Doris Lessing

I love it when the Nobel Committee gets it right. And I love that Doris Lessing remains her usual blunt self, calmly pointing out that time was a wasting if the Committee wanted to get her the prize before she pops off.

I was introduced to Lessing through the character of Martha Quest, rather than the better known Anna Wulf. Diane Middlebrook was teaching The Four-Gated City in a class my sophomore year and I still have a commercial paperback copy of that novel rattling around my house somewhere. The following fall, I went overseas to Cliveden and that is where I first saw The Golden Notebook. It was a house copy, and had been lying around and passed around for God knows how long. But I can still tell you what the cover of the paperback looked like. Black background, the title in gold type, followed by the author's name. Very simple, but it drew you in. You could tell lots of students had curled up in the drawing room and lost themselves in it. That it had made plenty of train rides, but never been left behind. I thought of my friends Liat and Jolene who had been at Cliveden the previous winter. I could see them reading it.

Lessing was one of the earliest writers I heard speak via Stanford's Lane Lecture Series. It was in the mid-80's and she read a short story about London that left no doubt she had a voice. An amazing, powerful voice. These readings are usually held at Kresge Auditorium, but this one was held in Mem Aud which was packed to the rafters, overflowing like it was an especially tempting Sunday Night Flicks offering.

The mid-eighties was also when Lessing decided to pull a trick on the publishing world, to see if they would publish the work of an unknown woman writer and give it a proper, critical look. So she submitted the The Diaries of Jane Somers to her publisher under a pseudonym. They published it without much fanfare, until Lessing went public with what she'd done. This is what I think of when there's all this back and forth about whether she should be classified as a feminist, whether she identifies herself as a feminist. She may not want the label, but she damned sure walks the walk. And has her entire career.

Her output has not lessened over the past two decades. I've loved (and recommended to friends) some of her most recent novels: Love, Again, The Sweetest Gift, The Grandmothers. Loved them enough to own them in hardback!

Lessing was self-educated, a voracious reader who wrote what she wanted to write. In both cases, she held no truck with literary fashion. It's for that and her amazing body of work, covering five decades, that she earned and deserves the Nobel. Do we still produce writers like that today? Can a writer have that kind of career today? I don't know the answer, or if it really matters. I'm just grateful that Doris Lessing achieved that kind of career and I get to read her work for the rest of my lifetime.

As for Harold Bloom's response that the award smacked of "political correctness," is this anything other than an indication of decades of emasculation anxiety? Teeny peeny, that's all I'm saying.