Margaret Atwood pays tribute to Doris Lessing who died recently
Doris Lessing was principled, unaffected and giving to other authors, writes Margaret Atwood
Wonderful Doris Lessing died last Sunday at the age of 94. You never expect such rock-solid features of the literary landscape to simply vanish. It's a shock.
I first encountered Lessing on a park bench in Paris in 1963. I was a student, living on baguettes, oranges and cheese, as one did, and suffering from a stomach ailment, as one did. My pal Alison Cunningham and I had been barred from our hostel during the day, so Alison was soothing my prostrate self by reading from The Golden Notebook, which was all the rage among such as us. Who knew we were reading a book that was soon to become iconic?
Just as we were getting to a crucial moment in the life of Anna Wulf, along came a policeman to tell us that lying down on park benches was against the law, so we decamped for a bistro and another interesting washroom experience. (Footnote: this was before second-wave feminism. It was before widespread birth control. It was before miniskirts. So Anna Wulf was a considerable eye-opener: she was doing things and thinking things that had not been much discussed at the Toronto dinner tables of our adolescence, and therefore seemed pretty daring.)
The other woman we were reading in 1963 was Simone de Beauvoir, but the childhoods of little-girl colonials such as ourselves lacked starched petticoats and were not very French. We had more in common with a remote-places-of-the-empire parvenu such as Doris Lessing: born in Iran in 1919, growing up on a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); then, after two failed marriages, running away to England with scant prospects, which was where we colonials with scant prospects ran away to then.
Doris did everything with all her heart, all her soul, and all her might
Some of Lessing's energy may have come from her outland origins: when the wheel spins, it's on the edges that the sparks fly. Her upbringing also gave her an insight into the viewpoints and plights of people unlike herself. And if you know you will never really fit in - that you will always be "not really English" - you have less to lose. Doris did everything with all her heart, all her soul, and all her might. She was sometimes wrong, as in the matter of Stalinist communism, but she never hedged her bets or pulled her punches.