Beyond Politics: The Stories of Doris Lessing and D.H. Lawrence

Doris Lessing appears to be a writer who came, saw, and conquered, dramatizing a few points of sexual and racial correctness before such points were commonplace. Born in 1919 in Persia, and raised in colonial Rhodesia, she arrived in London as a young woman carrying the manuscript for “The Grass Is Singing” (1950), a novel about sexual tension between a racist white woman and a black African man. I first read her in college, not in a literature class but in a course on African history. The 2007 Nobel committee called her an “epicist of the female experience … with visionary power.” Harold Bloom shrugged, and said the award was “pure political correctness.” The only account of the award that showed the way to any fresh interest in her work was the one by Christopher Hitchens, who in a short column went out of his way to praise not her 600-page “Golden Notebook” (1962), but her short stories.And in good time, Everyman’s Library has brought out “Stories” (Everyman’s Library, 655 pages, $26), an acid-free edition of Ms. Lessing’s short fiction. It is a packet of surprises. The stories are taut, realistic, and faintly ironical. The so-called visionary is here as effortlessly crisp as Muriel Spark (1918-2006). Ms. Lessing belongs to a generation of women who were toughened by World War II: Wartime independence liberated them, and put a kind of steel into their prose. And, as was the case for Grace Paley (1922-2007), another women of this generation, the vicissitudes of history made Ms. Lessing an activist, though she at least was quick to discover the pitfalls of political partisanship.The two stories that Mr. Hitchens picked out for special recognition, in fact, are stories of disillusionment — and in this we can see why his recommendation might be based on more than Ms. Lessing’s prose, which he describes as the “gold standard in modern writing.” An early piece, “The Day Stalin Died,” tells the story of Ms. Lessing’s drift away from the Communist Party, which she had joined as a youth. Cunningly designed as a shaggy-dog tale — in which the narrator, an author like Ms. Lessing, has lunch with a peevish fellow traveler and then takes her mulish younger cousin to get her picture made, only to discover that her cousin won’t relax around the fey, Firbank-reading photographer — the story is actually an emphatic tour of human pettiness. Only the narrator, who doesn’t speak much, takes the high ground, refusing to step where her fellow humans stampede. When one Comrade Jean calls, crying, at the story’s end to commiserate over Stalin, and declares that “We will have to pledge ourselves to pledge to be worthy of him,” the narrator can only muster a polite: “Yes, I suppose we will.” Another story, “The Temptation of Jack Orkney,” tells of a man who is tempted to abandon his faith in socialism for belief in Christianity.Ms. Lessing is clearly not the one-sided socialist or feminist she first appears to be, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t inspired by some of the key concerns of those movements. Her best story, “To Room Nineteen,” is after all a story of a woman whose marriage fails to fulfill her, and who loses her mind. Susan and Matthew marry late, pride themselves on their good sense, but are eventually struck by the flatness of their marriage. Matthew has an affair, but Susan is too sophisticated to take it very badly: “Nobody’s fault, nothing to be at fault, no one to blame, no one to offer or to take it.” She eventually finds that all her good sense leaves her empty; in a remarkable tracking of interior crisis, Ms. Lessing follows her down into craziness. In this story, sexual inequality is only the catalyst for a high, sometimes abstract, exploration of the self, which Ms. Lessing believes forms on its own, regardless of superficial happiness. Whatever the status of the rest of her oeuvre, these stories clearly belong to the great tradition of English literature.* * *As Margaret Drabble makes clear in her introduction to “Stories,” Ms. Lessing’s great predecessor was D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). And both have to be rescued from their reputations, and for similar reasons. Just as feminist readings have made Ms. Lessing appear boring, they have made Lawrence appear objectionable. But the man whom Kate Millet called a “murderous” male supremacist was more complicated than that, as the pieces newly anthologized in his “Selected Stories” (Penguin Classics, 353 pages, $13) remind us.Trying to see Lawrence through Ms. Lessing’s eyes is clarifying. In “Things,” a send-up of Boston Brahmins who move to Italy and try to be Buddhists only to end up as antique collectors, he provides the template for the marriage in “To Room Nineteen.” Here in Lawrence’s story is the marriage that finds itself flat and empty: “To be ‘free,'” Lawrence writes, “you must, alas, be attached to something. … or else a certain boredom supervenes, there is a certain waving of loose ends upon the air.”Like Ms. Lessing, Lawrence is concerned to see what people really need, beyond ideology. And he, just as much as Ms. Lessing, believes that marital problems materialize in spite of the comity of the partners, in their souls or in their bodies. This belief is why both speak for sexual imperatives: People can’t help themselves, the stories suggest. “Something crystallized in Winifred’s soul” is a typical Lawrence locution, from “England, My England,” one of his best stories.As Ms. Drabble writes, “Lessing’s oeuvre takes over where Lawrence’s left off, in a counterblast that tells another (but not an incompatible) side of Lawrence’s story.” Their longer work exaggerates what is visionary and even ponderous about each. But their short fiction, more so than Ms. Lessing’s new novel, “Alfred & Emily,” traps the quick, adroit psychological creativity they share.blyal@nysun.com

Beyond Politics: The Stories of Doris Lessing and D.H. Lawrence

Beyond Politics: The Stories of Doris Lessing and D.H. Lawrence

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