Most of the media seemed determined to turn Doris Lessing into a sweet old lady who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as it were, in a fit of absence of mind. Almost all of them said, on no evidence at all, that she’d been “shopping” at the time of the announcement. She has never been one to waste anyone’s time, least of all her own, and was absolutely clear about this prize; she’d won every other literary prize by now, she said, so she might as well have this one.
As indeed she might. When you start your literary career, nearly sixty years ago, by writing an absolutely technically flawless novel in the form of The Grass is Singing, there might seem to be few directions to go in. Doris Lessing’s amazing career seems to have been conducted as a series of bold provocations, either in her books’ ideas – The Fifth Child or that astonishing The Good Terrorist – or in their form. The Golden Notebook maddened critics at the time, as did the superb science-fiction quintet beginning with Shikasta.
She’s lost none of her touch for provocation. A couple of years ago, I gave her recent volume of novellas, The Grandmothers to a class of postgraduates; they just could not believe it, and some of them took this masterly book almost as a series of personal insults. Listening to their outraged discussion was a masterclass, despite itself, in a writer cutting to the chase, getting to the bottom of things. If it wasn’t that she has a deep enjoyment of nonsense, and a deep engagement with it, you would say that she is a no-nonsense sort of writer.
I once interviewed her and A.S.Byatt on stage, and decided to ask them the sorts of questions they might not have been asked in public before, confident that Dame Antonia and Mrs Lessing were women who can take more things in their stride than most people. I asked them which characters in classic fiction they thought they would have found sexually attractive. “What questions you ask,” Doris said, eyeing me caustically, but considered the matter, and started giving a reasoned and detailed response. That’s the sort of writer who utterly and indubitably deserves the Nobel Prize; the sort of writer who, you feel, you could ask any question at all and get an interesting comment in reply.
Philip Hensher writes regularly for The Spectator, to read his essays click here. Doris Lessing has also contributed to The Spectator, her articles can be found here.
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