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Doris Lessing
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Lessing’s more: prized author Doris goes on experimenting
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing continues to search for the most effective media to convey her literature, writes John Horder
The Temptation of Jack Orkney Collected Stories Vol 2.
By Doris Lessing.
Flamingo Modern Classic £7.99.
Looking for Doris.
By Barbara Brown.
The Tenth Bull £8.95.
DORIS Lessing, who lives in West Hampstead, is the author of 60 books, and recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It does her a disservice to put her on a pedestal, as one of her nearest neighbours has been doing lately. We shall be coming to that.
Throughout her writing career, which spans several decades, she has proved that she is as much a storyteller and teacher of neglected spiritual truths about the nature of reality as she is anything else.
She has had a spiritual teacher – the Sufi and author of the hugely amusing Mulla Nasrudin stories, Idries Shah – since her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published. As she is an intensely private person, this is not something she ever mentions in interviews with journalists.
In The Temptation of Jack Orkney, a collection of 19 sumptuous short stories, she demonstrates, as she has always done, that she is a storyteller who is constantly experimenting to find the form most suited to what she has to say.
On the surface, her stories Homage to Isaac Babel and A Year in Regent’s Park appear less full of life’s pain and chaos than Our Friend Judith and An Unposted Love Letter say. This would be to make a false supposition. The last two may reflect her emotions, including her feminism, more forcefully. That is due to her subject matter as much as anything else. In The Old Woman And Her Cat, she was transparently coming to terms with her mortality.
Doris Lessing refuses to be pigeon-holed in any of her writing. On the occasion I introduced her at West End Lane Books, on the publication of the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin, she described how her short story writing can’t and won’t be reduced to a formula. She was adamant about this, as she is adamant about the insanity of not cherishing our ancestral inheritance going back millions of years in an age when computers have replaced communication with people among the young.
She finds it necessary to experiment afresh in every story she writes. Experimentation for its own sake is all part of the process – all part of her debt to Idries Shah, no doubt.
My own Sufi teacher for the past 40 years has been trying to teach me that silence speaks louder than words. I have no doubt that silence has helped her discover her own authentic voice, as it has mine. Again, silence cannot be reduced to a formula, which explains why it means so much to her.
Barbara Brown, who is a neighbour of Doris Lessing, and has put her on a pedestal in the past, quotes from Doris’s The Four-Gated City (1969), and from the 16th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, in the foreword to Looking for Doris. I quote from Julian (a woman): “The mingling of both well-being and distress in us is so astonishing that we can hardly tell what state we are in. But the fact is, that is a part of being whole. We stand in this mingling all our life.”
We all need to find new ways of cherishing, loving, honouring and respecting Doris Lessing as a writer, storyteller, and teacher of lasting truths, while she is still with us.
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