Doris Lessing - Bio - Books - Analysis

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.

But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time." The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."

In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them." Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical judgement" - to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1951-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.

Attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf "tries to live with the freedom of a man" - a point Lessing seems to confirm: "These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.

Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 and If the Old Could..., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 appeared in 1995 and received the James Tait Black Prize for best biography.

Addenda


In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and In Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's personality, life and views.

In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote the book. In an interview she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview." And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996.

Late in the year, HarperCollins published Play with A Tiger and Other Plays, a compilation of 3 of her plays: Play with a Tiger, The Singing Door and Each His Own Wilderness. In an unexplained move, HarperCollins only published this volume in the U.K. and it is not available in the U.S., to the disappointment of her North American readers.

In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time, providing the libretto for the opera "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" which premiered in Heidelberg, Germany in May. Walking in the Shade, the anxiously awaited second volume of her autobiography, was published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. This volume documents her arrival in England in 1949 and takes us up to the publication of The Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her autobiography, she will not be writing a third volume.

Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind." 1999 also saw her first experience on-line, with a chat at Barnes & Noble (transcript). In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Annual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya.

December 31 1999: In the U.K.'s last Honours List before the new Millennium, Doris Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done "conspicuous national service." She revealed she had turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire because there is no British Empire. Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means "you're not called anything - and it's not demanding. I like that". Being a Dame was "a bit pantomimey". The list was selected by the Labor Party government to honor people in all walks of life for their contributions to their professions and to charity. It was officially bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II.

In January, 2000 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing.

Ben, in the World, the sequel to The Fifth Child was published in Spring 2000 (U.K.) and Summer 2000 (U.S.).

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

In 2005 she was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize.

In 2007 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Her most recent novel is The Cleft.




“Oh, Christ!” Doris Lessing is reported to have said when told she’d won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. The 87-year-old author has been a favourite for the Nobel for at least three decades now — her collected works would fill an entire bookshelf, and she is still widely read and discussed. Her oeuvre is so vast that it’s hard to capture the full impact of her writing, but here’s a look at some of her work.

The Grass is Singing: (1950)
Doris Lessing’s first novel was set in the Rhodesia of her adolescent years. Some of the sexual neurosis of that time can be seen in the 1952 Bantam cover, which features the towering, King Kong-like figure of a black man armed with a sword, watched by a shrunken, doll-like white woman.

There was little distance between an Indian reader, even in 1980s India, and Lessing’s world. The immutable laws that governed white Africa and that Mary Turner broke were in place, if in slightly different form, in our time; a relationship between memsahib and servant was just as unthinkable as it was then. The novel captured the slow disintegration of a young woman whose confidence and sense of self is slowly eroded by a bad marriage and her inability to handle the natives, the heat, the farm, the house or anything about the reality of Africa. The interracial relationship between Mary and the servant Moses was one of the reasons why Rhodesia banned Lessing from entering the country in 1956.

The Golden Notebook: (1962)
For at least three, and perhaps four, generations of women, The Golden Notebook was as iconic a text as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Lessing called it her albatross: the continuing success of The Golden Notebook often threatened to cast the rest of her formidable oeuvre in the shade, and she ruffled feminist feathers when she said bluntly that she didn’t see herself as a feminist.

Lessing broke several rules of form when she wrote the story of Anna Wulf, author of a very successful novel, who keeps four notebooks of different colours. The black records her early years in Africa; the blue is a record of her personal life; the red of her political life and her growing disenchantment with communism; the yellow contains a novel based on personal experience. As Anna Wulf grapples with a love affair and with possible insanity, she brings these all together in The Golden Notebook. It should be read today, if only as a reminder that there was a time when feminism meant not just sexual liberation, but political and artistic freedom as well.

Children of Violence: (1952-1969)
This five-book series, following the life of Martha Quest, is still remarkable, to any serious fan of Lessing’s writing. She would write two volumes of autobiography in later years, ducking away from the third on the grounds that it might hurt peoples’ feelings, but the ‘Martha Quest’ books is where she explored her life in Rhodesia, her uneasy relationship with domestic life and her break with the communist party. It’s also where she explored science fiction, imagining what it would be to grow old in a post-nuclear Britain, as a legitimate branch of literature. The Four-Gated City ranks as a classic work of SF, and Lessing’s insight that madness is only our reaction to seeing the future clearly remains chilling.

Canopus in Argos: (1979-1983)
Perhaps the best-remembered of Lessing’s SF novels are Shikasta: Re Colonised Planet 5 and The Sirian Experiments, part of the Canopus in Argos series. Today, reading them can be a difficult exercise — they come off as stodgy and wooden, and the initial refreshing shock of the ideas Lessing was trying to convey has worn off. Lessing, who was born in Persia, had been studying Sufism, and that influence shows in Shikasta, with its grand theme of millions of years of evolution compressed into the pages of a novel. Shikasta spawned a cult who believe fervently in Lessing’s imaginary worlds; when the writer tried to explain that these worlds didn’t exist, they set it down as an attempt by their ‘creator’ to test them.

The Diaries of Jane Somers: 1984
The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, novels by a “well-known journalist” called Jane Somers, were rejected by Doris Lessing’s publisher, had poor sales when finally published and only became a cause celebre when Lessing announced herself as the author. “If the books had come out in my name, they would have sold a lot of copies and reviewers would have said, ‘Oh, Doris, how wonderful’,” she said. She sparked off a furious debate: were the Somers books really as good as the rest of Lessing’s novels, what was she trying to prove? I found both ‘Somers’ books tedious, but then I find some of Lessing’s writing tedious too, so at least there was consistency.


«Είναι ηλίθιο να πιστεύεις σε δόγματα»
Πολλές φορές μέχρι τώρα ήταν υποψήφια για το Νομπέλ Λογοτεχνίας· το κέρδισε φέτος, χωρίς ωστόσο ιδιαίτερο ενθουσιασμό: «Μου είναι αδιάφορο...», έλεγε συχνά όταν τη ρωτούσαν στο παρελθόν αν θα επιθυμούσε μια τέτοια βράβευση. Αλλά δεν ήταν η μόνη τιμή που δεν την ενδιαφέρει. Ας θυμηθούμε πως είχε αρνηθεί προ ετών να πάρει τον τίτλο ευγενείας από τη βασίλισσα Ελισάβετ.

Εχοντας γράψει περίπου πενήντα βιβλία, δεκατέσσερα από αυτά έχουν μεταφραστεί στα ελληνικά, η γλυκιά 88χρονη Ντόρις Λέσινγκ παραμένει μια συγγραφέας με νεανικό πνεύμα και ζωηρή φαντασία. Της αρέσει να προκαλεί, αλλά και να ακούει, να αφουγκράζεται τις αλλαγές των καιρών.

Επαναστάτρια στην εποχή της, μετά τον πόλεμο, άφησε τη Ροδεσία (σημερινή Ζιμπάμπουε) και το συντηρητικό γαιοκτήμονα άντρα της. Ως δεύτερο σύζυγο επέλεξε τον κομμουνιστή Γκόντφριντ Λέσινγκ, και μαζί με αυτόν την επανάσταση, τη λογοτεχνία και τη ζωή στην Αγγλία.


Οπως και η Νοτιοαφρικανή Ναντίν Γκορντιμέρ, δεν σπούδασε ποτέ. Ο πρώτος της σταθμός, φεύγοντας από την Αφρική, το 1949, ήταν το Παρίσι, χρονιά που η Σιμόν ντε Μποβουάρ δημοσίευε το «Δεύτερο Φύλο», το πρώτο μεγάλο βιβλίο του φεμινισμού του 20ού αιώνα. Αργότερα, ανατρέφοντας μόνη της το γιο της Πίτερ (τους άλλους δύο τους άφησε στον πατέρα τους), έγινε οπαδός του κομμουνιστικού κόμματος, αλλά όχι για μεγάλο διάστημα: «Ολοι ήμασταν κομμουνιστές τότε, την εποχή του Ψυχρού Πολέμου... Μετά βαρεθήκαμε και προτιμήσαμε να το ρίξουμε στη διασκέδαση. Εκείνη την εποχή είχαμε ακόμη την αίσθηση του χιούμορ».

Καταφέρνει γρήγορα να εκδώσει το πρώτο της βιβλίο, η υπόθεση του οποίου έχει πολλές ομοιότητες με τη ζωή της. Η ηρωίδα είναι μια νέα γυναίκα παντρεμένη με έναν αγρότη τον οποίο απεχθάνεται, όπως και το αγρόκτημα, το χωριό, τη χώρα, το απαρτχάιντ. Το βιβλίο είχε άμεση επιτυχία. Η Λέσινγκ, πολέμια του απαρτχάιντ, για μεγάλο χρονικό διάστημα ήταν ανεπιθύμητο πρόσωπο στη Ροδεσία και στη Νότια Αφρική και ίνδαλμα για πολλούς Ευρωπαίους και κυρίως Ευρωπαίες.

Η ιδέα που έχει για τους πολιτικούς σήμερα δεν είναι ιδιαίτερα κολακευτική γι' αυτούς: Ο Τόνι Μπλερ; «Είναι ένα ανθρωπάκι, με όλες τις σημασίες της λέξης». Για τις πρόσφατες γαλλικές εκλογές και τον Σαρκοζί: «Δεν ξέρω, μπορεί και αυτός να είναι ανθρωπάκι», λέει σε πρόσφατη συνέντευξή της στην εφημερίδα «Λε Μοντ», με την ευκαιρία της έκδοσης στα γαλλικά του διηγήματος «Ο καρπός του έρωτα», που περιλαμβάνεται στο βιβλίο της «Οι Γιαγιάδες. Τέσσερις Ιστορίες» (εκδόσεις Καστανιώτης) που όμως στη Γαλλία κυκλοφόρησε ξεχωριστά.

Με Νόμπελ ή χωρίς αυτό, η Λέσινγκ παραμένει μια πολέμια του πολιτικά ορθού τρόπου ζωής και σκέψης. Επιτίθεται αδιάκοπα «σε εκείνους που έχουν ανάγκη από την αυστηρότητα και τα δόγματα και που συχνά είναι οι πιο ηλίθιοι», άνθρωποι που έχουν εγκαταστήσει «την πιο ισχυρή τυραννία σε αυτό που ονομάζουμε ελεύθερο κόσμο». Αλλά δεν είναι λιγότερο επικριτική απέναντι στις φεμινίστριες, τη στιγμή που η ίδια είχε χαρακτηριστεί, μετά την έκδοση του «Χρυσού Ημερολογίου» της, το 1962, «ζωντανή εικόνα του παγκόσμιου φεμινισμού».

Η γηραιά κυρία αντιμετωπίζει γενικότερα με σκωπτικό πνεύμα το φεμινιστικό κίνημα της δεκαετίας του '60, αφού -όπως λέει- όταν οι φεμινίστριες εκείνης της δεκαετίας πίστευαν πως είχαν ανακαλύψει τη σεξουαλική επανάσταση, η δική της γενιά, στους κύκλους της διανόησης και των τεχνών, στη δεκαετία του '50, είχε ήδη αποκτήσει κάθε είδους εμπειρία σε αυτόν τον τομέα.

«Αυτές οι γυναίκες» -είχε πει στη διάρκεια του Φεστιβάλ Βιβλίου στο Εδιμβούργο, το 2001- «συμπεριφέρονται άθλια απέναντι στους άντρες».

«Ηλίθιες, κακές και απαιδαγώγητες επιτίθενται σε ευγενικούς και έξυπνους άντρες... Εχει έρθει η ώρα να περάσουν στην αντεπίθεση». «Αυτά τα φεμινιστικά κινήματα- λέει επίσης στην εφημερίδα "Λιμπερασιόν"- δεν θέλησαν να δουν πως οι γυναίκες βρίσκονται πάντα στην αναζήτηση ενός άντρα και πως δεν μπορούμε να προχωρήσουμε στο χωρισμό μεταξύ ανδρών και γυναικών».

«Παραμένω σε αυτή τη θέση μου, λέει σήμερα η Λέσινγκ. Μετά την επανάστασή τους, πολλές γυναίκες δεν κατάλαβαν τίποτε, κι αυτό λόγω δογματισμού, λόγω έλλειψης ιστορικής ανάλυσης, λόγω της παραίτησής τους από την κριτική σκέψη, λόγω δραματικής έλλειψης χιούμορ».

Η διάθεσή της για συγκρούσεις ίσως είναι το μυστικό της εκπληκτικής της φόρμας. Δεν σκέπτεται δύο φορές αυτό που θέλει να πει. Αν θέλει να υποστηρίξει τους άντρες θα το κάνει, αν θέλει να μιλήσει για τις φυλές, θα μιλήσει για «Μαύρους» (όχι Εγχρωμους) και «Λευκούς» και γι' αυτό τα βιβλία της δεν θεωρούνται πολιτικά ορθά σε διάφορα αμερικανικά πανεπιστήμια. Λίγο τη νοιάζει. Ξαποστέλνει τους κριτικούς λογοτεχνικών βιβλίων, οι οποίοι -όπως λέει- πάσχουν, λόγω κομμουνιστικής επιρροής, από ψυχική ακαμψία. Ακόμη και η Σιμόν ντε Μποβουάρ δεν ξεφεύγει από την κριτική της και η σχέση της με τον Ζαν-Πολ Σαρτρ. Η Λέσινγκ δεν πίστεψε ποτέ στο μοντέλο του «δήθεν επαναστατικού ζευγαριού» που πρόβαλλαν οι ίδιοι και απογοητεύθηκε όταν είδε τη Σιμόν ντε Μποβουάρ να φέρεται τελικά σαν μια κοινή γυναίκα και τον Σαρτρ σαν έναν κοινό άντρα. «Επρεπε να είχε φύγει με τον Αμερικανό εραστή της», λέει σήμερα η Λέσινγκ και είναι σίγουρο πως εκείνη στη θέση της θα το είχε κάνει.

«Αυτό που με ενδιαφέρει πραγματικά είναι να προσπαθώ να καταλάβω τι "παίζεται" κάθε στιγμή. Αυτό είναι σημαντικό για κάθε συγγραφέα και αυτό πρέπει να αναδεικνύει στο έργο του». Το τελευταίο της βιβλίο που κυκλοφόρησε στη Βρετανία, στις αρχές του 2007, το «The Cleft», η Λέσινγκ το εμπνεύστηκε διαβάζοντας μια επιστημονική ανακοίνωση στην οποία υποστηριζόταν πως οι γυναίκες είναι το βασικό ανθρώπινο υλικό και πως οι άντρες εμφανίστηκαν αργότερα. Πρόκειται άραγε για μια επαναγραφή της Γένεσης με τον τρόπο του μύθου και του φανταστικού που τόσο αγαπά η συγγραφέας; Η απάντηση έρχεται με το σχόλιο μιας άλλης Βρετανίδας μυθιστοριογράφου, της Μάργκαρετ Ντραμπλ: «Η Ντόρις Λέσινγκ είναι μια από τις σπάνιες συγγραφείς που αρνήθηκαν να πιστέψουν πως ο κόσμος ήταν υπερβολικά περίπλοκος για να γίνει κατανοητός».

Η αλήθεια είναι πως οι γνώμες για το ταλέντο της Λέσινγκ είναι μοιρασμένες: άλλοι τοποθετούν τη Λέσινγκ στο Πάνθεον μαζί με τον Μπαλζάκ και την Τζορτζ Ελιοτ, εκτιμώντας τη λεπτότητα των συναισθημάτων της, την ιδιαίτερη προσοχή που προσδίδει στην ευαισθησία των νέων και των ηλικιωμένων και το μοναδικό της τρόπο να περιγράφει τις ανθρώπινες σχέσεις.

Υπάρχουν όμως και οι άλλοι, εκείνοι που της προσάπτουν ότι μοναδικός της στόχος είναι η πρόκληση και η αναστάτωση των αναγνωστών της, καταστρέφοντας με αυτόν τον τρόπο την εκπληκτική ευφυΐα της.