Retreat to Innocence

by Doris Lessing

Novel.

334 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Doris Lessing was born into a colonial family. both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and later had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(Extracted from the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995. Full text available on www.dorislessing.org).

Reviews

[A S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poor start, but got better towards the end.

[Judy · Rating 1 out of 5]

It could be that 1956 was just cursed. It took me forever to read the list of books for this year and hardly any of them excited or impressed me. Retreat to Innocence lacks the power of Doris Lessing's first two novels.

Set in London rather than South Africa, it tells the story of an affair between Julia, a young woman who is bored with her life, and Jan Brod, who is a writer, a Jew, a communist and an expatriate of Czechoslovakia. Julia, feeling unloved by her current boyfriend Roger, had taken to frequenting a coffeehouse where Jan Brod hung out. She rather throws herself at Brod and ends up becoming his lover, though he is much older and doesn't love her anymore than Roger does.

So the summer moves slowly along as does the story. Julia has very little understanding of herself, life around her, or Brod. The whole affair is doomed. In the way of spoiled young women, she comes to the end of the affair unchanged though she has been exposed to new ideas and realities.

I finished the book unsure of Lessing's point. Was she trying to show the shallowness of British people or the double standards of British immigration policies or the sad failures of communist idealism or what? Lessing has done all she could in later years to suppress the book, claiming that it is too sentimental. In fact, I had a hard time finding it. Perhaps someday when I read her autobiographies, I'll find out why she wrote and published it at all.