A Small Personal Voice by Doris Lessing (ed. Paul Schlueter)

Paul Schlueter was one of the founders of the Doris Lessing society (is it still running? I presume not because if it is and they haven’t organically found me and this Lessing-heavy blog then it doesn’t have the most basic of Google alerts set up) and an academic who wrote extensively on Lessing and her peers.

I’m guessing he must have been a recogniseable name for the Lessing-curious in the 1990s because, otherwise, it seems like a frankly bizarre decision to have his name featured so prominently on the cover and within the text of this 1994 collection of – I presume but this isn’t explicitly stated in the book – previously uncollected writings by the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing.

Some of these texts feel familiar, and may well have been jumping off points for sections of Going Home, which is (I think?) the only book of direct memoir of hers I’ve previously read, though of course I’ve read all of Children of Violence and other fiction of hers that is rooted in autobiographical recollection, so perhaps things feel familiar here because of the divergent versions I’ve encountered elsewhere and without such recourse to fact …

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Included here is an afterword Lessing wrote for a 1960s(ish) reprint of the 1883 novel The Story of an African Farm, which Lessing writes about gushingly, tho one questions – especially in this context where the parallels are made apparent in essays either side – if her love for that novel is more due to the narrative similarities with her own youth (and the youth of the author, Olive Schreiner) than to the text’s genuine literary merits… Either way, though, I’ve acquired a copy and will likely read it at some point this summer …

What else is there? A 60 page essay on Lessing’s mother, who seems almost as bad as the slightly worse caricature of her that appears as Martha Quest’s mother throughout the Children of Violence cycle; a less than ten page essay on her father, which tho lacking the details and depth of the much longer piece on her other parent, it rapidly paints a bleak and devastating portrait of someone whose entire life, personality and ability to exist in the world was lost in the trenches of World War One, many decades before he physically died. I wept hard, fast, and immediately after reading that.

There are book reviews here, including a brief, glowing review of a Kurt Vonnegut book I’ve never read and comments on Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, which I also haven’t read…

There are also lots of interviews here, in which Lessing covers ideas as varied as psychoactive drug use, the then-contemporary Labour party, other writers, her own personal life, and – of course – the politics of British colonial rule in the south of Africa and the botched (tanked? deeply flawed? idealistic? impractical? (and always racist, tho that goes without saying)) attempts by the white minorities to maintain money and power as governmental control left Westminster…

There’s a lot here to enjoy if you already like the writing of Doris Lessing, and as someone who is directly and explicitly interested in the alignments, promises and inconsistencies of autobiographical writing and writing that is explicitly and openly based on autobiographical experience, there’s a lot to get stuck into.

Though I imagine there’s a lot more of this in her actual memoirs (published in two parts in 1994 and 1997, which may well include chunks of text that’s included in A Small Personal Voice, but I don’t know)…

There’s also a reflective text on the critical reception to The Golden Notebook, which is entertaining as Lessing doesn’t like how it was received – yes, the reviews were glowing, but they weren’t glowing in the way, or focusing on the aspects of the novel, that she wanted…

So, yeah, a great collection of some interesting pieces of writing, many of which work context-free, but it’s more of an appetite whetter than an appetite satiater…

More Lessing to be read very soon, I think!!!

(Structurally/as a singular text, this reminded me of Space Crone… though the writing here (as there) is enjoyable, it’s emphatically lacking the kind of coherence that happens when an author collates and orders their own essays…)