“I’d been saying that I’m a writer and all this and I had short stories. But in fact, I hadn’t written a novel and there was in fact that moment – I was working in a lawyer’s office. I said: Enough now, I’m going to write this novel. And I went in to see my boss, Mr Hill, and I said: Mr Hill, I’m going to leave you and I’m going to write a novel, at which of course he fell about laughing because of how I left him. And I wrote a novel but while this sounds quite … we now embark on 10 years of difficulty.”
Doris Lessing – awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature - speaks about what compelled her to write her first novel ‘The Grass Is Singing’. Read the rest of the story in our interview with her from 2008: https://bit.ly/3Idi02V
。。。。。
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_lessing
"Even
in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing
herself, curious about the changing world around us," said Doris
Lessing's editor as he reflected on her life and literary career.
The main city library in Harare, Zimbabwe is about to receive Doris Lessing's entire book collection. The Nobel prize-winner, who died last year, made the bequest to the country where she lived for a quarter of a century and where she did much work to encourage literacy. She made this moving speech when accepting her Nobel prize for Literature at the age of 88:
"Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month's wages in Zimbabwe. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years' wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village - and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted with tears."
It's a talking point on BBC Newsday from 0200 GMT and we're keen to hear your thoughts: http://bbc.in/1ryrP36
Doris Lessing, writer, died on November 17th, aged 94
AS SHE climbed slowly out of the taxi with her shopping, her grey bun
coming down as usual, Doris Lessing noticed that the front garden was
full of photographers. They told her she had won the 2007 Nobel prize
for literature. She said, “Oh, Christ.” Then, picking up her bags, “One
can get more excited.” And then, having paid the cab man, “I suppose you
want some uplifting remarks.” She supplied a few later for her official
Nobel interview, but still on her own terms: wearing what looked like a
dressing gown and a lopsided, plunging camisole at a kitchen table
overloaded with open packets of crackers and messy jars of jam.
For 30 years, by her reckoning, people had expected that she would
get the prize. She hated expectation: that burden that made you a
prisoner of circumstances and dragged you along like a fish on a line.
The expectation when a child that she would behave, and not try to pull
down her itchy stockings or burst into tears. The expectation that she
would be a good wife (as she tried twice), pushing prams all day long,
instead of leaving her two small children behind to start a new life.
The expectation that the Communist revolution would usher in Utopia,
when it was all “a load of old socks”. Why did people expect such
things? Who had promised them? When?
Most frustrating was the public’s expectation that she, as a writer,
would keep to one path. After the success of her first novel, “The Grass
is Singing” (1950), packed in manuscript in her suitcase when she
arrived, almost penniless, in Britain from Southern Rhodesia, she could
have kept on writing about Africa. But in “The Golden Notebook” (1962)
she plunged instead into the world of a woman’s dreams and mental
disintegration, to wide dismay. In “The Good Terrorist” (1985) she
expanded on her theory that acts of terror could be blundered into,
rather than ruthlessly planned: again, alarums and confusion. Her
five-book “Canopus in Argos” series (1979-83) ventured into science
fiction, chronicling moral and ecological disaster on a planet,
Shikasta, that was Earth in thin disguise. Many of her fans thought she
had gone bonkers. She insisted that it was the best writing she had ever
done.
Her name for that, for it wasn’t really science fiction, was “space
fiction”: suddenly the old literary constraints were lifted, and she
could write with breadth about universal themes. It was like sliding out
of a stuffy room (she always noticed smells, whether of animal hide,
lice, peas, unwashedness) to thrust her nose into cool fresh air, or
running out into the bush of her Rhodesian childhood, with its miles of
tawny grass shining in the sun. Or, in her London life, coming out of
the flat where she had paced round and pecked at the typewriter all day
to wander for hours through the night-time streets.
For too long she had played the game of being pleasant, fitting in.
From childhood she was called “Tigger”, the bouncy beast, the jolly good
sport. Good old Tigger, who underneath it all was in a rage of hatred
against her mother and aching to run away as, at 15, she did. Another
persona was “the Hostess”, so generous and talkative to the lefty and
literary flotsam who crammed into her London flats, when inside she
would be crushed from some unwise love affair or other, or just wanting
to be alone. Everyone was a chameleon; hence “The Golden Notebook”, in
which a woman’s life was narrated in discrete notebooks, emotional,
political and everyday, which eventually tangled into one. Feminists
seemed mostly to notice that it mentioned menstruation. They made it
their handbook in the sex wars of the 1960s, which hadn’t been her aim
at all.
Myth and truth
A small part of her was feminist, just as a small part was Communist
in the 1950s, and Sufi later. Every ideology collapsed into something
else, just as her frail family farmhouse of mud and thatch would fade
back into the bush in time. She never gave her whole self to anything,
except to one lover, “Jack”, in the 1960s—and to her third child, Peter,
whom she cared for until he died, of diabetes, this year. As a writer
she stood outside, “wool-gathering” and observing with sly eyes, like
one of her cats. Much of her heart, though, lay in Africa, and her
writing soared when recounting the labour of blacks, the easy bigotry of
little-Englander whites (like her parents) and the sights and sounds of
the place, from the smoke-mist of dawn to the rustling, creeping noise
at night that revealed itself as rain. Rhodesia was her “myth country”.
She wrote “The Grass is Singing” to expose a truth: that white women
could desire black men. It made a shocking scene when Moses, the
cook-boy, was seen through the window buttoning up Mary Turner’s dress
with “indulgent uxoriousness”. And she could spring the hard truth in
dozens of smaller touches: describing a new mother as “a sack of bruised
flesh”, or the “silky black beards” of underarm hair.
There was a true Doris, too, somewhere. This “aliveness” was where
the stories came from, and it was buried deep. As she plumped herself
wearily down on the doorstep to answer questions, that Nobel morning in
2007, she seemed to show an authentic, unbrushed side to the world’s
press. But the real Doris was saying, as she had every day for decades,
Run away, you silly woman, take control, write.
Doris Lessing dies aged 94
Tributes pour in for Nobel prize-winning author of over 50 novels including The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing with her prize insignia of the 2007 Nobel prize in literature. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images
The literary world mourned on hearing that Doris Lessing,
the Nobel-prize winning author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass is
Singing, among more than 50 novels covering subjects from politics to
science fiction, had died peacefully at her London home aged 94.
Her younger son, Peter, whom she cared for through years of illness, died three weeks ago.
The
biographer Michael Holroyd, her friend and executor, said her
contribution to literature was "outstandingly rich and innovative". He
called her themes "universal and international … They ranged from the
problems of post-colonial Africa to the politics of nuclear power, the
emergence of a new woman's voice and the spiritual dimensions of
20th-century civilisation. Few writers have as broad a range of subject
and sympathy.
"She is one of those rare writers whose work crosses
frontiers, and her impressively large output constitutes a chronicle of
our time. She has enlarged the territory both of the novel and of our
consciousness."
The American author Joyce Carol Oates said: "It
might be said of Doris Lessing, as Walt Whitman boasted of himself: I am
vast, I contain multitudes. For many, Lessing was a revolutionary
feminist voice in 20th-century literature – though she resisted such
categorisation, quite vehemently. For many others, Lessing was a 'space
fiction' prophet, using the devices and idioms of the fantastic to
address human issues of evolution and the environment.
"And for
other readers, Lessing was a writer willing to explore 'interior
worlds', the mysterious life of the spiritual self. Though it is perhaps
a predictable choice, my favourite of her many novels is The Golden
Notebook. And my favourite of her many wonderful stories is her most
famous – To Room Nineteen."
Nick Pearson, her editor at HarperCollins/4th Estate, said: "I adored her."
Born
in Iran, brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe – where her 1950
first novel, The Grass is Singing, was set – Lessing had lived in London
for more than 50 years. In 2007 she came back to West Hampstead, north
London, carrying heavy bags of shopping, to find her doorstep besieged
by reporters and camera crews. "Oh, Christ," she said, on learning that
at 88 she had just become the oldest author and the 11th woman to win
the Nobel prize in literature. Pausing rather crossly on her front path,
she said: "One can get more excited", and went on to observe that since
she had already won all the other prizes in Europe, this was "a royal
flush".
Later she remarked: "I'm 88 years old and they can't give
the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking
they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."
The
citation from the Swedish Academy called her "that epicist of the
female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has
subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".
Pearson, her editor at the time, recalled the doorstep moment vividly: "That was what she was like. That was vintage Doris.
"When
I took over looking after her books, she had a fairly formidable
reputation, and the first time I went to meet her I was terrified, but
she was always completely charming to me. She was always more interested
in talking about the other writers on our list, what the young writers
were working on – and reading – than in talking about her own books."
Lessing's
last novel, although several earlier books have since been re-released
as e-books, was Albert and Emily, published in 2008. Pearson said: "That
was a very interesting book for her, revisiting the early life of her
mother and her father and how they had been touched by the first world
war.
"At the time she said to me 'this is my last book', and we
accepted that. She was already at a great age, and I could see she was
tired."
The publisher's UK chief executive, Charlie Redmayne,
added: "Doris Lessing was one of the great writers of our age. She was a
compelling storyteller with a fierce intellect and a warm heart who was
not afraid to fight for what she believed in. It was an honour for
HarperCollins to publish her."
在她的自傳《在我皮膚之下》(Under My Skin)的第一卷中，萊辛描繪了她很小的時候在羅德西亞的鄉村看到的一幕：父母並肩坐在房前，臉色凝重，充滿焦慮：「他們一起被困在那裡，受制於貧窮，更糟糕的是，受制於他們十分不同的背景所帶來的秘密的、不被接納的需求。在我看來，他們讓人難以忍受、十分可悲，而正是他們的無助讓我難以忍受。」她發誓永遠不能忘記這一幕，永遠不能像她的父母那樣：「意思就是，」她寫道，「永遠不要讓自己被困住。也就是說，我拒絕接受人類的處境——被環境束縛的處境。」
萊辛，1962年，也是出版《金色筆記》那一年。
Oswald Jones/Abergavenny Museum
萊辛筆下的很多女主人公都下過類似的決心，從《暴力的孩子們》(Children of Violence)系列中的瑪莎·奎斯特(Martha Quest)到《金色筆記》(The Golden Notebook, 1962)中的安娜·沃爾夫(Anna Wulfa)，她們發現聰明和天分不能確保你擁有成功或控制力，當「女人們的情感仍適用於那個不再存在的社會」時，她們必須「克服萬難，爭取做自由女性的機會」。瑪麗·麥格羅里(Mary McGrory)曾說，萊辛「用西蒙娜·德·波伏娃(Simone de Beauvoir)式的不屈不撓來描寫自己的性愛，用約翰·奧哈拉(John O』Hara)式的坦誠和細緻來描寫性愛本身」。
20世紀80年代，萊辛放下她審視人類心理的顯微鏡，拿起指向遙遠星球和星系的望遠鏡，出版了《阿哥斯的老人星：檔案》(Canopus in Argos: Archives)，那是一系列以外太空為背景的幻想小說，受蘇菲神秘派信仰啟發。雖然這些小說含有一些抒情描寫的段落——這與她一貫的實用主義文風很不一致——但是這些故事幾乎完全沒有她早期作品中對人類學的強烈興趣。有些故事是關於善惡的道德寓言；還有些是喬納森·斯威夫特(Jonathan Swift)式的社會政治諷刺故事。萊辛1999年的小說《瑪莎和丹恩》(Mara and Dann)採用了類似的手法，這個寓言故事以遙遠的未來為背景，講述的是冰河紀毀滅人類文明幾百萬年之後的事。
在她的後期作品，比如《本在世界上》(Ben, in the World)、《最甜蜜的夢》(The Sweetest Dream)和《祖母們》(The Grandmothers)中，萊辛努力把她的天分整合到一起：比如她從第一本小說《野草在歌唱》(The Grass Is Singing)便表現出來的，在不動聲色中構想出一個特定時空的能力；她在《瑪莎·奎斯特》系列小說中磨練出來的心理洞察力和社會細節觀察力；以及後來她對童話式寓言和科幻式漫遊的偏愛。
Tracing the Internal Tug of War at the Heart of Human Life
An AppraisalBy MICHIKO KAKUTANINovember 19, 2013
In the course of her very long and peripatetic career, Doris Lessing has done just about everything, from naturalism to psychological realism, from postmodern experimentation to moralistic fable-making, from science fiction to horror stories. She has evoked the Africa of her youth, postwar London and the chilly latitudes of outer space.
She has chronicled the 20th century’s utopian search for defining ideas — be they communism, feminism or psychology — and the fallout that such ideas have had on the lives of women trying to find an identity of their own.
Ms. Lessing’s childhood in Rhodesia seems to have heightened her awareness of the inequities of race and class and the inescapable connection between the political and the personal. And regardless of their setting, her books have tended to pivot around certain persistent themes: the relationship between the individual and society; the tension between domesticity and freedom, responsibility and independence; and the tug of war between human will and the imperatives of love, betrayal and ideological faith. This dynamic has often resulted in books with an air of impending disaster and humorless gloom, featuring people who are defined more by their problems than their dreams, people caught, like fish in a net, in the tumultuous, troubled zeitgeist of 20th-century Africa and England.
In the first volume of her autobiography, “Under My Skin,” Ms. Lessing described herself as a young girl, watching her parents sitting side by side in front of their house in the Rhodesian countryside, their faces tense and full of anxiety: “There they are, together, stuck together, held there by poverty and — much worse — secret and inadmissible needs that come from deep in their two so different histories. They seem to me intolerable, pathetic, unbearable, it is their helplessness that I can’t bear.” She vows never to forget this scene, never to be like her parents: “Meaning,” she wrote, “never let yourself be trapped. In other words, I was rejecting the human condition, which is to be trapped by circumstances.”
A similar determination informs the choices made by many of Ms. Lessing’s heroines, from Martha Quest in the “Children of Violence” series through Anna Wulf in “The Golden Notebook” (1962) — women who find that intelligence and talent do not ensure success or control, women who must grapple with “the hazards and chances of being a free woman” at a time when “women’s emotions are still fitted for a kind of society which no longer exists.” Ms. Lessing, Mary McGrory once observed, “writes about her own sex with the unrelenting intensity of Simone de Beauvoir, and about sex itself with the frankness and detail of John O’Hara.”
“The Golden Notebook,” acclaimed by many critics as Ms. Lessing’s masterpiece, was innovative not only in its psychological acuity, providing an emotionally detailed portrait of a woman frightened of chaos and breakdown, but also in its unorthodox structure, separating Anna’s experiences into four notebooks (black, red, yellow and blue), dealing with disparate aspects of her life. Out of these pieces can come something new and transformative, Ms. Lessing suggested: a fifth, golden notebook, where “things have come together, the divisions have broken down” and there is the promise of unity.
In the 1980s, Ms. Lessing traded in the microscope she’d trained on the human psyche for a telescope aimed at distant stars and galaxies, producing “Canopus in Argos: Archives,” a cycle of visionary novels set in outer space and fueled by a belief in Sufi mysticism. Though some of these novels contained passages of lyrical writing — quite at odds with her customarily utilitarian prose — the stories evinced little of the passionate interest in the human anthropology that had animated her earlier books. Some of them were moralistic fables about good and evil; others were more social-political satires in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. Ms. Lessing took a similar tack in her 1999 novel “Mara and Dann,” a fable set in the distant future, thousands and thousands of years after a great ice age has destroyed civilization.
In later books like “Ben, in the World,” “The Sweetest Dream” and “The Grandmothers,” Ms. Lessing struggled to integrate her gifts: her matter-of-fact ability to conjure a specific place and time, already on display in her first novel “The Grass Is Singing,” her psychological insight and eye for sociological detail honed in the Martha Quest novels and her later penchant for fairy-tale allegories and sci-fi perambulations.
Ms. Lessing herself has said she sees all her forays into different genres and styles as part of a single, golden continuum: “I see inner space and outer space as reflections of each other,” she once declared. “I don’t see them as in opposition. Just as we are investigating subatomic particles and the outer limits of the planetary system — the large and the small simultaneously — so the inner and the outer are connected.”
Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her time, on Thursday won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.
Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through voracious reading. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, nonfiction and two volumes of her autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
Ms. Lessing learned of the news from a group of reporters camped on her doorstep as she returned from visiting her son in the hospital. “I was a bit surprised because I had forgotten about it actually,” she said. “My name has been on the short list for such a long time.”
As the persistent sound of her phone ringing came from inside the house, Ms. Lessing said that on second thought, she was not as surprised “because this has been going on for something like 40 years,” referring to the number of times she has been on the short list for the Nobel. “Either they were going to give it to me sometime before I popped off or not at all.”
Stout, sharp and a bit hard of hearing, after a few moments Ms. Lessing excused herself to go inside. “Now I’m going to go in to answer my telephone,” she said. “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on.”
Although Ms. Lessing is passionate about social and political issues, she is unlikely to be as controversial as the previous two winners, Orhan Pamuk of Turkey or Harold Pinter of Britain, whose views on current political situations led commentators to suspect that the Swedish Academy was choosing its winners in part for nonliterary reasons.
Ms. Lessing’s strongest legacy may be that she inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook.” In its citation, the Swedish Academy said: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship.”
Ms. Lessing wrote candidly about the inner lives of women and rejected the notion that they should abandon their own lives to marriage and children. “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, tracked the story of Anna Wulf, a woman who wanted to live freely and was in some ways Ms. Lessing’s alter-ego.
Because she frankly described anger and aggression in women, she was attacked as “unfeminine.” In response, Ms. Lessing wrote: “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.”
Although she has been held up as an early feminist icon, Ms. Lessing later disavowed that she herself was a feminist, earning the ire of some British critics and academics.
Clare Hanson, professor of 20th century literature at the University of Southampton in Britain and a keynote speaker at the second international Doris Lessing Conference this past July, said: “She’s been ahead of her time, prescient and thoughtful, immensely wide-ranging.”
Ms. Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in what was then known as Persia (now Iran). Her father was a bank clerk and her mother was trained as a nurse. Lured by the promise of farming riches, the family moved to Rhodesia where Ms. Lessing had what she has described as a painful childhood.
She left home when she was 15 and in 1937, she moved to Salisbury (now Harare) in Southern Rhodesia, where she took jobs as a telephone operator and nursemaid. At 19, she married and had two children. A few years later, feeling imprisoned, she abandoned her family. She later married Gottfried Lessing, a central member of the Left Book Club, a left wing organization, and they had a son together.
Ms. Lessing, who joined the Communist Party in Africa, dropped out of the party in 1954 and repudiated Marxist theory during the Hungarian crisis of 1956, a view for which she was criticized by some British academics.
When she divorced Mr. Lessing, she and her young son moved to London, where she began her literary career. She debuted with the novel “The Grass is Singing” in 1949, chronicling the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. In her earliest work, Ms. Lessing drew upon her childhood experiences in colonial Rhodesia to write about the collision of white and African cultures and racial injustice.
Because of her outspoken views, the governments of both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa declared her a “prohibited alien” in 1956.
When “The Golden Notebook” was first published in the United States, Ms. Lessing was still unknown. Robert Gottlieb, then her editor at Simon & Schuster and later at Alfred A. Knopf, said it sold only 6,000 copies. “But they were the right 6,000 copies,” Mr. Gottlieb said by telephone from his home in New York. “The people who read it were galvanized by it and it made her a famous writer in America.”
Speaking from Frankfurt during the annual international book fair, Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, which has published Ms. Lessing in the U.S. and Britain for the last 20 years, said that “for women and for literature, Doris Lessing is a mother to us all.”
Ms. Lessing’s other novels include “The Good Terrorist” and “Martha Quest.” Her latest novel is “The Cleft,” published by HarperCollins in July. She has dabbled in science fiction and some of her later works bear the imprint of her interest in Sufi mysticism, which she has interpreted as stressing a link between individual fates and the fate of society.
In a review of “Under My Skin,” the first volume of Ms. Lessing’s autobiography, Janet Burroway, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said: “Mrs. Lessing is a writer for whom the idea that ‘the personal is the political’ is neither sterile nor strident; for her, it is an integrated vision.”
On her doorstep, Ms. Lessing said she was still writing—“but with difficulty because I have so little time,” referring to the regular visits she is making to the hospital to visit her son. 【10月11日 AFP】（写真追加、10月12日一部更新）スウェーデン・アカデミー（Swedish Academy）は11日、2007年のノーベル文学賞を英国の女性作家ドリス・レッシング（Doris Lessing）氏（87）に授与すると発表した。約半世紀にわたりフェミニズムや政治、幼少期を過ごしたアフリカを叙情的に描いてきた作品が認められた。
2人目の夫はドイツ人の政治活動家ゴットフリード・レッシング（Gottfried Lessing）氏だったが、1949年にまだ幼い息子と1作目『草は歌っている（The Grass Is Singing）』の草稿を手に英国へ渡り、同氏とも離婚した。人種的抑圧と植民地主義を焼け付くような鋭さでつぶさに描いた同作は翌年出版され、大きな成功を収めた。
Audio: Lessing in 1994 (RealAudio)
