Harriet

Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

Salutations, bibliophiles.

Today, I’m very excited to bring you Eleanor Anstruther.

Eleanor writes Eleanor’s Substack, where she shares short story fiction, personal memoir, and serialises her novels, the latest being FALLOUT which kicked off last week.

Do you know that feeling when you read a writer’s work and you just ‘know’ — this writer has got it, that inexplicable element that makes you want to just keep on drinking in their words? Well, that’s how I feel about Eleanor’s writing.

That element is in full show here in her essay on the book that made her — Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. Enjoy!

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It was the speed with which it moved that got me first. As a writer not yet writing, I read it before I could understand what Lessing was doing, and experienced it in its pure form, as a passenger of her prose and plotting, as yet unconscious that every word was chosen to drag me into the fate of her book as her characters, Harriet and David, are dragged. In the space of thirty-six thousand words, The Fifth Child, (her thirty-fifth published work), travels from the happiest of family set ups to a darkness barely registered by anyone outside of the house, while unavoidable to those inside. In the very first sentence we meet Lessing’s central character; her name is the first word we read because this novel, despite being about a marriage, a family, a house, feminism, the patriarchy, society, the class system and a classic of gothic horror, has at its heart, as does the Lovett family, Harriet Lovatt, wife of David, mother of Luke, Helen, Jane and Paul, and of the fifth child, Ben.  

The darkness begins, is allowed to drift in from the moment Harriet and David, newly married, much in love and dreaming of doing what others daren’t, to have a big family, six (or eight or ten) children enter the house they have bought together, the house they can’t afford. They made love, there, on the bed…. she was overwhelmed by his purpose…. “well,” said Harriet, in a little voice, for she was  frightened and determined not to show it, “well that’s done it I’m sure.” And immediately, a different note  enters the prose: He laughed. A loud, reckless, unscrupulous laugh, quite unlike modest, humorous, judicious  David. Now the room was quite dark it looked vast, like a black cave with no end. A branch scraped across a wall somewhere close.” And we’re off. The first seed has been planted in our minds and in her womb, a shadow, fleeting but unmissable, has fallen over the sun dappled happiness of the previous fifteen pages that we’ve rocketed through at lightning speed, their meeting and falling in love, their decision to have masses of children, to do life differently. Now, on their first night in that enormous home, we’ve felt a shudder which ties the house inextricably to the events unfolding, as if it itself has possessed them, is sentient, the reason for what happens, as if it seduces Harriet and David into believing they could be happy there so that it can wreak its havoc  on their lives, as if contained within its many walls a secret passage leads to another world from which Ben will come.  

And he comes, kicking and screaming onto the page from her womb that is bruised from nine months of fighting, a pregnancy that has her pacing the corridors, running down country lanes. People in passing cars would turn, amazed, to see this hurrying driven woman, white faced, hair flying, open mouthed, panting, arms clenched across her front. If they stopped to offer help she shook her head and ran on. We are prepared and not prepared. We know there is no going back. Or is there? After the dog dies, then the neighbour’s cat, after an elder sibling’s arm is bent back, and a child at school’s, broken,  after they come in one day to find Ben crouched on the kitchen table tearing a raw chicken apart with his teeth, and his four elder siblings have put locks on their doors, locking themselves in at night, the family coalesce in grim determined consul to agree, for the sake of all of them, that Ben is sent away. It’s here I’ll stop with the plot unless I spoil it, here that the force of  motherhood, that maternal instinct that makes us lift cars, put our bodies in the way of flying  bullets, is put to Doris Lessing’s test, and the choices Harriet makes, because let’s not forget she’s a mother to four others who need her too, are the choices which frame what happens next.  

I will say this, that on second reading now, as an adult, it threw up more questions than it answered, a shading lost on me when I read it as a teenager. A novel of its time? Certainly. Although she makes a point of drawing Ben as not human, she includes his cousin Amy, a baby with Down’s Syndrome, as the other “other” in the book. And although she draws Amy as sweet  and adored, her choice of language is at times unpleasant.  

An allegory? Lessing herself said it “bears the deep imprint” of “the terrible class system of castes and pigeonholing people, which is characteristically British,” and that Ben Lovatt fell into the category described as the “uneducable, the unassimilable, the hopeless.”  

As a feminist shout it’s clear the point she’s making. When Harriet tries to get help, the establishment voice of Dr Gilly says, “I’m going to come straight to the point, Mrs Lovatt. The problem is  not with Ben but with you.” And Harriet retorts, desperate, exasperated, exhausted by what today we would call gas lighting, “No one has ever said to me, no one ever ‘how clever of you to have four marvellous children! They are a credit to you. Well done, Harriet!’ Don’t you think it’s strange that no one has ever said it?  But about Ben – I’m a criminal!”  

It is rich in message, layered in meaning as the house is layered in the lives of the Lovatt family,  the seasons changing, the leaves falling in the garden, Christmas coming again; but more than  anything it is a masterpiece for its artistic brevity, that in one hundred and fifty two pages it does more for raising the bar on what is good than the thousands and thousands of pages written in  the hope of achieving the same punch. More than anything, this book made me a writer, it, she, Doris Lessing showed me what was possible. Read it. Tell me it doesn’t bruise with its power,  that it won’t make you sit up and listen, try harder. I read it now as a writer who writes, and still dream of such heights. 

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