Children of a Lesser Lessing

Believe it or not, the Nobel Prize authorities and the academic elite lionize a writer who denounces both communism and feminism. That’s because they honor her for the opinions that she held before she changed her mind.

It would be a little like the Conservative Political Action Conference honoring right-winger turned leftist David Brock for the books that he wrote 16 years ago. In recent autobiographies, former radical feminist Doris Lessing describes communism as a shameful failure” and communists as “murderers with a clear conscience” whose ideology “is the same as a passion for unhappiness.”

“The root of communism—a love of revolution—is, I believe, masochism, pleasure in pain,” she wrote in her memoirs. But these may not be the writings that prompted the Nobel Prize Committee’s description of her as “the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

“The Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm traditionally does not quite get the hang of the writers it celebrates, and they have done it again,” David Pryce-Jones writes in National Review. “They did not reward Lessing for her journey of self-discovery,” he insists.

He may be onto something. In like fashion, “shock brigades of professorinas in universities throughout the West are manufacturing feminist dissertations, mobilizing behind what they believe is Lessing’s banner,” Pryce-Jones asserts. He had a chance to visit with the grande dame, now in her late 80s, relatively recently.

The elder Lessing dismisses modern-day feminists as “some of the smuggest, most unself-critical people the world has ever seen.”

“They are horrible,” she avers. She probably would not feel all that comfortable at a Modern Language Association convention.

The world’s largest conclave of English professors holds many meetings devoted to drawing inspiration from all of the feminist tracts that Lessing herself no longer tracks with. The MLA even has within it a “Doris Lessing Society.”
“Her The Golden Notebook is a standard text for Women’s Studies college courses,” Bill Moyers points out. “Just as The Good Terrorist makes appearances in many political science classrooms and her fiction on English department reading lists.”

A Google search of women’s studies courses on Doris Lessing yields 108,000 entries, mostly about the work she did when she was literally a communist party fellow traveler. She was involved with at least one fellow who belonged to the party with whom she traveled extensively.

A comparable search of MLA panels on the lady’s work only gets you 860 finds but that’s deceptively low. It makes her competitive, for example, with Herbert Marcuse.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.