Essay Six: I Couldn’t Care Less — Doris Lessing and the Reinvention Nobody Wanted
This essay is part of Chameleons or Charlatans: The Art of Reinvention — a series examining artistic reinvention across the twentieth century through six figures, the cultural theory that illuminates them, and the question of whether what they did is still possible. Each essay stands alone. The series opens with The Invitation.
In October 2007 Doris Lessing climbed out of a black cab outside her home in north London and found herself surrounded by reporters. She had been out doing the grocery shopping. She was eighty-seven years old. When told she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature she said: oh Christ. I couldn’t care less.
A journalist — American, expectant, clearly anticipating something else entirely — received the full force of her views on why she had been chosen, delivered on the doorstep with the patient clarity of someone explaining something obvious to someone who should have worked it out already. Then she went back to pay the cab driver. Then she came back out and, when asked about prizes, said: I once won a prize which was called the Best Milkmaid in Norway, which was really one of the most charming prizes I have ever won.
She hadn’t thought about new readers either. When one journalist raised the possibility she brightened slightly. I’m very pleased if I get some new readers. Yes, that’s very nice. I hadn’t thought of that.
This is either the most complete performance of indifference in literary history or the genuine article. Given everything we know about Doris Lessing it is almost certainly the genuine article. Which makes her, from the outset, a different kind of figure from the others in this company. The others performed their reinventions with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Lessing simply didn’t. She wrote the books, said what she thought, and left you to work it out. The absence of performance is itself the most radical gesture on this list.
It also made the critical establishment profoundly uncomfortable. It still does.
Part One: Where She Came From
Doris May Tayler was born in 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia, where her father worked for the Imperial Bank of Persia — a detail that contains, in miniature, the entire colonial world she would spend her career anatomising. The family moved to Southern Rhodesia when she was five. Her father, like thousands of other returned soldiers, had been persuaded that farming in Africa was the future. It wasn’t. The farm failed. Her mother, a trained nurse, frustrated and displaced, projected her thwarted ambitions onto a daughter who had decided, early and completely, not to receive them.
Her motto, as she later described it: I will not.
She left school at thirteen. She educated herself from the farm’s library and from whatever she could order from England. By fifteen she was selling stories to magazines. By nineteen she had married her first husband Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children, both of whom she left when she walked away from the marriage in her early twenties.
She left her children. This belongs in this essay not as a footnote and not as a disqualification but as the fact that the personal darkness section of every essay in this series must reckon with plainly. The others on this list — all men — left wreckage behind them that was largely inflicted on others. Stravinsky’s first wife dying while he lived with his mistress. Miles’s documented violence. Godard’s broken friendships and the language he used in the presence of colleagues. In each case the damage moved outward — from the man toward the people around him.
Lessing’s is different in kind. She left. Not to pursue another relationship, not in an act of self-indulgence, but because staying would have ended her. The colonial Rhodesia of the 1940s had prepared one life for her — the wife, the mother, the settler woman managing the domestic — and she had decided, with the completeness of the I will not that runs through everything she subsequently did, that she would not live it. The children stayed with their father. They were cared for. She carried the decision and its consequences for the rest of her life.
The literary tradition understood this choice before Lessing made it. Nora Helmer walking out of the doll’s house in 1879 — Ibsen’s most radical act, the sound of a door closing that George Bernard Shaw said was heard around the world — is the mother who chooses self-realisation over the sanctioned domestic role and pays the social price. The Medea of the original myth — before Euripides made her a child-killer, before the tragedy was rewritten to make the woman’s transgression monstrous — was something more disturbing and more sincere: a woman of extraordinary power forced into impossible choices by a society that had given her no legitimate options, who acted on her own terms regardless of the cost. Lessing is in that lineage. Not heroic. Not excused. Simply the woman who understood that the alternative was a different kind of death and chose accordingly.
What the male artists on this list destroyed outwardly Lessing destroyed inwardly — or rather, she destroyed the role rather than the people. The sacrifice was real. The children grew up without her. That cost was paid by people who didn’t choose it. A choice the men would never have to make. We note it, as we note the other costs across this series, without excusing it and without using it to diminish what followed.
What followed was everything.
She found the Left Book Club, which led her to the small intense world of Southern Rhodesian communist politics, which led her to Gottfried Lessing, German communist exile and lawyer, whom she married in 1943 and divorced in 1949, taking their son Peter to London. She arrived with a manuscript, a small child, and no money. Before she had published a word in Britain, MI5 was watching.
Declassified files show she was under surveillance for more than twenty years — tailed in Rhodesia, monitored in London. The files described her as running the Salisbury Left Club, patronised by persons with foreign accents, where the general tone was very left and most topics ended in what the MI5 officer primly called anti-British, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist vapourings. The security services understood something the literary establishment took longer to grasp: that this woman, arriving from the colonial periphery with her fury and her manuscript, was not going to be contained by anyone’s categories.
Part Two: The Albatross and the Feminist Movement She Embarrassed
The Grass is Singing was published in 1950 and immediately recognised as important. Race, gender, the psychic cost of colonial society to everyone it touches — written with precision and a controlled fury that announced a major writer. It is also, in retrospect, already doing things the label social realist novel about colonial Africa doesn’t capture. The through line is present from the first page of the first book. The reinventions are the surface. The inquiry is constant.
The Children of Violence sequence — five novels tracing Martha Quest from colonial Rhodesia to post-war London — established Lessing as one of the most important British novelists of her generation. These novels sold. They were reviewed seriously. They built the cultural capital she would subsequently spend, and lose, and refuse to mourn.
Then came The Golden Notebook, and everything got complicated.
Published in 1962, The Golden Notebook is genuinely difficult — formally experimental, politically serious, psychologically raw, structured to enact its own argument about fragmented consciousness under historical pressure. Its protagonist Anna Wulf keeps four notebooks — black for Africa, red for communism, yellow for fictionalised autobiography, blue for unmediated diary — and then a fifth, golden notebook attempting to hold them together. The form mirrors the fracture. The novel is simultaneously about breakdown and formally performs it.
The women’s movement claimed it immediately. It was read as a feminist manifesto, a definitive account of what it meant to be a woman in the mid-twentieth century trying to hold together a political self, a sexual self, a creative self and a sane self.
Lessing was baffled. She said she had only written, in public, the sort of things women were always saying to each other in private. She had not intended a manifesto.
The movement that claimed her then expected her loyalty. It did not get it. On the feminist revolution, in her own words: what I really can’t stand about it is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible. And more precisely, more politically: there are many feminists who work in the media, and they think that feminism is very important. It is in their own lives, but mostly feminism has had an impact among privileged women in the advanced Western countries.
She referred to The Golden Notebook, in interviews for the rest of her life, as her albatross. The book that made her famous became the cage the establishment tried to keep her in. She kept departing anyway.
Part Three: What She Refused and What Survived
In 1983 Lessing published two novels — The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could — under the pseudonym Jane Somers, without telling her publishers. Her own publisher rejected them. Several others rejected them too. They were eventually published in small editions to minimal attention. When she revealed the deception it caused a literary scandal — not because the books were bad, but because the experiment had proved exactly what she intended it to prove.
The pseudonym is worth a moment’s attention before we get to the results. The Brontës wrote as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell — women claiming male names to access an authority the literary establishment denied to women. George Eliot did the same. Lessing’s move is the precise inverse. She did not claim a different identity to gain power she had been denied. She surrendered the identity that had granted her power, to test whether the work could stand without it. The direction of the deception is completely different. One is a claim. The other is an experiment.
She said she wanted to highlight what she called that whole dreadful process in book publishing where nothing succeeds like success. One sentence containing the entire Bourdieu argument about cultural capital without naming Bourdieu. The experiment proved the point with the precision of a controlled trial. The same prose. The same quality. A different name. The doors closed.
The accumulated symbolic capital of Doris Lessing — built over thirty years of serious work, critical recognition and reader loyalty — was the condition of her being read at all. Jane Somers, with identical words, was invisible. The literary field rewards the prior investment not the current work. She ran the experiment, published the results, named the finding, and went back to writing as Doris Lessing. The point had been made. There was more work to do.
She is her own counterpoint figure in this series — the only one for whom the deflation comes not from an external critic or an erased collaborator but from herself, in public, with deliberate intent. This is not only a gender observation though it is partly that. It is also a function of the novel form itself — the most private of the art forms we have examined, the one made alone and received alone, where the feedback loop between the artist and the world is slowest and most mediated. Lessing had no Diaghilev to be questioned by, no Braque to share the credit with, no Truffaut to send the devastating letter. She had the literary establishment’s silence and her own clear eyes. She used both.
And then she turned to science fiction.
Here is what the critical establishment missed across four decades of reviewing the departures and finding them wanting. The Sufi thread that serious scholarship traces through the entire body of work — the interest in conscious evolution, in the relationship between individual and collective, in the possibility of a kind of knowing that exceeds political analysis — is not a late development. It is present, underground, in The Golden Notebook. It is present in the Children of Violence sequence. It is the inquiry that the realist form could only partially contain and that eventually required inner space fiction to express fully.
The critical dismissal of that inner space fiction as inexplicable was, in retrospect, a defence of a specifically Enlightenment rational framework — the individual subject, the linear narrative, the knowable world accessible through reason and rendered in the realist form those values produced. Lessing’s Sufism and science fiction were both rejections of that framework. Not ignorant rejections — she understood the tradition she was refusing — but deliberate, two-fingered refusals of a worldview that the male critical establishment had naturalised so completely it could no longer see it as a worldview. The critics who found the Canopus sequence inexplicable were right that it was inexplicable within their terms. Their terms were the problem.
Gore Vidal — who had himself spent a career moving between historical fiction, transgressive satire, political polemic and memoir, who had built an entire literary persona on refusing the categories the establishment tried to apply to him, who as a queer man in mid-century America understood better than most what it meant to live outside the sanctioned identity — reviewed Shikasta for the New York Review of Books with sarcasm so studied it read as bewilderment dressed as contempt. Joan Didion. John Leonard. Harold Bloom calling the Nobel pure political correctness. The pattern held for nearly four decades: praise for The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, then bafflement, then disapproval, then the repeated question of why such a successful realist would turn cosmic spaceman.
Nobody asked why Gore Vidal turned historical novelist. Nobody asked why he wrote Myra Breckinridge. The range was evidence of his seriousness. Lessing’s range was evidence of something the critics couldn’t quite name but clearly found alarming. The asymmetry is not subtle and it is not accidental.
There is a connection here to something explored elsewhere on this blog — the physics essay on where we fit in a relational universe, where the deeper you look into the structure of matter the less it resembles fixed things and the more it resembles patterns of relationships with no fixed anchor point. Lessing was reaching for the same recognition decades before the physics made it academically respectable: that the single fixed viewpoint is insufficient for the largest questions, that consciousness is always relational, that the individual perspective cannot contain what most needs containing. The Canopus sequence is not science fiction in the genre sense. It is a novelist’s attempt to find a formal container large enough for what she needed to say.
The reinventions are real. The formal departures are genuine. And underneath them, consistent and unbroken, is the same fundamental project: the question of whether human consciousness, under the conditions capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy have created for it, can find its way to something larger than itself. The cosmic scale is not an abandonment of the political. It is the political extended to its logical conclusion.
Whether it always works as fiction is a different question. It doesn’t always work as fiction. The Canopus sequence contains five novels of which perhaps two and a half are completely successful on their own terms. The critical establishment used the failures to dismiss the project. The more considered response is that the project was more ambitious than almost anything her contemporaries attempted, that it succeeded often enough to matter, and that the failures are more interesting than most writers’ successes.
The Sufi thread is also — if we are direct about the parallel — the closest thing on this list to Bowie’s cosmic reach. Both reaching for a framework that goes beyond the individual psyche. Both finding in the cosmic scale a way to say something about the human condition that the earthbound forms couldn’t quite contain. Lessing found it in spiritual philosophy. Bowie found it in science fiction imagery and alien personas. Both were told they had gone too far. Both kept going. The difference is that Lessing’s cosmic reach required her readers to do real intellectual work with no hook and no beat to carry them. Which is either the most demanding artistic decision on the list or the most genuine one, depending on your position on what fiction is for.
Compare this to Godard’s Dziga Vertov period — also invisible, also unreceived, also operating outside the culture industry’s frame. The difference is that Godard’s invisibility was a position, theorised and justified and complained about. Lessing’s was simply where the work went. She didn’t bleat.
In October 2007 Doris Lessing climbed out of a black cab and found the reporters. We have already told you what she said. What the video shows — and it is worth watching — is something the transcript cannot quite capture: the wry precision of an eighty-seven year old woman who has spent sixty years refusing to perform for anyone’s expectations, delivering the Nobel committee’s citation back to the journalists with the patient clarity of someone who has already thought about this more carefully than the committee has, and finding the whole occasion faintly comic. The milkmaid prize was more charming. She means it.
She is the most daring figure in this essay. She worked in the hardest medium for reinvention — the novel, that supposedly domestic form, that supposedly feminine form, the form that the manly art worlds of music and painting and cinema have always been able to condescend to from a comfortable distance. She worked in it across sixty years, across more formal registers than any of the others in this company. She did it without the mythology of genius, without the performance of difficulty, without the self-destruction that culture reads as evidence of seriousness in its male artists. Regardless of your class, gender, faith or cultural formation, the work is available to you. She made sure of that. It was the last and most complete refusal — the refusal to make access to the work conditional on anything except the willingness to follow where it went.
She did it by writing the books, saying what she thought, and not asking whether you were following.
That is the most radical act on this list. Gore Vidal, of all people, should have known better than to miss it. Then again, even Gore Vidal had his categories. He just kept them better hidden than most.
Key Works
The Grass is Singing (1950) — the arrival: colonial guilt and the psychic cost of race, written with a fury that announced everything to come.
The Golden Notebook (1962) — the albatross: the most formally important British novel of the postwar period, which she spent the rest of her career escaping.
The Summer Before the Dark (1973) — the pivot: written as the cosmic period begins, a bridge between the realist and the visionary.
Shikasta (1979) — the cosmic commitment: the first Canopus novel, the work the critics couldn’t follow, which she considered her most important.
The Fifth Child (1988) — the exception that proves the rule: the cosmic sensibility operating at domestic scale, which got through.
The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983, as Jane Somers) — the experiment: the controlled test of how literary reputation actually works, run in public, results published.
At Home He Feels Like A Tourist 
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