Lessing Is Not the Least: Doris Lessing, Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature

By Donald K. Sharpes

She's the kind of writer that Elizabeth I of England would have been if she hadn't had to thwart the Spanish, and connive and scheme to rebuff her domestic conspirators and foreign enemies. As a woman writer one is not necessarily a feminist, just as a man is not necessarily sexist.

Doris Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature on October 12. For years she had been on the Nobel short list, but has been awarded numerous European prizes for literature, and received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1995.

She was born in Iran of British parents, raised in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and at 88 lives today in London. She dropped out of school at 13, fled a painful childhood at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, married at 19 and had two children. She then abandoned her family, married Gottfried Lessing with whom she had another son, Peter, joined the Communist Party and left it in 1954 before Russia crushed the Hungarian uprising. She divorced Gottfried, and she moved to London with Peter where she began her literary career with her first novel, "The Grass is Singing," published in 1950. Her latest novel is "The Cleft," in published in 2007.

The 1962 publication of "The Golden Notebook," is her acknowledged masterpiece and insured her notoriety and critical success. It described, through four colored notebooks, the multiple versions of a woman on life's fretful journey. Women were surprised when they read it at how complicated they really were.

The Nobel committee noted that she "with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." She never completed school and self-educated herself by reading omnivorously. Another fellow Nobel Prize laureate, the South African Nadine Gordimer, also did not finish high school.

Lessing’s early writings are autobiographical, but translate all the tough and raw emotions. Women are better at facing the painful cruelty of their past and giving testimony to it, without a Greek tragic chorus to chant the refrain. The revenge of women is a vivisection of their damaged and sometimes self-destructive youth. Later, in their mature years, they display an almost masculine robustness, not as steely and harsh as Sophocles' Electra's for the death of a father, but equally intrepid.

Her productivity is astounding with over fifty books and twenty-two novels of note. However, most of her critics, including Harold Bloom and John Leonard, bemoan her adventures into science fiction, astral and cosmic mythology, and a kind of spiritualism, and pooh-pooh her latest writings.

Nevertheless, at her best, Lessing reminds us without equivocation or comfort that suffering is contagious and a part of the human condition. Her now well-weathered face still holds a lonely soul trying to find meaning in an insane world. She exhibits the kind of writing that is uniquely personal. Yet somehow it translates into everyone's experience.

The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel would have been proud of her selection. He made his fortune by inventing dynamite, and established the Nobel prizes in 1895. Lessing's best novels are a kind an explosion in the mind and gut.

Donald K. Sharpes is professor emeritus at Arizona State University and author of an upcoming book Outcasts and Heretics: Profiles in Independent Thought and Courage.