Hard Facts

By Martha Duffy

At 75, novelist Doris Lessing is publishing the first volume of her autobiography. Already she is skeptical. "Were I to write it aged 85, how different would it be?" That's Lessing -- always doubting, exacting, comparing. Under My Skin (HarperCollins; 419 pages; $25) is not so much a recollection of her early life in Southern Rhodesia as a dissection of it. Remote styles of life -- in a colonial outpost at the end of the British regime in Africa, with its hopeless yearnings and longings, and in communist circles of the 1930s, with their blithe and heartless dreams of a brave new world -- come under a moral microscope. How legitimate were people's . experiences? How well have youthful agendas held up?

Lessing, best known for The Golden Notebook and the semi-autobiographical series The Children of Violence, was born in Persia of British parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father a World War I amputee who gained more his wife's pity than her love. Doris was called Tigger after the Winnie-the-Pooh character -- the whole family had A.A. Milne nicknames -- because she was a "healthy bouncy beast." When she was five, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia, hearts set on the wealth to be had in farming and mining. But a crippled man could hardly tame the bush; living was rough and laborious.

The chapters on childhood are marvelously, sometimes frighteningly, detailed. Both parents had all their teeth out before leaving for Africa. It was considered a sort of prophylactic, but one that subjected them to a lifetime of discomfort. Tigger sewed, cooked, tended to animals routinely: there is a wonderfully precise description of how to sit a hen and how to candle an egg. The remnant of civilized life that every woman sought was a bolt of Liberty fabric. Lessing apparently has a formidable sense of smell. Before easy dry cleaning, everybody's clothes smelled bad. Nuns -- she attended a convent school for a while -- smelled even worse.

She fled the farm in her teens; her savage rivalry with her mother was exhausting both of them. The elder woman resented the daughter's opportunities; the younger saw in her mother a stoicism she could never match. As a gutsy, pretty newcomer in the city of Salisbury, she fell in with young leftists and joined the Communists. These chapters make a scathing account of party delusions. "We despised anybody who did not believe in the Revolution," she writes, even doubting that she would demur if asked to go out and kill.

Salisbury social life was very lax. Lessing married the scion of a respectable family whom she did not love and produced two children. She walked out on that fledgling family to marry a Communist, Gottfried Lessing, with whom she had another child. Everyone drank, smoked and caroused. During her pregnancy by Lessing, she felt the need of an affair and nailed her man at once, a dedicated womanizer. By the end of the book she has moved to London with only the youngest child. (Though she saw Lessing when he too came to England, the relationship was over.) These facts are set out baldly and without apology. Like many artists, Lessing had a firm loyalty to what she considered her destiny. Human concerns came in a distant second.

Throughout the narrative Lessing measures her experiences against what would probably have happened if they had occurred later on, and provides a guide to corresponding episodes in her fiction. Set down in blunt, fluent prose, it is the same mix of the practical and the speculative that marks all her writing. And, alas, the same lack of humor. But if that is a flaw, it also ensures the author's total engagement with any subject she tackles. That is what one reads Doris Lessing for: unsparing clarity and frankness.