The Habit of Loving

08/02/2022

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A Sadness Beyond the Maudlin

Born in 1919, Doris Lessing seems both a very English writer (that first name) and an inexplicably international one that stretches far further than a surname invoking Slavic and Teutonic origins. Lessing was born in Persia (now of course Iran) and brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and moved to London at the end of the forties. By then she had left behind two children from her first marriage, and now had a further child and another divorce behind her. 

Lessing’s work is broad, even erratic, with science fiction (the Canopus in Argos series) competing with the vaguely futuristic (Memoirs of a Survivor), the feminist (The Golden Notebook) with exploring the politically radical (The Good Terrorist). There was also an abiding interest in Sufism. But if Lessing is a great modern writer it rests on her ability to explore the complications in contemporary relationships, the desires people possess and the difficulties they have matching them to others who have their own needs and yearnings. It is with such awareness so important a book as The Golden Notebook can come but, for our purposes, we will focus chiefly on a short story ‘The Habit of Loving’, which nevertheless contains many of Lessing’s preoccupations, and also a narrative force that can seem, from one perspective, undramatic, but from another devastatingly delineating.  

In ‘The Habit of Loving’, George is a 60yr-old London producer with a flat near the Marble Arch, an ex-wife, kids and, now, at the start of the story, a broken heart. Over the years, George has played the field, aware that he was a star on the pitch, but now he is not so young, and when he receives a letter from Myra saying she won’t be returning to Britain, he is in shock. She has been in Australia with her two children since 1943 but in the wake of the war he expected her return. Instead, she tells him that she likes Australia, doesn’t miss the English climate and, as Lessing’s narrator pointedly points out, no longer seems to miss George either. She flies over to London for a couple of weeks but it is over. “George’s eyes [unlike Myra’s], as he drove away from the airport, were dry. If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love which collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye.” 

As in many a Lessing story and novel, the writer both creates immense empathy and reserved judgement. Lessing isn’t a moralistic writer yet there is moral assertiveness nevertheless. One sees it in the sympathy she has for George’s predicament and her awareness that these are feelings most people go through and in circumstances far more difficult than those of the wealthy and comfortable George. This needn’t mean he doesn’t deserve sympathy for his broken heart but it does allow Lessing to show there is absurd self-pity in how he deals with his predicament. Early in the story, a year after the first letter from Myra (and shortly after a further rejection in print), he goes and visits his ex-wife. Molly married again after their divorce and she is now a widow, and George asks her to marry him once more, a moment that leaves her so startled, “she let the sugar-tongs drop and crack a saucer.” She asks what happened to Myra and after explaining it, the narrator says “…when he heard his voice saying this it sounded pathetic, and he was frightened, for he could not remember ever having to appeal to a woman. Except to Myra.” Molly says “you’re lonely George. Well, we’re none of us getting any younger”, as Molly tells him that she intends to marry a man younger than herself, a doctor at the hospital where she is on the Advisory Committee, and a progressive like her. She is fifty but doesn’t look it and he envies her life and her youthfulness, but is that love, and isn’t it ludicrous for George to try and remarry his ex after getting rejected by someone else? 

The story probably wouldn’t have worked ironically but it wouldn’t quite have worked either with irony’s complete absence. George is a pathetic figure in the twin sense: capable of inducing pathos but appearing lamentable too. Speaking of the years while Myra was initially in Australia and he was in London, while they were still together, however geographically far apart, the narrator notes that “during the four years since Myra had left, he had a number of affairs with young women round and about the theatre for he had been lonely. He had written quite frankly about these affairs, but she had never mentioned them in her letters.” He may, now that it is over, come to understand that the “…word heartache, meant that a person could carry a heart which ached around with him, day and night, for his case, months. Nearly a year now.” But what was Myra carrying around for four years in Australia as he openly told her about his affairs? Lessing is too good a writer to tell us he deserves what he gets, but that doesn’t mean the sympathy the narrator offers isn’t tempered by a perspective that we can’t avoid. Yet it’s the balance that counts. ”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 un-self-critical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.” (Guardian) 

Lessing of course became such an icon after The Golden Notebook in 1962, and in 2012 the Guardian asked various women writers what they thought of it. Diane Athill reckoned, “I loved her earlier writing about her life in Africa, which was relaxed and vivid, and which I recognised again when The Golden Notebook's story took it to Africa, but when it moved to London the style became clumsier. It tended to be assertive, and I agree with Montaigne that assertiveness provokes resistance.” Yet in numerous London stories like ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘To Room Nineteen’ and ‘One Off the Short List’, the stories are both assertive and tentative, dogmatic and pragmatic. In ‘To Room Nineteen’, Susan is a wealthy woman whose children have left home and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. After years of building up the perfect life in a large house, suddenly it seems very empty indeed, and she feels very empty too, eventually retreating to the room nineteen of the title, determined to find a little inner peace. Lessing doesn’t mock Susan' attempts even if one might wonder about the luxury of an emptiness that finds itself given actualised form in a house that is now far too big for her and her husband’s needs, and where someone tries to resolve the problem by taking a small room without sacrificing the luxury home. Susan is a sympathetic character who like George might be viewed dismissively from the outside but Lessing chooses to get inside her crisis without denying the irony that is viewable from a certain perspective, a perspective that must be entertained but mustn’t become paramount.

This gives to much of Lessing’s work an indeterminacy that could now be seen as problematic, especially perhaps in the context of the sexual politics she frequently explores. Margaret Drabble was full of praise when looking back on The Golden Notebook but also reckoned “throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing.” (Guardian) Such behaviour is both ironic and ambivalent, as if women were conforming in the small gestures thinking through how to escape from bigger problems. In turn, Lessing’s narrators offer such moments with a causticity the reader cannot deny but with an awareness of a reality that would probably see the women doing exactly that. What could be more ironic and at the same time problematic as a woman who is raped regarding the assault as no more than an inconvenience? In ‘One Off The Short List’, a failed-writer and radio journalist Graham, and a talented designer, Barbara, meet after he interviews her and, sharing a taxi home, he insists she invites him in. He pushes himself onto her and she accepts his overtures with reluctance but once in bed he cannot keep an erection. Rather than having him there all night, she reckons better to get him hard and get it over with. 

The story doesn’t turn out to be a horrific tale of rape, but a jaundiced account of sexual politics, sixties style (it was published in 1960), with Barbara, determined to get rid of him quickly rather than deny him pleasure altogether. He ends up staying the night anyway, and Lessing’s story shows that even in situations where a woman reluctantly sleeps with a man, the power dynamic isn’t absolute. Graham leaves disempowered; Barbara authoritative. When he wakes the next morning, he asks where she slept and she says upstairs in her own bed: “now, if you have everything, I’ll say good-bye. I want to get to the theatre.” Lessing provocatively proposes this is a ‘failed’ rape; that the power Graham seeks is weakened by the indifference Barbara shows. 

Graham is indeed a pathetic character even if unlike George he isn’t an object of pathos. If ‘One Off the Short List’ is a troublesome story, one that could cause a furore given the Me Too movement and Zero Tolerance, ‘The Habit of Loving’ is deeper partly because it accesses both pathos and the pathetic. After a while, George marries a younger woman whose emotional needs he cannot comprehend and where his own have become pronounced. After all, he had never before the breakup with Myra seemed to suffer emotionally; his marriage to Bobby looks like an attempt to escape from it only to find the sense of loss exacerbated by Bobby’s often emotional indifference. “George tried to gather her in his arms, and she turned away from him, and her sleep was unsharable. George could not endure it.” A merely jaundiced account would have said this is George getting what he deserves after years of no doubt cavalier behaviour as the narrator speak of George’s “old rake’s heart”. His ex-wife also notes that he may not have known Myra when they were married but he knew “…Philippa and Georgina and Janet and lord knows who else.” In such moments he is potentially pathetic, and the narrator uses this very word when saying “he tailed off, being pathetic against all his knowledge of women.”

It comes after he says to his ex-wife “But we were happy. Well, I was happy…” Now in his new marriage he isn’t, but he also sees that Bobby isn’t happy either when she becomes aware of her age and the feelings she has for the younger Jackie, with whom she has been working in a double act theatre show. “George was thinking only that this girl, his darling, was suffering now what he had suffered, and he could not stand it. She had been going through this for how long now?” Lessing’s purpose seems not to lambast “maudlin notions of love” (The Opiate), as Genna Rivieccio claims, but to examine the intricacies of a feeling that however deep is inevitably transitory, and that passes through humans that are themselves creatures of time, and of the ageing process. There is a sadness here that is far from maudlin; a recognition of human frailty as feeling, and where the grave awaits us all. Perhaps, Lessing might say, the habit of living and loving is inextricably linked with the habit of dying. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Habit of Loving

A Sadness Beyond the Maudlin

Born in 1919, Doris Lessing seems both a very English writer (that first name) and an inexplicably international one that stretches far further than a surname invoking Slavic and Teutonic origins. Lessing was born in Persia (now of course Iran) and brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and moved to London at the end of the forties. By then she had left behind two children from her first marriage, and now had a further child and another divorce behind her. 

Lessing’s work is broad, even erratic, with science fiction (the Canopus in Argos series) competing with the vaguely futuristic (Memoirs of a Survivor), the feminist (The Golden Notebook) with exploring the politically radical (The Good Terrorist). There was also an abiding interest in Sufism. But if Lessing is a great modern writer it rests on her ability to explore the complications in contemporary relationships, the desires people possess and the difficulties they have matching them to others who have their own needs and yearnings. It is with such awareness so important a book as The Golden Notebook can come but, for our purposes, we will focus chiefly on a short story ‘The Habit of Loving’, which nevertheless contains many of Lessing’s preoccupations, and also a narrative force that can seem, from one perspective, undramatic, but from another devastatingly delineating.  

In ‘The Habit of Loving’, George is a 60yr-old London producer with a flat near the Marble Arch, an ex-wife, kids and, now, at the start of the story, a broken heart. Over the years, George has played the field, aware that he was a star on the pitch, but now he is not so young, and when he receives a letter from Myra saying she won’t be returning to Britain, he is in shock. She has been in Australia with her two children since 1943 but in the wake of the war he expected her return. Instead, she tells him that she likes Australia, doesn’t miss the English climate and, as Lessing’s narrator pointedly points out, no longer seems to miss George either. She flies over to London for a couple of weeks but it is over. “George’s eyes [unlike Myra’s], as he drove away from the airport, were dry. If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love which collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye.” 

As in many a Lessing story and novel, the writer both creates immense empathy and reserved judgement. Lessing isn’t a moralistic writer yet there is moral assertiveness nevertheless. One sees it in the sympathy she has for George’s predicament and her awareness that these are feelings most people go through and in circumstances far more difficult than those of the wealthy and comfortable George. This needn’t mean he doesn’t deserve sympathy for his broken heart but it does allow Lessing to show there is absurd self-pity in how he deals with his predicament. Early in the story, a year after the first letter from Myra (and shortly after a further rejection in print), he goes and visits his ex-wife. Molly married again after their divorce and she is now a widow, and George asks her to marry him once more, a moment that leaves her so startled, “she let the sugar-tongs drop and crack a saucer.” She asks what happened to Myra and after explaining it, the narrator says “…when he heard his voice saying this it sounded pathetic, and he was frightened, for he could not remember ever having to appeal to a woman. Except to Myra.” Molly says “you’re lonely George. Well, we’re none of us getting any younger”, as Molly tells him that she intends to marry a man younger than herself, a doctor at the hospital where she is on the Advisory Committee, and a progressive like her. She is fifty but doesn’t look it and he envies her life and her youthfulness, but is that love, and isn’t it ludicrous for George to try and remarry his ex after getting rejected by someone else? 

The story probably wouldn’t have worked ironically but it wouldn’t quite have worked either with irony’s complete absence. George is a pathetic figure in the twin sense: capable of inducing pathos but appearing lamentable too. Speaking of the years while Myra was initially in Australia and he was in London, while they were still together, however geographically far apart, the narrator notes that “during the four years since Myra had left, he had a number of affairs with young women round and about the theatre for he had been lonely. He had written quite frankly about these affairs, but she had never mentioned them in her letters.” He may, now that it is over, come to understand that the “…word heartache, meant that a person could carry a heart which ached around with him, day and night, for his case, months. Nearly a year now.” But what was Myra carrying around for four years in Australia as he openly told her about his affairs? Lessing is too good a writer to tell us he deserves what he gets, but that doesn’t mean the sympathy the narrator offers isn’t tempered by a perspective that we can’t avoid. Yet it’s the balance that counts. ”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 un-self-critical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.” (Guardian) 

Lessing of course became such an icon after The Golden Notebook in 1962, and in 2012 the Guardian asked various women writers what they thought of it. Diane Athill reckoned, “I loved her earlier writing about her life in Africa, which was relaxed and vivid, and which I recognised again when The Golden Notebook's story took it to Africa, but when it moved to London the style became clumsier. It tended to be assertive, and I agree with Montaigne that assertiveness provokes resistance.” Yet in numerous London stories like ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘To Room Nineteen’ and ‘One Off the Short List’, the stories are both assertive and tentative, dogmatic and pragmatic. In ‘To Room Nineteen’, Susan is a wealthy woman whose children have left home and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. After years of building up the perfect life in a large house, suddenly it seems very empty indeed, and she feels very empty too, eventually retreating to the room nineteen of the title, determined to find a little inner peace. Lessing doesn’t mock Susan' attempts even if one might wonder about the luxury of an emptiness that finds itself given actualised form in a house that is now far too big for her and her husband’s needs, and where someone tries to resolve the problem by taking a small room without sacrificing the luxury home. Susan is a sympathetic character who like George might be viewed dismissively from the outside but Lessing chooses to get inside her crisis without denying the irony that is viewable from a certain perspective, a perspective that must be entertained but mustn’t become paramount.

This gives to much of Lessing’s work an indeterminacy that could now be seen as problematic, especially perhaps in the context of the sexual politics she frequently explores. Margaret Drabble was full of praise when looking back on The Golden Notebook but also reckoned “throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing.” (Guardian) Such behaviour is both ironic and ambivalent, as if women were conforming in the small gestures thinking through how to escape from bigger problems. In turn, Lessing’s narrators offer such moments with a causticity the reader cannot deny but with an awareness of a reality that would probably see the women doing exactly that. What could be more ironic and at the same time problematic as a woman who is raped regarding the assault as no more than an inconvenience? In ‘One Off The Short List’, a failed-writer and radio journalist Graham, and a talented designer, Barbara, meet after he interviews her and, sharing a taxi home, he insists she invites him in. He pushes himself onto her and she accepts his overtures with reluctance but once in bed he cannot keep an erection. Rather than having him there all night, she reckons better to get him hard and get it over with. 

The story doesn’t turn out to be a horrific tale of rape, but a jaundiced account of sexual politics, sixties style (it was published in 1960), with Barbara, determined to get rid of him quickly rather than deny him pleasure altogether. He ends up staying the night anyway, and Lessing’s story shows that even in situations where a woman reluctantly sleeps with a man, the power dynamic isn’t absolute. Graham leaves disempowered; Barbara authoritative. When he wakes the next morning, he asks where she slept and she says upstairs in her own bed: “now, if you have everything, I’ll say good-bye. I want to get to the theatre.” Lessing provocatively proposes this is a ‘failed’ rape; that the power Graham seeks is weakened by the indifference Barbara shows. 

Graham is indeed a pathetic character even if unlike George he isn’t an object of pathos. If ‘One Off the Short List’ is a troublesome story, one that could cause a furore given the Me Too movement and Zero Tolerance, ‘The Habit of Loving’ is deeper partly because it accesses both pathos and the pathetic. After a while, George marries a younger woman whose emotional needs he cannot comprehend and where his own have become pronounced. After all, he had never before the breakup with Myra seemed to suffer emotionally; his marriage to Bobby looks like an attempt to escape from it only to find the sense of loss exacerbated by Bobby’s often emotional indifference. “George tried to gather her in his arms, and she turned away from him, and her sleep was unsharable. George could not endure it.” A merely jaundiced account would have said this is George getting what he deserves after years of no doubt cavalier behaviour as the narrator speak of George’s “old rake’s heart”. His ex-wife also notes that he may not have known Myra when they were married but he knew “…Philippa and Georgina and Janet and lord knows who else.” In such moments he is potentially pathetic, and the narrator uses this very word when saying “he tailed off, being pathetic against all his knowledge of women.”

It comes after he says to his ex-wife “But we were happy. Well, I was happy…” Now in his new marriage he isn’t, but he also sees that Bobby isn’t happy either when she becomes aware of her age and the feelings she has for the younger Jackie, with whom she has been working in a double act theatre show. “George was thinking only that this girl, his darling, was suffering now what he had suffered, and he could not stand it. She had been going through this for how long now?” Lessing’s purpose seems not to lambast “maudlin notions of love” (The Opiate), as Genna Rivieccio claims, but to examine the intricacies of a feeling that however deep is inevitably transitory, and that passes through humans that are themselves creatures of time, and of the ageing process. There is a sadness here that is far from maudlin; a recognition of human frailty as feeling, and where the grave awaits us all. Perhaps, Lessing might say, the habit of living and loving is inextricably linked with the habit of dying. 


© Tony McKibbin