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By Robert Nagle

doris lessingFrankly, I was astonished to hear the news that Doris Lessing had won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. She was in fact the 2nd Nobel Prize winner whom I had met personally.

(The first was South African writer J.M. Coetzee, who taught a graduate writing workshop at Johns Hopkins the year I was attending in 1988-9).

About my meeting with Lessing, the circumstances could not be more random and inconsequential. She came into Houston in 1988 for the world premiere of an Phillip Glass opera she wrote the libretto for (Making of the Representative of Planet 9). As luck would have it, the local Greenway Theater in Houston was featuring a sneak preview of the film Powaqqatsi (which Philip Glass had written the score for). Both she and Glass came to the theatre to sign autographs, and I brought my copy of Fifth Child (which I had never read). I was vaguely familiar with Doris Lessing, but had never in fact read anything by her, so I had nothing really to say when I reached the front of the line. (Glass, on the other hand, was my longtime idol). So I asked her to sign the book on page 35. Lessig was perplexed at my request, as she should be.

Signing books on page 35 was a running joke for me. While in college, I used to sign any book I owned on page 35 to identify it as mine. Often, whenever I would give a book to a friend as a present (usually it an old copy of my favorite novel Candide), I would write a personalized remark on that page; usually it was humorous or semi-obscene, but more often it was of the “Jennifer, so what do you think of the book so far?” variety. The joke of course is that most of the time my friend didn’t read the book or didn’t read it until years later, long after I had forgotten what I had written. Years later, my friend would write to say he or she had read the message, ha, ha, ha.

I doubt Lessing would remember me; she had probably signed tens of thousands of books in her lifetime already. Inside the movie theatre, both Glass and Lessing sat in the row ahead of me; while the movie started, I could hear Glass humming and tapping his feet along with the occasional chuckle from Lessing. And I remember thinking, how lucky I was to be sitting in the row behind Greatness.

Lessing has written a lot of novels over her life. She is best known for Golden Notebook (which I found long and prosaic and not terribly interesting though it inspired a generation of contemporary feminist writers). A few months later I read her first novel The Grass is Singing in Stephen Dixon’s class at JHU, and that bowled us all over. Martin Seymour-Smith, while dismissing most of her novels and praising shorter works, admitted that Grass is Singing remains “technically her best.”

A few weeks ago I downloaded and listening to the outstanding audio interviews with Doris Lessing on Wired for Books (You can download the 1988 interview and the 1992 interview as mp3 files). These interviews show Lessing as feisty and talkative and socially engaged. In 1988 one of her main digressions was about Afganistan (where she had lived briefly). She seemed positively horrified by the human rights situation there, aggravated both by the Soviet government and the US-equipped Mujahideen. She warned that the human rights calamity there would eventually have far-reaching consequences. That was in 1988. She also discussed her attempt to dissect the terrorist mindset in her 1985 novel, the Good Terrorist.

Three things strike me about Doris Lessing. First, she is a cosmopolitan writer. Though she grew up in Rhodesia, she is identified not with a single country or region. Her engagement with social and political causes around the world has better equipped her to write for a world audience and insulated her from the need to write more commercial fiction. Second, contemporary writers trying to find connections between Internet literary forms and classical forms might regard Golden Notebooks as one of the few novels that could work as a blog (both in terms of how it is created and how it is read). Third, with her Martha Quest novels, Doris Lessing is probably the first Nobel-winning author to write a significant amount of science fiction. (The Nobel committee lost its best opportunity to honor the science fiction genre by passing over Stanislaw Lem multiple times).

See also: Joyce Carol Oates 1973 essay/interview about Doris Lessing.

 
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