Doris Lessing
Feminist flag-bearer who pushed the boundaries of realist fiction
DORIS Lessing, the Nobel prizewinning novelist who has died aged 94, was one of the towering figures of modern literature. In the course of a writing career that spanned the latter half of the 20th century, she commented on most of its grand sweeps and shed light on its many absurdities.
She was a prolific writer, producing a book a year for nearly 60 years. They included plays, poems and short stories, but her novels, in particular The Golden Notebook, remained her bestknown, best-loved and most controversial work.
A generous, open-minded character, she was, at various stages of her life, a communist, socialist, feminist, atheist, Laingian and finally a Sufi. To each of these beliefs she brought a tireless enthusiasm that sometimes obscured judgment.
She fell for ideas, digested then outgrew them, and then moved on. While she still believed, she wrote novels from the experience. Her interests were varied, but her ability to make fascinating fiction out of life was constant.
If she had written nothing else, The Golden Notebook (1962) would have secured Lessing a place in the hall of fame. With it, she wrote about “new women” in a new kind of novel — one that stretched the boundaries of realist fiction.
Through the story of the novelist Anna Wulf working her way through writer’s block, Lessing commented on the form of the conventional novel. By dividing the narrative between four notebooks, she mirrored her portrayal of breakdown and mental disintegration. At least that was what she thought she was doing. Much to her surprise, The Golden Notebook was hailed as a trumpet blast for women’s liberation and Lessing found many of her female friends avoiding her in case they were thought man-hating.
She was unable to understand it. After all, she argued, she had only written in public the sort of things women were always saying to each other in private.
In 1989, 27 years after its publication, Lessing was amused to receive letters praising The Golden Notebook from a genteel North London girls’ school. The “ball breaker” had become a bestseller.
In 1950, she caused a sensation in the literary world with her first published novel, The Grass Is Singing. It told the story of Mary, the wife of a poor white farmer in Southern Rhodesia who, driven mad by loneliness and poverty, begins an obsessive — and eventually fatal — relationship with her black houseboy. It was immediately popular, reprinted seven times in five months. From then
I do not think marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married
on, Lessing was established and the other books came swiftly.
As well as being a formidable novelist, Lessing was also a talented short-story writer, publishing collections alongside her other works. The success of her novels tended to overshadow her other achievements, but she remained stubbornly loyal to the short-story genre.
“Some writers I know have stopped writing short stories,” she once said, “because, as they say, there is no market for them. Others like myself, the addicts, go on, and I suspect would go on even if there really wasn’t any home for them but a private drawer.”
Her novels were not uniformly good. Some critics have called her style “plodding” and “flatfooted” and her space fiction was often dismissed. She continued to defend it and claimed: “I’ll be damned if I can see any difference between some parts of The Grass Is Singing, my first novel, and some parts of Shikasta [her worst novel].” As a literary critic she was inadequate; as a writer she stood alone.
She was born Doris May Tayler on October 22 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia, to British parents. Her father, Captain Alfred Cook Tayler, a World War 1 veteran, had married his nurse, Emily McVeagh, “which, as they both said often enough, was just as well”.
In the mid-1920s, the Taylers moved to Southern Rhodesia, where home was a maize farm on the veld. There they settled down to a life of quiet but persistent economic failure. In later life, Lessing was to recall the beauty of the land. While growing up, she was depressed by its loneliness. To annoy her mother, she left school at 14. To the end of her life, she remained immensely pleased with her lack of education.
By her own admission, she was the archetypally tiresome adolescent, irritating her parents with her outspoken dislike of Rhodesia’s “colour bar”. Towards the end of her life, she spoke admiringly of her tough teenage years, describing her younger self as a girl “who bulldozed her way through pieties”. In Martha Quest (1952), she drew a fascinating picture of a similar girl — restless, dissatisfied, bored, “tired of the future before it comes”.
At the age of 22 she left her father’s farm for the small town of Salisbury, where she earned her living as a telephone operator and clerical worker. In 1939, she married Frank Charles Wisdom. The marriage lasted five years and produced a son and a daughter.
A year after the divorce, she married Gottfried Anton Nicholas Lessing. That marriage also lasted five years and she bore another son, Peter.
She was less than enthusiastic about marriage, once remarking: “I do not think marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.”
During the early 1940s, Lessing was active in organising a communist group. Later she was to dismiss youthful politics as a way of creating a social life, but for many years a great deal of her energy was devoted to meetings, delivering pamphlets and drumming up supporters.
In 1949, Lessing left Rhodesia for England. She had her son, Peter, in her arms, £20 in her handbag and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in her suitcase. While waiting for it to be accepted and published, she lived a somewhat precarious existence in some of the seedier parts of London.
These down-and-out-in-London experiences became the subject of In Pursuits of the English. With her wryly funny take on post-war London and its working-class inhabitants, Lessing, in the tradition of the outsider, held up a mirror to England and English values. Among the galaxy of oddballs and misfits was the dim-witted landlady who thought Lessing might be black because she came from Africa. “Do I look like one?” replied an astonished Lessing.
“I’ve known people before calling it suntan,” came the confused and confusing answer.
Nevertheless, this grim and gloomy London was to be Lessing’s home for the rest of her life. Fortunately, the dingy 1950s gave way to the much brighter 1960s and she came to regard the capital as “a lovely place to live”.
Shortly after arriving in England, Lessing formally joined the Communist Party, a decision she subsequently dismissed as “crazy”. Her outspoken views on apartheid led to her being declared a banned person from South Africa and Rhodesia.
The ban was lifted 30 years later and she was able to return “home”. It was a visit that revealed how much she had changed and how much she owed the African continent. “Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature among other creatures in a large landscape,” she observed.
During the 1960s, she became more and more disenchanted with formal politics and more interested in psychology and the metaphysical. In her books — as well as in life — she explored the possibilities of psychoanalysis, telepathy, meditation, déjà vu and dreams.
Like many enthusiasts, she displayed a canny ability to adopt selectively any new theories or beliefs. Thus she could find spiritual satisfaction in Sufism, an aspect of Islam, while at the same time calling Islam itself one of “these bloody, bloody religions”.
Her views on apartheid led to her being declared a banned person from South Africa and Rhodesia
In 1986, her love-hate relationship with Islam was reinforced by a visit to Afghanistan as a guest of Afghan Aid. She supported the cause of the mujahedeen and embarked on a flurry of fundraising activities on their behalf, while at the same time deploring the treatment accorded Muslim women.
Lessing’s greatest strength lay in her apparently inexhaustible facility for chronicling what one critic called the “inner experiences of unhappy women”. Martha Quest was an exceptionally fine description of the wilfulness and vanity of an adolescent; Summer Before The Dark (1973), sadly less well, examined the middle years of a family woman subject to her children’s tyranny and in mourning for her lost good looks; and The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) looked at old age with a rather distressing emphasis on defecation.
She continued to produce novels until her 90th year and wrote two volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), which won the James Tait Black memorial prize the following year, and Walking in the Shade (1997). She was made a Companion of Honour in 2000 and a Companion of Literature the following year.
Informed by a reporter in 2007 as she alighted from a taxi with her groceries that she had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature, she replied “Oh, Christ”, in apparent irritation, and put down her shopping bags. “I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks of some kind,” she added.
Lessing’s achievements and versatility as a novelist won her many loyal readers, whose devotion was tested but unshaken by her eccentricity, perversity and fickleness. Sometimes she wrote in styles that did not suit her about ideas that did no credit to her intelligence; she even on occasion wrote badly. Yet she remained a writer whose exuberant spill of ideas overcame these lapses and whose energy and perception kept her admirers enthralled until the last page. — © The Daily Telegraph, London