The Columbia History of the British Novel

knocking at the door in spite of his humble beginnings. But no person of color, no voice from the colonized of the third world, had yet penetrated the canon, and the culture the British revered as representative of themselves and as the best in the world, the culture that it had been the mission of the empire -918- to carry to the four corners of the world, remained in the hands of an elite group of native-born white men, whose virtues and rightful sway it subtly but relentlessly asserted.

Marginal on every count but race to this construction of British culture, Doris Lessing has never been a friend or comfort to the cultural authorities and establishments of her nation, which is perhaps why her work continues to suffer relative neglect in her own country. Bringing to bear a colonial eye on Britain's imperial and racist ambitions, a socialist eye on its capitalist underpinnings, a feminist eye on its sexist presumptions, and a populist eye on its elitist rankings of form, genre, and readership, Lessing has never offered the British the image of themselves they like to see. In The Sirian Experiments, for example, Lessing presents her compatriots with Tafta, a kind of essence of the British technocrat:

He glistened with health, was rather fleshy, and he emanated a calm, self-satisfied conceit. His garb was that now worn everywhere over the planet, as if it had been ordered by a dictator-but these animals have never been able to relinquish uniforms. He wore blue very tight trousers of a thick material which emphasized his sexuality, and a tight singlet.

He was resting one buttock on the edge of a table, swung one leg, and smiled easily and confidently down at his audience.

Surveying British culture from the outside or underside, Lessing repeatedly draws the attention of her countrymen to their image in the eyes of those who do not share their presumption of rightful ascendancy.

One of many things Lessing has been unwilling to let the British forget about themselves is how often they have been at war in this century. Lessing is, oddly, one of the few British novelists of the generation that spans nearly all of Britain's wars in this century to fix her eyes on the history of human violence in our time. The century of destruction to which the title of this chapter refers is the name Lessing gives in Shikasta to the earth's present century, a century she describes in that novel as one of continual warfare, ecological devastation, raging epidemics, and ever-mounting arsenals of lethal weaponry. Born in 1919 of a World War I amputee and his nurse, Lessing recognized early that hers was a generation steeped in war. In an interview with Roy Newquist that first appeared in Counterpoint in 1964 and again in A Small Personal Voice in 1975, Lessing defined the people she was writing about in Children of Violence, a series of novels she had already been working on for close to fifteen years, as -919- people like myself, people my age who are born out of wars and who have lived through them, the framework of lives in conflict. I think the title explains what I essentially want to say. I want to explain what it is like to be a human being in a century when you open your eyes on war and on human beings disliking other human beings. I was brought up in Central Africa, which means that I was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is… It was all grossly unfair, and it's only part of a larger picture of inequity.

One-third of us-one third of humanity, that is-is inadequately housed and fed. Consciously or unconsciously we keep two-thirds of mankind improperly housed and fed. That is what the series of novels is about-this whole pattern of discrimination and tyranny and violence.

Lessing delineates here the patterns of violence-racial, sexual, cultural, and economic-that have continued to preoccupy her throughout her long and prolific career.

As a child, Lessing opened her eyes every day on the wreckage of World War I. Rhodesia was one of several remote and contested British colonies that drew a steady stream of veterans fleeing not just poverty and unemployment in postwar England but also the jingoism and cultural chauvinism that had dispatched them so jauntily to kill and die in the trenches. Lessing's first thoughts about war and its effects on the men and women who live through it were inspired by the evidence of human damage she saw all around her and, most graphically, at home. In the early, rather elegiac recollections of her father that appear in A Small Personal Voice, Lessing suggests that his spirit, like his leg, was amputated in the war to end all wars.

The boy who was beaten at school, who went too much to church, who carried the fear of poverty all his life, but who nevertheless was filled with the memories of country pleasures; the young bank clerk who worked such long hours for so little money, but who danced, sang, played, flirted-this naturally vigorous, sensuous being was killed in 1914, 1915, 1916. I think the best of my father died in that war, his spirit was crippled by it.

The love of life that survived public school education, religious intolerance, and economic exploitation could not survive World War I.

In the much later memoir of her parents that appeared in Granta in 1985, Lessing returns to the mutilated bodies of her father and his Rhodesian neighbors in a somewhat different key:

These nice people had one thing in common I didn't see then. They were survivors of World War I. The men had artificial arms or legs or eye-patches. -920-

They would discuss the whereabouts of various bits of shrapnel that were forever travelling about their bodies out of sight, but sometimes emerging from healthy tissue to tinkle into a shaving mug or onto a plate… There was a man with a steel plate which kept his brains in, and another rumoured to have a steel plate holding in his bowels. They talked about the war, both men and women-the war, the war, the war-and we children escaped from it into the bush.

When Lessing evokes these mutilated bodies for a third time in Shikasta, the macabre note of the Granta piece has deepened into an irony that overwhelms the elegiac cast of the original recollection. We no longer see through the eyes of a daughter wistfully reminiscing about her father whose spirit, like his body, was irreparably crippled by World War I. The bullet-studded and metal-plated bodies of the white farmers are now observed 'from below' by the race they have overpowered and exploited, and their scarred and maimed bodies are read as signs not of their victimization but of the inexplicability of their conviction of superiority:

There was a fight this afternoon among two young men of different tribes. Its cause was frustration.

The white farmer had then lectured the two on their warlike spirit, their primitive ways. It was backward and primitive to fight, he had said. The white people were here to save the unfortunately backward blacks from this belligerence, by their civilised and civilising example.

The older man was sitting upright, the firelight moving on his face, which was showing relish and enjoyment. He was entertaining them: his family has been the traditional storytellers of his subtribe. The younger men, listening, were laughing.

The older man was surveying the white culture from below, the sharp slave's-eye view.

He was enumerating the white farms and the white men who owned them.

This was about five years after the end of World War I, which had been presented to these black people as one fought to preserve the decencies of civilisation. There were half a dozen farmers in the area who had fought on the other side in that war, who also presented their part in it as a defence of the fundamental decencies.

'On the farm across the ridge, the man with one arm… '

'Yes, yes, that is so, he has only one arm.'

'And on the farm across the river, the man with one leg… '

'Yes, only one leg, one leg.'

'And on the road into the station, the man who has a metal plate to hold his intestines in.' -921-

Yes, what a thing, that a man must keep in his intestines with a piece of iron.'

'And on the farm where they are mining for gold, the man who has a metal piece in his skull.'

'Ah, ah, a terrible thing, so many of them, and all wounded.'

'And on the farm… '

Special benefits had been offered to ex-soldiers who would emigrate and take over this land. And so it was that to the eyes of the black people, the white people were an army of cripples. Like an army of locusts, who, after a few hours on the ground, show themselves legless, wingless, dozens of them, unable to take off again, when the main armies leave. Locusts, eating everything, covering everything, swarming everywhere…