Tony Grist (poliphilo) wrote,
Tony Grist
poliphilo

Lessing

The only opinion that really matters is the opinion of posterity, and the Nobel committee have got it wrong as much as they've got it right. They kicked off badly by giving the first ever prize to a minor French poet called Sully Prudhomme when they could have given it to Tolstoy or Ibsen . A list of literary greats that includes Galsworthy but not Woolf is a list one might have reservations about joining.

Doris Lessing found out she'd won from the journalists camped outside her garden gate waiting for her to return from a hospital appointment. She's a very small woman with no demned nonsense about her. 

"Have you heard the news?"

"No"

"You've won the Nobel prize for literature"

"Oh Christ."

But it's the way she says it- with the utmost weariness and disdain. Well, go see for yourself
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  • 23 comments

  • Supplementary

    The cover picture on that book I dreamed about looked a lot like this.....

  • Baptist Church 1882

    I have a cold. I was coughing so irrepressibly that I spent the night downstairs in a chair. Among the dreams that drifted by was one about a book…

  • Eostre

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