RIP Doris Lessing Doris Lessing, who died at aged 94, wasnt just a Nobel Prize-winning literary author — she was also a major hero of science fiction. She was one of the first authors with mainstream acclaim to embrace, and her fiction is worth more than a hundred writing workshops, for aspiring SF authors. She was a prolific writer, producing approximately 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 best known, 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 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. 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 within five months. From then on, Doris Lessing was established and the other books came swiftly. The Children of Violence series, published between 1952 and 1969, followed the adventures of one Martha Quest through adolescence, marriage, motherhood, divorce, communism and finally to the apocalypse of a Third World War. Doris Lessing always sternly denied any autobiographical basis for this series, but her own experiences were too similar to those of Martha’s for anyone to be convinced. She even borrowed her second husband’s middle name, Anton, for her heroine’s second spouse. In The Four-Gated City (1969), the last in the Children of Violence series, Doris Lessing moved her writing away from the sturdy realism of her earlier novels into the realms of the fantastic and the paranormal. She made telepathy a common occurrence and brought the shadowy world of mysticism and madness into focus. At the same time, she was discovering science fiction. It was a new genre of literature for her and she found its possibilities exciting. The Four- Gated City was the springboard for her own launch into space fiction. Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) traced the internal journey of a madman and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) the external travels of a woman in a post-holocaust London. The Canopus in Argos: Archives series, published between 1979 and 1983, represented Doris Lessing’s most determined attempt to chart new territories. But there were many who wished she had stuck with the old map. Some readers loyally followed her on her galactic mission; others grumbled and waited for her to return to her senses and realism. This she did, but in a wholly unexpected way. In 1984 Jane Somers, a new writer with only two books and a few tepid reviews to her credit, turned out to be the famous and highly regarded Doris Lessing. Jane Somers’ novels The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could (1984) had initially suffered a series of rejections including one from Doris Lessing’s own publishers. It was an elaborate hoax and one that gave her a great deal of pleasure. She considered herself thoroughly successful in proving the literary world’s uncourageous response to new writing. The rejection slips proved something else, the sagacity of publishers. A bad Doris Lessing was odd enough to be desirable, a bad novel by an unknown was just a bad novel. The Jane Somers books were Doris Lessing’s back door return to realism. The Good Terrorist followed in 1985. Inspired by the Harrods’ bombing, it described the posturing politics of demonstrations and riots and the unhappy Alice Mellings, who becomes caught up in that world. With The Fifth Child (1988) she resurrected the myth of the changeling to paint a merciless picture of ruined family life. 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.” The best among her short story collections, for example, The Habit of Loving (1957) and To Room Nineteen (1978), are tantalising glimpses into the hearts and lives of many different kinds of people, described with a vision accentuated by the demands of brevity. Her novels were not uniformly good. Some critics have called her style “plodding” and “flat-footed” and her space fiction was often dismissed out of hand. 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 First World War veteran, had married his nurse, Emily McVeagh, “which, as they both said often enough (though in different tones of voice), was just as well”. In the mid-1920s, the Taylers moved to Southern Rhodesia where home was a 3,000-acre maize farm on the veld. There they settled down to a life of quiet but persistent economic failure. In later life, Doris 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. 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, Doris 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 considerable energy was devoted to meetings, delivering pamphlets and drumming up supporters. In 1949 Doris 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, Doris 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 Doris Lessing. “I’ve known people before calling it suntan” came the confused and confusing answer. Doris 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. Doris Lessing’s first marriage, to Frank Charles Wisdom, was dissolved in 1943. Her second marriage, to Gottfried Anton Nicholas Lessing, ended in divorce in 1949. Doris Lessing, born October 22 1919, died November 17 2013
Posted on: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 20:22:17 +0000
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