The Grass is Singing

Doris Lessing speaks to us of the preoccupations of our age. Her imaginative ability and her impatience with humbug make her an extraordinary woman and litterateur

Ratna Raman Delhi

Reading the warm-up to the Nobel Prize award, I wondered who would win the prize for literature this year. For perhaps the 20th time I wondered why they didn't give it to Doris Lessing, who not only has a substantial body of work to her credit but has, over 60 years of writing, built up a formidable repertoire, varied in both form and content. As a prolific writer and a woman at that, Lessing has definitely had no shortage of critics. A Proper Marriage (1956), the second  volume of The Children of Violence (1952 -1967), dealing with the young, pregnant Martha, has agonised critics who found reading a hundred pages about a pregnant protagonist interminably dull. Again, her experiments with science-fiction were dismissed by the entire cannon of critics as third rate. So effective was their censure that a recent Routledge book, Science Fiction (2000), records every writer who has worked with the genre, with the exception of Doris Lessing.

There have been other naysayers who opined that she had damaged her chances for the Nobel by having such a varied repertoire and, until this year, they all seemed to be right. Learning that she had been chosen for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 was an exhilarating, magical moment for Lessing who, as she remarked herself on being told the news, had after all, won every other “bloody” prize in Europe. Certainly, in her case, the Nobel was long overdue.

Lessing is the daughter of a World War I veteran, Michael Tayler, who married Maud McVeagh, the woman who nursed him at the Old Royal Free Hospital in East London. After the war they moved out of England, with Tayler taking a job at the Imperial Bank of Persia. Both Doris (1919) and her younger brother Harry (1922) were born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran). Michael Tayler's disillusionment with the war and his unwillingness to live in “provincial and insular England,” led him to take his entire family to Southern Rhodesia where he became a maize farmer. Lessing's formative years were spent in Southern Rhodesia and she came of age in the years around World War II.

Opting out of a formal education when she was around 14, Lessing spent the next couple of years taking long rambling treks in the 'bush' or reading books that were shipped in periodically from England. Leaving home at 16, after teaching herself shorthand and typing, Lessing worked as a telephone operator in Salisbury where she met and married Frank Wisdom. Despite two children, her increasing discomfiture with her marriage pushed her to search for alternatives. A fraught personal life notwithstanding, she plunged herself with heady enthusiasm into the activities of the Communist Party of South Africa and soon opted out of marriage, domesticity and motherhood.

Later, she met and married Gottfried Lessing, a German refugee. But, from being an ardent and committed member of the Left in her early years, Lessing's subsequent engagement with realpolitik led to her resignation from the Communist Party in 1956.

Lessing's early exposure to cultures outside of the British, and her coming of age in the years when fascism was on the backfoot in Europe and Left-inspired struggles were the order of the day, formed the bulwark of her writing trajectory. Lessing arrived in England in 1948 with the manuscript of her first novel The Grass is Singing (and an infant son). It was published in 1950 by Alfred Knopf. A publisher in South Africa who had accepted the same manuscript two years earlier had deferred publication owing to the incendiary nature of its subject matter.

With this significant first novel which is structured around race relations and gender, Lessing offered a detailed investigation into the psyche of the white Rhodesian minority that controlled the wealth and resources of the people of a vast continent whose lives it had ruthlessly displaced and reduced. The novel mar-ked the beginning of her unique positioning as a recorder, narrator and chronicler of significant events in the 20th century.

Lessing examined, prior to the 1950s, many questions that would later be referred to as 'women's issues'. The Martha Quest narratives, which explore the life of a young female adolescent, are not only autobiographical but also provide, over five volumes, a sociological reading of Africa as well as England from the 1930s to 1980s. The Golden Notebook (1962), often trumpeted as the bible of the women's movement of the late 1960s, is not merely a prophetic insight into the lives of 'free women'. It experiments with the form and content of the conventional novel and allows us to read into the anxieties of authorial production. This Lessing achieves by juxtaposing a series of notebooks alongside a formal narrative. The book also engages with the important indicators of the 20th century. Not only does Lessing record the crises in different parts of the world, she also identifies Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as the two formative influences of the 20th century.

Lessing's writings in the 1970s are a journey into the realm of science fiction. Two of her outstanding books in this genre are Briefing For A Descent Into Hell (1971), a dystopic novel that shows the destruction of the planet, and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four And Five (1980), which examines sovereignty and control in an unfamiliar world that slowly falls into place as man-woman relationships unfold.

When examining her work over the last two decades, it is difficult to pin Lessing down to any particular genre or subject. Her travelogue highlighting the Afghan dilemma is juxtaposed with the larger mythic dimensions of a war wherein she reworks the prophecy of Cassandra to remind us of the horrors of war. The Fifth Child (1989) traces the life of an autistic child while its sequel Ben In The World (2000) shows him growing up to adulthood in an indifferent world.   

Mara and Dann (1999) makes use of the mythic narrative to document the story of civilisation, characterised by hostile climatic and political conditions. The Sweetest Dream (2002) is an incisive and biting satire on the failure of communism and a valiant attempt to redress the inequities of a ravaged fictional Africa through community work done by white descendants, presumably atoning for the sins of their predecessors. The Grandmo-thers (2003) narrates without inhibition a relationship that two adolescent young men share with each other's mothers.

Her most recent book The Cleft (2007) is a fascinating interpretation of origins, wherein she explores a world made up entirely of women. The women, inhabitors of a strangely shaped country, give birth only to females. Into this seaside paradise, men make an entry as an evolutionary blimp. They are referred to as Squirts while women are referred to as Clefts. Wickedly tongue-in-cheek and teasingly located around biological differences, this book showcases Lessing's charms as a storyteller of great repute.

Lessing's fiction and non-fiction speak to us, engagingly, of the preoccupations, presumptions and speculations of our age. Her fecund imaginative ability, her impatience with humbug, and her prolific, versatile writing, make her an extraordinary woman and litterateur, both of her times and of ours.

The writer teaches English literature in Delhi University