Reminiscing about Doris Lessing ...
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Thirteen years before Doris Lessing was named the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature this October, she paid her first visit to Southern California. Although her engagements were in Los Angeles, the Lannan Foundation had arranged for her to stay at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena, apparently because she was eager to visit the Norton Simon and Huntington art galleries. My wife and I, both longtime students of her work, arranged to have lunch with her at the hotel immediately after her arrival from Washington, D.C.
Looking around the plush environment, Lessing indicated that she had stayed in a similar hostelry in the nation’s capital: all peaches and cream, she said, not entirely approvingly. It would soon become apparent that, metaphorically speaking, such comfort wasn’t altogether her cup of tea. She was clearly someone who liked to stir things up, someone who thrived on contention. She was impossible to agree with — even when you did! Her escort from Lannan (which supports the work of contemporary writers and artists) was the most diplomatic of people, but the more emollient she tried to be, the more determined Lessing seemed to roil the conversational waters. Having seen this at such a low-key occasion, I was perhaps less surprised than most to observe Lessing’s grumpy and ungracious reaction to receiving the prize she had so long been denied.
Back in 1994, Lessing seemed to believe that everyone still thought of her as a militant communist and feminist, even when anyone who had read her work in recent years — and all three of her luncheon companions most certainly had — knew this to be no longer true, if indeed it ever had been. She was clearly hoping for a fight, but unfortunately for her, everyone at lunch was too much in tune with her for things to go that way.
Lessing’s deliberately difficult behavior was quite at odds with her physical presence and demeanor. Making no concessions to appear youthful, she was an attractive and pleasant-looking woman despite her heavyset physique and gray hair, which she wore in the simplest of buns. Her strikingly blue eyes shone from a profoundly weather-beaten face, as wrinkled as W.H. Auden’s. Her voice was mellifluous, beautifully modulated, with no trace of the harsh accent of colonial Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she grew up, with its characteristic very short i’s.
The one subject about which Lessing was not at all contrarian was food. Although she had just got off a plane, she was eager to try local dishes and discussed knowledgeably and enthusiastically the varieties of lobster, one of which she consumed with gusto and evident enjoyment.
Lessing, 88, who won’t be attending today’s ceremonies in Stockholm, will miss out on those luscious Scandinavian delicacies at the banquet. She has said that her doctors have advised her not to travel, and indeed she has been hospitalized recently with back problems. But it’s not a long flight from London to Stockholm, and one can even go quite easily, and quickly in a more comfortable fashion and comfortably by boat across the North Sea and then arrive by train. Having had the opportunity to size up her character firsthand, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Lessing is getting a certain satisfaction from making the Nobel people come to her. (The Nobel foundation has said it will deliver the $1.5-million prize to her in London.) The woman I know will definitely relish being the center of attention, rather than one among a group, however select, when the glittering gold medal is presented on her home turf.
— Martin Rubin
Martin Rubin, a frequent contributor to The Times Book Review, is the author of ‘Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.’