
 |
|
May 13, 2013
David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
May 10, 2013
Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
May 8, 2013
Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
Morgan Housel Admit it: No one has any idea what's going on
April 22, 2013
US man departing country arrested on terror charges
Barbara Williams: An unorthodox but growing treatment in a 9-year-old's battle against cancer
April 19, 2013
Caroline B. Glick: Why Obama's visit to Israel had no impact on public opinion or government policy
Morgan Housel: Gold collapse: The start of something big?
Pete Spotts: Livable super-Earths? Two candidates among Kepler's latest finds
April 17, 2013
Shira Rubin: Too much of a good thing? 'Palestinians' realize downside of foreign aid boom
Morgan Housel: BAD NEWS: EVERYONE IS RIGHT!
April 15, 2013
Kristen Chick: Egyptian Christians respond with harsh words to attack -- rocks, Molotov cocktails, and gunfire -- against main cathedral
Marcy Darnovsky and Karuna Jaggar: High Court to decide if you should own your DNA
Howard LaFranchi: US bracing for more Russian blowback after taking action against 18 more human rights violators
April 12, 2013
Mark Clayton: New cybersecurity bill: Privacy threat or crucial band-aid?
Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom: Jackie Robinson's Friend, Hank Greenberg; CNN's Jake Tapper; Texas County in the News is named for 19thC. Jewish soldier and Congressman
The Kosher Gourmet by Susan Russo: FRUITY QUINOA STUFFED PEPPERS: A flavorful, colorful and edible vessel of delicately fluffy, mildly nutty filling combined with chewy apricots, tangy cherries, and crunchy pistachios
April 10, 2013
Peter Grier: North Korean missiles: Could US shoot them down?
Morgan Housel: Warning: Don't waste your capital being fooled by profit prophets
Donald Hensrud, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Take vitamin supplements with caution --- even approved, they may actually do damage
Eryn Brown: 74 DNA discoveries move cure closer for three cancers
April 8, 2013
Jonathan Tobin: What Part of No Preconditions Do American Jews Not Get?
Fred Weir: Is Putin finally trading his own party for a new power base?
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Oct. 26, 2007
/ 14 Mar-Cheshvan 5768
Doris Lessing, free spirit
By
Paul Greenberg
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The picture in the New York Times showed an 88-year-old woman sitting on her door stoop in London holding armfuls of bouquets and surrounded by other floral tributes. Not as attractive as the flowers are the cameras, booms, mikes, reporters, cameramen and the other inevitable accessories to fame all around her. Hand to forehead, pondering some inane question or another ("How does it feel to win the Nobel prize for literature?"), she looked a little tired. Like a grandma at the end of a long day, maybe a long life.
Doris Lessing clearly had better things to do than pose for pictures or dispense the kind of instant wisdom that is expected on these occasions. Better things like going inside and answering the phone. All of her friends would have been calling. One of the great things about winning a great prize is sharing the good news with old friends. It must be almost as satisfying as imagining the reaction of one's enemies though at 88 surely Ms. Lessing has outlived most of them.
Not that the lady didn't have her share of snippy critics. Writers like her do. Because she hasn't been predictable. No one political party, school of thought or interest group could count on her. She's ideologically unreliable. She's belonged to no one but herself.
Having survived the 20th century, which is no mean feat, our newest and oldest Nobel laureate has come out of Africa but, like so many of her generation, she's got a European education. That is, she's seen a lot of death and destruction over her long life. Death may not always educate but it does harden. No wonder she told an interviewer the other day that, though the attacks of September 11th were terrible, they were not as extraordinary as Americans think. "They're a very naive people," she said of us Americans, "or they pretend to be."
Why not both? We are both naive and we hold onto our naivete in the hope that the world is a better place than it appeared September 11, 2001.
Shielded for so long by two oceans and G-d's mysterious grace ("G-d looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America"), we have become as vulnerable as the rest of the world but don't want to be. There have been some notable exceptions to our golden past slavery, the near-extinction of the American Indian, and that unpleasantness circa 1861-65 but we still have trouble recognizing evil as it gathers, or even when it is upon us. And so our reaction to it keeps veering between astounded panic and familiar laxity.
The more far-seeing of our leaders have told us that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but eternal is a long time. We grow tired. We nod off. Maybe if we ignore the threat, it will go away. We miss our isolation and imagine we can return there, retreat behind our oceans and be safe. It is a temptation, and every time we yield to it, we are shocked awake. It is taking us painfully long to lose our innocence, maybe because we fear, rightly, that we may lose our idealism with it. That's the American dilemma Doris Lessing was referring to in her own provocative way.
By now Ms. Lessing seems to have tried her hand at almost every form of literature essays, plays, fiction and non-fiction, realistic novels and silly sci-fi, incisive criticism and insipid mysticism, plus a couple of volumes of autobiography. But the one thing she could never carry off was cant. Sloganeering. Groupthink. You know, the kind of thing you hear on talk shows or in Congress or at national nominating conventions.
Maybe her allergy to the banal came from never having had much formal schooling she never finished high school and having to educate herself by reading, reading, reading. You learn to think for yourself that way.
Born in what was then Persia, raised in what is now Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing went through a couple of marriages and ideologies, and settled in what is still London, thank G-d. Like her locales, her loyalties shifted with time and events as she saw through one ideological fraud after another, from racism to Communism to political correctness. Call her a free agent.
Born Doris May Taylor in 1919, she could never stand being cooped up, physically or mentally. Long before she won a Nobel, she received an even greater honor from the now defunct regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa, both of which declared her a "prohibited alien" in the 1950s, when apartheid was still in the saddle and riding the backs of millions. Now that's recognition.
A great writer is always a subversive influence, a threat to things to as they corruptly are, a kind of one-person government-in-exile. And like V.S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing didn't let up just because the color of the racists changed.
She wrote from a woman's point of view, not a professional feminist's, which earned her a certain enmity among those who wanted to make feminism an all-encompassing ideology complete with the dense, indecipherable gibberish that a modern ideology demands.
Afer she left the Communist Party the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was the last, eye-opening piece of evidence she needed to make the break the comsymps in British academia never forgave her. Ex-Communists make the best anti-Communists, and Ms. Lessing joined a long, distinguished line that goes back to Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers.
And once Communism itself collapsed years later, she recognized that its habits of mind, or rather mindlessness, were being transferred to the disciples of political correctness.
Ms. Lessing's little essay, "Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer," written in 1992, remains an incisive expose of PC long before many others realized what a self-censoring, mentally paralyzing, totalitarian throwback it is. She ended that essay with this explanation for the rise of Political Correctness: "I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma."
Doris Lessing understood that certainty will always have its attractions; it saves people t
he labor of thought. Certainty was never an attraction for her. Quite the contrary. She was repelled by it; she saw it as the trap it is. And from an early age she resolved never to be trapped. She hasn't been.
Over the course of a long life, the lady developed an unfailing ability to see through the fraud du jour. Again and again, her independence offended precisely those who most needed offending at the time. True Believers of every persuasion were her natural prey.
Ms. Lessing may be long past her peak as a writer, but her eye for the fraudulent is as clear as ever. This latest honor is just a grace note. The Nobel Prize has something of a history of honoring the less than honorable. When it goes to a Naipaul or a Lessing, it redeems itself rather than the writer.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Send your comments by clicking here.
Paul Greenberg Archives
© 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Christine Flowers
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
A. Barton Hinkle
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Greg Schwem
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Lenore Skenazy
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Lisa Benson
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
Matt Davies
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Walt Handelsman
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
David Horsey
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Jimmy Margulies
Jack Ohman
Michael Ramirez
Rob Rogers
Drew Sheneman
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Scott Stantis
Danna Summers
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters
Dan Wasserman

Tech Q&A
Mr. Know-It-All
Ask Doctor K
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|