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| NSW South Coast, Australia |
This was a pleasure dome and a secret place. "I had forgotten how beautiful it was," he said, as they looked out across the crawling sea. But it wasn't really. Perhaps to some. But the beachside suburb where had had grown up had been overlain with fear. The end times were coming, the mighty wrath against the sinners. And the creeping hostility in the fabric of everything, it had begun. There wasn't any use even pretending he was comfortable where he was; he wasn't. Impatient to be gone. He could cast aside all attachments; well all attachments here. There were moments when The Places Fled included everything that had ever happened; and then some. And so, in a dreary introspection, lonely in a place where he had never belonged and held no affinity, he drank for company and ended up alone. Of course.
These fractious days were almost over, but even so he could barely count the days, the raining strands of grey hair, his physical awkwardness. If there was a way to hide he would do so. Deep inside had been the only place; but the walls had collapsed. So now he thrashed on an open sea. Moby Dick imagery still came to mind, as it had done for so many generations since Herman Melville wrote the classic. He was reading a shallow detective novel set in Venice, A Sea of Troubles. He was watching The Supranos. The series As Time Goes By was almost over. A crazed and delinquent air. Everyone else was in their place. Now he was making his own place; but it wasn't here. The death silence was too great; even with the morning radios and what had once been the almost indistinguishable murmur of his pursuers. He still found it hard to see how he could have walked into such a terrible trap.
The pain wasn't just psychic. He was beginning to hurt in the same familiar places, repetitive strain injury. He could have dumped his troubles on someone else, but should have avoided all consequence. He wasn't marching forwards anymore than he was marching back. The lonely gesture of a dying elephant. His companions had already been slaughtered. The worker's paradise had fallen to mud. The coifed wives who all thought they were hard done by if they hadn't been to the beauty parlour twice that week were all gone; or working themselves. The glistening new show-off utes parked ostentatiously in front of new houses were all gone; the sprawl of triumphant kids, insulated against all harm. They, too, had disappeared indoors to play with computer games; the overwhelming fear of their parents driving them inside.
The haphazard collection of new and old vehicles outside homes, they too were gone, a barely conceiled piece of memory. Their overlords had made them poor. The Australia of old had disappeared under the dead hand of socialism and the Tory whip. Coles and Woolworths thrived and the local shopping centres died. The Golden Arches of McDonalds became a ubiquitious part of the Australian landscape, and the small, cheerful hamburger and fish and chip shops disapeared. Over-regulation had strangled everything; and there was no way of unscrambling the omelette. The offender has been charged with an Unregulated High Risk Activity, the radio intoned of some schoolie jumping from balcony to balcony 11 floors up on the Gold Coast. As if all activity should be regulated, and to cover any field of human endeavour. As if a lifetime of proscription was only just beginning. And if you had a tatoo or had ever been a member of a Bikie Gang, well then God help you. You would be hunted down. Thank you Maurice New Man. Thank you Tories. Thank you Labor. You've destroyed the joint.
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Doris Lessing: a model for every writer coming from the back of beyond
Inventive, brave, down-to-earth – she never hedged her bets or pulled her punches, doing everything with all her heart
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'If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Lessing would be carved on it.' Photograph: Kieran Doherty/Reuters
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?
Just as we were getting to a crucial moment in the life of Anna Wulf, along came a policeman to tell us that lying down on park benches was against the law, so we decamped for a bistro and another interesting washroom experience. (Footnote: this was before second-wave feminism. It was before widespread birth control. It was before mini-skirts. So Anna Wulf was a considerable eye-opener: she was doing things and thinking things that had not been much discussed at the Toronto dinner tables of our adolescence, and therefore seemed pretty daring.)
The other woman we were sneakily reading in 1963 was Simone de Beauvoir, but the childhoods of little-girl colonials such as ourselves lacked starched petticoats and were not very French. We had more in common with a remote-places-of-the-Empire parvenue such as Doris Lessing: born in Iran in 1919, growing up on a bush farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); then, after two failed marriages, running away to England with scant prospects, which was where we colonials with scant prospects ran away to then.
Some of Lessing's energy may have come from her outland origins: when the wheel spins, it's on the edges that the sparks fly. Her upbringing also gave her an insight into the viewpoints and plights of people unlike herself. And if you know you will never really fit in – that you will always be "not really English" – you have less to lose. Doris did everything with all her heart, all her soul, and all her might. She was sometimes temporarily wrong, as in the matter of Stalinist communism, but she never hedged her bets or pulled her punches. She went for broke.
If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges.
She was political in the most basic sense, recognising the manifestations of power in its many forms. She was spiritual as well, exploring the limits and pitfalls that came with being human, especially after she became an adherent of Sufism. As a writer she was inventive and brave, branching out into science fiction in her Canopus In Argos series at a time when it was a dodgy thing for a "mainline" novelist to do. She was also very down-to-earth, having famously remarked "Oh Christ!" when informed in 2007 that she had won the Nobel prize. She was only the eleventh woman to do so, and never expected it; a lack of expectation that was in itself a kind of artistic freedom, for if you don't think of yourself as an august personage, you don't have to behave yourself. You can still kick up your heels and push the limits, and that was what interested Doris Lessing, always. Her celebrated experiment with a pseudonym as a demonstration of the hurdles facing unknown writers being just one example. (Her "Jane Somers" novels were reviewed as pale imitations of Doris Lessing, which must have been a little daunting for her.)
I never met Simone de Beauvoir – that would have been, in my youth, a terrifying prospect – but I did meet Doris Lessing, several times. These meetings took place in literary contexts, and she was everything a younger female writer might hope for: kind, helpful, interested, and with a special understanding of the position of writers from elsewhere within England.
As we age, we face a choice of caricatures; for women writers vis à vis younger ones, it's Cruella De Vil versus Glinda the Good. I encountered my share of Cruellas along the way, but Doris Lessing was one of the Glindas. In that respect, she was an estimable model. And she was a model also for every writer coming from the back of beyond, demonstrating – as she so signally did – that you can be a nobody from nowhere, but, with talent, courage, perseverance through hard times, and a dollop of luck, you can scale the topmost storyheights.
Doris Lessing was a radical, in the truest sense
The writer and critic Margaret Drabble recently made an observation that I think is representative of the diverse and prolific career of the British author Doris Lessing, who died last night at 94:
She made her own place. She didn’t like categories. She didn’t even recognise them.
It is a sentiment about which Lessing herself left her readers and critics in little doubt. During an interview on National Public Radio in 1984, Lessing was called to account for her move into the realm of science-fictional writing. She was asked:
Do you have some sense of what the role of the writer should be? Is it to show us the world as it is, or the world as it should be, or the world as it might be?
Lessing retorted:
Why do you make it “or, or, or”? It could be “and, and, and”.
Born the year after the first world war ended, two years after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and plunged that country into civil war, and decades before the colonial system in which she grew up would finally crumble, Lessing lived through the second world war, the Cold War, and myriad other conflicts of every type and size.
Exiled African independence leaders dined in her London flat throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s, she travelled through Afghanistan to uncover and record the ravages of successive waves of conflict there. And she was born in what would become Iran, a country that now finds itself in the crosshairs of international tensions.
Lessing’s early novels were written during a transitional stage in contemporary British and postcolonial literatures, and in the germinal years of what might now be generally referred to as the era of postmodern literature.
She left school in what was then Southern Rhodesia in her early teens and educated herself with the impromptu library of books she cobbled together by order from Britain. She wrote The Golden Notebook at the end of the 1950s as a post-war immigrant to London, and she has always occupied something of an in-between position – not only culturally and politically, but also in the literary milieu of her contemporaries.
Perhaps it is for that reason she continued to occupy an uncomfortable place in a genealogy of that period: she was a late modernist, an early postmodernist, a social realist, a Marxist, a Jungian, a Sufi, a science-fictionalist – among many other things.
A subtle political and intellectual evolution
Lessing’s near-infamous discomfort with being characterised as a feminist writer stemmed from a combination of motivations, but she was particularly uncomfortable with the reductive logic which seemed to follow from such a characterisation – namely, that that must be all she was. Her occasionally blunt articulation of this discomfort, along with her move away from the psychological and social realism of The Golden Notebook, led to her being seen in some quarters as a former fellow-traveller who had strayed from the path.
What is lost in this view of Lessing as an ideological turncoat, however, is an understanding of the subtle character of her political and intellectual evolution. To generalise, it is less the case that she disavowed her earlier politics than that she saw so many ideologies of emancipation turned into dogmas.
Early readers of The Golden Notebook were by no means wrong in recognising Lessing’s prescient and provocative diagnosis of what she referred to (albeit wryly) as “the sex war”. What the novel’s later preface suggests is that Lessing found the critical and popular emphasis on this issue to the exclusion of all others profoundly irritating.
She regarded the novel’s multiple threads as wholly intertwined and constitutive of one another, as facets of the broader theme of the individual who is both defined by and resistant to her relation to a social whole. Lessing was disillusioned with Marxism in theory and practice by the 1960s, yet continued to value that propensity to “look at things as a whole and in relation to each other” which she attributed to the Marxist readers of The Golden Notebook in her preface.
Beyond categories
To my mind this vision of a “whole” as constituted by and embracing fragmentation, breakdown, opposition and dissent, rather than requiring its resolution, was Lessing’s response to codification of all kinds – political, social, sexual, creative, intellectual, formal, generic.
The 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 titledBorder 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.
In a letter to the famous British historian and commentator E. P. Thompson, written in 1957 and published in the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade, Lessing expressed the belief that it was in her fiction writing that she would find whatever contingent, provisional knowledge was possible. She encouraged her correspondent, a long-time friend and sometime antagonist, to investigate his own beliefs and the character of his knowledge, through the act of writing, saying:
I suspect you of being an artist, in which case you ought to be finding out what you think by writing it … I don’t want to make any more concepts. For myself, I mean. I want to let myself simmer into some sort of knowledge, but I don’t know what it is … I want to write a lot of books.
I think that the knowledge Lessing allowed herself to “simmer into” will only appear that much more prescient, that much more profound, when her legacy is viewed in hindsight.
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.
How lucky we are that she did indeed go on to “write a lot of books”.
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