“He said he believed that love between a man and a woman — that is to say, real love, could exist only on a basis of absolute frankness. But frankness caused unhappiness. . . . I had heard similar complaints in my past, but surely this was the basic and intrinsic and terrible dilemma at the heart of love. Why did he think he was going to solve it all, just like that?”
–“Walking in the Shade. Volume 2 of My Autobiography. 1949-1962”
Doris Lessing
That is Doris Lessing writing in the second installment of her autobiography about Miles Malleson, a London actor who fancied her and with whom a long time ago she shared conversations about love. It is an interesting few paragraphs in a book that tells the story of an artist’s life and of how it connected with the vast political and social currents that swept across the 20th Century.
Compressing it all is a necessary sin. She was born in Persia in 1919 and moved to Southern Rhodesia five years later. In 1949, she moved to England, where she lives still in the north of London. She was a communist for a while. She knows well what it is to have no money, no food, no husband and a son to feed. She remains deeply reflective.
Lessing has written more than 30 novels, plays, poems and stories. One way or another, they all came from the flow of her complicated, intriguing, perplexing, sad and happy life. Midway through, the actor Malleson enters from stage left and seems like a small thing, a distant, recalled conversation about love and a friendship bonded by discussions about theater and visits to the zoo with Lessing’s son Peter.
One page and then it is gone.
Except that it is not.
It stays with you, not because of the man but because of the subject. She writes so very well about the great loves in her life (apparently not Malleson), the psychiatrist and writers and thinkers who shared her most private moments, her passions, that the relationships seem as though they would remain alive today.
Of course they are not.
People’s lives change, along with their connections. The difference is that when a writer of Lessing’s caliber is involved, the passion is likely to pop up someplace else, in a character, a theme in a book, an instant in a play.
“The trouble is,” she writes a few pages after her brief memories of the actor, “if you are a novelist, your typewriter is always longing to go clattering off after some tale.”
And so Malleson finds himself, somehow, in “The Habit of Loving,” just as so much of the rest of this woman’s life has worked its way into a remarkable body of work, some of it quite disturbing, but all of it interesting.
How did this happen?
She may have said it better than anyone else could a few days ago at the Art Institute of Chicago, when she came here to lecture for The Poetry Center of Chicago and was asked why she did what she did.
She said she was born to write.
Wouldn’t you like to know what she thinks about love now that enough time has passed so that the fire of all those old relationships has cooled?
How could she have been a Communist when it was so abundantly clear that Josef Stalin was the embodiment of evil? How could such an intelligent, sensitive person have swallowed so much ideological lead for so many years? Why are people so eager to embrace rigid ideologies, all of them so idiotic in retrospect that they all seem to end up in the same camp, no matter what their origin? Is political correctness and communism’s inability to recognize literature and art really the same beast wearing a different mask?
Does fiction have a future?
– – –
Lessing is 78 now and beyond coffee and tea, which make her heart beat too quickly. She gave up cigarettes a long time ago. But she must toy with something while she is being interviewed, so a safety pin plucked from the floor serves the purpose.
Could we talk for a few minutes about love? What value does it have? You say toward the end of your autobiography that it was like a drug for you. You wrote about the lover who left each morning so he could go home to his wife to get a clean shirt before going to work. You . . .
“He was married, for God’s sake! I was a mistress. I was so naive then, I could never really come to terms with it. . . . If I hadn’t been as psychologically naive as I was, I wouldn’t have had a pretty marvelous experience. Now, of course, I would say, “Oh, you heel! Out! You are married. But you see, I didn’t know enough to do that then.”
One way or another, the writer says after a few seconds pause, people are always looking for love, so it must have great value.
The process of falling in love is what is so magnetic, she says.
An addiction.
“I suddenly realized at some point, my God, that is what I have become, a sort of an addict of the process of being, not desperately in love, but just mildly in love. It was like a fix. It was a pretty shattering realization and the beginning of my return to sanity.”
Honestly?
“It isn’t just one degree of falling in love. One can have a light crush, which is quite pleasurable, actually. But really falling in love, my God, it is a calamity. It is a calamity.”
Why does it come out that way so often in literature?
“Well, because it is a good story, isn’t it? Yes, falling in love just as a pleasurable pastime is not worth writing about, really. It would do for perhaps a pleasant song, but not for writing about.”
– – –
“The slaughter in the trenches destroyed something vital in Europe — respect for government. And from that stemmed communism, fascism, national socialism, and later terrorism, anarchy and that attitude of mind which is now prevalent everywhere, the deadly `Well, what can you expect?’ ” from “Walking in the Shade”
You don’t meet many old Communists anymore.
The collapse of the Soviet Union put a spike through the heart of what had been an ailing, troubled political movement that, at least in Europe, struggled in mid-century with the realization that Stalin was a monster and that communism, Soviet-style, had become monstrous with him.
How is it that so many intellectuals were caught up in politics on the far Left? Did World War I really wreck the course of the 20th Century?
“I think it did. I was brought up on World War I. I had it pushed down my throat day and night by both of my parents. Now, I went through that process, which all of us old Reds have to do, ask the simple question: How was it that I fall for this murderous doctrine? Of course it didn’t look like it at the time. It looked very beautiful. How was it that some of the best people I have known in my life believed in this rubbish? Because it was rubbish.”
Her theory is that it flowed from the bitterness and despair spawned by World War I. The governments of Europe freely wasted their best and brightest in the trenches.
“I think then what happened was that government became contemptible. I think this is why people were so ready to go off to the Spanish Civil War, which by definition they could not win. . . .” Then the Second World War, with vast Soviet losses.
It was blood and bullets that set the stage for the young intellectuals of Europe to turn to communism. It lasted for Lessing, quite uncomfortably as the word dribbled out about the horrors of Stalinist Russia, until the mid-1950s. It was not an easy addiction to give up.
“Here I think is an analogy with the reluctance of people who are in love to give up their ridiculous hopes,” she writes. “If you step out of that country of your dreams, you are giving up the real experience, the knowledge of good and evil, you are tearing up your ticket to ride, you are relinquishing fructifying pain.”
Almost in passing, Lessing notes that the contemporary movement toward political correctness seems to embody many of mid-century communism’s attitudes toward art and literature. Conformity, a long list of taboos and the death of creativity come to mind in relation to Soviet censorship and literary pursuit.
“This is very deeply embedded in the way literature is taught now,” she said. “This is a whole thesis we could talk about for days. But sometimes I listen to an interviewer who has a literary education and I think, `This woman is talking pure communist literary talk and doesn’t know it.’ The other thing I find amazing is that everybody falls for it.
“This (political correctness) is all over the world now. Why didn’t people just say, `Look, for Chrissake, shut up and go off with your dogmas and inflict them on your friends.’ “
She agreed that just as the shift toward communism might have been a response to the horrors of the battlefield, the shift toward political correctness might be a simplistic response to racism and sexism in Western culture.
“We always want nice little solutions to things,” she said.
Doris Lessing is no longer poor.
She has sold thousands of books and says she is quite comfortable. But that came late. “Walking in the Shade” is full of references to the struggle to get enough money by writing or reviewing to pay the rent, feed her son Peter and pay his private school tuition.
Midway through the book, there is a rant aimed at publishing. Money is what dictates the game, she says. A book must be commercial or it won’t be a book. She is an obvious beneficiary of this process, but hates it nonetheless. She is convinced Marcel Proust could not be published today.
“I don’t think the present state of affairs is so healthy. . . . Good books get written, but it is just that I know some of the books we now value would not have been published.
“The publishing houses are full of people who love literature, but they are so absolutely overworked because the accountants say, `Well, you can do two people’s jobs now.’ “
Does that mean that fiction is in jeopardy, that it will become the victim of a commercial marketplace that wants only best sellers?
“It will go on,” she said, “because we are storytellers.”
