“Literature is analysis after the event.” Doris Lessing from The Golden Notebook.
To say that Doris Lessing had a huge impact on me is a monumental understatement.
I first read Lessing in 1970.
For two years I had been pouring all of my energy into the American antiwar movement, but now the New Left was exploding into fiery fragments — bombs going off on campuses, the Weatherman faction of SDS at the height of its insanity, paranoia, bone-grinding fear, bleak nihilism. During those two years of activism I had not read fiction. I remembered the writers I used to love, felt a nostalgia for a lost time when an innocent sweetness had been possible, but in 1970 it was not possible to admire John Updike for his elegant prose. Then I read The Golden Notebook and suddenly there was Lessing in all of her fury and intensity — WAKE UP, this is serious, this is BLOODY serious, this MEANS SOMETHING.
Anna, her shredded character split into four notebooks – I had never seen anything like that. Every twist, turn and backtracking of Anna’s inner and outer lives – I had never seen anything like that either. Lessing didn’t give a damn about beautiful language. She wasn’t creating art. She wasn’t writing “political” stories either. She exposed empty rhetoric, canned verbiage, correct positions. Lessing was not writing for a constituency. She was going after the truth with an unimaginable ferocity. Yes, I thought, fiction could mean something, could be real, could act as a lever in the world. Before America had interrupted me, I had been trying to write fiction. After reading Lessing, I thought that maybe I would try to write it again.
After The Golden Notebook, I read the Martha Quest novels – The Children of Violence – that ended with the magnificent Four Gated City. Lessing called that series a Bildungsroman. I had never seen that word before. I’d been piling up masses of paper about a character I called “John Dupre.” Maybe I could make that into a Bildungsroman. Maybe, like Lessing, I could make it into something real – not merely literature. My entire career as a writer is founded upon Doris Lessing.
Here is Anna confronting her Jungian analyst:
‘Look, if I said to you when I came in this afternoon: Yesterday I met a man at a party and I recognized in him the wolf, or the knight, or the monk, you’d nod and you’d smile, and we’d both feel the joy of recognition. But if I’d said: Yesterday I met a man at a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought: Yes, there’s a hint of something – there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in the dam, and through that gap the future might pour into a different shape – terrible perhaps, or marvelous, but something new – if I said that, you’d frown.”
‘Did you meet such a man?’ She demanded, practically.
Doris Lessing has gone into Great Time. Alas and farewell.
©Keith Maillard, 2013
