by Martin Rubin on September 4, 2008
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as he neared 70, George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer after he has reached the shore. When Doris Lessing got her Nobel last fall—at 88, the oldest person ever to win it—her reaction was as dismissive, saying that she had won “every other bloody prize.” As a writer who had been publishing one book after another for nearly 60 years, Ms. Lessing had long since triumphantly reached the shores of literary success. And in a very real sense, the literature Nobel, notable for ignoring so many of the best writers (starting with Tolstoy in its first 10 awards!), needed her to ornament it far more than she needed it to put a final stamp of approval on a remarkable body of work.
Even for someone who has been publishing since 1950, Ms. Lessing has produced an impressively large and diverse oeuvre. She has written highly imaginative science fiction, but mostly she writes in a strongly realist tradition. Best known as a novelist exploring the great issues of her age—communism, feminism, racism and colonialism—she’s also a distinguished essayist, travel writer and social and literary critic. Her work has sometimes been famously seminal, as in her classic feminist novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), but her writings have also deconstructed the ideologies, most notably feminism and communism, with which she has engaged. Just this year, with Alfred & Emily, a memoir of her parents that blends fantasy lives for them with the brutal reality of their actual existences, she’s shown that she can still knock one out of the park.
Somewhat lost in last year’s shuffle of praise for Ms. Lessing was her impressive record as a writer of short stories, and so it’s particularly salutary that this substantial collection, drawn from volumes published in 1957, 1963 and 1972, has arrived to remind readers of her mastery of this form. Only one story, “Report on the Threatened City,” points toward the use of futuristic fiction that took over the later parts of the initially autobiographical Children of Violence novel sequence and set Ms. Lessing on the path to the sci-fi arc of Canopus in Argos. Otherwise, the tales in this collection are realistic examinations and evocations of varied human experiences, social, sexual, emotional and political.
In her highly personal and critically authoritative introduction to Ms. Lessing’s Stories, Margaret Drabble hails her “direct, personal, authorial female voice” and also her “ability to write across the boundaries of age and gender.” Certainly the range of these stories is impressive. Whether she’s putting orthodox communist political correctness into perspective in “The Day Stalin Died” or exposing the eerily genteel world of an elderly London prostitute coping with changing laws in postwar London in “Mrs Fortescue,” Ms. Lessing is consistently original and always probing.
She’s certainly fearless in choosing her subject matter: “Each Other” exposes the consequences of the ongoing incest between brother and sister, both of them married. And her scope is not narrow. Even though the focus is largely on what motivates the incestuous pair and what drives them, the collateral damage to their spouses—and to themselves—is never neglected. Her best stories, “The Habit of Loving,” “The Temptation of Jack Orkney” and the devastating “To Room Nineteen,” are complex investigations of the consequences of choices made or fallen into. They are the most satisfying, because she invests them always not only with the texture of everyday life, but also with profound psychological insight.
Ms. Lessing’s essay “A Small Personal Voice” is by no means her best-known work, but it’s been subtly influential—and liberating—to many writers in the decades since she wrote it. And it’s also key to her own authorial voice, so notable in these stories. The adjective small is both instructive and a little misleading. It doesn’t mean insignificant, perhaps not even modest, although that’s closer. Its influence on others lies in its encouragement of individual expression without the necessity of its being trumpeted or expounded or pontificated. In Ms. Lessing’s case, the authorial voice is beautifully modulated, firm in its beliefs and conclusions, yet at the same time able to engage all manner of experience.
This is not say that it’s without the capacity to judge. Although the word “judgmental” as customarily used is the last term that springs to mind about Doris Lessing’s stories, they are in fact full of judgment. There’s never much doubt as to where the author stands as she recounts her tales. Her ethical, moral and political compass is finely tuned and firmly set. Her voice does not boom past her readers, but aims straight at head and heart for maximum effect.
Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif. He can be reached at books@observer.com.