To celebrate the life of Doris Lessing (October 1919 – 17 November 2013), we are posting a section of Kate Millett’s wrenchingly honest autobiographical work, Flying, published in 1974. Millett writes about her first encounter with Lessing. Millett tells you more about Doris Lessing the person than any impersonal obituary.
A good ten minutes late for lunch with no less a person than Doris Lessing. A thought that reduces money to its rightful insignificance as I churn out of the office leaving Paul to rumble. I astonish myself today. Waiting for a cab at Charing Cross I am Mary Marvel. A mere word and my blouse will explode revealing the mystic thunderbolt. I am an American comic strip heroine. Full tilt from broken wing to superwoman. Efforts to control my euphoria succeed not at all. Give in and live it, life has so few days like this. The cab obeys my supernatural signs. A great black beast at my command all the way to this great lady.
Roses in front and cheerful wallpaper. Impossible to be more extraordinarily ordinary. Nothing is more impressive than the commonplace situations that surround great persons. Like de Beauvoir’s pedestrian rooms hidden behind the most unassuming white stone front and a draconic concierge. I call up the stairs and she shakes my hand. Today a day so beyond possibility that I am flowing through it like a fairy tale. Or an acid trip. Or what you will. I feel like Anthony returned from the wars as I behold the strawberries she has actually washed with her own hands in my honor. “Lily white,” we joke. “Isn’t the racism of language amazing?” I am grateful as any undergraduate having lunch with the professor of his soul but we chatter like any two women over recipes. The room where she writes spied through a half-opened door. Inner sanctum of paper confusion. How reassuring that she’s not neat. And wait with my gin in the living room friendly in its rather tacky orientalia, Persian this and thats and rugs and curtains and cushions. The soft clutter of an English room, homely as the grace of her hair in a bun.
Confess my agony of last time. How absurd not to tell her of The Golden Notebook that I couldn’t write. “But now you can,” she says- Bright, maternal. “Do you worry you will lose writing?” “No, I know now that I can do it.” She says it simply. Just that command is what a lifetime has given. Then she astounds me. “I know I can do it. My problem is wondering why I should.” “But you are making literature,” I protest. Lifetimes of libraries and scholarships, vigil lamps, envy, admiration, idolatry. Six years of graduate school. My God, to make literature and wonder why one does it. Of course she has made a grimace over “literature.” “And if I were? What does it accomplish?” I have never thought. Art is of itself surely. I am dumbfounded by such a question. “Your book does things,” she says. Doris Lessing is referring to my poor damned thesis. Its humid rhetoric. The pedestrian tirade. “Books like that make change,” she insists.
“Just think of what The Golden Notebook has meant to the thousands of women who read it.” “But I’ve no idea. When I came to New York they thought it meant something else. We had a terrible time.” I laugh, remembering the fiasco at Kaufmann Hall. Movement heavies coming to cheer Lessing as their heroine, but she infuriates them by saying she doesn’t hate men at all and finds other world conditions—peace, poverty, class—all far more pressing than the problems of women. “Let me tell you what it meant to me. In a detail you may find ridiculous. It’s the moment your heroine shall we say,” we smile, “finds herself in a toilet at the outset of her period. In St. Paul we call it the curse.” We smile again. “And the blood is running down her legs while she struggles with toilet paper. Kleenex. That sort of thing. In a book! Happens every month of adult life to half the population of the globe and no one had ever mentioned it in a book.” There is a passage in Mary McCarthy where the heroine so-called does the sublimely stupid thing of getting drunk on a train and spends the night in a berth fucking some character she’s picked up. It’s the sort of harebrained thing we’ve all done and hated ourselves for afterwards. But she had the guts to admit it. Was honest enough. “Of course that is just the sort of thing one blushes to write,” she laughs. “But the most curious thing is that the very passages that once caused me the most anxiety, the moments when I thought, no, I cannot put this on paper—are now the passages I’m proud of. That comfort me most out of all I’ve written. Because through letters and readers I discovered these were the moments when I spoke for other people. So paradoxical. Because at the time they seemed so hopelessly private . . .”
“It is the expression of the self in women now that is most interesting,” she goes on. “I have been getting it in the mail and hearing it in rumors from the most peculiar places.” And she tells me people write her from loony bins. And she writes back. Virtue like this is too great a reproof to a noncorrespondent. “I cannot cure this woman’s mind but I do read her manuscript,” Lessing chuckles. “And it is fascinating. The whole thing pours out of her. So I suggested she write a book. Now I can’t wait to read it. In fact this is the only sort of thing that interests me now. What people write about their lives. I want to see what you do too.”
“But I’m always embarrassed. Have so much to be self-conscious about. Doing it in the first person which seems necessary somehow, much of the point is lost in my case if I didn’t put myself on the line. But feeling so vulnerable, my god, a Lesbian. Sure, an experience of human beings. But not described. Not permitted. It has no traditions. No language. No history of agreed values.” “But of course people wish to know,” she interrupts. “And you cannot be intimidated into silence. Or the silence is prolonged forever.”
I am lulled by her kindness and the strawberries. Slender maternal figure before me in her chair as I sit on the floor. Primed with my greatest confusion. Mother. “You see if I write this book my mother’s going to die. She has already given me notice.” Lessing laughs. “Mothers do not die as easily as they claim. My own announced her intentions with every book I wrote. And I went on hoping eventually I might manage to please her, that I could finally make her proud of me. Only to produce another funeral. Women who write books have a particular obstacle in their mothers. I suppose it is universal.” “There’s Colette and Sidonie.” “Ah, but they never quite convinced me. In any case I did not have their luck. My mother finally did die, for reasons of her own. But I find she never quite went away.”
With coffee we turn to politics and why it is not enough. Or never quite the right thing. “You’ll get it from that angle,” she warns. “I already hear you damned for a pacifist.” “I plan to atone for my sins with a course of study. Bury myself for a year in the country under volumes of Marx.” “You will be doing the Left an honor. They never read Marx themselves. But the irritating thing is their general inhumanity. It becomes the question of how to the exclusion of why. And the how grows more and more ugly. I did not join the Party till much later in England, so my real political activity was out in Rhodesia, where politics was something terribly real. The situation confronting us every day in its full horror and injustice. But when I came to England I found the Left could mean dull persons shouting at meetings. Boring me to death with their egos. With words. Verbiage more outrageous the less it meant. They hated art. In time I came to fear that they hated people as well. Living lives of frenzied emotionality based on the sufferings of other persons in other countries about whom they seemed to care very little except to find them convenient for certain neurotic needs and schemes of their own.”
I suddenly remember something from the news. “Did you notice in yesterday’s paper, Mideast oligarch arrests ten who plotted his assassination? What if this guy let them go? Showed mercy, and depended upon it as a tactic. Who could bring about his overthrow if he displayed such confidence in his powers to bring better rule than the other types? And if he can’t why doesn’t he quit? Imagine what a nightmare it must be to be in power. He’d enjoy his existence so much better as a private citizen.” While I am conjuring up a situation where the tyrant reforms in a great fanfare of trumpets, she notifies me that by today’s paper the despot has already dispatched his victims. “No one ever exercises any imagination,” we laugh, a laugh like a sigh.
“What is truly depressing,” she moves in her chair, “is to see men you’ve known, given shelter, fed, housed, helped once when they were radicals, outlaws, revolutionaries, returned to England now as powers. Ministers in African states. And have to listen while they describe their murders, rationalize their purges, excuse their crimes because they were necessary to stay in power.”
We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics. And more directly through change, liberation, small personal things, subjective exercises appropriate only to persons with enough to eat, residence in one of the supposedly advanced, namely developed, capitalist and imperialist nations. Who if they made certain inroads upon their own society could redirect it even to the advantage of the others upon whose neck it stands.
“But in seven years we have not even stopped the war in Vietnam,” I argue. “No, you have not. But you have begun something else more remarkable if less efficacious. A great pendulum of social force, a charge, a movement among millions of Americans spreading now abroad too. A potential. Beginning at home, or in the area upon which one has control, effect, knowledge.” I catch her meaning and see even why one begins with the self. All one has claim to finally. And change is a spiritual discipline one practices, waiting in hope. Starting with you and those around you. Knowing it takes time and that change is deep, is living, is a force formed within. Then projected supported by others, feeling it too. A communion. No, not mystic or if so, surely not bullshit, evangelical, deluded, or irrational. But real and measured in acts, in reality as well as in the psyche, as real, often, as the objective world. It is another way to live, to act, to feel, a transvaluation of values and of the very forms of apprehension. A reorientation of attitudes. A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.
Whatever else was said upon that second cup of coffee was unimportant since that moment held upon a spoon whereby we have communicated our hope and kissed good-bye. But still the walk to the station. No cabs. And the tube, she claims, is quicker. Watching her, a middle-aged English lady troubling to guide this brash American to a train station. Effusive in thanks, but it is insolence somehow to thank the great. And a poignant little hug no humility could honor.
(Thanks to Isaac for scanning the text.)