Ordinary People: Doris Lessing. Literary Giant. 1919 - 2013. Nobel Prize for Literature. "Epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

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Ordinary People: Doris Lessing. Literary Giant. 1919 - 2013. Nobel Prize for Literature. "Epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

"Grand dame of letters...." Amanda Craig. The Times. 2003

This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush.

After being chosen as the 2007 recipient of the Nobel Prize For Literature "BBC News", BBC, London (11 October 2007)

Nobel Author Doris Lessing Dies at 94

The Wall Street Journal 

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning and often-polarizing author of "The Golden Notebook" and other novels, died at age 94.

Doris Lessing was the author of dozens of works of fiction that tackled major concerns of her times: mental illness, battles of the sexes, the politics of apartheid and outright war.

Ms. Lessing, who died Sunday at age 94, was recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel committee called her an "epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

A statement from her publisher, HarperCollins, said the author died "peacefully at her London home in the early hours" of Sunday. Her family has requested privacy, the publisher said.

Ms. Lessing told her powerful stories in settings that ranged from her childhood home in Africa to outer space, where she set the five volumes of her "Canopus in Argos" series. But even when writing science fiction, Ms. Lessing's concerns were psychosocial and spiritual, reflecting in later years her increasing dedication to Sufism.

"She's going to be remembered as one of the great writers of her time," said Terry Karten, an executive editor at the Harper imprint in New York, who started working with Ms. Lessing in 1991. "Her imagination was so wide-ranging. She's written realistic novels, she's written science fiction, she's written for opera, many collections of short stories, and the best autobiography I've ever read, 'Under My Skin,'"—which, published in 1994, recounts her early life in Africa.

Most famous for her 1962 novel, "The Golden Notebook," long a touchstone for feminists, Ms. Lessing was also known for her "Children of Violence" series that culminated in the apocalyptic "The Four-Gated City" in 1969.

"Doris's long life and career was a great gift to world literature," Nicholas Pearson, her editor at HarperCollins, said in a statement.

Calling "The Golden Notebook" a "handbook to a whole generation," Mr. Pearson said that even in old age, Ms. Lessing "was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational."

Ms. Lessing was born to British parents living in Persia. The family moved to Southern Rhodesia, where her father, who had lost a leg in World War I, struggled to make a living as a farmer. She dropped out of school at 14 and left home at 15 to escape her mother, whom she depicted in memoirs as a martinet.

She married early and was twice-divorced with three kids by the time she emigrated to London in 1949, bringing along her youngest son.

In 1950 she published her first novel, "The Grass is Singing," set in an unspecified south African country and, like Alan Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country" of a few years earlier, critical of the apartheid system that prevailed at the time.

Although many of her novels touched politics, and she was banned for decades in South Africa and Zimbabwe for her forthright critique of apartheid, Ms. Lessing insisted that she wasn't a political writer.

"I'm [from] a generation that had Stalin," she told The Wall Street Journal in 2008. "The writer is the engineer of the soul, as far as he was concerned, for political reasons, and you'll find many people of our age repudiating that because it has led to so much bad writing."

Nevertheless, Ms. Lessing was a member of the British Communist party, leaving only after 1956 in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Nikita Khrushchev's 20th Congress Speech in which he admitted that Stalin had made grave errors.

"The Golden Notebook" concerns the subsequent decline of the British left. "That cracking up which affected not just the left, but generally, was what I was describing," she told the Journal.

Feminists who later embraced the book annoyed her. "I hated the 1960s feminists," she said. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life."

Ms. Lessing for many years had a strong interest in psychotherapy, especially the work of R.D. Laing, and later embraced Sufism.

When informed of her Nobel Prize by a journalist waiting at her home, Ms. Lessing responded with an exasperated "Oh, Christ," then added, "one can't get more excited than one gets, you know." She later complained that the publicity sapped her energy to write.

Her final novel, published in 2008, was "Alfred & Emily," part-memoir, part-imagining of how much happier her parents would have been had they never married.

—Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg contributed to this article.

Stephen Miller. The Wall Street Journal

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Doris Lessing, Nobel-winning writer, dies at 94 

The Washington Post 

Doris Lessing, a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist whose deeply autobiographical books and piercing social commentary made her one of the most significant, and wide-ranging, writers since World War II, died Nov. 17, at her home in London. She was 94.

Her publisher, HarperCollins, announced the death but did not disclose the cause.

Ms. Lessing’s wide-ranging literary reach touched on relationships between men and women, racism, colonialism, feminism, communism, aging and terrorism. A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, she seemed more annoyed than jubilant when she won in 2007.

“I couldn’t care less,” she told reporters who met her with news of the 2007 award as she returned to her London home from a shopping trip. “This has been going on for more than 30 years; one can’t get more excited. . . . I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise. I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.”

The Nobel committee, which had considered her for its prize for decades, described her as the “epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”

Controversial, contentious and an autodidact, Ms. Lessing drew deeply from her childhood and youth growing up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, where she first became aware of deep racial injustices, the struggle between cultures of native Africans and white immigrants, and the timeless conflict between the demands of the individual conscience and the good of society.

Her debut novel, “The Grass Is Singing” (1950), examined the tragic relationship between two Africans, a white farmer’s wife and her black servant, and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts. That, in addition to her outspoken criticism of racial injustice and apartheid in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, prompted those places to ban her for 30 years.

She wrote more than 50 books as well as short stories, essays and plays before publishing her final book, “Alfred and Emily” (2008), which both imagines and explores the lives of her parents.

Her most ambitious and most discussed novel was “The Golden Notebook” (1962), in which she considers relationships between the sexes through a complex narrative, revealing how political and emotional conflicts are intertwined. The protagonist, a modern female writer who tries to live as freely as a man would, keeps four color-coded notebooks, in which she reviews her experiences, reflects on her political life, writes a novel and pens a personal diary, bringing all four together into a golden notebook.

Feminists claimed her as one of their own, but Ms. Lessing, although acknowledging an underlying feminist philosophy and society’s oppression of women, said readers were missing her main theme about freedom and the rights of the individual. She rejected the label of feminist and spoke out against “romanticizing” and lack of self-criticism in the women’s movement.

Dropping out of school at age 14, she began a lifetime of self-education by reading major 19th-century Russian, French and English novels.

At odds with her mother, she left home as a teenager to work as a nursemaid, then a telephone operator. An early marriage to Frank Charles Wisdom in 1939 ended within four years; she left him and their two children because she said she felt trapped by the traditional role of housewife and mother.

The Left Book Club, a group of Communist literati, energized her. She met a German refugee, Gottfried Lessing, whom she married in 1945. That marriage ended four years later, after the birth of a son. She took that son and left Africa in 1949 for London. The following year, her first novel was published.

Leaving Africa and moving to England on her own, she told the BBC, was “very painful, but I could not stand that society. You have no idea of the awfulness of it. I was going completely mad, and I wouldn’t have stuck it so I knew I had to leave. . . . It wasn’t the children I was leaving; it was that. . . . No one who hasn’t lived in one of these colonies knows just how stultifying they are.”

She didn’t join the Communist Party until the 1950s and soon came to regret her membership, calling it “the most neurotic act of my life.” She left the party within a few years after experiencing the rigidity of its true believers, a topic she revisited in 1987.

“We are seeing now an example of the price a society must pay for insisting on orthodox, simple-minded, slogan thinking: the Soviet Union is a creaking, anachronistic, inefficient, barbaric society, because its type of Communism outlaws flexibility of thought,” she wrote that year. “In the long term, I think the race will go to the democracies, the flexible societies. . . . Looking back now, I no longer see these enormous blocs, nations, movements, systems, faiths, religions, but only individuals. . . . It is individuals who change society, give birth to ideas, who, standing out against tides of opinion, change them.”

In London as an impoverished single mother, she indulged in numerous disastrous love affairs, plunged into the city’s intellectual circles and forged her reputation as a novelist. She engaged in leftist demonstrations and politics, and met many future world leaders, including a young Henry Kissinger, who wanted to speak with a “left-winger,” she said.

They argued, but he left with her respect for his willingness to engage “the enemy,” she told Salon magazine in 1997. She also had a warm visit with feminist Betty Friedan and an amusing encounter with Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets.

“They turned up in London, a whole lot of them, and I went to meet them,” she recalled to the Associated Press’s Hillel Italie in 2006. “I thought they were extremely likable, but this isn’t how they wanted to be seen. I thought then, and I think I was right, that they weren’t as frightening and as shocking as they wanted to be. They were mostly middle-class people trying to be annoying.”

The racial, social and economic injustice of her formative years in Southern Rhodesia informed her work throughout her life. She also wrote about the Afghan mujahideen in “The Wind Blows Away Our Words” (1987), felines in “Particularly Cats” (1967) and outer space in the five-volume “Canopus in Argos: Archives.” She was impatient with those who scoffed at science fiction, noting that it informed millions of people in the basics of science.

“Ideas do not stay shut in neat boxes. They spread themselves about, leap walls, transfer themselves from mind to mind, sometimes one does not know how. We are all the creatures of science,” she said in the Guardian in 1991.

“Whatever her subject, Lessing is a surefooted and convincing storyteller,” wrote Mark Mathabane in The Washington Post’s Book World in 1993. “Her work possesses a universality, range and depth matched by that of few writers in our time.” 

Patricia Sullivan. The Washington Post

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Doris Lessing: her last Telegraph interview

Following the death of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing we republish the last interview she gave to the Telegraph, in which she discusses Hitler, literary awards and her relationship with her mother with Nigel Farndale 

The Telegraph 

When Nigel Farndale interviewed Doris Lessing in April 2008, at the age of 88, he found her still raging - at communists, war, Mrs Thatcher, the 'bloody Swedes' who awarded her the Nobel Prize...

It takes Doris Lessing just four minutes to come out with something, if not actually controversial, then at least unexpected. It's about Hitler. She says she understands him. This from a former member of the Communist Party. (She left in 1956, the year of Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Congress, the one in which he denounced Stalin.) We are talking, I should explain, about Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She recently read another of his books, about three German soldiers who, like Hitler, return from the Great War to the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. 'They see people carting millions of marks around in wheelbarrows and, being old comrades, they stand by each other. And as you read that you suddenly understand Hitler.'

She's not condoning Hitler, of course, merely explaining his early popularity. I mention her comment to show her endearingly cavalier way with language. She doesn't care what people might think. She is past caring. And there is a greatness to this lack of care. How many 88-year-olds do you know who have become a worldwide phenomenon on YouTube, for example? She did, last year, when the press descended on the house in West Hampstead where she has lived for the past 30 years, the house in which we are sitting now. As she emerged from a black cab with her son, Peter, who, eccentrically, was wearing a boa of fresh onions around his neck, she was told she had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was asked for a comment. This was the first she had heard of it, yet she was heroically unimpressed. 'Oh Christ,' she said, waving the question away. 'I couldn't care less...I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one.'

She was more gracious later, saying all the right things, but now when I ask about that Nobel moment she reverts to form. 'Who are these people? They're a bunch of bloody Swedes.'

'They sell a lot of dynamite, Doris,' Peter says. He has shuffled in to say hello, wearing a tea cosy on his head. He lives here, debilitated by diabetes. They had been returning from the hospital on that day of the Nobel announcement.

'This is my son,' Doris says, unnecessarily.

'The other one being dead.' Peter adds, equally unnecessarily. (Her elder son, John, a coffee farmer in Zimbabwe, died of a heart attack in 1992.)

'Why have you got a tea cosy on your head, Peter?'

'Because I've got a cold, Doris.'

The answer seems to satisfy her. 'Anyway,' she says, turning back to me, 'the whole thing is a joke. The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune. I know several people who have won and you don't do anything else for a year but Nobel. They are always coming out with new torments for me. Downstairs there are 500 things I have to sign for them.'

After I was buzzed into the house, I had indeed passed many boxes on my way up the stairs. I had also seen Peter at the end of a corridor, sitting at the kitchen table in his pyjamas. He nonchalantly, wordlessly, pointed a thumb in the direction of the sitting-room. That was where I found his mother, who is 5ft tall, with a soft, creased face, framed with grey tendrils that escape from a carelessly assembled bun.

The room, by the way, is everything you would hope a literary giant's sitting-room might be: splendidly chaotic, more like a junk shop. Someone once said that Lessing seemed to camp out in her own home. There are stacks of books, some teetering precariously, a globe, a tray of nick-nacks, African masks, oil paintings, rugs rucked up on the floor. She lives in here now, sleeping on a red sofa because her backache, caused by osteoporosis, makes it difficult for her to sleep on a bed. She shares the sofa with her huge cat, Yum-Yum, the name taken from The Mikado. 'One day I'll fall over Yum-Yum and have to be carted off to hospital,' she says, stroking the cat. Lessing is clear-minded and clear-voiced, but she does seem to gnaw at words, biting them, talking through gritted teeth like Clare Short. It gives even her moments of frivolity a certain sternness.

This most prolific and unconventional of writers has written the novel she claims will be her last (she has done more than 50 and 'enough is enough'). The first half of Alfred & Emily is a novella about how life might have turned out for her parents had it not been for the First World War. The second half is a biography of her parents. Her mother was a nurse during the war. 'She was warm-hearted but insensitive,' Lessing says. 'Nursing the wounded must have been hell. They would arrive by the lorry load, some already dead. That must have torn her up. It took me a long time to allow her that.'

Her father had been a soldier in the trenches. In 1917, shrapnel almost killed him. He had to wear a wooden leg and missed Passchendaele, the battle in which the rest of his company were killed. 'My father was talking about men he knew who died at Passchendaele up until the day he died,' Lessing says. 'He often wondered if it would have been better if he had died with them. He didn't let his disability hold him back, though. He did everything. I even saw him lowered down a rough mine shaft in a bucket, his wooden leg sticking out and banging against the rocky sides.' He died at 62, an old man. 'On the death certificate, cause of death should have been written as the Great War.'

She thinks much of her own character was informed by the war, through her parents. Without it, she might not have been writer, not had what Graham Greene said all writers must have, a chip of ice in her heart. 'Well, I've often thought about it. I was born out of the First World War. My father's rage at the trenches took me over when I was young and never left. It is as if that old war is in my own memory; my own consciousness. It gave me a terrible sense of foreboding, a belief that things could never be ordinary and decent, but always doom-ridden. The Great War squatted over my childhood. The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me. And my parents never passed up an opportunity to make me feel miserable about the past. I find that war sitting on me the older I get, the weight of it. How was it possible that we allowed this monstrous war? Why do we allow wars still? Now we are bogged down in Iraq in an impossible situation. I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.'

It is an extraordinarily comment, delivered in a matter-of-fact voice. And it reminds me of something she writes in Alfred & Emily: 'You can be with old people and never suspect that whole continents of experience are there, just behind those ordinary faces.' In Lessing's case, you could never guess from her small but kind eyes that she hated her mother. 'We hated each other,' she clarifies. 'We were quarrelling right from the start. She wouldn't have chosen me as a daughter. I was landed on her. I must have driven her mad. She thought everything I did was to annoy her. She had an incredible capacity for self-delusion.'

Did the book help her to understand her parents more; to empathise with them? 'Because my father had lost a leg, it was as if he were the only one who had the right to suffer, whereas my mother also suffered because of the war. She claimed her true love went down in a ship, but I was never sure, because the only photograph she had of him was from a newspaper. Something phoney about that. Why wouldn't she have had a proper photograph?' Lessing came to despise her mother, whom she coldly describes as having 'bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands'. A turning point in their relationship seems to have been when her mother claimed to be having a heart attack. 'She called her children to her and said, "Poor mummy. Poor, poor mummy." I was aged six and I hated her for it. This woman whimpering in her bed saying, pity me, pity me. How did a nurse talk all this rubbish about her heart? She must have known it was an anxiety attack rather than a heart attack. It was invented. My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.'

But not before she had taken to writing to her daughter to accuse her of being a prostitute. After a while, Doris would tear up her mother's letters as they arrived, without opening them. She was eventually driven to see a therapist about this bizarre relationship. 'My father and mother should never have been married,' Lessing says. 'He was so dreamy and sexual, whereas she was so brisk and efficient and cut and dried. They didn't understand each other at all. She was always funny about sex. She didn't hate it, so much as consider it hadn't existed. She would talk about sex as if it were an annoying person with a cold, bothering her.'

Born in Persia (as it was then) in 1919, Doris May Tayler (as she was then) grew up on a maize farm in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), her parents having emigrated there after the war. She read voraciously: literary classics sent over from a London book club. But she was an unhappy child and would run away from time to time. She was also paranoid about her weight and pioneered a diet of peanut butter and tomatoes. She would eat nothing else for months. It worked. She left home, and school, when she was 15 and married Frank Wisdom in 1939, at age 19, whom she met while working at the telephone exchange in Salisbury. He was a civil servant 10 years her senior. She had two children and began climbing what she once potently described as the 'Himalayas of tedium' of young motherhood.

In 1945, at the age of 26, she abandoned her family and married Gottfried Lessing, a communist who was a driving force in the Left Book Club. It was 'my revolutionary duty', she once said. They had a son, Peter. Doris and Gottfried divorced four years later, in 1949. She kept the name of her second husband, which may seem like an odd thing for a feminist to do, but Lessing has never been a conventional feminist. She has never been a conventional anything.

She emigrated to England with Peter and the manuscript of her first book, The Grass is Singing. It is set in Rhodesia and depicts a poor white farmer whose wife has a relationship with their African servant. Published in 1950, when she was 31, it marked her as a coming star, one prepared to challenge racist conventions. It also revealed her to be a novelist of huge natural gifts and technical command. Though dense with the smells and sights of the veldt, its technique owed much to the Russian novelists she had been devouring, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. But the life of the writer meant she had to be selfish. 'Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling,' she says. For the next five years she would pay a family in the country to take her young child off her hands for a fortnight at a time so that she could write. 'No one can write with a child around,' she says. 'It's no good. You just get cross.'

She began mixing with the great and the good of literary London: her circle included John Berger, John Osborne, Bertrand Russell and Arnold Wesker. According to Wesker, 'She was a good cook and gave wonderfully cosy dinner parties where we picked food from an assortment of plates and sat cross-legged eating it. She was like the best of her characters: concerned about friends, hugely intelligent, a no-nonsense person. She was impatient with humbug and pretentiousness. If you were guilty of neither of these, you were welcomed like family.' Another of her friends at this time was the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. She had to stay the night with him once because it was late. 'I wasn't expecting anything but a nice chat. I went to get ready for bed and when I came back all these whips had appeared. What was really strange was that he never said anything like, "Oh Doris, would you like a little whipping?" And I never said, "Ken, what are all these whips for?" So we chatted away about politics, went to sleep, then, in the morning, in comes his secretary to tidy away the whips.'

As well as the stultifying suburban life of colonial Africa, her books have explored the divide across which men and women talk to each other, at each other; the earnestness and perversity of communism; the way in which passion does not diminish with age; and, most notably, female neurosis. Her most influential book is The Golden Notebook, published in 1962 and to this day considered a feminist classic. This often-experimental exercise in post-modern fiction chronicles the inner life of Anna Wulf, exploring what it means to be intelligent, frustrated and female. It starts from the assumption that the lives of women are intimately connected to the accounts of themselves that society allows them to give. This insight moulds the form of the novel itself, with Anna's life being divided into different-coloured notebooks: black for writing, red for politics, blue for the everyday, and yellow for her feelings. The 'golden notebook' represents what Anna aspires to - the moment that will bring all her diverse selves into one whole.

With predictable unpredictability, the author now finds more to argue with in this work of her youth than do those feminists who elevated it to canonical status. She calls the novel her albatross and has come to regret the way critics failed to appreciate the structure of the novel, concentrating solely on its feminist message and its theme of mental breakdown as a means of healing and freeing the self from illusions. 

Her apparent irritation with the book may have had something to do with the adoring fans, especially feminists from America and Germany, who used to stand outside her gate in the summer. 'It became the property of the feminists,' she says. 'Yet it was fundamentally a political book. I used to tire of having to explain to young readers in the 1970s what Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Congress meant to world communism. That's what really gave the book its charge. At the time the comrades here were denying that Khrushchev had even made that speech, saying it was an invention of the capitalist press. Comrades were turning to drink in their despair.'

These days she can sound quite dismissive of the women's liberation movement. 'The battles have all been won,' she says, 'except for equal pay for equal work.' And this seems to have alienated some of her former disciples. But what did the feminists expect? What did her communist comrades expect? What, for that matter, did the Nobel Prize committee expect? They certainly got more than they bargained for. Lessing seems to have been enjoying the extra weight her opinions carry now that she is a Nobel laureate. Her post-Nobel declaration to the Spanish paper El Pais was a case in point. She said that 'September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.' It caused a furore in America, one that she seemed to revel in. For, as well as being uncompromising and single-minded, Lessing seems to regard herself as a professional contrarian. She was at her most obstreperous during last year's Hay Festival of Literarature, flattening respectful questions from the audience with, 'That doesn't make any sense' or 'Explain yourself'.

She was right about the 'bloody awards', by the way. Her first was the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1954; since then she's won everything - apart from the Booker, though she was shortlisted for it five times. In 1999, she was appointed a Companion of Honour. She was also asked to become a dame of the British Empire, but turned it down because it was 'a bit pantomimey'. She has a pretty good idea of why the Nobel came along so late in her life. 'It is probably because I have written in so many different ways, with never a thought that I didn't have the right to.'

With her latest book she has come full circle to the Rhodesia of her childhood. There is a moving chapter in which she describes returning as an elderly woman to the country she had once loved, only to find it devastated by years of Mugabe's tyrannous rule. She encounters a drunk and obnoxious black man who won't let her see her father's old farm. She had been a great champion of black rule. I ask if that encounter made her change her mind? 'Would I have fought against the blacks if I had known what was going to happen? The answer is, no. Then again it wasn't an attractive society I was brought up in.

Quite ugly, in fact. If only it had been possible to say, "I will only support you if you behave properly once you get into power, instead of turning into a murderous beast like Mugabe." Anyway, the fault is partly ours because why did we imagine that when the blacks got into power they would behave like, I don't know, Philip Toynbee. Why did we assume this? Instead, we have this ugly little tyrant, Mugabe. An odious man. I've never understood what happened to him. Everyone I knew who knew him said he used to be intelligent. What a hypocrite to throw out the whites when he said he wouldn't. Now look at the place. Starvation. Disease. Corruption. Low life expectancy. Terrible.'

Has she ever harboured any racist sentiments? 'Of course I have. I was brought up surrounded by racists that nowadays no one would believe were possible. But I don't think it's a question of race. I think it is like the Romans in Britain. The Romans found us barbarians and left us barbarians, but roll on a few centuries and here we are civilised. My brother was quite extraordinarily racist. Thought he was superior to black people. You couldn't believe it had never crossed his mind to think that not everyone agreed with his view that the blacks were baboons who had just come down from the trees. We didn't see each for 30 years. Nothing had changed. Sitting in the kitchen here, I couldn't have a conversation with him. I would have to count to 10. 

He tried to be a writer and was convinced I had stopped his own books being published. I hadn't. It was simply that they were unpublishable. He was an archetypal inhibited Englishman who could only exist in the colonies. He would go scarlet with horror if the subject turned to sex or love.'

She says he became an alcoholic, and that she would have become one, too, had she stayed in Rhodesia. After all, her son stayed there and he became one. I ask what it is like to outlive your own child. 'It goes against the rhythms of nature. Poor old John. He needn't have died. I got on with him, though I disagreed with his politics. He was white with suffering and anxiety because of the drought. He was so buttoned up he wouldn't scream and shout and complain. It is a trait of the British. You must try to weep occasionally.'

She also, of course, came to disagree with her second husband's politics. 'He couldn't take my writing seriously,' she says, 'because he was a communist and thought me bourgeois and a Freudian. All these epithets. I find it almost impossible to believe that he remained a communist all his life. He was murdered in Kampala, you know. 

Ambushed. He got into a car with his second wife and drove straight towards Tanzania, which was mad, and they flame-throwered him, which was the most dreadful death, and it didn't do his son any good. Peter was basically shattered by it. We think the communists did it because they put up a street name after him. That was how they did things.' Communists, she now believes, are 'murderers with a clear conscience'. But it took her a long time to get there. 'Yes I called Marxism "the sweetest dream" in one of my books. Then I discovered it was all a load of old socks. It seems incredible now that quite intelligent people believed in it all. What doubts there were were expressed in sly jokes. The jokes contradicted everything we believed in. We used to joke about how we were wrong about everything.'

Knowing the restlessness of her mind and her inability to resist a chance to shock, I ask her whether she now thinks Margaret Thatcher was a hero for standing up to the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. No such luck. 'She ended the Cold War did she? Well good for her. I couldn't stand her.'

Nigel Farndale 

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Doris Lessing, Novelist Who Won 2007 Nobel, Is Dead at 94

The New York Times

Doris Lessing, the uninhibited and outspoken novelist who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for a lifetime of writing that shattered convention, both social and artistic, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 94.

Her death was confirmed by her publisher, HarperCollins.

Ms. Lessing produced dozens of novels, short stories, essays and poems, drawing on a childhood in the central African bush, the teachings of Eastern mystics and years of involvement with grass-roots Communist groups. She embarked on dizzying and, at times, stultifying literary experiments.

But it was her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook,” a structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical tale, that remained her best-known work. The 1962 book was daring in its day for its frank exploration of the inner lives of women who, unencumbered by marriage, were free to raise children, or not, and pursue work and their sex lives as they chose. The book dealt openly with topics like menstruation and orgasm, as well as with the mechanics of emotional breakdown.

Her editor at HarperCollins, Nicholas Pearson, said on Sunday that “The Golden Notebook” had been a handbook for a whole generation.

As a writer, from colonial Africa to modern London, Ms. Lessing scrutinized relationships between men and women, social inequities and racial divisions. As a woman, she pursued her own interests and desires, professional, political and sexual. Seeking what she considered a free life, she abandoned her two small children.

Salon, in an interview with Ms. Lessing in 1997, said that “with her center-parted hair that’s pulled back into a bun and her steely eyes, she seems like a tightly wound earth mother.”

It was this figure, 10 years later, who approached her house in sensible shoes to find journalists gathered at her door waiting to tell her that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature. “Oh, Christ!“ she said upon hearing the news. “I couldn’t care less.”

The Nobel announcement called her “the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

And in the presentation speech at the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, Ms. Lessing was described as having “personified the woman’s role in the 20th century.”

The cavalier and curmudgeonly Ms. Lessing was making headlines again a few days after the announcement, dismissing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as “not that terrible” compared to the toll from decades of Irish Republican Army violence.

“The Golden Notebook,” which critics generally consider her best novel, has been published in many languages, and 50 years after it first appeared, it is still in print. It consists of a conventional novel, “Free Women,” and several notebooks, each in a different color, kept by the protagonist, Anna Wulf, a novelist struggling with writer’s block.

The black notebook deals with Africa and the novel Anna wrote from her experiences there; the red notebook chronicles her Communist Party days; the yellow is an autobiographical novel within the larger novel; the blue is a diary of sorts. The golden notebook, at the end, brings together ideas and thoughts from the other sections.

Ms. Lessing wrote that she had intended the novel to capture the chaotic period after the Soviet Union denounced Stalinism. Under the pressure of the revelations about Stalin’s crimes, the movement that had been the glue of her social and intellectual circle came undone.

She considered the novel to be a triumph of structure. By fragmenting the story, she said, she wanted to show the danger of compartmentalizing one’s thinking, the idea that “any kind of single-mindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness.”

But her book was seen as a feminist work, a response that irritated her. Even though her novels and stories were filled with the issues at the core of the feminist movement, Ms. Lessing had sharp words for feminists.

Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan in 1970, during the Vietnam War, she told her audience, “I’ve got the feeling that the sex war is not the most important war going on, nor is it the most vital problem in our lives.” In 1994, she was no less critical. “Things have changed for white, middle-class women,” she said, “but nothing has changed outside this group.”

While some ideas embraced by the women’s movement came naturally to her, Ms. Lessing differed with the movement on some issues in “Under My Skin,” the first volume of her autobiography, published in 1994. Discussing sexual harassment, for example, she wrote that “contemporary women scream or swoon at the sight of a penis they have not been introduced to, feel demeaned by a suggestive remark and send for a lawyer if a man pays them a compliment.”

Doris May Tayler was born on Oct. 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), the first child of Alfred Cook Tayler, a bank official, and the former Emily Maude McVeagh. Mr. Tayler was injured in World War I and lost a leg. Miss McVeagh was his nurse.

Ms. Lessing wrote in “Under My Skin” that her birth was a disappointment to them, and that the doctor who delivered her had to come up with a name because her parents had rejected the possibility that they might have a girl.

Her descriptions of growing up are colored by resentment toward her mother, who never let her forget how much she had sacrificed for her children. She found an ally of sorts in her father, but he also seeded her childhood with stories of World War I, which Ms. Lessing said imbued her with fatalism.

The family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), determined to make its fortune farming corn. On the farm, Doris was taught by her mother and read all the books she could find. She was sent to boarding school and then to a convent school. Convent school turned her into a Roman Catholic, but her conversion was merely a stop on the way to atheism. She left school at 14 and lived at home for a while. But as the friction with her mother became unbearable, she made two forays to Southern Rhodesia’s capital, Salisbury, and between those stints wrote and tore up two novels.

In Salisbury, where there was a shortage of women, Doris had her pick of partners for dancing, films and drinks at the Sports Club. Looking back, she singled out the dance music as the most seductive influence, but underlying it, she wrote, was nature “preparing us to replenish the population between world wars.”

The force exerted itself quickly. She managed to disengage Frank Wisdom, a civil servant, from his fiancée, and married him in 1939. She wrote that she was pregnant at the time but did not know.

She sought an abortion several times, but each time some circumstance intervened, she wrote. When she finally was told the pregnancy was too far advanced, she went home relieved. In retrospect, she said, “now it seems to me obvious I knew all the time I was pregnant, was in alliance with nature against myself.”

Her first child, John, exhausted her. But she found solace when she drifted into a group whose members considered themselves revolutionaries. She was excited by their ideas and became, in effect, a Communist.

Ms. Lessing began distributing the South African Communist Party newspaper and protesting the “color bar” laws that kept power in the hands of the white minority.

In 1943, her daughter, Jean, was born. By this point, the author was disillusioned with being a Salisbury matron, and Jean spent much of her first year in the care of others.

Finally, Ms. Lessing decided to leave her children, her husband and her home to pursue her ideals and life with her friends and comrades. She moved out of the family home to a rented room, took a job as a typist and kept up with news of the children through a relative. This drastic step was accorded no more than a few pages in her autobiography, and she dwelled on neither her reasons nor her regrets at any length in interviews.

“I couldn’t stand that life,” Ms. Lessing said in the Salon interview. “It’s this business of giving all the time, day and night, trying to conform to something you hate.”

If she had stayed with her family, she would have infected the children with the sense of doom she carried within her “like a defective gene,” she explained in “Under My Skin.”

“I was protecting myself because I knew I was going to leave,” she wrote. “Yet I did not know it, could not say, I am going to commit the unforgivable and leave two small children.”

She also wrote that she was having an affair at the time, but did not consider it to be an important factor in her decision.

Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the autobiography in The New York Times, said Ms. Lessing’s “matter-of-fact tone” in writing about this period leaves “a vivid if somewhat chilling picture of the author as a self-absorbed and heedless young woman.”

In 1943, she married Gottfried Anton Nicolai Lessing, a German Communist, because it was her “revolutionary duty” to protect him in a wartime environment hostile to Germans. Their plan was to divorce after the war. They had a son, Peter.

It was during this marriage, which was interlaced with affairs on both sides, that Ms. Lessing had what she called “that classical love affair every woman should have just once.” When she began to fantasize about having a baby with her married lover, she decided that she had to outsmart nature with sterilization surgery.

Her divorce from Mr. Lessing went according to plan. In 1949, she departed for England, taking her son as well as the manuscript to her first novel, “The Grass Is Singing,” about the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black male servant. It was published in 1950 to a warm reception and was later adapted as a film. Her first volume of short stories, “This Was the Old Chief’s Country,” appeared the next year.

Her five-novel series “The Children of Violence” explores coming of age in British colonial Africa, marrying and bearing children there and moving to London. The weighty series of books — “Martha Quest” (1952), “A Proper Marriage” (1954), “A Ripple From the Storm” (1958), “Landlocked” (1965) and “The Four-Gated City” (1969) — remolds some of the issues and situations treated in “The Golden Notebook”: war, Communism, sex, abortion, domestic violence, abandoning children, psychoanalysis and breakdown. But the series reaches forward to the next millennium and the destruction of the earth.

Many of Ms. Lessing’s novels are long, dense and complex. Her prose, one critic said, can be “indigestible.” J. M. Coetzee wrote that “Lessing has never been a great stylist — she writes too fast and prunes too lightly for that.” When she entered the realm of science fiction, she disappointed some of her staunchest supporters. Her “Canopus in Argos” series, which began with “Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta” in 1979, was greeted with both surprise and regret.

John Leonard, who classified “The Golden Notebook” among “the sacred texts of our time,” reviewed “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8,” one of the books in the series, in 1982, saying: “One of the many sins for which the 20th century will be held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs. Lessing. She will transport herself, no longer writing novels like a Balzac with brains, but, instead, Books of Revelation, charts of the elements and their valences.”

She adapted that book and another work from the series as an opera, “The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five,” with Philip Glass.

In the 1980s she published what amounted to a joke on the publishing industry and on critics, two books written — and submitted to publishers — under the pseudonym Jane Somers: “The Diary of a Good Neighbour” and “If the Old Could.” Both were rejected by Jonathan Cape, which had long been her British publisher.

As she had predicted, once they were published, they received little critical attention. Later, they were rereleased in one volume under Ms. Lessing’s name as “The Diaries of Jane Somers,” a book praised for the way it portrayed growing old in Britain.

“Alfred & Emily,” published in 2008, is half-fiction, half-memoir — on the one hand recounting her parents’ lives as they eked out a living on a small farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia and, on the other, imagining what their lives might have been like if World War I had not occurred.

Among the major influences on her thought, Ms. Lessing named Communism and Sufism. In between she embraced the psychiatry of R.D. Laing. She also counted Central Africa, World War I and her reading.

And, of course, there is her mother, who keeps arising in one guise or another. After reading the first volume of her autobiography, Mr. Coetzee commented: “There is something depressing in the spectacle of a woman in her 70s still wrestling with an unsubjugated ghost from the past. On the other hand, there is no denying the grandeur of the spectacle when the protagonist is as mordantly honest and passionately desirous of salvation as Doris Lessing.”

Later in life, she divorced herself from all “isms,” stridently expressing opinions that were often contentious, like her belief that modern music was feeding violent impulses into the brains of listeners and her condemnation of the Internet’s “inanities” in the Nobel acceptance speech she wrote but did not deliver herself because she was ill.

Readers did not stop interpreting her work in ways that infuriated her.

In “The Fifth Child,” published in 1988, Ms. Lessing wrote of an attractive family with four children that is shattered by the birth of the fifth, a monstrous aberration. She said the book tapped a reservoir of inner grief, and she was outraged at the response to the novel, which, she said, “was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.”

In 2000 she published “Ben in the World,” a sequel to “The Fifth Child,” and in 2002 “The Sweetest Dream,” a fictional account focusing on the 1960s that she said would stand in for her third volume of autobiography. In her review in The Times, Ms. Kakutani called “The Sweetest Dream” “a novel whose moments of brilliance are obscured by reams of tiresome exposition, hokey plot twists and astonishingly opaque characters.”

Ms. Lessing’s survivors include her daughter, Jean, and two granddaughters.

After her stroke Ms. Lessing said, she stopped traveling. Constantly reminded of her mortality, she said she became consumed with deciding what she should write in the precious time that remained.

But in discussing her writing in 2008, she said: “It has stopped; I don’t have any energy anymore. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

HELEN T. VERONGOS. The New York Times

Doris Lessing Vll (Artwork) 

The Adventures of Doris Lessing

John Leonard

The New York Review of Books 

November 2006

Time Bites: Views and Reviews

by Doris Lessing

HarperCollins, 376 pp., $27.95

The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

by Doris Lessing

HarperCollins, 282 pp., $24.95

It is as if some gauze or screen has been dissolved away from life, that was dulling it, and like Miranda you want to say, What a brave new world! You don’t remember feeling like this, because, younger, habit or the press of necessity prevented. You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

—Doris Lessing, Time Bites

Doris Lessing, who turned eighty-seven in October, is telling us what “old” feels like. Not a believer in “the golden age of youth,” she “shudders” at the very idea of living through her teens again, even her twenties. Since she left Africa for England more than half a century ago, a single mother and a high school dropout with a wardrobe full of avatars—angry young woman, mother superior, bad-news bear, bodhisattva—she has published an astonishing fifty-five books. Although Time Bites is her first collection of articles, lectures, book reviews, and broadcasts, The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog is her twenty-fifth novel. Nor does the fact that she’s four inches shorter than she used to be make her a shrinking violet. “Old” is as nice as she gets in Time Bites. Her default mode is usually imperious, as if ex cathedrawere the normal respiration of her intelligence.

With a muster more of adjectives than argument, she admires the great in their shallow graves (Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Bulgakov); promotes some personal favorites (Christina Stead, George Meredith, Muriel Spark); scolds us for neglecting others (Anna Kavan, Jaan Kross, Tarjei Vesaas); gets huffy about our provincial ignorance of a Sanskrit folktale cycle, The Fables of Bidpai; and chats up autobiography (Casanova, Cellini), Stone Age civilizations (Knossos, Catal Hoyuk), cults (Cromwell, the Red Guards, al-Qaeda), and Ecclesiastes (“the thundering magnificence” of the King James version). She has a genuine affection for the composer Philip Glass, who turned two of her “space fictions” into operas, and for the editor William Phillips, even if his name is twice shamefully misspelled. But for every lovely fugitive impression (“the first men probably did not know where their thoughts ended and the consciousness of beasts began”), there is a snide kick at “militant feminists,” and for every gut-wrenching account of the agony of Zimbabwe, a couple of twaddles about the “tyranny” of “Political Correctness.”

What makes Time Bites nonetheless a valuable addition to the Lessing index is its account of her finding her way to Sufi mysticism in the late 1960s. Loyal readers who have followed her out of Africa into celebrity are all too aware that a different Doris finished off the fifth and final volume of her “Children of Violence” series, The Four-Gated City (1969). It was as if Martha Quest, until then Lessing’s alter ego and doppelgänger in the series, had somehow got hold of a copy of The Golden Notebook, been desolated to discover the bankruptcy of every master narrative of Western Civ from Euclidean geometry to class war to the Oedipus complex, and then battered her way headfirst through the library wall into a prehistoric realm of memory, myth, madness, and genetic mutation. Or as if, in the yellow house in the south of France, Gauguin had turned suddenly into Van Gogh.

What happened? Her two volumes of autobiography aren’t much help, escorting her only up to The Golden Notebook in 1962. And instead of a third volume, she published a novel, The Sweetest Dream (2001), ostensibly picking up where the autobiographies left off but fictionalized so as to avoid “possible hurt to vulnerable people”—and possible libel suits. So she got to be cranky about Communists, feminists, journalists, shoplifters, progressive schools, conversion experiences, and grief therapy—but aside from the obligatory reference to yarrow stalks and the I Ching, the raptures of the deep went unmentioned.

For a while, encouraged by one of her biographers, some of us saw The Four-Gated City itself as a conversion experience, from the mystifications of Marx and a market economy to the mystagogies of R.D. Laing and mescaline. Time Bites makes it clear that we were wrong. After quitting the Communist Party and finishing The Golden Notebook, she needed to reupholster her own spacious mind. From William Butler Yeats, Saint John of the Cross, and Julian of Norwich to Buddhism and the Bhagavad-Gita, she was looking for something “that mirrored certain conclusions and discoveries I had made for myself…. It could not possibly be, I decided, that I was the only person with these thoughts.” What she found, courtesy of Idries Shah, was the poets and sages of a 1,300-year-old current of Islamic thinking that sought, through otherworldliness, a strenuous spiritual calisthenics of pilgrimage, sleeplessness, fasting, and ecstatic dance, and a kick-the-can pedagogy of parables, aphorisms, fables, verses, and jokes, to see past mere appearances to the hidden reality and transcendent dimension of human life.

Meet the Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi, with his bouillabaisse of Persian, hermetic, and Greek ideas. And the Spanish mystic Ibn al-Arabi, with his Bezels of Wisdom and his vision of an incarnate Sophia, the divine Wisdom. And the jurist and theologian al-Ghazali, who first told the tale of the Seven Valleys the pilgrim soul must cross toward annihilation of the self. As well as poets like ‘Attar, who elaborated on this ineffable topography in his Parliament of Birds, and Rumi, who founded an Order of Whirling Dervishes, the Mawlawiyyah. From al-Muqaddasi’s Revelation of the Secrets of the Birds and Flowers and Saadi’s Rose Garden to The Exploits of the Incomparable Mullah Nasrudin, Sufi literature is associative, intuitive, witty, respectful, transparent, and transcendent, preaching harmony, immanence, and the interconnectedness of all forms of organic life. What it seemed to say to a Lessing who had given up radical hope is that nothing is permanent, but neither will anything ever really change.

After the passionate indignation and furious intelligence of the African stories, The Grass Is Singing (1950), and the first four “Children of Violence” novels, when Martha went through that wall out of politics and psychiatry into dancing atoms and blue lights, Lessing stopped playing by the old narrative rules. From the apocalyptic vision in The Four-Gated City of an ancient metropolis, a clairvoyant priesthood, and emancipating mutants, there would follow Charles Watkins’s tortured apprehension of himself in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) as a splinter of the consciousness of superior beings beamed down from Venus; the frantic efforts by the nameless narrator of The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) to protect the girl-child Emily by hiding her in the patterned carpets and hanging gardens of a parallel universe; and the late-Seventies space-fiction series “Canopus in Argos,” in which earthlings were watched over and trifled with for millions of years by three separate intergalactic empires in five different evolutionary time zones.

In a preface to the first of these sci-fis, Shikasta: Re: Colonized Planet 5, Lessing suggested that “a single mind” wrote the Torah, the Apocrypha, the New Testament, and the Koran, as well as the liturgies of the Dogon (a tribe in Mali) and Popol Vuh (the sacred book of the Mayans). In a preface to the third, The Sirian Experiments, envious of physicists who got to play with black holes, white dwarves, and charmed quarks, she skyjacked a flying saucer: “As for UFOs,” she explained, “we may hardly disbelieve in what is so plentifully vouched for by so many sound, responsible, sensible people, scientific and secular.” It’s easy to see now that the do-good Canopeans were as much Sufi sages as they were golden Greeks.

At least temporarily, critical realism and social coherence went out the window in favor of biological mysticism, a collective unconscious, and lots of weather metaphors. The excruciating subjectivity of the modern predicament would resolve itself in a remedial reading of such sacred texts as The Cloud of Unknowing, the Book of Revelation, and the Upanishads. Thereafter, for every conventional novel like The Good Terrorist (1985), with its IRA wannabes, or Love, Again(1996), her sexy romp in the theater world, she would publish a fabulist shadow fiction like The Fifth Child (1988), about a Neanderthal baby in modern London against whom his own siblings locked their bedroom doors at night, or Mara and Dann (1999), set at the end of an ice age in a distant future of drowned cities and murderous tribes.

I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

—Doris Lessing, Preface to African Stories

Nineteen pages into The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, Mara dies giving birth. So much for the resourceful heroine of Mara and Dann, the plucky Mahondi princess on the run with her crazy brother from the drought-stricken heart of Ifrik to the ice cliffs of the Middle Sea, with whom, in a future as immeasurable and remote as the prehistoric past, we had crossed half a continent of white bones, singing beetles, and burning sand, only a step ahead of famine, scorpions, slavers, and death squads. Except for poppy smoke and banshee wail, Lessing is done with her.

So much too for what Lessing called an “adventure,” but which added up, by nudge, wink, and ninja kick, to something more original. It’s not just that Mara and Dann seemed to rehearse all of immemorial Africa—savannas, gorges, femurs, shamans, soldiers, refugees, empires, necrologies, genocides, and other affidavits of atrocity—and to catalog as well volcanic cataclysms in deep readings of ice caps, carbon clouds, and fossil dumps. It seemed also to rehearse every which way we tell these stories, in chronicles, almanacs, calendars, scriptures, theses, and screed, before deciding to be a fairy tale and apologue.

Thus as the ice grip on Yerrup thawed and desert gained everywhere in Ifrik, we followed seven-year-old Mara and three-year-old Dann from the murder of their parents, their abduction by strangers, and their childhood in hiding, on a rough passage north into the traumatic experience of barracks, brothels, and prisons; of earthquakes, flash floods, fire storms, civil war, and slave labor. While competent Mara made cheese, candles, and community, bipolar Dann, between losing his sister in a game of chance and losing his mind to drugs, killed enough civilians to become a general. “Immensities” troubled their dreams, and humiliating intuitions of their own “smallness,” as well as garbled tales from ancient texts about operatically unhappy characters with names like Mam Bova and Ankrena. But when they finally got north enough—Morocco? Tunisia?—to arrive at the legendary “Centre,” they found priestly clerks awaiting their prophesied appearance, out of drought, into rainbows.

Mara and Dann fabled itself to a fare-thee-well. There was a magic cloak, a designated nemesis, gold coins, evil twins, black towers, even a labyrinth, a counterplot, and a restoration fantasy. Not that Lessing, a Sister Grimm, admits of happy endings. If her 1999 novel accused its century of specializing in refugees, in forced relocations of the outcast and anathematized, it never suggested that any other century had been nicer. If Dann’s ancestors seemed to him omniscient (“There were people once—they knew everything. They knew about the stars…they could talk to each other through the air…compared to them we are beetles”), yet these know-it-alls, staring up from drowned cities, immured like woolly mammoths in blue ice, were just as dead as their epigoni. After 12,000 years of civilization, war was still the end of every story, “the ways of war became crueller and more terrible,” and a punishing ice age was what we deserved.

The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog is a lesser effort, a tying up of loose ends. It has some of the fairy-tale quality of its predecessor—aromatic forests, broken-hearted beasts, red and black armies, white witches, and “more of the long, long ago, the here-we-go-again”—plus a Candide garden, where a pregnant Mara takes up farming; a gloss on Max Weber, in which charisma is a curse; a marvelous account, as if to conflate the Tower of Babel, the Library at Alexandria, and Noah’s Ark, of “sand librarians,” frantic scribes in the Centre’s bowels, trying to save a page here, a paragraph there, even a skittering phrase (“Rose thou art sick”) from rising waters and disintegrating bark; and passages that remind us of Lessing’s raw power when her interest and ire are aroused. A calving of glaciers is reported in eddas and skalds:

They were staring at the ice cliffs of Yerrup, that seemed undiminished, in spite of how they cracked and fell. As they gazed, a portion of the lower shining mass groaned and fell, and slid into the waves, leaving a dark scarred cliff which from here looked like a black gap on the white….

Now they were close, too close, to a tall shining cliff face, bare of ice, though water was bounding down, off rocks, in freshets and rivers, and the sea was rocking and rearing so badly that the boat was in danger of overturning. They were clutching the sides and calling out, while Dann was yelling with exultation, for this was what he had dreamed of, and it was what he was seeing—there were the ice cliffs of Yerrup and the sounds they made as they fell was like many voices, all at once, shouting, groaning, screaming—and then, crack, another ice face was peeling off, and Dann found that the others had turned the boat and it was rocking its way back to shore, a long, dangerous way off…. And before they reached shore and safety, a large block of ice that shone blue and green and dusky pink was coming straight for them.

But there is an impatience to this sequel, a rude rush that can’t be bothered with chapter divisions or more than a handful of line-space breaks. Mara being dead, we are stuck mostly in the head of her unhappy brother, the poppy-smoking “General” Dann, whose “authority” as a wonder-worker is as unearned as it is widespread, whose fame is an illusion, “a flicker of nothing, like marsh gas, or the greenish light that runs along the tops of sea waves,” but who has been born with the peculiar ability “to set fire to the expectations of people who had never even met him.” And when Dann retires to anguish over his sister, or to indulge his bitter envy of those “lost time” ancestors who were so much cleverer than he, the narrative chores fall to Griot, his dutiful, humorless, green-eyed aide-de-camp, a former child soldier who followed Dann all the way from Agre, who sees to the training of the army his general leads into pointless battle, and who, like all the griots before him, will sing praise-songs on the killing fields.

Also green-eyed is the snow dog saved by Dann from drowning, whose “sodden mass” and “dense wetness” he buttons into his own jacket, whose dead weight he carries overland to a stranger’s shack, whose sneezes and shakes he warms through a winter’s night against his skin, the only creature he will ever love besides his sister—but an adoring pet who must turn against his own master to protect Mara’s daughter, the girl-child Tamar, from the despair and rage of her brain-sick uncle. Surely this remarkable beast deserved a better name than Ruff? 

Dann, Griot, Ruff, and an army of men wearing blankets invade the nation next door, not because anyone believes that their promises of “justice, order, fairness, kindness as a ruling idea” will work out better this time than elsewhen: “Over and over again, all the effort and the fighting and the hoping, but it ends in the Ice or in cities sinking down out of sight into the mud.” Nor is Dann under any illusion that “happily ever after” means more than “whistling in the dark.” Somewhere nearby, some other charismatic leader is already rousing another rabble. Soon there will be more children on the run. Still, this is how the story has always been written, and everyone must play his part. Sisters die, and so do civilizations, and in the rear-view mirror of the Sufi levitation the rest of us look smaller and smaller. But Doris Lessing is her own ecosystem, biocosm, Big Bang, and entropic universe. Her advice to us is chin up, and socks, too.

I was seeing a mature woman, a woman who has had her fill of everything, but is still being asked from, demanded of, persuaded into giving: such a woman is generous indeed; her coffers and wells are always full and being given out. She loves—oh, yes, but somewhere in her is a deadly weariness. She has known it all, and doesn’t want any more—but what can she do? She knows herself—the eyes of men and boys say so—as a source; if she is not this, then she is nothing. So she still thinks—she had not shed that delusion. She gives. She gives. But with this weariness held in check and concealed.

—Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor

Shake her family tree and down fall bootmakers, bank clerks, mariners, medics; a cousin to the painter Constable, a farmer who versified, a soldier who Charged with the Light Brigade, a widow who captained a barge. Doris’s father, having lost a leg in the Great War, talked about the trenches till the day he died, of diabetes. Her mother, a nurse who had once aspired to be a concert pianist, “wanted children, to make up to them what she had suffered as a child.” Follow these minor players on the British imperial stage from Kermanshah, Iran, where Doris was born in 1919, on a nightmare passage by oil tanker across the Caspian and lice-ridden train through war-torn Russia, to “wet, dirty, dark and graceless England”; by boat past sunsets, seagulls, and flying fish to Cape Town; by prairie schooner behind a team of oxen north to the flaming skies and termite heaps of Rhodesia, where the maize crop failed and so did tobacco, where gold didn’t pan out and neither did social ambition.

Did you know she spent four years in a convent school, so admiring of holy water, rosary beads, and sanctus bells that she actually converted for a minute or two to Roman Catholicism? Then her mother explained the Inquisition, and she quit religion and piano.

Imagine the novelist as Artemis, Doris as Diana: by age twelve, she already knew how to raise rabbits, worm dogs, churn butter, make cream cheese and ginger beer, shoot guinea fowl, and walk on stilts. Not that she wasn’t also reading—Dickens and Lewis Carroll. When at last she left the unhappy homestead where her mother loved her brother best, for the dance hall, typing pool, and Left Book Club in Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital, she added Lawrence, Proust, and Virginia Woolf to Kipling and Olive Schreiner. She also switched from The Observer to The New Statesman. The hard-drinking Young Married writing her first novel discovered the Russians “like a thunderclap”: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky. After which, as she abandoned the “spineless social democrats” for the “kaffir-loving” local Reds, she would abandon her dull husband, Frank Wisdom, and their two children for Gottfried Lessing and the Revolution.

He was a Communist, a German, an enemy alien in World War II, and lousy in bed: “It was my revolutionary duty to marry him. I wish I could believe this was just one of our jokes, but probably not.” To her children by Frank, she explained that she must leave them to make a better world; “One day they would thank me for it. I was absolutely sincere. There isn’t much to be said for sincerity, in itself.” Gottfried, the father of her third child, deserted them both after the war, for East Germany. Doris, alarmed at her habit of having children by every man she went to bed with, had her tubes tied. She moved to England in 1949, and published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, the following year.

Her second volume of autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997), is less thrilling than her first, Under My Skin (1994), unless you count a late date with Kenneth Tynan, during which they didn’t use his bedroom whips. Briefly, she would be lumped in with England’s Angry Young Men, but seems to have preferred the company of the novelist and art critic John Berger. Other names march by, tooting their horns—Honor Tracy, Isaak Dinesen, C.P. Snow, Kenneth Kaunda, Siobhan McKenna, Paul Robeson, Brendan Behan, Bertrand Russell, Laurence Olivier—and we are none the wiser. We do meet the American Trotskyist Clancy Sigal, on his way to a nervous breakdown for which a crazy doctor (probably R.D. Laing) would prescribe LSD, who shows up as Saul Green in The Golden Notebook, and who gave Doris the gift of jazz.

We also meet Mrs. Sussman, the analyst Lessing saw for three years before conscripting her so memorably into The Golden Notebook as Mother Sugar. Mrs. Sussman, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, was a Jungian who specialized in “unblocking” artists. In Doris she found archetypal residues of Electra, Medea, and Antigone. She especially liked the giant lizard dream that Doris would inflict on Martha in two of the “Children of Violence” novels. Later, in an essay on Laurens van der Post and the literature of exile, Lessing noted that “Papa Jung” and Africa were so compatible because “vast spaces, hinterlands and the nameless can so easily be archetyped into sympathetic symbols.” There is also an obvious kinship, in folk wisdom, ritual drama, and a collective unconscious, between Jung and Sufism.

But the ritual drama of Walking in the Shade is her love-hate affair with communism, less than a marriage but more than a one-night stand. Almost perversely, she joined the Party not with her friends in Africa during the war, but in England in 1952, even then holding off for the sake of appearances until after she returned from a very guided tour of the Soviet Union—art galleries, St. Basil’s, collective farms, Yasnaya Polyana—whereupon she not only attended cocktail parties at the Soviet embassy and sold Daily Workers door-to-door, but also sat through endless stupefying meetings of the Writers’ Group in her own room, as usual the perfect hostess. When at last she did quit the Party, sometime in 1957—after Hungary; after the Twentieth Party Congress; after the Soviet news agency Tass paid her way back to Africa; after she published A Ripple in the Storm, the Martha Quest novel that made merciless fun of her erstwhile comrades in Rhodesia; after many letters to and from E.P. Thompson—she kept her lip zipped about it so as not to give right-wing butcherboys the Schadenfreudian satisfaction.

Simultaneously, as if to stomp all over her foreign and domestic policies, there was also “the most serious love in my life”—the refugee Czech psychiatrist she calls Jack, a former Communist and current Marxist whose friends at home had been devoured by the purges. With Jack, she went to Paris and Eastern Europe. About Jack, she wrote a novel, Retreat to Innocence(1956), which she’s ever since suppressed. Why? It was “shallow,” “soft-centered and sentimental,” she says. Others suggest that it may have been embarrassingly “socialist-realist.” Or perhaps she prefers not being reminded of a time when she still believed in radical politics, social justice, and systemic change.

Odd, really. Much of this mid-Fifties period was later covered in her magnificent Golden Notebook. Although the blocked writer Anna Wulf hopes to “create a new way of seeing” and bring forth a whole healthy novel from the separate sickly parts of her fractious past and divided personality, her research notebooks—black for Africa, red for politics, blue for men, yellow for fiction—never add up. Having seen through capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, Marxism, patriarchy, and psychonanalysis to a lonely, chilly impasse, she is still a mess. No matter how many times she bathes, she can’t come clean. There are many unpleasant smells in Lessing’s autobiographies—camphor, horses, paraffin, chamber pots, dead fish, wet wool, the habits of nuns, her father’s crotch—but none so redolent as the very idea of Anna’s compulsive washings of herself in The Golden Notebook, so that she won’t smell of her own period. About an author who knows so much, you’d think there’s nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t say.

Yet somewhere along the path to a higher wisdom, Doris Lessing has found it necessary to scorn every vestige of a younger self who might have been noble, virtuous, brave, or even sincere. All these younger selves have to be as contemptible as “Comrade Johnny” in The Sweetest Dream, a Stalinist snake-oil salesman in a Mao jacket. In Walking in the Shade she says, “The root of communism—a love of revolution—is, I believe, masochism, pleasure in pain, satisfaction in suffering, identification with the redeeming blood.” This ignores Emma Goldman, Pablo Neruda, Jessica Mitford, Victor Serge, and so many others, some of them known to her personally, that you wonder about her memory hole. Likewise, in a review in Time Bites of a memoir she likes as much as I do, Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba, she can’t help but use the book as a stick to beat up on the naive young for their romantic inclination “towards sacrifice, pain, death” and then as a sax to blow some smoky blues:

This book will make a good number of aged people like myself wince, and laugh at youthful folly, but laughing out of the other side of our mouths we do sometimes suffer strange feelings of loss. Everywhere are the poor, the unfed, the insulted, the injured: it was nice, for a time, to think there could be an end to all this.

The loss I feel is of that left-wing secular culture whose rich texture she herself conveyed in The Golden Notebook, where Anna entertained the likes of Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Julia Kristeva. Instead: condescension. Such a wised-up schoolmarmy future—in which no one is ridiculous enough to think there could ever be an end to poverty, hunger, injury, and insult—may be Sufi adulthood, but it isn’t anywhere I’d want to live, nor the sort of fable I’d read to my grandchildren, nor even a reason to tie my shoes. Surely you can feel as bad as Killjoy Beckett without pretending to be the only grownup in the room.

During that space of time (which was timeless) she understood quite finally her smallness, the unimportance of humanity. In her ears was an inchoate grinding, the great wheels of movement, and it was inhuman…and no part of that sound was Martha’s voice.

—Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

Except that so often she is the only grownup in the room. For a dervish, Lessing’s not exactly light on her feet. Lofty and heavy, dogged and relentless, stubborn and punitive, she wears you down. It’s as if she knows so much, and so much better, that we have to carry her around—as Dann carried the snow dog to safety—all the way to Stockholm for a Nobel Prize long overdue. She has written tens of thousands of pages, many of them slapdash, millions of words, none of them mushy, one masterwork, The Golden Notebook, and may be the twentieth century’s least ingratiating great novelist, whose fatalism is often difficult to distinguish from complacency, and who is harder on women than on men: there is “a basic female ruthlessness,” she has said, “female unregenerate, and it comes from a much older time than Christianity or any other softener of savage moralities. It is my right.”

For someone who insists that each of us evolves immediately from “me” to “we,” as if, behind the Veil of Maya or under the Sephiroth Tree, individuality were a degenerative disease, her own ego is as unyielding as the ice on Planet 8. Should you fail to see how metaphors of dervishes, from Rumi’s Persian poetry or from modern molecular physics, can heal the hurt in our history and intimacy, she will feed you to her cats. High up in some impossible balcony, she looks down as if amused to see us strut and fret on a summerstock stage, the way Kate Brown in The Summer Before the Dark (1973) looked down on a production of A Month in the Country:

But what a remarkable thing it was, this room full of people, animals rather, all looking in one direction, at other dressed-up animals lifted up to perform on a stage, animals covered with cloth and bits of fur, ornamented with stones, their faces and claws painted with colour.

Here are a few of the many things she has told us that we probably didn’t want to hear: “There is really nothing we can do about what we were born with.” And: “Our lives are governed by voices, caresses, threats we cannot remember.” And: “Nothing in history suggests that we may expect anything but wars, tyrants, bad times, calamities, while good times are always temporary.” And, perhaps worst of all: “Where I think you may be wrong is that you seem to be thinking that if you decide not to become one thing, the other thing you become has to be better.”

These many Lessings, fifty-five volumes of her, add up to one big bill of indictment, one long history of disenchantments, and fifteen rounds with a heavyweight reality principle, after which an anchorite’s diet of cauliflower, sourdough, Mercurochrome, and scorn. If she doesn’t believe in free will, liberal humanism, historical determinism, existential psychology, the holy ghost, the Enlightenment, or victimhood (and she doesn’t), what does she believe in? Fate gets many mentions, bad luck and good looks play their part, zeitgeists are often blamed (“an era’s commanding flow”), bad boys will be bad boys, and Mother Nature never sleeps. But kinship, cats, and interconnectedness are at the top of her approved list. So is holding on, seeing it through, staying the stalwart course even as biker gangs pour through the city gates. According to this toughest of cookies, Original Sin may be hard cheese, but the real bitch is Eternal Recurrence.

Then there are mothers and daughters, as old as archetypes get. No one before or after Lessing has better anatomized the sick self-sabotaging of smart women who allow themselves to settle for indentured servitude as house mothers, group mothers, householders, hostesses, caretakers, nannies, nurses, and “neurotic nurturers.” We see this from Kate Brown in The Summer Before the Dark, who so efficiently organized her family, her office, and the care and feeding of a whole continent that she practically abolished herself, to Alice Mellings in The Good Terrorist, a lunatic Mother Courage among bomb-throwing nihilist losers, to the unnamed middle-aged surrogate mom in Memoirs of a Survivor(1975), who surrounds a menaced Emily with ladders, clouds, nests, and eggs, to Al-Ith in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five(1980), the “cosmic mother” who must marry the brutish King Ben Ata and teach him how to think, to Frances Lennox in The Sweetest Dream, who assumes responsibility for her own two boys, their friends and schoolmates, her ex-husband’s second and third wives, and any other strays who show up in Hampstead on the run from abusive homes, hateful politics, mental wards, and African colonies, as if Frances were a convent or crash pad. Even her own sons think Frances Lennox is too promiscuous in her hospitality. At what point does Earth Mothering amount to masochism?

And yet if there is any lesson Lessing has tried to burn into our brains, in book after book on page after page, as prophecy and curse, it is that somewhere a girl-child is crying, ignored or abused or abandoned, and someone must save her, no excuses. Look at and listen to Emily, in Memoirs of a Survivor:

Emily, eyes shut, her hands on her thighs, rocked herself back and forth and from side to side, and she was weeping as a woman weeps, which is to say as if the earth were bleeding….

The blinded eyes stare through you; they are seeing some ancient enemy which is, thank heavens, not yourself. No, it is Life or Fate or Destiny, some such force which has struck that woman to the heart, and for ever will she sit, rocking in her grief, which is archaic and dreadful, and the sobs which are being torn out of her are one of the pillars on which everything has to rest. Nothing less could justify them.

This is a politics of guardian angels. Emily, you should know, was Doris Lessing’s mother’s name.

John Leonard 

The New York Review of Books

Doris Lessing ll Pt ll (Artwork) 

Doris Lessing lX (Artwork) 

Doris Lessing Xl (Artwork) 

Doris Lessing X (Artwork) 

Doris Lessing. A Life 

Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels included The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).

Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the Prize the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Early life

Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), who were both English and of British nationality. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation. Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was there that Doris was born in 1919.

The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, among other plants, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian lifestyle amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm failed to deliver any monetary value in return.

Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare). She left school at the age of 14, and was self-educated from then on; she left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology and began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John and Jean), before the marriage ended in 1943.

After her first divorce, Lessing's interest was drawn to the popular community of the Left Book Club, a communist book club which she had joined the year before. It was here that she met her future second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter), before the marriage failed and ended in divorce in 1949. After these two failed marriages, she did not marry again. Gottfried Lessing later became the East German ambassador to Uganda, and was murdered in the 1979 rebellion against Idi Amin Dada.

When she fled to London to pursue her writing career and communist beliefs, Lessing left two toddlers with their father in South Africa (another, from her second marriage, went with her). She later said that at the time she thought she had no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."

The German politician Gregor Gysi is a nephew of her second husband.

Career

Because of her campaigning against nuclear arms and apartheid, Lessing was banned from South Africa and Rhodesia for many years.

She moved to London with her youngest son in 1949. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. Her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook, was written in 1962.

In 1982, Lessing attempted to publish two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers, to show the difficulty new authors faced in trying to have their works in print. The novels were declined by Lessing's UK publisher, but was later accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. The Diary of a Good Neighbour was published in England and the US in 1983, and If the Old Could in both countries in 1984, both as written by Jane Somers. In 1984, both novels were re-published in both countries (Viking Books publishing in the US), this time under one cover, with the title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author instead of listing Jane Somers.

She declined a damehood, but accepted appointment as a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". She was also made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2007, Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She received the prize at the age of 88 years 52 days, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category (after Leonid Hurwicz and Raymond Davis Jr.). She also was only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history. 

Lessing was out shopping for groceries when the announcement came, arriving home to tell reporters who had gathered there, "Oh Christ!" She told reporters outside her home, "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush." She titled her Nobel Lecture On Not Winning the Nobel Prize and used it to draw attention to global inequality of opportunity, and to explore changing attitudes to storytelling and literature. 

The lecture was later published in a limited edition to raise money for children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. In a 2008 interview for the BBC's Front Row, she stated that increased media interest after the award had left her without time or energy for writing. Her final book, Alfred and Emily, appeared in 2008.

A 2010 BBC radio documentary titled Useful Idiots listed among "useful idiots" of Joseph Stalin several prominent British writers, including Doris Lessing. 

Illness and death

During the late 1990s, Lessing suffered a stroke which stopped her from travelling during her later years and focused her mind on death. Lessing died on 17 November 2013 at her home in London.

Fiction

Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme (1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (to which she returned in The Good Terrorist [1985]), the psychological theme (1956–1969), and after that the Sufi theme, which was explored in the Canopus in Argos sequence of science fiction (or as she preferred to put it "space fiction") novels and novellas. 

Doris Lessing's first novel The Grass Is Singing, the first four volumes of The Children of Violence sequence, as well as the collection of short stories African Stories are set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Lessing's Canopus sequence was not popular with many mainstream literary critics. For example, in the New York Times in 1982 John Leonard wrote in reference to The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 that "[o]ne of the many sins for which the 20th century will be held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs. Lessing... She now propagandises on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic razzmatazz," to which Lessing replied: "What they didn't realise was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like Blood Music, by Greg Bear. He's a great writer." Unlike some authors primarily known for their mainstream work, she has never hesitated to admit that she wrote science fiction and attended the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention as its Writer Guest of Honor. Here she made a well-received speech in which she described her dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor as "an attempt at an autobiography."

When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the Canopus in Argos sequence. These novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution of other worlds, including Earth. (Similar concepts occur in science fiction by other authors, e.g. the Progressor and Uplift sequences.)

Using Sufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher" Idries Shah, the series of novels also utilises an approach similar to that employed by the early 20th century mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in his work All and Everything.

Earlier works of "inner space" fiction like Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) also connect to this theme. Lessing's interest had turned to Sufism after coming to the realisation that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her disillusioned.

Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars, but notably not by the author herself, who later wrote that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one's self from illusions had been overlooked by critics. She also regretted that critics failed to appreciate the exceptional structure of the novel. She explained in Walking in the Shade that she modelled Molly partly on her good friend Joan Rodker, the daughter of the modernist poet and publisher John Rodker.

Lessing did not like the idea of being pigeonholed as a feminist author. When asked why, she explained:

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.

—Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July 1982

Doris Lessing Society 

The Doris Lessing Society is dedicated to supporting the scholarly study of Lessing’s work. The formal structure of the Society dates from January 1977, when the first issue of the Doris Lessing Newsletter was published. In Spring, 2002 the Newsletter became the academic journal, Doris Lessing Studies. The Society also organizes panels at the Modern Languages Association (MLA) annual Conventions and has held two international conferences in New Orleans in 2004 and Leeds in 2007.

Archive 

Lessing's largest literary archive is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. The 45 archival boxes of Lessing's materials at the Ransom Center contain nearly all of her extant manuscripts and typescripts up to 1999. Original material for Lessing's early books is assumed not to exist because she kept none of her early manuscripts. Other institutions, including the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa, hold smaller collections.

Awards 

Somerset Maugham Award (1954)

Prix Médicis étranger (1976)

Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1981)

Shakespeare-Preis der Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S., Hamburg (1982)

WH Smith Literary Award (1986)

Palermo Prize (1987)

Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987)

Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989)

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography (1995)

Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995)

Premi Internacional Catalunya (1999)[47]

Order of the Companions of Honour (1999)

Companion of Literature of the Royal Society of Literature (2000)

David Cohen Prize (2001)

Premio Príncipe de Asturias (2001)

S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002)[48]

Nobel Prize in Literature (2007)

Wikipedia 

Doris Lessing lV (Artwork) 

Doris Lessing Vlll (Artwork) 

Doris Lessing. Words 

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

The Grass Is Singing, ch. 2 (1950)

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

Martha Quest (1952), Part III, ch. 2

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Particularly Cats, ch. 2 (1967)

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

The Four-Gated City (1969)

Literature is analysis after the event.

Quoted in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, ed. Michael Horovitz (1969): Afterwords, section 2

Laughter is by definition healthy.

The Summer Before the Dark (1973)

Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.

The Summer Before the Dark (1973)

You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

New York Times Book Review (30 March 1980), p. 24

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), p. 94, Flamingo edition

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

Interview with Herbert Mitgang, "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles," The New York Times, (22 April 1984)

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Interview with Herbert Mitgang, "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles," The New York Times (22 April 1984)

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we — we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

The Good Terrorist (1985)

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

As quoted in Writers on Writing (1986) by Jon Winokur

What matters most is that we learn from living.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

The Guardian, London (7 November 1988)

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.

As quoted in An Uncommon Scold (1989) by Abby Adams, p. 18

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

The Sunday Times, London (10 May 1992)

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

The Sunday Times, London (10 May 1992)

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

Boston Book Review interview by Harvey Blume (February 1998)

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

Index on Censorship (March/April 1999)

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

As quoted in Permission to Play : Taking Time to Renew Your Smile (2003) by Jill Murphy Long, p. 147

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Interview with Amanda Craig, "Grand dame of letters who's not going quietly," The Times, London (23 November 2003)

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

Interview with Amanda Craig, "Grand dame of letters who's not going quietly," The Times, London (23 November 2003)

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 660

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

"Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing" All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)

This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush.

After being chosen as the 2007 recipient of the Nobel Prize For Literature "BBC News", BBC, London (11 October 2007)

Oh Christ. I couldn't care less. ... I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.

As quoted in "Doris Lessing oldest to win literature Nobel" by Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star (12 October 2007)

The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. ... I was really astounded that some people were shocked.

As quoted in an undated profile at the BBC World Service

I was taken around and shown things as a "useful idiot" ... that’s what my role was … I can’t understand why I was so gullible.

In interview, quoted in "Useful Idiots BBC World Service (7 July 2010)

The Golden Notebook (1962)

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

As I have said, this was not noticed

Introduction (1971 edition)

I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.

Introduction (1971)

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."

Introduction (1971)

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Introduction (1971)

The two women were alone in the London flat.

"The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up."

First lines, "Free Women: 1"

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy.

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"

What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"

It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 2"

It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4"

There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I.I.I.I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4"

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh...

I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. ... I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been.

Anna Wulf, in "The Golden Notebook"

You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?

Anna Wulf, in "The Golden Notebook"

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

Saul Green in "The Golden Notebook"

There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.

Anna Wulf

None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

Anna Wulf

Salon interview (1997)

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies.…

"A Notorious Life" — interview with Dwight Garner at salon.com (11 November 1997)

The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism. Anyway, that's my thesis. It's very oversimplified, as you can see.

It was OK, us being Reds during the war, because we were all on the same side. But then the Cold War started. Almost overnight we became enemies of people who were close friends — they crossed the street to avoid us.

Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation. It's heart-breaking how often I have to say when I'm giving talks, "This book is out of print. This book is out of print." It's a roll call of dead books. 

Wikipedia

And God Created Woman ll Pt lll (ll). A Self Portrait 

AMERA ZIGANII RAO

A PROFILE  

FEMINIST AND HUMAN RIGHTS, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER. WRITER. MENTALIST AND ARTIST

AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™

The Super Sacred Brother Lover™

The Return To The Source. Ascension.

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. When we were giants. All of us. When you did more than rape me.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Neo Feminist™, Post Tribe Social Reformer™ and Sacred Sexualist™. Human Rights Healer. Metaphysical Philosopher, Writer, Spiritual Intelligence Teacher, Hierophant (Interpreter of The Universe) and Mentalist Self Actualiser.

I can help you grow power, from nothing.

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™.

Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™

The Company.

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.

Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living.

I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live.

We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived.

But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years.

The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world.

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life.

The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love.

They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth.

The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants.

They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you.

I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done.

Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift.

You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

Thank you to outside sources for photography and artwork. Darkroomed by Amera Ziganii Rao