Doris Lessing: the Hound of heaven has commandeered the attic

The phrase is from Joan Didion, writing in The White Album way back in the 1980s and commenting on Lessing’s A Small Personal Voice. What drives Didion slightly crazy is that cracked dogmatism and Lessing’s indefatigable pursuit of the Snark, social transformation or the truth behind a woman having a breakdown or what is free to happen when we admit we don’t love one another, or how could a racist society like white Rhodesia last so long?

And exhausting as the prospect is, I long to reread Doris Lessing, look again at The Five-Gated City and Martha Quest before I get to Alfred & Emily, the last attempt on the author’s part to exorcise Lessing’s own hardhearted, unloving and thoroughly admirable mother.

She breaks the reader open to possibilities and states of feeling as well as hard, unsentimental and revolutionary perceptions. This happens in all of her books, from The Grass is Singing to Golden Notebook to Shikasta.

Last night I was watching a documentary on Doris Lessing and just a little while ago, as I sat in something of an emotional slump, something came to me. Her breakthroughs in psychic understandings, the way she writes about telepathy, how she was able to capture something never voiced before about women thinking about themselves amidst fragmentation in The Golden Notebook. In the interview she refuses to answer questions about her 30 years of studying Sufi.

And of course she was born in Kermanshaw, Persia, in 1919. The Africa of colonial Southern Rhodesia before the Second World War described in Martha Quest was not her only great inspiration. She was a child in a curiously wild and medieval country, deserts and white-capped mountains, an amah. What lodged there, right at the start of the journey?

In the 1960s, as I understand it, she was influenced by Idries Shah and his notions of the commending self, a false persona of rigidity contradicted by all the fleeting impulses and innovative understandings of the liberated self, open to paradox and change. I am phrasing this very badly because Lessing herself has both great schematic rigidity, a kind of enduring dogmatism, combined with sudden breakthroughs of understanding and a willingness to tackle amorphous troubling topics and ideas, inchoate states of becoming or unbecoming, breakdown.

How much this insight has to do with Sufi teachings I don’t know.

But it does interest me that she has been able to overcome that rational poopooing within herself and hold onto a certain irony while continuing to explore themes like telepathy and extrasensory perception.