Atmosphere, Place, and Phenomenology: Depictions of London Place Settings in Three Writings by British-African Novelist Doris Lessing

[pre-publication version of a chapter prepared for Atmospheres and Aesthetics: Plural Perspectives, Tonino Griffero and Marco Tedeschini, editors. London: Palgrave, 2019; please do not quote without permission of the author]

Atmosphere, Place, and Phenomenology:

Depictions of London Place Settings in Three Writings by British-African Novelist Doris Lessing

David Seamon

F

or describing and understanding atmospheres, phenomenology is one of the most

helpful conceptual and methodological approaches. Most broadly, phenomenology examines human experience, particularly its less obvious, unnoticed, taken-for-granted strata, of which atmospheres are an integral part because they are difficult to locate

precisely either as a lived presence or as a rendered description. In its full acceptance of all aspects of human experience, including the less readily and tangibly present, phenomenology provides a grounded, workable means for identifying and explicating atmospheres.1

In this chapter, I focus on a phenomenology of atmosphere as related to place. By “atmosphere,” I refer to a diffuse ineffability that regularly attaches itself to particular things, situations, spaces, and environments—what philosopher Gernot Böhme (2014: 8) describes as a kind of “spatially extended feeling,” and philosopher Tonino Griffero (2014: 36) characterizes as the “emotional quality of a given ‘lived space’.”  By “place,” I refer to any environmental locus gathering experiences, actions, events, and meanings spatially and temporally (Seamon 2018: 2). By this definition, places range from a favorite sitting place or room to a building, neighborhood, town, city, or region. Following phenomenologists of place Edward Casey (2009) and Jeff Malpas (2018), I assume that place and place experience are an integral part of human life.

“Place,” writes Casey (2009: 15-16), “belongs to the very concept of existence. To be is to be bounded by place, limited by it… Place-being is part of an entity’s own-being.”

In considering the lived relationship between atmosphere and place, I draw on three works by British-African novelist Doris Lessing (1919–2013), who regularly in her writing offers lucid accounts of place atmospheres in London, the city she emigrated to from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) shortly after World War II.2 Before I examine specific place atmospheres in Lessing’s writings, I overview the lived relationship between place, atmosphere, and sense of place.

Place, Atmosphere, and Sense of Place

In relation to place, atmosphere refers to the invisible character that makes an environment singular and confers on that environment a specific presence and ambience (Borch 2014; Böhme et al. 2014; Griffero 2014, 2017). Böhme (2014: 96, 56), for example, links atmosphere to place when he writes of “spaces with a mood” and “that total impression that is regarded as characteristic” of a place. Similarly, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (2014: 20) defines atmosphere as “the overarching perceptual, sensory, and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation.” Böhme and Pallasmaa’s descriptions of atmosphere point toward its remarkably complex, experiential constitution. Atmospheres are nebulous, elusive, mutable, and therefore never fully graspable or describable. They cannot be identified by vision alone but incorporate a wide range of lived qualities that include sound, smell, tactility, emotional

vibrations, and an active, indeterminant immanence of things, spaces, and environmental qualities.

In many ways, place atmospheres are related to “sense of place,” “spirit of place,” or genius loci—the unique ambience and character of a place, for example, the “London-ness” of London or the “Tuscan-ness” of Tuscany (Relph 1976: 63-78). As with discussions of atmosphere, explications of genius loci regularly focus on an ineffable environmental presence impossible to locate or describe precisely or completely. For example, British novelist Lawrence Durrell (1969: 157) characterized genius loci as “the invisible constant in a place,” and Norwegian architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz (1980: 10) contended that genius loci gives “life” to places. American writer Henry Miller spotlighted the indescribable atmospheric core of place experience when he explained his reaction to a fellow American who asked the writer why he lived in Paris: “It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets” (cited in Sciolino 2016: 47).

Place Atmospheres in Lessing’s Four-Gated City

As one procedural means for explicating qualities of place atmospheres more exactly, I examine several descriptions from Doris Lessing’s writings, beginning with her 1969 novel, The Four- Gated City (henceforth City), which depicts the emigrant experience of a young Southern Rhodesian woman named Martha Quest, who arrives in battle-scarred London immediately after World War II (Lessing 1969). A major theme of City is the difficult process by which

newcomers find their place and make a home in a strange and unfamiliar environment (Seamon

1981). Martha has come to London, partly to find out who she is and, at least for a time, to be someone different from the person she was in Southern Rhodesia.

As one narrative means for highlighting the potential worlds in which Martha might find her place in London, Lessing draws on the contrasting atmospheres of several place settings that Martha encounters in her first few months in the city. The first of these place settings is a small café located in London’s working-class South Bank neighborhood and run by elderly couple Jimmy and Iris. When Martha first takes lodging above this small café shortly after arriving in London, she sees this place as nothing more than one of “millions of little shops, each one the ground floor of an old house” (Lessing 1969: 8). As she works part-time behind the counter to pay for her lodging above the café, however, Martha become aware of its unique, imposing atmosphere:

It was jolly in the café; people coming in knew each other, knew Iris and Jimmy. They had shared, many of them, their childhood, their lives. They had shared, most of them, the war. And they had opened their hearts to her…. What people actually said in that café was the least of what they were able to convey (Lessing

1969: 11-12).

In the several weeks she works in the café, Martha comes to see that its atmosphere involves a daily rhythm that begins early in the morning at five, when Iris opens the café unofficially to lorry drivers who live in nearby boardinghouse whose landlady won’t feed them so early. Between five and eight, the café is “a scene of bustling, steaming intimacy” (Lessing

1969: 75). As Martha sits in the café one morning, ready to begin employment in another part of

London, she registers the atmosphere of this place: “The air of the small steam box which was

the café vibrated with interest, tact, sympathy—friendship, in short…” (Lessing 1969: 4). As she leaves the café for the last time, she looks through the “dim muslin” that screens the café windows and notes how the interpersonal exuberance within sheds “warmth onto the pavement” (Lessing 1969: 77).

In contrast to the vibrant, supportive atmosphere of Jimmy and Iris’s café is the dull, conforming ambience of Baxter’s, a traditional London restaurant to which lawyer and acquaintance Henry Matheson invites Martha to inquire about her working for his law firm. Martha walks to the restaurant in a heavy rain and enters with wet hair and damp coat, greeted by a man “in shabby dinner clothes and sleeked-down dandruffy hair…, already disapproving” (Lessing 1969: 24). The place is “muted, dingy, rather dark” with “dull-flowering wallpaper.” None of the furnishings have “any sort of charm or beauty” but are chosen for the ready way

they “melt into this scene.” As Martha studies the restaurant more carefully, she realizes that “things were expensive” and “money had been spent… to keep the restaurant exactly as it had always been: in an expensive shabbiness, dowdiness…. But Henry didn’t care, he was at home cozy with his kind” (Lessing 1969: 25). Later, a female acquaintance takes Martha to lunch at a restaurant called Fanny’s, which is a less elegant version of Baxter’s, with the same kind of food, “but plainer, without sauces, and much cheaper.” The restaurant is decorated with “dull floral curtains and wall paper of a pinkish floral design” (Lessing 1969: 81). Martha senses intuitively how both restaurants relate to a specific social-class standard of which she is uncertain she

wishes to be a part: “[S]omewhere behind both was a country house, or a large farmhouse: the country, at any rate, with centuries of a certain kind of taste behind it. If Fanny’s and Baxter’s had to do without paint or new curtains for fifty years, they would still present themselves to the world with impermeable self-esteem” (Lessing 1969: 81).

Eventually, Martha finds a home in London when she goes to work as a live-in secretary for Mark Coldridge, a part-time novelist and prosperous entrepreneur living in a commodious Georgian townhouse in upper-middle-class Bloomsbury, an elite neighborhood that, even after the recent war, “had the unity of its original design: houses, terraces, grassy squares full of old trees” (Lessing 1969: 88). Here, Martha notes, “one thought of the beauty of London” rather than its tattered post-war ugliness. Martha is taken to Mark’s house by left-wing Labor-Party

organizer Phoebe Coldridge, Mark’s former sister-in-law and a sister of one of Martha’s Southern Rhodesian friends. Lessing describes Martha’s first encounter with Mark’s house, which, from the front door, appears claimed by the trees and plantings of the square near which it is located. Standing in the house’s hall, Martha realized that, for the first time in her life, “she

was in a setting where, if she chose to stay, there would be no doubt at all of how she ought to behave, to dress. She had always resisted such a setting, or the thought of it. If she took this job, then it must be for a very short time. She felt attacked by the house—claimed” (Lessing 1969:

88-89).

At first, Mark mistakenly assumes that Martha is the young female applicant he does not wish to hire because of her political connections with Phoebe. He directs Martha toward an off- hall parlor that is a “long, subdued, beautiful room which looked as if no one had been in it for months” and feels like a “no-man’s land or defensive area” (Lessing 1969: 90). Unsettled by the awkward, unused quality of this room, Martha prepares to decline the position and leave. “No. Wait,” Mark exclaims, suddenly realizing that she is not Phoebe’s young protégé and making it clear to Martha that he had chosen the discommodious room “to put off, or intimidate” this other female applicant. He studies Martha, and she studies him: “He was looking at her more closely. She stood, to be inspected; examining him. But all she felt was: Here are claims. Not only from him… but from the house, the furniture—even this area in London” (Lessing 1969: 90). Mark takes Martha upstairs to a small first-floor room full of papers, books, and “comfortable clutter.” The informal surroundings make it easier for Martha to be at ease. After some deliberation, she accepts his employment offer. As she goes to bed her first night in her new London home, she

closes her eyes “on a room whose presence was so strong, so confident, that she was saying as she went to sleep: I’ll stay for just a short time. A couple of months….” (Lessing 1969: 104).

Ultimately, Martha remains as Mark’s employee for much of her adult life, and the major portion of City depicts the shifting fortunes of the Coldridge house and family as largely seen through Martha’s eyes. Several years after her first meeting with Mark and now responsible for and attached to the life and residents of the house, Martha walks upstairs and gives attention to the various rooms and their contrasting atmospheres marked by their contrasting occupants— Mark; Francis, Mark’s son; and Paul, Mark’s nephew and a neurotic adolescent whose mother committed suicide and whose father, a nuclear scientist and Mark’s brother, fled to the Soviet Union as a Russian spy:

She went up the stairs, through a house separated with the people who inhabited it, into areas or climates, each with its own feel, or sense of individuality: Mark’s rooms, unmistakable, even with o ne’s eyes shut, even with sound shut off, because of their atmosphere of something closed in, enduring, stubborn; Francis’s room which was kept as it had been for years—a boy’s room, with cricket bats and butterflies in cases… ; then Paul’s area—but even the flight of stairs that approached Paul’s floor emanated electric storm, for here not even silence, or sleep, could be the quiet of peace. Even from the street, raising one’s eyes, one

expected that the apertures of the third floor would shoot out a baleful blue ray, was surprised to see a pair of neat and pretty windows, in the pattern of windows that opened the tall narrow house to the light (Lessing 1969: 352).

I choose these narrative examples from City because each illustrates the powerful ways in which both effable and ineffable environmental qualities sustain a unique sense of place—the jovial robustness of the café; the intentional blandness of the two restaurants; the imposing solidity of the Coldridge house; the contrasting ambiences of its upstairs rooms as radiated by their occupants’ disparate personalities. All these examples involve specific environmental settings evoking dissimilar atmospheric presences that Lessing deftly pinpoints by the phrase “climates, each with its own feel, or sense of individuality.” In turn, she specifies the “feel” and “individuality” of these “climates” by more exact sensuous and emotional descriptors such as “jolly,” “intimate,” “shabby,” “dull,” “comfortable,” “enduring,” “stubborn,” “electric,” and “baleful.” At least partly, these less perceptible qualities arise via features of the material and fabricated environment but, at the same time, Martha senses and feels these settings in her own unique way because of her personality, her personal and cultural history, and her acute corporeal, emotional, and intellectual sensibilities. Lessing’s descriptions illustrate how place atmosphere is an “in-between” phenomenon grounded in lived qualities of both experiencer and environment experienced. As Griffero (2017: xiv-xv) explains, “atmospheres exist ‘between’ the object (or rather, the environmental qualita) and the subject (or rather, the felt-body).”

The “London-ness” of London

In other writings, Lessing offers narrative descriptions of London as a place unto itself. These accounts illustrate how one’s place sensibilities shift over time and indicate that, with experience, practice, and changing life events, one may better empathize with a specific place and cultivate a self-understanding that is more comprehensive, accurate, and attuned to that

place. In Lessing’s writings, this shift in self-understanding is highlighted in City and in her 1960

In Pursuit of the English, a journalistic account of her first year in London (Lessing 1960;

henceforth Pursuit).

When Lessing first arrives in England in 1949, she is thirty years old and a struggling writer with a three-year-old son. She has emigrated because she wants to and “can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come to England” (Lessing 1960:12). Encountering this strange new

place as a newcomer, however, she dislikes England at first and questions her decision to leave her homeland: “The White Cliffs of Dover depressed me. They were too small. The Isle of Dogs discouraged me. The Thames looked dirty. I had better confess that for the whole of the first year, London seemed to me to be a city of such appalling ugliness that I wanted only to leave” (1960: 12). In time, both Lessing and Martha Quest come to appreciate London for its “London-ness,” and an important guide for this progressive understanding is London “insiders” like café proprietor Iris,

who introduce Martha to less visible qualities of the city and help her to become a London “insider” herself. Iris has an exhaustive, generational knowledge of her local South Bank neighborhood, and she initiates Martha in this knowledge as they regularly walk the neighborhood together. When she accompanies Iris through the bomb-damaged South Bank streets that are her home, Martha sees “in a double vision, as if she were two people: herself and Iris, one eye stating and denying, warding off the total hideousness of the whole area, the other, knowing it in love” (Lessing 1960: 10).

In time, both Lessing and Martha Quest come to admire London and appreciate its uniqueness as a remarkable urban place. Perhaps the most compelling description of this affectionate way of seeing is Lessing’s account of standing on the National Gallery steps and looking out at Trafalgar Square, to which she has been taken by her friend, Miss Privet, another London insider:

It was a wet evening, with a soft glistening light falling through a low golden sky. Dusk was gathering along walls, behind pillars and balustrades. The starlings squealed overhead. The buildings along Pall Mall seemed to float, reflecting soft blues and greens on to a wet and shining pavement. The fat buses, their scarlet softened, their hardness dissolved in mist, came rolling gently along beneath us, disembarking a race of creatures clad in light, with burnished hair and glittering clothes. It was a city of light I stood in, a city of bright phantoms. But Miss Privet was not one to harbour her pleasures beyond reasonable expectations. For ten minutes I was allowed to stand there, while the light changed and the thin clouds overhead sifted a soft, drenching golden atmosphere.

Then she said, “Now we must go. It’ll be dead in a minute, just streets” (Lessing 1960: 229-30).

As with the earlier atmospheric descriptions relating to interior place settings, one recognizes in these South Bank and Trafalgar depictions how the experience of place atmosphere can shift over time and how environmental and human qualities contribute significantly to place atmosphere. Particularly with the help of London insiders, Lessing and Martha Quest gradually gain a deeper, more inclusive engagement with the city and see it more as it is in itself rather than as

they imagine, expect, or demand it to be. In this sense, they empathize with London in its “London- ness” and discern atmospheric qualities that are accurately a part of London itself rather than a less accurate projection distorted by personal preconceptions, presumptions, or frustrations.

Because her medium is writing, Lessing can only describe her immersive experience of Trafalgar Square in words that mostly incorporate environmental elements and sensuous and affective qualities. Underlying these depictable features, however, is the ineffable wholeness of

place as atmosphere. As we as readers envision Lessing’s experience imaginatively and vicariously, we are transported to the invisible dimension of Trafalgar Square’s presence even if we have never

visited this place ourselves. Lessing’s account illustrates how a unique place atmosphere is

grounded in geographicality—the term that French historian Eric Dardel (1952) used to identify the specific lived qualities of a place evoked by geographical qualities like weather, climate, topography, vegetation, light qualities, water features, human-made elements, and the like (Relph

1985: 21). These geographical qualities are the environmental foundation of a particular place, but atmosphere is its integrated presence via place-as-place (Relph 1985: 25-26; Seamon 2018: 25-26).

The Lived Complexity of Place Atmosphere

One of Lessing’s most encompassing illustrations of the lived complexity of place atmospheres is her short story, “Dialogue,” a title meant to be ironic, since the unnamed narrator experiences a personal struggle as to how she is to encounter and understand the world in which she finds herself (Lessing 1978). Is she to experience the world sensuously and emotionally, or is she to know it only intellectually and secondhand? Is the lived core of human being heartfelt communality or cerebral detachment? As the story opens, the narrator stands on a London street corner watching an elderly woman buying potatoes from a vendor who is part of a bustling street market. Nearby, a music store broadcasts opera music onto the sidewalk, where two disheveled teenage boys partake in “earnest conversation” (Lessing, 1978: 10). A bus stops to discharge passengers, one of whom passes and says, “What’s the joke?” He winks, and the narrator realizes she is smiling, filled with a sense of well-being bolstered by the communal liveliness of the familiar street:

This irrepressible good nature of the flesh, felt in the movement of her blood like a greeting to pavements, people, a thick drift of a cloud across pale blue sky…. A bookshop had a tray of dingy books outside it, and she rested her hand on their limp backs and loved them. Instantly, she looked at the world “love,” which

her palm, feeling delight at the contact, had chosen…. (Lessing, 1978: 368-69).

The foil to this sensuous, emotionally-grounded awareness of place is the cold, cerebral situation that awaits the narrator when she reaches her final destination: former lover Bill’s apartment in a ten-story high-rise that hovers over the vibrant street scene. This building is “narrow and glass-eyed,” many floors higher than the “small shallow litter of buildings” below, probably soon to be demolished because they are not “economical” (Lessing 1978: 367). The high-rise building is economical, replacing on its corner lot, “three small houses, two laundries, and a grocer’s” (Lessing, 1978: 367). For over an hour, the narrator lingers at the foot of the tall building, fortifying her sense of self by imbibing the lively street scene. She has promised Bill a visit because he is terminally ill, apartment-bound, and “one of the solitary ones” (Lessing 1978:

371). She rides the elevator to the top floor, rings Bill’s door, which he opens and directs her into the living room. She takes her usual place on a long, benchlike settee, covered with a red blanket. He sits in “his expensive chair which looked surgical, being all black leather and chromium” (Lessing 1978: 369) He is challenged by the openness of the room, which is large, high, and with an outer wall that is mostly window. Looking out from this window to the city below is “a release” for the narrator, but the view is “a terror” for Bill, who prefers the dim enclosure of his tiny bedroom, “always darkened by permanently drawn midnight blue curtains, so that the

narrow bed with the books stacked up the wall beside it was in a suffocating shadow, emphasized by a small yellow glow from the bed lamp” (Lessing 1978: 369).

The narrator’s dilemma is transitioning between Bill’s solitary, intellectual world above and the convivial, life-filled world below. Why, she asks, does she continue to visit this man who refuses to accept that her love of life is real? Why does she deliberately forsake the “happiness… she left in the streets”?

Was it because she believed the pain in this room was more real than the happiness? Because of the courage behind it? She might herself not be able to endure the small dark-curtained room which would force her most secret terrors; but she respected this man who lived on the exposed platform swaying in the clouds (which is how his nerves felt it) (Lessing 1978: 370).

During her visit, she and Bill debate the relative merits of sociability, kindness, and comfort (the narrator’s point of view) vs. loneliness, self-interest, and anguish (Bill’s). As they disagree, the narrator closes her eyes and makes herself remember “with her flesh, what she had

discarded… on the pavement—the pleasure from the touch of faded books, pleasure from the sight of ranked fruit and vegetables…. a pulse of vitality, like the beating colours of oranges, lemons and cabbages, gold and green, a dazzle, a vibration in the eyes….” (Lessing, 1978: 374). Their conversation reaches an impasse, and the narrator leaves but cannot shake the painful perplexity with which Bill’s attenuated, ungenerous world fills her. As she returns to the street, the exuberant sidewalk life that gave her energy before is now unfamiliar, and “the hazy purple sky that encloses London at night was savage, bitter, and the impulse behind its shifting lights was a source of pain.” Everything seems hostile and there is “a flat black-and-white two- dimensional jagged look to things” as “the tall building, like a black tower, stood over her, kept pace with her” (Lessing, 1978: 377).

By chance, her hand pulls a leaf from a hedge, and its piquant aroma renews her sense of life: “A faint, pungent smell came to her nostrils. She understood it was the smell of the leaf which… seemed to explode with a vivid odour into the sense of her brain so that she understood the essence of the leaf and through it the scene she stood in” (Lessing, 1978: 377). Though in the background she still senses the dark tower, “immensely high, narrow, terrible,” she also feels the sustaining energy of the street:

She stood fingering the leaf, while life came back. The pulses were beating again. A warmth came up through her soles. The sky’s purplish orange was for effect, for the sake of self-consciously exuberant theatricality, a gift to the people living under it. An elderly woman passed, mysterious and extraordinary in the half-light, and smiled at her. She was saved from deadness, she was herself again. She walked slowly on, well-being moving in her, making a silent greeting to the people passing her (Lessing, 1978: 377-8).

Environmental Ensemble, People-in-Place, and Common Presence I end with Lessing’s “Dialogue” because this short story points to the complex lived ways in which environment, people, and atmosphere intertwine via place and place encounter. Elsewhere (Seamon 2018), I have argued that place and place experience can be understood via the relationships among three components: environmental ensemble, people-in-place, and common presence. The environmental ensemble refers to the material and environmental qualities of place, both natural and human-made, and is more or less equivalent to Dardel’s geographicality mentioned earlier. Although any specific place’s environmental ensemble is singular, it is an essential contributor to atmosphere because it is the material ground for place experiences and place events. In turn, people-in-place relates to the human worlds associated with a particular environmental ensemble and includes the human experiences, actions, meanings, and situations integral to the place, whether habitual and usual or reflectively planned and out of the ordinary. Via people-in-place, the atmosphere of place is encountered and known, though as Griffero (2014, 2017) points out, this awareness may be ignored, misread, distrusted, taken-for-granted, hidden from one’s conscious awareness, or lost sight of over time.

Overarching both environmental ensemble and people-and-place is the less visible component of common presence, which refers to the material and lived “togetherness” of a place impelled by both its physical and human qualities. The common presence of a place has bearing on its degree of “life” and environmental wholeness (Alexander 2002–2005). I suggest that the relative “togetherness” of entities in space buoys an environmental “common presence” that emerges as a sensible quality shared by the entities (including human beings) that are a part of that space (Seamon 2018: 88). Common presence relates to the ways that the degree of spatial togetherness of a place, engendered through both its environmental and human components, contributes to is relative character and singularity, including less comprehendible and accessible aspects like atmosphere and sense of place.

In Doris Lessing’s place descriptions, one sees how each of these three place components plays a role in place atmosphere. On one hand, there are physical and spatial qualities of the environmental ensemble that set the material ground for the particular atmosphere: the café space, the restaurants and their furnishings, the Coldridge house, the Trafalgar setting, the geographical fabric of London. On the other hand, there is a specific person-in-place—Martha

Quest, Doris Lessing, or the unnamed narrator—who “tunes into” these place settings and makes contact with less tangible qualities, sensibilities, and feelings that, in sum, mark place atmosphere. In turn, this place atmosphere is one lived expression of common presence as it gathers up and integrates human and environmental elements spatially. In City, Lessing refers obliquely to this gathering, indwelling quality of common presence when she writes that “People in any sort of communion, link, connection, make up a whole” (Lessing 1969: 221). It is the degree of wholeness, shaping and being shaped by the spatial “togetherness” of the specific constellation of environmental ensemble and people-in-place, that defines the common presence of place (Seamon 2018: 90). An integral aspect of this common presence is the range of atmospheres supporting and being supported by the particular place.

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1 Useful introductions to phenomenology include Finlay 2011; Moran 2000; van Manen 2014.

2 For discussions of Lessing’s oeuvre, see Brazil et al. 2018; Rascheke et al. 2010. On Lessing’s portrayal of London

in her writings, see Arias 2005; Seamon 1981, 1993; Wick Sizemore 1989.