10/13/07
Finally, Lessing
That Doris Lessing, at the age of 88, has at last won the
Nobel Prize for literature is a cause for celebration, and for allowing that
some things, at least, however unexpectedly, can finally go right in this
world. Why it took the Nobel Committee so long to come to a correct conclusion
about her achievement is the remaining mystery. It has, to her many readers,
been an open secret for decades she is simply one of the world's most
commanding writers, with a range of theme, material, style and genre no other
writer in English can match.
She is a great writer about the twentieth-century allure of
Marxism (one of the best on the subject, up there with Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur
Koestler, Czeslaw Milosz and Richard Wright), about aging, about women's lives
(the purportedly feminist aspect of her work), about psychological and
neurological extremes, about inter-generational love, and, in the science
fiction books for which the guardians of literary purity naturally condemned
her, a great investigator into the impact on human culture of climate change.
Memory -- how it gets represented and passed on, and by whom
-- is a fundamental theme for her, as is the related issue of writing. As Anna
Wulf, the novelist at the center of "The Golden Notebook", Lessing's
breakthrough novel, put it:
"It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have
some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a
kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life;
one couldn't live at all if one used it for living. "
Having interviewed Doris Lessing twice, once in person, once
by phone, I can tell you she is companionable, amiable and without a whiff of
pretension, condescension or self-importance; in short, she's a pleasure to
talk to. Like Anna Wulf, it's in writing that she unleashes her terrifying
"second sight". In writing she trusts it, stays with it, follows
where it leads. Writing is how she extends herself into the world, probes its
possibilities. You can feel this relentlessly exploratory intelligence in every
form she's used -- novels, short stories and myriad, under-appreciated essays.
She's great about cats, even better about heartbreak.
Perhaps roused from bed by a Guardian reporter hoping to mix
some bile into the tale of Lessing winning the Nobel Prize, a grumpy Harold
Bloom attributed the decision to "pure political correctness." In a
way, by getting Lessing so perfectly and completely wrong, this verdict does us all a favor. Being
politically or in any other way correct was impossible for her. She's always
been massively and productively incorrect, and splendidly fulfills the mandate
of a great writer by being so. She's exemplary in that no category can define
her. Isn't being irreducible to formula one reason we value and need great
writers?
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