i live in zimbabwe born and bred here 70 years ago
doris's observations of the first half of her autobiography are before my time but tie up with the stories of my parents
so refreshing to read them from the horse's mouth
so honest
almost painfully honest
thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it
i will take a breather before tackling the second part ( )

«Las propias opiniones sobre nuestras vidas cambian todo el tiempo, difieren a edades diferentes. Si yo hubiera escrito un relato sobre mí a los veinte años, habría sido un documento beligerante y combativo. A los treinta, confiado y optimista. A los cuarenta, repleto de culpa y justificaciones. A los cincuenta, confuso e inseguro. Pero a los sesenta y más allá aparece algo nuevo: comienzas a ver tu primer yo a una gran distancia. Cuando eres capaz de regresar a los diez años, a los veinte años, a cualquier edad que desees, ves a esa niña, a esa joven mujer, como alguien casi distinto. Te alejas volando de lo personal. Has recibido ese gran regalo que da hacerse mayor: objetividad, impersonalidad.» Doris Lessing. «Dentro de mí y Un paseo por la sombra son libros cuya extensión se justifica por la extraordinaria variedad de los logros de Lessing, su memoria excepcional y su talento como escritora.» Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review

“Here we are at the core of the problem of memory. You remember with what you are at the time of remembering.”

“Every novel is a story, but a life isn’t one, more of a sprawl of incidents.”

“How do you know that what you remember is more important than what you don’t?”

As might be expected, the first volume of Nobel-Prize-winning author Doris Lessing’s autobiography (covering her birth in Kermanshah, Persia, and her childhood, youth, and early adult years—to the age of 30–in Southern Rhodesia) is a stimulating read, often rewarding and wise, but occasionally frustrating, too. In my opinion, the first half of the book is the better. It considers the time before Lessing’s involvement with the Rhodesian Communist Party and her early, rather strangely cobbled marriages (to men she didn’t love and who, likewise, had no great feeling for her).

Lessing observes that children and grown-ups do not live in the same sensory world. The early years of life are marked by their “intense physicality”. Time passes differently for children, and what one experiences when young leaves the greatest impression. Lessing provides many details about her life in a stone house in a mountainous region of western Iran and on the Rhodesian veldt. Her descriptions of the times after she left her parents’ farm in her mid-teens to work first as an au pair and then as a legal secretary pale by comparison. I think I was expecting more intensity in Lessing’s account of her adolescence—i.e., a description of a burgeoning life of the mind (à la Simone de Beauvoir). I can’t say I got it.

Lessing begins by considering her parents and their families of origin. Throughout the book she regularly returns to The Great War, which, she says, ruined her parents’ lives. Those who survived it, she writes, “lived lives wrenched out of their proper course.” Maude McVeagh, Lessing’s “ferociously energetic”, capable mother, who had defied her controlling and aspirational father to become a nurse, lost her great love, a doctor to the war. His ship went down after being torpedoed by the Germans. Maude nursed Alfred Tayler, Lessing’s father, in the London Free Hospital. A soldier whose injury required a leg amputation, Alfred also suffered from shell shock and would be haunted for the rest of his days by his experiences in the trenches. He never got over his country’s betrayal of a generation of young men and was contemptuous of “the complacent crooks who had got rich out of the war.” From early on, Lessing was aware of her father’s demons: “I used to feel there was something like a dark, grey cloud, like poison gas, over my early childhood.” As for her mother: “I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything”. Lessing determined that hers would be a life entirely different from theirs. “I will not. I will not [be trapped]” became her mantra.

After the war, Lessing’s father worked as a banker in Kermanshah and then Tehran for about five years, providing his status-conscious wife and two young children with something approximating a middle-class way of life. However, he felt shackled and unhappy in such an existence. He was bored by the life of “dinner parties and musical evenings” that his wife thrived on. On a home leave from Persia, he jumped at the opportunity of making a go at farming in Rhodesia. The move to Africa presented his daughter and son with ample opportunities to enjoy the natural world. They were relatively free of the constraints that middle-class children in England were typically subject to.

Lessing’s African upbringing no doubt fostered some of the independence of spirit that she would later be known for. Her mother, however, was initially deeply unhappy in Africa. There were no “nice” people near the Tayler farm. Maude’s genius for society was starved and her energy was subsequently funnelled into the lives of her children. Hers became “the pathetic identifications of a woman whose gratification is only in her children.” She had a breakdown and took to her bed for months, undergoing “that inner reconstruction which most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you had believed you must have to live at all.” Eventually, being the capable woman that she was, she pulled herself together and threw herself into the hard work that life on the land demanded. In spite of the Taylers’ efforts, however, the farm was never a success. Maize did not bring money. Neither did tobacco. Quests for gold and precious minerals on the property also yielded nothing. Soon enough, Lessing’s father was battling serious illness, diabetes, in a time when the medical profession hadn’t figured out how to properly use insulin. Tending to him as he wasted away over many years became his wife’s full-time job.

While I had a vague idea of the outline of Lessing’s life before reading this first volume of her autobiography, I’ll admit that I was surprised by what she reveals about her marriages. These were not love (or apparently even lust) matches. Indeed, it is hard to understand quite what was motivating her. Her first marriage was to Frank Wisdom, a civil servant. A decade older than Lessing, Frank was a member of a sports club she frequented, and he, too, was involved in the progressive political scene that attracted her. An “unregenerate”, she married him in an act of “female ruthlessness”, for he was, in fact, already engaged to a girl in Britain. Before long, knowing she “was not going to stay in this life”, Lessing ended up leaving him and her two young children: “There is no boredom like that of an intelligent young woman who spends a day with a very small child.” Yes, she “commit[ted] the unforgivable”, but, had she not, she would’ve had a breakdown or become an alcoholic. Her eldest son, John Wisdom, would later tell her that although he understood the reasons for her leaving, he nevertheless resented her having done so.

Lessing’s union with Gottfried Lessing, an ideological, “purist” communist, German-Jewish refugee, and scion of a wealthy Eastern European industrialist family, is even more baffling. Lessing supplies a number of explanations for this second marriage. The two were the only unpaired members in their political circle, so they more or less fell together by default, she says. Later, though, she opines that the marriage was “”forced by circumstance”. In a third take on the relationship, Lessing states that she married Gottfried in order to mitigate Salisbury society’s view of him as an enemy alien. She describes the rigid and orderly Gottfried dispassionately, as she would a character in one of her novels. Lessing acknowledges that he was a generous and mostly reasonable man, albeit one with little tolerance for the subjects that engaged her: psychology, psychoanalysis, and the world of dreams, myths, and fairy tales. He sounds like quite a trial: a humourless, dry stick of a man, a number of whose traits might have placed him on the autism spectrum were he alive today. Whatever led to the marriage, both Gottfried and Doris knew going in that they would eventually divorce.

I was surprised to read of Lessing’s cavalier (even careless) attitude to conceiving and bearing children. When she tells her father she is having a third baby (with Gottfried, whom she has every intention of divorcing), Alfred wonders why she’d do this, given that she’s already abandoned two young children. (He’s not the only one who wonders. I do, too.) Looking back, Lessing concludes that she was more or less fulfilling a biological imperative. As a heathy, fertile young woman living at a time when the population was still recovering from The Great War’s decimation, she did as Nature bid. Ultimately, though, she had her tubes tied, which she acknowledges was one of the smartest things she ever did.

I was underwhelmed and slightly frustrated by what I saw as Lessing’s somewhat superficial treatment of her youthful communist years. I felt that I got only an impressionistic sense of her thinking during that period. It seems that in the second half of her book, she was unable to resist writing novelistic descriptions of her friends and “comrades” in the cause. The reader doesn’t get much on her interior life. Early in the autobiography she had observed: “The older I get the more secrets I have, never to revealed . . .” Maybe she didn’t want to hold up the contents of her mind for viewing. Possibly she could not clearly recall what she was thinking as a young woman. Perhaps she felt her fiction, especially the novels in the Children of Violence series and The Golden Notebook, had already done an adequate job exploring or exposing the truth of those times.

If part of the measure of a good literary biography is the degree to which it makes the reader want to read or return to the writer’s body of work, Under My Skin is a great success. Throughout the book, Lessing regularly takes the time to link key people and incidents in her life to the characters and events in her fiction. Having completed the book, I am eager to approach the many works of hers I haven’t yet read and rediscover those I have. ( )

Nel 1994 e nel 1997 Doris Lessing pubblicò in due distinti volumi la sua autobiografia: Sotto la pelle (1919-1949) e Camminando nell’ombra (1949-1962).
Il primo racchiude in quasi cinquecento pagine i primi trent’anni della vita e che si apre con una polemica indirizzata verso il crescente numero di autobiografie non autorizzate.
Il libro, il cui titolo riprende una famosa canzone di Cole Porter, narra
dell’infanzia della Lessing a Kermanshah dove il padre lavorava in una banca e in Rhodesia (oggi Zimbabwe), colonia britannica dove la famiglia si trasferì nel 1925.
Icona di molte cause, dall’anticolonialismo al femminismo, donna dallo spirito libero e indipendente ha ricevuto il Nobel nel 2007 per avere saputo cantare l’esperienza femminile ed essere stata fine osservatrice della "civiltà divisa". ( )

I don't agree with Lessing about everything, nor do I like everything she has written. With that disclaimer, I feel free to say that this is a great memoir. From her early life as a child of white immigrants to "Northern Rhodesia" to her life in South Africa first as a fairly conventional wife and mother and later as a divorced, remarried communist activist, Lessing is honest, witty and thoughtful. Interesting insights into the time period and also into the life of an extraordinary woman. ( )