It was scheduled as a hankie job. Journalists gathered outside Doris Lessing’s
home in north London on Thursday to record the bashful – and hopefully
tearful – reaction of the supposedly frail 87-year-old author to the news
that she had won the £765,000 Nobel prize for literature.
Perhaps they had forgotten that Lessing is a former communist firebrand and
one of the surviving Angry Young Men – albeit an honorary one. A
professional contrarian with a restless mind as sharp as a tack, she does
not give “a load of old socks” what the world thinks of her.
So the hacks rocked back on their heels when confronted by Lessing’s brusque
dismissal of literature’s highest honour. “I’ve won all the prizes in
Europe, every bloody one,” she said, noting wearily that her name had been
on the Nobel shortlist for 30 years. “You can’t go on getting excited every
year about this.”
Later she mustered a few gracious phrases, perhaps finding merit in the fact
that the Nobel prize was conceived by the inventor of dynamite. Of late
Lessing seems to have taken a delight in exploding the assumptions of her
adoring fanbase.
The fiery old dame of English letters was at her most incendiary during the
Hay literary festival in May, when respectful questions lobbed her way were
clobbered. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she snapped at one fawning
disciple. “Explain yourself!” At the end of one particularly lengthy inquiry
she remarked that she had not heard “a single word of it”.
She emerges as a more gentle and vulnerable figure in the fastness of her
Hampstead home, where her beloved cat Yum Yum presides over the piles of
books and newspapers that dominate her sitting room. Small, with the face of
a wise gypsy woman and white hair drawn back into a bun, she is apt to
complain to visitors that her bones have the consistency of chalk and she is
going deaf as a result of taking daily antimalarial pills as a child.
Yet she is nimble enough and her steely intellect is a reminder that she
remains arguably Britain’s most influential writer. Her torrent of fiction,
poetry and drama links her to a cabal of women writers – including Iris
Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Naomi Mitchison and Nadine Gordimer – whose writing
defined the latter half of the 20th century and whose lives broke every
convention.
To Lessing’s scandalous baggage of having divorced two husbands and abandoned
two children to pursue her rise as a postwar literary figure, another
surprising accusation was added last year. In his biography of John Osborne,
A Patriot for Us, John Heilpern claimed that the playwright and Lessing had
been lovers.
Lessing emphatically denied the allegation, while remembering Osborne as an
unhappy “wounded” man who was easily hurt: “He was very social, rather witty
– sometimes unkindly. He was a very mixed-up person, extremely generous in
some ways, and then he would lash out.”
If she fondly remembers the group of Angry Young Men to which she was coopted
– hosting tea parties in Hampstead for the likes of Osborne, Ken Tynan,
Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson – she is scornful of the feminists who
tried to make her their icon. Her 1962 autobiographical work, The Golden
Notebook, depicting the life, loves and mental breakdown of a contemporary
“free woman”, became a keystone in the burgeoning feminist movement.
Now she views the book as her feminist “albatross” and the sisterhood as “some
of the smuggest, most unself-critical people the world has ever seen. They
are horrible”. Her beef is that after their initial “burst of energy”,
feminists became political and turned on each other instead of achieving
more.
She did not get their thanks for her recent novel, The Cleft, in which she
invented an early race of women of the same name who live free from sexual
intrigue and men, bearing only female children, until their harmony is
shattered by the birth of male offspring called the Squirts. These
references to reproductive equipment so upset a female proof reader that she
refused to continue working on it.
The Cleft received mixed reviews, reflecting the division of Lessing’s readers
between those who love her straight novels and those who prefer her science
fiction. The latter was said to be responsible for her early removal from
the Nobel prize’s unofficial list, even though she regards her Canopus in
Argos series of SF books as her finest work. In the 1960s, she recalled last
week, “they sent one of their minions especially to tell me they didn’t like
me at the Nobel prize and I would never get it”.
So why do they like her now, better than they did then? “They can’t give a
Nobel to someone who’s dead so I think they were probably thinking they had
better give it to me now before I popped off.”
The Swedish Academy described Lessing as “that epicist of the female
experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a
divided civilisation to scrutiny”. On hearing this, the author perked up:
“Oh good, did they say that about me?” Not everyone hailed the award. Harold
Bloom, the American literary critic, called the academy’s decision “pure
political correctness”.
Lessing’s ideological odyssey from communism through psychiatry to mysticism
began in Africa. In fact she was born in Persia (now Iran) on October 22,
1919, the daughter of Captain Alfred Taylor, a first world war amputee, who
worked for the Imperial Bank of Persia. The family moved to the British
colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the vain hope of making a
fortune farming maize.
Her mother Emily, a nurse, aspired to the lifestyle of an Edwardian lady but
her brooding resentment at genteel poverty made Lessing resolve not to fall
into the same trap. To escape her mother’s stifling expectations, she left
the Dominican convent high school in Salisbury at 13. Then, two years later,
she left home. “I had to leave,” she recalled. “I went off to be a
nursemaid, or what is now called an au pair. It was a great waste of time.”
After working briefly as a chauffeur she found happiness as a telephone
operator at the Salisbury exchange, dancing all night at the sports club: “I
don’t know how I survived. We drank from lunchtime until midnight.”
At 19 she married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant 10 years her senior, with whom
she had two children. Bored, she found intellectual stimulation among the
colony’s influx of Europeans fleeing the Nazis. She turned from tea parties
to politics at 24, joining the Left Book Club. There she met and later
married Gottfried Lessing, a hardline communist and German emigrant, but the
marriage did not last long. Their sex life was awful. Marriage, she has
concluded, “is not one of my talents”.
In 1949 she took a boat to England, with two marriages behind her, a baby and
the manuscript for The Grass is Singing. Asked why she had abandoned her son
and daughter from her first marriage, she quoted Rousseau’s explanation for
putting his children into a foundling home: “They are going to be much
better brought up, because look at me, I’m so rackety.”
Two granddaughters – a lawyer and an architect – live in South Africa. Peter,
the son from her second marriage, is a diabetic who shares her home.
The Grass is Singing, set in Rhodesia and depicting a poor white farmer whose
wife has a relationship with their African servant, marked her as a coming
star in 1950, helping to open people’s eyes to the reality of colonialism.
In the 1950s Lessing recanted her “neurotic decision” to join the Communist
party after Stalin’s postwar purges. She has since described communists as
“murderers with a clear conscience”.
While struggling as a single mother in postwar London, described in Walking in
the Shade, she produced nine novels in 10 years, not to mention plays at the
Royal Court theatre, essays, poems and journalism.
Lessing was lionised in Britain while her books were banned in white South
Africa and Rhodesia. Today she has harsh words for both countries: “South
Africa is a horrible place. It’s very abrasive and provincial in the same
way that Rhodesia was.” She blames the “liberal establishment” for
handing over Zimbabwe to Robert Mugabe: “They could see what he was like
from the moment he started killing off the Matabele. We found it hard to
criticise a black leader.”
She has insisted that her next novel will be her last: “I really do think that
enough is enough.” It will leave her more time to give the sycophants hell.
