The Mumpsimus

When crime writer Robert Galbraith was revealed to be J.K. Rowling, I of course thought of Richard Bachman and Stephen King, but I also thought of Jane Somers and Doris Lessing . Lessing wrote and submitted two books under the Somers pseudonym, they were rejected by her publisher (Jonathan Cape) in Britain, and when they were eventually published by Michael Joseph in the UK and Knopf in the US, they were barely noticed and didn't sell well. The story itself is interesting and, as these stories tend to do, reveals much about the power of expectations created by a recognizeable writer's name. Now, in a short piece at the New Yorker website, James Lasdun has revealed himself to be the in-house reader at Jonathan Cape who rejected Lessing's first Somers novel . Once Lessing's ruse was revealed, it seems he was a bit of a laughingstock, which is unfortunate — I expect most, if not all, of the people who criticized him for rejecting the book would probably have don...

In fact, in the spiritual world, we change sexes every moment. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men I object to anything that divides the two sexes ... human development has now reached a point at which sexual difference has become a thing of altogether minor importance.  We make too much of it; we are men and women in the second place, human beings in the first. --Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 19 Dec 1884 [quoted in Monsman] I first tried to read The Story of an African Farm some years ago when I went on a Doris Lessing binge; I hadn't heard of the novel before reading Lessing's praise of it, and what she said intrigued me.  But I went into The Story of an African Farm expecting it to be, well, a story , and it was soon apparent that, for all the book is, it is only "a story" in the loosest sense -- indeed, it's more accurate to say it is a book containing a lot of stories, but even that misses much of what is wonderful and unique in Olive Schrei...

I've spoken of my admiration for much of Doris Lessing's work , but I have remained silent on her writings about Africa and her thoughts on that, the continent of her birth. Mostly because I've felt that her perspective on Africa was an important one for a while, but that she is also very much a product of her time and situation, as are we all. I liked parts of her Nobel lecture very much, and the overall thrust of it -- which I perceived as a call to recognize the systems and luxuries that allow literature to be written -- is one I think deserves to be raised more often, and I was glad Lessing did. I didn't even mind her disparaging comments about the internet, because I never expected her to be very familiar or approving of it, anyway. But some of what she writes about Africa bothered me quite a lot, in that she seems to be nostalgic for colonialism. Ramblings of an African Geek now has a post addressing this : Never mind the damage colonization has done and still...

There are few awards that much interest me these days, but I look forward to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature every year, not because I think it's more legitimate than any of the others, but because it's so often weirdly surprising, and now and then it goes to a writer I quite respect. The choice of Doris Lessing this year surprised me mostly because she's been rumored for it so long that I was sure her time had passed, especially since most of her work since her autobiographies hasn't gained much acclaim. As for me, I can't claim to be devoted to Lessing the way I am to Coetzee and Pinter , but I did go through a Lessing phase eight or nine years ago, and read many of her books. Which doesn't mean I'm an expert, by any means -- she's so prolific I don't think I read even half of her novels. Maybe a quarter. (I gave a lot of them away, and the ones I kept are in a box in New Hampshire, so I don't have any at hand. Thus, ...