The Lady Laureate

The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded yesterday to the Persian-born novelist Doris Lessing, now 87, whose six-decade career has spanned genres as wideranging as radical political literature, engaged social fiction on race and gender, intimate, “inner space” novels, and science fiction.The award is a just one. In its announcement, the Nobel committee noted Ms. Lessing’s ability to reveal the female experience, and also her ability “with skepticism, fire and visionary power [to subject] a divided civilization to scrutiny.” Over her long career, Ms. Lessing has not only examined men and women and their behavior toward each other with tremendous skill, but has gazed outward at the world, scrutinizing the colonial Africa in which she was raised, and produced an enormous body of work, including one true masterpiece. The Nobel committee is correct in assessing “The Golden Notebook” (1962) as one of the groundbreaking novels of the last 50 years, and the achievement of that book alone gives Ms. Lessing a literary stature commensurate with the Nobel Prize.Ms. Lessing was born to British parents in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran). Her parents then moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where they became miserably unsuccessful farmers. I first became aware of Ms. Lessing in 1960, when I read “In Pursuit of the English,” a sardonic, rather Orwellian down-and-out-in-London short account of a fledgling young woman writer from Southern Rhodesia, who, with her 2-year-old son, moves into a working-class boarding house.But what really made one take note was “The Golden Notebook.” Ms. Lessing’s leap in technique with this book was enormous. Somewhere in that period Ms. Lessing came to the realization that novels aren’t perfect poems, and aren’t tidy short stories: Novels are inherently messy. If one of the criteria for judging the true greatness of a novel is whether it changed the way we perceive the world, the way we live in it, and the way we write about it, then “The Golden Notebook” has earned the recognition it received yesterday.A year after Ms. Lessing wrote “The Golden Notebook, “the much younger Sylvia Plath pseudonymously published “The Bell Jar,” about the mental breakdown of a woman poet. “The Golden Notebook” was an obvious precedent. In that novel, Ms. Lessing dealt with the breakdown of a woman writer under the competing strains of psychoanalysis, writing, the allure and disappointments of communism, the demands of the female body, sex, and the fresh news about the shaky relations between men and women. In addition, she wrote eloquently about the problem of being a transplant, a woman eternally involved with Southern Rhodesia, yet living in London. But certainly not all of Ms. Lessing’s impact was bleakness.What is perhaps most impressive about Ms. Lessing’s startling early work was that the characters actually talked. They were big time gabbers, and this was well before Woody Allen had celebrated this kind of urbane verbal culture in his films. In Ms. Lessing’s fiction, the intellectuals sounded like real intellectuals. At the time, most literary fiction regarded style as the chief purpose of fiction. Characters in contemporary novels often sounded like symbols, or monosyllabic idiots; in the French nouveau roman they sounded like unemployed mathematicians. Unlike Plath, Ms. Lessing had no great feeling for language, but her use of structure was brilliant. We all learned new techniques from her fragmented novel, which traced the effort of the central character to record her life in four, simultaneously-kept notebooks, each dedicated to various aspects of her mental life, one of which concerned her upbringing in Southern Rhodesia.Interestingly, many powerful women writers of that generation, such as Ms. Lessing, Isak Dinesen, Marguerite Duras, the Venezuelan Teresa de la Parra, and Christina Stead, all shifted continents relatively early in life. In some cases, they switched languages. I’ve thought about this aspect of their writing a lot. Had there been no Southern Rhodesia in Ms. Lessing’s life, I’m not sure she would have hit upon the technique of the simultaneous notebooks, for instance. But such geographic displacements can also, inadvertently, release in a woman writer a generic power — the power of an exile’s soul. Exile, self-induced or not, knows no gender. With an exile, the complaint against women writers — that they housekeep, that they tidy up in their writing, that their themes are too contained — is erased. The moment they are gazing, like James Joyce, at home, from the distance of another continent, to which they don’t truly belong, facing, as artists, an intractable geography, at that moment, even a woman writer at mid-century became unburdened by gender.I’m not a great admirer of Ms. Lessing’s Sufi or science-fiction novels, I never understood her abandonment of her two older children, and I don’t agree with all her attitudes toward men. But these are picky, personal observations. Was there much as a writer that I learned from her? Yes. Is she an essential part of our literary history? Yes. Does she deserve the Nobel? Yes.Ms. Solomon, a cultural correspondent for El País, novelist, and essayist, is the author of the memoir “Arriving Where We Started.”

The Lady Laureate

The Lady Laureate

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