Presented with snapshots of the Tayler family on their farm Rhodesia and asked to pick out the artist or artist-to-be among them, one might at a pinch settle on the father, rather stiff military but clearly not unintelligent. Certainly not on the daughter, pleasant-looking enough but ordinary as a loaf of bread. Yet the daughter had it in her not only to escape the future staring her in the face  -marriage to a decent young fellow followed by life of managing servants and having babies - but to become one of major novelists of her time.
Alfred Cook Tayler, Doris's sad-eyed father, having lost a leg in the trenches of World War I, married the nurse tending him and quit a native country whose manifold hypocrisies he could no longer bear. His wife, already in her mid-thirties, gave up her career to have a family. Their first child, Doris - later Doris Wisdom, then, Doris Lessing - was born in Persia in 1919.
Following ideas about child rearing fashionable at the time, Emily Maude Tayler imposed on her children a rigid schedule of feeding times and bowel movements, reproducing upon them her own upbringing at the hands of an unloving stepmother. Doris responded with deep anger against a mother who on principle refused to feed her when she cried, who made it clear that she preferred her son to her daughter, and who chatted openly to guests about "how the little in particular (she was so difficult, so naughty!) made her life an total misery.” No child could  have stood up to such an "assault on [her] very existence.” “For years I lived in a state of accusation against [her], at first hot, then cold, and hard.”
Since her mother would not love her, she turned to her father. "The smell of maleness, tobacco, sweat… enveloped her in safety." But there was a darker side to his love. The stump amputated leg poked out at her from his dressing gown, and obscenity with a life of its own. There was also the tickling game, "when Daddy captures down into his little girl and her face is forced down into his lap or crotch, into the unwashed smell… His great hands go to work on my ribs. My screams, helpless, hysterical, desperate." For years afterward she had dreams in which she struggled while brutal faces loomed over her. “I wonder how many women who submit to physical sufferings at the hands of their men were taught by ‘games’, by ‘tickling’”.
After Persia the Taylers moved to Rhosedia – a colony founded only thirty-five years earlier, - drawn by the lure of quick fortunes to be made in  maize farming. But their thousand-acre farm  ("It would not occurred to [my parents] that the land belonged to the blacks”) was not large enough to be economically viable. Though her mother adapted well, her father lacked the doggedness needed for farming; they were always in debt (p.74).
For the two children, however, growing up in the backcountry was a wonderful formative experience. From their parents they learned about geology and natural history; bedtime stories fed their imagination. Books were ordered from London, and devoured. (Books were cheap enough in the 1920s for a struggling colonial family to buy in quantities; no Zimbadwean child of today, and certainly no rural child, could afford such a wealth of reading matter.) By the age of twelve Doris knew how to set a hen, look after chickens, and rabbits, worm dogs and cats, pan for gold, take samples from reefs, cook, sew, use the milk separator and churn butter and ginger beer, paint stenciled patterns on materials, make papier-mâché, walk on stilts … drive the car, shoot pigeons and guineafowl for the pot, preserve eggs - and a lot else.
"That is real happiness, a child's happiness: being enabled to do and make, above all to know you are contributing to the family, you are valuable and valued" (p. 103).
Later Lessing would indict settler society for its "coldness [and] stinginess of the heart" toward blacks (p. 113); the charge would be fleshed out in The Grass Is Singing (1950), an astonishingly accomplished debut, though perhaps too wedded to romantic stereotypes of the African for present-day tastes, as well as in African Stories (1964). Yet Rhodesia was not a wholly bad social environment in which to grow up. Aside from the restorative power of the natural world (about which Lessing is unabashedly Wordsworthian), there reigned among the children of the settlers a strongly egalitarian spirit that helped her escape the class obsessions of her parents. And among the ten thousand whites in Salisbury, the capital, she would in time discover a sizable contingent of refugees from Europe, most of them left-leaning, many of them Jewish, who would exert a decisive intellectual and political influence on her.
Meanwhile, to the confusing signals that her parents sent out, Doris responded with behavior typical of the unloved child calling for love. She stole, lied, cut up her mother's clothes, set fires; she wove fantasies that the Taylers were not her real parents.
At the age of seven, "a frightened and miserable little girl" (p. 90), she was packed off to a convent boarding school where the nuns-themselves the unwanted daughters of German peasants frightened their charges with hellfire stories. There she spent four wretched years. After a further stretch in an all-girls high school in Salisbury, with weekly letters from her mother reproving her for ' the money she was costing them, she dropped out of the educa- ; tion system definitively. She was thirteen.
Yet she had never been a poor student. On the contrary, if only to please her mother, she made sure she always came first in class. She was popular with the other girls, inhabiting a false self she calls "Tigger" (after the A. A. Milne character], "fat and bouncy .. . brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability.” When later she gravitated into Communism circles, she was known as “Comrade Tigger”. She repudiated the nickname once she left Rhosedia in 1949, but, refusing to go away, the Tigger self mutated into what Lessing calls the Hostess  self, “bright, helful, receptive, attentive," and disturbingly reminiscent of her mother (89,20).
Is this a clue to the title of the first volume of her autobiography: Under My Skin? In isolation, the title gestures in conventional fashion toward self-revelation. But an epigraph reminds us  of its context in Cole Pore: I’ve got you under my skin / I’ve got you deep in the heart of me, / So deep in my heart you’re really part of me, / I've got you under my skin. / I’ve tried not to give in….” The hidden addressee of  the book, the “you” deep in the Lessing's heart, under her skin, emerges all to plausibly as her mother, dead since 1957.
Averse to any display of emotion, her mother had found a way of expressing tenderness toward her children by persuading they were ill and nursing them to health. Back at home, Doris played along, using illness as an excuse to spend days in bed reading. But she could find the privacy she craved. When she began to menstruate, her mother trumpeted the news to the males of the household.  When she tried vto diet, her mother piled her plate. Her fourteenth year was spent fighting for her life against amother who, as she tried to control her infant bowel movements, now seemed to be asserting ownership over her body.
To escape, Doris took a job as a nursemaid. Guide by her employer, she began to read books on politics and sociology while nightly the same employer’s brother-in-law crept into her bed and ineptly toyed with her. Characteristically, she does not pretend she was a passive victim. She “[fought] the virginity of [her] placid suitor . . . in a fever of erotic longing.”. “It is my belief,” she writes, that some girls – among whom she clearly includes herself- "ought to be put at the age of fourteen” with an older man as a form of “apprentice love” (p.185).

II

Lessing's precocious preschool reading had included Scott, Stevenson, Kipling, Lamb's versions of Shakespeare, Dickens. (In her time, she notes tartly, children were not "patronized" but on the contrary encouraged to try things that were beyond p. 83.) Now she began to read contemporary fiction, D. H. Lawrence in particular, as well as the great Russians. By the age of eighteen she had written two apprentice novels herself. Shy also selling stories to South African magazines. She had, in fact, slipped into being a writer.
Of the three best-known women writers to emerge southern Africa - Olive Schreiner, Nadine Gordimer, and Lessing (who, though reluctant to accept the label "African writer”, freely acknowledges that her sensibility was formed in and by Africa) - none completed high school. All were substantially self-educated, all became formidable intellectuals. This says something about the fierceness with which isolated adolescents on the margins of empire hungered for a life they felt cut off from, the life the mind - far more fiercely, it turned out, than most of their metropolitan cousins. It also says something about how desultory pressure was on girls to proceed all the way through the educational mill, domesticity being their ultimate lot.
Intermittent visits to her parents' farm only confirmed to Lessing that she had done well to escape when she did. Her mother was beginning to conform to the worst of colonial stereotypes, complaining about the servants in a "scolding, insistent, nagging voice full of dislike," while her father slowly wasted away from diabetes, a "self-pitying, peevish, dream-sodden old man talking, talking about his war." When he eventually died, she had an urge to scratch out the words "Heart failure" under Cause of  Death on the death certificate and write instead, "First World War” (pp. 157, 326, 372).
Becalmed in what felt more and more like a backwater, (this period of her life would be evoked in Landlocked [1965]), she wrote and rewrote The Grass Is Singing. "I was waiting for my future. real life, to begin" (p. 418).

III

Lessing's first marriage, at the age of nineteen, was to a man much older than herself - a marriage involving not the real woman but the Tigger self, the "Jolly young matron" (p. 207). Not yet ready for motherhood, she gave birth to a son, then neglected him. The child responded with anger and bewilderment uncannily like that of the young Doris.
A second child followed. She was drinking more and more, having affairs, treating her husband badly (much of this material went into A Proper Marriage [1954], the second of the Martha Quest novels and the most directly autobiographical). The situation was clearly untenable. Vowing to herself that her children would one day inherit "a beautiful and perfect world where there would be no race hatred, injustice, and so forth," she gave them into the care of relatives and began to make plans to leave the country. She bore within her, she felt, the same "secret doom" that 'lad ruined her parents' lives and would ruin her children's too if he stayed with them. "I was absolutely sincere," she records dryly. "There isn't much to be said for sincerity, in itself" (pp. 262-63).
In the wake of the battle of Stalingrad, with the glory it brought to Russian arms, Lessing was converted to Communism. In her account of her Communist years a certain defensiveness is still detectable. In truth, she writes, "I was never committed with all of myself." By the time the Cold War broke out and she and her comrades suddenly became pariahs to white Rhodesian society, she was already beginning to have doubts. By 1954 she was no longer a Communist, though for years she felt "residual tugs of loyalty" (pp. 284, 397).
Recruits tended to be people with unhappy childhoods behind them, looking for a substitute family; their own children they hrugged off as unwanted nuisances. As an enthusiastic newcomer and as a woman), Lessing was assigned the task of peddling The Guardian, organ of the South African Communist Party, in the poorer areas of Salisbury. Of all her Party activities, this may in fact have been the most useful to her as a writer: it enabled her to meet working-class people and see something of working-class life (A Ripple from the Storm [1958] gives a fuller and livelier account than we get here).
The activities of the Salisbury Communists, their loves and hates, take up much of the first three Martha Quest novels. Lessing justifies the extended treatment she gives - in both autobiography and novels - to this politically insignificant clique on the grounds that it exhibited on a small scale "the same group dynamics that made and unmade the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (p. 292).
One consequence of joining the Communists was that Doris met Gottfried Lessing, whom she married in 1943. Gottfried came from a prosperous Russian family of assimilated German Jewish descent, turned back into Germans by the 1917 revolution and then back into Jews by the Nuremberg laws. He was also, in his wife's words, "the embodiment of cold, cutting, Marxist logic," a "cold, silent man" of whom everyone was afraid (pp. 288, 301).
Gottfried does not figure directly in the Martha Quest novels because he was still alive when she wrote them (he ended his life as East German ambassador to Uganda, where he perished during the coup against Ids Amin). Lessing does her best to explain and humanize this unappealing man, with whom she describes her sexual life as "sad." What he really needed, she writes, was a woman kind enough to "treat her man as a baby, even for a few hours of the dark" (pp. 303, 318).
Gottfried encouraged her writing, though he did not approve of what she wrote. "What I liked most about myself, what I held fast to, he liked least." She had married him to save him from internment as an enemy alien; to strengthen his application for British citizenship she remained in an "unhappy but kindly marriage" until 1948, long after it should have ended (pp. 293, 358). 

I V 

Lessing has never been a great stylist, she writes too fast and prunes too lightly for that. The first three Martha Quest novels, or at least long stretches of them, go bent under the burden not only of prosaic language but of an uninventive conception of novelistic form. The problem is compounded by Lessing's passive heroine, dissatisfied with life but unable to take control of her destiny in any meaningful way. But if these novels have not lasted well, they at least attest to ambition on a large scale:  the ambition of writing a bildungsroman in which the development of an individual will be followed within an entire social and historical context.
Lessing was not blind to her basic problem, namely, that the nineteenth-century models she used were exhausted. After the third volume she interrupted the series, breaking entirely new ground with the formally adventurous Golden Notebook. Landlocked, with which the series resumes after a seven-year gap, reflects in its stylistic experiments not only Martha's impatience with a life without a future but Lessing's own impatience with her medium; while The Four-Gated City (1969), with which the series closes, points forward toward Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) (which Lessing called "inner-space fiction"), Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), and the speculative fiction of the Canopus in Argos series, rather than backward to the early books. What Lessing was looking for, and to a degree found, was a more inward, more fully contemporary conception not only of character but of the self and of the self's experience of time (including historical time). Once this had been arrived at, the nineteenth-century trappings fell away of themselves.
Since the publication of The Golden Notebook in 1962, Lessing has had an uneasy relationship with the women's movement - which claimed the book as a founding document - and a positively hostile relationship with the academy, which claimed her book as a prototypical postmodern novel. Between herself and her most enthusiastic feminist disciples she has maintained a wary distance; literary critics she has dismissed as fleas on the backs of writers. She has in turn been attacked by feminists (among them Adrienne Rich) for failing to conceive an autonomous feminist politics, and by the academy for trying to control the interpretation of her books rather than allowing them to spin off into textual space.
In her autobiography she does not hesitate to let fly at "correct" political attitudes, which she sees as little different from what in the heyday of the Party was called "the line." Thus - despite her father's tickling game she labels the late-twentieth-century concern with the sexual abuse of children a "hysterical mass movement." She condemns "the avaricious or vindictive divorce terms so often demanded by feminists." Ever since adolescence, she records, she has been more interested in the "amazing possibilities" of the vagina than in the "secondary and inferior pleasure" of the clitoris. "If I had been told that clitoral and vaginal orgasms would within a few decades become ideological enemies ...I'd have thought it a joke." As for the social construction of gender, she recalls the "ruthlessness" with which she stole her first husband from another woman, a "basic female ruthlessness .. . [that] comes from a much older time than Christianity or any other softener of savage moralities. It is my right. When I've seen this creature emerge in myself, or in other women, I have felt awe" (pp. 313, 25, 404, 266, 206).

On Western breast-beating about the colonial past, she comments: "[It cannot] be said too often that it is a mistake to exclaim over past wrong-thinking before at least wondering how our present thinking will seem to posterity" (p. 50). A Nigerian writer found one of her stories good enough to plagiarize and publish under his own name, she recalls: so much for the politically correct line that whites should not write about black experience. Her own fiction explores male experience, including male sexual experience, without reserve.

As someone whose life has had a substantial public and political component, Lessing confesses a certain respect for people who don't write memoirs, who "have chosen to keep their mouths shut." Why then her own autobiography? Her answer is candid: "self-defense." At least five biographers are already at work on her. "You try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography" (pp. 11, 14-15).

But one suspects larger reasons too. Besides the epigraph from Cole Porter, her book bears another from Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufism have been important to Lessing since the 1960s. Shah links individual fate to the fate of society by arguing that no society can be reformed until its members can individually identify the forces and institutions that dictate and have dictated the course of their lives. Self-exploration and social progress thus go in tandem.

The two epigraphs come together and cohere in Lessing's thinking in a surprising way. Through the music to which her generation danced, music of the Cole Porter variety, she says, there pulsed a deep rhythm promising sex and salvation.  When this subliminal promise of the zeitgeist was not fulfilled, a whole generation, including herself, reacted as if cheated of its birthright. "I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion - the illusion that everyone is entitled to happiness (p. 16). (In contrast, she suggests, the deep rhythm of today's cacophonous popular music sends people out to torture, kill, and maim.)

As a child born in the aftermath of World War I, Lessing is convinced that, through her parents, she too vibrated to the basso ostinato of that disastrous epoch. "I wonder now how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak" (p. 10).

The idea that the ship of history is driven by currents deeper than consciousness-an idea of which her deep - rhythm hypothesis is a slightly batty example - keeps coming back in Lessing's autobiography. In fact, the turn away from a Marxist, materialist conception of history had already been hinted at symbolically in A Ripple from the Storm, in which Martha dreams of a huge saurian, fossilized yet still alive, staring dolefully at her from an earth pit, an archaic power that will not die. One of the problems with the present autobiographical project - a problem of which she is well aware-is that fiction has better resources for dealing with unconscious forces than discursive self-analysis. Her own previous most successful explorations of the historically embedded psyche have been in such works as The Golden Notebook and the visionary symbolic-allegorical narrative Memoirs of a Survivor (in which, incidentally, she attempts to reposition herself as mother of a daughter rather than daughter of a mother). It is as novelist rather than as memoirist, therefore, that, three-quarters of the way through the present project, she pronounces her succinct verdict on it: "There is no doubt that fiction makes a better job of the truth" (p. 314).

The best parts of the first volume are about her early childhood. To most of us, early experience comes as such a shock that we repress the memory of it - an amnesia, Lessing suggests, that may be a necessary protective mechanism for the species. Her own powerful (and powerfully rendered) first memories revolve with distaste around the ugliness and loudness and smelliness of the world she has been born into - the "loose bulging breasts… [and] whiskers of hair under arms" of adults in a swimming pool in Persia, the "cold stuffy metallic stink . . . of lice" in a Russian train (pp. 19, 40).

Much effort has clearly gone into the first five chapters. In their clarity of recall (or of imaginative construction - it makes no difference) and cleanness of articulation, they belong among the great pieces of writing about childhood:

It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain. Because I understand, everything falls into its proper place about me, the thatch of the roof soaking up its wet from the sky, the frogs sounding as loud as if they are down the hill, but they are a couple of miles off, the soft fall of the rain on the earth and the leaves, and the lightning, still far away. And then, confirming the order of the night, there is a sudden bang of thunder. I lie back, content, under the net, listening, and slowly sink back into the sleep full of sounds of rain (p.63).

Passages like this celebrate special moments, Wordsworthian "spots of time," in which the child is intensely open to experience and also aware of heightened openness, aware that the moment is privileged. As Lessing observes, if we give time its due phenomenological weight, then most of our life is over by the time we are ten.

There are also fine passages later in the book where Lessing candidly reinhabits her youthful narcissism. She pedals her bicycle "with long brown smooth legs she is conscious of as if a lover were stroking them." "I pulled up my dress and looked at myself as far up as my panties and was filled with pride of body. There is no exultation like it, the moment when a girl knows that this is her body, these her fine smooth shapely limbs" (pp. 260, 173). There are also leisurely recollections of pregnancy, childbirth (troublefree), and nursing, including reports on her babies' feeding habits and stools.

The first volume is dominated by the figure of Lessing's mother, who has also figured, either openly or in disguise, in much of what she has written during the course of a career now into its fifth decade. In this latest round, Lessing does her best to be fair to her opponent. For a page or two she goes so far as to hand over the narration to her - a halfhearted experiment soon abandoned.

“There was never a woman who enjoyed parties and good times more than she did, enjoyed being popular and a hostess and a good sort, the mother of two pretty, well-behaved, well-brought-up, clean children," she writes. (The hidden barb here, the barb Lessing cannot resist, is the code word "clean," which in the Tayler household, referred to potty training) The trunks that accompanied them from Teheran to their mud-walled home in Rhodesia held silver tea trays, watercolors, Persian carpets, scarves, hats, evening dress – finery that her mother would never have a chance w off. On the farm this "handsome, well-dressed, dryly humorous woman, efficient, practical, and full of energy," found no adequate to her ambitions (p. 402). Her affections were transferred from her husband to her son as soon as he was born; he remained bound to her till he went off to boarding school, where, somehow, he learned to say No to her demands. "Now I see her as a tragic figure," Lessing writes; during her lifetime, "I saw her.. as a tragic certainly, but was not able to be kind" (pp. 33, 402,15).

Yet despite determined attempt to see her parents as ordinary human beings rather than as looming figures in the mind, the first volume repeats the pattern of blaming the mother familiar from earlier writings, and looks ahead to the return of the mother and a rerun of the mother-daughter quarrel in the second volume.

There is something depressing in the spectacle of a woman in her seventies still wrestling with an un-subjugated ghost from the past. On the other hand, there is no denying the grandeur of the spectacle when the protagonist is as mordantly honest and as passionately desirous of salvation as Lessing.

V

Volume 2 takes up the story with Doris arriving in London in 1949, a "forthright, frank young woman," as she saw herself, blessedly free - thanks to her colonial upbringing - of the endemic English hypocrisy. She brought with her her young son, and the completed manuscript of The Grass Is Singing.

The novel soon found a publisher, and her career as a writer was launched. Through the 1950s, until the commercial success of The Golden Notebook (1962), her books sold steadily if not spectacularly. She did not need to go out to work. From them she earned about twenty pounds a week, she calculated-a workingman's wage.

The move to England - or, in the parlance of Rhodesian settler society, "home" - proved permanent. Telling the story of those early days, she tries to recreate something of the texture of life in a country still suffering the aftermath of the war. Though her social circle tended to consist of left-wing artists and intellectuals, she allows fair space to the ordinary Londoners she met. But, as she frankly concedes, In Pursuit of the English, the memoir she published in 1960, gives a more vivid and more engaged sense of the times than she is able to provide here.

Repeatedly she remarks on the remoteness of Britain of the 1950s from the prosperous Britain of today; young people cannot understand, she says, how poor their country used to be. People cannot be made to understand: is that the fault of these heedless young folk, one might ask, or of the writer who at this moment quails before the task of overcoming their historical amnesia?

Despite the grimness of life in the 1950s, those are times for which Lessing clearly feels some nostalgia. She misses, for instance, the commitment and sense of purpose she found in the ritual ban-the-bomb marches from Aldermaston to London, with the opportunities they provided for easy contacts across class lines.

Involvement in the disarmament movement led her to pay a visit to Bertrand Russell and his secretary Ralph Schoenman. The memory of how the elderly philosopher was duped and manipulated by the younger man makes her determined not to be captured in her old age and turned into a "wise woman" figurehead by feminist groups (p. 302).

Looking back, she misses the excitement of a literary world in which publishing demanded a real enthusiasm for new writing and a readiness to take chances. By contrast, she condemns today's publishing industry for its cynicism and philistinism, as well as for the pressure it puts on writers to promote their own work. She deplores the obsession of the public with the writer's private life, and the humiliations that writers have to undergo in interviews with ignorant and indifferent interlocutors.

Now, as then, she detects in the British psyche "a smallness, a tameness, a deep, instinctive, perennial refusal to admit danger, or even the unfamiliar: a reluctance to understand extreme experience:" In literature this manifests itself in a enduring preference for "small, circumscribed novels, preferably about the nuances of class or social behavior" (pp. 96, 126).

The divisions of Walking in the Shade are based on the succession of apartments and houses Lessing lived in, always in search of an environment where she could get on with her writing in peace and at the same time bring up her child. She records two or three major love affairs, with men ever reluctant to take on the role of father to the boy. Her mother turns up again, demanding to live with her. She hardens her heart and refuses. Her mother returns to Rhodesia and dies there. Lessing is consumed with guilt, sympathizing intensely with the old woman in her loneliness, yet creeping back regressively, despite herself, into the hard, selfish, self-protective shell she had grown as a child: "No, I won't. Leave me alone" (p. 223).        

VI 

Walking in the Shade is short on dates, but it would appear that sometime in the early 1950s Lessing gave in to pressure from her circle (pressure that she now ascribes to mere envy) that she do more than merely write books and articles, and formally joined the British Communist Party. If a single question dominated the book, it is the question of how she and so many other intelligent socially concerned, peace-loving people could, in effect, have given themselves as tools to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; and of how, even when they had lost faith in the USSR, they did not lose faith in religion of world revolution.

In exploring her own motives, Lessing recognizes that her first, depressing experience of the inflexible British class system played a part (although technically an outsider to the system, in practice she found she was excluded from the working class by her accent).
And of course she believed in the anticolonial struggle, the brotherhood of man, and all the other stated ideals of Communism.
But finally she has to see her motive for joining the Party as irrational: at a trans-individual level she was participating in "some kind of social psychosis or mass self-hypnosis," while at a personal level she was being controlled by "a deeply buried thing ... riding me like a nightmare," a "continuation of early childhood feelings" that she cannot get to the bottom of (pp. 58, 89).
From the very obscurity of this explanation, it emerges that to the present day Lessing does not understand why she did what she did. Insofar as the puzzle she is trying to solve is at the heart of this second volume, the ultimate goal of the autobiographical enterprise itself, namely, to get to the truth of oneself by going back over the ground of the past, by telling the story of one's life afresh, still evades her here.
This is by no means the first time Lessing has explored the mystery of the self and the destiny it elects. There is a strong autobiographical strain in her fiction, particularly the Martha Quest novels and The Golden Notebook, which cover the same decade of her life as Walking in the Shade. Did Lessing believe, when in the early 1990s she embarked on the autobiography, that it could yield deeper truths about herself than her fictions of thirty years ago?
The answer is, very likely, no. Lessing has always been aware that the energies liberated in poetic creation take one deeper than rational analysis ever can. Something has changed; however, since she wrote the novels based on her Communist phase, namely, the terms of the inquiry itself. Time has passed; starting - with the revelations of the 1956 Party congress, the buried history of the USSR has year by year been emerging from the ice. Specifically, it has become more and more clear that Hitler was "a mere infant in crime" compared with his exemplar Josef Stalin, who was "a thousand times worse" (Lessing's words; p. 262).
Communism calls to the nobler impulses of the human heart. yet in its nature there is something that "breeds lies, makes people lie and twist facts, imposes deception." Why should that be so? Lessing cannot say. "These are deeper waters than I know how to plumb" (p. 65). What she does know is that she gave her allegiance to the Party. The Party chose her to visit Russia as a member of what was supposed to be a representative delegation of British intellectuals and she went. Out of dedication to the greater cause, she did not afterward publish the truth about what she saw in Russia, even though she (now) records that at least one ordinary Russian was prepared to risk his life to tell the delegation that what they were being shown was a lie. She was no mere rank-and-file member: she served on the committee of a Party Writers' Group. ("Accustomed as I am to being in a false position - sometimes I think it was a curse laid on me in my cradle - this was the falsest”, she writes forty years later.) She even wrote fiction according to the Party's prescription - for instance, the oft-anthologized story “Hunger” ("I am ashamed of it," she writes now) (pp. 95, 78).

Stalin was a thousand times worse than Hitler. If intellectuals like Heidegger and Paul de Man have deserved to be investigated and denounced for the support they gave to Nazism, what do those intellectuals deserve who supported Stalin and the Stalinist system, who chose to believe Soviet lies against the evidence of their own eyes? This is the huge question that exercises Lessing's moral conscience, coupled with a second and equally troubling question: Why does no one any longer care?

Though Lessing must be admired for broaching these unfashionable questions, it cannot be said that she gives either of them a satisfying answer. In an odd way, her exploration of her past as a Party member parallels her exploration of her past as a daughter. In both cases, looking back, she can see that she behaved badly, even culpably. Furthermore, at some obscure level, at the time, she knew she was behaving badly. But with the best will in the world she cannot get to the bottom of why she did what she did, beyond concluding that she was in the grip of a compulsion, a compulsion that was not unique to her but afflicted hundreds of thousands of others. It was, as she puts it in the first volume, part of the zeitgeist. 

VII 

"You'd think my life was all politics and personalities, though really most of the time I was alone in my flat, working" (p. 249). Lessing does indeed spend a lot of time on politics, and as much time on personalities from the literary and theatrical worlds whose paths crossed hers, many of them of no great interest any longer.
Her second volume is in most respects a memoir, and a memoir of rather casual, scattered, life-and-opinions kind; aside from her treatment of her Communist past, it lacks the thoroughgoing self-exploration, and the concomitant anguish of tone, that marks the first volume.
As for her political life, the story Lessing tells here is not to be read as an apology - in the climate of the 1990s, that would have been far too politically correct a step to take, and Lessing has nothing but scorn for correctness, whose genealogy she (correctly) traces back to the Party and the Party line. Nevertheless, she does describe her willful blindness to the truth as "unforgivable," and does affirm that she tells her story so that her readers may learn not to do likewise (p. 262). It is clearly a history she has wanted to set down in full before she dies. However one may qualify the term, it does, in the end, constitute a confession.
J. M. Coetzee
(in Stranger Shores)