Putting the Questions Differently

Putting the Questions Differently
Doris Lessing

Earl G. Ingersoll

A collection of interviews with the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature that serves as an invaluable companion to her work.Doris Lessing is one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These interviews give us her thoughts on her early years as a communist and fledgling writer in Southern Rhodesia, her views on marriage, the family and feminism, on other writers from Tolstoy to Lawrence, and on her later experiments in psychotherapy and mysticism. She reveals how these preoccupations have influenced her own work, from ‘The Golden Notebook’ to her acclaimed autobiographical masterpiece ‘Under My Skin’.The book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand not just Lessing, but also the profound impact she has had on our age.

Putting the Questions Differently

Interviews with Doris Lessing

1964–1994

EDITED BY

EARL G. INGERSOLL

Contents

Title Page (#udd0dd576-df39-5261-a6d5-ac2d7927c3ec)

Introduction (#u24bc39f1-71be-53f2-b4e3-1ec2b151a9ee)

Chronology (#u2a7eda31-2b29-57ec-85ae-6e6f0e1864c6)

Talking as a Person (#ua5250aee-1f93-5342-9085-ac87eb7f9586)Roy Newquist

The Inadequacy of the Imagination (#udc2adddc-03c7-5317-99b8-bc360e05dc46)Jonah Raskin

Learning to Put the Questions Differently (#uc046fc98-7774-5912-9507-4e5183a124ba)Studs Terkel

One Keeps Going (#ua30d12f7-15e6-502c-ac3d-2e49ed509daa)Joyce Carol Oates

The Capacity to Look at a Situation Coolly (#uf9c13812-99c6-5fa2-816a-a3c82ad80ea9)Josephine Hendin

Creating Your Own Demand (#ua7281af0-6dcf-5e1b-9101-49322c15c9d0)Minda Bikman

Testimony to Mysticism (#u83a73d16-b20d-5e9b-8417-f50ea0ca1cf1)Nissa Torrents

The Need to Tell Stories (#u2683a987-60bb-5a7f-bcfc-8e699cd516dc)Christopher Bigsby

Writing as Time Runs Out (#uf8dcf4a5-a6b2-5a44-86a2-24d0ec8e4b9c)Michael Dean

Running Through Stories in My Mind (#u595a7062-0080-5df0-bb7a-6b14ddf9c590)Michael Thorpe

Placing Their Fingers on the Wounds of Our Times (#litres_trial_promo)Margarete von Schwarzkopf

Breaking Down These Forms (#litres_trial_promo)Stephen Gray

Acknowledging a New Frontier (#litres_trial_promo)Eve Bertelsen

The Habit of Observing (#litres_trial_promo)Francois-Olivier Rousseau

Caged by the Experts (#litres_trial_promo)Thomas Frick

Living in Catastrophe (#litres_trial_promo)Brian Aldiss

Watching the Angry and Destructive Hordes Go Past (#litres_trial_promo)Claire Tomalin

Drawn to a Type of Landscape (#litres_trial_promo)Sedge Thomson

A Writer Is Not a Professor (#litres_trial_promo)Jean-Maurice de Montremy

The Older I Get, the Less I Believe (#litres_trial_promo)Tan Gim Ean and Others

Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind by Communism (#litres_trial_promo)Edith Kurzweil

Reporting from the Terrain of the Mind (#litres_trial_promo)Nigel Forde

Voice of England, Voice of Africa (#litres_trial_promo)Michael Upchurch

Describing This Beautiful and Nasty Planet (#litres_trial_promo)Earl G. Ingersoll

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)

The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)

The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)

Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ulink_2a79d541-e280-5fb8-a2bd-4fbe55551142)

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):