DORIS LESSING
Under My Skin
You cannot sit down to write about yourself without rhetorical questions
of the most tedious kind demanding attention. Our old friend , the Truth,
is first . The truth ... how much of it to tell, how little? It seems it is
agreed this is the first problem of the self-chronicler, and obloquy lies in
wait either way.
Telling the truth about yourself is one thing, if you can, but what
about the other people? I may easily write about my life until the year I
left Southern Rhodesia in
1949,
because there are few people left who
can be hurt by what
I
say;
I
have had to leave out, or change - mostly a
name or two - very little . So Volume One is being written without snags
and blocks of conscience. But Volume Two, that is, from the time
I
reached London, will be a different matter, even if
I
follow the example
of Simone de Beauvoir who said that about some things she had no in–
tention of telling the truth. (Then why bother? - the reader must be ex–
pected to ask.)
I
have known not a few of the famous, and even one or
two of the great, but
I
do not believe it is the duty of friends, lovers,
comrades, to tell all. The older
I
get the more secrets I have, never to be
revealed and this,
I
know, is a common condition of people my age. And
why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
I
read history with conditional respect. I have been involved in a
small way with big events, and know how quickly accounts of them be–
come like a cracked mirror. I read some biographies with admiration for
people who have chosen to keep their mouths shut. It is, I have observed,
a rule that people who have been on the periphery of events or a life are
those to rush forward to claim first place: the people who do know often
say nothing or little. Some of the most noisy, not to say noisome, scandals
or affairs of our time, that have had a searchlight on them for years, are
reflected wrongly in the public mind because the actual participants keep
their counsel and watch, ironically, from the shadows. And there is an–
other thing, much harder to see. People who have been real movers and
exciters get left out of histories, and it is because memory itself decides to
reject them. These instigators are flamboyant , unscrupulous, hysterical, or
Editor's Note: This essay is excerpted
from
the book
Under
My
Skin
by Doris
Lessing, to be published in October by HarperCollins. Copyright
©
1994 by
Doris Lessing. Used by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers.
