Interactive Lessing

Apologies to Chet, who sent me a link to The Golden Notebook Project some weeks ago, and which I forgot to follow up until reading this enthusiatic entry on Eli James blog.

The project is a remarkable exercise in collaborative reading, centered on Doris Lessing's novel. Seven women, including novelists Naomi Alderman and Helen Oyeyemi are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins. The project went live on Monday 10 November 2008 and is about halfway through.

As I told you some time back, I read The Golden Notebook in the '80s (*sigh* decades ago!), but it has remained with me ever since, in a way that most books don't (Harriet Rubin has a very interesting post on the project's blog about this phenomena), but browsing the notes makes me want to pick the book up again.

Lessing Receives Her Nobel

Doris Lessing formally received her Nobel prize in a ceremony in London on Wednesday night, since she was too frail to fly to Stockholm last year for the presentation. My love and congratulations too.

It makes me very happy to hear that her publisher HarperCollins is going to donate 10,000 fiction and non-fiction books to Zimbabwe in her name.

Authors - Protect Your Space!

Doris Lessing speaking at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, told her audience that she feels “desperately sorry” for young authors, pushed into promotional tours and expected to do the rounds of literary festivals - in themselves enjoyable, but likely to take them away from the core business of putting words on paper:

We all know that writing comes out of a man or a woman sitting alone in a room with the telephone off the hook, a cup of coffee and in the good old days, a cigarette.

Ben Hoyle, writing in the Times, points out that the remarks expand on thoughts expressed in Lessing’s Nobel lecture on December 7*, which was recorded and played to the Swedish Academy hall in Stockholm because of the 88 year-old author's ill health. In this Lessing said:

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.

If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Let us jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We, cynically enquire, How are her boobs? Is she good-looking? If this is a man, Charismatic? Handsome? We joke but it is not a joke.

This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of paparazzi begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening.

He, she is flattered, pleased.

But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: I've heard them: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me.

Some much publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to.

And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your sole, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go."

(* I'm so glad that Hoyles' piece sent me off to read the whole lecture. What she says about the hunger for books and thirst for knowledge in Africa compared to western indifference among plenty, is something I can personally vouch for after living in Nigeria and teaching in a school as poorly equipped as the one she describes.)

Readsmonthly Rocks!

In yesterday's Readsmonthly section of Starmag, I got to pay tribute to Doris Lessing. There's also a list of suggested reads. Writing it really had me scraping round in the far corners of my brain for traces the books had left behind decades before ... and left me wanting to reread especially The Grass is Singing and Memories of a Survivor.

The shy and very talented Shahril Nizam is interviewed by Daphne Lee about his new collection of poetry and art If Only. Daphne is absolutely right about how self-effacing he is in public, but she told me that she'd found Shahril so fascinating to talk to that she had forgotten to take notes at points during the interview!

The poet/illustrator says about his work:

Drawing and writing are just ways of externalising thoughts and ideas ... But I find it hard to be direct all the time. Maybe that’s true of everyone. Sometimes we are open and sometimes secretive, even with ourselves. Sometimes, there are things we don’t truly understand or even want to admit. That doesn’t mean we can’t be honest, too. ... I find writing a poem or drawing a picture allows me to be honest without revealing too much. The imagery, symbolism and so on can mean anything. And it can mean one thing to one person and another to someone else. It can be different truths to different people.

Celebrity reviewer Tom Abang Saufi talks about Paul Theroux's The Elephanta Suite. (Tom of course is one of Malaysia's top fashion designers.)

I've read a lot of Theroux, travel writing and fiction, and very much enjoy his work. But he's so prolific that I gave up trying to keep up some time back. But I think I've just been talked into picking up this one! Especially as I love the idea of intertwined stories.

I had to nick this lovely picture of Amir Muhammad from the page listing author events happening up and down the country! Both Amir and Shahril Nizam are appearing at the Courtyard, MPH Mid Valley Megamall, on November 11th 3-4 p.m.

More Lessing

There is in the New York Times today, and absolutely wonderful picture of Doris Lessing slumped on the front doorstep of her house, facing a barrage of reporters.

She says she was a bit surprised because she had forgotten about the award being announced today and she's been a likely contender for the something like 40 years:

Either they were going to give it to me sometime before I popped off or not at all.

John Mullan on the Guardian blog writes about her achievements and her most important novel The Golden Notebook:

Of course the Nobel Prize is usually a long service award - the recognition of a status first gained decades ago and then held on to. So it was with Harold Pinter a couple of years ago, and, as with Pinter, there will be the thought that the award is a mark of her political influence. She has been known as a feminist novelist, especially because of The Golden Notebook, her most important novel. This defined an era by making fiction from arguments between women about what it was to be "Free Women" (the heading for the first section of the book). For 1962 it was audacious stuff. It brought to the English novel a heady brew of new material: political debate, psychotherapy sessions, disastrous sex. It is the earliest novel I know of to include matter-of-fact mentions of pre-menstrual tension and tampons.

It was a novel in which the contradictions between a woman's different needs and desires are enacted in its very form. The Golden Notebook is made out of four notebooks (black, red, yellow, and blue), all supposedly written by Lessing's heroine, Anna: different narratives, only just held together. It has usually been the content of Lessing's fiction that has drawn attention. What is less often noticed is her restless experimentation with form and genre. She hardly seemed to worry about leaving many readers behind when she took to science fiction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The genre was attractive to her because she wanted to write novels of ideas; she didn't worry about sales. Responding mischievously (and resentfully) to those who regretted that she had left "the real world" behind, she then wrote Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983), a bleakly realistic account of old age, which she sent to publishers under the pseudonym Jane Somers. She was delighted to note that without the label "Doris Lessing", publishers and reviewers (and maybe readers) had no idea what fictional direction she might take.

He also provides a timely reminder at the end of this piece (when he says only 6 of his class of 24 students had even heard of her) that there's a generation who haven't read her, and will enjoy discovering her books.

The Guardian has a treasure trove of archived articles, interviews and reviews. Elsewhere in the paper, Fiona Sampson looks at what makes an author "Nobelisable":

Writers are often identified as being Nobelisable for similar reasons. The Nobel prize carries an aura of the writer's life as a public one; of collective identity voiced, shaped or advocated by a visionary, perhaps even brave, individual. The writer as unacknowledged legislator, maybe, but nevertheless visibly engaged with their own society. There is something of this aura behind suggestions that the decision-making of the Nobel committee is "politicised". But maybe these suggestions have it back to front. Perhaps the Nobel prize, in so far as it honours the public effects of a writer's work, acknowledges the importance of big ideas. Perhaps it holds onto those twin notions - of the writer as thinker, rather than entertainer; of great writing as a matter of often-passionately-held ideas, rather than of style - which are so out of fashion in the Anglo-Saxon publishing world.

The bold letters are mine. Lessing was always writer-as-thinker, is that a quality we really look for in writing today?

Postscript:

Nury Vittachi has a very nice Doris Lessing story to tell.

The Sex Life of David Herbert

Lady Chatterley's Lover created a storm of controversy when it was first published: never before had any novelist written so frankly about sex. And the book remained banned in Britain for three decades until the famous obscentity trial at the Old Bailey in 1960. (It's apparently still banned in Malaysia where the censors haven't woken up to the fact that it is pretty mild fare compared to much of the fiction that's on our shelves!)

But what was Lawrence's own sex life like?

In this fascinating article from the Guardian Doris Lessing talks about Lawrence's sexual relationship with his wife, Frieda, and how the tuberculosis he suffered from while writing Lady C. heightened his sexuality and its feverish imaginations but at the same time cruelly caused impotence.

Lawrence lived in an era that "was sexually ignorant to the point these days that it is hard to rmember it or understand it" and Lessing claims that Lawrence was clued up about some aspects of sex, but totally ignorant about others. (I leave which and what for you to discover!)

Lady Chatterley's Lover for all it's reputation for being a racy read, a smutty book, is a beautiful novel about the power of sex to redeem the human spirit, and I was much moved by it when I read it as a teenager going through my Lawrence phase and feeling that no writer before had ever come so close to understanding what I felt. Lessing tells this wonderful story about another reader greatly affected by it:

I once owned a farm cottage on the edge of Dartmoor and I often drove up and down from London, giving lifts, as in those days we thought nothing of it. Once, coming up from Devon, I stopped near Salisbury Plain, where they train soldiers, to give a lift to a very young soldier who I at once saw was in an unusual state of mind. He was flushed, smiling, could not stop talking, sometimes exploding in a young laugh, surprising himself and me. He was in love. Scarcely conscious of me, the middle-aged woman driving him up to London and his true love, he had to talk, had to tell someone ... he wished he could tell me how he felt, he didn't have the words, but did I know this book here? And he brought out a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. A friend had given it to him, saying it was all about love, and yes, he was right, this friend, he had never read anything like it, well, he wasn't really a reader, actually this was the only book he had ever read. But he had read it several times, and kept finding new things in it. Had I read it? he wanted to know, and if not I must look out for a copy. Then I would understand what he was feeling now ... and there he sat, all the way to London, Lady Chatterley's Lover in his hand, smiling, laughing.