Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing died last Sunday at the age of 94. Her life, like her work, was varied:
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 out of 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 Doris 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.
Kim Murphy elaborates on The Golden Notebook:
In her work, Lessing raised but didn’t necessarily answer the existential questions of women’s lives in the 1960s and beyond: Is it better to be married or single? How do you raise children and have a professional life? Is a woman denying her intellect if she longs for a man to love her? Why do older women still feel passion, and what is acceptable for them to do about it? If my life is so perfect, why do I feel as though I’m losing my mind? …
“The Golden Notebook” suggested that humanity, male and female, is driven by a common yearning: “Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who would really understand me, who’d be kind to me,” one of the characters said. “That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”
The above video from 2007 captures Lessing’s reaction to the news that she won the Nobel Prize. Her first words? “Oh, Christ!” When she was offered the title of “Dame” in 1992, she was similarly dismissive, rejecting the honor by writing, “There is something ruritannical about honours given in the name of a non-existent Empire.” David Ulin praises her as someone who believed “that literature should recognize no boundaries, that the best work moves us by challenging our preconceptions, whether they have to do with content or with form”:
This, in some ways, could be read as Lessing’s legacy: Don’t stand on ceremony, question your beliefs and prejudices and always, always be prepared to change your mind.
Justin Cartwright remembers a woman “truly unique in her views and in her take on life.” Sophia Barnes argues that “[t]he diversity of Lessing’s oeuvre goes hand in hand with the impossibility – and I would argue the futility – of trying to categorise her”:
A recent collection of scholarly essays on her work was titled Border Crossings, in reference to her seemingly endless capacity for moving between spaces, genres, forms and modes of thinking. What is important to emphasise is that in crossing borders Lessing did not leave what she had experienced or thought behind; rather, she constantly moved back and forth across borders, displaying an adaptive historical consciousness which was vital to the whole body of her fiction.. … She was a postmodernist before postmodernism, a post-communist before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and perhaps both more and less of a feminist than she has often been seen to be. She was without doubt a radical, in the truest sense: intellectually uncompromising, absolutely individual, always striving with the boundaries of her form and the intellectual climate of her age.
From her 2007 Nobel lecture:
We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be. We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.
The New Yorker has assembled a collection of her pieces here. The New Statesman has republished her first piece for the magazine, from 1956, on being refused entry into South Africa. Her 1988 interview with the Paris Review is here.
The Dish 