Remembering Doris Lessing, the eternal rebel : The Tribune India

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Remembering Doris Lessing, the eternal rebel

Had Doris Lessing been alive, she would have turned 100 on this October 22.

Remembering Doris Lessing, the eternal rebel

The Golden Notebook is easily the best work of Doris Lessing.



Ratna Raman

Had Doris Lessing been alive, she would have turned 100 on this October 22.  She died in 1913, leaving behind a rich and voluminous legacy of writing, enabling us to engage with her ideas on a variety of issues that preoccupied lives in the 20th century and continue to do so even in the 21st century.  Born at the end of World War I, Lessing came of age around World War II, growing up literally and figuratively under the influence of two humongous Wars. Conflict and confrontation, however, continued to be a part of human lives long after the Wars. The world continues to engage in some form of warfare on an everyday basis and the collateral damage from these wars has continued to mount.

Lessing’s first full-length novel The Grass is Singing, 1950, draws attention to the question of female empowerment in the context of race. At the time of writing this novel, Lessing was deeply inspired by the ideals of the Communist Party. The novel’s white protagonist, Mary, is shown as part of the ruling elite in fictionalised Africa, and Lessing highlights the complicit silence around both race and gender. She’s critical of the white elite for controlling the blacks’ land, and points out rampant commercialisation and increasing insensitivity towards land and its original inhabitants. Although Lessing is identified in England as part of the ‘angry young men’ who drew attention to England’s condition in the 1950s, her oeuvre extended beyond, questioning the boundaries and structures set up by the Occident. In fact, her recognition of the limitations of the white middle-class feminism is articulated succinctly in her very first novel.

Lessing’s subsequent novels repeatedly raise the questions of race, class and gender, weaving autobiography and fact through a series titled Children of Violence. The first three novels in the series follow the realist narrative mode, but the subsequent two break away from this genre, offering dystopic and futuristic projections.

By the 1960s, Lessing had recognised that our world was headed for difficult times and each one of her narratives explores and underlines this predicament. Her magnum opus The Golden Notebook, 1962, prophetically envisages many of the concerns raised during the second wave of women’s movements. The Golden Notebook has women protagonists, and celebrates female friendships. Yet, it also records, through its black, red, yellow and blue notebooks, the different kinds of wars being staged in different parts of the world and the deep-rooted schisms dividing not merely individuals, but also communities, races and genders. In her Preface to The Golden Notebook in 1971, Lessing speaks of the urgent need to embrace the knowledge about the cataclysmic changes that our world is being subjected to. Fifty years later, the cataclysmic changes continue to accelerate. 

Her forays into science fiction and into what she terms  inner space travels constantly unveil fragmented beings trying to make sense of a harsh world. The fragmented and vulnerable individual in a hostile world continues to be the subject of her concern. Her later fiction traces the journeys of several such protagonists who try to make sense of the world they inhabit. Lessing highlights the shored up ruins, despite the solutions offered by “grandfathers Marx and Freud”. 

In the last decades of the 20th century, Lessing opined that communism was upheld by her generation in the manner of a new religion with Utopian possibilities, such as ushering in justice and fair play for everyone.  Accepting that this was a dream, Lessing goes on to declare that “we are all put here for a purpose”, perhaps reminding the privileged West about its responsibilities. She continued to write fiction for another twenty years, drawing upon the realms of realism, memory, myth, science, autobiography and history to question the chaos and suffering that privileged citizens had unleashed upon the world.

Memoirs of a Survivor (1977) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1982) speak about the after effects on cities of the actions of exploitative and greedy inhabitants. Mara and Dann (1999) highlights climate change and the sweeping threat it represents for all species. In The Sweetest Dream (2001), she talks about a different kind of revolution: one that begins in the hearth or the kitchen, where cooking and the consumption of food are presented as important activities. The privileged who eat at this kitchen undertake further acts of sustenance, choosing to engage and provide support systems that sustain and nourish the less fortunate. This may be a dreamlike idea, but the novel provides a critical examination of how the hubris of a heroic male led to the decline and failure of communism. Lessing breathes life into the quotidian, underscoring the infinite possibilities that little acts of goodness and kindness can bring about.

It is perhaps in the fitness of things that she received the Nobel Prize in 2007 for a lifetime of writing. Today, her anxieties about the exploitation of nature, environmental degradation, small wars being fought all over the world and state control resonate far more than they probably did when she first wrote about them. 

Lessing died in 2013, unaware of the tremendous contribution she had made through her writing and her espousal of charitable causes, such as donating her money for the Afghan cause and towards children’s libraries in Zimbabwe. Her 100th birth anniversary is a good time to engage with her writing. There is no better way to pay tribute to a writer of her stature.

A life less ordinary

Doris Lessing was born on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Iran. Her father, Alfred Tayler, was a World War I veteran, and had lost a leg in the War. Tayler’s horror of the war and dislike of England pushed him into accepting a job at the Imperial Bank of Persia, where both Doris (1919) and her brother Harry were born. Subsequently, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia in 1925, where Tayler purchased a vast stretch of land for farming. Doris came of age in Southern Rhodesia, resisting her mother’s attempts to get her to train for a career in music or advanced studies. She left home to work as a nursemaid, typist, stenographer and journalist. She married Frank Wisdom and had two children with him. She joined the Communist Party of South Africa and married Gottfried Lessing. In 1949, she moved back to London with her son, Peter, from her second marriage. She has written around 50 books, and the genres include short stories, drama, opera, graphic novel, poems, science fiction, psychological novel, prose fiction, short novellas and prose essays. Lessing’s first novel The Grass is Singing was published in 1950, while her last novel The Cleft was published in 2008.  Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) is easily her most popular book, and is seen as the Bible of the women’s movements of the late 1960s. Doris Lessing won over 15 awards for her work, including a Nobel Prize in 2007 for a lifetime of work, the Somerset Maugham Award (1954), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995), and the Golden PEN Award (2002). She died on November 17, 2013, at Hampstead, London.

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