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