Doris Lessing, Author Who Swept Aside Convention, Is Dead at 94 // Margaret Atwood - Doris Lessing: a model for every writer coming from the back of beyond
Doris Lessing, the uninhibited and outspoken novelist who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for a lifetime of writing that shattered convention, both social and artistic, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 94. Her death was confirmed by her publisher, HarperCollins. Ms. Lessing produced dozens of novels, short stories, essays and poems, drawing on a childhood in the Central African bush, the teachings of Eastern mystics and involvement with grass-roots Communist groups. She embarked on dizzying and, at times, stultifying literary experiments.
But it was her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook,” a structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical tale, that remained her best-known work. The 1962 book was daring in its day for its frank exploration of the inner lives of women who, unencumbered by marriage, were free to raise children, or not, and pursue work and their sex lives as they chose. The book dealt openly with topics like menstruation and orgasm, as well as with the mechanics of emotional breakdown.
Her editor at HarperCollins, Nicholas Pearson, said on Sunday that “The Golden Notebook” had been a handbook for a whole generation. As a writer, from colonial Africa to modern London, Ms. Lessing scrutinized relationships between men and women, social inequities and racial divisions. As a woman, she pursued her own interests and desires, professional, political and sexual. Seeking what she considered a free life, she abandoned two young children. Still, Salon, in an interview with Ms. Lessing in 1997, said that “with her center-parted hair that’s pulled back into a bun and her steely eyes, she seems like a tightly wound earth mother.”
It was this figure, 10 years later, who arrived at her house in sensible shoes to find journalists gathered at her door waiting to tell her that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature. “Oh, Christ!” she said upon hearing the news, adding, “I couldn’t care less.” The Nobel announcement called her “the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” And in the presentation speech at the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, Ms. Lessing was described as having “personified the woman’s role in the 20th century.” (She accepted the prize at a ceremony in London.)
The cavalier and curmudgeonly Ms. Lessing was making headlines again a few days after the announcement, dismissing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as “not that terrible” compared to the toll from decades of Irish Republican Army violence.
‘The Golden Notebook’
“The Golden Notebook,” which critics generally consider her best novel, has been published in many languages, and 50 years after it first appeared, it is still in print. It consists of a conventional novel, “Free Women,” and several notebooks, each in a different color, kept by the protagonist, Anna Wulf, a novelist struggling with writer’s block.
The black notebook deals with Africa and the novel Anna wrote from her experiences there; the red notebook chronicles her Communist Party days; the yellow is an autobiographical novel within the larger novel; the blue is a diary of sorts. The golden notebook, at the end, brings together ideas and thoughts from the other sections.
Ms. Lessing wrote that she had intended the novel to capture the chaotic period after the Soviet Union officially renounced Stalinism. Under the pressure of the revelations about Stalin’s crimes, the movement that had been the glue of her social and intellectual circle came undone. She considered the novel to be a triumph of structure. By fragmenting the story, she said, she wanted to show the danger of compartmentalizing one’s thinking, the idea that “any kind of single-mindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness.”
But her book was seen as a feminist work, a response that irritated her. Even though her novels and stories were filled with the issues at the core of the feminist movement, Ms. Lessing had sharp words for feminists.
Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan in 1970, during the Vietnam War, she told her audience, “I’ve got the feeling that the sex war is not the most important war going on, nor is it the most vital problem in our lives.” In 1994, she was no less critical. “Things have changed for white, middle-class women,” she said, “but nothing has changed outside this group.”
While some ideas embraced by the women’s movement came naturally to her, she differed with the movement on some issues in “Under My Skin,” the first volume of her autobiography, published in 1994. On sexual harassment, for example, she wrote that “contemporary women scream or swoon at the sight of a penis they have not been introduced to, feel demeaned by a suggestive remark and send for a lawyer if a man pays them a compliment.”
Doris May Tayler was born on Oct. 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), the first child of Alfred Cook Tayler, a British bank official, and the former Emily Maude McVeagh. Mr. Tayler was injured in World War I and lost a leg. Miss McVeagh was his nurse.
Ms. Lessing wrote in “Under My Skin” that her birth was a disappointment to them, and that the doctor who delivered her had to come up with a name because her parents had rejected the possibility that they might have a girl. Her descriptions of growing up are colored by resentment toward her mother, who never let her forget how much she had sacrificed for her children. She found an ally of sorts in her father, but he also seeded her childhood with stories of World War I, which Ms. Lessing said imbued her with fatalism.
The family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), determined to make its fortune farming corn. On the farm, Doris was taught by her mother and read all the books she could find. She was sent to boarding school and then to a convent school. Convent school turned her into a Roman Catholic, but her conversion was merely a stop on the way to atheism. She left school at 14 and lived at home for a while. But as the friction with her mother became unbearable, she made two forays to Southern Rhodesia’s capital, Salisbury, and between those stints wrote and tore up two novels.
In Salisbury, where there was a shortage of women, Doris had her pick of partners for dancing, films and drinks at the Sports Club. Looking back, she singled out the dance music as the most seductive influence, but underlying it, she wrote, was nature “preparing us to replenish the population between world wars.”
The force exerted itself quickly. She managed to disengage Frank Wisdom, a civil servant, from his fiancée, and married him in 1939. She wrote that she was pregnant at the time but did not know it. She sought an abortion several times, but each time some circumstance intervened, she wrote. When she finally was told the pregnancy was too far advanced, she went home relieved. In retrospect, she said, “now it seems to me obvious I knew all the time I was pregnant, was in alliance with nature against myself.”
Her first child, John, exhausted her. But she found solace when she drifted into a group whose members considered themselves revolutionaries. She was excited by their ideas and became, in effect, a Communist. Ms. Lessing began distributing the South African Communist Party newspaper and protesting the “color bar” laws that kept power in the hands of the white minority. In 1943, her daughter, Jean, was born. By this point, the author was disillusioned with being a Salisbury matron, and Jean spent much of her first year in the care of others.
Striking Off on Her Own
Finally, Ms. Lessing decided to leave her children, her husband and her home to pursue her ideals and life with her friends and comrades. . read more:
Margaret Atwood - Doris Lessing: a model for every writer coming from the back of beyond
Wonderful Doris Lessing has died. You never expect such rock-solid features of the literary landscape to simply vanish. It's a shock. I first encountered Lessing on a park bench in Paris in 1963. I was a student, living on baguettes, oranges and cheese, as one did, and suffering from a stomach ailment, as one did. My pal Alison Cunningham and I had been barred from our hostel during the day, so Alison was soothing my prostrate self by reading from The Golden Notebook, which was all the rage among such as us. Who knew we were reading a book that was soon to become iconic?
