An unfortunate sound bite: taking Doris Lessing seriously (but not too seriously)

Warholized, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

Over the course of the weekend I read several reports of the interview with Doris Lessing that was going to air on BBC4’s Front Row today at 7:15 UK time (there’s some complicated abbreviation for the time zone, something like BST, but it sounded like a disease and does this mean they’re not doing daily savings time this year – should they not be doing it by now if they’re going to?).

From the headlines and the quotes, I thought the majority of the interview was going to focus on Lessing’s considered reaction to having won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. All the sound bites quoted in The Guardian and in The Times online featured her saying, “It’s been a bloody disaster.” The implication in many of the articles was that winning the Nobel had ruined the remains of her writing career as it meant she was now having to spend all her time fending off requests for interviews. My initial response was, “how very churlish – you certainly asked for your 15 minutes of fame and now you’re upset because you can’t close the Pandora’s Box you’ve opened.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, she does say, in response to the interviewer’s question regarding how winning the Nobel has affected her life and writing career, “It’s been a bloody disaster.” The line is delivered with a chuckle, and it is prefaced by an ardently sincere warning from Lessing to other writers about failing energy levels, what it takes to write, and how little time there really is for that sort of labour-intensive work. Do it now, she’s saying, don’t put it off.

At 88 she doesn’t think she has another book in her. I would say that’s just fine. She’s already got more than 50 published books to her credit. She’s mastered at least four different genres: the short story, the essay, the contemporary novel, and, from all reviews, science fiction. I’m not a fan of anyone’s science fiction – when P.D. James and Margaret Atwood stray into this genre I became angry with them, as if they had suddenly displayed bad taste so extreme as to throw all their other accomplishments into question. That’s probably a bit of an over-reaction. But because so much of Lessing’s recent work has been sci fi, I haven’t been reading it. Even the fifth novel in her Children of Violence series (the first novel was Martha Quest) was a bit much for me, and had I not discovered her marvelous short stories and had to read The Golden Notebook at university, I might have lost interest in her. But I have always hung onto a copy of her book of essays, reviews and interviews published in 1975, A Small Personal Voice.

Most of the Front Row interview actually focuses on her latest book, Alfred and Emily, a fascinating mix of family biography and fiction, in which Lessing imagines her parents’ lives as they might have been and then recounts their actual lives, profoundly changed and their course forever altered by WWI. This is a Lessing I will read, for a variety of reasons.

In her interview with Front Row shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in 2007, Lessing said, “There’s something abrasive in me because I have often made people very cross.” I laughed when I read this. Being occasionally abrasive is part of the writer’s job description, isn’t it? The strident form of Communism she espoused in her youth, her writing a novel perceived as a feminist manifesto (The Golden Notebook) and then quarreling with descriptions of herself as a feminist, writing two novels under a pseudonym to prove how difficult it is to get work published, her public announcements for a good 20 years before she actually won the Nobel Prize that she would never win it – well – controversy and Doris Lessing are old pals. The prize committee acknowledged this, describing Lessing as, "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

So I’m going to read Alfred and Emily for a lot of reasons. One is that I think we are all sentimental about our ‘own’ wars, and almost every generation has one. For my parents it was World War II, and their enthusiastic participation in that war coloured their views on the war I consider my own, that nasty little exercise in empiricism known as the Vietnam War. More than 20 years after I ran around attending anti-war demonstrations in Ottawa (I finally had to stop going because I kept getting into shouting matches with the organizers, mostly Marxist-Leninists – I still remember the rather stunned look on the organizer’s face when I yelled, “Just because Nixon is wrong doesn’t mean Ho Chi Minh is right!”), my mother told me that she and my father had been wrong about the war in Vietnam. I don’t think this meant she was finally reconciled to my choosing an American draft dodger as my first lover, just that perhaps my father shouldn’t have taken Cassius Clay’s refusal to serve quite so personally. My dad loved that man until he refused the draft, and then it was as if he had never existed. We never called him Muhammad Ali and we never watched televised boxing again. But I can’t blame my parents for believing at the time – when they were in mid- and late teens – that the Second World War was the war to end all wars and one they were eager to participate in to keep the world safe for democracy. And I can’t condemn them for applying their life experiences inappropriately 20 years later. Neither the German nor the Japanese economies was seriously impacted by my father’s refusal to buy either a German or a Japanese car for 30 years after the end of WWII. Living with the courage of his convictions may have meant we spent a lot more on repairs than others did, but if it helped my father sleep well at night, it was worth it. Besides, we met lots of kind and interesting people in the course of those breakdowns in the countryside surrounding Ottawa.

But another reason I will read Alfred and Emily is that I am becoming increasingly conscious myself of the passage of time, of the external events that shape our personal realities, and of the multiple roles we are called upon to play during the course of our lives, regardless of whether we choose to have children or not. I have been contemplating a blog post about having always been a reluctant member of the – as one television commercial now states – generation that refuses to grow old. The idea isn’t a new one, although its being so baldly stated seems almost delusional, and I think any group of people that bases its life philosophy on advertising slogans (who did that commercial about never growing up, was it Mattel?) is in serious difficulty. Which just goes to prove how bad I've always been at being a baby boomer.

Much as I’m looking forward to reading this new book of Lessing’s, I wish she could, at 88, be content with what she has already accomplished and perhaps consider that retirement is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. When asked about the money that comes with the Nobel Prize, she said she’d been advised to give it all away for tax reasons. She then mentioned she was sleeping in her downstairs sitting room because she can’t manage the stairs in her North London home any more. Her back and her heart and her kidneys are playing up, and it is one of the most charming moments in the latest interview when she announces that during a recent stint in hospital she’s suddenly discovered that she actually has these organs. There’s even a little giggle. It’s not up to me to tell her how to spend her money. But I caught myself thinking one of those fancy little chair lifts that zoom up and down flights of stairs might not be a bad use of some of it. (I’ve only ever seen a couple of these but I love the way you ascend the stairs riding side saddle, as it were. There’s something so imperious about ascending a flight of stairs in that manner, clutching a cane – one of those deeply ambivalent items that is both support and weapon, depending on the way it’s held.) Or perhaps sell the house and buy a flat that’s all on one level?

I think I’m going to let her have the last word here. In her essay “Afterword to The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner,” Lessing defines the novel as ‘that hybrid, the mixture of journalism and the Zeitgeist and autobiography that comes out of a part of the human consciousness which is always trying to understand itself, to come into the light.’

P.S. You only have seven days after the date of broadcast to listen to BBC4 interviews, although you can download the podcasts and listen to them at a later date. Here’s the link to Front Row.

P.P.S. Alfred and Emily won’t be available in Canada from Harper Collins till July 23.