WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.259 So the stack of documents we have here today 00:00:03.259 --> 00:00:06.679 is, well... It's a little intimidating, isn't 00:00:06.679 --> 00:00:08.449 it? Honestly, yeah. I mean, you've got Nobel 00:00:08.449 --> 00:00:10.789 Prize citations right next to it. Declassified 00:00:10.789 --> 00:00:14.449 MI5 surveillance logs. Exactly. And then a pile 00:00:14.449 --> 00:00:16.589 of science fiction novels and these incredibly 00:00:16.589 --> 00:00:19.809 gritty realist memoirs. And if you just looked 00:00:19.809 --> 00:00:21.989 at these sources separately, you would absolutely 00:00:21.989 --> 00:00:24.690 assume we were profiling three or four completely 00:00:24.690 --> 00:00:27.030 different people. No question. It's a disjointed 00:00:27.030 --> 00:00:30.789 collection. It is. You have the... Colonial farmer 00:00:30.789 --> 00:00:33.189 living in a mud hut. Then you have the communist 00:00:33.189 --> 00:00:35.390 radical in post -war London. The psychological 00:00:35.390 --> 00:00:37.909 realist dissecting mental breakdowns. And the 00:00:37.909 --> 00:00:40.490 mystic space opera writer. But of course we were 00:00:40.490 --> 00:00:42.729 talking about just one person. Doris Lessing. 00:00:43.179 --> 00:00:46.060 A woman who, it seems, managed to irritate almost 00:00:46.060 --> 00:00:48.140 every single demographic she ever belonged to. 00:00:48.359 --> 00:00:50.640 That's one way of putting it. I mean, she angered 00:00:50.640 --> 00:00:53.399 the colonialists in Rhodesia. She alienated the 00:00:53.399 --> 00:00:56.259 communists in London. She really frustrated the 00:00:56.259 --> 00:00:58.719 feminists who tried to claim her. And then, yeah, 00:00:58.780 --> 00:01:01.399 she completely baffled the literary critics by 00:01:01.399 --> 00:01:03.840 writing about aliens. It feels like a career 00:01:03.840 --> 00:01:07.189 built on, I don't know. Bridge burning. Or maybe 00:01:07.189 --> 00:01:09.310 bridge building. Just not the bridges people 00:01:09.310 --> 00:01:11.269 expected her to build. She was always a moving 00:01:11.269 --> 00:01:13.849 target. A moving target. I like that. And that's 00:01:13.849 --> 00:01:15.609 really what we want to explore in this deep dive. 00:01:15.890 --> 00:01:18.170 We're not just, you know, walking through a biography 00:01:18.170 --> 00:01:21.530 from A to B. We are trying to map the evolution 00:01:21.530 --> 00:01:24.569 of a mind that just refused to settle. And to 00:01:24.569 --> 00:01:26.870 do that, you have to understand the world she 00:01:26.870 --> 00:01:29.609 was born into, which is, it's just so vastly 00:01:29.609 --> 00:01:31.489 different from the one she left. Completely. 00:01:32.629 --> 00:01:34.430 Geopolitically unrecognizable. And when we said 00:01:34.430 --> 00:01:36.950 different, we mean, I mean, she was born in 1919. 00:01:37.069 --> 00:01:39.930 Right, 1919. So the world is still reeling from 00:01:39.930 --> 00:01:41.629 the First World War. The immediate aftermath. 00:01:41.810 --> 00:01:45.489 Exactly. And the location is so key to everything 00:01:45.489 --> 00:01:47.890 that follows. She wasn't born in London or anywhere 00:01:47.890 --> 00:01:50.890 in England. She was born in Kermanshah, Persia. 00:01:51.049 --> 00:01:54.730 Modern day Iran. Modern day Iran. Her father, 00:01:54.950 --> 00:01:57.909 Captain Alfred Taylor, he was there working as 00:01:57.909 --> 00:02:00.260 a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia. But 00:02:00.260 --> 00:02:02.280 his story isn't just about being a bank clerk, 00:02:02.379 --> 00:02:05.099 is it? The source material paints a very specific 00:02:05.099 --> 00:02:08.620 picture of Alfred Taylor. Oh, absolutely. He's 00:02:08.620 --> 00:02:11.360 a World War I veteran, and he's carrying a significant 00:02:11.360 --> 00:02:13.699 amount of trauma. He lost a leg in the war. And 00:02:13.699 --> 00:02:16.919 that trauma, it's not just physical. No, it was 00:02:16.919 --> 00:02:19.560 deeply psychological. And it defined the family 00:02:19.560 --> 00:02:22.900 dynamic. He met Doris's mother, Emily Maud, in 00:02:22.900 --> 00:02:25.099 the Royal Free Hospital in London. It's almost 00:02:25.099 --> 00:02:28.949 that classic tragic wartime trope. You know, 00:02:28.949 --> 00:02:31.610 the wounded soldier and the nurse who cared for 00:02:31.610 --> 00:02:34.229 him. Exactly. They marry. They decide to leave 00:02:34.229 --> 00:02:36.729 England to escape the postwar depression and 00:02:36.729 --> 00:02:39.069 the, you know, the grayness of it all. And they 00:02:39.069 --> 00:02:40.949 end up in Persia. But that's not the move that 00:02:40.949 --> 00:02:43.389 defines her, is it? The pivotal moment, the one 00:02:43.389 --> 00:02:45.689 that seems to really forge the Doris Lessing 00:02:45.689 --> 00:02:48.849 psyche that happens in 1925. That's the one. 00:02:48.930 --> 00:02:51.229 The move to southern Rhodesia. which is now, 00:02:51.310 --> 00:02:53.669 of course, Zimbabwe. And looking at the records, 00:02:53.770 --> 00:02:56.210 this wasn't some calculated career move. This 00:02:56.210 --> 00:02:58.349 was, it feels like it was a fantasy. It was a 00:02:58.349 --> 00:03:00.770 delusion, frankly. Alfred Taylor had heard that 00:03:00.770 --> 00:03:02.750 you could get rich farming maize in the colonies, 00:03:02.849 --> 00:03:05.430 so he bought 1 ,000 acres of bush. And we have 00:03:05.430 --> 00:03:07.669 to be really clear about what bush means here. 00:03:07.789 --> 00:03:10.250 This isn't, you know, rolling green fields ready 00:03:10.250 --> 00:03:13.669 for a plow. Not at all. This is untamed, rough, 00:03:13.909 --> 00:03:18.150 difficult scrubland. His vision was to become 00:03:18.150 --> 00:03:20.289 a wealthy landowner, this colonial gentleman 00:03:20.289 --> 00:03:24.110 farmer. The reality was something else entirely. 00:03:24.349 --> 00:03:27.490 And the mother, Emily, she brought a completely 00:03:27.490 --> 00:03:30.439 different set of expectations to this. this mud 00:03:30.439 --> 00:03:32.379 hut in the middle of nowhere. Oh, she brought 00:03:32.379 --> 00:03:34.680 the Adorian drawing room with her. She tried 00:03:34.680 --> 00:03:37.620 to impose this rigid British class structure 00:03:37.620 --> 00:03:41.000 on a life that was fundamentally wild and, frankly, 00:03:41.379 --> 00:03:43.520 impoverished. The records show she was ordering 00:03:43.520 --> 00:03:46.539 goods from London. Yes, piano tunes, Persian 00:03:46.539 --> 00:03:49.939 rugs, silverware. She's trying to maintain this 00:03:49.939 --> 00:03:53.199 facade of... civilized life while the farm is 00:03:53.199 --> 00:03:54.919 failing and the money is running out and a young 00:03:54.919 --> 00:03:57.539 doris is watching this all unfold this this clash 00:03:57.539 --> 00:03:59.620 and that's what formed her consciousness watching 00:03:59.620 --> 00:04:01.520 this desperate attempt to maintain appearances 00:04:01.520 --> 00:04:03.599 it's a harsh environment for a child you have 00:04:03.599 --> 00:04:05.479 the physical harshness of the african bush which 00:04:05.479 --> 00:04:07.139 is obvious but then you have this psychological 00:04:07.139 --> 00:04:10.639 pressure cooker inside the house exactly The 00:04:10.639 --> 00:04:13.180 mother pretending their aristocracy, the father 00:04:13.180 --> 00:04:15.460 struggling with his disability, with his PTSD, 00:04:15.680 --> 00:04:18.560 with the failing crops. The farm delivered very 00:04:18.560 --> 00:04:20.839 little income. It was a constant struggle for 00:04:20.839 --> 00:04:24.639 survival. And Doris, even as a child, she saw 00:04:24.639 --> 00:04:27.600 through the pretense. She did. She saw the enormous 00:04:27.600 --> 00:04:30.300 gap between the story her mother was telling, 00:04:30.459 --> 00:04:33.540 that they were refined British citizens, and 00:04:33.540 --> 00:04:36.870 the reality of their poverty. And that skepticism, 00:04:36.990 --> 00:04:39.870 that ability to see through social facades, it 00:04:39.870 --> 00:04:42.250 starts right there on that maize farm. Her education 00:04:42.250 --> 00:04:44.629 is another really fascinating piece of this puzzle 00:04:44.629 --> 00:04:46.889 because usually when we talk about Nobel Prize 00:04:46.889 --> 00:04:49.350 winners, we're listing off places like Cambridge, 00:04:49.550 --> 00:04:52.790 Oxford, the Ivy League. But Lessing's CV looks 00:04:52.790 --> 00:04:55.410 very, very different. It does. She attended a 00:04:55.410 --> 00:04:57.730 Roman Catholic content school for a while, the 00:04:57.730 --> 00:05:00.129 Dominican Convent High School in Salisbury, and 00:05:00.129 --> 00:05:02.009 then spent about a year at a girls' high school. 00:05:02.149 --> 00:05:05.170 But here's the kicker. She dropped out. At what 00:05:05.170 --> 00:05:08.670 age? At age 13. 13. I mean, today that is almost 00:05:08.670 --> 00:05:11.290 unheard of. But even then, for a family with 00:05:11.290 --> 00:05:13.250 those kinds of aspirations, that must have been 00:05:13.250 --> 00:05:15.589 a huge point of contention. It was an act of 00:05:15.589 --> 00:05:19.009 rebellion, a profound one. She refused to fit 00:05:19.009 --> 00:05:20.970 into the mold her mother had designed for her. 00:05:21.189 --> 00:05:23.790 Her mother wanted a polite, educated daughter 00:05:23.790 --> 00:05:27.250 who could marry well. Doris just wanted out. 00:05:27.649 --> 00:05:30.730 So she leaves formal education and she never 00:05:30.730 --> 00:05:33.279 goes back. Never. From age 13 onwards, she was 00:05:33.279 --> 00:05:35.399 entirely self -educated. And when you look at 00:05:35.399 --> 00:05:38.220 the sheer depth of her later work, the philosophy, 00:05:38.420 --> 00:05:41.459 the psychology, the history, the science, it 00:05:41.459 --> 00:05:44.000 is just staggering to think she did all of that 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:46.339 on her own. It is, but I think it also explains 00:05:46.339 --> 00:05:49.300 her fierce independence of thought. She wasn't 00:05:49.300 --> 00:05:51.319 taught what to think by a university curriculum. 00:05:51.860 --> 00:05:54.519 She read voraciously, but she read what she could 00:05:54.519 --> 00:05:57.180 find, and she drew her own conclusions. And she 00:05:57.180 --> 00:05:59.000 didn't just stay on the farm reading, did she? 00:05:59.019 --> 00:06:02.560 She left home pretty early. At 15. Just two years 00:06:02.560 --> 00:06:04.579 after dropping out of school, she left to work 00:06:04.579 --> 00:06:06.899 as a nursemaid for a family. And this is one 00:06:06.899 --> 00:06:08.860 of those moments that feels like it's out of 00:06:08.860 --> 00:06:11.579 a novel itself, a chance encounter that changes 00:06:11.579 --> 00:06:14.300 everything. It really is. Her employer, the family 00:06:14.300 --> 00:06:16.079 she was working for, noticed her intelligence, 00:06:16.279 --> 00:06:18.660 her curiosity, and they started giving her books. 00:06:18.860 --> 00:06:21.399 Not novels, though. No, books on politics and 00:06:21.399 --> 00:06:23.939 sociology. And this was the catalyst. It's always 00:06:23.939 --> 00:06:26.199 that one interaction, isn't it? The right book 00:06:26.199 --> 00:06:28.480 at the right time. It was the spark. Absolutely. 00:06:28.959 --> 00:06:31.300 She started reading about how the world worked. 00:06:31.720 --> 00:06:35.319 about systems of power, class, colonialism. And 00:06:35.319 --> 00:06:37.800 at the same time, around age 15, she began selling 00:06:37.800 --> 00:06:40.500 her own stories to magazines in South Africa. 00:06:41.040 --> 00:06:44.019 So the writer was born right there, in that moment 00:06:44.019 --> 00:06:46.360 of adolescent struggle, fueled by these borrowed 00:06:46.360 --> 00:06:49.120 books. So you have this teenage girl, brilliant, 00:06:49.399 --> 00:06:52.819 self -taught, living in a colony that is racially 00:06:52.819 --> 00:06:56.100 segregated and socially rigid. Yeah. And she's 00:06:56.100 --> 00:06:58.259 already questioning everything. Which brings 00:06:58.259 --> 00:07:00.680 us to her next phase. And I think this is where 00:07:00.680 --> 00:07:03.019 the modern listener might struggle to reconcile 00:07:03.019 --> 00:07:04.939 some of her choices. It's definitely the most 00:07:04.939 --> 00:07:06.899 controversial part of her biography. We have 00:07:06.899 --> 00:07:08.379 to talk about the marriages and the children. 00:07:08.600 --> 00:07:11.000 Yes. This is the part of her life that often 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:14.839 generates the most heat. So in 1937, she moves 00:07:14.839 --> 00:07:17.939 to Salisbury, the capital, now Harare, to get 00:07:17.939 --> 00:07:20.180 away from the farm. She works as a telephone 00:07:20.180 --> 00:07:22.560 operator. A way to get to the city. A way to 00:07:22.560 --> 00:07:25.779 get to the city. And in 1939, she marries a civil 00:07:25.779 --> 00:07:28.680 servant named Frank Wisdom. They have two children, 00:07:28.819 --> 00:07:33.100 a son John and a daughter Jean. So on the surface, 00:07:33.139 --> 00:07:35.800 a very conventional start to adult life. On the 00:07:35.800 --> 00:07:39.079 surface. But inside, she was suffocating. She 00:07:39.079 --> 00:07:41.259 felt trapped by domesticity, by the expectations 00:07:41.259 --> 00:07:43.519 placed on a wife and mother at that time. The 00:07:43.519 --> 00:07:46.519 marriage didn't last. No. They divorced in 1943. 00:07:47.319 --> 00:07:49.620 And this is the decision that dogged her for 00:07:49.620 --> 00:07:51.500 the rest of her life. The one that critics and 00:07:51.500 --> 00:07:53.759 interviewers never let her forget. She left the 00:07:53.759 --> 00:07:55.860 children. When she left the family home, she 00:07:55.860 --> 00:07:58.060 left the two children, John and Jean, with their 00:07:58.060 --> 00:08:02.319 father. Leaving your children in 1943. That is, 00:08:02.319 --> 00:08:05.439 well, it's nuclear. Even today, a mother leaving 00:08:05.439 --> 00:08:07.759 her children voluntarily is viewed with intense 00:08:07.759 --> 00:08:09.879 suspicion. Back then, it must have been seen 00:08:09.879 --> 00:08:12.860 as a profound moral failure. Oh, it was. The 00:08:12.860 --> 00:08:15.019 judgment was immense. But we have to look at 00:08:15.019 --> 00:08:17.019 her reasoning, which she was very open about 00:08:17.019 --> 00:08:19.360 later in life. She never made excuses for it. 00:08:19.399 --> 00:08:22.240 She analyzed it. She famously said, for a long 00:08:22.240 --> 00:08:24.839 time, I felt I had done a very brave thing. Brave. 00:08:25.180 --> 00:08:27.500 That's a really provocative word to use in that 00:08:27.500 --> 00:08:30.300 context. What does she mean by that? Well, she 00:08:30.300 --> 00:08:32.740 explained that for an intelligent woman, and 00:08:32.740 --> 00:08:35.179 she knew she was one, spending endless time with 00:08:35.179 --> 00:08:38.259 small children was, in her words, boring. Yeah. 00:08:38.720 --> 00:08:41.980 But it was deeper than that. The key quote, the 00:08:41.980 --> 00:08:45.360 one that explains everything, is this. I felt 00:08:45.360 --> 00:08:47.740 I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I 00:08:47.740 --> 00:08:49.799 would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated 00:08:49.799 --> 00:08:52.460 intellectual like my mother. A frustrated intellectual 00:08:52.460 --> 00:08:55.139 like my mother. There it is. It all comes back 00:08:55.139 --> 00:08:57.039 to the farm. She saw her mother's bitterness, 00:08:57.360 --> 00:08:59.759 her mother's unlived life, and she decided she 00:08:59.759 --> 00:09:01.720 would rather be a villain in the eyes of society 00:09:01.720 --> 00:09:05.139 than become that version of herself. Precisely. 00:09:05.500 --> 00:09:08.080 She equated that traditional domestic motherhood 00:09:08.080 --> 00:09:10.659 with a kind of death of the self, a spiritual 00:09:10.659 --> 00:09:13.100 and intellectual death. And she chose the self. 00:09:13.580 --> 00:09:16.379 It's a brutal calculus, perhaps, but it is the 00:09:16.379 --> 00:09:19.500 absolute bedrock of the free woman themes that 00:09:19.500 --> 00:09:22.159 permeate all of her later work. She was rejecting 00:09:22.159 --> 00:09:25.120 the role that society said she had to play. She 00:09:25.120 --> 00:09:26.919 refused to be the sacrificial vessel for her 00:09:26.919 --> 00:09:29.019 family. Yeah. And instead of just running away, 00:09:29.259 --> 00:09:31.259 she ran towards something. Right. She didn't 00:09:31.259 --> 00:09:33.200 just go off to be a hermit. She dove right into 00:09:33.200 --> 00:09:35.980 the political deep end. She did. Right after 00:09:35.980 --> 00:09:38.879 the divorce, she was drawn into a circle of radicals 00:09:38.879 --> 00:09:41.460 and joined the Left Book Club. Which was basically 00:09:41.460 --> 00:09:45.059 a communist organization. Yes. You have to remember 00:09:45.059 --> 00:09:47.700 the context. This was during World War II. The 00:09:47.700 --> 00:09:50.759 Soviet Union was an ally against Hitler. And 00:09:50.759 --> 00:09:53.820 for intellectuals in the colonies who despised 00:09:53.820 --> 00:09:56.139 the racism and inequality they saw around them 00:09:56.139 --> 00:09:58.940 every day, communism seemed like the only moral 00:09:58.940 --> 00:10:01.179 alternative. And it's in this group that she 00:10:01.179 --> 00:10:03.519 meets husband number two. Gottfried Lessing. 00:10:04.200 --> 00:10:07.399 a German communist, an émigré. They were drawn 00:10:07.399 --> 00:10:09.799 together by their shared political passion. They 00:10:09.799 --> 00:10:12.700 married, had a son named Peter. Let me guess. 00:10:12.940 --> 00:10:14.960 Well, history repeated itself to an extent. They 00:10:14.960 --> 00:10:17.820 divorced in 1949. The political ideals couldn't 00:10:17.820 --> 00:10:20.080 sustain the domestic reality. And just to add 00:10:20.080 --> 00:10:22.039 a bit more texture to this period, because the 00:10:22.039 --> 00:10:24.279 sources indicate her personal life was just incredibly 00:10:24.279 --> 00:10:26.279 messy and passionate. It was. There was also 00:10:26.279 --> 00:10:28.919 a significant affair going on. Yes, with an RAF 00:10:28.919 --> 00:10:31.159 serviceman stationed in southern Rhodesia named 00:10:31.159 --> 00:10:34.429 John Whitehorn. We know about this because she 00:10:34.429 --> 00:10:37.830 wrote him 90 letters between 1943 and 1949. And 00:10:37.830 --> 00:10:39.649 those letters are preserved. They are. They're 00:10:39.649 --> 00:10:42.570 in an archive now. And they show this woman who 00:10:42.570 --> 00:10:46.350 is just passionately engaged with ideas, with 00:10:46.350 --> 00:10:50.669 love, with the war, but who is completely, fundamentally 00:10:50.669 --> 00:10:52.909 unable to settle into a conventional domestic 00:10:52.909 --> 00:10:56.289 routine. She was just wired differently. So we 00:10:56.289 --> 00:11:00.029 get to 1949. She's 30 years old. She is twice 00:11:00.029 --> 00:11:02.850 divorced. She has left two children behind, but 00:11:02.850 --> 00:11:05.590 she has her youngest son, Peter, with her. And 00:11:05.590 --> 00:11:07.830 she decides that Rhodesia is too small for her. 00:11:07.929 --> 00:11:10.330 Can't contain her anymore. She takes Peter and 00:11:10.330 --> 00:11:12.870 moves to London. And this is the moment Doris 00:11:12.870 --> 00:11:15.570 Lessing, the writer we know, truly arrives. She 00:11:15.570 --> 00:11:17.809 arrives with the manuscript of her first novel 00:11:17.809 --> 00:11:21.029 in her suitcase. The grass is singing. She arrives 00:11:21.029 --> 00:11:23.480 with barely any money. She arrives as a single 00:11:23.480 --> 00:11:25.820 mother in a city that is still scarred, still 00:11:25.820 --> 00:11:27.840 recovering from the Blitz. And she wasn't just 00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:30.240 a writer looking for a publisher. She was arriving 00:11:30.240 --> 00:11:33.399 as a radical, a political figure. She was. And 00:11:33.399 --> 00:11:35.419 this is where the story takes a turn that sounds 00:11:35.419 --> 00:11:37.519 like something out of a spy thriller. The surveillance 00:11:37.519 --> 00:11:41.220 years. Exactly. Because we now know, thanks to 00:11:41.220 --> 00:11:43.500 these declassified files, that she wasn't just 00:11:43.500 --> 00:11:46.039 being watched by literary critics. She was being 00:11:46.039 --> 00:11:48.629 watched by the state. It's incredible. The extent 00:11:48.629 --> 00:11:51.289 of this only became clear in 2015. Yes. Yeah. 00:11:51.389 --> 00:11:54.070 When a five -volume secret file was released 00:11:54.070 --> 00:11:57.970 to the National Archives, five volumes, MI5 and 00:11:57.970 --> 00:12:01.009 MI6, were monitoring her for around 20 years. 00:12:01.070 --> 00:12:04.549 20 years starting when? It started in the early 00:12:04.549 --> 00:12:08.230 1940s in Rhodesia because of her Communist Association's 00:12:08.230 --> 00:12:10.309 error, and it continued when she moved to London. 00:12:10.629 --> 00:12:13.389 Five volumes. That is a lot of paperwork for 00:12:13.389 --> 00:12:15.070 someone who writes fiction. What were they so 00:12:15.070 --> 00:12:18.029 afraid of? Her associations. It was the height 00:12:18.029 --> 00:12:20.289 of the Cold War. She was a member of the Communist 00:12:20.289 --> 00:12:23.389 Party of Great Britain. Her flat in London became 00:12:23.389 --> 00:12:26.610 a kind of hub for radicals, for political exiles, 00:12:26.610 --> 00:12:28.590 for writers from all over the world. And she 00:12:28.590 --> 00:12:31.570 was an activist. A very prominent one. She campaigned 00:12:31.570 --> 00:12:35.269 against nuclear arms. And perhaps most dangerously 00:12:35.269 --> 00:12:37.169 in the eyes of the British establishment, she 00:12:37.169 --> 00:12:39.370 was a very, very vocal opponent of apartheid 00:12:39.370 --> 00:12:41.870 in South Africa. Which ironically puts her on 00:12:41.870 --> 00:12:43.889 the right side of history. But at the time... 00:12:44.169 --> 00:12:46.090 That got you on a watch list. It got you more 00:12:46.090 --> 00:12:49.169 than that. It got you banned. In 1956, she was 00:12:49.169 --> 00:12:51.149 officially prohibited from entering both South 00:12:51.149 --> 00:12:53.509 Africa and southern Rhodesia. The ban lasted 00:12:53.509 --> 00:12:56.350 for years. It did. She was effectively exiled 00:12:56.350 --> 00:12:58.370 from the land where she grew up. All because 00:12:58.370 --> 00:13:00.490 she insisted that black Africans deserved equal 00:13:00.490 --> 00:13:02.789 rights. But, and here is that pattern again, 00:13:02.830 --> 00:13:05.710 the one we keep seeing, she didn't stay a loyal 00:13:05.710 --> 00:13:08.070 communist soldier, did she? No. She joined the 00:13:08.070 --> 00:13:10.129 party, she was spied on for being in the party, 00:13:10.230 --> 00:13:13.679 and then... She left the party. 1956 was the 00:13:13.679 --> 00:13:16.559 breaking point for her and for many Western intellectuals. 00:13:16.559 --> 00:13:18.940 This was the year the Soviet Union sent tanks 00:13:18.940 --> 00:13:22.200 into Hungary to brutally crush a popular revolution. 00:13:22.460 --> 00:13:25.149 The masks slipped. Completely, for lessing the 00:13:25.149 --> 00:13:28.549 brutality, the hypocrisy. It was too much. She 00:13:28.549 --> 00:13:31.389 saw the reality behind the ideology, and she 00:13:31.389 --> 00:13:33.409 walked away. She left the Communist Party of 00:13:33.409 --> 00:13:36.149 Great Britain that same year. It's just so fascinating 00:13:36.149 --> 00:13:39.330 how she commits so fully to something, whether 00:13:39.330 --> 00:13:41.850 it's a marriage or a political ideology. She 00:13:41.850 --> 00:13:44.169 explores it to its absolute limit, and then when 00:13:44.169 --> 00:13:45.830 she sees the cracks, she doesn't try to patch 00:13:45.830 --> 00:13:48.389 them up. She just leaves. She was intellectually 00:13:48.389 --> 00:13:51.299 ruthless in that way. She had no time for self 00:13:51.299 --> 00:13:54.700 -deception. She later said she was utterly disillusioned 00:13:54.700 --> 00:13:56.419 by the experience. And she didn't just quietly 00:13:56.419 --> 00:14:00.200 leave, did she? Not at all. In the 1980s, she 00:14:00.200 --> 00:14:03.059 became an extremely vocal opponent of the Soviet 00:14:03.059 --> 00:14:05.179 Union, especially their actions in Afghanistan. 00:14:05.580 --> 00:14:07.820 She gave a famous interview to The New York Times 00:14:07.820 --> 00:14:10.340 where she really broke down her move away from 00:14:10.340 --> 00:14:12.960 Marxist philosophy. What was her core criticism 00:14:12.960 --> 00:14:15.919 of it in the end? That it ignored the spiritual 00:14:15.919 --> 00:14:19.090 aspect of humanity. She felt it was too mechanical, 00:14:19.169 --> 00:14:21.809 too materialistic. It had no room for the inner 00:14:21.809 --> 00:14:24.389 life, for the non -rational parts of being human. 00:14:24.490 --> 00:14:27.250 Which is actually a perfect segue into her writing 00:14:27.250 --> 00:14:29.669 because her fiction tracks these intellectual 00:14:29.669 --> 00:14:32.470 and political shifts perfectly. It's like a map 00:14:32.470 --> 00:14:35.049 of her mind. It is. So you have what critics 00:14:35.049 --> 00:14:37.960 call phase one. the communist or social realist 00:14:37.960 --> 00:14:41.120 phase. This is roughly from 1944 to 1956. And 00:14:41.120 --> 00:14:42.779 this starts with her first novel, the one she 00:14:42.779 --> 00:14:44.679 brought to London in her suitcase. The Grass 00:14:44.679 --> 00:14:47.480 is Singing. It came out in 1950, and it was an 00:14:47.480 --> 00:14:50.080 immediate sensation. It's set in southern Rhodesia, 00:14:50.139 --> 00:14:53.299 and it deals with the racial politics and, crucially, 00:14:53.379 --> 00:14:55.759 the psychological disintegration of a white farmer's 00:14:55.759 --> 00:14:59.580 wife, Mary Turner. It's a grim book. It's not 00:14:59.580 --> 00:15:02.879 a happy read. No, it's raw. It's unforgiving. 00:15:03.309 --> 00:15:06.049 But it perfectly captures the claustrophobia 00:15:06.049 --> 00:15:08.389 of the Bush, the simmering heat, the racial tension, 00:15:08.490 --> 00:15:11.090 the psychological collapse. It established her 00:15:11.090 --> 00:15:13.649 as a major literary voice right out of the gate. 00:15:13.809 --> 00:15:16.250 And her collections of African stories continued 00:15:16.250 --> 00:15:19.549 to explore those themes. Yes, her early work 00:15:19.549 --> 00:15:21.909 is very much rooted in that social and political 00:15:21.909 --> 00:15:24.909 landscape. But then as her politics began to 00:15:24.909 --> 00:15:27.450 shift, so did her fiction. Which brings us to 00:15:27.450 --> 00:15:29.740 the big one. The book that, if you take a literature 00:15:29.740 --> 00:15:32.200 class on the 20th century, is almost guaranteed 00:15:32.200 --> 00:15:34.659 to be on the syllabus. The Golden Notebook. Published 00:15:34.659 --> 00:15:37.519 in 1962. And this marks the peak of what we'd 00:15:37.519 --> 00:15:40.679 call her psychological phase. And we have to 00:15:40.679 --> 00:15:43.379 park here for a while. You cannot talk about 00:15:43.379 --> 00:15:46.879 Doris Lessing without dissecting this book. Structurally, 00:15:46.960 --> 00:15:49.059 it was like a bomb going off in the literary 00:15:49.059 --> 00:15:52.250 world. Okay, so why? What made it so radically 00:15:52.250 --> 00:15:54.730 different? It broke the traditional form of the 00:15:54.730 --> 00:15:57.909 novel. Up until then, most novels were, you know, 00:15:57.909 --> 00:16:00.710 linear narratives with a clear beginning, middle, 00:16:00.750 --> 00:16:04.190 and end. The Golden Notebook argues that a modern 00:16:04.190 --> 00:16:07.070 life, and specifically a modern woman's life, 00:16:07.309 --> 00:16:10.110 cannot be contained in a single linear story. 00:16:10.610 --> 00:16:13.590 It's too fragmented, too chaotic. So for the 00:16:13.590 --> 00:16:15.450 listeners who haven't read it, let's break down 00:16:15.450 --> 00:16:17.190 the architecture of the book, because it's not 00:16:17.190 --> 00:16:20.330 just one story, is it? Not at all. You have a 00:16:20.330 --> 00:16:22.710 frame story, which is a fairly conventional short 00:16:22.710 --> 00:16:24.970 novel called Free Women. It's about two friends, 00:16:25.190 --> 00:16:28.570 Anna and Molly. But interspersed within that 00:16:28.570 --> 00:16:31.110 narrative, you have excerpts from the notebooks 00:16:31.110 --> 00:16:34.120 of the protagonist, Anna Wolf. And she keeps 00:16:34.120 --> 00:16:36.940 four separate notebooks to record different parts 00:16:36.940 --> 00:16:39.120 of her life. Exactly. And the color coding is 00:16:39.120 --> 00:16:41.980 crucial here. She's trying to compartmentalize 00:16:41.980 --> 00:16:44.460 her experience to stop herself from falling apart. 00:16:44.679 --> 00:16:46.379 So what are the different notebooks? There's 00:16:46.379 --> 00:16:49.100 a black notebook, which is for her past experiences 00:16:49.100 --> 00:16:51.320 in Africa, the source of her novel. There's a 00:16:51.320 --> 00:16:53.659 red notebook for her political life, her time 00:16:53.659 --> 00:16:56.120 in the Communist Party, and her growing disillusionment 00:16:56.120 --> 00:16:58.179 with it. Then there's a yellow notebook, which 00:16:58.179 --> 00:17:00.440 is a fictionalized version of her own painful 00:17:00.440 --> 00:17:02.980 love affair. It's essentially a novel within 00:17:02.980 --> 00:17:05.400 a novel. And finally, there's a blue notebook, 00:17:05.619 --> 00:17:08.220 which is a personal diary. It records her daily 00:17:08.220 --> 00:17:11.359 life, her dreams, her psychoanalysis sessions, 00:17:11.460 --> 00:17:13.779 her memories. So she's trying to keep the chaos 00:17:13.779 --> 00:17:16.019 of her life in these separate color -coded boxes 00:17:16.019 --> 00:17:18.859 so she doesn't go crazy. Exactly. The underlying 00:17:18.859 --> 00:17:21.950 logic is... If I can just keep the politics in 00:17:21.950 --> 00:17:24.670 the red box and the emotions in the blue box 00:17:24.670 --> 00:17:27.069 and the past in the black box, I can function. 00:17:27.470 --> 00:17:29.349 But the whole point of the book is that this 00:17:29.349 --> 00:17:32.569 doesn't work. It fails completely. The brilliance 00:17:32.569 --> 00:17:34.630 of the book is that she does fall apart. The 00:17:34.630 --> 00:17:36.990 barriers between the notebooks break down. The 00:17:36.990 --> 00:17:39.430 content starts to bleed into one another. Her 00:17:39.430 --> 00:17:41.769 life becomes too messy to categorize. And that 00:17:41.769 --> 00:17:45.190 leads to the titular golden notebook. Yes. In 00:17:45.190 --> 00:17:47.609 a state of mental breakdown, she attempts to 00:17:47.609 --> 00:17:49.990 bring all the strands together into one single 00:17:49.990 --> 00:17:53.079 golden notebook. The book explores this idea 00:17:53.079 --> 00:17:55.980 of mental breakdown not as a failure, but as 00:17:55.980 --> 00:17:58.519 a necessary, even positive process. A way to 00:17:58.519 --> 00:18:01.779 strip away illusions. A way of healing and freeing 00:18:01.779 --> 00:18:04.380 oneself from false divisions, from illusions, 00:18:04.640 --> 00:18:07.759 and finding a new, more integrated way of being. 00:18:07.980 --> 00:18:09.859 Now here is where it gets really complicated 00:18:09.859 --> 00:18:13.539 culturally. This book became a bible for the 00:18:13.539 --> 00:18:16.240 second wave feminist movement in the 60s and 00:18:16.240 --> 00:18:19.569 70s. It was hailed as a landmark text. It was 00:18:19.569 --> 00:18:22.109 seen as the definitive novel on the female experience. 00:18:22.450 --> 00:18:25.230 But Lessing, she absolutely hated that label. 00:18:25.390 --> 00:18:28.369 She despised it. She felt completely and utterly 00:18:28.369 --> 00:18:31.349 misunderstood. She was so frustrated that people 00:18:31.349 --> 00:18:33.829 were reducing it to a gender manifesto. I have 00:18:33.829 --> 00:18:35.750 one of her quotes here about it. She said, what 00:18:35.750 --> 00:18:37.690 the feminists want of me is something they haven't 00:18:37.690 --> 00:18:39.930 examined because it comes from religion. They 00:18:39.930 --> 00:18:42.089 want me to bear witness. It's a fantastic quote. 00:18:42.519 --> 00:18:44.279 And she goes on to say she didn't want to stand 00:18:44.279 --> 00:18:47.440 up and say, ha, sisters, I stand with you side 00:18:47.440 --> 00:18:49.680 by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn 00:18:49.680 --> 00:18:52.200 where all those beastly men are no more. It's 00:18:52.200 --> 00:18:54.799 scathing, isn't it? But it's so consistent with 00:18:54.799 --> 00:18:56.980 her character. Remember, she'd already walked 00:18:56.980 --> 00:18:59.559 away from the Communist Party because she hated 00:18:59.559 --> 00:19:02.920 the groupthink, the slogans, the dogma. And now 00:19:02.920 --> 00:19:04.859 she saw the feminist movement developing its 00:19:04.859 --> 00:19:07.759 own kind of dogma. Exactly, its own orthodoxies. 00:19:07.960 --> 00:19:10.839 And she instinctively recoiled from it. She refused 00:19:10.839 --> 00:19:13.359 to be a mascot for any movement. So what did 00:19:13.359 --> 00:19:15.299 she think the book was about, if not feminism? 00:19:15.859 --> 00:19:19.339 She saw the sex war, as she called it, as just 00:19:19.339 --> 00:19:22.460 one symptom of a much larger fragmentation in 00:19:22.460 --> 00:19:25.819 society. The real struggle was larger. It was 00:19:25.819 --> 00:19:27.440 about the individual against the collective, 00:19:27.720 --> 00:19:30.599 the self against delusion, about the fragmentation 00:19:30.599 --> 00:19:32.799 of consciousness itself in the modern world. 00:19:33.370 --> 00:19:37.230 To focus solely on gender was, for her, missing 00:19:37.230 --> 00:19:39.589 the entire point. And this book wasn't a one 00:19:39.589 --> 00:19:41.529 -off. It was part of a larger project during 00:19:41.529 --> 00:19:43.950 this phase, right? Yes. It sits alongside her 00:19:43.950 --> 00:19:45.990 five -novel sequence, the Children of Violence 00:19:45.990 --> 00:19:48.670 series. That series follows a character named 00:19:48.670 --> 00:19:51.309 Martha Quest from her youth in Africa to her 00:19:51.309 --> 00:19:54.430 old age in a post -apocalyptic Britain. It covers 00:19:54.430 --> 00:19:56.150 much of the same psychological and political 00:19:56.150 --> 00:19:58.630 ground. So she writes this masterpiece of realism 00:19:58.630 --> 00:20:01.049 and psychology. She's the undisputed queen of 00:20:01.049 --> 00:20:03.750 the literary scene. And then she does it again. 00:20:03.809 --> 00:20:06.049 She pivots. And this time she pivots so hard 00:20:06.049 --> 00:20:08.029 she nearly falls off the map for some people. 00:20:08.109 --> 00:20:10.460 She pivots into deep space. The space fiction 00:20:10.460 --> 00:20:13.640 phase. I love this part because it is so wonderfully, 00:20:13.779 --> 00:20:16.539 willfully unexpected. And if you were a literary 00:20:16.539 --> 00:20:20.079 critic in 1979, you probably just threw your 00:20:20.079 --> 00:20:21.900 hands up in despair. You have this celebrated 00:20:21.900 --> 00:20:24.500 author of realistic psychological fiction, and 00:20:24.500 --> 00:20:27.220 suddenly, in the late 70s and early 80s, she 00:20:27.220 --> 00:20:29.599 starts writing about interstellar empires and 00:20:29.599 --> 00:20:31.779 aliens. And we need to correct a misconception 00:20:31.779 --> 00:20:34.839 here. This wasn't her, you know, losing the plot 00:20:34.839 --> 00:20:37.000 or going through some strange midlife crisis. 00:20:37.319 --> 00:20:40.700 This was a deli - deliberate philosophical shift. 00:20:40.859 --> 00:20:43.400 And it was driven by her new intellectual passion. 00:20:43.720 --> 00:20:45.759 It was driven by her deep interest in Sufism. 00:20:45.900 --> 00:20:48.259 We touched on this briefly, her feeling that 00:20:48.259 --> 00:20:52.039 Marxism lacked a spiritual dimension. She found 00:20:52.039 --> 00:20:54.660 that dimension in Sufism, particularly through 00:20:54.660 --> 00:20:57.180 the teachings of Idris Shah. Right. Shah became 00:20:57.180 --> 00:20:59.980 her good friend and teacher. And for Lessing, 00:21:00.019 --> 00:21:02.619 Sufism wasn't so much a religion as it was a 00:21:02.619 --> 00:21:05.019 system of cognitive evolution. What's the core 00:21:05.019 --> 00:21:08.259 idea there? The core idea is that humanity is 00:21:08.259 --> 00:21:10.799 asleep. We're living in a daze of conditioned 00:21:10.799 --> 00:21:13.859 responses, cultural programming, petty squabbles, 00:21:13.900 --> 00:21:17.119 and ego -driven desires. The purpose of life 00:21:17.119 --> 00:21:20.460 in this view is to wake up to a higher, more 00:21:20.460 --> 00:21:23.339 objective consciousness. And science fiction 00:21:23.339 --> 00:21:25.819 or space fiction, as she insisted on calling 00:21:25.819 --> 00:21:28.339 it. A term she borrowed from C .S. Lewis. Right. 00:21:28.480 --> 00:21:30.839 That became the perfect vehicle for exploring 00:21:30.839 --> 00:21:33.559 this idea. If you want to write about humanity 00:21:33.559 --> 00:21:36.200 being asleep, it really helps to adopt the perspective 00:21:36.200 --> 00:21:39.980 of an alien race that is fully awake. Precisely. 00:21:40.019 --> 00:21:43.920 Which brings us to the Canopus in Argos archive 00:21:43.920 --> 00:21:47.779 series, a sequence of five novels. And the basic 00:21:47.779 --> 00:21:49.940 premise is what? It's an allegorical history 00:21:49.940 --> 00:21:52.319 of humankind told from the perspective of an 00:21:52.319 --> 00:21:54.440 advanced interstellar society called Canopus. 00:21:54.859 --> 00:21:56.980 They're trying to accelerate the evolution of 00:21:56.980 --> 00:21:59.420 life on other worlds, including ours. And Earth 00:21:59.420 --> 00:22:01.079 has a different name in these books. Earth is 00:22:01.079 --> 00:22:03.119 called Shikasta, which essentially translates 00:22:03.119 --> 00:22:06.160 from Persian as the broken one or the damaged 00:22:06.160 --> 00:22:09.079 one. That says it all, really. It does. The first 00:22:09.079 --> 00:22:11.480 novel is framed as a series of reports and case 00:22:11.480 --> 00:22:14.140 studies from Canopian agents observing Earth. 00:22:14.589 --> 00:22:18.309 It's a God's eye view or rather an advanced alien's 00:22:18.309 --> 00:22:20.829 eye view. And this perspective allowed her to 00:22:20.829 --> 00:22:23.230 recontextualize all the themes she had written 00:22:23.230 --> 00:22:27.029 about before. All of them. War, racism, communism, 00:22:27.349 --> 00:22:30.490 feminism. From the perspective of Canopus, these 00:22:30.490 --> 00:22:33.589 aren't grand, tragic, heroic struggles. They 00:22:33.589 --> 00:22:36.450 are symptoms of a degenerative disease. They 00:22:36.450 --> 00:22:39.009 are the squabbles of infants on a minor damaged 00:22:39.009 --> 00:22:42.029 planet. So how did the literary world react to 00:22:42.029 --> 00:22:44.740 this? The critics? They were not having it. The 00:22:44.740 --> 00:22:47.839 reception was mixed at best, and in many cases, 00:22:47.880 --> 00:22:50.460 openly hostile. The New York Times review was 00:22:50.460 --> 00:22:53.220 particularly brutal, wasn't it? Scathing. The 00:22:53.220 --> 00:22:55.160 critic, John Leonard, who had praised her earlier 00:22:55.160 --> 00:22:57.500 work, basically accused her of betraying her 00:22:57.500 --> 00:22:59.980 talent. He wrote that she was propagandizing 00:22:59.980 --> 00:23:02.220 on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic 00:23:02.220 --> 00:23:05.720 razzmatazz. Cosmic razzmatazz, ouch. It's a great 00:23:05.720 --> 00:23:07.779 line, but it completely misses the point of what 00:23:07.779 --> 00:23:09.720 she was trying to do. But Lessing fought back. 00:23:09.759 --> 00:23:12.039 She didn't apologize or backtrack. Not for a 00:23:12.039 --> 00:23:15.259 second. She argued that science fiction contains 00:23:15.259 --> 00:23:17.480 some of the best social fiction of our time. 00:23:18.039 --> 00:23:20.960 She felt that while the so -called literary writers 00:23:20.960 --> 00:23:23.640 were stuck analyzing another middle -class divorce 00:23:23.640 --> 00:23:26.279 in Hampstead, the sci -fi writers were asking 00:23:26.279 --> 00:23:31.220 the real questions. Those were the questions 00:23:31.220 --> 00:23:33.509 that interested her. She really admired writers 00:23:33.509 --> 00:23:36.230 like Greg Baer and Olaf Stapleton. She saw the 00:23:36.230 --> 00:23:39.029 genre not as an escape from reality, but as a 00:23:39.029 --> 00:23:41.410 laboratory for exploring it on a grander scale. 00:23:41.650 --> 00:23:43.910 And she put her money where her mouth was. She 00:23:43.910 --> 00:23:45.589 actually went to the World Science Fishing Convention 00:23:45.589 --> 00:23:48.329 in 1987 as the guest of honor. Which is a fantastic 00:23:48.329 --> 00:23:51.049 image, isn't it? The grand dame of British literature, 00:23:51.269 --> 00:23:53.410 the Nobel laureate -in -waiting, hanging out 00:23:53.410 --> 00:23:55.750 with the sci -fi crowd because she felt they 00:23:55.750 --> 00:23:57.710 were the only ones asking the important questions. 00:23:57.930 --> 00:24:00.369 It just shows her total lack of pretension. She 00:24:00.369 --> 00:24:02.730 followed the idea wherever it led her. If the 00:24:02.730 --> 00:24:05.750 idea led to a mud hut in Rhodesia, she went there. 00:24:06.210 --> 00:24:08.650 If it led to a psychological breakdown in a London 00:24:08.650 --> 00:24:11.670 flat, she went there. And if it led to Zone 3 00:24:11.670 --> 00:24:14.329 on a planet run by a galactic empire, she went 00:24:14.329 --> 00:24:16.630 there too. It's also worth noting, this wasn't 00:24:16.630 --> 00:24:19.029 totally out of the blue. Her novels Briefing 00:24:19.029 --> 00:24:21.630 for a Descent into Hell and Memoirs of a Survivor 00:24:21.630 --> 00:24:24.390 were already blurring the lines of reality. They 00:24:24.390 --> 00:24:27.009 were the precursors. They were novels about inner 00:24:27.009 --> 00:24:30.250 space, about madness and memory that showed she 00:24:30.250 --> 00:24:32.569 was already moving beyond conventional realism 00:24:32.569 --> 00:24:36.089 long before Canopus. Speaking of a lack of pretension 00:24:36.089 --> 00:24:39.029 and maybe a healthy dose of mischief, we have 00:24:39.029 --> 00:24:41.670 to talk about the prank, the Jane Summers hoax. 00:24:41.869 --> 00:24:44.190 Oh, this is legendary in publishing circles. 00:24:44.309 --> 00:24:46.450 It's my favorite story about her. It's brilliant. 00:24:46.910 --> 00:24:50.750 This was in 1982. By this point, Lessing is incredibly 00:24:50.750 --> 00:24:54.390 famous. Her name alone guarantees sables in reviews. 00:24:54.829 --> 00:24:57.740 But she had a theory. She believed the publishing 00:24:57.740 --> 00:25:00.859 industry had become lazy and complacent. She 00:25:00.859 --> 00:25:03.000 believed that new unknown authors had almost 00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:05.440 no chance of getting a fair reading and that 00:25:05.440 --> 00:25:07.519 established authors were published regardless 00:25:07.519 --> 00:25:09.839 of the quality of their work, simply because 00:25:09.839 --> 00:25:12.460 of their famous name. So she decided to run an 00:25:12.460 --> 00:25:14.839 experiment to test the system. A magnificent 00:25:14.839 --> 00:25:17.700 one. She wrote two novels, The Diary of a Good 00:25:17.700 --> 00:25:21.720 Neighbor and If the Old Could. But she didn't 00:25:21.720 --> 00:25:24.539 put her name on them. She created a pseudonym. 00:25:25.309 --> 00:25:28.069 Jane Summers. And she sent them to her own publishers. 00:25:28.150 --> 00:25:30.970 To her own UK publisher, Jonathan Cape, who had 00:25:30.970 --> 00:25:33.190 made millions of pounds off her work over the 00:25:33.190 --> 00:25:36.549 decades. And they rejected them. That is the 00:25:36.549 --> 00:25:39.369 ultimate gotcha. I mean, you can't make that 00:25:39.369 --> 00:25:41.670 up. It is. They sent her standard rejection letters. 00:25:41.809 --> 00:25:43.950 They didn't recognize her voice, her style, her 00:25:43.950 --> 00:25:46.589 genius. They just saw an unsolicited manuscript 00:25:46.589 --> 00:25:48.970 from an unknown woman. So what happened to the 00:25:48.970 --> 00:25:50.990 books? They were eventually published by other 00:25:50.990 --> 00:25:53.980 houses. Michael Joseph in the UK and Alfred A. 00:25:54.000 --> 00:25:56.480 Knopf in the US, but purely on their perceived 00:25:56.480 --> 00:25:59.900 merit as debut novels. And they sold very few 00:25:59.900 --> 00:26:01.839 copies. Because nobody knew who Jane Summers 00:26:01.839 --> 00:26:04.420 was. Exactly. When Lessing finally revealed the 00:26:04.420 --> 00:26:06.900 ruse, it caused a massive uproar. It was a huge 00:26:06.900 --> 00:26:08.559 embarrassment for the critics who'd ignored the 00:26:08.559 --> 00:26:10.680 books and for the publishers who'd rejected them. 00:26:10.920 --> 00:26:12.960 She proved her point in the most dramatic way 00:26:12.960 --> 00:26:15.900 possible. She proved that the machinery of fame 00:26:15.900 --> 00:26:19.940 often drives the industry, not necessarily the 00:26:19.940 --> 00:26:23.500 writing itself. It was such a punk rock move 00:26:23.500 --> 00:26:26.319 for a woman in her 60s. It really highlights 00:26:26.319 --> 00:26:28.759 her role as a provocateur. She wasn't just this 00:26:28.759 --> 00:26:31.359 serious intellectual. She loved to poke the bear. 00:26:31.599 --> 00:26:35.099 She really did, which... Brings us to her very 00:26:35.099 --> 00:26:37.220 complicated relationship with official honors. 00:26:37.539 --> 00:26:39.900 Because for someone who loved to poke the bear, 00:26:40.140 --> 00:26:42.380 the establishment kept trying to give her medals. 00:26:42.640 --> 00:26:45.779 And she kept saying no. She declined an OBE in 00:26:45.779 --> 00:26:49.380 1977. And then, more dramatically, she declined 00:26:49.380 --> 00:26:52.380 a damehood in 1992. Turning down a damehood is 00:26:52.380 --> 00:26:55.220 a big deal. The press certainly thought so. What 00:26:55.220 --> 00:26:57.599 was her reasoning? Why turn it down? It was very 00:26:57.599 --> 00:27:00.240 specific and very consistent with her anti -colonial 00:27:00.240 --> 00:27:02.559 roots. She said she couldn't accept an honor 00:27:02.559 --> 00:27:05.180 that was linked to a non -existent empire. So 00:27:05.180 --> 00:27:07.339 it was the dame of the British Empire part she 00:27:07.339 --> 00:27:10.220 objected to. Exactly. The empire was gone, and 00:27:10.220 --> 00:27:12.299 she had spent her youth watching the damage that 00:27:12.299 --> 00:27:15.339 empire did in Africa. For her, accepting the 00:27:15.339 --> 00:27:17.240 title would have been a betrayal of her own history 00:27:17.240 --> 00:27:18.920 and principles. That's a very fair point. Yeah. 00:27:19.019 --> 00:27:21.170 But she didn't say no to everything. No, she 00:27:21.170 --> 00:27:23.609 wasn't reflexively anti -establishment. She was 00:27:23.609 --> 00:27:27.009 principled. In 1999, she accepted the Companion 00:27:27.009 --> 00:27:29.309 of Honor. Why that one? Because its citation 00:27:29.309 --> 00:27:32.269 is for a conspicuous national service. And it's 00:27:32.269 --> 00:27:34.509 in the personal gift of the monarch. It has no 00:27:34.509 --> 00:27:36.750 link to the empire. For her, the distinction 00:27:36.750 --> 00:27:40.069 was crucial. And of course, she eventually accepted 00:27:40.069 --> 00:27:43.609 the ultimate prize. The Nobel Prize in Literature 00:27:43.609 --> 00:27:47.720 in 2007. She was the 11th woman... in 106 years 00:27:47.720 --> 00:27:50.599 to win it. And at the time, she was the oldest 00:27:50.599 --> 00:27:53.539 winner of the literature prize ever at 88 years 00:27:53.539 --> 00:27:55.799 old. And the scene when she found out is just 00:27:55.799 --> 00:27:59.299 perfectly quintessentially Lessing. It's wonderful. 00:27:59.480 --> 00:28:00.960 She was coming home from a trip to the grocery 00:28:00.960 --> 00:28:03.779 store. She gets out of a black cab with her shopping 00:28:03.779 --> 00:28:06.460 bags and there's a huge swarm of reporters and 00:28:06.460 --> 00:28:08.660 cameras waiting on her doorstep. And her reaction? 00:28:08.900 --> 00:28:10.420 She just sat down on her front steps looking 00:28:10.420 --> 00:28:13.920 exhausted and said, oh Christ. She wasn't overwhelmed 00:28:13.920 --> 00:28:15.759 with gratitude. She was just sort of resigned 00:28:15.759 --> 00:28:18.119 to all the fuss it was going to cause. Still, 00:28:18.220 --> 00:28:20.579 the citation from the Swedish Academy is beautiful. 00:28:21.059 --> 00:28:23.900 They called her the ethicist of the female experience, 00:28:24.160 --> 00:28:27.119 who, with skepticism, fire, and visionary power, 00:28:27.420 --> 00:28:30.460 has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny. 00:28:30.980 --> 00:28:34.380 Skepticism, fire, and visionary power. I mean, 00:28:34.380 --> 00:28:36.140 that sums her up perfectly, doesn't it? It really 00:28:36.140 --> 00:28:40.180 does. But there is a curious... Almost sad final 00:28:40.180 --> 00:28:43.660 detail about her Nobel medal itself. The auction. 00:28:43.819 --> 00:28:47.420 The auction. Yes. In 2017, just four years after 00:28:47.420 --> 00:28:49.779 her death, her Nobel medal was put up for auction. 00:28:50.119 --> 00:28:52.839 It was only the second time a literature medal 00:28:52.839 --> 00:28:55.619 had ever been sold like that. Why? We don't really 00:28:55.619 --> 00:28:58.809 know. It speaks perhaps to the unsentimental 00:28:58.809 --> 00:29:00.829 nature of her estate or maybe just the financial 00:29:00.829 --> 00:29:03.650 realities that follow literary legacies. But 00:29:03.650 --> 00:29:05.910 in a strange way, it feels fitting. She never 00:29:05.910 --> 00:29:07.970 cared about the hardware, the prizes, the medals. 00:29:08.170 --> 00:29:10.509 She only ever cared about the work. Let's talk 00:29:10.509 --> 00:29:12.170 about the end of her journey. She lived a very, 00:29:12.210 --> 00:29:14.710 very long and full life. She did. She suffered 00:29:14.710 --> 00:29:17.150 a stroke in the late 1990s, which was devastating 00:29:17.150 --> 00:29:18.789 for her because it stopped her from traveling. 00:29:19.089 --> 00:29:21.950 And travel had been her lifeblood observing Africa, 00:29:22.150 --> 00:29:25.559 Europe. The world. But she remained active. Oh, 00:29:25.579 --> 00:29:27.859 yes. In her later years, she was still a fixture 00:29:27.859 --> 00:29:30.779 at the theater and the opera in London. But she 00:29:30.779 --> 00:29:33.619 became preoccupied with death. There's a note 00:29:33.619 --> 00:29:35.420 in one of her diaries where she's asking herself 00:29:35.420 --> 00:29:37.599 if she would have time to finish a new book. 00:29:37.720 --> 00:29:40.720 A writer until the very, very end. The fear wasn't 00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:43.640 death itself, but the unfinished sentence. That's 00:29:43.640 --> 00:29:47.059 it, exactly. She died on November 17, 2013, at 00:29:47.059 --> 00:29:50.200 her home in West Hampstead, London. She was 94. 00:29:50.910 --> 00:29:54.109 The official cause was kidney failure and sepsis. 00:29:54.109 --> 00:29:56.549 She was survived by her daughter, Jean. Who she 00:29:56.549 --> 00:29:58.910 had reconnected with in later life. But sadly, 00:29:59.069 --> 00:30:02.329 both of her sons, John and Peter, had pre -deceased 00:30:02.329 --> 00:30:04.849 her. Which is a profound tragedy for any parent. 00:30:05.259 --> 00:30:07.539 To outlive your children. It is. But her literary 00:30:07.539 --> 00:30:10.259 legacy is absolutely secure. Her papers are now 00:30:10.259 --> 00:30:13.039 archived for future scholars. A massive collection 00:30:13.039 --> 00:30:15.940 at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. 76 boxes 00:30:15.940 --> 00:30:19.180 of manuscripts, notebooks, letters. And the University 00:30:19.180 --> 00:30:21.160 of East Anglia holds her more personal archives, 00:30:21.380 --> 00:30:23.400 including those passionate love letters to John 00:30:23.400 --> 00:30:25.480 Whitehorn we mentioned earlier. Some of those 00:30:25.480 --> 00:30:27.960 were embargoed for years, keeping her secrets 00:30:27.960 --> 00:30:30.579 just a little bit longer. So if we look back 00:30:30.579 --> 00:30:33.099 at this incredible life, I mean, born in Persia, 00:30:33.240 --> 00:30:36.299 raising maize in the Rhodesian bush, leaving 00:30:36.299 --> 00:30:38.859 her family to become a revolutionary, being spied 00:30:38.859 --> 00:30:42.400 on by MI5, writing these realistic masterpieces 00:30:42.400 --> 00:30:45.279 that defined a generation, and then pivoting 00:30:45.279 --> 00:30:47.660 to write about space aliens and Sufi mysticism, 00:30:47.740 --> 00:30:51.630 and finally winning the Nobel. What is the core 00:30:51.630 --> 00:30:53.869 theme here? What's the thread that ties it all 00:30:53.869 --> 00:30:56.450 together? I think the core theme is a refusal 00:30:56.450 --> 00:30:59.609 to be categorized. A profound, lifelong refusal. 00:30:59.950 --> 00:31:02.349 She was a chameleon, but not because she was 00:31:02.349 --> 00:31:04.920 hiding or trying to fit in. She changed because 00:31:04.920 --> 00:31:07.599 she was constantly growing. She moved from communism 00:31:07.599 --> 00:31:10.720 to Sufism, from realism to science fiction. From 00:31:10.720 --> 00:31:14.039 abandoned mother to literary matriarch. She never, 00:31:14.059 --> 00:31:17.240 ever let her past self dictate who her future 00:31:17.240 --> 00:31:19.319 self could be. So it's the courage to change 00:31:19.319 --> 00:31:21.220 your mind, isn't it? Publicly and completely. 00:31:21.559 --> 00:31:23.420 Absolutely. And that is perhaps the rarest and 00:31:23.420 --> 00:31:25.700 most valuable quality. In a world, especially 00:31:25.700 --> 00:31:28.240 in our current time, where we so often feel pressured 00:31:28.240 --> 00:31:30.279 to pick a team, to pick an identity, and then 00:31:30.279 --> 00:31:32.240 to defend it to the death. Lessing represents 00:31:32.240 --> 00:31:34.559 the power of intellectual flexibility. There's 00:31:34.559 --> 00:31:36.599 that quote of hers that critical thinking is 00:31:36.599 --> 00:31:39.000 essential in a world of information overload. 00:31:39.380 --> 00:31:41.480 And she lived that. She was willing to stand 00:31:41.480 --> 00:31:43.480 up and say, you know what? I used to believe 00:31:43.480 --> 00:31:45.859 this with all my heart, but I've looked at it 00:31:45.859 --> 00:31:48.680 again and now I see it differently. She did it 00:31:48.680 --> 00:31:51.180 publicly and she did it radically time and time 00:31:51.180 --> 00:31:53.859 again. And that is a really powerful thought 00:31:53.859 --> 00:31:56.599 to leave our listeners with. Are we, are any 00:31:56.599 --> 00:31:59.619 of us? capable of that kind of radical change 00:31:59.619 --> 00:32:03.279 today? Can we look at our own most deeply held 00:32:03.279 --> 00:32:05.839 beliefs with that much skepticism and that much 00:32:05.839 --> 00:32:08.319 fire? That is the challenge she leaves behind. 00:32:08.599 --> 00:32:11.200 Not just to read her incredible books, but to 00:32:11.200 --> 00:32:14.119 try and adopt her mindset, to be willing to break 00:32:14.119 --> 00:32:16.500 the mold, even if you're the one who spent half 00:32:16.500 --> 00:32:18.339 your life building it. Okay, let's unpack this. 00:32:18.440 --> 00:32:20.700 Or actually, I think we have unpacked this quite 00:32:20.700 --> 00:32:24.380 thoroughly. Doris Lessing, a life lived without 00:32:24.380 --> 00:32:27.140 a safety net. Thank you for listening to this 00:32:27.140 --> 00:32:29.000 deep dive. Thank you. Until next time.