Doris Lessing: Homage to the New Man

What this episode covers

It’s easy to forget when one sees how ubiquitous the “author reading” has become that there was a time when this custom was practically unheard of. Writers are, after all, often introverted, timid - even misanthropic - and generally tasked with sitting alone in a room, mired in their own thoughts and pulling words out of thin air which they clack down onto screens and then woops no that won’t do...erase that erase erase. Do it again. Writers, at least in our often romantic notion of them, are watchers, not do-ers. They linger in the backgrounds and take notes. They brood. Maybe, though, this very notion is one that is fast becoming anachronistic. For in today’s market-driven go-go-go warp speed world, authors are expected to write a book a year, Tweet witty quips regularly to their tens of thousands of followers, snap brilliant Instagram pics with their lattes and labradors, do the talk show circuit, serve on prize juries, write newspaper columns (“The Death of the Novel”), fly on planes from festival to library to festival and perform their own work on stages to thunderous applause, sign books for hours, listen patiently as readers gush, talk with authority on TV or a podcast episode about the state of this or that or the other- and then innovate, advocate, pontificate. It’s a wonder writers write at all. This long and windy diatribe to simply point out one brief and lovely moment when Doris Lessing announces from the stage that this reading, this moment from a Harbourfront event in Toronto in 1984, is her first reading. Ever. And when you, the listener, realize that Doris Lessing, though far from being at the end of her career (she was already in her mid-60s by this point), for just a moment you get a glimpse into that other former world of the writer as loner, as someone charged with quietly finding the words and writing them out, not broadcasting them to the world. There is a sweetness to imagining her there on that stage, wondering how she got there, blinking into the lights, dry-throated, looking out into that room of eager faces waiting for her to speak, to be more than a mere writer. And it’s that world, that old world where writers wrote quietly in rooms (and drank and scrapped and raged - some things never change) and you can hear hints of that old world in her voice when she reads these two beautiful stories about young girls on the cusp of adulthood. That’s the Doris Lessing we hear as we “look” into that world from before, a world she is about to leave behind, stepping up to that microphone for the first time, clearing her throat and letting go of the past. *** This audio recording of Doris Lessing, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1984, is used with the kind permission of The Doris Lessing Literary Will Trust as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors. And, as always, thanks to TIFA, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, for allowing us access to their archives. Find out more at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.