Doris Lessing, who died aged 94, penned over 50 works, including two operas © Elke Wetzig
“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life, the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.” This was Doris Lessing in 1964—provocative and passionate, as ever. She died on Sunday. She was 94. She had written over 50 books, from experimental novels to science-fiction inspired by Sufi mysticism to the whimsical On Cats.
Her restless imagination came from a restless life. Born in Persia in 1919, growing up on a failing farm in Rhodesia, she ran away to the city, then fled again, this time for England, leaving two failed marriages (and two children). She took one of her sons with her, and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), which was both the harrowing story of a white woman murdered by her black servant, and a furious evisceration of colonial conceit.
She never pulled her punches. In 2007, her response to the news that she’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature—“Oh Christ! I couldn’t care less”—went viral.
I first came across Lessing in a dated 1970s anthology called Plays By and About Women. The stage direction at the top of Lessing’s Play with a Tiger (1958) specified trousers for the heroine, Anna, because “It is hard to play Act Two in a skirt.” I was intrigued. And soon, I was caught by Anna’s caustic, venomous voice, and by her dilemma of how to have a relationship with a man without being limited. As for the second act, it’s a freewheeling, non-naturalistic, exhilarating ride in which Anna and her lover revisit their pasts, rehearse possible futures and try to work out how to live.
Lessing took the story further in her 1962 masterpiece The Golden Notebook. The heroine, another Anna, is a feminist and a “free woman” but she’s tormented by writer’s block, conflicted about men, torn between work and motherhood, and wracked with doubt about her allegiance to communism. She is coming apart at the seams, filling the pages of different coloured notebooks—black for her thoughts on Africa, red for politics, blue for men, and yellow for feelings, hoping she can one day join everything up in the golden notebook, heal herself and become whole. With a startling structure that echoes women’s fractured lives, taboo-shattering passages about menstruation, a fabulous portrait of female friendship and a lot of riotous, candid talk about men and sex, The Golden Notebook quickly became a feminist classic.
It’s also a book about how men and women have to try harder to understand each other. Nobel chair Per Wastberg said Lessing “displayed an almost limitless empathy with odd lives and a freedom from prejudice regarding every form of human behaviour.” And in her last book, Alfred and Emily, written when she was 89, she made her bravest attempt at empathy. She imagined the lives her parents might have had if there had been no First World War. Giving her parents alternate (happy) lives meant writing herself out of existence. But she did it anyway, and it’s breathtaking. And then, because she was never sentimental, she devoted the second half of the book to the story of what really happened. Maybe after that this prolific writer didn’t need to write another book. She’d fought hard to understand her parents, set them free and tell the truth, all at once—and through all of it, she was writing to please herself.
