DORIS LESSING

If you were to ask most people what impression they have of Doris Lessing, our only serious contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, they would probably tell you she is the firebrand Communist author of The Golden Notebook, one of the great feminist novels of our times. Her novels – over 50 of them – repeatedly attacked the behaviour of white people towards black, challenged sexual stereotypes and, at the end of the Golden Notebook, seemed to suggest that joining the Labour Party was the solution to public and private woes. Yet like Paul Johnson and numerous other former luminaries of the Left she is now a Telegraph-reading thorn in the side of New Labour.

“We do not have a Government that trusts the people, the vox pop. This is the most Philistine Government we’ve ever had,” she says. Having attacked the Prime Minister at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year as “a fantasist”, “a child of the 60s who believes in magic” and “probably not very bright”, she longs to get rid of the current Labour Government. She was “appalled” to see photographs of Gordon Brown kissing his baby on the front cover of serious newspapers last month, she says. “I’d even consider voting Tory, though I probably won’t. We desperately need a strong Opposition.”

It isn’t only Blair who has come in for withering criticism. A recent novel, The Sweetest Dream, pours contempt on a crypto-communist newspaper that is obviously The Guardian, the Bible of the Left. In previous interviews she has denied being a feminist, and expressed a compassion for men that has been considered as shocking a recantation of beliefs as Fay Weldon’s. True, she gave up her “neurotic decision” to join Communist Party membership back in the 1950s, before many other intellectuals tumbled to the evils of Stalinism. She has since described Commusnists as “murderers with a clear conscience.” Fiercely intelligent, wholly self-educated and an indisputably great, if uneven writer, she has given the impression of being bolshy in every sense of the word.

Yet the woman who lives in the heart of a nexus of West Hampstead streets, all gloomily named after the heroes of Greek tragedy, could not be more different. Her sun-filled upstairs room could be that of any Bohemian with its African carvings, its piles of books, its low damask sofas and vases of multicoloured flowers. There are birthday cards featuring the Madonna and Child, wooden masks, a wonderful old stove and a messy desk with a small fire extinguisher on it – perhaps to put out the incendiary side of her work. There are neatly-folded copies of The Telegraph and The Independent on the floor, and National Gallery prints of Breughel and Uccello paintings pinned to the walls. Yet the novels, and particularly The Grandmothers (HarperCollins £15.99), her latest collection of short stories do not by any means suggest this neat, pretty grandmother of letters is going gentle into the goodnight. Fierce, disturbing, gripping and unexpectedly funny they display her uncanny prescience for writing about topics that have only recently come into debate: in the case of the first story, the sexual passion that can exist between beautiful young boys and middle-aged women.

“Astonishing, isn’t it?” Lessing says. “There’s Germaine Greer with her book on The Boy, and Zoe Heller with her novel – which I thought rather good – and I write this. I was told about the grandmothers by a young man who was a friend of the two boys. He was sick with envy at their luck at sleeping with each other’s mother. He described it as 10 years of perfect bliss, but this old sceptic doesn’t believe in that. I wrote what I thought might happen, instead.”

Lessing is our greatest laureate of love – mystified by it, by the reason why two people can be instantly attracted to each other (“have you heard the theory that we have hidden genes that match?”) and has both suffered and described its pangs throughout an immensely varied existence. “I can’t find a pattern to the people I’ve been in love with,” she says in frustration, adding that the capacity to fall in love does not diminish with age. The subject was originally addressed in Love, Again (1996), perhaps her finest novel, and is returned to in The Grandmothers. “The whole thing is a mystery. One doesn’t now act on it, but it does go on happening. You see someone and think, Yes, it’s still there.”

Her two volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin, and Walking in the Shade describe a childhood in the former Rhodesia where she left convent school at 13, but read omnivorously. Married at 19, as was expected of her generation, she had a son and daughter by her farmer husband, Frank Wisdom before leaving him and their children for Gottfried Lessing, a Communist. She had one son by him, Peter, whom she took to England with her when she outgrew that marriage, in turn. Arriving in London in 1949, her first novel, The Grass is Singing, about a woman who feels suffocated by small-town racism, was an immediate success. It was followed by an increasingly formidable body of autobiographical work, climaxing in 1962 with The Golden Notebook which became a key-stone in the burgeoning feminist movement of the 1950s. It’s depiction of the life, loves and mental breakdown of Anna Wulf, a “free woman”, remains a startling piece of fiction, both in terms of its political content and its modernist, diary-like form. Its women take responsibility for their own lives and grapple independently with work, sex, maternity and politics. Lessing was surprised at the fuss it caused.

“When I wrote it I was not conscious of writing anything particularly inflammatory. In all the political movements I had been involved in, I had been listening to women talking about women’s issues, and about men. Suddenly when I wrote down their private conversations, people were astounded. It was as though what women said didn’t exist until it was written.”

On the vexed question of whether she is or is not a feminist she is unequivocal.

“Of course I’m a feminist,” she says at once. “I just think they’ve gone over the edge. I don’t approve of the damage that has been done to boys and young men. What I admire are the times when feminists campaigned for things. We ought to be campaigning for equal pay, and really good nursery schools, but apart from a few letters and articles there’s no concerted movement. If you think of the battle over the Married Women’s Property Act [in the Victorian era], where they got out and got the aid of the powerful, they marched, they wrote letters to newspapers – and got the law changed. Women now don’t do that, and I find it very depressing. The 1960s movement just fizzled out in talk.”

She points out that good state nursery care used to exist as a matter of course, during the War and immediately after, when women were needed to work in factories.
“My son Peter went to a state nursery for a year or two when we first arrived, it was taken for granted. Then it disappeared, because they didn’t want women to work.”

She does, however, deny that feminism achieved much by way of liberation.
“The freedom of women was achieved by two things: 1, the Pill and 2. Labour-saving devices like the washing-machine. By science, not by feminism.”

If aspects of her work are strongly autobiographical, the greater part clearly comes from her chameleon-like capacity to make a strong personality invisible, to listen with a unique attentiveness and focus. She has a capacity for stillness that is unlike that of anyone I have ever interviewed.

“You have to be a listener,” she says, in her quiet, cultured voice. Doesn’t she get accused, as many novelists are, of betraying real-life people?

“My reply is, You shouldn’t trust an author,” she says laughing; but adds that “people can tell you a great deal about themselves in a very few words.” Often she transposes the characters from one culture to another, as in the second short story of the collection, Victoria and the Stavenings, about a black girl impregnated by the son of a white liberal family. The seeds of that came from America, where the gulf between black and white is of money: transposed to Britain, it became as much about class as about racism. She knows liberals who exclaim, like the Stavenings, “I’ve always longed to have a black grandchild”, and the power of the story is that she makes you see the anguish of all concerned, from the black grandchild yearning for a middle-class life, to the mother who is losing her daughter. That, too, has become weirdly topical because of Diane Abbot’s decision to educate her son privately: Victoria has to choose between sending her daughter to the violent, hopeless state school or accepting that her black daughter will be educated privately among middle-class white kids. A return to the themes of her earliest work on racism, and also to her recent novel, The Sweetest Dream, it is about people on the edge of doom.

Yet she seems surprised when asked if her vision of humanity is tragic. “If you look at the ends of my stories you could say that, but The Grandmothers have a wonderful time with each other’s sons. You have a wonderful time, for a time – that’s the best one could say of life.”

This does not strike one as a particularly optimistic thing to say, but Lessing is a realist. She refuses to complain about her old age, though the narrator of another story, The Reason For It says, “I do sometimes wonder why old people bother to keep alive, it is such an effort.” She has a bad back, and osteoporosis for which she takes a pill but otherwise her appetite for work and life seems undiminished.

Unwilling to talk about politics at first (“oh, don’t let’s – it’s so boring”) she becomes more outspoken on this question of how tax-payers’ money is spent. A keen supporter of the theatre, Lessing also belongs to the Book Trust, which works at trying to reverse the effects of the kinds of culture Diane Abbot was trying to protect her son from.

“What does Tony Blair read?” she says. “Major and Thatcher both read books.”
Her despair at the embattled status of literature is shot through with hope because of the effect of Harry Potter, and admiration for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

“Maybe what we’re going to have is an elite who do read. That’s better than nothing. But then it’s evident that those who don’t read are handicapped, they’re going to notice that themselves. I believe there will be a back-lash. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s not to give advice. Really, parents should leave books lying around marked “forbidden” if they want their children to read.”

Of her own books, she thinks “the Golden Notebook will survive, for historical reasons. It’s set in school history classes, which pleases me very much.”

Her struggle to continue to write as a young single mother in post-War London is awe-inspiring. She produced 9 novels in the fist decade of her son’s life, not to mention plays performed at the Royal Court, essays, poems and journalism. Raising her son single-handed in an Earls Court flat is vividly described in her second volume of autobiography, Walking in the Shade, which also describes a roller-coaster love-life. After the state nurseries stopped, she could only manage to write when her son was at school, though by huge luck discovered an intellectual Austrian Jewish family in Kent who took in children, and would farm him out there for a couple of weeks during the holidays. Her son had “the most marvellous time” while she just worked and worked.

Today Peter, now 54, is ill in bed with diabetes. Her other son John, a coffee farmer, dies in 1992. It is her daughter and grand-daughters – one an architect, the other a lawyer in Cape Town, who are “clever, brilliant women” who have clearly carried on the Lessing tradition of intellectual achievement. (There are, however, no great-grandchildren, though she says “it would be nice.”) Having a small child “saved” her, she says, “from being sucked into the glamorous, hard-drinking world of Soho” where so many other talented writers and artists of 1950s London drowned.

Perhaps it is this life of unremitting productivity that has kept her so vital, so vigorous. Her motto is, “Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.” By the time I leave her sun-filled sitting-room, I do not feel that I have been in the company of an elderly woman, waiting for the Nobel Prize that should so clearly be hers. Rather, I feel that she will continue to inspire, provoke, rebuke and above all entertain her international audience for many decades to come.

The Sunday Times, November 2003