I don’t think it fits anywhere at all with my other novels,” Doris Lessing says of her latest book, which brings her total to more than 50. The Cleft was inspired by “a scientific report claiming that women were the basic human stock, and that men came along much later”, she says. The title comes from a quote by Elizabeth I (“If I had been born crested not cloven, your Lordships would not treat me so”) and is the name given to this female species. Their universe is disrupted when one of them gives birth to “a monster”, so called on account of the “ugly” bundle of “bumps and lumps and the thing like a pipe which is sometimes called a sea squirt”. It is from this that the men earn their nickname “the squirts”. This isn’t a joke — Lessing is famous for many things, but humour isn’t one of them.
For a writer who is most celebrated for social realism, Lessing has an almost perverse attraction to the fantastical. “She is one of the very few novelists who has refused to believe that the world is too complicated to understand,” Margaret Drabble has said. But as long-time Lessing follower John Leonard lamented in a review of one of her outer-space Canopus novels in 1982: “Why does Doris Lessing — one of the half-dozen most interesting minds to have chosen to write fiction in English in this century — insist on propagating books that confound and dismay her loyal readers?” His answer: “She intends to.” And here she’s at it again. The Cleft has provoked some confusion and dismay — and not a few sniggers — among critics. “I’m naturally rather nervous, wondering how people are going to react to it,” she says, without a hint of nervousness. “It’s probably not a very easy book for some people.”
Lessing is a professional contrarian, to be relied upon to stir things up (as she did at the Edinburgh book festival a few years ago by declaring that women should stop giving men such a hard time). She has spent the near-half century since The Golden Notebook — her “albatross” — was appropriated as “the bible of the women’s movement” taking swipes at her disciples. “I’m not interested in being a feminist icon. If you are a woman and you think at all, you are going to have to write about it, otherwise you aren’t writing about the time you are living in,” she says. “What I really can’t stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.” It’s not for nothing that she earned her reputation as feminism’s favourite misogynist.
She might have shrunk in recent years, but at 87 Lessing is still a formidable presence: squat and solid as a carved deity. The only times she shows any sign of her age is as she pushes herself creakily from the sunken sofa in the corner of her first-floor living room.
Although there might be a whiff of 1970s evolutionary feminism about The Cleft, there is little here to cheer those who feel abandoned by the author of The Golden Notebook. The “Old Shes” are lazy, stupid creatures; the younger clefts are more curious (at least sexually), but display a handy instinct for housework and childcare. The squirts, meanwhile, are blessed with an appetite for adventure and invention. No wonder the feminists get cross. “What I was suggesting with the advent of the males was that a whole new spirit of curiosity and enquiry was born, which seems to me quite possible. Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative — despite what current ideology says. Of course, men and women are different. You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can’t say I do like it very much,” she says grimly.
The mother is an ambivalent figure, both protector and tormentor, throughout Lessing’s fiction, reflecting her troubled relationship with her own mother, from whom she was forever in “nervous flight”. One of the defining memories of her childhood was of her parents sitting in front of the house under a cloud of resentment and cigarette smoke, shackled together by the life of disappointment in Southern Rhodesia. “I won’t. I will not. I will not be like that” became the mantra of her adolescence. And indeed, much of her early life can be understood as a series of escapes, shedding skins as completely as a snake in the bush.
The outline of her life — the African childhood, the two marriages, the abandoned children, the journey to London and her rise to become one of the most important figures in postwar literature — will be well known to her readers. So, too, will her ideological or spiritual journey from communism through psychiatry to mysticism. She has thoroughly documented both, not only in her memoirs — Under My Skin (to 1949) and Walking in the Shade (1949-62) — but in her fiction, from The Grass is Singing (1950), a story of racial injustice set in Rhodesia, through the Children of Violence series (her most autobiographical novels, better known as the Martha Quest books), right up to later novels such as Love, Again (1996) and The Grandmothers (2003). Not forgetting The Golden Notebook in 1962.
Instead of completing the final instalment of her autobiography, she wrote The Sweetest Dream in 2001. This was not, she insists, “novelised autobiography”, but an attempt “to recapture the spirit” of the 1960s, in particular her own experience as a “housemother”, opening her home to waifs and strays. “I think I got the time right, the atmosphere,” she says. “I didn’t put the actual people in because they are all now middle-aged or elderly and some are quite famous.” And she’s still not letting on. “Good God no.” Adding teasingly: “It’s a pity — a great pity.” — Â