You, Me, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark: Week Two
(pages 78-149)
Welcome back! Thanks to all who joined in on the conversation last week. I hope everyone is enjoying the reading. I’ve been having a great time with it. I’m reading it for the second time, but it keeps surprising me. I remembered the broad strokes, but not much of the detail, so it’s been a real pleasure to reread and discover it again.
This new section brings us to Spain, which, given that the book was published in 1973, would have still been under Franco’s dictatorship. As I read, I waited to see if that aspect of the setting would be addressed, or if Spain itself here would be as the Spaniards are said to be when she first arrives: “extras and bit players on their own coasts.” With this, we see, as always in Lessing, her awareness of class and inequity. That’s something I love about her work: her characters never live in some magical realm where socioeconomic factors don’t exist. While still in Istanbul, Kate acknowledges the “incredulity...mixed with only just-controlled resentment” of Ahmed when she gives him some of her dresses for his wife. Lessing writes, “...she saw how much tact and self-control had gone into Ahmed’s working with her for the past month.” As so with the Spanish waiters and the locals around her, relegated to being background and setting for tourists.
Lessing doesn’t look away from issues of class and privilege and the ridiculousness of the middle-class tourist: “In a moment they, Jeffrey and she, would be outbidding each other in that most common of middle-class verbal games: which of them had acquired more grace by being close to other people’s sufferings.”
But I shouldn’t have doubted Lessing on politics in regard to the dictatorship either. She never, ever forgets the political waters that her characters are moving through. She acknowledges the morality laws that loosened toward the end of Franco’s life allowing bikinis on the beaches and even unmarried couples taking hotel rooms together, under the pressure/lure of the money that tourism brought and that Spain was coming to depend on, depends upon still. She goes further in acknowledging the dictatorship, referring to Spain as “...this country whose own standards were still strict—men still owning women’s sexuality.” The bikini-clad tourist might be tolerated, but the women of Spain were not free. We should remember that this was true as Lessing was writing it. This book came out in 1973, and Franco’s dictatorship didn’t end until his death in 1975.
Okay, but politics aside, we find Kate here in Spain, having left her role of mother at home in London and her role of mother at the Global Foods conference in Istanbul, only to be trapped in the role of mother even with her younger lover. She feels maternal toward him wants to comfort him like a mother. She can’t help it, can’t escape it. This feeling rises up in her even before she knows that he is sick. When she first notices he’s unwell, she mostly feels relieved of her obligation to act as a lover. She’s there with him, but she isn’t really engaging with the whole affair. She seems to be at a remove from it, as if watching herself as “a woman” performing the role of older woman having a fling with a younger man.
We learn that Kate had a moment of awakening three years earlier, when Tim, age 16, told her she was suffocating him. The identity that had surrounded her and defined her all of these years was now doing harm to her youngest child, stifling him. Now, without her family around her, in Spain, a lover she doesn’t really want sick in bed, she starts to really confront it. I get the sense that this is the work of the novel, this is the central conflict—Kate finally facing what began to stir that night at dinner three years earlier.
Following along as Kate traveled on the endless bus journey with the delirious Jeffrey, I was screaming in my head for her to leave him, to turn and get on a bus headed toward Madrid (because I keep my heart under a cobblestone there, and I always think the answer is to go to Madrid) and have the time alone that she clearly needs. I always want characters to be sensible and solve their problems much sooner than a well-paced plot would allow. The bad choices they have to make to feed the demands of narrative are torture to me. I wanted her to go under her own power, strong and healthy and choosing to go, rather than fleeing in a feverish blur, but that wouldn’t have made for much of a novel...
(Yes, my own characters do make terrible choices that make readers scream at them and me. Guilty.)
At least at first, Kate basically says that Jeffrey’s illness isn’t a virus or bacteria, but a sort of moral failing. If he truly had to work to survive, he would not be ill. He was suffering an illness of the spirit. A “spiritual crisis,” she calls it. This is classic Lessing, something I have to admit irritates me a bit when it crops up in her novels. People just get sick sometimes, Doris. It’s a thing that bodies do. Jeffrey’s inability to choose a path in life is a whole separate issue. Maybe it’s because she thinks it’s all in his spirit or head that Kate doesn’t worry about catching whatever it is that Jeffrey’s got (though of course she does catch it). But neither do Señor Martinez or the truck driver who brings Jeffrey to the convent, or the nuns. (Is that how we were before the pandemic? Did we just not worry that much around sick people? That can’t be right, but who can remember now...)
On page 140, Lessing writes: “While her body, her needs, her emotions—all of herself—had been turning like a sunflower after one man, all that time she had been holding in her hands something else, the something precious, offering it in vain to her husband, to her children, to everyone she knew—but it had never been taken, had not been noticed. But this thing she had offered, without knowing she was doing it, which had been ignored by herself and by everyone else, was what was real in her.” Oof. That one hurts. What was real in her had no place in her life as wife and mother. What was real in her was ignored—completely unrecognized—by her family and even by herself. As I read this, I suspect that Kate doesn’t yet know what that thing that is real in her is. She can’t yet put her finger on it. This is the work she’s here to do. Her longing for her husband, for sex with her husband, is actually a desire to run backwards into the trap of a life without the real Kate.
And throughout, that mysterious seal. On page 145: “She knew that walking into the winter that lay in front of her she was carrying her life as well as the seal’s...” So the seal dreams are part of the work that Kate has to do. The seal is, perhaps, the real Kate whose been nearly erased by Kate the mother. What do you think?
Okay. Back in London. Sick as hell. Onward. Let’s see which Kate comes out the other side of this.
Let’s discuss in the comments!
As a reminder, here is our remaining reading and discussion schedule:
6/20: pp149-206 (The Hotel through “twitching like a puppet to those strings...”
6/27: pp206-273 (“Next day Maureen...” to end)