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print versionThe Guardian, 17 November 2013
Doris Lessing dies aged 94
Tributes pour in for Nobel prize-winning author of over 50 novels including The Golden Notebook
by Maev Kennedy
Doris Lessing with her prize insignia of the 2007 Nobel prize in literature. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images
Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing, among more than 50 other novels ranging from political to science fiction, has died aged 94.
Twitter reacted quickly to the news, a shock to many despite her great age. The author and critic Lisa Jardine described it as "a huge loss"; the agent Carole Blake described her as an "amazing writer and woman"; and the writer Lisa Appignanesi wrote: "One of our very greatest writers has left us this past night, RIP."
The writer Bidisha tweeted: "Doris Lessing: prolific multi-genre genius dies in sleep after writing world-changing novels and winning Nobel. Not bad at all."
Born in Iran, brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe – where her 1950 first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was set – Lessing had been a London resident for more than half a century. In 2007 she arrived back to West Hampstead, north London, by taxi, carrying heavy bags of shopping, to find the doorstep besieged by reporters and camera crews. "Oh Christ," she said, on learning that their excitement was because at 88 she had just become the oldest author to win the Nobel prize in literature. Only the 11th woman to win the honour, she had beaten that year’s favourite, the American author Philip Roth.
Pausing rather crossly on her front path, she said "one can get more excited", and went on to observe that since she had already won all the other prizes in Europe, this was "a royal flush".
Later she remarked: "I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off."
The citation from the Swedish Academy called her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".
Her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook was described as "a feminist bible", and her fellow laureate J M Coetzee called her "one of the great visionary novelists of our time" .
Lisa Allardice on Doris Lessing: ’She helped change the way women are perceived, and perceive themselves’
by Lisa Allardice
Doris Lessing in 2007
Doris Lessing being besieged by the media at her London home after winning the Nobel prize for literature in 2007. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
"Oh Christ!" was Doris Lessing’s characteristically no-nonsense response to the assembled crowd of photographers from whom she learned that she had finally been awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2007. Bundling out of the back of a taxi, she had assumed all the cameras were there because they were filming a soap or an episode of Morse or something, for which the terraced street in West Hampstead where she lived for more than 25 years was particularly popular.
"I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal flush," she said from her front step. This scene became a hit on YouTube, with teenage bloggers commenting on how "cool" the latest laureate was. But Lessing was just being herself. She really didn’t give a damn about what the world thought.
After 40 years of being shortlisted, Lessing at 87 was the oldest winner of the literature prize, and only the 11th female winner in its then 104-year history. What a pity, she scolded, that Virginia Woolf wasn’t number four or five. The Swedish academy (which, according to Lessing, had publicly disapproved of her in the 1970s), described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". The Golden Notebook, published 45 years before, was commended as a "pioneering work" that "belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship".
Lessing’s fate was always to be feted as a pioneer of the feminist movement, a mantle she had thrust upon her and spent many years trying to shake off, much to the ire of the sisterhood who had claimed her as a leader. It was a lifelong source of frustration to her that the feverish excitement, both positive and negative (she was called a "man-hater" and "ball-breaker") provoked by its depiction of female emancipation, in particular sexual liberation, eclipsed the – to her – more important theme of madness and breakdown and the novel’s experimental, fragmentary structure.
Although she came to see The Golden Notebook as her "albatross", she had to concede that the novel, written during a period of great personal and social upheaval, had a life and energy of its own. "This book has got a sort of charge to it. It keeps popping up somewhere in some country and I have to say ’My God, this book has got something. It has got a quality, a vitality.’"
Generations of – mainly, it is true, female – readers agree. The Guardian Review book club boasts a distinguished history of literary guests, but only Lessing achieved the distinction of a spontaneous standing ovation upon entering the room, a tiny figure dressed entirely in black, stolid as a carved deity. "I read your book in 1964 when I was 20," one woman said, almost tearfully, "and you saved my life", a sentiment echoed by women of all ages in the room. This guru-like reputation followed her everywhere, and she would recall how, after a talk at a university in New York, a girl asked: "Now, Mrs Lessing, tell me the meaning of life." She replied: "What makes you think I know it?" To which the girl, unsatisfied, complained: "Come on. Don’t be like that. Don’t hold out on us."
Lessing herself was sceptical of a book’s life-changing potential – "people are just ready to think differently" she would say – but she did admit to being profoundly influenced by The Sufis written by Idries Shah, following her disillusionment with communism in the 1960s. Her literary path took her in the opposite direction to that of a fellow intrepid chronicler of the 20th century, JG Ballard. As Martin Amis noted, Ballard turned from navigating outer to inner space, while Lessing swapped social realism for science fiction. Of all her more than 50 books, she was most proud of her Canopus sci-fi novels – and it was always a sore point with her that, although popular, they were not more critically esteemed.
AS Byatt described her as "one of the few prophets of literature", and JM Coetzee called her "one of the great visionary novelists of our time". Indeed, Lessing seemed to have an almost uncanny genius for pre-empting problems or social change, be it the sexual revolution of the 60s or ecological disaster in her later fiction. It was, perhaps, this sensitivity that made her so receptive to change in her own life, always knowing, as we say today, when to "move on". But despite her intellectual restlessness, and long-term exile, part of her heart remained for ever in the Africa of her childhood, manifest in her fiction – as always on both personal and political levels – in the flight from her mother, with whom she fought either directly or in memory until her mother’s death, and the injustices of apartheid she witnessed.
She forever credited the combination of the "quite excessively British attitudes" of her expat parents and "the other eye", acquired through growing up in a foreign country, as the ideal foundation for a novelist. Her journey from Marxism to mysticism is well documented – and there are few political or cultural ideologies of the 20th century which Lessing did not embrace – only, usually, to divorce herself with equal ferocity. She may have been given to contrariness and paradox, but she was consistent in her enquiring engagement with the times.
An interviewer who visited Lessing in West Hampstead shortly after the author had just moved in, observed that it had the impression of "camping out". After more than a quarter of a century of camping out, the house, with its seven flights of stairs (a trial to Lessing in her final years), seemed almost to be supported by a precarious interior scaffolding of piles of books and shelves. She lived there with a succession of much-loved feline companions, and Peter, her son from her second marriage, who had an adjoining flat of his own.
Early in her career, Lessing was much castigated for failing to demonstrate sufficient breast-beating over abandoning her two children from her first marriage when she left Africa in 1950. "While it was a terrible thing to do, it was right to do it," she insisted. In her autobiography Lessing, with her typical combination of idealism and merciless clear-sightedness, recalls the explanation she gave to her children: "I was going to change this ugly world, they would live in a beautiful world where there would be no race hatred, injustice and so forth … I was absolutely sincere," she writes, before concluding: "There isn’t much to be said for sincerity, in itself."
She may not have changed the world in quite the way she had imagined when she set sail for Britain all those years ago, and it may be far from the beautiful place she envisaged, but she has changed the lives of countless readers and, whether she liked it or not (and it’s a fair bet that secretly she did), she helped change the way women are perceived, and perceive themselves.
Outspoken to the last, Lessing was still making headlines with controversial views on 9/11 or the banality of the internet. Mercurial, mischievous, generous and imperious, she was a true grande dame, a writer who simply "couldn’t not write". For her, her greatest achievement was "to go on writing through thick and thin. I’ve met girls who say ’My mother told me to read you, and my grandmother.’ That really is something, isn’t it?"
The Telegraph, 3:23PM GMT 17 Nov 2013
Doris Lessing: her last Telegraph interview
Following the death of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing we republish the last interview she gave to the Telegraph, in which she discusses Hitler, literary awards and her relationship with her mother with
Nigel Farndale
The Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing, whose works include The Golden Notebook and Memoirs of a Survivor, has died
The Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing Photo: AP
By Nigel Farndale
When Nigel Farndale interviewed Doris Lessing in April 2008, at the age of 88, he found her still raging - at communists, war, Mrs Thatcher, the ’bloody Swedes’ who awarded her the Nobel Prize...
It takes Doris Lessing just four minutes to come out with something, if not actually controversial, then at least unexpected. It’s about Hitler. She says she understands him. This from a former member of the Communist Party. (She left in 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress, the one in which he denounced Stalin.) We are talking, I should explain, about Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She recently read another of his books, about three German soldiers who, like Hitler, return from the Great War to the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. ’They see people carting millions of marks around in wheelbarrows and, being old comrades, they stand by each other. And as you read that you suddenly understand Hitler.’
She’s not condoning Hitler, of course, merely explaining his early popularity. I mention her comment to show her endearingly cavalier way with language. She doesn’t care what people might think. She is past caring. And there is a greatness to this lack of care. How many 88-year-olds do you know who have become a worldwide phenomenon on YouTube, for example? She did, last year, when the press descended on the house in West Hampstead where she has lived for the past 30 years, the house in which we are sitting now. As she emerged from a black cab with her son, Peter, who, eccentrically, was wearing a boa of fresh onions around his neck, she was told she had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was asked for a comment. This was the first she had heard of it, yet she was heroically unimpressed. ’Oh Christ,’ she said, waving the question away. ’I couldn’t care less...I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one.’
She was more gracious later, saying all the right things, but now when I ask about that Nobel moment she reverts to form. ’Who are these people? They’re a bunch of bloody Swedes.’
’They sell a lot of dynamite, Doris,’ Peter says. He has shuffled in to say hello, wearing a tea cosy on his head. He lives here, debilitated by diabetes. They had been returning from the hospital on that day of the Nobel announcement.
’This is my son,’ Doris says, unnecessarily.
’The other one being dead.’ Peter adds, equally unnecessarily. (Her elder son, John, a coffee farmer in Zimbabwe, died of a heart attack in 1992.)
’Why have you got a tea cosy on your head, Peter?’
’Because I’ve got a cold, Doris.’
The answer seems to satisfy her. ’Anyway,’ she says, turning back to me, ’the whole thing is a joke. The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world’s publishing industry to jump to their tune. I know several people who have won and you don’t do anything else for a year but Nobel. They are always coming out with new torments for me. Downstairs there are 500 things I have to sign for them.’
After I was buzzed into the house, I had indeed passed many boxes on my way up the stairs. I had also seen Peter at the end of a corridor, sitting at the kitchen table in his pyjamas. He nonchalantly, wordlessly, pointed a thumb in the direction of the sitting-room. That was where I found his mother, who is 5ft tall, with a soft, creased face, framed with grey tendrils that escape from a carelessly assembled bun.
The room, by the way, is everything you would hope a literary giant’s sitting-room might be: splendidly chaotic, more like a junk shop. Someone once said that Lessing seemed to camp out in her own home. There are stacks of books, some teetering precariously, a globe, a tray of nick-nacks, African masks, oil paintings, rugs rucked up on the floor. She lives in here now, sleeping on a red sofa because her backache, caused by osteoporosis, makes it difficult for her to sleep on a bed. She shares the sofa with her huge cat, Yum-Yum, the name taken from The Mikado. ’One day I’ll fall over Yum-Yum and have to be carted off to hospital,’ she says, stroking the cat. Lessing is clear-minded and clear-voiced, but she does seem to gnaw at words, biting them, talking through gritted teeth like Clare Short. It gives even her moments of frivolity a certain sternness.
This most prolific and unconventional of writers has written the novel she claims will be her last (she has done more than 50 and ’enough is enough’). The first half of Alfred & Emily is a novella about how life might have turned out for her parents had it not been for the First World War. The second half is a biography of her parents. Her mother was a nurse during the war. ’She was warm-hearted but insensitive,’ Lessing says. ’Nursing the wounded must have been hell. They would arrive by the lorry load, some already dead. That must have torn her up. It took me a long time to allow her that.’
Her father had been a soldier in the trenches. In 1917, shrapnel almost killed him. He had to wear a wooden leg and missed Passchendaele, the battle in which the rest of his company were killed. ’My father was talking about men he knew who died at Passchendaele up until the day he died,’ Lessing says. ’He often wondered if it would have been better if he had died with them. He didn’t let his disability hold him back, though. He did everything. I even saw him lowered down a rough mine shaft in a bucket, his wooden leg sticking out and banging against the rocky sides.’ He died at 62, an old man. ’On the death certificate, cause of death should have been written as the Great War.’
She thinks much of her own character was informed by the war, through her parents. Without it, she might not have been writer, not had what Graham Greene said all writers must have, a chip of ice in her heart. ’Well, I’ve often thought about it. I was born out of the First World War. My father’s rage at the trenches took me over when I was young and never left. It is as if that old war is in my own memory; my own consciousness. It gave me a terrible sense of foreboding, a belief that things could never be ordinary and decent, but always doom-ridden. The Great War squatted over my childhood. The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me. And my parents never passed up an opportunity to make me feel miserable about the past. I find that war sitting on me the older I get, the weight of it. How was it possible that we allowed this monstrous war? Why do we allow wars still? Now we are bogged down in Iraq in an impossible situation. I’ll be pleased when I’m dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.’
It is an extraordinarily comment, delivered in a matter-of-fact voice. And it reminds me of something she writes in Alfred & Emily: ’You can be with old people and never suspect that whole continents of experience are there, just behind those ordinary faces.’ In Lessing’s case, you could never guess from her small but kind eyes that she hated her mother. ’We hated each other,’ she clarifies. ’We were quarrelling right from the start. She wouldn’t have chosen me as a daughter. I was landed on her. I must have driven her mad. She thought everything I did was to annoy her. She had an incredible capacity for self-delusion.’
Did the book help her to understand her parents more; to empathise with them? ’Because my father had lost a leg, it was as if he were the only one who had the right to suffer, whereas my mother also suffered because of the war. She claimed her true love went down in a ship, but I was never sure, because the only photograph she had of him was from a newspaper. Something phoney about that. Why wouldn’t she have had a proper photograph?’ Lessing came to despise her mother, whom she coldly describes as having ’bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands’. A turning point in their relationship seems to have been when her mother claimed to be having a heart attack. ’She called her children to her and said, "Poor mummy. Poor, poor mummy." I was aged six and I hated her for it. This woman whimpering in her bed saying, pity me, pity me. How did a nurse talk all this rubbish about her heart? She must have known it was an anxiety attack rather than a heart attack. It was invented. My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.’
But not before she had taken to writing to her daughter to accuse her of being a prostitute. After a while, Doris would tear up her mother’s letters as they arrived, without opening them. She was eventually driven to see a therapist about this bizarre relationship. ’My father and mother should never have been married,’ Lessing says. ’He was so dreamy and sexual, whereas she was so brisk and efficient and cut and dried. They didn’t understand each other at all. She was always funny about sex. She didn’t hate it, so much as consider it hadn’t existed. She would talk about sex as if it were an annoying person with a cold, bothering her.’
Born in Persia (as it was then) in 1919, Doris May Tayler (as she was then) grew up on a maize farm in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), her parents having emigrated there after the war. She read voraciously: literary classics sent over from a London book club. But she was an unhappy child and would run away from time to time. She was also paranoid about her weight and pioneered a diet of peanut butter and tomatoes. She would eat nothing else for months. It worked. She left home, and school, when she was 15 and married Frank Wisdom in 1939, at age 19, whom she met while working at the telephone exchange in Salisbury. He was a civil servant 10 years her senior. She had two children and began climbing what she once potently described as the ’Himalayas of tedium’ of young motherhood.
In 1945, at the age of 26, she abandoned her family and married Gottfried Lessing, a communist who was a driving force in the Left Book Club. It was ’my revolutionary duty’, she once said. They had a son, Peter. Doris and Gottfried divorced four years later, in 1949. She kept the name of her second husband, which may seem like an odd thing for a feminist to do, but Lessing has never been a conventional feminist. She has never been a conventional anything.
She emigrated to England with Peter and the manuscript of her first book, The Grass is Singing. It is set in Rhodesia and depicts a poor white farmer whose wife has a relationship with their African servant. Published in 1950, when she was 31, it marked her as a coming star, one prepared to challenge racist conventions. It also revealed her to be a novelist of huge natural gifts and technical command. Though dense with the smells and sights of the veldt, its technique owed much to the Russian novelists she had been devouring, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. But the life of the writer meant she had to be selfish. ’Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling,’ she says. For the next five years she would pay a family in the country to take her young child off her hands for a fortnight at a time so that she could write. ’No one can write with a child around,’ she says. ’It’s no good. You just get cross.’
She began mixing with the great and the good of literary London: her circle included John Berger, John Osborne, Bertrand Russell and Arnold Wesker. According to Wesker, ’She was a good cook and gave wonderfully cosy dinner parties where we picked food from an assortment of plates and sat cross-legged eating it. She was like the best of her characters: concerned about friends, hugely intelligent, a no-nonsense person. She was impatient with humbug and pretentiousness. If you were guilty of neither of these, you were welcomed like family.’ Another of her friends at this time was the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. She had to stay the night with him once because it was late. ’I wasn’t expecting anything but a nice chat. I went to get ready for bed and when I came back all these whips had appeared. What was really strange was that he never said anything like, "Oh Doris, would you like a little whipping?" And I never said, "Ken, what are all these whips for?" So we chatted away about politics, went to sleep, then, in the morning, in comes his secretary to tidy away the whips.’
As well as the stultifying suburban life of colonial Africa, her books have explored the divide across which men and women talk to each other, at each other; the earnestness and perversity of communism; the way in which passion does not diminish with age; and, most notably, female neurosis. Her most influential book is The Golden Notebook, published in 1962 and to this day considered a feminist classic. This often-experimental exercise in post-modern fiction chronicles the inner life of Anna Wulf, exploring what it means to be intelligent, frustrated and female. It starts from the assumption that the lives of women are intimately connected to the accounts of themselves that society allows them to give. This insight moulds the form of the novel itself, with Anna’s life being divided into different-coloured notebooks: black for writing, red for politics, blue for the everyday, and yellow for her feelings. The ’golden notebook’ represents what Anna aspires to - the moment that will bring all her diverse selves into one whole.
With predictable unpredictability, the author now finds more to argue with in this work of her youth than do those feminists who elevated it to canonical status. She calls the novel her albatross and has come to regret the way critics failed to appreciate the structure of the novel, concentrating solely on its feminist message and its theme of mental breakdown as a means of healing and freeing the self from illusions. Her apparent irritation with the book may have had something to do with the adoring fans, especially feminists from America and Germany, who used to stand outside her gate in the summer. ’It became the property of the feminists,’ she says. ’Yet it was fundamentally a political book. I used to tire of having to explain to young readers in the 1970s what Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress meant to world communism. That’s what really gave the book its charge. At the time the comrades here were denying that Khrushchev had even made that speech, saying it was an invention of the capitalist press. Comrades were turning to drink in their despair.’
These days she can sound quite dismissive of the women’s liberation movement. ’The battles have all been won,’ she says, ’except for equal pay for equal work.’ And this seems to have alienated some of her former disciples. But what did the feminists expect? What did her communist comrades expect? What, for that matter, did the Nobel Prize committee expect? They certainly got more than they bargained for. Lessing seems to have been enjoying the extra weight her opinions carry now that she is a Nobel laureate. Her post-Nobel declaration to the Spanish paper El Pais was a case in point. She said that ’September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.’ It caused a furore in America, one that she seemed to revel in. For, as well as being uncompromising and single-minded, Lessing seems to regard herself as a professional contrarian. She was at her most obstreperous during last year’s Hay Festival of Literarature, flattening respectful questions from the audience with, ’That doesn’t make any sense’ or ’Explain yourself’.
She was right about the ’bloody awards’, by the way. Her first was the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1954; since then she’s won everything - apart from the Booker, though she was shortlisted for it five times. In 1999, she was appointed a Companion of Honour. She was also asked to become a dame of the British Empire, but turned it down because it was ’a bit pantomimey’. She has a pretty good idea of why the Nobel came along so late in her life. ’It is probably because I have written in so many different ways, with never a thought that I didn’t have the right to.’
With her latest book she has come full circle to the Rhodesia of her childhood. There is a moving chapter in which she describes returning as an elderly woman to the country she had once loved, only to find it devastated by years of Mugabe’s tyrannous rule. She encounters a drunk and obnoxious black man who won’t let her see her father’s old farm. She had been a great champion of black rule. I ask if that encounter made her change her mind? ’Would I have fought against the blacks if I had known what was going to happen? The answer is, no. Then again it wasn’t an attractive society I was brought up in. Quite ugly, in fact. If only it had been possible to say, "I will only support you if you behave properly once you get into power, instead of turning into a murderous beast like Mugabe." Anyway, the fault is partly ours because why did we imagine that when the blacks got into power they would behave like, I don’t know, Philip Toynbee. Why did we assume this? Instead, we have this ugly little tyrant, Mugabe. An odious man. I’ve never understood what happened to him. Everyone I knew who knew him said he used to be intelligent. What a hypocrite to throw out the whites when he said he wouldn’t. Now look at the place. Starvation. Disease. Corruption. Low life expectancy. Terrible.’
Has she ever harboured any racist sentiments? ’Of course I have. I was brought up surrounded by racists that nowadays no one would believe were possible. But I don’t think it’s a question of race. I think it is like the Romans in Britain. The Romans found us barbarians and left us barbarians, but roll on a few centuries and here we are civilised. My brother was quite extraordinarily racist. Thought he was superior to black people. You couldn’t believe it had never crossed his mind to think that not everyone agreed with his view that the blacks were baboons who had just come down from the trees. We didn’t see each for 30 years. Nothing had changed. Sitting in the kitchen here, I couldn’t have a conversation with him. I would have to count to 10. He tried to be a writer and was convinced I had stopped his own books being published. I hadn’t. It was simply that they were unpublishable. He was an archetypal inhibited Englishman who could only exist in the colonies. He would go scarlet with horror if the subject turned to sex or love.’
She says he became an alcoholic, and that she would have become one, too, had she stayed in Rhodesia. After all, her son stayed there and he became one. I ask what it is like to outlive your own child. ’It goes against the rhythms of nature. Poor old John. He needn’t have died. I got on with him, though I disagreed with his politics. He was white with suffering and anxiety because of the drought. He was so buttoned up he wouldn’t scream and shout and complain. It is a trait of the British. You must try to weep occasionally.’
She also, of course, came to disagree with her second husband’s politics. ’He couldn’t take my writing seriously,’ she says, ’because he was a communist and thought me bourgeois and a Freudian. All these epithets. I find it almost impossible to believe that he remained a communist all his life. He was murdered in Kampala, you know. Ambushed. He got into a car with his second wife and drove straight towards Tanzania, which was mad, and they flame-throwered him, which was the most dreadful death, and it didn’t do his son any good. Peter was basically shattered by it. We think the communists did it because they put up a street name after him. That was how they did things.’ Communists, she now believes, are ’murderers with a clear conscience’. But it took her a long time to get there. ’Yes I called Marxism "the sweetest dream" in one of my books. Then I discovered it was all a load of old socks. It seems incredible now that quite intelligent people believed in it all. What doubts there were were expressed in sly jokes. The jokes contradicted everything we believed in. We used to joke about how we were wrong about everything.’
Knowing the restlessness of her mind and her inability to resist a chance to shock, I ask her whether she now thinks Margaret Thatcher was a hero for standing up to the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. No such luck. ’She ended the Cold War did she? Well good for her. I couldn’t stand her.’
