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Book Review: Under My Skin - Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing

Like most avid readers, I am hard-pressed to choose a writer I would call my “favorite”. It’s like asking Moses his favorite commandment; or, more appropriately, asking an Atkins Diet reject his/her favorite chocolate bar. The [literary, not chocolate] bar is just too high and picking a singular author as one’s most beloved is a nearly insurmountable task. If one is lucky enough to be able to name a favorite, that too raises all sorts of questions. Will every other writer one reads now be compared to the favored? Will works by other writers always be disappointing? What if the preferred author writes something positively craptastic? Does that change everything? Is choosing a favorite a fixed thing, or is it changeable, subject to one’s whims and preferences at any given time? Is it possible to have more than one favorite?

These are tough questions to answer, and I don’t have much insight into the answers. All I know is that there are a handful of authors that I absolutely adore, and though I can’t pick an ultimate favorite from the list, they all hold a special place in my book-lovin’ heart.

Near the top of my list has got to be the name of Doris Lessing. I am a fairly recent Lessing fan, having been turned onto her work after she won last year’s Nobel Prize. And I will admit, even though I’d heard of her and was intrigued by some of her titles, the only reason I began my love affair with all things Lessing was her reaction to winning the Nobel. Coming home from a morning of grocery shopping, the then-87-year-old writer was bombarded with press waiting outside her north London home. When told she had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Lessing responded, “Oh Christ!…I couldn’t care less!…I’m 88 years old, and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.”"

As you might expect, this bit of octogenarian snarkery forever endeared me to Ms. Lessing (for the record, her official acceptance of the prize was much more gracious). And so I went forth and picked up my first Lessing book, the one I had always been most interested in reading, The Golden Notebook.

Now I’ve mentioned before on this here blog how much I totally, completely love The Golden Notebook. It is one of those rare books that reached into the very core of my being and experience and shook me vigorously. It is challenging, troubling, inspiring, and probably the most intelligent piece of literature I’ve ever read. It is often hailed as a feminist classic, for reasons I can certainly understand, but there’s much more to this important book than just a rogue act of feminism. There is a universal humanity to this story, something to which we can all relate, especially any of us in a marginalized population who’ve ever felt fragmented and inauthentic in our relationship with the world. The Golden Notebook was life-changing for me, but, perhaps more importantly, it made me feel less alone in my struggle. For that reason alone I will always love Doris Lessing.

Since The Golden Notebook, I’ve read nearly all of Lessing’s earlier work. I still have not had the balls to approach her later science fiction (”space fiction”, as she calls it), due to my reading impairment, an impairment that is known in medical circles as being “SciFi-challenged”. I will get to Lessing’s space fiction one day, not because I’m waiting for a miracle pill that will cure my impairment and suddenly make spaceships, aliens, and intergalactic war more palatable — but simply because it’s Lessing.

Reading any of Ms. Lessing’s work, you can feel the pull of autobiography tugging at the storylines. I think we, as readers, are always trying to glimpse a bit of an author (especially a favored one) in his/her stories, and some make that task easier than others. Lessing doesn’t exactly make it easy, but one does definitely walk away with a sense that she has, at least in some small part, lived her books. I got this sense most strongly from Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor (a sort of metaphorical autobiography) and the Martha Quest novels, The Children of Violence series (the books of which, Lessing admits, are thinly-veiled memoirs).

But there is still a desire to know the real story behind the woman, to get the scoop on what life has been like for such a vibrant, complex, whip-smart, snarky writer. Unfiltered and unmetaphored. In her own words.

Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949, was released in 1995, and it more than fills the bill. Volume two, Walking in the Shade, was released in 1998, and covers the years 1949-1962. We’re still waiting on the next volume, but as I’ve only read Under My Skin at this point, it is the first installment I will focus on here.

While most autobiographies place the focus on the external events that shape the subject, it is, not surprisingly, the internal landscape that most intrigues Lessing in Under My Skin. Throughout her life, she has been “involved in a small way with big events”, and it is these events (as well as, it could be said, small events she was involved with in a big way) she presents and analyzes in a way only Doris Lessing can. Her childhood — born in Southern Rhodesia (now Iraq) to British parents, their eventual migration to South Africa, where young Doris was raised — and young adulthood are chronicled here with a wry, witty, and precise pen. From an early age, she shows a restrained fascination for that internal landscape, constantly observing it, challenging it, critizing it…and, yes, even ignoring it. She weaves the various strands of the tapestry with both honesty and grace: her relationships with an alienating, overbearing mother, a world-weary, loving father (disfigured in World War I), a little brother with whom she could never quite connect, a series of friends, husbands, lovers, acquaintenances, and associates who, in their own small ways, contributed to her evolution as a woman and an artist.

The politics are here as well. Lessing was an integral player in the early days of the Communist movement in South Africa. It is invigorating to read of her political passion and drive (remember, this was at a time when Communist ideals looked pretty damn rosy to a lot of people). Though she has since left the Communist Party, Lessing makes no apologies — thankfully — for her time there and how it contributed to her social consciousness.

Far from being a kiss-and-tell (”Kisses are the least of it,” Lessing writes), Under My Skin charts the author’s love life with equal honesty and grace. Never for one second does she devote a single word to assigning blame for her two failed marriages or her liaisons with lovers (both as a single woman and a wife). She is more interested in the emotional terrain that lent itself to the creation and eventual disintegration of these relationships. But Lessing by no means excuses herself: she’s willing, sometimes uncomfortably, to investigate her own motives in these unions. What we have, quite simply, is a young person still discovering and deciphering her world, and, before she’s truly mapped out an authentic course, she gets caught up in affairs of the heart (as so many people do).

Which leads me to the one aspect of Under My Skin that gave me trouble. With her first husband, Frank Wisdom, Lessing had two children, a boy named John and a girl named Jean. When Jean was still a baby, Lessing left her husband and children and became involved with the man who would become her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, a Communist comrade (with whom she had another son, Peter). Even today, a woman abandoning her children is something of a rarity, but in the 1940s it was all but unheard-of. Lessing writes of the painful decision and the events that precipitated it…but it doesn’t seem enough. There is, and I think Ms. Lessing would agree with me, a certain level of self-absorption to such an act, and though she attempts to shed light on it, it’s one issue that isn’t probed deeply enough. After she leaves Frank and the children, she doesn’t even mention them for, literally, hundreds of pages. I read the latter part of this book wondering about her kids (who do show up, near the end, at an awkward, makeshift reunion of sorts), about what she must have felt and been going through, for someone who feels and experiences life with so much passion would surely be haunted by such a choice. Alas, this is the one element that does not get “under her skin” enough — or perhaps it does, and Lessing knows there are no words, no excuses, no explanation that could properly capture it.

But the words — oh, the words! — of every other aspect of this book! Page after beautiful page of the lush African landscape, its changing character as our narrator herself changes and grows. The cast of characters, the ramshackle cities and towns, the expansive plantations, the disturbing social divisions, even the wild animals of the veld — all so vibrantly painted and brought to life. Lessing’s experience is a revelation, not always easy and pat, but consistently mesmerizing.

By the end of this first volume, Lessing is on her way to London, the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in her suitcase. Filled with the hope and promise of a new life and a fresh start, she leaves both the personal and political unrest of her beloved South Africa behind. It is on this threshold that Under My Skin comes to its close, and we too feel that same hope — for we know the decades of brilliant literature to come. Grade: A-

Book Title Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949

Author Doris Lessing

Publisher Harper Perennial

Year Published 1995

ISBN 0060926643

Snarkbytes Here are two wonderful interview snippets with the great Doris Lessing. In the first, produced by the Nobel committee, she talks about her journey as a writer, touching upon the arbitrariness of it all. In the second interview, Lessing discusses the creative process and character creation, as well as a recurring character in her work whose presence confounds her.

Image Sources Frankfurt Book Fair, Think or Thwim

November 11, 2008 | Filed Under Authors, Biography & Memoir

Comments

3 Responses to “Book Review: Under My Skin - Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing”

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