Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing
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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