Authors: Lynne Segal
The nature of the loss and regret Lessing experienced approaching middle age is consistent in her memoirs and fiction, with narcissistic wounds very much to the fore. Persuasively, Lessing suggests that, at least for her, it is not so much the end
of any specific attachments but rather the loss of her own former self that provides the key to the sorrows of ageing. Somewhat unusually, she says that when young she was always confident about her own physical attractiveness and its magnetic effect on the men she encountered: ‘I used to stand among people, knowing that my body was strong and fine, under my dress, and secretly exalt, or look at a naked arm, or my hair in the mirror, and thrill with pleasure.’
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Again in her memoirs Lessing depicts her own youthful arrogance, even cruelty, towards others who desired her, up until her late thirties. It is a cruelty she attributes to young women generally in her writing. However, her own most passionate attachments, we learn, were to men who always made it clear that they were promiscuous seducers, who would never love her alone. It is the abandonment by two such lovers, one after the other, first by the Jewish psychiatrist she calls ‘Jack’, then, after a three-year relationship, by the American writer Clancy Sigal, which Lessing says caused her to have a breakdown. For several months, aged thirty-nine, she became alcoholic, suffering what is probably, she says, the ‘clinical condition’ of many another discarded middle-aged woman: ‘who slides into drinking, feeling abandoned, unloved, unwanted’.
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Revisiting her young self, Lessing later reflects upon the particular forms of gratification she found in those earlier attachments, as with her former lover ‘Jack’: ‘what I loved was his loving me so much’.
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Consistently, it is the loss of self-love that she emphasizes in describing her own ageing miseries. She is mourning the disappearance of her young self, and the pain she experiences from witnessing what she sees as the self-absorbed aggression of so many of the young women she encounters – which she almost admits is a form of projection. However, if there seems a surprising degree of narcissism in
Lessing’s description of her younger self, the nature of narcissism is itself always ambiguous. The longing for love, in its most romantic sense, is never unrelated to some form of narcissism. In his essay ‘On Narcissism’, Freud argued that the ego or self is formed through the narcissistic experience of being the loved object of another, creating a form of ‘primary narcissism’ that later ‘gives rise to a vigorous attempt to recover that state’. This, he continued, is why falling in love always includes aspects of narcissism: ‘To be their own ideal once more, in regard to sexual no less than other trends, as they were in childhood – this is what people strive to attain as their happiness … Being in love consists in the flowing over of ego-libido onto the object.’
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In Freud’s view, it is when our sense of self-worth, the fundamental narcissistic satisfaction that is sustained by the ongoing love of another, encounters frequent obstacles that a person begins to invent forms of ‘secondary narcissism’, falling back on attempts to love only what we once were, or what we imagine that we might have been, but no longer are. Lessing narrates her life-story as though she is presenting a case study of this form of secondary narcissism, with her insistence on loving what she once was – she loves herself, but only in so far as she is the object of desire for another. A further comment Freud made in his essay, suggestive of the perils of love at whatever age, is that ‘another person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love’.
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Again, this could help explain why certain people are more likely to fall in love with the young, the beautiful and the self-absorbed, that is, those least likely to be able to sustain any reciprocity in mutual attachments.
One thing that is certainly evident in Lessing’s
autobiographical writing, as in descriptions of the male lovers in her fiction, is that she offers little that is especially positive in her account of the men who become objects of desire. Moreover, just as she sometimes mentions her own guilt over the men she once teased or rejected, in all her writing Lessing identifies with, and yet also reproaches, what she sees as the cruelty of young women who remind her of her youthful self. It is they who are responsible for the pain that devastates older women. In her first formal memoir, she reflects upon an encounter she has as an older woman with a ‘pretty girl of twenty’ in a changing room, whom she describes as provocatively displaying the back of her beautiful body for Lessing’s inspection: ‘Deliberately, she allowed the towel around her to fall, displaying a beautiful back. She half-turned … so that I could see her breasts … She smiled at me, cool, triumphant, and went out. Pain was slicing through me for what I had lost. And, too, because I knew that I had been every bit as arrogant and cruel as that girl.’
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Older women, she often comments with weary resignation – in her memoirs as in her fiction – lose men of their own age to younger women, because such men are the inevitable prey of these younger women. Meanwhile, mature men are programmed by their own nature to respond to these predatory girls, whether they really want to or not. Further absolving men, while keeping a baleful eye on young women, Lessing adds a further Freudian flounce to her dour Darwinian dogma, commenting that men have had to ‘fight so hard to free themselves from their mothers, but then circumstances and their natures make their wives into mothers, and they free themselves again’.
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It is a pitiful unfairness she sees as biologically rather than culturally encoded.
Back to basics, for Lessing, means always returning to the
narcissistic injuries of ageing. This is perhaps most explicit in the crafting of her novel,
Love, Again
, which, like her memoirs, she wrote in her late seventies. It is here that Lessing fully explores what she sees as the full force of the disaster shadowing the eruption of sexual longings in any woman on the brink of joining what Lessing elsewhere refers to as ‘old hags’ in their chairs.
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A complex and troubling text, its protagonist, Sarah Durham, is an energetic and successful theatre producer in her sixties who was widowed decades earlier. At the novel’s opening we see her cheerfully industrious, announcing that having been an attractive young woman, who once ‘always had people in love with her’, she had experienced the anguish of love all too often and was now thankfully done with all that: ‘ “Thank God it can never happen to me again. I tell you, getting old has its compensations” ’ (39). We know what to expect. Soon enough, Sarah has lost all her carefully nurtured serenity, with old passions rekindled when, during the theatrical production of an exceptionally poignant, tragically romantic musical, she finds herself falling in love again, though never wanting to. In quick succession she is emotionally undone by her desire for first one young man, then another, after each of them had seemed to respond to her own ageing charm and wisdom.
The novel thus creates a platform for Lessing to share her views on the near catastrophe attending any upsurge of sexual desire in an ageing woman: she is forced to remember and relive her past loves, taking her right back to the first losses and emotional deprivations of childhood. Again, however, Lessing is most evocative when describing the tragedy of thwarted narcissism she sees accompanying falling in love in old age: ‘One falls in love with one’s own young self – yes, that was likely: narcissists, all of us, mirror people … it can have nothing to do with
any biological function or need’ (104). In the novel, the unexpected and violent need Sarah has for these men’s attentions soon has her experiencing corrosive shame, dread, humiliation and guilt, despite and because of the ways in which it also rejuvenates and energizes her. She feels she is ‘ridiculous’, but above all, she is destroyed by her searing jealousy of the young women she sees as her competitors: ‘She was poisoned … Certainly she was ill … She felt in fact that she was dying’ (133). As Lessing takes pains to clarify, Sarah had fallen in love with the pride, arrogance and cruelty of her younger desiring self, which she sees reflected in the young man she has fallen for, who has brought her former self back to life. Wallowing in, yet knowing the painful futility of such projected identification, Lessing keeps illustrating the ways in which this sudden eruption of burning passion is a reliving of her own youth and
amour propre
, the desire to avoid old age, to close the gap between the body she had been living in apparently ‘comfortably enough’, as she has aged, but which had always, at the same time, ‘seemed accompanied by another, her young body, shaped in a kind of ectoplasm’ (94). Seemingly, it is against her conscious wishes that Sarah falls in love, triggered by these two men’s unexpected interest in her, making her yearn again for the existence of that desirable woman she once knew she had been and making her feel ‘like a miserable old ghost at a feast’ (137).
Avoiding sexual passion therefore seems essential to Lessing if the ageing woman is not to experience ‘atrocious suffering’: ‘I simply can’t wait to go back to my cool elderly self, all passion spent’ (180). However, as Lessing also realizes, so long as it is at least conceivable that an ageing woman might once again feel or imagine herself to be noticed and appreciated by another, however fleetingly, she surely risks the reigniting of
passion. Indeed, Lessing suggests in this novel: ‘old women by the thousand – probably by the million – are in love and keep quiet about it. They have to.… A secret hell populated by the ghosts of old loves, former personalities’ (171). The problem, Lessing notes, echoing Beauvoir, is our sense that we have some unchanging inner core, making us never able to feel simply the age we are.
In
Love, Again
, for instance, Sarah keeps returning to the mirror, forcing herself to absorb the age she really is,
because the person who is doing the looking feels herself to be exactly the same (when away from the glass) as she was at twenty, thirty, forty … the same as the girl and young woman who looked into the glass and counted her attractions. She has to insist that this is so, this is the truth, not what I remember, this is what I am seeing, this is what I am. This. This. (236)
In Lacan’s account of the infant’s mirror phase, it is one’s reflected image that forms the basis for establishing any sense of a unitary self. However, inverting this formula, in later life it can seem that it is the mirror that lies to us, obscuring the true self, which seems to exist somewhere within. I am reminded here of a recent witticism about old age from the British writer Will Self: ‘in modern western societies, “acting our age” is something that requires an enormous suspension of disbelief’.
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There is, however, another feature of Lessing’s writing that makes desire so impossible for an ageing woman such as herself, and it is that the body she wants to embrace is, specifically, a young person’s body. Sarah, for instance, mourns: ‘I shall never again hold a young man’s body in my arms. Never. And it seemed to her the most terrible sentence Time could
deal her’ (260). Why the emphasis on youth? Because it is only youth that can gratify the narcissistic identification. Interviewed by the Irish scholar Billy Gray, at eighty-four, a decade after writing
Love, Again
, Lessing is still wondering why people fall in love at all. However, by this time she has joined those older women claiming she is ‘happy to be invisible’, feels ‘much more free’ and able to talk to men without any presumption that you desire them: ‘I mean it’s a great deprivation to cease to be a sexual being but not as bad as you think it is because … by then it’s only a deprivation if you happen to be in love which thank God has only happened to me once … a total disaster I can tell you!’
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I detect some tension between becoming happily ‘invisible’ and the presumption that men will still notice and freely talk to her – not altogether invisible then, though perhaps invisible
as a woman
.
Nevertheless, I too can see that if and when women do genuinely start to feel ‘invisible’, we are safely, indeed definitively, spared the dangers of imagining ourselves the object of another’s desire, however briefly. When Gray presses Lessing on issues of ageing and sexuality she finally says: ‘But what I really mean is … quite simply, if you have been young and beautiful, the idea aged fifty, of going to bed with someone, is too much of a blow to your pride.’
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Lessing can feel no joy in any man actually seeing her ageing body, and here she is referring to a firm, attractive, middle-aged female body. What she loves, and has always loved, was her sense of being young and beautiful. Early on in her memoirs, Lessing also mentions the pathos of ageing women displaying old photos of their youthful selves for visitors to survey, suggesting that what they are secretly saying is: ‘Don’t imagine for one moment that I am this old hag you see here, in this chair, not a bit of it,
that
is what I am really like.’
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Lessing thus shares the passion of men such as Philip Roth, though she must
be
, rather than
have
, that young and beautiful object, or as the Lacanians would say, she must be the thing that promises men phallic completion. Hence the sense of aggression, even cruelty, she always attributes to young women.
Lessing’s personal escape from these narcissistic wounds came from her embrace of the spiritual guidance of Idries Shah, whose Sufi teaching helped her, she said, to move away from individual cravings, towards a transcendental, mystical domain.
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However, other women, who claim never to have had the assertive self-confidence about their own youthful beauty that Lessing recalls, nevertheless suggest that it may well be a type of failed narcissism that has diminished, if not removed, their interest in sex in old age. In her thoughtful memoir written in her mid-seventies, Jane Miller reflects: ‘I wonder whether desire for things and people, covetousness, longings, are all aspects of narcissism … all feelings in some way related to pleasure in one’s self.’ Nowadays, Miller continues, feeling no pleasure in her own body, it is impossible to find enjoyment in the thought of others’ desiring it, however unlikely they might be to do so. Although she knows there are women her age who would disagree, she adds: ‘It can’t be a coincidence that one should be stripped of desire and being desirable and desired more or less in one fell swoop.’ She does admit that although it makes for a more peaceful life, sustaining one’s pride from the turmoil of rejection, jealousy and more, it also ‘feels like an absence … perhaps even a loss: though perhaps not a loss of any greater significance than the loss of a front tooth’.
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The loss of that front tooth, clearly, is first and foremost, a blow to one’s sense of self. However, I wonder if Miller’s equanimity over the abandonment of sexual desire is not related to her
being still, as she writes, happily married for over forty years to a man of significant eminence – the writer and critic Karl Miller.