A singular survivor

Doris Lessing joined the communist party in Rhodesia, left two children to come to England, and then explored mysticism. Emma Brockes finds the iconoclastic author of the feminist classic, The Golden Notebook, has a talent to explore, move on, and surprise

It was in a cafe in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, that Doris Lessing received her first, rather clumsily delivered death threat. This was 1956 and her debut novel, The Grass Is Singing, about a relationship between a white woman and a black man, was incensing colonial Africa. A large, blond, South African man approached her at a table one afternoon and after hesitating for a moment, handed over a white feather dipped in tar.

"What are you," she asked drily, "the Ku Klux Klan?" Like a child fulfilling a dare, he gabbled a warning about putting ideas into the blacks' heads, before losing his nerve and leaving. The following year, the Rhodesian government named her a "prohibited immigrant" and she was banned from the country she grew up in, until the old order crumbled and it turned into Zimbabwe in 1980.

Lessing is not a woman easily intimidated. By the time she was 30 she had survived successive waves of bullying, from an embittered mother, from a regime of unhinged nuns, from a bigoted husband. Above all, she had survived the punishing cycle of drought and thunderstorm which characterises the African bush, where children must learn to conquer their fear of snakes, scorpions and poisonous insects.

"What influence does African culture have on your work?" asked a witless member of the audience at the Hay on Wye literary festival some years ago. Lessing blinked at her with undisguised irritation. Africa, she pointed out, is not like "the Isle of Wight or Long Island". Its cultures are unquantifiable, its influence on those who grew up there too intrinsic to analyse. "Whatever I am, I have been made so by central Africa," she wrote in Going Home, her journalistic account of Southern Rhodesia. "The fact is, I don't live anywhere. I never have since I left that first house."

She is nearly 80 now and has been based in London for 50 years, first in Notting Hill, then in Earls Court, now in a winding street of mansion blocks in north west London. Her house is cluttered with books, throws, sheepskin rugs and a black and white cat called Yum-Yum ("after the Mikado") whose smell is everywhere.

In snub-nosed shoes and a plain smock, Lessing is a formidable figure - what in South Africa would be known as a "buller:" a tough nut, a hard case who even at 79 looks as though she could do you some serious damage in a rugby tackle. Her hair is parted down the middle and drawn into a low bun, giving her the outline of a Russian doll - appropriate for a woman whose life comprises phases so contradictory that they are often studied as independent parts of a too-complex whole.

"Her whole career is very interesting as a map of imaginative survival for the last 50 years," says Lorna Sage, an academic who has known Lessing since the 1970s. "She's got a kind of talent for mobility."

"She descended on a gloomy Britain and became one of the great observers of its culture" says Malcolm Bradbury, Lessing's friend for over 30 years. "She is one of a group of writers who really sparked post-war fiction at the end of the fifties."

She is an outsider, a "difficult" woman whose old comrades from the communist party still smart from her brisk re-evaluation of the movement as a figment of their own "mass psychopathology". One suspects that she referred to her phenomenally successful book, The Golden Notebook, as a "failure" and an "albatross" partly to piss off the feminists who took it up as their manifesto. She more than justifies her reputation for scaring people.

Just now, however, she is excited, because I have said how much I enjoyed her new book, Mara And Dann, a science fiction adventure set in Africa after the next ice age. It is a treat to read, a novel with a storming plot which pursues two adolescent siblings as they flee up the length of Africa with the fires of global warming licking at their heels.

"Thank you, that really is a great compliment.," she says energetically, the Rhodesian accent worn down into a slightly clipped English. "They were always asking me to write a book for children and I never have, because if I deliberately try to do something, it will be dead. But the kids like it very much, which really pleases me."

She makes no concessions to a younger readership. The book is written in her usual, arid prose, free of the humorous nips and tucks authors sometimes deploy to make readers feel they are in on a private joke. Lessing delivers the occasional blast of dry humour, but it is her intellectual honesty, her ability to say the unsayable, which has made her famous.

Nonetheless, her publishers have a problem with Mara and Dann. Lessing's previous works of science fiction, the Canopus In Argus Archives series (sample titles: The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 and Documents Relating To The Sentimental Agents In The Volyen Empire) were met with horror by some critics, who regarded her switch from "real" literature to the geek market as a sort of brain fever.

Friends swallowed and called it "brave". "It was certainly radical for a 'serious' novelist to go anywhere near science fiction," says Malcolm Bradbury. "But she is not, really, one of the great team of science fiction writers."

Lessing regarded the controversy with amusement. It appealed to her playful side, her particular brand of irony which she expressed in 1981 by submitting one of her manuscripts - The Diary Of A Good Neighbour - under the pseudonym Jane Somer, and delighting when it was rejected by two of her main publishers. ("I have never really been forgiven for that," she says.) Her point? That books are judged less for the quality of their writing these days, than for the reputation of the name on the dust jacket.

In this sense, Mara And Dann does not conform to the Doris Lessing brand name. "My publishers don't know how to market it. It has been out in the States for six weeks now and readers don't know what to make of it. It's a straightforward adventure story and they want to find deep messages in it, but I don't think there are any, really." Students of her work will still pick out familiar themes: disintegration, flux, the redeeming power of storytelling. "What did you see?" ask the main characters, again and again, so that it becomes a motif. Why "what did you see?" and not "what did you feel?"

"Now that really is a question," says Lessing, scathingly. "What did you feel? A woman who has just seen all her kids die in a fire: what did you feel? What you see is much more important. If a child was asked 'what did you feel' they wouldn't learn anything. 'What did you see?' - now that's the beginning of learning everything."

What the young Lessing saw and learned is recorded to the last pore in Under my Skin, the first volume of autobiography she wrote four years ago to thwart inaccurate biographers. It won the James Tait Black Prize, but was still received by some critics as almost hurtfully factual: the tone snappish, the refusal to flirt with the reader's expectations of personality taken as a snub.

"It is not a likeable work," ran one unfavourable review, "containing little humour or tenderness or modesty. Even her self-criticism has an arrogant finality about it." Perhaps this revealed more about her than anything else: that here was a woman not afraid to be disliked.

"She has a great air of self-containment," says Lorna Sage. "It can make one feel very trivial and restless by comparison. I have seen her in lecture halls and she does not perform in any grand way, but she answers people's questions with sometimes scary directness. She is very unaffected, unselfprotected, which I think impresses no end."

She has been upbraided for being too serious, but friends insist that, though she may sound like a guru, she is often only teasing.

"I would like to have been an explorer," Lessing says, smiling a little now, for that is in many ways what she is. "A friend of mine has just been in Mongolia looking for lost cities and dinosaur bones. Off they went, into the heart of the Gobi desert, where they ate two bowls of noodles and an apple a day and it was very cold. That is what I would like to have done."

Lessing was born in Persia to middle-class English parents, and spent the first years of her life in Kermanshahan, where her father, Alfred Taylor, was branch manager of the Imperial Bank of Persia. Like many veterans of the first world war he was deeply disillusioned with Britain and, to her mother's regret, never felt able to live there again. After his stint in the bank, they moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia, which brought them nothing but misery.

"I can't convey the horribleness of Southern Rhodesia as a country," says Lessing. "Quite apart from it being a tiny white minority, it was the most provincial, boring place you can imagine. I mean it was unspeakably boring. No one ever talked about anything but sport or the problem of the natives." She squirms at the recollection.

Unbeknownst to her, Muriel Spark was experiencing similar frustrations not far away. Spark writes in her own autobiography, Curriculum Vitae: "Some miles away lived Doris Lessing, then a young girl like me, still in her teens. How I would have loved to have someone like Doris to talk to."

While Lessing's brother, Harry settled into a life of stolid conformity, she rebelled, graduating from a junior school run by nuns who had been out in the sun too long, to a high school which she left when she was 14. Her adolescence, largely spent roaming about the bush, was not without its pleasures.

"The world had unused places then," she wrote in Under My Skin. Exploring them gave a sense both of independence and of physical pride: "It never occurred to me to be ashamed of what I had, even when in a plump phase. I used to stand among people, knowing my body was strong and fine, under my dress, and secretly exult." Away from the influence of social mores she was free, for a little while, to define herself.

It didn't last. For a young woman there was little to look forward to but morning tea parties and evening sundowners. At 19 she married a civil servant called Frank Wisdom, 10 years her senior, and by her early twenties had two children, John and Jean.

"The war atmosphere was so hectic and unreal. Everyone was getting married. I was like a fish in a shoal, I did what everyone else was doing. But of course it wasn't what I wanted to do. I wouldn't have survived if I'd stayed." Where did it come from, this belief that there was something better out there for her? She doesn't know. Not from her parents, who wilted a little more each year under the burden of failing crops and physical hardship. Not from solidarity with her brother, Harry, who would grow up to be a sort of Colonel Blimp figure and die in the colony.

"My brother was innately conservative. I don't think it ever crossed his mind to disagree with authority. He was racist to the extent that the word becomes meaningless. And the word sexist? You just have to laugh."

Her mother, a capable and vigorous woman, longed for a social life beyond the narrow, unsophisticated circles of white settlerdom and when she didn't get it, put all her energies into criticising her daughter. If Lessing inherited anything from this deeply disappointed woman, it was the no-nonsense stoicism English matrons are parodied for.

Her own resilience has shortened her patience with others: young women are upbraided in Walking In The Shade, the second volume of her autobiography, published last year, for their lack of mettle: they "scream or swoon at the sight of a penis they have not been introduced to, feel demeaned by a suggestive remark, and send for a lawyer if a man pays them a compliment." Young writers are put off too easily when they don't win big contracts for their first manuscript. "It was a different attitude then," she says, coolly. "We just got on with it."

This is more than retrospective bravado or old-biddy chauvinism of the "young people? they don't know they're alive" variety. It is rooted in Lessing's essential capacity for cutting her losses, jettisoning allegiances and hauling herself into the next phase of her life. Lorna Sage says: "She is a figure of great mobility and restlessness and that is her representativeness. It's about moving on."

For a while, she "got on" with her marriage, socialising with thick-necked men in polo shirts and women for whom she says no other word but "lumpen" will do. "While I was married, I was going along with everything very efficiently: being a good housewife, going to morning tea parties. I did it all and I did it well. And then I thought, what am I doing in this awful country?"

She wasn't the only one. The communist party in Rhodesia was, at that time, viewed by its sister party in South African as rather amateur. But it was culture, not politics, which drew Lessing to the group of dissidents and intellectuals - one of whom she would marry - who made up the only group of white people in the colony to openly oppose minority rule. In 1942, at the age of 23, her education really began.

"I suddenly met people who had read books and took it for granted that the political system was not going to last," she says. "It was absolute bliss to be able to talk about ideas." She began chewing through the great, literary classics of 19th century realism which would provide a foundation for so much of the work that followed.

Over 50 years later, Malcolm Bradbury recalls witnessing the fruit of this education burst out into a lecture hall: "I have been on reading tours with her and seen her address audiences with fire in her eyes. On one occasion she went round to sixth formers, pressing them: read! read! It is a great passion of hers, because she is one of those people for whom reading was the great transformation, the absolute centre of her education. That is one of her striking features."

For a while the two existences, colonial wife and political activist, ran in parallel. "I was going between this very heady atmosphere back to being a civil servant's wife where you had to be careful of what you said because the husband's career was at stake." Something had to give.

In 1943, she left her first husband and two children to marry fellow comrade, Gottfried Lessing. The marriage was only built to last the duration of the war. "He really was a very narrow man and went on being all his life, so I'm told," she says. In 1949, they parted and Lessing came to London with their young son, Peter.

It is a decision which has pursued her ever since. How could you? interviewers have asked time and again, grappling with the inconsistency of a woman known for her humanitarian spirit, leaving her two young children to move thousands of miles away with a third.

"Now I know that it was about the most intelligent thing I ever did," she says. "But at the time I was doing it, it was awful; dreadful." She believes if she had stayed, the misery would have turned her into an alcoholic. Does it anger her that she has been penalised for leaving her children in a way that a man would not have been? She looks annoyed.

"It doesn't anger me, it was inevitable." There is a pregnant pause. "Of course it's worse for a woman to do it than it is for a man." And she narrows her eyes in suspicion at what feminist piety might argue otherwise. "I became friends with the children when they got older and that was OK, but it didn't make it any better. It is far worse for a mother to leave her children than a father." She got on with it.

The London Lessing found in 1949 was drab, shell-shocked, class-ridden - "it saved me, having a child. If it hadn't been for him, I would have gone to bed and put the blankets over my head" - and it wasn't until the mid 1950s that things started looking up.

Lessing's friend and agent, Jonathan Clowes, was in London at that time and recalls the excitement of feeling they were living in a new meritocracy. "There were a lot of people like me - jumped-up working-class people who had come up through the grammar schools, who somehow seemed to be running everything."

"About half way through the fifties, a new generation arrived that didn't want to talk about the war," says Lessing. "They opened coffee bars, the police got all excited about the sin that was going on. I liked that all very much."

In keeping with the age, her house became a drop-in centre for troubled youngsters and she, a kind of "housemother". It was in this frenetic atmosphere that she broke off from the serial novel she was working on - part of the Children Of Violence series which charted the progress of an Afrikaner girl across five volumes - to write The Golden Notebook, her experimental novel dissecting the life of a sexually liberated woman. The book ran the full gambit of female unmentionables - menstruation, clitoral orgasm, frigidity - and transformed Lessing into an icon for women's liberation. To some female readers, however, her frankness was an unwelcome and unpalatable exposure of their "secrets," a straw that broke more than one camel's back.

In a 1962 issue of Vogue, Siriol Hugh-Jones, the magazine's former features editor, unleashed a tirade of abuse on that triumvirate of women writers: Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Lessing.

Murdoch was culpable for "an endless flow of bizarre and usually enormously disagreeable people involved in meaningless and heartless events". Spark, though commended for her "witty care for words," ultimately boiled down to "a lonely, Roman Catholic prankster whispering little dry and lethal jokes about peculiar school mistresses".

But it was Lessing for whom the author reserved her most indignant disapproval. Here was a woman, "dismal, drab, embarrassing," sodden with "self-pity," who in the Golden Notebook had single-handedly set back the women's movement "a good long way".

"Mrs Lessing leaves one with the really terrible impression of a woman - shrewish, naggy, self-righteous and impossible to live with." Hugh-Jones could only marvel that the gentlemen reviewers of Fleet Street were chivalrous enough not to have finished her off in a way her fellow females were happy to.

The Golden Notebook, first published in Britain in 1962, didn't make it to France or Germany for 14 years because it was considered too inflammatory. When it was republished in China in 1993, 80,000 copies sold out in two days. "It took realism apart from the inside," says Lorna Frame. "Lessing threw over the conventions she grew up in to stage a kind of breakdown - to celebrate disintegration as the representative experience of a generation - when what you should have been doing is getting the act together." She challenged the put-up or shut-up culture of an uptight nation; it was all very un-English.

The Golden Notebook became so widely and endlessly talked about that Lessing grew to regard it as a distraction from the rest of her work and particularly to resent how the hype overshadowed the book's intellectual content. But she shrugged off the press attacks with relative ease. After all, she had been writing in a climate of disapproval since the early days.

"When The Grass Is Singing came out, nobody liked it. The whites hated it, my dear comrades hated it. When it did well, it annoyed a great many people. But if you want to be a writer and you haven't got some kind of stubbornness, you've had it."

"Yes, there was a lot of to-do over the Golden Notebook at the time," says Clowes, "but I think she was a bit surprised by it all. She couldn't understand why everyone was making such a fuss. She's never bothered too much about reviews because she says that, historically, they are often shown to be totally wrong."

Besides, the communist party had taught her to observe a certain nobility in suffering; a forbearance under siege. When she later came to analyse these feelings, she identified them as a hangover from the war. The "elite of suffering," as she called it - a sort of "nobody knows the trouble I've seen" romanticism, bred in the trenches - was a truth so hard it made people wince when referred to in public talks.

"The communists were elite because they were alone in their bravery. It took a long time for me to say, hang on, this is the same attitude that the soldiers had in the great war: the civilians don't understand us, the government sold us out, we stand alone. And I thought, my god, it has probably fed into communism."

It wasn't until 1956, when Khrushchev "came clean" about Stalin's crimes at the party's famous 20th congress, that Lessing terminated her membership. For many western communists, this event destroyed the last vestiges of their belief in what Lessing now calls a political "nonsense".

Some old comrades were so appalled they committed suicide. The extremity of the fallout still intrigues her.

"The question is, why did people refuse to recognise the truth for so long? In the early 1960s, when everyone was leaving the communist party, a man who had been tortured in a soviet prison came to my house to tell the comrades in the west the real truth about Russia. There were a lot of people there who had been reds. The man was waiting for us to say, ah, comrade, at last you have told us the truth! but nobody did. I don't understand it to this day."

But others who survived the political climate at that time, question the slant of Lessing's appraisal. Professor Jane Miller lived in London through the same period and shared communist friends with Lessing. "I suppose I questioned the claim that her experience of the party was representative," she says. It was a "partisan" account of the time, she believes, "lopsided and over-generalised" and in an essay Miller wrote for an American academic journal, she casts a sceptical eye over Lessing's dismissal of the movement as a sort of mass delusion. "To gather retrospectively an entire generation's ideological commitment into a single, idiosyncratic mea culpa, smacks of another kind of ideologue, even a scourge."

Lessing concedes that she was only ever a "real" communist in Rhodesia - "I had never invested my whole self in it the way a lot of people had" - and has been quick to highlight the movement's more ridiculous aspects: "The typical communist was an unsmiling little tyrant served by a bevy of gasping women."

Still, she implies, if she is betraying the spirit of the time by refusing to re-evoke the sentiments which drove it, then it is because one cannot revisit strong feelings without poisoning them with nostalgia or retrospective bitterness. The best one can hope for is a clinical evaluation. "I think the tragedy was that the socialist parties of the west allied to the soviet union in their minds. They identified with failure, with brutality and I am sure this is what has corrupted socialism in our part of the world."

Does she worry that today's younger generation is dangerously politically apathetic? "When I look back and see what all that moral fervour did, no." Did nothing good come out of it? "What was attractive was the accomplishment that went with it: people were very brave."

And does she still think that literature has the power to destroy empires? "Yes, it probably does, in countries where you've got a tyranny. Of course some writers can't wait to have a tyranny to work on. But it is very nice to be living in a time when there aren't passionate beliefs."

She continues to lend her name to local campaigns, however, for better reading in schools, for the preservation of the trees in Hampstead Heath, and, revealingly, to pursue a faith in Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam which she studied for years under the tutelage of Idries Shah. Its origins are in seventh-century aesthetics and followers of Sufism aim to achieve direct union with God. They grew in number after the publication of Shah's book, The Sufis, in 1964. "It was as if I had been waiting to read that book all my life," Lessing has said. "It is a cliche, but the book changed my life."

She has a granddaughter studying at Oxford and another doing architecture in Cape Town where her daughter Jean has settled. Peter lives in London; her other son John died of a heart attack in 1991, a casualty of farming in Africa. "She is a very clear, firm-minded person," says Bradbury. "She used to be much more light hearted than she is now, but that is part of the peril of ageing, that people lose some of their joie de vivre."

"I do find the world less and less convincing as I grow older," she has said, unconvincingly. Since finishing Mara And Dann, she has completed a sequel to The Fifth Child in which, with characteristic optimism, the enfant terrible of the first volume grows up to parent a decent child.

She is now working on another book, taking the total to over 80. "I think it's her wisdom that distinguishes her," says Clowes. "And her amazing capacity to surprise. We'll talk about a book she might write, then suddenly she rings up and says 'Oh, I've started something else.' It is extraordinary."

The day before we meet, she has had a new experience. Lessing is posing for a portrait commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery and has endured the first, hour-long sitting. She is anticipating the others with dread. "It is incredibly hard work," she says with a sly grin. "I am always moving."

 Mara And Dann, An Adventure, is published by Flamingo at £16.99

Life at a glance

Doris May Lessing

Born: October 22, 1919; Kermanshahan, Persia (now Iran).

Education: left school at 14.

Married: 1939 Frank Wisdom. (one son, one daughter), marriage dissolved 1943; 1945 Gottfried Lessing (one son), marriage dissolved 1949.

Political affiliation: joined the Communist Party in London, 1951; left, 1956.

Major works: The Grass is Singing, 1950; In Pursuit of the English,1960; The Golden Notebook, 1962; The Memoirs Of A Survivor, 1975; The Good Terrorist, 1985; Under my Skin, 1994.

Awards: 1954 Somerset Maugham Award (for Five, a collections of short stories); 1985, WH Smith Literary Award and the Mondello Prize for The Good Terrorist; 1994 James Tait Black Prize for Under my Skin; nominated for the 1996 Bad Sex Award iin the Literary Review.