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'Walking in the Shade: My Autobiography, 1949-1962' by Doris Lessing

A Misguided Flirtation

Sunday, October 26, 1997

By Betsy Kline, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Walking in the Shade: My Autobiography, 1949-1962 By Doris Lessing HarperCollins $27.50

Out of the African sun and into the gloomy shade of post-war England, Doris Lessing embarks on volume two of her autobiography, "Walking in the Shade," a memory fest that reconstructs her most politically active years and coming of age as a writer.

As in volume one, "Under My Skin," her recall of events and emotions played out almost a half century ago is astounding. But her grasp of every wrinkle and rent in the social fabric of the times is no less than what we would expect from a writer of her keen perception.

If and when the memory blurs, she is quick to note it. Mostly, she steams full speed ahead.

In 1949 she left Southern Rhodesia, where she had spent her girlhood on the hardscrabble plains with her emigre British parents and brother. Theirs was not a happy family. Her father, Alfred Tayler, was an embittered, crippled veteran of World War I; her mother, Emily, a morose martyr whose true love had been killed in that war.

By the time Persian-born Doris Tayler Wisdom Lessing embarked for England, she had two failed marriages, two children abandoned to her first husband's family, a son by her second husband, the haunted German exile Gottfried Lessing, the manuscript for her first novel ("The Grass Is Singing") in publisher's limbo and a yearning for "A clean slate, a new page - everything still to come" in the country of her ancestry.

With few funds and 2 1/2 -year-old Peter in tow, she landed in the bomb-ruined landscape of London, where she basically threw herself on the kindness of strangers for the most meager of housing and rationed food.

Lessing's vivid recollections of the poverty of body and the weariness of spirit that pervaded shell-shocked England in the 1950s provide the proletarian backdrop for her misguided adventures as a member of the Communist Party.

In Africa, Doris and her crowd of young rebels had idealistically and naively flirted with communism as their backlash against the policies of apartheid.

In England, she took the plunge as a full-fledged member - a move she regretted even before the ink was dry on her party card.

"Does it matter if one woman succumbed to lunacy? No. But I am talking of a generation, and we were part of some kind of social psychosis or mass self-hypnosis. I am not trying to justify it when I say that I now believe all mass movements - religious, political - are a kind of mass hysteria and, a generation or so later, people must say, But how could you believe . . . whatever it was?"

Lessing and her British comrades had more than an inkling of the wholesale atrocities being committed in the Soviet Union, but chose, naively, to believe Josef Stalin was not aware and that a core of good communists would rise to set everything right.

Reality hurt. Lessing writes in minute detail of her first sojourn to the Soviet Union as part of a communist writers' group, her first sour taste of the duplicity and tunnel vision of the Soviet system.

Back in England, she came to dread party meetings and all the shallow rigmarole that accomplished nothing.

When Nikita Khrushchev finally came "clean" in 1956 about Stalin's mass murders of his own people, Lessing and other idealists where crushed, not because it was news to them, but because he fell short of acknowledging the sheer enormity of the genocide.

Throughout her membership, Lessing's involvement took a back seat to her writing and "the child."

During these times of economic and emotional turmoil, Lessing wrote the bulk of what are considered by most critics as her masterpieces: "The Golden Notebook," "This Was the Old Chief's Country" (short stories), and the first four novels of her "Children of Violence" pentology: "Martha Quest," "A Proper Marriage," "Landlocked," and "A Ripple in the Storm," her treatise on group psychology and the general stupidity of "party" mentalities.

Lessing sets up many a scene peopled with real-life characters and scenarios, then casually tells the reader that if they need to know more, to read this book or that short story for her literary embellishment. She also takes critics and readers to task for wanting to mine her books for autobiographical nuggets. Everything and everybody is a composite, she argues.

In passing, Lessing mentions meetings with well-known writers, her foray into writing for the theater that left her sorely unhappy (the source of her last novel, "Love, Again"), her mother's visit to England that only renewed their ancient antagonisms, her return to Rhodesia only to find she had been classified a "prohibited" person, the author's months-long bout with alcoholism, her succession of moody, difficult lovers and casual sexual encounters, her despair over the decline of the publishing business, her bare existence on working man's wages, and more.

"Walking in the Shade" sort of breaks down into an errant ramble in the last chapter. But then who can tidily wrap up segments of their life when so much of it is an ongoing process?