Doris Lessing s Sixties HEAD TOPICS
Doris Lessing s Sixties
10/22/2022 6:10:00 PM The Sweetest Dream captures the folly of a decade s utopian spirit
Source The New Yorker
In her novel “The Sweetest Dream,” Doris Lessing—born on this day in 1919—renders the political hypocrisies and timeless wisdoms of the sixties. The Sweetest Dream captures the folly of a decade s utopian spirit Doris LessingIllustration by Tom BachtellIf you’re writing a novel about the nineteen-sixties, then you’re writing a historical novel, for the nineteen-sixties were a long time ago, and everyone knows how things turned out. And if you're writing a historical novel then you are probably at least as interested in what doesn’t change as in what does. In the dazzle of the moment—any moment—people are likely to seem pure reflexes of current conditions. The guy on the cell phone with the flag pin in his lapel has “Bush II” written all over him. Back in the days of Bush I, he was probably a slob who bummed rides and wore a Megadeth T-shirt, unrecognizable even to his present self. From a novelist’s point of view, though, the flag pin and the T-shirt can seem surface events, exterior decoration on an unvarying internal structure. That inside space used to be called “human nature,” a term with regrettable universalist implications. Now we call it “hardwiring,” and feel much better about ourselves. But it is basically the same thing: the residue of personality that no change can corrode. Read more:
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It will serve steak and seafood and is scheduled to open in the spring of 2023. Image courtesy of Getty Images Plano Woman Faces a Second Lawsuit Over Racist Attack Against Four Indian AmericansA second woman has filed a lawsuit against Esmeralda Upton, a Plano resident caught on video attacking and hurling racist insults at a group of Indian American women as they were winding down a night out in late August. Indrani Banerjee and three friends met at the restaurant Sixty Vines... Good. She’s vile. What year is this MIPCOM: ‘Game of Thrones’ Producer Frank Doelger Set for Surveillance Thriller ‘Concordia’The sci-fi series imagines a utopian community run by AI that hides a dark secret. Save this story for later.A Japanese cat lover who was hospitalised earlier this year left behind scores of cats in his apartment during the hot summer months without water.Oct 21, 2022, 7:58 PM Description The space at the top of Reunion Tower in Dallas will have a new steak and seafood restaurant next year.October 20, 2022 4:00AM Esmeralda Upton of Plano, right, berated four women outside of the Sixty Vines restaurant on Dallas Parkway in West Plano on August 24. Doris Lessing Illustration by Tom Bachtell If you’re writing a novel about the nineteen-sixties, then you’re writing a historical novel, for the nineteen-sixties were a long time ago, and everyone knows how things turned out. And if you're writing a historical novel then you are probably at least as interested in what doesn’t change as in what does. Gunma Wan Nyan Network, an animal welfare organization, counted some 170 cats that were under the care of a man in his 60s in the Takasaki area of eastern Japan’s Gunma province. In the dazzle of the moment—any moment—people are likely to seem pure reflexes of current conditions. It will serve steak and seafood and is scheduled to open in the spring of 2023. The guy on the cell phone with the flag pin in his lapel has “Bush II” written all over him. “Many of the cats were emaciated … The windows of the house were closed and the smell of ammonia from excrement was overpowering when members entered the house in early September,” the group said. Back in the days of Bush I, he was probably a slob who bummed rides and wore a Megadeth T-shirt, unrecognizable even to his present self. This was Banerjee and her friends’ first interaction with Upton. From a novelist’s point of view, though, the flag pin and the T-shirt can seem surface events, exterior decoration on an unvarying internal structure. The cats had to fend for themselves without anyone stopping by to take care of them. That inside space used to be called “human nature,” a term with regrettable universalist implications. Now we call it “hardwiring,” and feel much better about ourselves. The cats had been surviving on their own since early August, when their caretaker fell ill and was hospitalised. But it is basically the same thing: the residue of personality that no change can corrode. Doris Lessing’s “The Sweetest Dream” (HarperCollins; $26. “The owner is recovering, and the animal welfare group will take care of the cats on a volunteer basis until he is discharged from the hospital and can look after the cats again,” it said.” The Observer contacted several email addresses and phone numbers listed for Upton and her husband but did not receive any response. 95), which is her twenty-fourth novel and something like her fiftieth book, is about the nineteen-sixties and their aftermath. About two-thirds of the story takes place in London, in a big house inhabited by an extended family and its hangers-on; the rest takes place in Africa, in a Zimbabwe-like nation called Zimlia. It is a fairly cold book. An Author’s Note offers the following advice, or, possibly, warning: “I am not writing volume three of my autobiography”—the first two volumes, “Under My Skin” and “Walking in the Shade,” took Lessing up to 1962—“because of possible hurt to vulnerable people. Which does not mean I have novelised autobiography. At one point Upton reached into her purse and threatened the group, screaming, “You turn off that phone or I swear to God I’ll fucking shoot your ass. . . . I hope I have managed to recapture the spirit of, particularly, the Sixties, that contradictory time which, looking back and comparing it with what came later, seems surprisingly innocent.” This is so evenly balanced between invitation and rebuff that no doubt the wise response is to ignore it. And that's what they do. What Lessing means to say, apparently, is: This is not my story, but these are my sixties. The central figure in the book is a fortyish woman named Frances. She is divorced from her Communist husband, a ridiculous fraud with the nom de guerre Comrade Johnny, and she lives with their two sons in the house of her former mother-in-law, Julia, who also considers Johnny a sponger and a fool. Frances is (in the language of the time) an Earth Mother: self-effacing, welcoming to every stray and dropout who shows up at her door, mature and maternal but by no means asexual. Like her creator, she is an accomplished cook, a writer (of nonfiction), and a person with a social conscience who detests campaigns and causes. The next day, police arrested her on two misdemeanor charges, assault causing bodily injury and making terroristic threats. In the twenty or so years the story covers, Frances manages to provide shelter and succor to her sons’ girlfriends (one of whom they share), her ex-husband’s crazy ex-wife and his anorexic stepdaughter, her lover’s crazy ex-wife and their two children, various of her sons’ school friends, assorted runaways, a couple of African children brought to England by the stepdaughter (who then dies), and, at the end, the unreconstructed Johnny himself, who lives in the basement and drinks toasts to the memory of Joseph Stalin. With the equivocal license granted by the Author’s Note, a reader might conclude that Lessing’s nineteen-sixties consisted mainly of an effort to secure private happiness in a world of idiotic political posturing and lousy family dynamics. Most of the characters, apart from Frances and her mother-in-law, parrot the self-serving Marxist slogans of Comrade Johnny, who shows up regularly at the house to deliver speeches in which he says things like “Fidel is a genuinely great man. He is pointing us all the way into the future.” The kids find this “groovy. One of Banerjee’s friends who was also attacked that night, Bidisha Rudra , filed a similar suit against Upton last month. ” Most of them are from middle-class families, but they shoplift the goodies they want and travel on the Underground without paying the fare, on the theory that they are helping to destroy the capitalist order. They think their parents are “shits,” and “all used the word fascist as easily as they said fuck, or shit, not necessarily meaning much more than this was somebody they disapproved of.” As the story unfolds into the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the characters adopt feminist, anti-colonialist, and other politically correct attitudes as well. And nearly all of them, including Frances, suffer from some sort of primal emotional deprivation. Their mothers are abusive or depressive; their fathers are indifferent or absent or dead. Upton at some future date see what happens to Ms. Every character carries his or her special load of guilt and anger. In 1960, Lessing turned forty-one. She had been married and divorced twice, had three children, and had passed through a period of political activism as a Communist, first in Rhodesia, where she grew up, and then in London, where she moved in 1949. She was well known in England as one of the (female) Angry Young Men; and her novel “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, made her famous nearly everywhere. As an artist, she had already arrived; as a woman, she did not have much to learn from the student rebellion or the sexual revolution. Given Upton's refusal to take a breath test, Walker said, she might have a hard time arguing she was drunk. They must have seemed cartoon versions of her own experiences, illustrations of the second-time-as-farce syndrome. It is not surprising that the nineteen-sixties, in her novel, figure as a time of self-righteous posturing, relieved mainly by naïveté and ineffectuality. It is when the younger characters grow up and take their places in the world that their silliness begins to have consequences. The purpose of the African sections of the story is to show us how some of these ignorant, selfish, and spoiled kids have become ignorant, selfish, and spoiled adults. One is now a minister of the newly liberated Zimlia; another is a lawyer at a World Bank-type outfit that dispenses largesse to the Zimlians, none of which makes its way to the people who need it; a third is a muckraking journalist out to smear anyone unfriendly to Zimlia’s Marxist regime. “She has a lot of hate written on her heart, and she acted that day in a matter totally consistent with her beliefs and her views. Like the radicals in the sixties part of the book, Johnny and his comrades, these are all utopians (some are genuine utopians, some are opportunists, some have lost the ability to know the difference), and utopianism, the “sweet dream” of a world without suffering, is the novel’s great and unmitigated evil. There is room for virtue in the world, but it is the virtue of individual acts of charity—the acts of people like Frances, tirelessly cooking supper for everyone who turns up in her kitchen, and Sylvia, the former anorexic, who works herself to death trying to run a hospital in rural Zimlia. What virtuous people perpetually struggle against is not political ideology, for ideology (as Lessing imagines it) is really just a mask for resentment. Marxism is one form of resentment; feminism is another. “Some people have come to think that our—the human being’s—greatest need is to have something or somebody to hate,” the narrator explains. Since we started the Dallas Observer , it has been defined as the free, independent voice of Dallas, and we'd like to keep it that way. (The narrator is not shy of explanations.) For decades the upper classes, the middle class, had fulfilled this useful function, earning (in communist countries) death, torture and imprisonment, and in more equable countries like Britain, merely obloquy, or irritating obligations, like having to acquire a cockney accent. But now this creed showed signs of wearing thin. The new enemy, men, was even more useful, since it encompassed half the human race. From one end of the world to the other, women were sitting in judgment on men . . . telling little anecdotes of this man’s crassness or that man’s delinquency. . . . Never have there been smugger, more self-righteous, unself-critical people. To readers who know only “The Golden Notebook”—or only the reputation of “The Golden Notebook”—this may seem like recanting. It is not. “The Golden Notebook” is the story of a woman, Anna Wulf, trying to break out of a prison of abstractions. Some of these abstractions are Marxian, some are Freudian, some are just the superstitions acquired by living in a society in which women’s pain and pleasure count for less. The point (if one can speak this way about a novel) is not that Marxism, Freudianism, and sexism are bad—and We Shall Overcome. The point is that happiness is always threatened by abstractions, of whatever time or political tendency. In mid-century London, for a woman like Anna, Marx and Freud and self-absorbed boyfriends happened to be the forms that oppression took. Today, there are different invitations to self-destruction. Feminism, for instance. Happiness is also threatened by the tendency of human beings to use and emotionally abuse other human beings, and that tendency, “The Sweetest Dream” insists, is eternal. Utopianism is evil not only because it countenances real suffering today in the name of abstract justice tomorrow. It is evil because it teaches perfectibility. Part of being happy is knowing how to live with people the way they are, and with yourself, the way you are. If feminism means changing the way men are, rather than dealing with men the way they are, then Lessing is not a feminist. What makes her work so cold is not her disapproval of the ideals and illusions of other people, although that disapproval is chilling enough. It is her fatalism.The belief that people can remake themselves by catching up with the times is one of the illusions she mocks: it’s why there is so little about London in the nineteen-sixties in this novel about London in the nineteen-sixties. “We carry invisible templates as ineluctably ourselves as fingerprints, but we don’t know about them until we look around us and see them mirrored,” she says. Giving people a mirror to see themselves in is one of the reasons for writing a novel. Published in the print edition of the .