Putting the Questions Differently

Interviews with Doris Lessing

1964–1994

EDITED BY

EARL G. INGERSOLL

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chronology

Talking as a Person Roy Newquist

The Inadequacy of the Imagination Jonah Raskin

Learning to Put the Questions Differently Studs Terkel

One Keeps Going Joyce Carol Oates

The Capacity to Look at a Situation Coolly Josephine Hendin

Creating Your Own Demand Minda Bikman

Testimony to Mysticism Nissa Torrents

The Need to Tell Stories Christopher Bigsby

Writing as Time Runs Out Michael Dean

Running Through Stories in My Mind Michael Thorpe

Placing Their Fingers on the Wounds of Our Times Margarete von Schwarzkopf

Breaking Down These Forms Stephen Gray

Acknowledging a New Frontier Eve Bertelsen

The Habit of Observing Francois-Olivier Rousseau

Caged by the Experts Thomas Frick

Living in Catastrophe Brian Aldiss

Watching the Angry and Destructive Hordes Go Past Claire Tomalin

Drawn to a Type of Landscape Sedge Thomson

A Writer Is Not a Professor Jean-Maurice de Montremy

The Older I Get, the Less I Believe Tan Gim Ean and Others

Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind by Communism Edith Kurzweil

Reporting from the Terrain of the Mind Nigel Forde

Voice of England, Voice of Africa Michael Upchurch

Describing This Beautiful and Nasty Planet Earl G. Ingersoll

Index

About the Author

Also by the Author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

FEW WRITERS HAVE VOICED more misgivings about the value of interviews yet submitted to as many of them as Doris Lessing. The two dozen conversations in this collection were selected from over 100 in which she has participated in the past three decades. Those 100 or so interviews run the usual gamut in a writer’s interviews. Among those not included here are many of the “celebrity interview” variety in which it is the writer’s fame that generates the interview. Such interviewers may know little or nothing of the writer’s work and occasionally may even begin with that confession, as though their busy lives as journalists somehow justify their not having completed their “assignments” in preparation for the interview. It is just this preoccupation with the writer’s personality that Mrs. Lessing has found particularly frustrating. As she has insisted on several occasions recently, being interviewed, especially following the appearance of one of her publications, is a part of book promotion that she submits to, often without enthusiasm. The interviews in this collection of “conversations” are generally “literary” interviews. The interviewer, frequently an academic or writer, can be expected to ask informed questions.

If Mrs. Lessing has misgivings about the interview as a literary form, they are grounded in her commitment to the writer’s craft. As one who is especially sensitive to language, she is dismayed by the narrow confines of the interview format. Seldom does the interviewee have the opportunity to prepare for the questions to be posed, and her views on complex issues or problems must be limited to a spoken response without the opportunity to revise. In such conversations, it is obviously impossible to say to one’s questioner: “Give me an hour to think about that question, before I respond,” or “Could you ignore what I’ve been saying for the past two minutes so that I might begin again?” or “May I reorganize the points that I am trying to make?” Clearly, she has felt the pressure toward oversimplification that such a format can easily produce. She herself has written about interviews in an article aptly entitled “Never the Whole Truth?” appearing in a recent issue of British Journalism Review (Winter 1990):

The slightest involvement with the machinery of interviews has to convince you that no one cares about facts. How many have I sat through, uninterested in the questions I am asked, which I have probably answered dozens of times before. I do this, I hope, amiably, with every appearance of interest: before any interview or ‘promotion’ trip I resolve never to seem impatient or bored, and to answer every question as if for the first time. But more than once, an interviewer, sensing I am not totally enthralled, has leaned forward at the end to enquire if perhaps there is something not yet mentioned that I would like to discuss. But on saying ‘Yes – so and so — ’ a look at first of incredulity, and then of boredom settles on his or her face, because what I have just said is not exciting enough, does not feed myths about writers. But an interview is ‘dead’ if the interviewee tells the interviewer what to ask. Why bother to have an interview at all? (The publishers have an instant reply to this.) The point is, the interviewer’s questions do interest him, her, and represent in some way the readers. When a German interviewer flounced off, ‘If you are not going to talk about your personal life…’ she was right. That is what interested her and therefore her readers. (Her fault was not to say in advance that this is what she expected me to talk about.) But it is a remarkable fact that of what must now be hundreds of interviews all over the world – you would be surprised how many interviews a writer doing ‘promotion’ is expected to agree to – only two or three stay in my mind as good ones – that is, based on real insight. I am not joking when I say that writing about writers has long since lost the idea that truth should be the aim.

What is at stake here is vital to Mrs. Lessing’s concerns with contemporary thinking, or perhaps its absence. As one well-versed in the subversion of language by political ideologies, she is acutely aware of the need to escape the entrapment of received notions and the morass of professional jargon. From her point of view, her interviewers frequently pose questions that are nearly impossible to answer, largely because they are not really questions at all. They are assertions disguised as questions, mini-lectures to which she occasionally replies, “Well, you’ve already said it.” Beyond that, however, she is aggravated by the contemporary tendency to insist on putting everything into compartments, a sort of perverse legacy of nineteenth-century scientists who felt an inordinate pleasure in labeling and categorizing phenomena. In speaking with fellow-writer Brian Aldiss, she has a famous laugh at the expense of an unidentified but eminent critic, who kept repeating in a review of The Fifth Child on the radio, “But you can’t categorize this book; you can’t categorize it,” as though if we only could, then we would no longer have to think about it.

Mrs. Lessing has participated in a large number of interviews not merely because hers has been such a significant voice in the last thirty years, but because she is a genuinely international writer, as is evident in interviews conducted in places as far from her London home as Singapore and in interviews originally appearing in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, and Norwegian newspapers and magazines. She has been a much-sought-after speaker around the world. That should not be surprising, given her background.

Doris Tayler Lessing was born in 1919 of English parents in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran). Her father had survived the First World War with psychological as well as physical wounds. Like many veterans, he was dismayed by England and took a bank job in Persia, hoping to start over in a different country. In her words, he was something of a dreamer, and when he happened on an agriculture fair he suddenly decided to move his family to Southern Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then called. Mrs. Lessing grew up in Southern Africa, where Marxism attracted her, along with many other sensitive young whites, since it seemed the only political ideology addressing itself to racial injustice. In 1949, as a young woman in her late twenties, she left her second husband Gottfried Lessing and accompanied by their son Peter moved to London where she has continued to live. She brought with her the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing. It was not her first attempt at the novel, since as she has told her interviewers, she destroyed the manuscripts of two earlier apprentice works. Its critical success and modest royalties launched her as a writer. Years later, she has been amused at her innocence in assuming that she would be able to support herself and her son through writing, but then, as she remarks, writers in mid-century England seldom aspired to the huge sales and royalties to support extravagant life styles that young writers often hope for today.

During the ’50s and ’60s, The Grass Is Singing was followed by the five volumes of her Children of Violence series. The first three in the series – Martha Quest, A Ripple from the Storm, and A Proper Marriage – as she herself admits, drew heavily upon her own experience as a young woman. Her next novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), was not part of the Children of Violence series. Still probably her best-known work, The Golden Notebook began an accelerated movement away from the autobiographical impulse in her fiction. Unfortunately, her readers have often been unwilling to accept her assertion that the women characters are not Doris Lessing in disguise. Those readers have had particular difficulties with The Golden Notebook, which some American feminists tried to read as a bible of Women’s Liberation. As Mrs. Lessing repeats throughout the later interviews, she had quite different interests in her famous novel and has deeply resented its appropriation as a weapon of sexual politics. Indeed, one distinct theme in these interviews is Mrs. Lessing’s attempt to rescue her own fiction from her readers who often want to reduce its complexity to their own narrow points of view.

In many ways, The Four-Gated City is among Mrs. Lessing’s most important novels. Like The Golden Notebook, it is one of those novels written for readers in the future. She has often indicated her sadness that there are no nineteenth-century novels giving readers in this century a better understanding of a movement like Chartism, for example. She goes on to say that she had hoped The Golden Notebook would offer future readers a clearer sense of what sensitive, thinking people were concerned with in mid-century England. The Four-Gated City fulfills that need for the ’60s. However, it also points toward her continuing interests throughout the ’70s and ’80s, especially toward her interest in the “space fiction” that would precipitate a kind of crisis in her literary reputation.

Central to her later interests is the attempt to move out of the realist mode that brought her critical acclaim and a large readership for her earlier fiction. Briefing for a Descent into Hell and The Memoirs of a Survivor are the clearest evidence of that movement away from conventional realism toward “inner space.” Both are “difficult” novels because they demand more “willing suspension of disbelief” than many of her readers have been prepared for, even though fictional exploration of “insanity” in The Golden Notebook and the apocalyptical last section of The Four-Gated City point in that direction. And then, almost to demonstrate that she had not said farewell to the realist mode, The Summer Before the Dark appeared in 1973, between Briefing and Memoirs, creating difficulties once again for those bent upon “categorizing” her writing or smoothly plotting the course of her “career.”

More than anything, it was toward her problematical “space fiction” that The Four-Gated City pointed the direction. In 1979 she launched the Argos in Canopus series with the “novel” Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. If its readers were surprised and puzzled, it was in part because they had not paid enough attention to the increasing presence of science fiction on the literary scene in her watershed novel, The Four-Gated City. These same readers may also have misread Mrs. Lessing’s interest as an attempt to join the virtually universal chorus of scoffers at this “sci-fi,” to use the persistent “mainstream” and media term of amused disdain for a fiction damned in part for its popularity. She has preferred the term “space fiction” for the Canopus series, not because she wants to dissociate it from “science fiction,” but only because she admits to having too little formal training to claim that her writing is “science fiction.” As she indicates in the interviews that follow, she turned to space fiction because it alone offered her the opportunity to range freely in time and space and to find metaphors to express her concern with contemporary problems and issues.

The response to the Canopus series among her readers, both professional and “common,” has been astounding. In reviews of the novels, in critical articles, and in letters to Mrs. Lessing herself, many readers have indicated their dismay that she has been wasting her talent writing fantasy. Some who have been particularly dismayed are those readers still waiting for her to write another Golden Notebook, or at least a “women’s book,” like The Summer Before the Dark. She has persisted, however, past the second Canopus novel, The Marriages of Zones Three, Four, and Five, which is about as close as she has come in the series to pleasing that readership. The latest three novels in the Canopus series are more similar to Shikasta than to Marriages. One of these, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, has led to yet another new departure for her writing, the libretto for the opera of the same name, written in collaboration with Philip Glass, an artist whose work has also had its share of detractors.

The most recent of the Canopus novels deliberately ends without a clear sense of closure. As Mrs. Lessing indicates, she plans a sixth novel and perhaps even more in the series. She has been “sidetracked,” she says, by The Fifth Child and The Good Terrorist, as well as by African Laughter, her memoirs of four visits to Zimbabwe, and by the first volume of her autobiography. The two novels that “sidetracked” her might be misread as her bowing to the pressure of those readers bent upon returning her writing to the realist mode. Certainly, they are more realist than the fiction beginning with Briefing; they represent, however, in the clearest fashion, Mrs. Lessing’s insistence upon her own artistic integrity and the freedom to write in diametrically opposed modes, as they suit her differing interests as a writer.

Although she is perhaps best known as a novelist, we ought not to ignore her accomplishment in other genres. In addition to essays and memoirs, she has published well over a dozen collections of shorter fiction; indeed, her most recent work at this writing is The Real Thing (English title London Observed) a collection of short stories and sketches. As she comments in the interviews that follow, she has also had a love affair with the theater – Play with a Tiger was produced in London in the early ’60s – with all the passion and heartbreak implied by that commonplace metaphor.

Mrs. Lessing’s awareness of her own reputation and her frustrations with the “business” of being a writer are no more clearly evidenced than by the Jane Somers affair. Ten years ago, she decided to write and publish a novel under a pseudonym. She did so – twice – in what she later published in her own name as The Diaries of Jane Somers. In part she wanted to explore her suspicion that the publication of books had become commercialized to such a point that the exigencies of the marketplace and the “bottom line” had clearly obscured traditional interests in literary merit and cultural value. Those who know her writing were not taken in by what she has termed the “hoax” of the Jane Somers novels and, indeed, some became “co-conspirators,” if you will. Others were not so fortunate. Publishers’ readers and book reviewers who wrote the customarily “patronizing” – her term – encouragements of this hypothetical “first novelist” were obviously not amused, when they had damned with faint praise novels by Doris Lessing. Similarly, publishers who turned down the manuscripts without even sending them out to be professionally evaluated were not happy with what the “hoax” had demonstrated. As she became aware, the marketers of books were most concerned that as an unknown writer “Jane Somers” had no “personality” to help them to sell the book. Besides, would there be an “author” to be interviewed as part of their marketing strategies?

The series of conversations has been arranged chronologically from her interviews in the early ’60s to one as recent as 1993. The early interviews appear, despite Mrs. Lessing’s apprehension that her views have changed over the past two decades. Most of the interviews have already appeared in print, some in journals as well known as The Paris Review; others, however, have appeared in smaller magazines such as Kunapipi and Glimmer Train Stories, where they are less readily accessible. Some appear here for the first time as transcriptions of taped interviews, notably those with writers Studs Terkel, Brian Aldiss, and Claire Tomalin. The collection includes translations of interviews in French and German. These pose problems because of the obvious infelicities of style inherent in translations of translations; however, they contain valuable interchanges and emphasize the genuinely international nature of her readership.

The conversations appear with the permission of both those who hold rights to them and Mrs. Lessing, who had the opportunity to read and approve the manuscript. The interviews have been edited to enhance consistency in mechanics, notably American spelling, and to reduce the redundant or unimportant material endemic in the transcriptions of spoken versions of the language. Wherever passages have been omitted in reprinted interviews, the notation “//” indicates such omissions, especially when a hiatus in the text might otherwise be distracting. Occasionally, repeated passages have been preserved to serve as bridges from point to point, or, more importantly, to allow Mrs. Lessing to emphasize points. She herself says, “As I have said and it bears repeating…” or words to that effect. As she reminds us, interviews are an indication more often of the interviewer’s interests than the interviewee’s. However, the reader will discover in these conversations a range of responses to issues and concerns in Mrs. Lessing’s writing. Taken together, they represent a record of a life in writing.

EARL G. INGERSOLL

October 1993

Chronology

1919

Born 22 October, in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran); parents, Alfred Cook Tayler and Emily Maud McVeagh. Her brother, Harry, was born in 1921.

1924

Moved with her family to a farm near the small town of Banket, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), where her father grew tobacco and corn.

1933

Ended her formal education at a Roman Catholic high school in Salisbury.

1939

Married Frank Wisdom, a civil engineer. Their children John and Jean remained with their father when their parents were divorced in 1943.

1943–49

Worked as a secretary and stenographer in Salisbury. Participated in a small political group with Marxist roots, but the Communist Party was not sanctioned by the colonial government.

1945–49

Married to Gottfried Lessing, a Marxist immigrant. Their son Peter, born in 1947, accompanied his mother to London when his parents’ marriage ended in divorce and his father returned to East Germany to assume a government post.

1950

The Grass Is Singing (Michael Joseph; New York, Crowell).

1951

This Was the Old Chiefs Country (Michael Joseph; New York: Crowell, 1952).

1952

Martha Quest, the first volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964).

1953

Five: Short Novels (Michael Joseph; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).

1954

A Proper Marriage, the second volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964). Received Somerset Maugham Award of the Society of Authors for Five: Short Novels.

1956

Retreat to Innocence (Michael Joseph; New York: Prometheus, 1959).

1957

The Habit of Loving (MacGibbon and Kee; New York: Ballantine, Crowell, Popular Library).

1958

A Ripple from the Storm, the third volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966).

1962

The Golden Notebook (Michael Joseph; New York, Simon & Schuster). Play with a Tiger: A Play in Three Acts (Michael Joseph).

1963

A Man and Two Women (MacGibbon and Kee; New York: Simon & Schuster, Popular Library).

1964

African Stories (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, Popular Library, 1965).

1965

Landlocked, the fourth volume of Children of Violence (MacGibbon and Kee; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966).

1966

The Black Madonna and Winter in July (Panther).

1967

Particularly Cats (Michael Joseph; New York, Simon & Schuster).

1969

The Four-Gated City, the fifth volume of Children of Violence (MacGibbon and Kee; New York, Knopf).

1971

Briefing for a Descent into Hell (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1972

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape); American title The Temptation of Jack Orkney (New York, Knopf).

1973

The Summer Before the Dark (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1974

The Memoirs of a Survivor (Octagon; New York: Knopf, 1975).

1976

Received the French Prix Medicis for Foreigners.

1978

Stories (New York, Knopf).

1979

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, the first volume of Canopus in Argos: Archives (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1980

The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five, the second volume of Canopus in Argos: Archives (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1981

The Sirian Experiments, the third volume of Canopus in Argos: Archives (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1982

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, the fourth volume of Canopus in Argos: Archives (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf). Received the Shakespeare Prize of the West German Hamburger Stiftung and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

1983

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1984

The Diaries of Jane Somers (New York: Random House), two novels originally published under the pseudonym Jane Somers as The Diary of A Good Neighbor and If the Old Could… (Michael Joseph, 1983–84; New York, Knopf).

1985

The Good Terrorist (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1986

Received the W. H. Smith Literary Award.

1987

Received the Palmero Prize and the Premio Internazionale Mondello.

1988

The Fifth Child (Jonathan Cape; New York, Knopf).

1992

African Laughter (New York, HarperCollins). London Observed (HarperCollins); American title The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (HarperCollins).

Talking as a Person Roy Newquist

Roy Newquist’s interview originally appeared in Counterpoint (Rand McNally, 1964). Copyright © 1964 by Roy Newquist. Reprinted with permission.

Newquist: When did you start writing?

Lessing: I think I’ve always been a writer by temperament. I wrote some bad novels in my teens. I always knew I would be a writer, but not until I was quite old – twenty-six or -seven – did I realize that I’d better stop saying I was going to be one and get down to business. I was working in a lawyer’s office at the time, and I remember walking in and saying to my boss, “I’m giving up my job because I’m going to write a novel.” He very properly laughed, and I indignantly walked home and wrote The Grass Is Singing. I’m oversimplifying; I didn’t write it as simply as that because I was clumsy at writing and it was much too long, but I did learn by writing it. It focused upon white people in Southern Rhodesia, but it could have been about white people anywhere south of the Zambezi, white people who were not up to what is expected of them in a society where there is very heavy competition from the black people coming up.

Then I wrote short stories set in the district I was brought up in, where very isolated white farmers lived immense distances from each other. You see, in this background, people can spread themselves out. People who might be extremely ordinary in a society like England’s, where people are pressed into conformity, can become wild eccentrics in all kinds of ways they wouldn’t dare try elsewhere. This is one of the things I miss, of course, by living in England. I don’t think my memory deceives me, but I think there were more colorful people back in Southern Rhodesia because of the space they had to move in. I gather, from reading American literature, that this is the kind of space you have in America in the Midwest and West.

I left Rhodesia and my second marriage to come to England, bringing a son with me. I had very little money, but I’ve made my living as a professional writer ever since, which is really very hard to do. I had rather hard going, to begin with, which is not a complaint; I gather from my American writer-friends that it is easier to be a writer in England than in America because there is much less pressure put on us. We are not expected to be successful, and it is no sin to be poor.

Newquist: I don’t know how we can compare incomes, but in England it seems that writers make more from reviewing and from broadcasts than they can in the United States.

Lessing: I don’t know. When I meet American writers, the successful ones, they seem to make more on royalties, but then they also seem to spend much more.

I know a writer isn’t supposed to talk about money, but it is very important. It is vital for a writer to know how much he can write to please himself, and how much, or little, he must write to earn money. In England you don’t have to “go commercial” if you don’t mind being poor. It so happens that I’m not poor anymore, thank goodness, because it’s not good for anyone to be. Yet there are disadvantages to living in England. It’s not an exciting place to live; it is not one of the hubs of the world, like America, or Russia, or China. England is a backwater, and it doesn’t make much difference what happens here, or what decisions are made here. But from the point of view of writing, England is a paradise for me.

You see, I was brought up in a country where there is very heavy pressure put on people. In Southern Rhodesia it is not possible to detach yourself from what is going on. This means that you spend all your time in a torment of conscientiousness. In England – I’m not saying it’s a perfect society, far from it – you can get on with your work in peace and quiet when you choose to withdraw. For this I’m very grateful – I imagine there are few countries left in the world where you have this right of privacy.

Newquist: This is what you’re supposed to find in Paris.

Lessing: Paris is too exciting. I find it impossible to work there. I proceed to have a wonderful time and don’t write a damn thing.

Newquist: To work from A Man and Two Women for a bit. The almost surgical job you do in dissecting people, not bodily, but emotionally, has made me wonder if you choose your characters from real life, form composites or projections, or if they are so involved you can’t really trace their origins.

Lessing: I don’t know. Some people I write about come out of my life. Some, well, I don’t know where they come from. They just spring from my own consciousness, perhaps the subconscious, and I’m surprised as they emerge.

This is one of the excitements about writing. Someone says something, drops a phrase, and later you find that phrase turning into a character in a story, or a single, isolated, insignificant incident becomes the germ of a plot.

Newquist: If you were going to give advice to the young writer, what would that advice be?

Lessing: You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. This is hard to describe.

Newquist: What about reading as a background?

Lessing: I’ve known very good writers who’ve never read anything. Of course, this is rare.

Newquist: What about your own reading background?

Lessing: Well, because I had this isolated childhood, I read a great deal. There was no one to talk to, so I read. What did I read? The best – the classics of European and American literature. One of the advantages of not being educated was that I didn’t have to waste time on the secondbest. Slowly, I read these classics. It was my education, and I think it was a very good one.

I could have been educated – formally, that is – but I felt some neurotic rebellion against my parents who wanted me to be brilliant academically. I simply contracted out of the whole thing and educated myself. Of course, there are huge gaps in my education, but I’m nonetheless grateful that it went as it did. One bit of advice I might give the young writer is to get rid of the fear of being thought of as a perfectionist, or to be regarded as pompous. They should strike out for the best, to be the best. God knows, we all fall short of our potential, but if we aim very high we’re likely to be so much better.

Newquist: How do you view today’s literature? What about the recent trend toward introspection?

Lessing: Well, I haven’t been to America, but I’ve met a great many Americans and I think they have a tendency to be much more aware of themselves, and conscious of their society, than we are in Britain (though we’re moving that way). By a coincidence I was thinking this afternoon about a musical like West Side Story, which comes out of a sophisticated society which is very aware of itself. You wouldn’t have found in Britain, at the time that was written, a lyric like “Gee, Officer Krupke.” You have to be very socially self-conscious to write West Side Story.

Newquist: What do you feel about the fiction being turned out today? Does it share the same virtues and failings as theater or can it be considered separately?

Lessing: Quite separately. You want to know what contemporary writers I enjoy reading? The American writers I like, for different reasons, are Malamud and Norman Mailer – even when he’s right off center he lights rockets. And Algren. And that man who wrote Catch-22. And of course, Carson McCullers. But I only read the books that drift my way; I don’t know everything that comes out.

Newquist: How do you feel about critical reactions to your own works?

Lessing: I don’t get my reviews anymore. I read reviews if they turn up in the papers I get, but I go through them fast and try to pay little attention to what is said. I think the further I’m removed from this area – reviews, the literary squabble-shop – the better.// You see, the literary society in London is very small and incestuous. Everyone knows everyone. The writer who tosses a scrap of autobiography into an otherwise fictional piece (which writers always have done and always will do), he’s not credited with any imagination. Everyone says, “Oh, that character’s so and so,” and “I know that character.” It’s all too personal. The standards of criticism are very low. I don’t know about American critics, but in this country we have an abysmal standard. Very few writers I know have any respect for the criticism they get. Our attitude is, and has to be, Are the reviews selling books or not? In all other respects, the reviews are humiliating, they are on such a low level, and it’s all so spiteful and personal.

Newquist: Do reviews sell books in England?

Lessing: My publishers claim they help build a reputation and that indirectly they do sell books. This is probably true. But in Great Britain everything is much more cumulative and long-term than in America. One simply settles in for what you call the long haul. But “reputation” – what are reputations worth when they are made by reviewers who are novelists? Writers aren’t necessarily good critics. Yet the moment you’ve written a novel, you’re invited to write criticism, because the newspapers like to have one’s “name” on them. One is a “name” or one is not, you see. Oh, it’s very pleasant to be one, I’m not complaining, I enjoy it. But everyone knows that writers tend to be wrong about each other. Look at Thomas Mann and Brecht – they were both towering geniuses, in different ways, and they didn’t have any good word for each other.

Ideally we should have critics who are critics and not novelists who need to earn a bit to tide them over, or failed novelists. Is there such an animal, though? Of course, sometimes a fine writer is a good critic, like Lawrence. Look at something that happened last year – I wrote a long article for the New Statesman about the mess socialism is in. There was a half-line reference to X. To this day, people say to me, “that article you wrote attacking X.” This is how people’s minds work now. At the first night of one of Wesker’s plays, up comes a certain literary figure and says, his voice literally wet with anxiety, “Oh, Wesker is a much better playwright than Osborne. He is, isn’t he?” He felt that someone’s grave should be danced on. He was simply tired of voting for Osborne. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In and out.

You’re going to say the literary world has always been like this. But what I said about the theater earlier applies – nothing wrong with the audience who likes Who’s for Tennis? and the critics who do. It’s all theirs. But they should keep out of the serious theater. Similarly, of course, the literary world is always going to seethe with people who say, I’m bored with voting for X. But writers should try to keep away from them. Another bit of advice to a young writer – but unfortunately economics make it almost impossible to follow: Don’t review, don’t go on television, try to keep out of all that. But, of course, if one’s broke, and one’s asked to review, one reviews. But better not, if possible. Better not go on television, unless there is something serious to be said (and how often is that?). Better to try to remain what we should be – an individual who communicates with other individuals, through the written word.

Newquist: To return to A Man and Two Women. Which stories in this collection would you choose as personal favorites?

Lessing: That’s very difficult. I like the first one, titled “One off the Short List” because it’s so extremely cold and detached – that one’s a toughy. I’m pleased that I was able to bring it off the way I did. Then there were a couple of zany stories I’m attached to. The story about incest I liked very much – the one about the brother and the sister who are in love with each other. Not autobiographical at all, actually; perhaps I wish it were. And I like “To Room 19,” the depressing piece about people who have everything, who are intelligent and educated, who have a home and two or three or four beautiful children, and have few worries, and yet ask themselves “What for?” This is all too typical of so many Europeans – and, I gather, so many Americans.

Newquist: Perhaps life without challenge or excitement amounts to boredom.

Lessing: Life certainly shouldn’t be without excitement. The Lord knows that everything going on at the moment is exciting.

Newquist: But hasn’t boredom become one of our most acute social problems?

Lessing: I don’t understand people being bored. I find life so enormously exciting all the time. I enjoy everything enormously if only because life is so short. What have I got – another forty years of this extraordinary life if I’m lucky? But most people live as if they have a weight put on them. Perhaps I’m lucky, because I’m doing what I want all the time, living the kind of life I want to live. I know a great many people, particularly those who are well-off and have everything they are supposed to want, who aren’t happy.

Newquist: Right now a great many criticisms are leveled against bored Americans who have a surfeit of what they want. Is this true of England?

Lessing: I think that England is much more of a class society than America. This street I live on is full of very poor people who are totally different from my literary friends. They, in turn, are different from the family I come from, which is ordinary middle class. It isn’t simple to describe life in England. For instance, in any given day I can move in five, six different strata or groups. None of them know how other people live, people different from themselves. All these groups and layers and classes have unwritten rules. There are rigid rules for every layer, but they are quite different from the rules in the other groups.

Newquist: Then perhaps you maintain more individuality.

Lessing: The pressures on us all to conform seem to get stronger. We’re supposed to buy things and live in ways we don’t necessarily want to live. I’ve seen both forms of oppression, the tyrannical and the subtle. Here in England I can do what I like, think what I like, go where I please. I’m a writer, and I have no boss, so I don’t have to conform. Other people have to, though. But in Southern Rhodesia – well, there one can’t do or say what one likes. In fact, I’m a prohibited immigrant in South Africa and Central Africa, although I lived in Rhodesia twenty-five years. But then, the list of people who are prohibited in these areas is so long now.

I am not as optimistic as I used to be about oppressive societies. When I opened my eyes like a kitten to politics, there were certain soothing clichés about. One was that oppressive societies “collapsed under their own weight.” Well, the first oppressive society I knew about was South Africa. I lived close to it, and I was told that a society so ugly and brutal could not last. I was told that Franco and his Fascist Spain could not last.

Here I am, many decades later, and South Africa is worse than it was, Southern Rhodesia is going the same way, and Franco is very much in power. The tyrannical societies are doing very well. I’m afraid that the liberals and certain people on the Left tend to be rather romantic about the nature of power.

I’m not comparing tyranny to conformity. The point is that people who are willing to conform without a struggle, without protest to small things, who will simply forget how to be individuals, can easily be led into tyranny.

Newquist: But isn’t there strength in the middle road? In the area that lies between Fascism and Communism?

Lessing: I don’t know. I hope so, but history doesn’t give us many successful examples of being able to keep to the middle. Look at the difference between British and American attitudes toward Communism right now. Sections of America seem absolutely hypnotized by the kind of propaganda that’s fed to them. Now, if it is true that Communism is a violent threat to the world, then Britain – which has a different attitude – has been eating and working and sleeping for twenty years without developing ulcers, but America has ulcers. I would say that we are doing a better job of keeping to the middle of the road. You’ve got some rather pronounced elements who would like to head for the ditch or force a collision.

Hasn’t America been enfeebled by this hysterical fear of Communism? I don’t think you sit down to analyze what the word “Communist” means. You end up in the most ridiculous situations, as you did in Cuba. When you see what a great nation like America can do to muddle this Cuban thing you can only shrug your shoulders. Please don’t think I’m holding out any brief for my own government, but we’re in a lucky position. I mean, England is. We’re not very important, but America holds our fortunes in their large and not very subtle hands, and it’s frightening. When I went to Russia, in 1952, I came to the not-very-original conclusion that the Americans and Russians were very similar, and that they would like each other “if.” Now I see you moving closer and beginning to like each other, so now both of you are terrified of the Chinese, who will turn out (given fifteen years and not, I hope, too much bloodshed and misery) to be just like us, also. All of these violent hostilities are unreal. They’ve got very little to do with human beings.

Newquist: And very little to do with the arts?

Lessing: The arts, nothing! I was talking as a person, not a writer. I spent a great deal of my time being mixed up in politics in one way or another, and God knows what good it ever did. I went on signing things and protesting against things all the while wars were planned and wars were fought. I still do.

Newquist: To get back to your career, what are you working at now?

Lessing: I’m writing volumes four and five of a series I’m calling Children of Violence. I planned this out twelve years ago, and I’ve finished the first three. The idea is to write about people like myself, people my age who are born out of wars and who have lived through them, the framework of lives in conflict. I think the title explains what I essentially want to say. I want to explain what it is like to be a human being in a century when you open your eyes on war and on human beings disliking other human beings. I was brought up in Central Africa, which means that I was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is. I was the daughter of a white farmer who, although he was a very poor man in terms of what he was brought up to expect, could always get loans from the Land Bank which kept him going. (I won’t say that my father liked what was going on; he didn’t.) But he employed anywhere from fifty to one hundred working blacks. An adult black earned twelve shillings a month, rather less than two dollars, and his food was rationed to corn meal and beans and peanuts and a pound of meat per week. It was all grossly unfair, and it’s only part of a larger picture of inequity.

One-third of us – one-third of humanity, that is – is adequately housed and fed. Consciously or unconsciously we keep two-thirds of mankind improperly housed and fed. This is what the series of novels is about – this whole pattern of discrimination and tyranny and violence.

Newquist: You have mentioned becoming involved with mescaline. Could you describe this in more detail?

Lessing: I’m not involved with it. I took one dose out of curiosity, and that’s enough to be going on with. It was the most extraordinary experience. Lots of different questions arise, but for our purposes the most interesting one is: Who are we? There were several different people, or “I’s” taking part. They must all have been real, genuine, because one has no control over the process once it’s under way. I understand that experiences to do with birth are common with people having these drugs. I was both giving birth and being given birth to. Who was the mother, who was the baby? I was both but neither. Several people were talking and in different voices throughout the process – it took three or four hours. Sometimes my mother – odd remarks in my mother’s voice, my mother’s sort of phrase. Not the kind of thing I say or am conscious of thinking. And the baby was a most philosophic infant, and different from me.

And who stage-managed this thing? Who said there was to be this birth and why? Who, to put it another way, was Mistress of the Ceremony? Looking back, I think that my very healthy psyche decided that my own birth, the one I actually had, was painful and bad (I gather it was, with forceps and much trouble) and so it gave itself a good birth – because the whole of this labor was a progress from misery, pain, unhappiness, toward happiness, acceptance, and the birth “I” invented for myself was not painful. But what do I mean, we mean, when we say “my psyche” – or whatever phrase you might use in its place?

And then there’s the question of this philosophic baby, a creature who argued steadily with God – I am not a religious person, and “I” would say I am an atheist. But this baby who was still in the womb did not want to be born. First, there was the war (I was born in 1919) and the smell of war and suffering was everywhere and the most terrible cold. I’ve never imagined such cold. It was cold because of the war. The baby did not want to be born to those parents (and remember the baby who was also its own mother) and this is the interesting thing, it was bored. Not the kind of boredom described in my story “To Room 19.” But a sort of cosmic boredom. This baby had been born many times before, and the mere idea of “having to go through it all over again” (a phrase the baby kept using) exhausted it in advance. And it did not want, this very ancient and wise creature, the humiliation of being smothered in white flannel and blue baby ribbons and little yellow ducks. (Incidentally I’ll never again be able to touch or look at a baby without remembering that experience, how helpless a baby is, caged in an insipid world of comfort and bland taste and white flannel and too much warmth.) This creature said to God, Yes, I know that boredom is one of the seven deadly sins, but You created me, didn’t You? Then if You gave me a mind that goes limp with boredom at the experiences You inflict on me, whose fault is it? I’ll consent (this baby said) to being born again for the millionth time, if I am given the right to be bored.

But as the birth proceeded, the pain, the boredom, the cold, the misery (and the smell of war) diminished, until I was born with the sun rising in a glow of firelight.

Yes, but who created all this? Who made it up?

It wasn’t me, the normal “I” who conducts her life.

And of course, this question of I, who am I, what different levels there are inside of us, is very relevant to writing, to the process of creative writing about which we know nothing whatsoever. Every writer feels when he, she, hits a different level. A certain kind of writing or emotion comes from it. But you don’t know who it is who lives there. It is very frightening to write a story like “To Room 19,” for instance, a story soaked in emotions that you don’t recognize as your own.// That is a literary question, a problem to interest writers. But that creature being born wasn’t a “writer.” It was immensely ancient, for a start, and it was neither male nor female, and it had no race or nationality. I can revive the “feel” or “taste” of that creature fairly easily. It isn’t far off that creature or person you are when you wake up from deep sleep, and for a moment you don’t recognize your surroundings and you think: Who am I? Where am I? Is this my hand? You’re somebody, all right, but who?

The Inadequacy of the Imagination Jonah Raskin

Jonah Raskin’s interview was conducted on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in spring 1969. It originally appeared in New American Review 8 (1970) and was reprinted in A Small Personal Voice, ed. Paul Schlueter (Knopf, 1977). Copyright © 1970 by Jonah Raskin. Reprinted with permission.

Raskin: I felt that in your most recent novel, The Four-Gated City, you wanted to reach out directly to the new audience which has been shaped by television and the atmosphere of violence.

Lessing: I want to reach the youth. Maybe because I was determined to reach people the form of the book has been shot to hell. The first version was too long, and the second time I wrote it the form changed. I’ve had Children of Violence set up for twenty years. By the time I wrote the last volume I’d put myself into a damned cage, but it’s probably better now that I’ve heaved the rules out.//

Raskin: How do drugs fit into your sense of the changes of the mind?

Lessing: I took mescaline once. I’ve taken pot a bit. Drugs give us a glimpse of the future; they extricate us from the cage of time. When people take drugs they discover an unknown part of themselves. When you have to open up, when you’re blocked, drugs are useful, but I think it’s bad for people to make them a way of life because they become an end in themselves. Pot should be used with caution, but not banned. I’m against all this banning. I think people can expand and explore their minds without using drugs. It demands a great deal of discipline. It’s like learning a craft; you have to devote a lot of time, but if you can train yourself to concentrate you can travel great distances.

Raskin: In your fiction you explore large tracts through dreams, don’t you?

Lessing: Dreams have always been important to me. The hidden domain of our mind communicates with us through dreams. I dream a great deal and I scrutinize my dreams. The more I scrutinize, the more I dream. When I’m stuck in a book I deliberately dream. I knew a mathematician once who supplied his brain with information and worked it like a computer. I operate in a similar way. I fill my brain with the material for a new book, go to sleep, and I usually come up with a dream which resolves the dilemma.

Raskin: The dreams in The Golden Notebook are points of intensity and fusion, aren’t they? Anna sees fragments – a lump of earth from Africa, metal from a gun used in Indochina, flesh from people killed in the Korean War, a Communist party badge from someone who died in a Soviet prison – all of which represent crises in contemporary life.

Lessing: The unconscious artist who resides in our depths is a very economical individual. With a few symbols a dream can define the whole of one’s life, and warn us of the future, too. Anna’s dreams contain the essence of her experience in Africa, her fears of war, her relationship to Communism, her dilemma as a writer.

Raskin: Do you think that the Freudian concepts are valid?

Lessing: There are difficulties about the Freudian landscape. The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down. But the unconscious can be what you make of it, good or bad, helpful or unhelpful. Our culture has made an enemy of the unconscious. If you mention the word “unconscious” in a room full of people you see the expressions on their faces change. The word recalls images of dread and threat, but other cultures have accepted the unconscious as a helpful force, and I think we should learn to see it in that way too.

Raskin: How did you create the character of Mrs. Marks, “Mother Sugar,” in The Golden Notebook?

Lessing: My own psychotherapist was somewhat like Mrs. Marks. She was everything I disliked. I was then aggressively rational, antireligious, and a radical. She was Roman Catholic, Jungian, and conservative. It was very upsetting to me at the time, but I found out it didn’t matter a damn. I couldn’t stand her terminology, but she was a marvelous person. She was one of those rare individuals who know how to help others. If she had used another set of words, if she had talked Freud talk, or aggressive atheism, it wouldn’t have made a difference.//

Raskin: You’ve also been at the center of many political conflicts. Near the end of The Golden Notebook Anna says that “at that moment I sit down to write someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulder and stops me… It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the FLN. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?” I feel a tension between my life as a writer and my political activity. Could you tell me how you have felt about this situation?

Lessing: // I am intensely aware of, and want to write about, politics, but I often find that I am unable to embody my political vision in a novel. I want to write about Chinese peasants, the Algerians in the FLN, but I don’t want to present them in false situations. I don’t want to leave them out either. I find it difficult to write well about politics. I feel that the writer is obligated to dramatize the political conflicts of his time in his fiction. There is an awful lot of bad socialist literature which presents contemporary history mechanically. I wanted to avoid that pitfall.

In the scene from The Golden Notebook, which you’ve mentioned, I was trying to introduce politics and history into Anna’s world.

I’m tormented by the inadequacy of the imagination. I’ve a sense of the conflict between my life as a writer and the terrors of our time. One sits down to write in a quiet flat in London and one thinks, Yes, there’s a war going on in Vietnam. The night before last, when we were having dinner here, the police were raiding the university and arresting students.

Raskin: How do you view the future?

Lessing: I’m very much concerned about the future. I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction, and I think that science-fiction writers have captured our culture’s sense of the future. The Four-Gated City is a prophetic novel. I think it’s a true prophecy. I think that the “iron heel” is going to come down. I believe the future is going to be cataclysmic.

Raskin: You’re pessimistic, aren’t you? Don’t you think that my generation has been liberated, and is liberating much of the society? Our values aren’t commercial.

Lessing: I’m not saying that the youth have commercial values. In the 1960s the youth have had a great deal of freedom. It has been a wonderful moment in history. During the period of “flower power” I met some young Canadian poets who assured me that flowers were mightier than tanks. They talked sentimental rubbish. It’s too late for romanticism. Young people in this decade have been allowed freedom; they have been flattered and indulged, because they are a new market. Young people coming to the end of this era are hitting exactly what previous generations before them have hit – that awful moment when they see that their lives are going to be, unless they do something fast, like the lives of their parents. The illusion of freedom is destroyed. A large part of the student protest is indirectly due to the fact that after seven or eight years of lotus eating, young people suddenly realize that their lives may be as narrow, as confined, as commercially oriented, as the lives of their parents. They don’t want that life, but they feel trapped. This feeling can be good or bad depending how it’s used.//

Raskin: It seems to me that your political experience in Africa would be relevant to the experience of white and black radicals today. Could you say something about it?

Lessing: The Communist Party in South Africa was like a seven-year flower which blooms and vanishes. It came into existence in the ’20s but it spread and burgeoned toward the end of the ’30s. The Communist Party had an enormous effect on politics because it ignored the color bar. In the Communist Party white and black people worked together on the basis of equality. Unfortunately, there were more whites than blacks in the party. If there was a Communist Party there today it would have to be predominantly black. But I don’t see how blacks can organize anything coherent at the moment. What’s likely to happen is sporadic outbreaks of violence by heroic anarchists. Another weakness of the South African Communist Party was its attitude toward the Soviet Union. But it organized trade unions and blacks. When it was banned it went underground and collapsed. Only a handful of brave individuals survived.

Raskin: The black South African is much more exploited and oppressed than the Afro-American, I imagine.

Lessing: The Africans are fed lies day and night. Every African township has police spies and government informers. A great section of the African population is corrupt, bought off. The black worker, especially the miner, lives in what amounts to a concentration camp. He’s policed, doctored, fed, watched. He hasn’t got freedom. He’s well fed by African standards, but he’s a slave. South Africa is a fascist paradise. It’s one of the most brilliant police states in history.

Raskin: Some of the things you’ve said about radicals and repression remind me of the ending of The Golden Notebook, which has puzzled me. Could you explain it?

Lessing: When I wrote The Golden Notebook the left was getting one hammer blow after another. Everybody I knew was reeling because the left had collapsed. The scene at the end when Molly goes off and gets married and Anna goes off to do welfare work and joins the Labour Party was intended as a sign of the times. I was being a bit grim about what I observed about me. Women who had been active for years in socialist movements gritted their teeth and said, “Right, the hell with all this politics, we’ll go off and be welfare workers.” They meant it as a kind of joke, but they carried out their program. They did everything and anything that took them out of politics. Women who had refused to get married because they were dedicated to the cause made marriages which they would have found disgusting five years earlier. They regarded it as a kind of selling out. Brilliant Communist Party organizers went into business and entertainment and became rich men. This didn’t happen to everyone, but it happened to many Communists.

Raskin: Many of the New Left students are from Old Left families who are now well off. The sons of famous Establishment professors are in SDS. How do you see the generations?

Lessing: The strain of watching the horrors becomes so great that middle-aged people block them out. My generation doesn’t understand that young people have penetrated below the surface and have seen the horrors of our civilization. We’ve been so damned corrupted. Humanity has got worse and worse, puts up with more and more, gets more and more bourgeois. The youth have realized this.

I have always observed incredible brutality in society. My parents’ lives and the lives of millions of people were ruined by the First World War. But the human imagination rejects the implications of our situation. War scars humanity in ways we refuse to recognize. After the Second World War the world sat up, licked its wounds ineffectually, and started to prepare for the Third World War. To look at the scene today, to see what man has done to himself, is an incitement to young people to riot. I’m surprised that the New Left isn’t more violent.

I hope you don’t regard me as unduly bitter. Humanity is a brave lot of people. Everyone of my lot has had to fight on two fronts. Being a Red is tough. My personal experience isn’t bad, but friends of mine have been destroyed. The revolutionary movements they were working in sold them down the river. The ex-Communists of my lot have lost a certain kind of belief.

Raskin: What is it you’ve lost? Isn’t it possible that the political struggles of my generation can revive that belief?

Lessing: The ex-Communists of my lot can’t be surprised by anything. There is no horror that one cannot expect from people. We’ve learned that.

Well, yours is a new, young generation, and with a bit of luck the New Left won’t have the kind of hammering my generation did. Maybe it’ll be different. Maybe it’ll not be the way I think it will be. But you and your generation need a calm to negotiate the rapids.

Learning to Put the Questions Differently Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel’s radio interview was conducted in Chicago June 10, 1969. Printed by permission of Studs Terkel.

Terkel: The passage which you just read from The Four-Gated City seems one of the keys to the book. Lynda, who is the wife of a friend of your protagonist Martha Quest, has been considered mad, and Martha finds out something, doesn’t she?

Lessing: Well, you see, I’ve done my homework on this point without ever planning to do it, because it so happened that for the last twenty years, without ever intending to do it, I have been ever involved with psychiatrists or social workers dealing in what we call “madness,” or have had very close friends who have been quote, unquote “mad” in one way or another. This is not anything that I had planned to do; it has just happened this way. What one experiences gets into one’s work!

When I wrote this book, although I had a fairly clear idea of certain things I wished to say, other things I discovered as I wrote. Lynda is the character who fascinates me the most in this book, because she is the crystallization of a great deal of experience in a form I never expected. I found out a great many things about what I think through Lynda. Lynda is like a lot of people I’ve known who spend their time in and out of mental hospitals. This is getting more and more common. I have no doubt at all that a lot of people will either be in mental hospitals themselves or have friends who are in and out of mental hospitals and live their lives in a twilight of drugs. I mean by “drugs” …

Terkel:…sedatives, tranquilizers …

Lessing:…that cycle of chemical things which people get put full of. These people, I maintain, are probably not mad at all, or a great many of them are not or never have been mad. Just before I left England, I met a doctor who’d been working in America, and he said that there is a different approach here to schizophrenia. In England people can go to a doctor and be told that they’re schizophrenic, but it’s happening less and less here, I’m told. This “disease” – in quotes again, because I don’t think it is one – has been broken down, and almost as it were spirited away by words as if it ceases to exist because doctors say it doesn’t exist and because they dish out drugs. I think what’s going to happen in the next – all right, for argument’s sake, let’s say – ten years is a lot of rethinking is going to take place about what schizophrenia is. I think we’re going to have a lot of surprising conclusions to what schizophrenia is, and what we are, in fact, doing is to suppress and torment – I can use very strong language about this because I have dear friends who go through this misery and it’s hard to be cool about seeing people being tormented. In short, a lot of perfectly normal people, with certain capacities, are being classed as “ill.”

Terkel: Let’s dwell on this. This seems to be the recurring theme. You deal with certain circles, literary people, people in the midst of cataclysmic events – the time of Suez and after – writers in difficulty. Martha Quest is searching, is she not, throughout? She wants to find out what it’s about, really, who she is.

Lessing: Yes, that’s what we’re all doing. I chose that name when I started the first book in this series twenty years ago almost blindly, you know. I reread Martha Quest, the first volume, recently and I was fascinated to see that all those themes are there which bear right throughout this cycle.

Terkel: But the cycle and these themes have developed because in the meantime things have happened in the world in these twenty years too, right along with it – to you as an individual as well as to the world itself – that make your themes all the more critical and pertinent now.

Lessing: I understood that when I chose the title for the sequence, Children of Violence. Violence is now a vogue word; it’s a cliché: we’re living in a violent time. When I chose it, it was far from being that.

Terkel: It’s as though in a sense the writer is a prophet; you were prescient in that sense. You as a writer, as a creative spirit, obviously were sensing something in the world in which you were living.

Lessing: I don’t think that writers have any more sense than anyone else, actually. We can express things better. Our function as writers, I maintain, is to express what other people feel. If we’re any good, it’s because we’re like other people and can express it.

Terkel: Then it’s a question of art and craft, and you must express what is a universal feeling is what you’re saying, in a way. Getting back to Lynda and Martha, obviously you are expressing what many, particularly sensitive people are feeling.

Lessing: More and more, you see – I looked at the figures recently, but I’ve nearly forgotten because my head for figures is appalling – but I know the proportion of our hospital beds now occupied by people who are quote, unquote “mad” is unbelievable, something like half. And it’s going up all the time. But the capacity for the human race to take things for granted is what’s so terrible. We say that the number of people going mad is going up because of the “greater stress” people are under. But what is this supposed “greater stress” that they’re under? What in effect is happening to make people become sensitive in this particular way? Do we ask the right questions about it? Is it enough to say that we’re driven mad by motorcars and the tension of society? What else is happening to us?

Terkel: In The Four-Gated City too you dwell on various events that overtake the country. You also dwell on personal relationships, as well as the new generation of children who make this tremendous leap forward. Is it because the leaps are so overwhelming today too?

Lessing: We can’t talk about this without throwing out a whole lot of generalizations, which I shall now throw out. You see, I don’t think that I say anything madly original, but I do think perhaps that I’m better at putting facts together; I think I’m quite good at seeing things in juxtaposition.

If I say that two world wars haven’t done humanity any good – it’s not a very original observation – but do we remember at all times, do we actually wonder what effect two world wars have had on some young person in university who is driving the authorities mad by his behavior? I’m astounded by the lack of imagination of some older people. I don’t like this business of “generation gap” – it’s a great cliché: there’s a gap between some members of the younger generation and some members of the older generation. But a large number of the older generation talk about young people as if the young people have inherited the same world they inherited. And they have not, and the world is so terrible – and marvelous. Its possibilities are so incredible. And these young people are reacting very intensely to a situation which no generation has had to face before, including a very strong possibility of never getting to live to be thirty or forty. They all know this. And if their mothers and fathers don’t realize that this is a part of their thinking, then they’re very stupid and very insensitive. I think they’re a marvelous generation, not that I’m one to dish out the praise because I think they’ve got great lacks as well.

Terkel: You say “lacks,” and your book, through Lynda, is almost a plea for the imagination of possibilities. You speak of a “lack of imagination.” The “lack of imagination of possibilities” obviously fascinates you.

Lessing: Yes, I think we’re living in a time that’s like the middle of an atom blast, with everything bad and good happening together, because we don’t know what’s going to come out of what we’re living through now. Everything’s changing so fast that we can’t grasp the changes. This is the essential thing. The kids are trying at least to grasp them, and they haven’t sunk back in some drunken, suburban haze, which is what some of their elders are doing.

Terkel: The elders live in a martini haze, and yet they condemn the young for what they might describe as the “pot scene.” The young see a double standard, don’t they?

Lessing: Yes, they do. What I’m troubled about the youth is that they’re too complacent. It’s an interesting thing to say since they’re always being as bold as they are. But none of them has ever experienced fighting in an atmosphere which is against them. I know that the police beat them up and authority hates them and a lot of the older generation hates them with real vindictiveness, this is true – but the fact is that there is a freemasonry among the young: they stand by each other, support each other, approve of each other, even though they may disagree with each other. I think what’s likely to happen in this country and other parts of the world – in fact, it’s inevitable – is that it’s not going to continue to be that a large mass of the youth are more or less of one mind.

A large section of that youth are going to be bought by authority and bribed probably by flattery. You’re going to find the fighters down to a minority, because it’s always like this. There’s never been a time when the fighting’s not been done by a minority, and the mass of the citizens are staid, conservative, and frightened. What are these kids then going to do? At the moment I don’t see youth thinking about how they’re going to react when they haven’t got this mass support of their own generation. I don’t think they realize what it’s like to be out on a limb fighting by themselves.

Our generation knows this very well, because we’ve seen it, we’ve lived through it. We know very well that when the heat gets turned on, people run, and when it gets unpleasant a few people remain fighting. And when public opinion – that’s the point – turns against something, not many people last. This, these kids haven’t had yet, and this is why I think they’re very vulnerable, because they don’t know yet.

For instance, I’m taking that group of people which I think is the most savagely brutal and stupid lot in the world – white South Africans – who are at the same time, if you meet them, kindly, friendly, nice human beings. I remember, when the Second World War ended, the Fascists in Nazi Germany who we knew were everything that history says they were, and I then met them and they were no different from you or me; they’d been in a different historical set-up – that’s all. Until these kids know that there isn’t one of us who, put in a different set-up, wouldn’t be brutal, savage, exploitive, they know nothing about how history works.

There is no original virtue in being twenty-two on a college campus. To be young is a minimal requirement – after all, everyone’s been young; it’s a grace, but not a very long-lasting one. Have they, in fact, been doing their homework and looking at how many large groups of people in the world now are living in Fascist countries, to be condemned by the same standards that they use to condemn society in America? Have they asked what’s going to happen to them in ten years’ time, when the heat goes up? Because if they’ve not thought this out, then they’re as good as defeated.

Terkel: This is a theme without ending – the theme of man and circumstance. In Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its subtitle “The Banality of Evil” – and we face now too the evil of banality – she says that Eichmann was indeed not a beast: he was a man who acted beastly. Isn’t this what you’re saying, that the possibilities are within?

Lessing: Yes, can you imagine in 100 years’ time, if anyone is alive then, that anyone’s going to look back to the Second World War and say, “Oh, those beastly Germans”? They’re going to say that the world allowed a certain type of government to take power in Germany, and a very small group of people in other countries protested what was going on; but we’re all going to be implicated in this kind of guilt. And they’re going to look back on what we’re living through now and say, “These people allowed” – I’m not going to list the horrors, because we all know them – “to happen,” even though we’re terribly nice, good, kind, charming, delightful people. Right?

Terkel: We come here to this question of the individual. I remember my own experience, and again this is all reflected in The Four-Gated City, hearing a group of men in South Africa, all of them charming, genial, singing the Schubert lied, “Das Lindenbaum,” all Afrikaaners, accepting and bolstering apartheid in its most horrendous forms. But, as you say, personally, because I was white, they were charming, wholly removed from the world around them.

Lessing: Bernard Shaw said somewhere the most terrifying thing: “Is it really necessary for Christ to be killed in every generation to save those who have no imagination?” Well, is it? People are so unprepared for the fact that a man can be a nice person as an individual yet support the most appalling policies. This shouldn’t happen after what the human race has experienced.

Terkel: You’re talking about roots too, aren’t you? You’re really talking about a knowledge of the past, knowing what happened and why it happened?

Lessing: Well, you said last night that these kids behave as if history started three years ago, and that’s what their hang-up is, because it hasn’t.

Terkel: It comes back to that again.

Lessing: I really don’t want to go on about the kids, because I admire them and I think they’re very brave. I feel differently. There are so many of my generation who are against them and who are vindictive. I’m not prepared to criticize them too much.

Terkel: Before we return to The Four-Gated City, you’ve been traveling for about five weeks now through America, and you said that somewhere in the Midwest you saw some incredible antagonism toward the young by our contemporaries.

Lessing: Yes, I met it absolutely nakedly. I think a great many older people are envious, and critical because they’re envious. But I hadn’t before ever met the naked hatred of the young that I met in the Midwest: they hated young people. It’s really ugly to see it. And these are teachers who are supposed to be teaching these kids.

Terkel: And you were saying that one of the reasons you think is envy of a certain joyousness among the young.

Lessing: Yes, there’s a great style and joy and a good humor – that’s the great thing they’ve got.

Terkel: Getting back to The Four-Gated City, could I ask you how you chose that title?

Lessing: It’s a phrase that comes out of mythology, and it’s in the Bible, spread all over the folklore of every conceivable part of the world. I chose it because the structure of Children of Violence goes in fours – each book is divided into four – and this is four again. It’s a very ancient symbol, and also I had a dream in which I saw what I later discovered to be an Egyptian theme: the sacred cow stands on great white legs and the hind legs are the people of the city. It was a beautiful dream, in technicolor – just at the time I was trying to work out what I was going to call this book.

Terkel: There’s an old Negro spiritual called “Twelve Gates to the City.” I take it this theme is universal, this matter of gates.

You spoke of there not being enough imagination. Earlier we were talking about the horrors of behavioral scientists who follow a certain pattern, manipulative people, and you were saying there’s another aspect of life that these men never even dream of, and many of us don’t – possibilities of experiencing.

Lessing: Yes, they treat human beings as if they were rats; they do their research on rats and pigeons. They can’t ask the right questions. But I think it’s a mistake to attack and criticize a phenomenon which is not going to be very important in five years’ time, because these people are very little people. I gather they’re quite important in the scientific structure, but I’ll lay a bet, any sum you care to mention, that what they stand for will be dead in a very short time because they’re too small, too limited, too narrow-minded to… This is the problem in these discussions: there’s never enough time to go into these matters.

I think that one of the things that’s happening everywhere is that we’re breeding new kinds of imagination and ways of thinking and experiencing. Actually they’re very old and we find them in cultures we tend to describe as primitive; they’re backward technologically, but they’re not backward in any other way and probably more advanced than ours. What is going to happen, I think, is a discovery that many ways of experiencing and sensing the world which we describe as superstitious are not anything of the kind. If you look at what’s going on everywhere – well, your country has a genuine feeling of new possibilities – you find these surprising people who would describe themselves as rationalists and die to defend that old-fashioned label are using ways of perceiving that our culture doesn’t admit: one of them is the use of dreams, which actually is rather respectable in our society, so it gets made use of; but also different forms of extrasensory perception are being seriously researched and accepted. And have you really ever thought about how the atmosphere’s changed about something like telepathy in ten years? Of all places it was the Soviet Union that suddenly made the announcement that they were experimenting into the use of telepathy for space travel. Now this sounds like space fiction – I’m a great reader of space fiction. Here in space fiction you find some novel so incredible that you think it’s a fantasy and it’s in the newspaper the next day.

Terkel: Coming back to Lynda and Martha, the protagonist in The Four-Gated City, we see that Martha, the sane woman, the secretary, the arranger, suddenly comes to lean toward Lynda’s way of thinking, doesn’t she?

Lessing: Yes, what happens is that Martha lives in this house with Lynda who has this label slapped on her: Lynda’s the nutty one, she’s mad. But Martha, by being with Lynda, begins to understand that what Lynda is doing is experiencing things in a different way. I try to explore what certain kinds of madness are. I’m inclined to think that schizophrenia is not madness at all. We’ve been dogmatic about this. I don’t want to say that schizophrenia is just this; I don’t like this business of saying something is only that.

Terkel: I’m fascinated by this character Lynda.

Lessing: One of the ideas that helped create Lynda was a woman I knew in London who was fifteen before she realized that everybody didn’t know who was at the other end of the telephone and didn’t hear what other people were thinking. She knew what other people were thinking, and in short she discovered that far from everyone being like this she was very much by herself and she learned to shut out the world. Lynda is a girl who has a very solitary childhood, and through a series of circumstances she comes under pressure, cracks up emotionally as God knows how many people do in adolescence – because everybody’s a bit crazy in adolescence – and is classed as a schizophrenic and a variety of other things, has a lot of treatment such as shock treatment, insulin treatment, the whole gamut, and is so damaged that she spends the rest of her life in and out of mental hospitals. At the same time, she has these powers, increasingly, the capacity to hear what people are thinking and to see.

Now I would like to define this, because a lot of people have this capacity. They have labels stuck on them by doctors and psychiatrists, and they don’t know in fact what they have. A great many people overhear what other people are thinking. It’s a capacity that can be developed if you are patient, are prepared to make mistakes, and you’re not bulldozed by the scientific way of thinking, which hasn’t learnt to put its questions right. They have to learn how to put the questions differently. The way they are putting the questions now means that they’re not able to learn.

The other capacity that a lot of people have is they see pictures inside their eyelids; a great many people see them when they’re ill, tired, under great strain, or before they go to sleep. There’s a word for that – “hypnagogic.” The doctor will say, “Oh yes, that’s a hypnagogic thingamajig – dismissed!” This capacity is what they refer to in the Bible as the seer’s visions, something which in our culture is not supposed to happen at all, and therefore it’s just ignored. Now this too can be developed, and it’s got nothing to do with time.

I’m really well aware that this is going to sound nutty: this particular thing can be, not always, out of time. It’s on a different time length, wavelength. It can take different forms: it can be in black-and-white, it can be in technicolor, it can be in a series of stills, like shots from a movie, frozen shots, it can be like a movie running – a lot of different things. I saw in Scientific American, just before I left, an article on research done on children. I’ve completely forgotten – is it eidetic children? – that is, children who, if you project an image, maintain this image. They’ve done a lot of research on that, you see.

Terkel: It’s funny that you mention that because the other night on TV Jacob Bronowski said that William Blake had this particular attribute that you just described.

Lessing: He also had a lot of others, quite clearly.

Terkel: But this matter of image, “Blake could see,” this is Bronowski talking, “Blake could see clearly, wholly, in absolutely all dimensions” that which you just talked about.

Lessing: It’s the “eidetic” – the capacity to hold an image in front of your eyes as if it were a photograph. That’s not what I was talking about when I spoke of seeing the pictures moving or the stills; that’s something else.

Why I was talking about that was to describe how the scientist dealt with it: the test as to whether the child was telling the truth or not was the amount of detail he could come up with from this picture. You see, now if he was able to remember the exact number of buttons on a coat or the hairs on the pussycat’s tail, he was telling the truth, and, if not, he didn’t have this capacity. This is a scientific mind working, you see. If I meet you on the street tomorrow morning, we have a chat, and we go away; and if you were in an observant mood and I was, you couldn’t say what I’d been wearing and I couldn’t say what you’d been wearing. If someone had said, “How’s he looking?” I would say, “I don’t know; he looked much as usual.” But we’d have absolutely no doubt at all that we’d met each other, even if we couldn’t remember a single detail. Right? We’d go to the stake that we’d met each other, even though we could say no more than that. The scientists are not yet able to measure what happens when you and I meet on the street, or what meets on the street. What meets, when we meet on the street?

Terkel: Is it two bodies, two pairs of eyes, two pairs of legs, or is it something in addition to that?

Lessing: Right, something in addition to that, which everybody responds to, but which we can’t yet measure. What is it?

Terkel: You’re saying the questions are wrong questions. And the questions are asked wrong because there’s a cynicism or skepticism involved, talking about the child who sees this in his mind, so they’re really not so much curious about what the child saw but questioning the veracity of the child.

Lessing: I think they have an unconscious, or perhaps not so unconscious, bias to prove that these things don’t exist. This is their problem. I met a girl in New York who said she read this book [The Four-Gated City] and she had a great burden taken off her because she was like Lynda. She suddenly realized she’d never been ill. Now this made me so happy.

Terkel: The passage you read at the very beginning dealt with that specific point that she’d been told she was crazy but she wasn’t really.

Lessing: There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been tortured by doctors and psychiatrists in a way which they regard as so barbarous. The whole range of treatments used in mental hospitals are savage and cruel and terrible and destroy people.

Terkel: It’s as though we’re in Neanderthal times at this moment in treatment.

Lessing: Yes. Why is it that we have allowed to come about the state of affairs where a human being sits behind a desk and says, “Such-and-such is wrong with you,” and we believe him? Why do we allow this kind of thing to be done to us? Now that’s a much more interesting question, because the history of medicine is not one that encourages us to believe that they are likely to be right. Putting it at its mildest, they are extremely conservative and inflexible and unimaginative and continually damning new ideas; but in spite of the fact that psychiatry is a new and very feared thing, we will take their word, we allow them to slap a label on this – why do we?

Terkel: Do you know R. D. Laing?

Lessing: Yes, I do, and his work. I think he hasn’t gone far enough. I admire him because he has battled with the English medical establishment and changed the plan so as to make it possible to ask questions in a way it simply wasn’t possible before.

Terkel: You mention the psychiatrist who is detached, who has this patient on the couch, whereas Laing is saying he must also adhere to his own vulnerability. I think he uses the phrase “fellow passengers.”

Lessing: I once saw on television Laing and some other doctors of his school who have had a great influence, contrasted with the old-fashioned kind, and what came out was the marvelous compassion of one and the cold violence of the other.

Terkel: So it brings us back again to …

Lessing: Oh, I wanted to say something very interesting. In The Four-Gated City I imagined that there were doctors tucked away in health services, psychiatrists working on these capacities; I hadn’t finished that section before I started hearing of doctors who, in fact, keeping their mouths shut, are working away in your country and in Britain and in the Soviet Union; using the whole facade of what they have to work with, they are researching extrasensory perception and schizophrenia. So it’s happening! These doctors, who at the moment have to keep quiet because they’d lose their jobs, are going to make a very great difference.

Terkel: The Four-Gated City has an appendix which I would describe as apocalyptic. An event occurs, the exact nature you don’t describe – perhaps a plague – I assume it’s many things. You’re implying that unless the imagination is used we face disaster. Is that it?

Lessing: Well, I’m a bit gloomy about the future. I don’t see a big shooting war because they say they’ve too much to lose, but some kind of accident is inevitable, because it’s happening now, some smaller thing going wrong all the time. I think parts of the world will be damaged so badly that they can’t be lived in for a while, and there will be a very great deal of various poisons in the atmosphere, and we don’t know the effect this will have on the human organism. We can imagine it. Like everything else, it will have good effects and bad effects. Everything always goes in double harness: there’s no such thing as a totally bad thing or a totally good thing; they always go together.

Terkel: Do you see any way in which this could be prevented? I’m not asking you for a panacea now, or a nostrum. You just see it as inevitable?

Lessing: You can’t pick up a newspaper without reading warnings from scientists about what we’re doing. I can’t remember the name of this bloke who said that there is a very fine layer of substance around our earth on which the whole of life depends. We’re pumping so much rubbish up there that we’re changing that layer. The forecasts are various, because after all nobody knows very much, even scientists. We could destroy all organic life.

Terkel: If this is likely to happen, we come back to lack of imagination again, don’t we? Through these characters, Martha and Lynda, you’re saying that there’s something in the human psyche not yet explored?

Lessing: It couldn’t be with human beings as they are now; I think we’re evolving into better people perhaps. As a part of this vortex we’re in, it’s possible that we’re changing into people with greater capacities for imagination, and that we are going to be regarded as the “missing link,” the transition people, and we’ll have much better people.

Terkel: You know that old Chinese curse that the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke uses: may you live in interesting times.

Lessing: Yes, indeed, we are living in interesting times.

Terkel: Let me ask you a question, which I know has become increasingly tiresome, yet being in America you’ve been asked it so often. To many militant women in America, you are the Simone de Beauvoir of Britain, particularly because of The Golden Notebook. I suppose you encounter this very often, because you’re laughing. Now this always throws you, doesn’t it?

Lessing: No, I’ve got terribly bored with it – that’s the truth – because I don’t think The Golden Notebook is about what they say it was about. Now I can modestly say that it has a large variety of themes, one of them being the sex war; but I now find myself, because I’m overreacting and impatient, in what sounds like a lack of sympathy for women who I know are often under very heavy pressure. But I think this whole trouble between men and women is a symptom of something very much bigger. We’re not going to solve what’s wrong between men and women by handing insults to each other. Something else has to be put right.

The climate has changed in Britain very sharply, and you’ll find there’s very much less tension between the younger generation, men and women, and people in my age group. Why? There are always physical things which change these emotional reactions, which people tend to forget. If you get a balance between the sexes, a lot of tension goes out. You should provide day nurseries and equal wages for women. My personal bias is not to sit around discussing psychology; one should be out battling for better nurseries and equal wages. That’s where this battle has to be fought.

Terkel: So you see this quote, unquote Women’s Liberation as not unrelated to the human battle itself; that is, not something separate and apart?

Lessing: I think people are scared stiff and they’re beating hell out of each other, that’s all, in one way or another. I can’t find anything helpful to say about this, you see, because I think it’s a minor thing – the cause of great unhappiness, but it’s not the most important thing.

Terkel: You happen to be a writer who is a woman. These characters, Lynda and Martha, could’ve as easily been two men, couldn’t they?

Lessing: Yes.

Terkel: You deal with many fascinating aspects of the contemporary world, but we come back to this theme that man has not yet discovered his possibilities.

Lessing: No, I think they’re just beginning. We’re on the threshold. We should be alert all the time for what we’re overlooking. You see, I don’t think some things are going to happen; they’re happening now. We should try to be more awake to what’s happening in our friends and ourselves because even just slightly more awake we could begin to see things happening. We always talk as if things are going to start happening in fifty years’ time. But we overlook what’s happening now. Will you name me a society ever that hasn’t had great blind spots that afterwards people look backward on and wonder how it’s possible that those people were so blind? What are our blind spots?

Terkel: So it’s asking the impertinent question, the hitherto unasked question?

Lessing: Yes, it’s always a good idea in any set-up where there’s that question or that idea which seems most stupid and ridiculous to ask whether it really is so stupid and ridiculous.

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