Reading takes you many places: last week I started Doris Lessing’s The Sweetest Dream and was taken at how it caught certain parts of the excitement of the 1960s. However, as I read on I became annoyed by Lessing’s stereotypic presentation of unrepentant Old Lefties, and their slow change into militants for all the wrong causes.
Her worst example (or best, depending on how you look at it) is Johnny Lennox, her heroine’s first husband, who was never a good Communist (he lied about fighting in the Spanish Civil War,) treated his lovely, generous mother badly, and ends his life, washed up in the spare room in his mother’s old house. He stands for all that is wrong with doctrinaire positions, and Lessing has nothing but contempt for him and for the men who led post-Independence Africa. (The book appears to end just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, so she’s silent on what has happened in South Africa since.)
A writer should never have to apologize for his or her characters’ lives, but, if he or she is writing realistic fiction, must make those lives believable. Lessing paints her people with such a broad brush, though, that several of them seem no more than caricatures. I recognized the Africa she wrote about, as well as some of the incidents, but I regret very much linking this book to our Old Lefty friend Marge Franz, who has never given up her passion for setting wrongs right while living a life filled with decency.
Marge was a great friend of Jessica Mitford: back in our Berkeley days she lent me Mitford’s terrific memoir Hons and Rebels and arranged for me to do an interview with her. It seems she also ended up being Mitford’s literary executor for her letters. And that brings me to my next reading: Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Sussman (Knopf, 2006.) Thomas Mallon says in his New Yorker review: “A week spent with her letters makes everybody else seem a bore.” It will be, I hope, an antidote to the rancor found in Lessing’s novel.
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5 comments:
Mary, I was alerted to your blog posting by a Google alert for Jessica Mitford. Thanks for the mention of my book "Decca." Anyone interested in more information on the book can find it on my web site, www.peterysussman.com.
I share your admiration for Marge Frantz -- I'm a huge fan of hers -- but I don't understand the connection or linkage to Doris Lessing. Would you please elaborate?
Thanks, Peter
The connection is a little lateral, and you have to go back to a posting I had lasat week--marysoderstrom.blogspot.com/2007/11/dreams-strange-and-sweet-books-about.html--in in which I say that Frances Lennox in Lessing's The Sweetest Dream reminded me of people I knew in Berkeley in the 1960s. I told a little story about Marge, but I didn't include her last name. And, now, as I say above, I think Lessing got many things wrong.
Looking forward to reading Mitford's letters: this morning's blog has some more thoughts about correspondance.
Mary
Now I get it. Thanks.
I read your new comments on correspondence. Of course, I too couldn't resist ruminating on that disappearing art in the introduction to "Decca."
Peter
By the way, Peter, if you are in contact with Marge Franz, please tell her that Lee and Mary Soderstromm send their best wishes. We lost track of her some time ago, but there is a little nest of former IR Center people who remember her with fondness.
Mary
who is getting the Jessica Mitford letters this weekend.
I am in contact with her periodically and will try to remember to pass along your best wishes. And, if you wish to contact her yourself, I think I can share her email address with you if you communicate with me privately (peter@psussman.com).
Peter
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