. Doris Lessing Reflects on World, Change

Biography - Doris Lessing.org

From the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995

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 - Jan Hanford

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.

Her most recent novel is The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the snow dog.

Doris Lessing Reflects on World, Change - Hillel Italie- The Associated Press - Saturday, October 7, 2006; 11:15 PM

LONDON -- For more than 20 years, author Doris Lessing has lived on a quiet block in North London, in a brick Hampstead house among a row of such homes, as straight and steady as a line of toy soldiers.

Long favored by artists and intellectuals, her neighborhood is an ideal mix of solitude and activity, just a short, uphill walk from shops and cafes and busy, curving streets, a place that on this warm afternoon could convince you the world is but one long coffee break. The 86-year-old Lessing knows better.

"It's extremely affluent around here and people just take it for granted," she says. "I don't remember anything like this when I first came to London."

She has known many homes before living here: A country house in Persia (now Iran), a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a boarding house in South Africa, cold water flats around London. She has married twice, raised three children, watched this city rise from the dust of World War II, looked on in shock as the great truths of her youth _ apartheid, Communism, Nazism, the British empire _ all vanished.

"When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she recalls. "What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire _ nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?"

The author of the classic "The Golden Notebook" and more than 40 other works, including an upcoming novel, "The Cleft," Lessing can be a severe figure in her author photos, with her gray-white hair pulled back in a bun, dark eyes set in a cold stare as if engaged with the gravest matters.

But in person, she is warmer, a casual presence who rises at 5 each morning to feed the birds who gather by a nearby reservoir. Interviewed recently in her living room, Lessing wears a plain blue dress as she brings out two glasses and a 64-ounce, plastic bottle of Diet Coke. She settles on a well-used sofa, in a flat that could be described as vintage bohemian: furniture old and low to the ground, books scattered throughout like so many ashtrays after an all-night party.

"She's an intrepid soul," says fellow author Margaret Atwood. "She's a very good writer and she's had a very interesting life."

Born Doris May Tayler in 1919, she was a contrarian child with a mantra of three short, stubborn words: "I will not." Books, not grown-ups, were her best companions. As a girl, she read "The Secret Garden," biblical tales, Rudyard Kipling, history books about Napoleon, the Crusades, and Benjamin Franklin and Charles Dickens, whom she chose against the advice of the nuns in her convent. By age 10, she had written a one-act play featuring Shakespearean monarchs.

"I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading," says Lessing, who dropped out of school at age 15.

Not long after moving to London, she debuted as an author in 1950 with "The Grass Is Singing," a short novel set in South Africa about a white woman's terror of a black servant, and soon followed with three of her autobiographical "Children of Violence" novels: "Martha Quest," "A Proper Marriage" and "A Ripple From the Storm."

In 1962, she released "The Golden Notebook," her most famous and influential work, the story of a writer's divided selves _ political, literary, sexual _ that sold millions of copies and anticipated the uprising to come with its declaration that "every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream."

"It's a touchstone book for my generation, and for a lot of women of every generation," says Kate Millett, the 72-year-old feminist and author of "Sexual Politics," "Flying" and several other books.

"When I read it, I remember thinking, `This is a book I've always wanted to read,' something about the perseverance of the character and the fact she had good women friends. I think I wanted to live inside that book for a while when I read it."

Lessing herself has long denied that "The Golden Notebook" was written for the liberation of women. During the interview, she cites an early line in the novel _ "everything's cracking up" _ as a message well beyond the breakdown of traditional male-female relationships. Referring to the book's nonlinear structure, she calls it "a way of looking at things from all different angles and not just from the straight and narrow."

Unsentimental about men, Lessing has been attacked by critic Harold Bloom for her "crusade against male human beings." But she is just as tough on women, whom she often presents as equally capable of kindness and malice, reveling in their appearance and their ability to attract men.

"I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement," she says. "Whatever type of behavior women are coming up with, it's claimed as a victory for feminism, doesn't matter how bad it is. We don't seem go in very much for self-criticism."

In her work, and in her life, she assumes nothing, considers all sides. She sees herself as a particular kind of person _ living in a certain time and place _ who could have easily turned out differently. Her books have been influenced by Communism, Sufism and science fiction, but two contradictory impulses show throughout: to demonstrate that nothing is permanent; to insist that nothing really changes.

"Mara and Dann" is set in a future of endless war and flight. "The Fifth Child" shows how a sensible, affluent British couple sustains its lifestyle through the birth of four children, only to be destroyed by the fifth. In "Memoirs of a Survivor," an educated British woman cares for a teenage boy as the country collapses into anarchy.

"Quite a few people think it wouldn't take very much to return to a few warrior bands, with a few breeding women," Lessing says. "Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse."

For a brief time, Lessing imagined she could have the best of fate, when she joined the Communist Party in Rhodesia, and again in London. She had been inspired, she later wrote, by the idealism of the mid-20th century and by being around people "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read."

"Some of them were marvelous people and they tended to be very good at analyzing the problems of their own society," she now says. "But they talked absolute rubbish about international affairs and the Soviet Union. I left the party (in the 1950s) when everybody else did, as it became evident that the Soviet Union was a very bad place."

Through literature, and politics, she came to know some of the leading thinkers and artists of her time. Her encounters include a warm visit with Betty Friedan ("a good Jewish mother, we got on like anything"), a contentious meeting with a young Henry Kissinger ("a harsh, abrasive aggressive force") and an amused get together with Allen Ginsberg and some fellow Beats.

"They turned up in London, a whole lot of them, and I went to meet them," she recalls. "I thought they were extremely likable, but this isn't how they wanted to be seen. I thought then, and I think I was right, that they weren't as frightening and as shocking as they wanted to be. They were mostly middle-class people trying to be annoying."

Lessing doesn't write every day, she says, but works often enough to publish at least one book a year and complete the occasional review or essay or short story, an uncommercial art form she cherishes like so many antique coins. Lessing's next novel, "The Cleft" _ its title a reference to female genitalia _ is her latest report on the "attitudes" between the sexes.

"I saw a science magazine which said that the basic human type is female and that men came along afterward," she explains. "You have an original community of females, on a seashore, very conventional. Then, one gives birth to a baby boy and somehow the boy manages to grow up.

"So I've written a story based on this. I have it all told by a literary Roman senator _ an aristocrat, very reactionary _ discussing the very violent revolutionary, and evolutionary, changes.

"I noticed that my typist at the publishing house was shocked by some of the words I used. I can't wait to see what people make of it. Some people will hate every word of it; it's not politically correct."