Doris Lessing

October 2, 2000
When the prolific, multifaceted novelist Lessing (Ben; In the World; etc.) heard that several biographies of her were in the works, she wrote--"in self-defense"--two well-received books covering her first four decades before this first, disappointing biography could be published. In her own books, Lessing captured the more colorful and exuberant parts of her life: her childhood in Southern Rhodesia, her rebellious adolescence, her two unsuccessful marriages, her anticolonial political radicalism, her affiliation with the Communist Party and her literary debut in London's bohemian, intellectual circles. Klein (Aline; Gramercy Park), after a pallid paraphrased account of Lessing's version, is left to assemble other, less satisfactory sources on the remaining years, which cover Lessing's writings after The Golden Notebook, her experiments with radical psychology and her conversion to Sufism. Klein's interviews with Lessing's ex-friends and former colleagues are largely anonymous--and often filled with memories of her aloofness, irritability or vulnerability. Some are willing to go on record, such as Clancy Sigal, who was, at least in his own opinion, the great love of her life; Klein similarly takes full advantage of Lessing's correspondence with editor Robert Gottlieb. Otherwise, she depends on material from Lessing's previously published interviews and her often autobiographical fiction and nonfiction. Klein's psychological analysis of her subject lags after Lessing's own, without the irony and wit, and her striving for an objective viewpoint results, often, in merely noting Lessing's inconsistencies. Lessing entitled the first volume of her autobiography Under My Skin--which is where, for all Klein's research despite Lessing's disapproval, this biography never gets. B&w illus.