OUT AND ABOUT : Memory Book

Wednesday, Nov. 3, 1994 A few days after her 75th birthday, Doris Lessing reads for the Lannan Foundation to promote her new book, “Under My Skin, Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949.”

Waiting for the sold-out reading to begin, we page through the book, look at photographs of a young Lessing. She gazes back with a frank, mischievous intelligence, looking exactly like a girl who could burn down a farm storehouse “because of an error of judgment.”

The same dark, lively gaze greets us shortly as Lessing, gray-haired and calm, steps to the podium.

Writing this book, she says, gave her a keen awareness of the tension between family saga and memory. There’s family pressure “to make children remember things they don’t actually remember.” She reads about how, at age 5, she traveled with her family from Persia to England via Moscow. At one station, her mother left the train to buy food and was left behind. The family saga recalls 2 days of worry and her mother’s spunk; her own memories are more personal, mixed, emotional: faces of hungry people in the train windows, her one-legged father’s helplessness, the way she compulsively dressed and undressed her teddy bear.

Lessing regards the autobiographical enterprise with skepticism. “I learnt a great deal writing this book,” she says. “The tricks of a novelist get into autobiography. But novels have shape and an internal coherence, which autobiography should not. Life is a big sprawling mess full of false beginnings. . . .”

Memory, too, is slippery. “I remembered far too much to put into this book . . . and even if you remember a great deal, it’s nothing to what there is to remember. . . . Memory is so slight, so unreliable an organ. . . . Any incident can be described half a dozen ways, all of them true. Choose one and the other five disappear. . . .” On the other hand, memory is clearly selective: “You remember things if you were particularly alert or alive or awake at the time.”

“I was under very heavy pressure to have opinions not my own foisted on my childhood,” Lessing says. “I was determined not to be got at.”

We see such determination as she fields questions from the interviewer.

No, she says, she did not become a writer because of a difficult childhood. “I became a writer because I couldn’t do anything else. . . . I don’t think this is uncommon for women: writing because you can’t do anything else is really part of the women’s (literary) tradition.”

No, she does not feel her work was protected from critical literary appraisal because it was embraced by feminism or labeled science fiction.

No, she did not work to improve the dialogue in her novels because the literary critic Irving Howe pronounced it “wooden” in an essay on “The Golden Notebook.”

Rather, Lessing regards her prolific output with detached affection. “ ‘Marriages (Between Zones Three, Four and Five)’ is a good book,” she says. “ ‘Jocasta’ had problems. ‘The Sirian Experiments’ still makes me laugh--I read it the other day.” “The Golden Notebook” received “botchy” reviews, but has a vitality of its own--”I just watch it with interest.”