Walking In The Shade: Volume Two Of My Autobiography 1949-1962 by Doris Lessing Harper Collins 369 pp, £20 in UK
`Why am I reading this?" The question begs to be asked as you're working your way through Walking In The Shade, the second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography. The book is badly written by any standards. It has no shape; but then an illusion, at least, of shapelessness is one of the charms of The Golden Notebook, giving it the texture of real experience. Language is not used in this autobiography with sophistication, artistry or originality; but then it was not for this, either, that The Children Of Violence series of novels or The Golden Notebook was distinguised, and yet they impressed. So a more interesting question is really: why do people read Doris Lessing at all?
The political insights granted to her by her upbringing in Southern Rhodesia as apartheid began to rip asunder and her flight into hardline communism make the meat of novels such as her first, The Grass Is Singing, and her 1985 novel, The Good Terrorist, and they deeply inform The Children Of Violence and The Golden Notebook. I am, however, one of literally hundreds of thousands of women who recognised the Martha Quest books and The Golden Notebook as having the same skeleton, if not the same flesh, as their own lives. Doris Lessing's gift, for me, has been that she has put the mid-20th-century woman in fiction more convincingly than anyone else, by exploring her own life with frightening honesty.
The question remains, however: why read the autobiography? While Under My Skin belonged to the period of Lessing's life which inspired the Martha Quest series, Walking In The Shade belongs to The Golden Notebook. This will be nothing like as interesting a period for most readers, simply because it is closer: in time and in place. The great theme of this era of early middle age was a frustrated search for a real partner, and the major realisation gained was that she did not know how to search: "The Golden Notebook's fuel was feelings of loss, change: that I had been dragged to my emotional limits by Jack and then Clancy - rather, I had been dragged by my emotional needs, which really had nothing to do with them as individuals. I had understood my need for the wounded hero, the suffering man, and knew all that must stop."
While this is a hugely instructive realisation, it is explored so much more vividly in Lessing's fiction; there are scenes from The Golden Notebook which sometimes I imagine to be part of my personal memory - the dinner Ella cooks to absolute perfection and then wastes as the hours go by and the hopeless Paul still does not show up, for instance. Perhaps because this love and this pain have been so deeply explored in Lessing's fiction, here she writes neatly and smartly around them.
Honesty can never be more than subjective, of course, and while this is fine in fiction, in an autobiography as artless as this one it is irritating to watch Lessing putting her spin on reality. You would imagine that in her late seventies she could write closer to the reality of her relationship with her mother, who came to London from Rhodesia to be with her, and went home five years later, mostly because Lessing would not take her in. The women's mutual incomprehension makes wonderful material for fiction, but one expects more perspective in a memoir. There is only one real moment of breakthrough: wondering how she would react now, could she meet her mother, she writes: "I think that I would simply put my arms around her . . . Around who? Little Emily, whose mother died when she was three, leaving her to the servants, a cold unloving stepmother, a cold dutiful father."
Lessing dismisses her two marriages as not having been "real", and repeats the same cliches to explain them away; she married Frank Wisdom in Rhodesia because "the war drums were beating", for instance. You'd think she'd feel a twinge of conscience when she succumbs to one of her crotchety generalisations, describing journalists as being like "so many programmed rats" in being unable to think of a better adjective than "grey" for John Major.
This volume will be of value to scholars of Lessing's work, to devotees forced to read every word she writes, and to those looking for snap-shots of the recent, but nearly forgotten past. Ponder this report from the early 1950s: "I thought I had experienced everything in the way of dismalness and greyness in London, but suddenly I was in this city of old, unkempt buildings, and dignified, a city proud of itself, but everywhere ran about ragged children, with bare feet, legs red with cold, hungry faces. Never has there been such a poor place as Dublin then . . ."