Putting the Questions Differently

I asked her if she was pleased, generally, with her writing and with its public response. Strangely, she replied that she sometimes had to force herself to write – that she often was overcome by the probable “pointlessness” of the whole thing. I asked Mrs. Lessing if she meant that her own writing seemed to her sometimes futile, or was it the role of literature in society.

“I suppose one begins with the idea of transforming society,” she said, “through literature and then, when nothing happens, one feels a sense of failure. But then the question is simply why did one feel he might change society? Change anything? In any case, one keeps going.”

I told Mrs. Lessing that her writing has worked to transform many individuals, and that individuals, though apparently isolated, do, in fact, constitute society. Her own writing, in my opinion, does not exist in a vacuum, but reinforces and is reinforced by the writing of some of her important (and nonliterary) contemporaries – Ronald Laing, Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Barry Commoner – and many other critics of the “self-destructing society.”

“Yet one does question the very premises of literature, at times,” Mrs. Lessing said. “Has anything changed? Will anything change? The vocal opposition to the war in Vietnam, in America – has it forced any real change?”

“I think there have been changes, alterations of consciousness,” I said.

Mrs. Lessing received my opinion respectfully, but it seemed clear that she did not share it. She went on to remark that she felt rather out of touch with current writing since she kept to herself, generally, and did not make any attempt to keep up with all that was being written. She asked me about the English writers I admired. When I told her that I very much liked V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, she agreed that Naipaul was an excellent writer. “But somehow I don’t feel a rapport with him, the kind of sympathy I feel for someone like Vonnegut, even though he writes about a part of the world, Africa, I know very well.”

Of the younger English writers I admired, only Margaret Drabble was a familiar name to Mrs. Lessing. She liked Miss Drabble’s writing but had not yet read The Needle’s Eye; I told her that I thought this novel shared some important themes with her own work – the conscious “creating” of a set of values by which people can live, albeit in a difficult, tragically diminished urban world.

“Well, whether literature accomplishes anything or not,” Mrs. Lessing said, “we do keep going.”

When I left Mrs. Lessing’s flat and walked back down the hill to the underground station, I felt even more strongly that sense of suspension, of unreality. It seemed to me one of the mysterious paradoxes of life, the inability of the truly gifted, the prophetic “geniuses” (an unforgivable but necessary word) to comprehend themselves, their places in history: rare indeed is the self-recognized and self-defined person like Yeats who seems to have come to terms not only with his creative productivity but with his destiny. Doris Lessing, the warm, poised, immensely interesting woman with whom I had just spent two hours, does not yet know that she is Doris Lessing.

Yet it is natural, I suppose, for her not to know or to guess how much The Golden Notebook (predating and superseding even the most sophisticated of all the Women’s Liberation works) meant to young women of my generation; how beautifully the craftsmanship of her many short stories illuminated lives, the most secret and guarded of private lives, in a style that was never self-conscious or contrived. She could not gauge how The Four-Gated City, evidently a difficult novel for her to write, would work to transform our consciousness not only of the ecological disaster we are facing, the self-annihilating madness of our society which brands its critics as “mad,” but also of the possibilities of the open form of the novel itself. Never superficially experimental, Mrs. Lessing’s writing is profoundly experimental – exploratory – in its effort to alter our expectations about life and about the range of our own consciousness.

Her books, especially the Martha Quest series, The Golden Notebook, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, have traced an evolutionary progress of the soul, which to some extent transforms the reader as he reads. I think it is true of our greatest writers that their effect on us is delayed, that it may take years for us to understand what they have done to us. Doris Lessing possesses a unique sensitivity, writing out of her own intense experience, her own subjectivity, but at the same time writing out of the spirit of the times. This is a gift that cannot be analyzed; it must only be honored.

The Capacity to Look at a Situation Coolly Josephine Hendin (#ulink_3e5e2fc8-0b5a-5148-bd44-1aa1af10ec1c)

Josephine Hendin’s interview was conducted in New York on WBAI Radio December 30, 1972. The transcription was prepared and edited by Patricia Featherstone. Printed with the permission of Bill Thomas, Director, Pacifica Radio Archive.

Hendin: In The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Short Stories one thing that interested me particularly was your story “Report on a Threatened City,” where creatures from another planet come down to earth to warn everyone of an imminent disaster, and no one seems to want to pay attention. When they try to warn the young people they’re in a state which you describe as “disabling despair.” You say while they are more clear-headed than their elders, more able to voice and maintain criticisms of the wrongs and faults of society, they’re not able to believe in their own effectiveness or ability to do anything about it. Is this how you see young people?

Lessing: Well, not all of them, of course. But I do think, certainly in England, I don’t know about this country, that there are large numbers of young people who might have been political perhaps a few years ago, but who seem to be perhaps numbed. Well, I’m not surprised, if you look at what’s going on everywhere. Let’s put it this way: I’m very glad that I’m not twenty, because I don’t think I would be able to regard what’s going to happen with all that equanimity. About what goes on here, as I say, I don’t know at all. Quite a common thing to see in England is groups of young people living together on some basis or another, often quite informalized. They don’t say, “I’m going to set up a group of young people.” It’s what seems to happen. A feature of this is that people tend to be unambitious and work out some kind of rather relaxed, informal sort of style of living, which is very interesting to see because it’s quite different from anything that my generation did, for example.

Hendin: When you say you don’t think you’d be able to regard what’s going to happen with such equanimity, in this particular story it’s a kind of doom. At least in a specific city that is going to happen, and in The Four-Gated City you prophesy a kind of apocalyptic war. Is that what you see as coming?

Lessing: This story is about San Francisco, of course. There was a program on British television, it must have been about eighteen months ago, and I read an article about the same time, and what fascinated me about this was that the citizens of San Francisco didn’t seem to know the situation they were living in, yet one can have programs on British television or erudite articles about it. I mean, the fact that all the amenities are on the San Andreas fault, everything from fire stations to hospitals, and in fact the posts that are supposed to cope with emergencies will be the first to go if there’s an earthquake. Well, it was a fascinating thought that the people who were going to be involved didn’t know what they were in for. And this just sparked off that story. But I gather that since then things are not really much better. If you write something like that, people send you articles and comments, and I gather that the citizens of San Francisco don’t know very much more than they did then. But it’s quite freely discussed in other parts of the world, much more than it is in San Francisco. And that is the interesting thing about that, that we don’t face the situation that is perhaps intolerable. We decide not to look at it straight. Maybe it’s a basic human tendency or something of the kind. This is possibly what’s going on in New York, because when I came here in 1969 everything was much sharper, more aggressive, more tense, and the newspapers were much more sharp and clear. But this time, when manifestly the external situation hasn’t changed in the slightest, I find the newspapers rather bland compared to the English newspapers, and everything seems to be rather good-natured, from which I deduce that things have been swept under the carpet because it’s too painful to look at them. I may be wrong about that. But it’s possible at least that that’s what’s happening.

You asked about the ending of The Four-Gated City. I’m not saying that’s a blue-print, but I think something of the kind is likely to happen. One doesn’t need to have a crystal ball to see that this is what’s going to happen. You just have to read [a newspaper]. There’s a paper in England, for example, called The New Scientist, which is written in language that non-mathematical dopes can understand, you see, like me. You’ve just got to read that for a couple of months to see that far from the danger of war receding, it’s sharpened, that far from our ecological problems being better, they’re worse, and so on. When I wrote The Four-Gated City, I thought that I was perhaps going out on such a limb that no one would ever speak to me again. By the time it was published it was all old hat, things were moving so fast. But the fact that they’re old hat doesn’t mean to say that anything’s changed very much. The problems that we, I mean the human race, have to solve are every bit as bad as they were. The fact that we’re not looking at them, or it doesn’t seem to be that we’re looking at them, doesn’t make them any better.

Hendin: I was wondering how you would write about your idea that things seem to be more good-natured here, with the proliferation of small groups, each of which has their own special interests. I’m thinking in the main of those groups which are concerned with improving the environment, with the great number of women’s organizations which want to improve the lot of women in this country, and with the proliferation of various kinds of black power groups showing a spectrum of all degrees of militancy.

Lessing: This kind of bitty approach to these enormous problems is not enough, and what we need is something that perhaps the human race is not evolved enough to do, which is some kind of overall scheme which seizes the problems, and looks at them as global problems, and not the problems of individual countries, let alone of groups. As I say, this is not me talking, because whereas previously, when I had such thoughts that I really thought were quite extraordinary, and indeed, perhaps shamefully pessimistic and so on, it turns out that this is the kind of thinking of people in very responsible positions who, in fact, say extremely clearly things like: “If within ten years we don’t do so and so and so and so, the situation will be out of control.” Now what they suggest should be done in ten years is usually precisely this ability of humanity as a whole to look at itself as a whole, and to face its problems as a whole. This is in fact what is necessary.

Hendin: Is what you call the “disabling despair” of the young in some way a reaction to the sense that this is not going to be done?

Lessing: This is what some sections of young people seem to do. Do you know, I do find this difficult, when a sentence or statement from a story is quoted to you: “You say so and so,” and in actual fact it is out of context.

Hendin: Fair enough. To get back to the context of the story, which is interesting in itself in terms of the form, you describe the situation as it evolves around the visit of creatures from another planet to the Earth. And in a number of your books you’ve been interested, it seems to me, in using this – whether as a metaphor or whether you see it as a possibility – the idea of space travel, and beings from another planet coming here. I was wondering what significance you felt this had.

Lessing: I don’t see why it’s impossible. If there were beings from another planet here I doubt whether we would recognize them. It wouldn’t take very much, would it, some day for intelligent creatures to disguise themselves in such a way that they wouldn’t be recognized.

Hendin: I get the feeling sometimes in many of your stories that people see each other as though they were space travelers looking at aliens on another planet – that somehow the distance between people is sufficiently great, or between people and the lives they are leading. The sense of disillusionment becomes so great that there’s a feeling of immense distance.

Lessing: This whole business of using people from outer space is a very ancient literary device, isn’t it? It’s the easiest way of trying to make the readers look at a human situation more sharply.

Hendin: But somehow it seems to reflect the same sense of distance that so many of the characters in your books have in relation to themselves and to the worlds they live in. It seems to be bound up with the whole sense of estrangement, for example, that Martha Quest has, in so many of those situations where she’s there and not there, and in situations in which she feels alien, whether as a girl growing up, on this farm in central Africa or in London, when the disaffection with the Communist Party is at its highest – a sense of being a part of something which she has no deep emotional connection to. I was wondering whether or not you didn’t have in mind the idea of being spaced out and yet involved in something. In “Not a Very Nice Story,” you talk about people’s sense that feeling is all-in-all. You say, “We feel, therefore we are.”

Lessing: The story was about two married couples who were all close friends, a set of affairs which continued for years. Two of the people in the situation have what is known as an adulterous relationship. What I was asking in the story was, “What in fact is love?” because these two were not supposed to be in love, or lovers, but they were lovers, but their relationship was extremely cool and practical. This was an anecdote told to me by someone, by one of the men actually, involved in this foursome, and I was extremely shocked. He wanted to know why I was shocked. He said that these two marriages were in fact very successful marriages, and the children were all happy, well adjusted, etc., and so on. I was shocked by the deception. Having listened to him for some time, I asked myself, “All right, why am I shocked?” And out of this question I wrote this story, which simply made a statement. I haven’t taken any sides or anything of that kind. I’m still shocked by the situation; yet I still ask questions – about the nature of marriage, which I find hard to admire, the institution thereof. I’m always interested in the patterns that people try to evolve themselves. But this one, please note, nobody consciously evolved. It happened in life, and it happened in my story, much to the surprise of all the people involved in it.

Hendin: I’m tempted to ask what you think the nature of marriage is.

Lessing: Well, there must be something very wrong with this Mum and Dad and two children, or it wouldn’t break up all the time. I used to have a great many theories about marriage, sex, love, and all this kind of thing. But everything is going to change. Sometimes I think that maybe some form of polygamy or group marriage would be a good thing. But then, whenever you have thoughts like this, of course, you end up with the problem of the children, because children are the most conservative creatures in existence, and they get very upset if they don’t get what everybody else has. One can either say it doesn’t matter that it’s hard on the children, or you’re not going to do it because it’s hard on the children, but one has to face the fact that children tend to pay the price for any experimenting that adults do.

Hendin: In The Summer before the Dark, you describe the situation of a woman whose children are pretty much grown up, and who, looking back on her life, seems to feel that a great many of the personal questions which seemed at one time so important, whether to love this man or that, whether to marry, aren’t very meaningful.

Lessing: When you get middle-aged, which I am, it’s fairly common to look back, and to think that a lot of the sound and fury that one’s been involved in perhaps wasn’t all that necessary. Or you can say this is just emotional middle-aged spread, or something of the kind. But it could also possibly be quite a useful frame of mind to be in. I discuss this with my friends who have reached the same age. There is quite often a sense of enormous relief of having emerged from a great welter of emotionalism.

Hendin: But it’s more than that for Kate, a sense that personal relations were not as important as she had thought – that the sense of strength to be derived from feeling at peace with oneself, apart and alone, is what’s important. She dreams of carrying a seal through all kinds of misfortunes and protecting it as though the seal in some way is bound up with the most important part of herself, which gets carried through whatever storms occur in marriage, or raising a family, and is preserved intact.

Lessing: I don’t think that I’m saying that this woman was repudiating anything she’d done. She’d simply moved on to a different state in herself, which is a different thing altogether, really. You know, we’re very biological animals. We tend always to think that if one is in a violent state of emotional need, it is a unique emotional need, or state. In actual fact, it’s probably just the emotions of a young woman of twenty-three whose body is demanding that she should have children. It’s hard for some people to take, because we’re all brought up to have this fantasy about ourselves, that everything we feel and think is uniquely and gloriously our own. Ninety percent of the unique and marvelous and wonderful thoughts are, in fact, expressions of whatever state we happen to be in.

Hendin: Kate becomes friendly with a young girl in that novel, Maureen, who’s trying to decide what to do with her life, and she decides that at the end it really doesn’t seem to matter whether she marries one man or another.

Lessing: Maureen tends to be more passive than not, and getting married was very much on her plate. A lot of young women think of marriage in terms not of a man, but of a way of living. When young women think about getting married, what they’re choosing when they choose a man is often a way of life. Maureen had quite a lot of choices and she wasn’t really mad about any of them. I know a lot of girls who don’t want to get married at twenty-four. It would be interesting to see how they’re thinking at thirty, but that’s another thing. But it is interesting the number of young women I know who don’t want to get married at all. They don’t want to have children. Well, they’re trying to cheat on their biology, and as I say, it would be nice to see what happens.

Hendin: Couldn’t it also be an alternative to marriage?

Lessing: Yes. When I find a very determined young woman of twenty-four who announces she’s got no intention of ever getting married, and looks as if she’s going to stick to it, I’m interested because I’m wondering if in fact women are changing their nature or not.

Hendin: In The Golden Notebook, Anna or Molly says that she thinks there must be a completely new kind of woman.

Lessing: No, I think that maybe they are not new kinds of women at all. They are women very much conditioned to be one way who are trying to be another, or what they think is something different. But the way we think and the way we feel are usually pretty well at loggerheads for most people. These conversations between women in The Golden Notebook and other places are always being taken out and quoted as if they are blueprints of mine or a political program. Well, they’re not. They’re accounts of the kinds of states of mind women get into.

Hendin: In Martha Quest, there’s a comment about people coming to books of different kinds for cues to life. Do you think this is the way a great many people have come to read your books?

Lessing: I think people now go to sociological books more than novels for cues of how to live their life. I used to go particularly to novels to find out how I ought to live my life. But, to my loss, I see now I didn’t find out.

Hendin: About the way we think and the way we feel being at loggerheads, one thing that always interested me about Martha Quest’s life was, why does she do it? Suddenly given her freedom at a certain point, why does she get married to a man she scarcely seems to love, and who she’s aware of not being in love with?

Lessing: Well, this was a very general situation about men, and don’t forget that that was the war. The more I look back at that war, the more I think that everyone was insane, even people not involved in it. And I’m not being rhetorical. I think that everyone was crazy round about then. And the rest of the behavior that went on was more crazy than usual. I don’t want to suggest that human beings are sane in between wars; we manifestly are not, but that was a very terrible war, you know. This is a thing I keep coming back to. We go through a terrible experience, it comes to an end, and it is as if it hasn’t happened, or it simply gets pushed off into words. It becomes verbalized. The First World War degraded and demoralized us terribly and the Second World War did it more thoroughly, and we have not got over either of these wars. The children of that war were profoundly affected by it. We tend to ignore this. We get steadily more and more demoralized, and barbarized, by the things we do, but we don’t like to really look at this fact. So, if in the middle of the Second World War a young woman, or very many young women, got married somewhat light-heartedly, it’s just a very minor symptom of the general lunacy.

Hendin: Well, in what ways do you think the war affected trust in relations and the way people see themselves and each other? Is it the bomb, or simply the accessibility of so much violence through films?

Lessing: No, it’s just one very small thing. I remember towards the end of the Second World War, after we’d had four and a half years of horror, non-stop, of the most vicious propaganda from both sides we were still capable of being shocked by the fact that the Russians publicly hanged Nazis. Well, no one would even lift an eyelid now to look at the photographs. Twenty years on, we’ve become so used to worse. That’s the horrible truth. We’re just not shocked at anything.

Hendin: The characters, then, in The Four-Gated City in particular, seem to be as acute in terms of their ability to sense what’s going on about them. Particularly, I think, the character you describe as being mad, being insane, Lynda, and I think in that portion of the book when Martha selfconsciously drives herself mad. Do you think they’re the only people who remain in touch with these things?

Lessing: The person in that book who has much more of a grasp of what’s going on, physically if you like, is a man. He has a kind of a blueprint of what’s going on everywhere, separating him off from what he thinks and does, from the others. These people were really into their own experiences with each other. People living together, who know each other very well, form some kind of a whole. They experience things through each other, and what one of them discovers becomes the property of the others usually. But also there are many different layers of ourselves. I mean, we know something in one part of ourselves that we don’t know in another.

Hendin: There is a feeling in that book of being collective, not personal and unique. Even when Martha decides to go mad she describes it as being plugged into the self-hater, as though this were some almost universal force, which anyone would encounter.

Lessing: This figure is very prominent in many schizophrenics. That’s a word I don’t like but these labels will have to do. You’ll find very many “mad people” saying: “They hate me. They’re talking about me all the time. They want to destroy me.” There are endless variations on this particular theme. This figure is common to very many people who are off-balance. I don’t think it’s very hard to explain either. All you have to do is to watch any mother bringing up her child; from the time this child is born this goes on: “Be a good boy and do this. Be a good girl and do this. You’re a bad boy. You’re a bad girl. If you do that I won’t love you. If you do that so-and-so will be angry.” This “conscience” is partly the externalization of what its parents can’t stand, mostly its manner. This figure, the self-hater, which mad people describe continually, and express continually as this very powerful destroying force, is this lifetime of conditioning.