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.