WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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wanted most to do. I had in mind the kind of book she saw as
her ideal work or the sort of life she would like to live. Her answer
stunned me so, I hardly knew what to say. She said she wanted to
conquer England, and she had already accomplished that. I
thought of all the conquerors who had preceded her, and could
scarcely find a basis of comparison with this small, gentle, soft–
spoken woman.
True, Doris Lessing has been enlarged into a heroic figure
by the feminists, but as she has said privately, she is not a feminist
and has been somewhat embarrassed by the attempt to coopt her
into a movement that is too one-sidedly ideological for her broad
talents. I suppose, too, she has had
to
resist having her effort to
realize her gifts blown up into a cause. Nor are her stories or
novels feminist works, unless any work by a woman whose
leading characters are women is to be taken as feminist writing–
which is simply a tautology parading as cultural or literary
criticism.
In terms of criticism, the question, primarily, is how good or
important a writer Doris Lessing is, and, to a lesser extent, what
the meaning or impact of her work is. This is not the place to
deal full y with either o f these qu es tions and, as in the case of
other writers with whom I have been sympa thetic, I cannot be
entirely objective. But it is clear that Doris Lessing is a fiction
writer of considerable force, in the line of the great naturalists.
Although she does not have the brute power of Zola or Dreiser or
their ideological sweep, she does, like them, build her narratives
slowly, by accretion, brick by brick, as though they were archi–
tectural structures. Her prose, like that of most naturalists, lacks
the grace of the more symbolic writers and the inventiveness of
the experimentalists. Except, perhaps, for the recent semi-science–
fiction novels, she is not a child of modernism. Her themes are,
of course, contemporary, and the fate of her characters is deter–
mined by the forces of the modern world, but her perspective is
primarily social and does not draw heavily on the rhetorical
and imaginative resources of the leading modernists. It is as a
social novelist-as a post-modern writer-tha t Doris Lessing
must be judged , and as such she is a dominant fi gure. After a ll ,
this was her credo: she herself argued that realism is the only
literary mode for writing about contemporary life.
Recently, however, Lessing has made a remarkable switch,
