Doris Lessing: The Sweetest Dream

By PENELOPE BIEDER

In 1995 when Doris Lessing was 76 she finished writing volume one of her autobiography, Under My Skin. It traced her life from her birth to British parents in Persia (now Iran) through growing up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to 1949, not long before her arrival in London.

Volume two, Walking in the Shade, followed in 1997, and begins what she called her "real life" in London, which would have happened years before if the war had not intervened. She arrived by sea, full of hope, carrying the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing and her 2-year-old, Peter.

These memoirs I cannot recommend highly enough. They are a riveting, extremely candid examination of a life fully lived. They are unforgettable - wry, honest, shocking and without a trace of self-pity despite the rigours of Africa, followed by solo parenting in 50s London. Both are essential reading for those who have followed her numerous novels and short-story collections, from the Children of Violence sequence which began in the early 50s with Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage to The Golden Notebook (1962), to the Canopus in Argos: Archives series which began in 1979.

I hear they are being read by a younger generation, too.

Aware that Lessing will be 83 this year, I was eagerly awaiting volume three, assuming it would journey from the 60s to the present. When The Sweetest Dream arrived late last year I grabbed it eagerly, ready to devour the heady world of late-century London, but in the first line of the book, under "Author's Note", I read: "I am not writing volume three of my autobiography because of possible hurt to vulnerable people. Which does not mean I have novelised autobiography. There are no parallels here to actual people, except for one, a very minor character. I hope I have managed to recapture the spirit of, particularly, the sixties, that contradictory time which, looking back and comparing it with what came later, seems surprisingly innocent. There was little of the nastiness of the seventies, or the cold greed of the eighties."

So, I thought, was this to be a novel where one became detective, matching fictional characters with real ones - deciding that the newspaper the Defender where our heroine Frances Lennox (Doris) writes a column, must of course be the Guardian, and so on? Possibly.

One can perhaps guess that elderly, German-born Julia (Frances' mother-in-law) is a version of the venerable Toni Sussman who was also fictionalised as Mother Sugar in The Golden Notebook. But it is far less exhausting to enjoy The Sweetest Dream as a novel, as it is intended, and to let the notion of biography sadly slip away.

The title points this out, and I decided it refers to a paragraph late in the novel where Frances muses that "there was such a thing as happiness and here it was, here they were, both of them, contented, like cats in the sun. But these two middle-aged people - courtesy would call them that - cuddled to themselves a secret they knew would shrivel if exposed. And they were not the only ones: ideology has pronounced their condition impossible and so, people keep quiet."

Until then it seemed Frances is constantly in the kitchen, creating vast, endless meals for a moving population of her children's adolescent friends who move in, bludge, steal, eat and drink her out of house and home, are rude, demanding of her time, are emotional and at times, ill.

If Frances is Doris, I am amazed she finished one book, let alone the daunting pile that exists.

But these ongoing dinner parties, where even ex-husband, political guru Johnny, seems to turn up every night to cadge a meal, are a handy plot device for getting everyone together to talk. And they are all great talkers.

Sweet, generous Frances (how did she afford all that food on her columnist's wage?) is there for everyone, forgiving over and over again the transgressions of the young, musing with matriarch Julia, who lives upstairs, that they are deeply damaged by being the offspring of war (children of violence).

She takes in all manner of waifs and strays, even her ex-husband's troubled second wife lives in the basement flat for a while. She is an archetypal earth mother, part of a phenomenon of the 60s in Lessing's view, a "neurotic nurturer" she calls herself. Frances' kids think she is working out some guilt or other, rooted in her childhood. Groovy young Sylvia decides that Frances is working on her karma, damaged in a previous life.

Everyone is studying politics and economics and when Frances declares that "what is so extraordinary is that anyone should want to, when they never get it right, particularly the economists" our distinguished author allows herself to momentarily comment: "This remark was so far in advance of its time that it was allowed to pass, was probably not even heard."

London in the 60s thus is overlaid with a haughty hindsight, and when this intrudes the book can falter. It is a headlong read, written with a ferocious energy extraordinary in an octogenarian, and unvarying in its rush through a number of lives. It can be earnest but it is never hectoring, and when it reaches the Africa of the 90s it is moving and stirring, politically and emotionally.

When I conquered my disappointment at The Sweetest Dream being fiction, I enjoyed it. But first, please, read the autobiographies.

Flamingo

$31.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.