About book Walking In The Shade: Volume Two Of My Autobiography--1949-1962 (1998)
Reading this second volume assuredly requires your stamina, familiarity and sense of humor since its scope/plot is a bit different from its predecessor in which it's divided into normal numerical chapters while this one divided into four main road/street themes, each with its seemingly never-ending length of narrations, dialogs, episodes, etc. it's a pity there's no contents section in this book so the following tentative contents may help you see what I mean:Denbigh Road W11 (pp. 1-16)Church Street, Kensington W8 (pp. 17-134)Warwick Road SW5 (pp. 135-251)Langham Street W1 (pp. 253-369)I would like to say something from my notes on reading this sequel from page 160 onwards because I finished reading its first portion some years ago and my reflection was fragmentary, it's impossible for me to recall some key points worth mentioning and sharing with my Goodreads friends. I'm sure those Doris Lessing scholars teaching or doing research in the universities worldwide would have something literarily professional to say more than this review. First, I think we should achieve our appropriate reading stamina after finishing reading Volume One, thus we have no choice but keep going with this Volume Two. Basically, nearly all episodes were on how she became acquainted with innumerable celebrities such as Bertrand Russell (p. 265 if you're curious how he greeted her; she had never met him before), Henry Kissinger, Joshua Nkomo, etc. and involved as a communist members but she announced, “By 1954 I was no longer a Communist, …” (Volume One, p. 397) I found reading the first three-fourths of this book quite tedious because it’s like a labyrinthine journey. However, from around page 290, it’s more readable and related to her works, for example, how she got feedback on her “The Golden Notebook”.Second, when we are familiar with her narrations, her readers would definitely found reading her words or sentences touching, I don't mean everywhere, rather I mean when we read carefully, for instance, I noticed her use of 'likeable' interesting such as " ... He was a very large, likeable man, ..." (p. 283) vs. the opposite, "That incident of the unlikeable young women presaged more than I could know. ..." (p. 365) Then, we would run into some rare good words like: ‘companionableness’ (p. 348), ‘gentrification’ (p. 359), ‘housemother’ (p. 368), etc. Eventually, we couldn’t help heaving a sigh and asking ourselves why we simply couldn’t have written such a fantastic sentence like this before, “… I felt permanently guilty because I didn’t do this: …” (p. 365) Once in a while, we can observe and cherish how she’s written masterly with unique grammar, for example, “Her thighs were black and blue because her veins bruised easy.” (p. 362) and I think this is a kind of parallelism application. One of the reasons is that, of course, she is one of the awe-inspiring world-class writers in the 20th century. Third, I liked her sense of humor as written in this excerpt: … Apart from a couple of sketches written for the New Yorker, I had not written for money . . . No, the truth compels me to state: twice an impecunious friend and I had attempted frankly commercial film scripts, but you cannot write successfully for money with your tongue in your cheek, and these dishonest ventures had come to nothing. Serves me right, I had thought. Now I was secretly seeing myself as a fallen soul, yet there was nothing wrong with what I wrote for television. … (p. 356)Before this, I admired her brave declaration I had never read or heard before, that is, “My job in this world is to write, …” (p. 285) Some unique and good points like these, I think, would be something wonderfully interesting, worth reading after we had found reading this volume quite tedious, or nearly all for some readers. However, from page 297 on, we would enjoy reading her narrations on how she worked, wrote, lived in an apartment; her mention on Buddhism and Hinduism (p. 320) is also interesting.In sum, this Volume Two is supplementary to Volume One, therefore, we should read it to learn how she has thought, worked and written till she was/is awarded nearly all literary prizes in Europe and possibly in the world.
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The second volume of her autobiography, from her move to London in 1949 to 1962. Definitely very interesting, if you can ignore the rhetorical passages. While from the first volume, I learned that the first four volumes of the Children of Violence were fairly autobiographical, here I learned (as I partly suspected, since the one thing I know about Lessing is that she is an author, and Martha isn't) that the last volume is much less so -- in fact, I wasn't prepared for how totally non-autobiographical, and even totally contrasted it was to her real life. And it is really a pity, because her real life was much more interesting than the novel.In the novel, she lives in one house for almost the entire time in London, in a situation with a mentally ill woman; they are allies against the stupidity of the psychiatrists and the mental hospital, and Martha has a bad experience with a totally useless psychiatrist. In real life, she lived for four years with a psychiatrist from a mental hospital, and credits her analyst with saving her sanity. She moves from flat to flat, none of which resembles the House from the novel. Her experiences as a single mother before it was common would have made a great novel as well.Her second lover was an American Trotskyist -- I would love to have read her take on that, before she decided that all left-wing politics from the French Revolution on was one big mistake (but what she says about Trotsky shows she is still viewing things through a Stalinist lens). Even in this book, though, there are passages which undercut her thesis, and show that she doesn't entirely believe what she is saying. One of the things I like about her fiction is the way she seems to be looking over her shoulder, with an ironical detachment from what she is writing, as if there is an unsaid, "Yes, this is true, but. . ." These passages are far less common in the autobiography. Instead, contradictory passages just stand next to each other, or a chapter apart, and never meet. She marvels that people accept government outrages, that they don't think, don't protest -- and then asserts that anyone who protests anything is naive, is egocentric, is romantic, in thinking that what they say, think, or do is of any importance . . . what are their credentials to change the world? All "heirs of Lenin", potential dictators. . .I think the basic problem is that for all her anti-communism, she (like so many people who were in the Stalinist camp) never really broke from the central dogma: that Stalin was the legitimate heir of Marx and Lenin, that Marxism -- and all revolutionary ideas -- are identical with Stalinism, and Stalinism is identical with Marxism and revolution, that all the ideas and words misused by the Stalinists really mean what they meant to the Stalinists, whoever uses them, etc.All this is not to deny that the book is very interesting, both about Lessing and about her times, the people she met, was friends or enemies with, not only in politics but in the publishing and theater world. She knew what was happening behind the scenes and describes it very well; only the value judgments are sometimes outrageous (and at other times seem very sane, when not about "the Left"). It is not a book I would recommend generally, but it will be fascinating to those who have thought about some of these issues.
—James F
