THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR - DORIS LESSING

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

one of her profoundest visionary excursions." —Gail Godwin, Chicago Tribune Book World

 

 

 

 

In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman—middle-aged and middle-class—is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal—a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.

 

"An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility." —Time

"A brilliant fable." —Maureen Howard, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Doris Lessing again presents herself as one of the most intelligent of all modern novelists." —Philadelphia Bulletin

"The most fluid and suggestive of all her books." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A short, easily read novel...part science fiction and part 19th-century realism, its effect is profoundly affecting and mystical... especially moving for those who have responded to Lessing's previous work." —Houston Chronicle

"A major work, one that well proves her vigor, originality and importance as a novelist." —Cleveland Free Press

 

 

 

 

The Memoirs of A Survivor Year First Published: 1974 First Published by: Octagon Category: Novel This Edition: British first edition ISBN: 09-008-6030-8 click on image for larger version

 

 

From the book cover: "An attempt at autobiography', says Doris Lessing, describing her new book, which has qualities that make it seem like a fable or a magical tale, but is square in that ancient tradition where the storyteller's leap into the fantastic has, but the rules, to be made from a ground of the most solid reality. Here, though, reality is the very day of a few years hence, when barbarism is what is normal, and each of us has to fight for survival - men, women, and even little children who are so brutalised by necessity they are more frightening than the ferocious adults. From her windows the narrator watches things fall apart, sees the migrating hordes seethe past in search of safety, the shelter, the good life that is always somewhere else - far from the anarchy of this emptying city where people huddle together in tribes for self-defense, where plants and animals are taking over deserted streets and houses. She also watches over the child Emily, brought into her care by a stranger who instructs: "Look after her, she is your responsibility," before vanishing. Emily - who, by the time the story is told, has become a beautiful world-worn young woman not yet sixteen - is also guarded by Hugo, half cat and half dog, "Emily's animal," the bizarre and lovable beast whose presence dominates this tale.   Comments: This book was made into a film in 1981 starring Julie Christie, directed by David Gladwell. In 1993, a play based on the book was performed at The Festival Theatre. Also see: American Edition

 

 

 

 

photo by Peter Lessing The Memoirs of a Survivor Year First Published: 1975 First Published by: Alfred A. Knopf Category: Novel This Edition: American first edition ISBN: 0-394-49633-7 click on image for larger version

 

 

From the book jacket: "Doris Lessing's new book is a darkly visionary novel set in the not-so-distant future when men, women, and even young children are fighting for survival in a world that is swiftly falling apart. Mrs. Lessing calls this book "an attempt at autobiography," but it is also a fable, a magical tale describing the charged emotional atmosphere a few years from now, when barbarism is the norm and each of us has to struggle to survive. From her window the narrator watches things fall apart, sees the migrating hordes seethe past in search of the safety, the shelter, the good life that is always somewhere else - far from the anarchy of the emptying city, where people huddle together in tribes for self-defense, where plants and animals take over deserted streets and houses. She also watches over the child Emily, left with her by a stranger who says, "Look after her; she is your responsibility," and then disappears. Inside her room ordinary time unexpectedly dissolves, and the narrator is faced with painful scenes from the past - from childhood and adolescence, even from infancy. And also with a growing knowledge of an intelligent presence that is always there, just behind the facade of our everyday reality... This is a strong, phantasmagorical book which develops themes touched upon in The Four-Gated City, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark, and in parts of The Golden Notebook.

 

 

 

 

 

Doris Lessing Considers Her World and the World

By MAUREEN HOWARD

June 8, 1975

 

 

THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR By Doris Lessing.

oris Lessing's new work, "The Memoirs of a Survivor," is a brilliant fable, quite unlike any of her previous novels yet dependent on them, a restatement of her major themes. "Words are when one stands back to look," Martha Quest says towards the end of the earlier "The Four-Gated City," and words come from her torrentially, as from a consciousness so heightened that her mind careens from one perception to another. The massive accumulation of words that Lessing has usually demanded for her heroines gives them a reality so large that it strains, and is meant to strain, the boundaries of fiction. Their sprawling histories encompass decades, careers, political movements, the crises of women in our time.

 

Now, from a later perspective and with self-scrutinizing insight Doris Lessing herself stands back to look not only at the world but at her own earlier imaginations of it: her words have a special precision and eloquence. The distended urgency of her earlier heroines is discarded, and the narrator of this book is a woman who turns a cool, faceless attention to the crumbling society around her. From her window she records the landscape of apocalypse with total control, and with a rhetoric that measures (and weights) her experience, that seeks out the phrases that will correctly answer the events of that time, "the protacted period of unease and tension before the end. . ." The city is besieged. Wandering packs of youths devastate an area and then move on. Hordes of people have already left for the country and relative safety. "While everything. . .broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives as if nothing fundamental was happening."

 

Lessing's fable takes hold with tremendous force in "Memoirs of a Survivor," for it is obvious from the start that her beleaguered city is only slightly more grotesque than London or New York or Rome. There is an irrelevant government that maintains an unresponsive system of justice and a remote bureaucracy, a government that could "adjust itself to events, while pretending probably even to itself, that it initiated them." Polluted air, street gangs, meaningless violence, the devaluation of language--it is all too close for comfort. The shock of recognition is more horrifying than the fantasy of "Briefing for a Descent Into Hell" or "The Four-Gated City." The tone is even-tempered, genial as domestic gossip: the price of potatoes, the hoarding of sugar. We know this world and have indulged in the same irony that Doris Lessing uses on us. A few weeks ago umbrellas were still being rented out on the beaches of Saigon. Last year that plane crash outside Washington led to the discovery that a secret bomb shelter for top Government officials lay hidden in the Virginia hills. There is no surprise, no outrage. As Lessing predicted years ago, "The future is what happens."

 

"The Memoirs of a Survivor" is deceptively simple, as good fables tend to be. Her choice of this form is deliberate and bold, as though she has no time to give us background and motivation (her old Dreiserian amplitude)--all that apparatus of the old genre. Emily, a child of about 12, is delivered to the flat of the woman who tells us her story: the girl is her responsibility. She is a tidy, polite child without a history, defensive, loving only to Hugo, her bizarre cat-like dog, a mutation of a pet in a threatening world which suffers a shortage of morality and meat. Emily's self-involvement, her adolescent posturing is funny and touching. What unfolds is a strange coming of age: this child of our time is overly wise, sexually precocious. In blue jeans and funky costumes she seems, like Lolita, to be a pure product of her culture. She wants to be out on the street with the kids, but she is an anachronism. She is flawed with a moral sense. It may be absurd that she can't drift off with the next tribe because of her loyalty to Hugo, but her vulnerability is moving. Emily falls in love, that old catastrophe, and suffers, before she is 16, the heartbreak of a woman.

 

Her lover, Gerald, is a benevolent gang leader who takes over and abandoned house to care for homeless children. The society that he sets up with Emily is an earnest democracy: order is imposed on chaos--fanatical, ingenious ways of ordering life being the great lesson of survival--but it is exhausting. At any moment the children can revert to stealing, to petty jealousies and intrigue. Gerald's goodness finally leads him to fostering a pack of savages, little children of such bestiality that in hours they destroy the hard-won civility of his household. They are beyond salvation, yet he feels that in abandoning them he will give up the best of himself.

 

Doris Lessing's characters often come to self-awareness and renewal by protecting, healing and guarding others. Anna Wulf and Martha Quest are brought through madness to "inner vision" by caring for the mad themselves. In "The Memoirs of a Survivor" the woman narrator, who calls herself Emily's guardian, washes and irons, plans for the girl's future, and worries, like any mother of an adolescent, that she is beyond interfering. Emily, anxious and distraught, nurses a sick waif, June Ryan, back to health. But June, shallow, worthless, a perfect example of the new breed without conscience joins a group of women who are moving on. Impulse and inconsequence take the place of real feeling, and Emily is bereft. Lessing's message, recognizable from her previous work, is close to Auden's "We must love one another and die." With dogged persistence, she repeats the idea from novel to novel, qualifies it with a cold reality. We must care. We must take on responsibility, preserve what is left. We will be disillusioned, defeated, but we must.

 

Emily's story is one half of "The Memoirs of a Survivor," an external record of events which parallel Lessing's recapitulation of another major theme: that our interior lives are rich with possibilities. We must rely on our perceptions to inform us. Like a cinematic dissolve the wall of the guardian's flat fades away: here lie rooms and gardens that change form vision to vision, another world to be set in order, and again the task is difficult. A sort of poltergeist, a marauder of her psyche, can ruin all her efforts, leaving the place in disarray. The ease with which this inner world is projected is markedly different from the elaborate justifications of the visionary in Lessing's other novels, as though she had come to terms with her own belief. The life behind the survivor's wall is more than plausible: it has the authenticity of dreams. With her we come to understand that the interior and exterior worlds are close together, imagination bred of memories.

 

Scenes of Emily's childhood take place beyond the wall, projections of such incisive and painful beauty that they must illuminate the "real" world. In one scene the girl's father holds her prisoner and tickles her, a dread but permissible sexual encounter between father and daughter which captures his guilt and desire. Emily, a small child, is seen in white rooms which are as cold as her complaining mother's ignorance and inattention. Red drapes, red scratches, flames score the white--one is reminded of the dimension which color takes on in Bergman's "Cries and Whispers." And Bergman must come to mind for this fable is closer to "Persona" than any work of fiction. There is such a fusion of lives and roles here, a shared past. We are told, "I knew I was seeing an incident that was repeated again and again in Emily's? her mothers? Early life." The past must become our wonderful story if we are to transcend the terrible rules and limitations of our specific lives. The overlay of a grand psychic drama on the little melodrama of Emily's love story is the real theme of "The Memoirs of a Survivor." Doris Lessing speaks of this book as "an attempt at autobiography," and it is self-referential but not in the usual way. It is a synthesis of her earlier work: the scenes are from her past, perhaps her past as Emily, but surely from the past of her own novels.

 

How can it end--this apocalyptic vision? Lessing resorts to romance without apologies. Everything is probable as the last walls dissolve, like the final orchestrations in late Shakespeare. All the principals walk, literally, into the imagined landscape of Lessing's alternatives--the guardian, with her family as it were, Emily, Hugo translated to a noble beast, Gerald and at the last moment the savage children so that their salvation may be accomplished after all.

 

In her introduction to the new edition of "The Golden Notebook," Doris Lessing speculates that in the narrowness and impermanence of the exterior world all the old values, all her words will be swept away. "So why write novels," she asks, "Indeed why! I suppose we have to go on living as if. . ." As the very title, "The Memoirs of a Survivor," is meant to suggest, we endure.

Maureen Howard's latest novel is "Before My Time."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Swedish Academy awards the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature to Doris Lessing.

The citation: "that epicist of the female experience,

who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biography
From the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin,
HarperPerennial, 1995

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.   Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.   But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time." The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."   In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.   Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them." Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."   In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.   During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.   Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.   Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical judgement" - to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1951-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.   Attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf "tries to live with the freedom of a man" - a point Lessing seems to confirm: "These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic."   In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.   Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 and If the Old Could..., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume one of My Autobiography, to 1949 appeared in 1995 and received the James Tait Black Prize for best biography. Addenda (by Jan Hanford)   In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago. She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and In Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's personality, life and views.   In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote the book. In an interview she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview." And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996.   Late in the year, HarperCollins published Play with A Tiger and Other Plays, a compilation of 3 of her plays: Play with a Tiger, The Singing Door and Each His Own Wilderness. In an unexplained move, HarperCollins only published this volume in the U.K. and it is not available in the U.S., to the disappointment of her North American readers.   In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time, providing the libretto for the opera "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" which premiered in Heidelberg, Germany in May. Walking in the Shade, the anxiously awaited second volume of her autobiography, was published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. This volume documents her arrival in England in 1949 and takes us up to the publication of The Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her autobiography, she will not be writing a third volume.   Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind." 1999 also saw her first experience on-line, with a chat at Barnes & Noble (transcript). In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Annual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya.   December 31 1999: In the U.K.'s last Honours List before the new Millennium, Doris Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done "conspicuous national service." She revealed she had turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire because there is no British Empire. Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means "you're not called anything - and it's not demanding. I like that". Being a Dame was "a bit pantomimey". The list was selected by the Labor Party government to honor people in all walks of life for their contributions to their professions and to charity. It was officially bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II.   In January, 2000 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing. Ben, in the World, the sequel to The Fifth Child was published in Spring 2000 (U.K.) and Summer 2000 (U.S.). In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.   She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel is Alfred and Emily. She has announced it is her final book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.dorislessing.org

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14/reviews/lessing-survivor.html