How Writer Doris Lessing Didn't Want To Be Remembered
Many call Doris Lessing a feminist icon — a characterization the author rejected as "stupid."
In the course of a long and eventful life, author Doris Lessing was many things.
She
was a mother — and a self-described "house mother" for a procession of
starving artists, writers and political refugees. She was a refugee
herself, from bourgeois respectability in 1940s Rhodesia. She was a
campaigner against racism, a lover, an ardent communist, and a serial
rescuer of cats.
But during an interview in Lessing's North
London home one dark, cold day just shy of her 89th birthday, the writer
briskly rejected the label most frequently attached to her: feminist
icon — particularly when applied to her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook.
"Oh, it's just stupid; I've seen it so often," she said. "I mean, there's nothing feminist about The Golden Notebook. The second line is: 'As far as I can see, everything is cracking up.' That is what The Golden Notebook is about!"
Author Doris Lessing died Sunday at the age
of 94. Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature for a life's work
which included around 40 books and collections of essays and memoirs.
The novel follows Anna Wulf, a single mother and a writer on the
verge of a nervous breakdown in post-war London. Wulf keeps
different-colored notebooks to chronicle her political, social, sexual
and emotional selves. Only in the golden notebook of the novel's title
would all these selves finally be integrated.
The Golden Notebook
has been called one of the great and most complex novels of the 20th
century. Lessing herself has been called one of the century's most
clear-eyed observers.
Indeed, even in the science fiction which
she considered her finest work, Lessing's characters live firmly within
— and are utterly the products of — history.
"I think all the
time we are being manipulated by great social currents. We are not often
aware of it," Lessing said. "Well, my life certainly has been. First,
it's been dominated by war, right from the start. I've never been free
of all that. I got married and had children because of the Second World
War — as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring
a child into this wicked world!' But we had children by the dozen and
got married. So, no, this is how we are formed."
Lessing was
raised by British parents in Zimbabwe — called Rhodesia then. She left
school at 13, left home at 15 and married for the first time at 19.
By
the age of 30, Lessing had married again and become disenchanted with
her second husband and his communist beliefs. She moved to London with
their son, and began living some of the experiences described in The Golden Notebook.
While
her novels tended to attack sweeping historical and social themes,
Lessing could also work in miniature. In 1999, she read from an essay
called "A Week in Heidelberg." In it, she trains her powers of
observation on a blackbird – "A bold, black, glossy bird," she writes,
"with eyes outlined in orange." She had wooed it to her hotel windowsill
with a piece of apple.
"He knew I was there — or something was
making him nervous — and he kept jabbing his beak hard into the apple
flesh, then stopping to look at the white screen close to him. And then
there was another series of quick, downward jabs. To shrink yourself
down in imagination and see that gleaming weapon just above you — what a
horror! The worm's eye view..."
"She
was never a great stylist," author and critic Blake Morrison says. "No
one would sit down to relish the prose. What she was was a great
observer, a great joiner-in, really, engaging with the intellectual
movements, the swirls and currents of the day."
It's an
assessment with which Lessing would likely have agreed. "I have done
quite a good job of documenting a lot of our time, I think. I mean, what
is The Golden Notebook? It couldn't be written now, could it? I
think that some of my books are very good. I've written some rather
good short stories."
Lessing once refused to allow the Queen to
declare her a dame of the British Empire, because — in the author's
words — "There is no British Empire." Lessing called winning the Nobel
Prize "a disaster" for her writing, but her friends say the money which
came with the prize helped ease her final years, spent, by her own
account, giving interviews and caring for her invalid son.
