PRIVATE LIVES

A DETAILED SECOND VOLUME OF DORIS LESSING'S MEMOIRS; AN ABSORBING CHILDHOOD MEMOIR BY J. M. COETZEE

Author: By T. Kai Norris Easton

Date: SUNDAY, October 26, 1997

Page: N1

Section: Books

In ``Under My Skin,'' Lessing brilliantly evoked her own childhood: first in Persia (present-day Iran), where she was born, and then in ``the bush'' of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), on her family's 1,000-acre farm. In its description of an African childhood and its achievement -- good compelling reading -- Lessing's first volume is a closer match to Coetzee's memoir than its sequel is.

``Walking in the Shade'' charts Lessing's arrival by ship at the Docklands of London in 1949, bearing her 2 1/2-year-old son, Peter, and the manuscript of her first novel, ``The Grass Is Singing'' -- which became an immediate literary success. Not yet 30, Lessing leaves behind two marriages, two other children, and a difficult relationship with her mother in ``that dreadful provincial country Southern Rhodesia.''

With chapters named after the various London streets where Lessing lived and wrote, this second volume takes us up to 1962, with the publication of her best-known work, ``The Golden Notebook.'' Her writing career, her British communist years, and her love affairs form the basis of the book, the bulk of which is given over to politics, and Lessing's need to know why she and ``everyone'' who was a communist in those days had such great expectations. Was it a kind of mass hysteria, this idealism? ``And their packs infest the age,'' she writes, taking a line from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. She now considers joining the Communist Party ``the most neurotic act'' of her life, for she had never been fully committed, despite years of active involvement. As she writes, ``My `doubts' . . . have to be recorded here, though they were then so uneasy and so unsure of themselves.''

Lessing's remarkable memory and her knack for vivid description result in a fascinating portrait of postwar London and the Zeitgeist that characterized the ``poisonous miasma'' of the Cold War, but ``Walking in the Shade'' does not boast the accomplished writing so much in evidence in ``Under My Skin,'' suffering most from unwieldiness and an excess of detail. As if foreseeing this, she writes, ``I have far too much material for this second volume. . . . At once, problems, literary problems.''

The difficulty for Lessing -- and here the reader will find traces of ``The Golden Notebook'' -- is that if she is to write truthfully about those years, how does she compress them into one neat little package, one fluid narrative? She admits, ``So far this has mostly been a record of outward events: trips, meetings, the Writers' Group, politics -- and so it will go on. A scaffolding, a framework, into which fits the interior life. . . . Impossible to describe a writer's life, for the real part of it cannot be written down.''

What she does write down about her writing life makes up some of the most interesting bits of the book. She describes her work pattern: intense concentration while wandering about the room, tidying up, with feverish stints at the typewriter and short concentrated sleeps in between. At night, her restlessness takes her out into London's streets, where she walks sometimes for hours -- never fearing for her safety, she says, as women do nowadays.

Lessing frequently adopts the tone of the wise older woman. She also has a tendency to make sweeping statements, such as the following: ``I am sure there is not one woman writer, ever, at any time in the world's history, who has not heard these words from her man.'' (The words are: ``You don't love me; you only care about your writing.'') But Lessing has no time for political correctness or for her critics. Indeed, she is writing this lengthy autobiography in self-defense against her biographers. It is a shame that Lessing's enormous writing talent isn't sharper here; her own chronicles of her life should surely be more interesting than theirs.

J. M. Coetzee's ``Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life'' is a tremendously readable and powerful memoir about his childhood in the Western Cape. Telling his story with a purposeful detachment -- in third-person narration, from the perspective of his earlier self as a 10-year-old boy -- he crafts a selection of tales from school, the boy scouts, and family life. His childhood in the Cape Town suburb of Worcester and, later, in Cape Town itself is spent in a state of gloom. The voice is that of a fearful boy who is at once ``Prince'' of the house, rebelling against and without respect for his father, protected and promoted by his mother, and who at school is an excellent student -- and a nervously quiet one: What if the other boys should find out he has never been caned in his life? He is tormented by this secret, as he is by all of his secrets: his attachment to England, his support for the Russians.

This is a remarkable work in many ways, not least for its candid vulnerability: It tells of the awkwardness and seriousness of Coetzee's childhood, without a hint of false nostalgia. This is not to say that the gloom never lifts: The boy is happiest when reading, especially adventure stories of ``The Swiss Family Robinson'' kind, or when riding his bicycle or playing cricket. Though he is his ``mother's son'' and feels uneasy in male Afrikanerdom, he loves more than anything Voelfontein (``Bird-fountain''), the paternal family farm in the Karoo: ``He loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass, loves the birds that give it its name.''

The chapter on the farm must be singled out: It is a triumph of storytelling. Coetzee's prose magically evokes the pastoral beauty of the farm, while his unusually perceptive boyhood self ponders his sense of belonging in the landscape. Despite the colonial history he's been taught, he knows that the Coetzees are not its first inhabitants. In the end, he can go only so far: ``I belong to the farm,'' he says to himself, stopping short of the impossible ``The farm belongs to me.''

``Boyhood'' is a masterfully told, spare, and accessible memoir, and an unexpected companion to Coetzee's intellectual autobiography, ``Doubling the Point'' (1992), a collection of his essays and interviews with David Attwell.