{"id":691,"date":"2017-03-15T06:26:21","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T06:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=691"},"modified":"2018-10-09T14:32:01","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T13:32:01","slug":"on-the-trail-of-doris-lessing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2017\/03\/15\/on-the-trail-of-doris-lessing\/","title":{"rendered":"On the trail of Doris Lessing"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Lara Feigel<\/a>, Reader in Modern Literature<\/em><\/p>\n

My research over the last few years has taken me to some unlikely places. You wouldn\u2019t expect to find the papers of the very British novelist Rebecca West in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the wartime diaries and letters of Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene in Austin, Texas. It\u2019s odd spending a day in London in the Blitz and then emerging out of the air-conditioned archive into the Texan heat. One evening I even found myself being taught to two-step by a cowboy alongside a couple of other British academics.<\/p>\n

But the most adventurous research trip I\u2019ve been on was to Zimbabwe, where I went in August on the trail of Doris Lessing. Lessing grew up in Southern Rhodesia, as it then was, on a farm in the bush. She then moved at the age of eighteen (in 1937) to the capital city of Salisbury (now Harare) where in the space of the next decade she married twice, had three children, devoted herself to communism and wrote the novel that would make her name.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing, first American edition cover, 1950.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My books seem to be becoming increasingly personal. I still tell students that it\u2019s the text that counts and that it\u2019s important not to use the biography as a kind of code-breaker, enabling us to work out the intention or \u2018true\u2019 meaning of the text. But I\u2019ve abandoned my early conviction that the life is irrelevant to the work, and have started to think that often it\u2019s the intersection between the two (the way that the work is shaped by the life and, perhaps more interestingly, the way that the life is shaped by the work) that I have most to say about. With Lessing, though, I\u2019ve decided to take the risky step of making it autobiographical as well as biographical, bringing myself into the narrative.<\/p>\n

How is a writer’s life shaped by her work?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why would I do this? I\u2019m not always sure if it\u2019s a good idea. But there\u2019s something about the questions I\u2019m asking here \u2013 about why she abandoned her first two children, about what freedom, motherhood, sex, love, communism, writing meant for her \u2013 that made me want to make my workings explicit, showing who I am in thinking about her, and what assumptions I\u2019m bringing to the investigation. I haven\u2019t always been convinced that I\u2019m doing the right thing, but in Zimbabwe I was sure that I was, because it was such an amazing trip, and in an ordinary book I wouldn\u2019t have been able to write about it.<\/p>\n

I saw the nursing home where she gave birth to her three children, which still had the same cast iron beds that she\u2019d lain on feeding her babies. I saw the parks where she went mad with boredom, pushing her pram up and down, waiting for her real life to begin. I saw the flat where she wrote The Grass is Singing<\/em>, resolutely screening off all distractions and claiming her days for herself. <\/em><\/p>\n

And then it was time to go to the bush.<\/p>\n

\"lara
In the bush, August 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lessing wrote about her childhood home in at least 10 books. Each time, there were descriptions of the mountains she could see in the distance \u2013 four different ranges on different sides of the house. There were descriptions of the extraordinary sunsets and sunrises over the empty veld, and of the millions of stars she could see at night.<\/p>\n

In London, Lessing missed the African sky and the African sun. It mattered to me to find the exact spot where she\u2019d seen all this; the particular views that she thought had made her a writer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I did find it. I had a lot of false starts, where we took the wrong bend and found ourselves in the wrong patch of bush. It was all too flat to believe we\u2019d find the hill I\u2019d read about so many times. But then my guide asked around and we found someone who recognised the name of her farm, Kermanshaw, named after the Persian town where her parents had begun their married life. Now it\u2019s called Kimansah, but that was enough to send us on our way, and suddenly I was on a hill, looking at the four mountain ranges from exactly the angle that she described them. That was what I\u2019d hoped for. But it was even better, because the family now living there invited me to stay the night, so I saw the sun set and rise, and saw the stars that she\u2019d miss for the rest of her life.<\/p>\n

Now I have to find a way to write about it. I don\u2019t know what the people who read the book will think of all this. I dread to think what mark I\u2019d give it if it landed on my desk as a student dissertation. But the pleasure of being an academic in an English department today is that there is endless scope to find new ways of writing about books; that the journey you begin as a student takes you to places you could never have expected or imagined.<\/p>\n

\"lara
Portrait of Lara, Kimansah, August 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0Lara Feigel is co-director of the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture<\/a> and runs the Ivan Juritz Prize<\/a>, which celebrates creative experiment in all art forms.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Ivan Juritz Prize is open for submissions now until Friday 31 March 2017. The Prize was established in 2014 to celebrate the creative explosion of the modernist era and reward art that seeks to \u2018make it new\u2019. Postgraduate students throughout Europe either from traditional academic disciplines or from creative courses are invited to submit texts, films, musical compositions, virtual documentation of artwork, excerpts of moving image work and proposals for installation and performance. Entrants are encouraged to play with form to make the judges think, feel and question.<\/em><\/p>\n

The prize is a collaboration between the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture at King\u2019s College London and Cove Park, Scotland\u2019s International Artist Residency Centre. Winners receive \u00a31,000 and spend the first two weeks of September at Cove Park, engaging in a residency and showcase. All shortlisted works are given a public performance at the prize-giving and are written up in the journal <\/em>Textual Practice.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

You might also enjoy “An open drafting process of \u2018Capoeira Boy\u2019” by Ruth Padel<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Lara Feigel, Reader in Modern Literature My research over the last few years has taken me to some unlikely places. You wouldn\u2019t expect to find the papers of the very British novelist Rebecca West in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the wartime diaries and letters of Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene in Austin, Texas. It\u2019s odd […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":684,"featured_media":694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,26,18],"tags":[208,214,209,35,213,211,212],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20th-21st-centuries","category-culture-text-and-history","category-modernism","tag-doris-lessing","tag-field-work","tag-modern-literature","tag-modernism","tag-new-historicism","tag-research-in-progress","tag-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/684"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":771,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions\/771"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}