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Lessing received the prize for her life’s work over a 57-year career as a writer |
At last, Doris wins the big one
Fiction can be more truthful than the truth itself, says new Nobel literature laureate Doris Lessing
OH Christ!” said the notoriously tetchy Doris Lessing as she arrived by taxi with her shopping at her home in Gondar Gardens, West Hampstead, on Thursday and was informed by journalists on her doorstep that she had just won the Nobel prize for literature.
Ms Lessing, 87, was rather more composed a little later when the news had sunk in, and she told the world: “It is the most glamorous prize… so it’s the icing on the cake. I’ve been on the shortlist for 40 years. It’s good to be the 11th woman on the list. Now I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”
At a recent appearance at Burgh House in Hampstead, Ms Lessing recalled how she had arrived in England from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1949 with her infant son Peter, leaving behind two children and two ex-husbands, and with the manuscript of her first book, The Grass is Singing, under her arm.
She sent the book to publishers who sent it back demanding a whole raft of changes.
“Well, I had written and rewritten the book so many times that I wasn’t prepared to do any more rewriting at all… So I just sent it back, and I got this note back from them congratulating me on the work I had done on it,” she said.
Ms Lessing is most famous for her seminal 1962 book The Golden Notebook, which was singled out by the Nobel Academy as “a pioneering work” that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th- century view of the male-female relationship”.
Ms Lessing told the Hampstead audience that the book started with words to the effect of “As far as I can see, everything is cracking up…
“That seems to me to be an absolutely accurate description of that time. Everything was breaking up, and one of the reasons why I wrote the book was that I wanted to chronicle the time before it all just disappeared.
“I think I got the feeling of that era. The Communist party was disappearing, and that whole epoch was coming to an end. People were having breakdowns, getting religion and becoming gurus and extremely successful businessmen.
“There used to be a joke in the CP that if you wanted to have a really successful business partner, you needed to get hold of an old Red – because they had spent so much time studying the failings of capitalism.”
She revealed that when the novel finally went on sale in China in 1993 it sold 80,000 copies in the first two days: “But I later discovered that it wasn’t an accurate translation – they took all the sexy bits out.”
Ms Lessing talked about the autobiographical parts of The Golden Notebook, and how they differed from the account of her life in her volumes of formal autobiography.
She said: “There I was writing an autobiography that was supposed to be true, sitting there sweating it out and trying to remember what was true and when it all happened, and I came up with what I thought was the truth.
“But the stuff that was half made up in the novel was much more truthful. I honestly don’t understand it, but I got much more truth into it.
“The fact is that whole sections of The Golden Notebook are half true, but they are alive and true, whereas the facts in the autobiography are true but very laboured.”
Ms Lessing also spoke about the wide range of her writing, which includes some science fiction, about which she said: “Some people think that the SF books have my best writing in them, and I agree with them.”
She added: “There was a time when I had two separate readerships – the readers of the science fiction and the readers of the realistic books.
“I was at a meeting once in San Francisco when a man stood up and said: ‘Doris, I hope you’re not going to waste your time writing any more realistic rubbish’. But then a woman got up and said: ‘Oh no! Please don’t write any more of the science fiction stuff, which is so awful’. And then they got into a violent argument, to which I just sat and listened.”
Doris Lessing has written plays, short stories, two opera librettos and some 32 novels, the most recent of which was The Cleft, published at the beginning of this year.
A new novel, as yet untitled, is to be published in January.
MATTHEW LEWIN
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