The Summer Before the Dark

Lessing here writes about transitions, about identity, about women and how they are together, with men and how they are seen. I would be surprised if any woman, certainly over the age of 35 or so, does not read this with some recognition. Kate, married, mother, educated and enlightened, ends up on a spiritual and physical journey at what feels like a turning point. She meets younger men and women; sloughs off her skin and puts it on again, and essentially goes through the quest which will take her to a different phase of life - from dependency to self possession, from home to home.

Doris Lessing is a writing machine and queen of all genres. The list of other works contained in my Vintage paperback spans two pages and includes not only novels, but short stories, drama, poetry and non-fiction. As this is my first experience with her writing, I can’t comment on much, but this book is definitely a force. It has palpable heft and a weightiness that I haven’t often experienced with women writers. At its core it is a feminist piece with more than a few easily recognizable themes and characters fashioned specifically to illustrate certain ideas, situations and social norms. Don’t let that put you off though, the writing is startling and, at least to me, innovative. I will definitely be reading more of her work.

Here show more are some of my notes -
I think Lessing might have invented the Cougar.

So many layers to Kate’s personality and past, skillfully revealed.

Terrific insight into the interior of a marriage and (extra-marital) affairs.
p. 98 - Now she admits the kids were right to call themselves monsters. She had to come to it by shedding her mother persona.
What does the seal dream represent? Could be so many things. Her lost/inner self. Her kids. Her need to mother things.

Jeffrey = trying

p. 17x - The theater scene is really interesting. The culmination of her madness? Her sanity? Her breakthrough? Her illness burns away her old, complacent self. The one that existed for others. Judgmental Kate.

And where are her things? Earlier she gave away the dresses she bought for her job, now everything seems to be gone. Physical baggage = mental baggage. She rids herself of Jeffrey, too. Relief.

Yet another stand-in for her children to mother. Maureen.

p. 204 Attention makes her feel like herself again. Not the care of the sick attention, but sexual attention. Attraction. She’s aware of her visibility v. invisibility and though she acknowledges it and is appalled by it, she can’t help courting it. She can’t escape the box of physicality she associates with her true self.

p. 102 - “Nothing in the homage her grandfather paid womanhood, or in the way her mother had treated her, had prepared her for what she was going to have to learn, and soon.” - basically a life of self-effacement and sacrifice to her children, husband and home. Lessing calls it self-abnegation.

p. 202 - (responding to Maureen’s asking if she’ll watch the flat for a few days while she goes off) “No.” With an effort, Kate stopped herself from saying, “But if you want me to, of course I will.” She said, “You see, it’s not often that I get the chance to be absolutely free, and not have to do things, look after things. I don’t know when I shall have it again.”
“How long?”
“What?”
“Since you had it, since you were free?”
“This is the first time in my whole life that I’ve had it.”

After she makes peace with herself, she goes back to her family, but I think something is permanently free inside Kate. Her mind, her spirit, her true identity. Those things will soar forever. show less

Great book!
The protagonist is extremely concerned with her image:
"A woman dressed suitably for a family afternoon walked back across the lawn, but with care so that the grass did not Mark her shoes. Her own choice would have been to go barefooted, to discard her stockings, and to wear something like a moo moo or a sari or a sarong -- of that sort that with her hair straight to her shoulders."

She gets a job for part of the summer, being a portuguese translator for an organization called The food group, which ostensibly helps growers in different countries to know which crops are needed and where. But, she admits to herself:
"nonsense, it was all nonsense; this whole damned outfit, with its committees, it's conferences, it's eternal talk, show more talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few 100 men and women incredible sums of money."

I don't know why she's married. She has a husband who has a chronic cheating problem. I suppose it's because she has four children that she thinks cannot do without her. Though she's such a helicopter mom, she's made the youngest, a boy, into a neurotic spoiled brat.
"There was the crisis when Michael had fallen tormentedly in love with a younger colleague at the hospital. By then the marriage had accommodated very many strains and surprises. It was 10 years old; the children were born. This affair had been so shattering to the emotions of Michael and Kate, if not to their intelligences, which were quite easily understanding everything that was happening, that it was not repeated. Or rather, not in that form. Later she had understood - he had allowed her to understand - that he was having, occasionally and discreetly, and with every care for her, the wife's, dignity, affairs with young women who would not be hurt by them: affairs of the kind that blossomed among the delegates and the machinery of conferences in the great Organizations of the world. She had accepted it, and with not more than a tolerable pain. The pain was more what some part of her which she felt she ought not to approve of believed was owed to the situation.... But for the rest - the Truth was, she had lost respect for her husband. Why, when he was doing no more than 'everyone' did, men in his situation? But she was feeling about him, had felt for some time, rather as if he had a weakness for eating sweets and would not restrain it. He was diminished; there was no doubt about that."
That's what I'm talking about; that men have a weakness, and they don't restrain it, because from the time they are little boys, they've been told, over and over and over, and heard, over and over and over: boys will be boys!

Working with this organization gives Kate perspective. As any woman who constantly is bombarded with the faces of her younger colleagues (images from social media, and every other media), Kate is faced with the unrealistic expectations for her looks, as she ages:
"... It seemed as if the street was filled suddenly with young women, unmarried girls, or girls with babies, and they all of them moved - yes, that was where you could see it, and how they moved - with the calm, casual, swinging grace, freedom. It was confidence. It was everything that she, Kate, had lost in excess of self-consciousness, in awareness of the consequences of what she did.
Then, having most conscientiously absorbed the truth of these young women - it was painful, the contrasting of herself with them - she looked at the movements, at the faces, of her contemporaries. 20 years was the difference, that was all it needed, to set these brave faces into caution, and suspicion. Or, they had a foolish good nature, the victim's good nature, an awful defenseless niceness - like the weak laugh that sounds as if it is going to ebb into tears. They moved as if their limbs had slowed because they were afraid of being trapped by something, afraid of knocking into something; they moved as if surrounded by invisible enemies."

After her job is finished for the summer, she goes with a man who is about 14 years younger than her, to Spain. It's something she does impulsively, because she has decided, why not?
When they first get there, they come to the coast, and because it's August, it's blasted with crowds. Vacationers. Especially young people.
Jeffrey, for that is his name, and she are both presented with the difference in their age, and the crowd of wild Young creatures, throwing themselves with abandonment to their enjoyment.
He keeps insisting that he knows a village, inland, where they can see the real Spain, and enjoy themselves. But they are extremely disappointed. For one thing, they can't enjoy themselves, because they stand out like a bruised thumb, with their glaring adulterous relationship, in this little village where it is so stricken with poverty, and everybody works hard to earn the few pesetas they can get from what they can grow in the earth. and because it's so hot and dusty, that all you can do is sweat and suffer.
The young man comes down with some kind of sickness, that knocks him flat off his feet.
"Yet of course Jeffrey was ill, really ill, even if, had he been a Spanish laborer or a small Farmer for whom a day's work was the difference between eating and not eating, he would not have been ill at all. Not, of course, that she grudged it to him! She did not, even if she could not help wishing that he could have gone home to the States to enjoy the spiritual crisis. Which of course it was... As for her, she was muttering to herself, ribald, being out of sight of señor martinez [the proprietor of the hotel], she was here for physical reasons. That was what she had contracted for - the body, the pleasures of the flesh; wishing there was someone with whom she could share the joke, she's sponged Jeffrey's forehead and lifted him to drink."

Kate finally leaves Jeffrey to a doctor, and then he is shipped off to his relatives. She falls ill from the same thing Jeffrey had, and barely makes her way home to London. There, she checks into a fancy hotel, that will give her the full service she needs so she can get over her illness, ask her house is rented out to another family till the end of august. One night when she's finally getting back on her feet, she goes out to the theater. Something with her illness has changed her, turned her into someone that sees others with new eyes:
"She looked at the people around her, knowing that it was with a cocky aggressive sideways cast of her eye, as if expecting them to hiss back at her, 'don't stare!' But look at them, all these tourists, just as she herself had been till a week or so ago, with their good clothes, and their solid flesh, and their grooming, their carefully arranged faces in their hair -- good lord, look at the heads around her, there were parts of the world where a family could be kept alive for 50 pence a week. Some heads here would keep a dozen families alive for months. This was a ridiculous way of thinking, because it was no more than what people have been thinking for the last 200 years. The French Revolution. 2,000 years. Christianity. Probably thousands of years longer than that, if one only knew it. For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not. the old woman next to her was a fat old thing with dead white hair carefully puffed and curled to hide a shining pink scalp. Her carcass, with its diamonds and its furs would feed hundreds of families for years and years. As people had probably never stopped thinking. But what a remarkable thing it was, this room full of people, animals rather, all looking one direction, at other dressed up animals lifted up to perform on a stage, animals covered with cloth and bits of fur, ornamented with stones, their faces and claws painted with color. Everyone had just finished eating animal of some kind; and The furs that were everywhere, despite the warm evening, were from animals that had lived and played and fornicated in forests and fields, and everyone's foot covering was of animal skin, and their hair - no one had to come back to this again, it was impossible not to -- their hair was the worst: Mats and caps and manes and wigs of hair, crimped and curled and flattered and lengthened and shortened and manipulated, hair dyed all colors, and scented and greased and lacquered. It was a room full of animals, dogs and cats and wolves and foxes that had gone on their hind legs and put ribbons on themselves and brushed their fur. This was a thought even more useless if possible. There had been a caricaturist, hadn't there, who drew people as animals, so what was the point of thinking like this, he hadn't achieved anything by it, for it all went on and on."
I think I love this author, she thinks so much like me.

When she's well enough, she goes out looking at shops. On the bulletin board in a grocery, she sees a notice for a room to let, nearby.
In this flat a basement apartment, lives a girl called Maureen, a young woman who comes from a family with money, a spoiled, petulant girl. This girl wears an outfit for half a day, then changes it for another, where she indulges a whole other mood.
It reminds me of my younger daughter, when she was younger. She would always be changing her clothes. I don't remember if I was like this.
Kate tries an experiment because she notices that men at a construction site are behaving a certain way:
"down the street a corner block was being lifted to the sky in tall flats. The bottom part of this building was complete: it fitted exactly into its allotted area, with no space left over. For five or so floors it was as it would go on, save that the windows had scrolls of chalk on them. Then began disorder: it was as if the building at that point had been broken off. High in the air men walked on planks, dangled buckets, wielded trowels, manipulated cranes. Men were working, too, at ground level, preparing what was to be hoisted aloft. Kate realized that she was standing still, staring; had been for some minutes. The men took no notice of her.
The fact that they didn't suddenly made her angry. She walked away out of sight, and there, took off her jacket - Maureen's, -- showing her fitting dark dress. She tied her hair dramatically with a scarf. Then she strolled back in front of the workmen, hips conscious of themselves. A storm of whistles, calls, invitations. Out of sight the other way, she made her small transformation and walked back again: the men glanced at her, did not see her. She was trembling with rage: it was a rage, it seemed to her, that she had been suppressing for a lifetime. And it was a front for worse, a misery that she did not want to answer, for it was saying again and again: this is what you have been doing for years and years and years."

This book touched me, and i suppose it's because I'm an aging woman. I have recently become conscious of wrinkles around my mouth and my "turkey neck." I'm furious with myself for caring about this, so this book came at a good time for me.
I'm fascinated with the way this author takes the protagonist through transformations. I wonder if the title refers to the fact that, when she returns to her family, she'll never be the same again, and will enter into (another) a period of dark. show less

http://wineandabook.com/2014/04/15/review-the-summer-before-the-dark-by-doris-le...

GENERAL SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve never read The Summer Before the Dark, and would like to discover it with no previous knowledge of the plot, I suggest you stop here. Since it was published in 1973, and because Lessing is a NOBEL PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR, I’m writing with the assumption that I’m the one late to the party (which is usually the case) and many of you lovers of literary fiction have probably either read it already or are super familiar with the plot. So, if not, stop. Now. You’ve been warned.

“All those years were now seeming like a betrayal of what she really was. While her body, her needs, her emotions–all of herself–had been show more 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.” (page 140)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I couldn’t help but call to mind Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) (which I’m coincidentally currently rereading) as I read Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark. Though Lessing’s piece takes place in the 1960s, she’s covering familiar territory: Lessing’s heroine Kate Brown has reached a point in her life where she has the chance to figure out who she is, outside of her roles of dutiful wife and nurturing mother. What’s powerful about Lessing’s work is how Kate’s feelings of superfluousness drive the narrative. Kate has done what she’s supposed to: she supported her husband by raising their children, running their home and entertaining their guests. Now her children are grown and her husband is abroad; no one needs her anymore. There is nothing she is supposed to be doing. At a time where she has the unique opportunity to reassert herself and explore her own passions and interests beyond the expectations of others, it becomes clear she doesn’t remember how. As a result, even as she steps away from the confines of the home, she continues to let her life be dictated by the decisions of others. (e.g. a friend of her husband suggests she takes a job as a translator and she does; a handsome stranger she meets in a hotel lobby suggests she accompany him to Spain and she does). Kate may *think* she’s making decisions for herself, but she’s still largely being guided by the whims and needs of those she meets (i.e.men). Then, midway through the novel, finding herself in the middle of the European equivalent of Hicksville in Spain, she gets sick. Like, debilitatingly, life-threateningly sick. She flees back to London, and spends weeks upon weeks in bed in a crazy-expensive hotel, completely neglecting her appearance and overall cleanliness and health…Kate seems to have completely LOST HER SHIT. (n.b. What I found equally as disturbing as Kate’s transformation was the lack of contact from her family and their general lack of concern for her well-being. They’re all off, doing their own thing, not at all curious as to how she is or what’s she’s been up to. It just struck me as really sad.) By the time she gets out of bed, Kate is emaciated and unkempt, and decides to greet the world as such. Her clothes are falling off of her. Her gray hair has grown in and her red-dye job has faded, and the gray has reclaimed the majority of her hairline. She no longer projects “Mrs. Michael Brown.” She is someone else entirely. She finds herself ignored. Invisible. And she’s fascinated by this experience, by being able to face society as someone other than “herself.” This sensation is the thing that seems to trigger a bit of clarity and productive self-reflection…but then she relapses (growth-wise). Kate, on a whim, decides to rent a room in a flat belonging (??) to 20-something Maureen, who in time comes to stand in for Kate’s daughter Eileen. Kate quickly resumes the maternal role of nurturer during Maureen’s existential crisis of sorts (i.e. SO MANY MEN LOVE ME! WHICH ONE DO I MARRY??? And I’m kind of like, meh, about most of them). And in the interim, Kate comes to the following conclusion:

“The mood she was in when she walked in at her front door again would be irrelevant: now that was the point, it was the truth. We spend our lives assessing, balancing, weighing what we think, we feel…it’s all nonsense. Long after an experience which has been experienced as this or that kind of thought, emotion, and judged at the time accordingly–well, it is seen quite differently. That’s what was happening, you think; and what you thought or felt about it at the time seems laughable, jejune.

How was her summer out of the family going to seem to her in a year or so’s time? She could be quite certain that it would not seem anything like it did now. So, why bother to assess and weigh, saying, This is what I am thinking, and therefore I should do this or that, this or that is happening…at which point in Kate’s deliberations (for she was, of course, doing what she was deciding was pointless) Maureen came in, and said, “Kate, you know what it is? It doesn’t matter, that’s what it is. I can’t feel that it matters. Whatever I decide to do.” She went quickly out again.” (page 256)

Uplifting, right?

Moral of the story: it’s healthy to be a bit selfish. It’s dangerous to completely surrender our entire selves to one thing, whether it be to our job, to our children or to our relationships…because if that outer thing, that image that we’ve allowed to define us, is suddenly removed, what remains?

Rubric rating: 8.5 Depressing, but thought-provoking. (Plus .5 was awarded for the recurring seal dreams. Because SEALS.) show less

I think I would like this novel better if I were older—I don't yet have the... experience? distance? to really evaluate the evolution of Lessing's protagonist and decide if it rings true for me or not. I certainly thought the beginning of it was marvellously done, and Lessing impressed me as a marvellous writer when it comes to the internals—the sketching out of thoughts, of identity—but I became less and less certain of the novel as I reached the second half of it. Perhaps this was the reaction Lessing intended to evoke—a sense of being off kilter, of being unbalanced—but all the scenes with Maureen and her group felt rather awkward to me, as if authenticity was being sacrificed to agenda.

I shelved this as a "former hopeful" which is not the same as a "did not finish." While it did pique my interest, it just wasn't clicking with me. When I DNF a book it's more of a condemnation-- it went in a direction I couldn't brook, the writing devolved with every page, or maybe I just plain lost interest. A "former hopeful" means that while the book still seems interesting, there was something about that said it wasn't going to be a good fit for me. In this case, it was Lessing casually mentioning that the MC spent a year or so with her grandfather in Africa overseeing a Portuguese colony (and doing so with a firm hand). Maybe if it seemed like it would be affecting her thinking or be an issue she struggled with I'd be more show more interested. But I had the sense that it was more of a "fun bit of backstory" than a tragic-- or at least troubling in some way-- part of her youth. So I'm out. Maybe I'm wrong. I enjoy Lessing's writing and there are still plenty of her books that I haven't read, so there's no need to force myself to like this one.
Plus the good thing about books is that covers don't have to stay closed forever, nothing says I can't try again in a few years. (Fate, please note I am not trying to tempt you.) show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2556537.html

I did not get on well with the only other Doris Lessing book I have read, The Grass is Singing, but I thought this was excellent - a short novel about a woman in her mid-40s who suddenly gets an opportunity to break away from her family and friends, and grabs it with both hands. I found the geographical and character descriptions excellent, and Kate's journey to freedom rather exhilarating. Recommended.