Doris Lessing Died Yesterday
Doris Lessing died today and people who have not have been in touch
for some time contact each other just to say, "Doris Lessing died".
She was that important to that many of us. Yes, she was ninety-four but that
did nothing to lessen the blow, the personal hit of grief, the need to say to
whomever might understand: "Doris Lessing died".
Lessing got the Nobel Prize for literature belatedly, at age 88 —
the details of why it took the Nobel Committee so long to arrive at such foregone
conclusion are irretrievably buried in shameful Nobel murk and miasma — only to
scoff at it, saying in would just get in the way of her writing anything again,
which, so far as we know, it did.
There are Nobel Prizes and Nobel Prizes. In a way, Lessing's Nobel
Prize was not only belated but incommensurate. The real award, one hopes, will
come from literary history/posterity. Only literary priggishness of various
kinds stand in the way of her being read as she ought to be. Literary
priggishness was always in her way.
She was one of the finest writers about the entanglement of leftwing
intellectuals with Communism, on a level, perhaps, with Sartre and Milosc, and
better than Sartre.
She wrote splendidly about ageing — none better. Though aging is now
a literary theme, she wrote about it without pathologizing it. She didn't
require labels like Parkinsons, or Alzheimer’s or Dementia to take it on, not that such descriptors are
invalid, hardly, but to say she saw the process and its sorrows and losses,
however described and treated, as unavoidable functions of mortality.
There are writers who are supremely gifted at transmuting and
expressing the vectors of time, place — history — in their fiction, Phillip
Roth and E. L. Doctorow being two who spring easily to mind, perhaps Hillary
Mantel, though I haven't had the pleasure, as well. Lessing did that and more:
when historical space and time felt confining, she availed herself of the
modalities of science/speculative fiction to include geological eras, pre- and
trans-historical time. Doris Lessing used climate change as backdrop to
humanity in several of her books, the kinds of books the likes of Gore Vidal
dripped scorn on for having violated the strictures of literary fiction as he
conceived it.
Then there are those who say she was unpolished as a stylist. They
are basing that assessment on "The Golden Notebooks", in which
unpolished expression was her style of choice. These particular literary prigs
miss the fact that she could write in other ways, and that "Love
Again", for example, is a work of exquisite lyricism.
Lessing baffled categories and critics, except for those, like me,
who were marked by her and knew her for the bold and extraordinary writer and
creature that she was.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Doris Lessing twice. In my first
encounter, in the flesh, I tried to scare her just a bit, and just for fun,
succeeded, briefly.
In addition:
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