closing down. Women marry to have children, said the official when Flo said she was trained for restaurant work and wanted to go back to it’ (125). Changes in attitudes to women working outside the home and the closure of state nurseries that opened during the war suggest that the domesticity of the 1950s is clearly on the horizon.

1949–50 was also a period of changes in the composition of Britain’s cities and in what remained of the British empire. These developments also altered ideas about nationality. Shortages in the workforce led to increasing immigration from the Caribbean from 1948 onwards and the idea of ‘Commonwealth’ replaced that of empire as a consequence of processes of decolonisation after the Second World War. According to Louise Yelin, the 1948 British Nationality Act ‘distinguished two classes of British subjects: citizens of the United Kingdom and its colonies – in effect, white colonials – and Commonwealth citizens’; over a decade later, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act ‘restricted immigration on the part of black Africans, West Indians and South Asians but not on the part of white former colonials’.⁷ Lessing’s essay is set the year after the British Nationality Act took effect and was first published in 1960, just before the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill was passed. It is clear, therefore, that this legislation can provide a framework for In Pursuit: in the decade between the year when the essay is set and its date of publication racial violence increased, finally resulting in rioting in Notting Hill, where In Pursuit takes place. Yelin suggests that ‘ethnic nationalism, in which race, culture and ethnicity play a primary role’ began to dominate ideas of Englishness in this period;⁸ John McLeod claims that ideas of national identity deriving from place of birth are replaced in the 1950s by those deriving from inherited lineage and blood-lines.⁹ However, exactly how the text deals with these changes has been disputed. Yelin claims that the text ‘largely ignores’ issues of race and immigration from the Caribbean and that this is ‘only in part’ because it is set prior to the worst episodes of racial violence and organised opposition to immigration. She argues that the text’s significant project is to establish Lessing’s Englishness and her status as an English writer.¹⁰ In contrast, McLeod prefers to see the text as offering a challenge to ‘exclusionary models of English identity’, a challenge which Lessing recognises as particularly necessary in the climate of 1960, after a decade when ‘race rose to prominence as the key arbiter of identity and belonging’.¹¹

It is certainly the case that the narrator’s focus in In Pursuit is on ideas of Englishness and foreignness defined in terms that avoid an emphasis on skin colour or contemporary definitions of ‘race’. This could be seen as a regrettable omission that springs from the privileged perspective of colonial whiteness, or a deliberate refusal of emerging models of national identity defined in terms of ‘race’. Undoubtedly, Lessing’s concern is to establish the shifting, transient nature of Englishness, but also its enduring mythical power. She begins the essay with a series of comic vignettes about her father that typify the stereotype of the English eccentric, but focuses on what Englishness is not more than on what it is. She establishes the extent to which Englishness is not commensurate with Britishness by contrasting her father with her mother, who ‘would refer to herself as Scottish or Irish according to what mood she was in, but not, as far as I can remember, as English’ (2). She lists the variety of meanings ‘English’ might have in a colony:

In the colonies or Dominions, people are English when they are sorry they ever emigrated in the first place; when they are glad they emigrated but consider their roots are in England; when they are thoroughly assimilated into the local scene and would hate ever to set foot in England again; and even when they are born colonial but have an English grandparent. This definition is sentimental and touching. When used by people not English, it is accusatory. My parents were English because they yearned for England, but knew they could never live in it again because of its conservatism, narrowness and tradition. They hated Rhodesia because of its newness, lack of tradition, of culture. They were English, also, because they were middle-class in a community working-class. (8)

Englishness is therefore a mirage, a fiction, made up of contradictions and only present via absence. The things the narrator’s parents long for about England (tradition, culture) are those things they miss in Southern Rhodesia, but also precisely the things they repudiated in England and that prompted them to leave. The final return to ideas about class and nationality only serves to substitute one lacunae or aporia for another: just before this passage, the narrator summarises her fruitless search for the working class. Communist Party (CP) ideology (with which the narrator has become increasingly involved) rejects a number of her potential contenders for the ‘genuine’ working class: first of all the native African population, who, she is told, are not working class but ‘semi-urbanized peasants’; second, the Londoners she shares a house with during her first year in England (presumably the characters we are later introduced to in the text), who, she is told, are not working class but ‘lumpen proletariat, tainted by petty bourgeois ideology’ (7); third, those members of the CP who themselves come from working-class backgrounds, who are ‘not typical’; fourth, miners, who ‘are members of a very specialized, traditionalized trade’ and ‘nothing whatsoever to do with the working-class as a whole’ (7–8). Finally she is told, with much irony, to take a trip back to Africa ‘where the black masses are not yet corrupted by industrialism’ (8), which returns her to where she started.

This circuitous route through a number of potential definitions of the ‘working class’ gives the reader an early clue to the result of the narrator’s pursuit of ‘the English’. ‘Doris’ describes herself as an ‘exile’ (2) and an ‘alien’ (6) and imagines England as a ‘grail’ (9). She insists that Englishness can only be understood by those on the periphery of the Commonwealth, stating that ‘the definitive thesis on Virginia Woolf will come, not from Cambridge, but from Cape Town’ (30). Yelin argues that her exile status actually allows the narrator ‘a privileged state of being in which she is English even if she has never been to England’.¹² In contrast, I would suggest that the perception of herself as enjoying a privileged outsider perspective actually allows her to recognise the insubstantiality but also the emotive and hegemonic power of most claims to authentic Englishness, including her own. This is an important discovery for narrator and reader in the opening chapter of the text.

As we continue reading, ‘Doris’ finds somewhere to live and begins to get to know better both the people she is sharing a house with and the area of London in which she is living. It becomes clear to her that her understanding of Englishness as flimsy and precarious is shared by Rose, her closest friend, who is unable to successfully define Englishness. She explains and defends Flo’s practice of attempting to charge extortionate rents, saying ‘It’s because she’s a foreigner, it’s not her fault’ (56). When ‘Doris’ presses her to explain what ‘kind’ of a foreigner Flo is, the following exchange ensues:

‘I’m not saying anything against her; don’t think it. She’s English really. She was born here. But her grandmother was Italian, see? She comes from a restaurant family. So she behaves different. And then the trouble is, Dan, isn’t a good influence – not that I’m saying a word against him.’

‘Isn’t he English?’

‘Not really, he’s from Newcastle. They’re different from us, up in places like that. Oh no, he’s not English, not properly speaking.’

‘And you?’

She was confused at once. ‘Me dear? But I’ve lived in London all my life. Oh, I see what you mean – I wouldn’t say I was English so much as a Londoner, see? It’s different.’ (56–7)

Later on, Rose refers back to this conversation:

‘I’m from London, as I told you. That’s what I