2007 Nobel Prize for Literature:
Doris Lessing
Doris
Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist
whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and
reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her
time, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature
Announcing
the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as "that
epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and
visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." The
award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6
million.
Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high
school and largely educated herself through voracious reading. She has
written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, nonfiction and two
volumes of autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize
in Literature.
Ms. Lessing learned of the news from a group of reporters camped on
her doorstep as she returned from a visit to the hospital with her son.
"I was a bit surprised because I had forgotten about it actually," she
said. "My name has been on the short list for such a long time."
As the persistent sound of her phone ringing came from inside the
house, Ms. Lessing said that on second thought, she was not as surprised
"because this has been going on for something like 40 years," referring
to the number of times she has been mentioned as a likely honoree.
"Either they were going to give it to me sometime before I popped off or
not at all."
After a few moments, Ms. Lessing, who is stout, sharp and a bit hard
of hearing, excused herself to go inside. "Now I'm going to go in to
answer my telephone," she said. "I swear I'm going upstairs to find some
suitable sentences, which I will be using from now on."
Although Ms. Lessing is passionate about social and political issues,
she is unlikely to be as controversial as the previous two winners,
Orhan Pamuk of Turkey or Harold Pinter of Britain, whose views on
current political situations led commentators to suspect that the
Swedish Academy was choosing its winners in part for nonliterary
reasons.
Ms. Lessing's strongest legacy may be that she inspired a generation
of feminists with her breakthrough novel, "The Golden Notebook." In its
citation, the Swedish Academy said: "The burgeoning feminist movement
saw it as a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books that
informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship."
Ms. Lessing wrote candidly about the inner lives of women and
rejected the notion that they should abandon their lives to marriage and
children. "The Golden Notebook," published in 1962, tracked the story of
Anna Wulf, a woman who wanted to live freely and was, in some ways, Ms.
Lessing's alter ego.
Because she frankly described anger and aggression in women, she was
attacked as "unfeminine." In response, Ms. Lessing wrote, "Apparently
what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great
surprise."
Although she has been held up as an early heroine of feminism, Ms.
Lessing later disavowed that she herself was a feminist, for which she
received the ire of some British critics and academics.
Ms. Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in what is now Iran.
Her father was a bank clerk, and her mother was trained as a nurse.
Lured by the promise of farming riches, the family moved to what is now
Zimbabwe, where Ms. Lessing had what she has called a painful childhood.
She left home when she was 15, and in 1937 she moved to Salisbury
(now Harare) in Southern Rhodesia, where she took jobs as a telephone
operator and nursemaid. She married at 19 and had two children.
A few years later, feeling imprisoned, she abandoned her family. She
later married Gottfried Lessing, a central member of the Left Book Club,
a left-wing organization, and they had a son.
Ms. Lessing, who joined the Communist Party in Africa, repudiated
Marxist theory during the Hungarian crisis of 1956, a view for which she
was criticized by some British academics.
When she divorced Mr. Lessing, she and her young son, Peter, moved to
London, where she began her literary career. Her debut novel, published
in Britain in 1949, was "The Grass Is Singing," which chronicled the
relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. In her
earliest work Ms. Lessing drew upon her childhood experiences in
colonial Rhodesia to write about the collision of white and black
cultures and racial injustice.
Because of her outspoken views, the governments of Southern Rhodesia
and South Africa declared her a "prohibited alien" in 1956.
When "The Golden Notebook" was first published in the United States,
Ms. Lessing was still unknown. Robert Gottlieb, then her editor at Simon
& Schuster and later at Alfred A. Knopf, said it sold only 6,000 copies.
"But they were the right 6,000 copies," Mr. Gottlieb said by telephone
from his home in New York. "The people who read it were galvanized by
it, and it made her a famous writer in America."
Speaking from Frankfurt during its annual international book fair,
Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, which has
published Ms. Lessing in the United States and Britain for the last 20
years, said that "for women and for literature, Doris Lessing is a
mother to us all."
Ms. Lessing's other novels include "The Good Terrorist" and "Martha
Quest." Her latest novel is "The Cleft," published by HarperCollins in
July. She has dabbled in science fiction, and some of her later works
bear the imprint of her interest in Sufi mysticism, which she has
interpreted as stressing a link between the fates of individuals and
society.
Lynn Bryan, a friend of Ms. Lessing, spent some time at the author's
home on Thursday as flowers arrived, Champagne was served and the phone
rang off the hook. Ms. Bryan said she asked Ms. Lessing why she thinks
she won the prize this year.
"'I don't know,'" Ms. Bryan said the author replied. "'I am genuinely
surprised because they rejected me all those years ago.'" The phone rang
again, Ms. Bryan said. It was another friend, whom Ms. Lessing was to
meet that evening at a Chinese restaurant.
She apologized and told him she couldn't. She had just won the Nobel
Prize. |