“Memoirs of a Survivor”: Doris Lessing’s remarkable novel of collapse and renewal
by Roberta Werdinger
More than forty-five years ago, the novelist and short story writer Doris Lessing published Memoirs of a Survivor, which lays out a memorable scenario of collapse. It came in the middle of a remarkable and productive career (Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007 at the age of 88) which brought her from Zimbabwe, where she was largely raised, to London, and which produced an outpouring of short stories and novels. Lessing had an uncanny ability to integrate incisive commentary on the political and social issues of her day with the imaginative and spiritual lives of her characters. Her astute synthesis of these different realms is evident in the 1974 Memoirs of a Survivor, which Lessing called “an attempt at an autobiography.”
The story is told through the lens of an unnamed narrator in an unnamed, large city who views the collapse of her civilization through the window of her ground-floor apartment. Collapse is also viewed through the eyes of Emily, an orphaned girl on the cusp of womanhood who is dropped at the narrator’s door in the book’s opening pages and serves from then on as the main driver of the narrative. Accepting this unfamiliar girl’s appearance matter-of-factly, the narrator manages to expand her point of view to include that of a generation that is being asked to take on the tasks of survival before they are emotionally and physically ready.
While the story that unfolds is often harrowing, we are never to forget that this book was written by a survivor. “We all remember that time,” the narrator begins. “It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared …. as if we are saying, ‘It was like that for you, too?'”
What “it” exactly is is never clearly defined. We know that ordinary life in this modern city has ceased; that people construct makeshift lives in half-deserted buildings; that the city authorities are, when they exist at all, weak and ineffective; and that people are forming ad-hoc societies to fend for themselves. Lessing’s focus is not on environmental disasters so much as on the decline of civilization itself, and the human response in self-organizing societies which reflect both the best and the worst of their nature.
Emily, all of thirteen, has had to grow up fast. In the new reality she has been thrust into, most of the societal restrictions on women and girls, whether protective or oppressive, have been lifted. The old order has failed her utterly and she must fend for herself. She does this rapidly, wielding a social deftness that lands her as partner to a charismatic gang leader, Gerald, and as a leader to the throngs of orphaned young people who are filling the streets. A new alternative society has formed; with remarkable makeshift vigor, they dismantle and repurpose outdated consumer goods, grow vegetables in gardens, and stable farm animals in the upper floors of deserted apartments. Gerald and other gang leaders protect the younger people and keep the peace. Along with the occasional altercations, there was “warmth, caring, a family.”
Not so the younger generation. This group emerges later in the narrative, as collapse progresses and conditions worsen. They are incapable of the kind of affiliation that unified the earlier bands of young people so that they could, in their rough way, protect each other in their daily foraging for resources. Gerald takes it upon himself to take in and acculturate these younger people, but neither he nor Emily are able to reach them: they relieve themselves on the floor and throw their food about, baring their teeth while chanting threats. A further breakdown of civilization, Lessing seems to be saying, is afoot.
Yet amid all the bleakness of the situation, Lessing also presents an alternative vision, one which wells up from the earth itself, with its inherent generosity. Allowing her consciousness to roam, the narrator encounters the detritus of a crumbling civilization–“smashed and dirtied rooms,” rotting furniture, even a corpse. She then emerges into “a garden between… old brick walls,” with “a fresh delightful sky above me that I knew was the sky of another world.” This other world in fact resembles a well-kept, idyllic English garden, with “an exquisite old rose growing on one wall… among the leeks and the garlics and the mints.” Like the other scenes and people encountered in these visions, the garden is both imaginal and real. It provides an elemental force that propels the narrator forward–a star, however distant, by which she can set her course.
“…though it was hard to maintain a knowledge of that other world, with its scents and running waters and its many plants, while I sat here in this dull shabby daytime room–the pavement outside seething as usual with its tribal life–I did hold it. I kept it in my mind. … Yes, towards the end it was so; intimations of that life, or lives, became more powerful and frequent in “ordinary” life, as if that place were feeding and sustaining us, and wished us to know it.”
Reading these words in my present life, with my “go bag” sitting near my front door while toxic smoke from California wildfires inflames my lungs and toxic politics sear my brain, I am moved immeasurably by Lessing’s words. Her narrator, struggling to manage in a chaotic world that could soon be ours, manages to hold a vision of a world that is capable of the ultimate act of generosity, arcing back in space and time to feed and sustain the souls of a people trapped in an unbearable present. Perhaps Lessing herself has reached back in time to encourage us on the path, as it threads through our troubled history and emerges in the fresh air of a garden, that most ancient and intimate act of collaboration with the earth.
Roberta Werdinger is a writer, editor, and Zen priest and practitioner, currently living in rural Northern California. Lately, she has been devoting much time and thought to employing art and literature to address the crises of our time, and to preserving cultural forms for whatever future civilizations may replace the present one.
Image credits: Wikimedia Commons (Doris Lessing, 2006); Peganum (Garden House Brighton)
Laura Jane Berger
Thank you so much , Roberta, for reminding me of the title of this book. It has played in my subconscious since the decades ago when I read it. One scene which surfaces into my consciousness with some regularity is when a well-meaning group goes door to door soliciting funds to purchase vitamins for the adolescents. The touching absurdity of that effort remains clearly seen in so much of how we ostensibly try to address our deep problems. There is no author that seeps into my subconscious as effectively as Doris Lessing. Similarly, one of her books that I picked off a giveaway shelf, is The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, part of a science fiction series. It’s about a beautiful and bountiful planet that some distant lords populate with wise, intelligent, loving people with the intention of cultivating a more perfect civilization. However, it becomes clear that the planet is moving away from the sun, becoming progressively colder into an Ice Age and leads to eventual extinction for the inhabitants . The book has penetrated me with the resonance of its story of how the inhabitants come to terms with and accept the end of their Eden . First, they attempt to build walls to stop the incoming glaciers. There are heroic actions from some of the youth, and the people place desperate hope for guidance from the benevolent lords who visit more and more infrequently. Eventually, they surrender, huddle and die. Unforgettable.