Publisher's Weekly Review
More casually written and organized than the superb Under My Skin, this second volume of Lessing's memoirs contains acute, brutally frank comments on topics from book publishing to left-wing activism. She opens with her arrival in London four years after the end of WWII. A 30-year-old single mother with a two-year-old son, Lessing left Southern Rhodesia in search of a place and a means to write freely. Chapters are named for the locations in which she livedDenbigh Road, Church Street, Warwick Road, Langham Streetand her narrative is similarly episodic. She covers her love affairs, years of psychotherapy, her increasingly disenchanted involvement with the Communist Party, the books she was writing, though she also interpolates musings on current topics (modern book promotion, the yuppification of London). Lessing is reticent about emotions: those who want to know what this period in her life felt like should read The Golden Notebook, whose genesis is discussed here with disappointing brevity. A virtual Who's Who of British culture make appearanceshistorian E.P. Thompson, playwrights Arnold Wesker and John Osborne, theater critic Kenneth Tynan, philosopher Bertrand Russell, to name a fewbut some of the most evocative portraits limn unknowns and relatives. (Lessing's unflinching assessment of her mother's final years is especially notable.) The author isn't capable of being boring, but this rambling chronicle is a disappointment. Photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Chatty, opinionated, intimate, Lessing is as hard on herself as she is on some of her famous contemporaries. She looks back at the 1950s when "everyone" in London was a Communist sympathizer and she was one of the Angry Young Men. Like her first volume, Under My Skin (1994), this sequel combines social history and personal revelation. She begins with her arrival in war-battered London from Southern Rhodesia in 1949 with a small child to support and her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, to sell. She ends with the publication of her most celebrated work, The Golden Notebook, and many will read this memoir for what it says about her when she was writing what has been called "the bible of the Women's Movement." She writes about the "contradictory, lunatic" emotions and behaviors that made her join the Communist Party and then about her disillusionment with all those dreams of a golden age. At the same time, she is the archetypal new independent woman, trying to balance her roles as breadwinner, mother, daughter, lover, neighbor, friend, and comrade, while she struggles to retreat from it all, to find the isolation, the "underwater state," she needs in order to write. Not the least of the pleasures here is the gossip, the glimpses, some friendly, some acerbic, about the famous, from Bertrand Russell and Joshua Nkomo to Henry Kissinger ("He experienced me as a sanctimonious wincing idiot") and Vanessa Redgrave ("Oh my God, that was me not so long ago, and how did people put up with me"). Lessing can be silly and infuriating (as in the glib comparison of American and European men in bed), but all those readers who "want to think as they read" will find much here to make them recognize their own uncertainties. --Hazel Rochman
Kirkus Review
Lessing, as this second installment of her autobiography again proves, is one of those rare writers who has lived the examined life and is willing to share what she has learned and done, even if it is not to her credit. Unlike the first volume of memoirs (Under My Skin, 1994), the personal narrative takes second place here as Lessing concentrates on the intellectual and ideological forces that affected her during the 1950s. She arrived in London with her young son, Peter, in 1949, after leaving her second husband. London was still a bleak and bombed-out city--housing was short, food was rationed, and the people were enervated. Lessing found a good agent and managed to live on her earnings as a writer. She describes her mother's lonely death in Rhodesia, caused in part, Lessing thinks, by her rejection of her mother's offers of affection and support. She does not slight the personal or domestic: She worries about raising Peter as a single parent, and frankly describes her two lengthy affairs. But it is the world of ideas, of publishing, writing, and the theater, that primarily engage her. She describes how she writes and what she tried to achieve in writing her immensely influential novel The Golden Notebook. She is frank about joining the Communist Party (probably ``the most neurotic act of my life''); about her disillusionment with it and other mass movements (``the first impulse was the thrills . . . secondly came the politics''); and she is angry and insightful about the British, who suffer, she says, from ``a reluctance to understand extreme experience.'' A history of a difficult, often grim time related by an astute observer, as well as a truthful record of a bumpy journey to self- knowledge. Further proof, if it were needed, of Lessing's remarkable ability to look reality in the face and not blink. (Author tour)
Library Journal Review
A follow-up to Lessing's acclaimed memoir, Under My Skin (LJ 10/1/94), this volume covers the years when she wrote The Golden Notebook. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Walking in the Shade Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962 Chapter One Denbigh Road W11 High on the side of the tall ship, I held up my little boy and said, 'Look, there's London.' Dockland: muddy creeks and channels, greyish rotting wooden walls and beams, cranes, tugs, big as and little ships. The child was probably thinking, But ships and cranes and water was Cape Town, and now it's called London. As for me, real London was still ahead, like the beginning of my real life, which would have happened years before if the war hadn't stopped me coming to London. A clean slate, a new page--everything still to come. I was full of confidence and optimism, though my assets were minimal: rather less than 150; the manuscript of my first novel, The Grass Is Singing, already bought by a Johannesburg publisher who had not concealed the fact he would take a long time publishing it, because it was so subversive; and a few short stories. I had a couple of trunkfuls of books, for I would not be parted from them, some clothes, some negligible jewelery. I had refused the pitiful sums of money my mother had offered, because she had so little herself, and besides, the whole sum and essence of this journey was that it was away from her, from the family, and from that dreadful provincial country Southern Rhodesia, where, if there was a serious conversation, then it was--always--about The Colour Bar and the inadequacies of the blacks. I was free. I could at last be wholly myself. I felt myself to be self-created, self-sufficient. Is this an adolescent I am describing? No, I was nearly thirty I had two marriages behind me, but I did not feel I had been really married. I was also exhausted, because the child, two and a half, had for the month of the voyage woken at five, with shouts of delight for the new day, and had slept reluctantly at ten every night. In between he had never been still, unless I was telling him tales and singing him nursery rhymes, which I had been doing for four or five hours every day. He had had a wonderful time. I was also having those thoughts--perhaps better say feelings--that disturb every arrival from Southern Africa who has not before seen white men unloading a ship, doing heavy manual labour, for this had been what black people did. A lot of white people, seeing whites work like blacks, had felt uneasy and threatened; for me, it was not so simple. Here they were, the workers, the working class, and at that time I believed that the logic of history would make it inevitable they should inherit the earth. They--those tough, muscled labouring men down there--and, of course, people like me, were the vanguard of the working class. I am not writing this down to ridicule it. That would be dishonest. Millions, if not billions, of people were thinking like that, using this language. I have far too much material for this second volume. Nothing can be more tedious than a book of memoirs millions of words long. A little book called In Pursuit of the English, written when I was still close to that time, will add depth and detail to those first months in London. At once, problems--literary problems. What I say in it is true enough. A couple of characters were changed for libel reasons and would have to be now. But there is no doubt that while 'true', the book is not as true as what I would write now. It is a question of tone, and that is no simple matter. That little book is more like a novel; it has the shape and the pace of one. It is too well shaped for life. In one thing at least it is accurate: when I was newly in London I was returned to a child's way of seeing and feeling, every person, building, bus, street, striking my senses with the shocking immediacy of a child's life, everything oversized, very bright, very dark, smelly, noisy. I do not experience London like that now. That was a city of Dickensian exaggeration. I am not saying I saw London through a veil of Dickens, but rather that I was sharing the grotesque vision of Dickens, on the verge of the surreal. That London of the late 1940s, the early 1950s, has vanished, and now it is hard to believe it existed. It was unpainted, buildings were stained and cracked and dull and grey; it was war-damaged, some areas all ruins, and under them holes full of dirty water, once cellars, and it was subject to sudden dark fogs--that was before the Clean Air Act. No one who has known only today's London of self-respecting clean buildings, crowded cares and restaurants, good food and coffee, streets full until after midnight with mostly young people having a good time, can believe what London was like then. No cares. No good restaurants. Clothes were still 'austerity' from the war, dismal and ugly. Everyone was indoors by ten, and the streets were empty. The Dining Rooms, subsidised during the war, were often the only places to eat in a whole area of streets. They served good meat, terrible vegetables, nursery puddings. Lyons restaurants were the high point of eating for ordinary people--I remember fish and chips and poached eggs on toast. There were fine restaurants for the well-off, and they tended to hide themselves away out of embarrassment, because in them, during the war, the rigours of rationing had been so ameliorated. You could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the British Isles. The sole civilised amenity was the pubs, but they closed at eleven, and you have to have the right temperament for pubs. Or, I should say, had to have, for they have changed so much, no longer give the impression to an outsider of being like clubs, each with its members, or 'regulars', where outsiders go on sufferance. Rationing was still on. The war still lingered, not only in the bombed places but in people's minds and behaviour. Any conversation tended to drift towards the war, like an animal licking a sore place. There was a wariness, a weariness. On New Year's Eve, 1950, I was telephoned by an American from the publishing scene to ask if I would share the revels with him. I met him in my best dress at six o'clock in Leicester Square. We expected cheerful crowds, but there was no one on the streets. For an hour or so we were in a pub but felt out of place. Then we looked for a restaurant. There were the expensive restaurants, which we could not afford, but nothing of what we now take for granted--the Chinese, Indian, Italian restaurants, and dozens of other nationalities. The big hotels were all booked up. We walked up and down and back and forth through Soho and around Piccadilly. Everything was dark and blank. Then he said, To hell with it, let's live it up. A taxi driver took us to a club in Mayfair, and there we watched the successors of the Bright Young Things getting drunk and throwing bread at each other. But by the end of the decade, there were coffee bars and good ice cream, by courtesy of the Italians, and, good cheap Indian restaurants. Clothes were bright and cheap and irreverent. London was painted again and was cheerful. Most of the bomb damage was gone. Above all, there was a new generation who had not been made tired by the war. They did not talk about the war, or think about it. The first place where I lived was in Bayswater, which was then rather seedy and hard to associate with the grandeur of its earlier days. Prostitutes lined the streets every evening. I was supposed to be sharing a flat with a South African woman and her child: I wrote about this somewhat unsatisfactory experience in In Pursuit Of the English. The flat we were in was large and, well furnished. Two rooms were let to prostitutes. When I discovered this I did not realise at once who these smartly dressed girls were who tripped up and down the stairs with men--and tackled the South African woman, because I did not think this was good for the two small children, she burst into tears and said I was unkind. I spent six weeks looking for a place that would take a small child. There was a heat wave, and I couldn't understand why people complained about the English weather. My feet gave in on the hot pavements, and my morale almost did, but then a household of Italians welcomed the child and me, and my main problem was solved. This was Denbigh Road. Peter had been accepted by a council nursery. Circumstances had taught him from his very first days to be sociable, and he loved going there. When he came back from the nursery he disappeared at once into the basement, where there was a little girl his age. The house, dispiriting to me, because it was so grim and dirty and war-damaged, was a happy place for him. We were at the beginning--but literally--in a garret, which was too small for me even to unpack a typewriter. I sent some short stories to the agent Curtis Brown, chosen at random from the Writers & Artists Yearbook, and Juliet O'Hea wrote back what I later knew was a form letter: Yes, but did I have a novel or was I thinking of writing one? Walking in the Shade Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962 . Copyright © by Doris Lessing. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949-1962 by Doris Lessing All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
