Putting the Questions Differently

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.

One Keeps Going Joyce Carol Oates (#ulink_ad98e9f1-118a-594f-845b-28996b53f903)

Joyce Carol Oates’s interview was conducted in Mrs. Lessing’s London home in spring 1972 and originally appeared in The Southern Review. Copyright © 1972 by Joyce Carol Oates. Reprinted with permission.

It is a bright, fresh, cold day in London, one of those excellent winter days that seem to promise spring. But it is already spring here, by the calendar, the spring of 1972, not winter, and one’s expectations are slightly thrown off – everything has been blooming here for months, and now trees are in full leaf, the sun is a very powerful presence in the sky, but still it is strangely cold, as if time were in a permanent suspension. Walking along Shoot-Up Hill in Kilburn, London, I am aware of people’s steamy breaths – in mid-May! – and as always I am a little disconcerted by the busyness of main thoroughfares, the continual stream of taxis and shiny red double-decker buses and private automobiles, and the quiet that attends this commotion. It seems so unexpected, the absence of horns, the absence of noise. Americans in London are disoriented by the paradox of such enormous numbers of people crowded into small areas without obvious intrusions upon one another, or even obvious visual displays of their crowdedness. It is usually the case that a one-minute walk off a busy road will bring one to absolute quiet – the pastoral improbability of Green Park, which is exactly like the country and even smells like the country, a few seconds’ stroll from Piccadilly on one side and the Mall on the other – and Doris Lessing’s home, only a few hundred yards from Kilburn High Road, incredibly quiet and private, as remote a setting as any home deep in the country.

She lives in the top-floor flat of a handsome, sturdy, three-storied house on Kingscroft Road, a short, curving street of single and semidetached homes, with brick or stone walls that shield their gardens from the street. There is a fragrant smell of newly-mown grass in the air, and the profusion of flowers and full-leafed trees seem out of place in the cold. Upstairs, the large room that serves Mrs. Lessing as both a dining room and a workroom looks out upon a yard of trees, delicate foliage that is illuminated by sunshine just as I am shown into the room.

It is a room of spacious proportions: at one end a wide windowsill given over to trays of small plants, at the other end an immense writing desk covered with books and papers. The flat – fairly large by London standards – is well-lived-in and comfortable, filled with Mrs. Lessing’s own furniture, rugs, pillows, and many shelves and tables of books.

Doris Lessing is direct, womanly, very charming. She wears her long, graying black hair drawn into a bun at the back of her head; her face is slender and attractive, exactly the face of the photographs, the “Doris Lessing” I had been reading and admiring for so long. Meeting her at last I felt almost faint – certainly unreal – turning transparent myself in the presence of this totally defined, self-confident, gracious woman. I had arrived at Kilburn half an hour early, in order to wander around, to see the neighborhood in which she lived; and now, meeting her at last, I marveled at how easily the space between us had been crossed. Surely everything must seem to me a little enchanted.

When I had left the Kilburn underground station, however, I had paused at a news agent’s stand to read in amazement of the attempted assassination of George Wallace. I explained to Mrs. Lessing that I was still stunned by the news – that I hardly knew what to think – that I felt depressed and confused by this latest act of violence. And, like many Americans in foreign countries, I felt a sense of shame.

Mrs. Lessing spoke very sympathetically of the problems of violence in contemporary culture, especially in America. “But everyone had guns when I was a child, on the farm,” she said, referring to her childhood in Southern Rhodesia. “They went out and shot snakes; it seemed quite natural, to kill. No one ever seemed to ask: Why? Why kill? It seemed entirely natural.” She asked me some very perceptive questions about the political climate in the United States: whether anyone would take Wallace’s place (since it seemed, this morning, that Wallace might not recover), whether I thought the long, courageous years of effort of the antiwar protesters had really done much good? She seems more sympathetic, generally, with the United States – or with the liberal consciousness of the United States – than with England; when I remarked upon this, she said that her writing seemed to her better understood in the United States.

“In England, if you publish regularly, you tend to be written off,” she said. “In America, one has the impression of critics scrutinizing each performance – as if regarding one’s efforts at leaping hurdles, overcoming obstacles, with interest.”

I asked about the response in England to a recent novel, the very unusual Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971). “The readers who best understood it were the young,” she said.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell is “inner space fiction” (Mrs. Lessing’s category), and shows a remarkable sympathy with the “broken-down” psyche. It is the record of the breakdown of a professor of classics, his experience of a visionary, archetypal world of myth and drama, his treatment at the hands of conventional psychiatrists, and his subsequent – and ironic – recovery into the mean, narrow, self-denying world of the “sane.” An afterword by the author makes the fascinating observation that the defining of the “extraordinarily perceptive” human being as abnormal – he must have “something wrong with him” – is the only response one can expect, at present, from conventional medical practitioners. I asked Mrs. Lessing if she were sympathetic with the work of Ronald Laing, whose ideas resemble her own.

“Yes. We were both exploring the phenomenon of the unclassifiable experience, the psychological ‘breaking-through’ that the conventional world judges as mad. I think Laing must have been very courageous, to question the basic assumptions of his profession from the inside…In America, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in The Manufacture of Madness, has made similar claims. He has taken a very revolutionary position.”

Mrs. Lessing has known people who have experienced apparently “mystical” insights. After the publication of that iconoclastic book, The Golden Notebook (1962), she received many letters from people who have been in mental asylums or who have undergone conventional psychiatric treatment but who, in Mrs. Lessing’s opinion, were not really insane – not “sick” at all.

I asked whether the terms “mystical” and “visionary” weren’t misleading, and whether these experiences were not quite natural – normal.

“I think so, yes,” she said. “Except that one is cautioned against speaking of them. People very commonly experience things they are afraid to admit to, being frightened of the label ‘insane’ or ‘sick’ – there are no adequate categories for this kind of experience.”

Because this is a problem I am encountering in my own writing, I asked Mrs. Lessing whether she felt it was extremely difficult to convey the sense of a “mystical” experience in the framework of fiction, of any kind of work intended to communicate naturalistically to a large audience. She agreed, saying that in England, at least, there is a tendency for reviewers to dismiss viewpoints that are not their own, that seem outside the ordinary response. I mentioned that Colin Wilson, in treating most sympathetically the writings of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (in his New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution), received at least one review that attempted to dismiss him as “clever,” and that I believed this quite symptomatic of English literary reviews in general. Mrs. Lessing, who has met Colin Wilson, said that reviewers and critics have been intent upon paying him back for his early, immediate success with The Outsider, written when he was only twenty-three; but that he is erudite, very energetic, and an important writer. However, critical response to a book like his, or any book which attempts to deal sympathetically with so-called “mystical” experiences, will meet opposition from the status quo.

One of the far-reaching consequences of Doris Lessing’s two recent books, Briefing and The Four-Gated City, will be to relate the “mystical” experience to ordinary life, to show that the apparently sick – the “legally insane” – members of our society may, in fact, be in touch with a deeper, more poetic, more human reality than the apparently healthy. But both novels are difficult ones, and have baffled many intelligent readers. When I first read The Four-Gated City, in order to review it for the Saturday Review, I was astonished at the author’s audacity in taking a naturalistic heroine into a naturalistic setting, subjecting her to extraordinary experiences, and bringing her not only up to the present day but into the future – to her death near the end of the twentieth century. I could not recall ever having read a novel like this. And it is the more iconoclastic in that the novel is the last of a five-part series, Children of Violence, begun in 1952, tracing the life of Martha Quest, an obviously autobiographical heroine.

I asked Mrs. Lessing what she was working on at present, if she were continuing this exploration of the soul; but she said that, no, in a way she might be accused of a slight “regression,” in that the novel she has just finished concerns a woman whose marriage has disintegrated and whose life is suddenly hollow, without meaning. “The title is The Summer Before the Dark, and the woman in it, the woman who loses her husband, goes to pieces in a way I’ve witnessed women go to pieces.” Her own marriages, she mentioned, were not very “permanent,” and did not permanently affect her; but this phenomenon of a woman so totally defined by her marriage has long interested her. More immediately, she was planning a collection of short stories: the American edition to be called The Temptation of Jack Orkney, and the English edition The Story of an Unmarrying Man. She was arranging a visit to the United States for a series of five lectures, to be delivered at The New School, and she was very much looking forward to the trip – she wanted to visit friends, and to travel, if possible, to the Southwest.

Her last trip to the United States was in 1969, when she gave a number of lectures at various universities. At that time she met Kurt Vonnegut, “a bloke I got on with very well,” whose writing she admires immensely. This struck me as rather surprising, since to me Doris Lessing’s writing is of a much more substantial, “literary” nature than Vonnegut’s; but their similar concerns for the madness of society, its self-destructive tendencies, would account for her enthusiasm. She spoke of having heard that Vonnegut did not plan to write anymore – which I hadn’t heard, myself – and that this distressed her; she thought he was very good, indeed. She mentioned Slaughterhouse-Five as an especially impressive book of his.

Less surprisingly, she felt a kinship with Norman Mailer, and believed that the critical treatment he received for Barbary Shore and The Deer Park was quite unjustified; “they’re good books,” she said. I mentioned that the exciting thing about Mailer – sometimes incidental to the aesthetic quality of his work – was his complete identification with the era in which he lives, his desire to affect radically the consciousness of the times, to dramatize himself as a spiritual representative of the times and its contradictions, and that this sense of a mission was evident in her writing as well. “In beginning the Martha Quest series, you could not possibly have known how it would end; and the sympathetic reader following Martha’s life cannot help but be transformed, along with Martha,” I said. Mrs. Lessing was understandably reticent about her own writing – and perhaps I embarrassed her by my own enthusiasm, though I did not tell her that she was quite mistaken in her feeling that her writing might not have the effect she desired: The Golden Notebook alone has radically changed the consciousness of many young women. Was there anyone else with whom she felt a kinship? She mentioned Saul Bellow, and of course D. H. Lawrence, and Nadine Gordimer. (Mrs. Lessing cannot return to the country of her childhood and girlhood, Southern Rhodesia, because she is a “prohibited immigrant”; homesick for the veld, she had her daughter send her several color photographs of African flowers, which are on display in her flat.) At the back of her mind, she said, is a work “about two men in prison,” which she is not writing (as Kurt Vonnegut was “not writing” for decades the story of the Dresden fire bombing which is the ostensible subject of Slaughterhouse-Five); perhaps this work, which she may someday do, is related to her Southern Rhodesian background.

What most excited her about America was, during her visit, the spirit of liberality and energy in the young. She gave a lecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969, when that university was in a state of turmoil (a condition that the national press unaccountably overlooked, focusing news stories on Columbia and Berkeley), then flew to Stony Brook, which, though hardly a radical institution at the time, immediately erupted into student riots and rampages, brought on by a long history of police harassment over drugs. After visiting these two universities, Mrs. Lessing was scheduled to fly to – of all places – Berkeley, where she gave another lecture. She was most favorably impressed by the students, and young people in general, with whom she became acquainted. I asked her if she might like to teach full-time, but she said she would hesitate to take on a position of such responsibility (she had been offered a handsome job at City College, which she declined with regret), partly because she considered her own academic background somewhat meager. “I ended my formal education at the age of fourteen, and before that I really learned very little,” she said. It struck me as amazing: a woman whose books constitute a staggering accomplishment, who is, herself, undisputably a major figure in English literature of the twentieth century – should hesitate to teach in a university! It is rather as if a resurrected Kafka, shy, unobstrusive, humble, should insist that his works be taught by anyone else, any ordinary academic with ordinary academic qualifications, sensing himself somehow not equal to what he represents. Perhaps there is some truth to it. But I was forced to realize how thoroughly oppressive the world of professional “education” really is; how it locks out either overtly or in effect the natural genius whose background appears not to have been sufficient.

Mrs. Lessing said that connections between English writers and universities were quite rare, but that in the United States it seemed very common. I explained that this was because of the existence of creative writing programs in the United States, which were not narrowly “academic,” but which allowed a writer-in-residence to meet with students once or twice a week, giving him much time for his own work. In England, many writers are forced to work in publishing houses or on magazines. The publishing world in London, Mrs. Lessing said, is always changing; editors are always switching publishers, publishing houses disappear and new ones appear.//