Writer Doris Lessing Turns The Page On The Doctrinaire
For a writer who once was an adamant politicker, Doris Lessing has an almost allergic reaction to falling into anyone's partisan camp.
Claimed by feminists and leftists at various times in her career (in the 1950s she was a member of the Communist Party), she eludes classification both in her novels and in her life. Now in her 70s, Lessing is a lithe and graceful presence, softly spoken, with a quick smile and a ready sympathy.
But her quiet demeanor doesn't prevent her from debunking any social strictures she sees as putting the life of the mind in danger.
She's in town tonight to deliver a talk on what she calls "the pressures on literature at the moment" at Seattle Arts & Lectures. Her targets include the usual suspects, such as corporations that have turned book-publishing over to the accountants ("very nice people . . . but they're not the same animal as the old publishers who have a passion for books").
What her fans may not be expecting are the withering things she has to say about the role of "political correctness" in the arts.
"I think the whole thing is a continuation of Communist Party doctrine," she said yesterday in an interview at the Sorrento Hotel. "It's the same attitude: the need to control literature by an ideology.
"But the interesting thing is that the people who are politically correct don't seem to recognize this. They haven't taken the trouble to find out what terrible results this has had in the
past."
Along with such lively provocations, her lecture should offer readers a chance to ask Lessing about a life and career that have been extraordinary.
Born in Persia in 1919, Lessing moved with her family to rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) when she was 5. She came of age during World War II and was married twice before moving with her son to London in 1949. Her first novel was published a year later: "The Grass Is Singing," a lucid account of an impoverished, colonial Madame Bovary living in an atmosphere of racial animosity and marital isolation.
With each book, Lessing has experimented with form and broadened her scope. "The Golden Notebook" (1962) is a stunning portrait of a mind in ferment, with multiple narratives casting strange light on one another as the novel's heroine sorts out her political beliefs, romantic life and her vocation as a writer. By the end of the '70s she was embarked on a five-volume sci-fi epic, "Canopus in Argos: Archives."
Later books found her combining the lyrical realism of her early work with a fablelike subtext, notably in her 1988 novel, "The Fifth Child," a tale of a suburban London family whose complacent existence is undermined by the birth of their fifth child, who is a genetic throwback: a goblin endowed with a fearful temper and ferocious strength.
Most recently Lessing appears to have come full circle, employing a clear, empirical eye in a book of stories and sketches, "The Real Thing" (HarperCollins, $20, published in England as "London Observed"), and a work of nonfiction, "African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe" (HarperCollins, $25). Both are vivid accounts of their chosen terrain.
Lessing writes with winning affection about the increasingly intricate ethnic shadings of London, where she still lives, taking delight in some of the unexpected results of Britain's empire coming home to roost: "Never has there been a sadder sartorial marriage than saris with cardigans."
In "African Laughter," she explores every corner of the land that shaped her, spending time with her brother and son (both farmers) and traveling to remote schools and villages where Zimbabwe's success as a country is threatened by poverty, environmental degradation, government corruption and an AIDS epidemic.
While touching on these serious issues, Lessing manages to work in some mischievous humor. The book's most poignant moment comes with her portrait of her brother shortly before his death. Almost a stranger to her during the 25 years she was prohibited entry into white-ruled Southern Rhodesia because of her anti-racist politics, he emerges as a prickly character with an indelible allegiance to his race and a rough and tender love for his country.
He misses no opportunity to chide her about her "funny ideas," then gruffly grants her permission to describe some of his: "Are you taking down things I say to use in evidence against me? I don't care provided you write down the bloody stupid things you say, too."
Taken together, the two books are a splendid comeback after a four-year silence. In the case of "African Laughter" she is, as she puts it, better positioned to write about her subject than many of the people living in Zimbabwe. "There is absolutely no contact, or hardly any, between most of the white remaining farmers and the blacks as ordinary people," she explains. "They're full of the most ridiculous prejudices about each other."
While Lessing remains "fascinated" by politics, she no longer believes in "these great rhetorical causes. I'm much more interested in smaller, practical aims - things that can be done."
"African Laughter" singles out the example of four hardy souls who roam the country, researching and soliciting contributions for how-to books that give advice on farming, technology and social problems, trying to satisfy a hunger for books and knowledge that the better-financed aid organizations fail to address.
As for government on the national level, Lessing now sees it as an "astonishing theatrical performance" with some preposterous comical aspects.
"What about the whole business of Mrs. Thatcher's end?" she chortles. "Could Shakespeare have done any better than that? A cliffhanger for three days! All that is very exciting. But in the end we are always running along after events, pretending that we're controlling them, running like mad, trying to catch up with the escaping horse."
Her smile grows rueful: "We always come to understanding a situation when it's too late to do anything about it."
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-- Doris Lessing appears at Seattle Arts & Lectures at First United Methodist Church, 7:30 p.m. Information: 621-2230.