Doris Lessing: A Biography

by Carole Klein Narrated by Anna Fields

Overview

Both in her personal life and in her literature, Doris Lessing broke the rules. Born in Persia and raised in Rhodesia by a hypercritical mother and a father who was shell-shocked during the First World War, she was forever in search of her essential identity. Twice married and divorced before the age of thirty, she moved to Britain with one of her children and little more than an unpublished manuscript in her suitcase. Ardently embracing communism, then feminism, she would discard them both long before their attractions faded for others. As a writer, she consistently charted new territory, most famously with the series of science fiction novels she submitted under a pseudonym. Based on numerous interviews and sources, this is a fascinating portrait of a celebrated literary rebel who continually reinvented herself and the world in her prodigious work.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

When the prolific, multifaceted novelist Lessing (Ben; In the World; etc.) heard that several biographies of her were in the works, she wrote--"in self-defense"--two well-received books covering her first four decades before this first, disappointing biography could be published. In her own books, Lessing captured the more colorful and exuberant parts of her life: her childhood in Southern Rhodesia, her rebellious adolescence, her two unsuccessful marriages, her anticolonial political radicalism, her affiliation with the Communist Party and her literary debut in London's bohemian, intellectual circles. Klein (Aline; Gramercy Park), after a pallid paraphrased account of Lessing's version, is left to assemble other, less satisfactory sources on the remaining years, which cover Lessing's writings after The Golden Notebook, her experiments with radical psychology and her conversion to Sufism. Klein's interviews with Lessing's ex-friends and former colleagues are largely anonymous--and often filled with memories of her aloofness, irritability or vulnerability. Some are willing to go on record, such as Clancy Sigal, who was, at least in his own opinion, the great love of her life; Klein similarly takes full advantage of Lessing's correspondence with editor Robert Gottlieb. Otherwise, she depends on material from Lessing's previously published interviews and her often autobiographical fiction and nonfiction. Klein's psychological analysis of her subject lags after Lessing's own, without the irony and wit, and her striving for an objective viewpoint results, often, in merely noting Lessing's inconsistencies. Lessing entitled the first volume of her autobiography Under My Skin--which is where, for all Klein's research despite Lessing's disapproval, this biography never gets. B&w illus. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Lessing is certainly one of the most influential women writers of the 20th century. She came into this world as a product of a father she ended up pitying and a mother she ended up loathing. The author married because it was the proper thing to do, but after having two children, she left them and her husband to pursue her career. She was an ardent Communist, but despite her admiration for the black African way of life, she had no real desire to see them in control of their own destiny. Klein presents a highly literate, often critical look at Lessing, focusing more on her life than on her work, and this is what makes the book a must-have for medium and large library collections. Reader Anna Fields's unemotional, straightforward delivery does justice to Klein's insightful biography of a complex, complicated, confusing, and often contrary woman who seems to prefer words to people, enriching the world of literature in the process.-Joseph L. Carlson, Lompoc P.L., CA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Doris Lessing provides a fine biography of a great American writer, based on interviews with her associates and friends and following her life and times. Prior readers of Lessing's works will consider this required reading as it lends many insights into her literary influences and career.

Kirkus Reviews

An unauthorized, incomplete, and rather hostile biography of the writer Doris Lessing (Ben, In the World, p. 657, etc.).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169901078
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	09/11/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Born into a Broken World

'We use our parents like recurring dreams,' writes Doris Lessing, 'to be entered into when needed; they are always there for love or for hate.'

    Like a detective on an elusive case, Doris Lessing has studied old photographs of her parents. Are there traces to be found of the people they became? Would she discover the ultimate source of her own years of waking nightmares?

    There is a photo of Lessing's mother, Emily Maude McVeagh, in adolescence. She is a tall girl with a round, confident face. Her hair is pulled back and tied with a black bow. She wears a school uniform, blousy white shirt and long dark skirt, a proud young citizen of her beloved British Empire. Born in 1884, Emily was named after her mother Emily Flower, who died giving birth to a son when Emily was three years old.

    Emily Maude's father, John William McVeagh, had worked himself up to the middle class, from office clerk to manager of a bank in suburban London. Class was immensely important to him, the yardstick by which he measured his opinions and decisions. He must have been smitten with his beautiful young wife. How else could he have overlooked the fact that during her short life she had never really abandoned her working-class habits and tastes? Had she lived past the age of thirty two, their marriage might well have foundered as McVeagh became increasingly preoccupied with his social position.

    As it was, McVeagh never mentioned his wife to his children, and their home contained not a single pictureof her. It was almost impossible for young Emily to conjure up a truthful image of her mother. There were only the vague memories of her earliest childhood and the obvious disapproval of the household staff who raised the three children after their mother's death. With no one to counteract the servants' version of her mother as an imprudent, common woman, Emily Maude adopted that view as well. In Under My Skin (the first volume of her autobiography), Doris Lessing recalls the disdain in her mother's voice whenever she mentioned Emily Flower. Her pursed mouth and little sniff seemed to imply that Emily Flower's death was fitting punishment for her lower-class ways.

    McVeagh remarried when his three children were still young, but his elegant new wife had little interest in taking on a mother's role. McVeagh was not troubled by his wife's aloofness towards his children. He was equally remote as a father, stern and demanding, with never a gesture or expression of love. The only family life Emily experienced was when everyone attended what her father considered important public rituals of the empire: the funeral of Queen Victoria, Edward VII's coronation, or the visits of the Kaiser and other heads of state.

    To her daughter, Emily expressed no love for her father, but did insist that she respected and admired him. His formal portrait hung on the mud wall of their African childhood home in Southern Rhodesia. Doris detested the man she saw inside the ornate frame. His corpulent form and chubby face, greased hair and old-fashioned, tightly tailored clothes were the very embodiment of what Doris disliked about England. In that image she saw the arrogance and repression of the British empire and the class system that went with it.

    Despite her loveless background, Emily Maude was a lively girl with many friends. She often went to the theatre, musicals, and late suppers with her friends. She liked the rough and tumble of hockey and lacrosse, and less boisterous sports such as tennis and bicycle excursions. She did well in school, far better than her dull-witted brother. And, unusual for the time, her father considered sending her to university. One can imagine McVeagh's enthusiasm when he told his daughter of his enlightened plans, and his dismay when she rejected the rare and costly opportunity of a university education.

    Emily stood her ground. Although she was a talented musician who dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, her practical nature together with a genuine desire to care for people, made her feel she should first be trained as a nurse. McVeagh was furious. Respectable middle-class girls did not become nurses. If Emily went through with these shocking plans, she would get no help from him.

    That might have been the end of it, but John McVeagh underestimated his daughter's determination. Emily went off to train at London's Royal Free Hospital, where the work was hard and the wages low. Despite the obstacles in her path she passed her final exams with high marks, which no doubt bolstered her self-assurance.

    By the time Emily Maude graduated to being Sister McVeagh, she had put the dream of being a concert pianist behind her, although later in life she would grow melancholy about abandoning music. She would lament who she once was and might have become. As a newly licensed nurse, however, she was happy with her work. She loved being needed. The gratitude of her patients when she came to their bedsides was like an expression of their love, which Doris Lessing believes was her mother's true motivation for entering nursing. Emily fed her hunger for love through the people who needed and valued her.

    Despite the heavy demands of her workday, Emily filled her evenings with a busy social life and played the organ at various churches. When she could, she went on holidays with friends, and no matter how crowded her life, she found time to read prominent authors of the day such as George Bernard Shaw. Nursing was always arduous work, but its demands dramatically escalated with the onset of war in 1914. Trainloads of soldiers arrived at the Royal Free Hospital. Sister McVeagh ministered to these wounded bodies with such dedication that a number of the men wrote poems to her. She was proud of these tributes, and kept them in an album that she treasured long past her nursing days.

* * *

Doris Lessing's father, Alfred Cook Tayler, was born in 1886 in a small farming village near Colchester where his father was a bank clerk. The job was respectable but lowly and the family had to make do on very little money. Alfred's mother, Caroline, who appears in a baby picture of Alfred, is described by Doris Lessing as a 'fat, plain woman' with 'the face of a head cook.' And indeed, Mrs Tayler worked wonders in the kitchen on her limited resources. Decades later, when Alfred suffered from diabetes and had to follow a Spartan diet, he rhapsodised over memories of suet, and treacle pudding and ham and sausages smoked at home.

    Besides the all-important Bible there was apparently little interest in books and certainly no money for them. On Sundays, the family went to church three times, and all week Alfred anxiously anticipated that day which always recurred too quickly. Alfred had an older brother who was superior to him in school and their father beat his younger son when he didn't do as well. When they finished school both young men became bank clerks like their father, but Alfred remained a clerk while his older brother rose quickly to a managerial post. Lessing says her father found little pleasure in his clerk's job. But, he tried hard to improve his skills and he even laboriously changed his handwriting because one of his superiors disparaged it. Alfred may have felt that he would not mind his bank clerk's job so much if his personal life were richer.

    Whatever the reason, one day Alfred decided to live on his own in Luton, about an hour away from the family home. It was a happy move. Away from his family and the narrow confines of his little village, he was free to indulge the side of him that loved to play, to be expansive, to be free of imposed, arbitrary constraints.

    He swam and rowed, played football and cricket, sang at musicals and danced with the local girls, thinking nothing of walking ten or fifteen miles to attend dance parties that might be held two or three times every week. He would stay until the very last, walking back under the stars. By the time he reached home he could often see the beginnings of a rising sun. Buoyed by the previous evening's pleasures, he would wash and shave, make tea and porridge, and set off for work.

    The girls in Luton all loved him. For a time he was engaged to one girl, and then broke it off and became engaged to her sister. Their mother was equally smitten with their charming, handsome suitor and, until the second broken engagement, welcomed him into her house as if he were her son. Doris Lessing recalls that when Alfred told this story in front of his wife, (he repeated it many times, like all his reminiscences) he would invariably add, 'Just as well I didn't marry either of them; they would never have stuck it out the way you have, old girl.' As Lessing reports statements like these her tone is biting. In all her writing about her parents and their sadness and suffering at fate's perversity, she rarely suggests that they cared for each other and tried to protect each other from the hardship they shared.

    One of Lessing's judgements that rings grimly true is that war was a defining element of her life. The carefree young Alfred was irrevocably changed by the experience of battle. Among the many early photographs of her father, the largest presents a darkly handsome young man wearing a World War I officer's uniform. He holds his body erect, his jacket is smartly buttoned and decorated with badges. He is ready to do his duty for the British Empire, enlisting as a soldier in 1914 because he was horrified at the German abuses in Belgium. Filled with idealism, he was eager to do his part, even though he 'knew' he would be injured.

    The source of his prescience was a fortune-teller. Doris Lessing writes about this fanciful streak in her father's past: 'I concluded at the age of about six my father was mad,' assuring the reader that it 'did not upset me.' The fortune-teller told Alfred that although he would twice be in great danger, he would not die because he had the protection of an ancestor — his existence unknown to Alfred — who was a famous soldier. She also said Alfred would sense beforehand his imminent injury.

    At the front, Alfred did become seriously ill with what he thought was a ruptured appendix. A few days before he was felled by the terrible pain as anticipatory dread overtook him. The feeling of dark warning was so intense before a second illness, about two years later, that he wrote to his parents from the battlefield telling them he was about to be killed. Once more, the fortune-teller's prophecy was fulfilled when his legs were riddled by shrapnel. Alfred did not die. Indeed, he would look back on it as the luckiest thing that ever happened to him because ten days after he was taken to the hospital his entire company was killed in the battle of Passchendaele.

    On a surgical table at the Royal Free Hospital, Alfred Tayler's leg was amputated at mid-thigh. He was also suffering from shell shock and despite his belief that he was lucky, he fell into a deep and prolonged depression. The combination of traumas kept him in the hospital for nearly a year. Even when he was free of physical pain, his thoughts were sombre, and at night his dreams were terrifying. A physician assured Alfred that what he was experiencing was common to people who had gone through such severe stress and that Alfred was not, as he had begun to fear, going mad. Most people had a hidden store of troublesome feelings, the doctor said. When Alfred Tayler told Doris the story years later, he always cautioned her to remember that no one could know what battles people had to wage inside themselves.

    Lying in his hospital bed, Tayler brooded over his war experience, which had been so different from his ideals. When he first entered the service, filled with patriotism and a sense of honour, the war had satisfied all his chivalrous instincts. The English soldier was the best in the entire world, he would maintain for the rest of his life. He had never experienced such friendship as he did on the field and in the trenches. This courtesy was extended to the enemy. Once, Alfred and a German soldier came face to face. As if by silent agreement, they lowered their guns, smiled at each other, and walked away. It was his Christmas of 1914, when some British and German troops gave each other presents, sang carols together, and played a rowdy game of soccer. Alfred used to wish, he said later, that he could get the opposing generals into those trenches for just twenty-four hours to see what the ordinary soldier faced every day. A firsthand look would surely persuade them to end the war. Gradually, he realised that such a visit would have made no difference at all. British authorities were horrified by stories of compassion. Soldiers were urged by every voice of society to defend his flag ruthlessly against the wicked Hun.

    Crippled and his future uncertain, Alfred felt bitterly estranged from the country he had fought for. No one in government seemed to appreciate what price had been paid by the young soldiers in the trenches. Nor did most civilians want to know about the slaughter he had managed to escape. Alfred Tayler began to call the war he had joined so proudly 'the Great Unmentionable', and wrapped up in this sardonic appellation lay his conviction that he had to leave England once he was out of the hospital.

    Alfred Tayler's war stories used to bore Doris Lessing when she was growing up, but in an experiment with mescaline in the early 1960s some of the sense memories that came to her were her father's experience of battle. This frightening event proved to her that the Great War had been an overriding influence on her life as well.

* * *

Alfred Tayler's nurse at the Royal Free Hospital was Emily McVeagh. She was kind to him and he was grateful and responsive to her. They spent many hours together and, although she didn't understand his mental anguish, she diligently tried to ease his physical suffering. When Tayler was finally ready to leave the hospital, he asked Emily to marry him.

    The proposal threw Emily into confusion. She had been offered the matronship of St. George's Hospital in London, a highly unusual opportunity for a woman in her early thirties. The idea made her proud. But the truth was, she liked nursing better than administration. Even more important, she was still mourning the military doctor she'd fallen deeply in love with who had drowned when his ship was torpedoed. There were very few men left in London and, although her photographs contradict her, Emily thought of herself a plain woman. She was nearly thirty-five, well past the conventional age of marriage.

    Understanding her dilemma, Alfred Tayler sympathised with Emily's loss and was patient with her. Long afar they did marry, his wife kept the doctor's picture on her dressing table. Alfred's voice contained genuine sorrow when he told Doris and her brother, Harry, 'Your poor mother ... he was a good chap, that young doctor.'

    Perhaps the major reason Emily finally accepted Alfred's proposal was that she very much wanted to have children — although not right away. Alfred was still quite depressed and she felt oddly ill herself. This debilitating weakness may have stemmed from the cumulative effects of her years of war work or a mild form of the devastating Spanish 'flu that swept the world after the war. She felt that if they did marry, it would be best to wait until she and Alfred were stronger before thinking about starting a family.

    As his release from the hospital drew nearer, Alfred was increasingly determined not to stay in England. Here he was, a cripple with a wooden leg, and out on the streets able ex-soldiers were selling matches in order to survive. There was no hope of dealing with his bitterness and anger unless he got away from its source.

    Alfred asked the bank that had employed him before the war to transfer him to one of their branch banks in Persia, then dominated by France and Britain, with Britain controlling most financial matters. To Alfred's delight, he was offered the job of bank manager at the British-run Imperial Bank of Persia in the town of Kermanshah.

    The news of this job had encouraged Emily to accept Alfred's marriage proposal. She was excited at the idea of sharing in the social status of his managerial position in an exotic country. She would go to parties, wearing lovely clothes, and serve elegant dinners and teas to 'nice' people. Yes, she would marry Captain Alfred Tayler.

    The wedding, in January 1919, was small and informal. Both bride and groom were too emotionally burdened to pretend to the naive joy of a traditional ceremony. There was an additional constraint: Caroline Tayler was not at all happy with her son's choice. Sister McVeagh was used to ruling people's lives, and Mrs Tayler was certain her daughter-in-law would assume the same control inside her home as she had in the hospital.

    Nonetheless, they must have made a handsome pair — the good looking Alfred and the dynamic Emily, both suffused with the excitement of a ceremony that would change their lives forever. With Alfred getting his wish to leave England, and Emily happily indulging her love of shopping by acquiring stylish frocks that she would be able to wear regularly, the couple were as happy as their bruised past allowed them to be.

    Everything seemed perfectly in order for the life they were about to start together. Except for one small matter. On their wedding night or soon after, despite their plans to postpone parenthood, a child was conceived — Doris.

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