Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October
22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled
in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother
had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through
maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement,
energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian
life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres
of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure
and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother,
Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother,
obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules
and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns
terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was
later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from
which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her
formal education.
But like other women writers from southern African who did not
graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer),
Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented
that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think
that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't
thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how
to escape, all the time." The parcels of books ordered from London fed
her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early
reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered
D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured
her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept
her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were
also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking
them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing
has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."
In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen
and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics
and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night
and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written,
"in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she
indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories,
and sold two to magazines in South Africa.
Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people
cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological
and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage
and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking
of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when
they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think,
of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable
of being and what actually happened to them." Lessing believes that she
was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing
is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual,
the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone
operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two
children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared
would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she
was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of
Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to
read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after
she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned
with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949,
Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published
her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a
professional writer.
Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging
out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and
her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written
about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality,
the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality,
and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good.
Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and
early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials,
and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956,
in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited
alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she
admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical
judgement" - to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness
and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1951-1959),
a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about
the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke
new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment,
in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing
depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless
honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness,
and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.
Attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger
and aggression, Lessing responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking,
feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." As at least one early
critic noticed, Anna Wulf "tries to live with the freedom of a man" - a
point Lessing seems to confirm: "These attitudes in male writers were taken
for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly
not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic."
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the
quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden
Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing
for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs
of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes
of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect
Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on
Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that
individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link
between their own fates and the fate of society.
Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985)
and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under
the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 and
If
the Old Could..., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction
works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My
Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 appeared in 1995 and
received the James Tait Black Prize for best biography.
Addenda (by Jan Hanford)
In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University.
Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren,
and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly
removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now
as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40
years ago.
She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the
unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being
out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and
In
Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These
two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's
personality, life and views.
In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published
by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote
the book. In an interview, she describes the frustration she felt during
a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers
it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another
book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot
and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview."
And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the
Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction
in 1996.
Late in the year, HarperCollins published Play with A Tiger
and Other Plays, a compilation of 3 of her plays: Play with a Tiger,
The Singing Door and Each His Own Wilderness. In an unexplained move,
HarperCollins only published this volume in the U.K. and it is not available
in the U.S., to the disappointment of her North American readers.
In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time,
providing the libretto for the opera "The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four and Five" which premiered in Heidelberg, Germany in May. Walking in
the Shade, the anxiously awaited second volume of her autobiography, was
published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics
Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. This volume documents
her arrival in England in 1949 and takes us up to the publication of The
Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her autobiography, she will
not be writing a third volume.
Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the
U.S in January 1999 and is scheduled to be published in the U.K. in April
1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I
adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind."
1999 also saw her first experience on-line, with a chat at Barnes &
Noble (transcript). In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Annual
International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya.
She has just completed the sequel to The Fifth Child, which will be published
next year. |