Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing
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generally in subordinate positions. In fact, they play an extremely important part which no one recognizes – possibly not even they themselves. And I will quote an example that demonstrates it. A friend of mine got ill in Russia and was in hospital. It was a European hospital, with doctors on top, male and female, and wards and the whole lot, just as we’re familiar with. But she was struck more and more by the role played by the ward women, which we do not have in this country. They weren’t nurses so much. They were cleaners, and floated around – they brought meals and all that kind of thing. They had an enormous influence, and everybody relied upon them. Yet they were paid nothing at all, and nobody gave them much respect. In fact, it became evident to her that these females were a kind of bastion. Everything depended on these women for a sort of humanity and decency. Whenever I went into a big organization, I would look for these women. They can be anywhere, they can be at the top or the bottom, but they provide a quality without which the whole thing wouldn’t exist. That is in fact what I think women do generally.
I don’t have the old kind of feminist thoughts that I used to have. I mean, I’ve lost my moral indignation completely. I certainly try to understand what is happening. That’s quite different from trying to think what ought to be happening. The thing is that in trying to find what happens, you come to some very interesting conclusions. And one of mine is that this great suppressed class of women in fact keeps everything going. They are what makes things run. I do so much hate the way women who have children and run homes are put down all the time. Sometimes you meet a woman with four kids and you say, “What are you doing?” and she says, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m only a housewife.” It’s enough to make you cry when you know the work this woman does, how hard she has struggled with it all. Yet they’re so apologetic. They think they haven’t done anything. It’s awful. There isn’t any harder or more demanding job, or one that needs more quality. Middle-aged women, at the end of half a lifetime of working with children and so forth, are the most highly equipped people there are. They can turn their hands to absolutely anything. They can cope with God-knows-what human situations with tact and patience. I used this theme a little bit in Summer Before the Dark.
Bikman: In your novels, particularly the first four Children of Violence books, you write so incisively of the forces that shape women’s lives. Nearly every issue that the Women’s Movement in the United States has raised in the past decade is discussed in those novels and, somewhat less centrally, in the last Children of Violence book, The Four-Gated City. Do you have any idea how you developed those perceptions?
Lessing: It would be enough to say I’m a woman, after all? You know, it wasn’t my generation that invented feminism. My mother was a bit of a feminist. In fact, it was born, I think, with the French Revolution. You see, every generation suddenly invents everything.//
Bikman: Did the conditions of your growing up in Rhodesia contribute to your perceptions?
Lessing: I had a very isolated childhood. There were various reasons why I had to develop an extremely clear and critical mind. It was simply survival. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t in my life been ridiculously emotional. Without boring you with all the psychological details, my position in the family was such that I was very critical, and fairly early on. I had to be, because my mother and father were both in complicated emotional states. I was under terrible pressure as a child, which is true of every child, mind you, but I think it was slightly worse in my case. And then I was in this social set-up, which I disliked, this white-black thing. I can’t remember a time when it didn’t make me uneasy, even when I didn’t know why I was. I think most young people have an extremely clear eye as to what goes on, but women, particularly, tend to lose it when they become adolescents. Perhaps I lost it less than some.
Bikman: So you were able to see clearly the dynamic between white settlers and the black population?
Lessing: I wasn’t clearly seeing it at all. It took many years for me to see it. I think it had far more to do with the family set-up. I had to fight every inch of the way against a very difficult family situation. I’ve got several friends who had a fairly tough childhood, and every one of them has this extremely clear critical eye about what goes on – which is not always a good thing. It can make you very unhappy. You tend to be somewhat bleak, which I am. I think a good many children are born looking at the adult world – because they’ve been forced into it – with an extremely cold eye. And I had it, or I can’t remember any time I haven’t had it.
Bikman: Did you know when you began the Children of Violence series that it was going to be five books?
Lessing: Yes, I knew almost at once that it was five books, roughly sketched out in my mind. I didn’t know how it was going to end, of course. It got less and less realistic as it went on. A good deal of it was in fact autobiographical, but some of it was invented. I think most writers have to start very realistically because that’s a way of establishing what they are, particularly women, I’ve noticed. For a lot of women, when they start writing it’s a way of finding out who they are. When you’ve found out, you can start making things up.
Bikman: The idea of the perfect city appears in several of your books, even as early as Martha Quest, when Martha has a vision of a golden city. Shikasta, of course, is based on an ideal city that gives rise to harmony and serenity. Before Shikasta, the idea seems to have been most fully stated in The Four-Gated City. In writing Shikasta, did you consciously go back to The Four-Gated City and take that moment and expand it into a full-length book?
Lessing: No. You see, the whole concept of a city, four-gated or otherwise, is so archetypal, so in the mythology of all nations, when you start looking. You will find it’s nearly always a metaphor for states of mind, states of being. Anyway, my thought is a serious query about the effect the proportions of buildings have on the people who live in them. This is not a metaphorical thought at all. This is a practical thought, which I think about more and more. And I wonder if the violence, the antisocial attitudes we associate with high-rise buildings, the tower blocks [a reference to London’s council flats, or public housing], might have something to do not only with the fact that the people who live in them have no real responsibility for the building as a whole – which is what I think the sociologists have decided – but I’m wondering if buildings affect the mentality of people in ways we haven’t begun to research. This is my thought. This is my specific thought, not metaphorical. And I’ve used it in Shikasta as a query because I’m not making statements. You know, whenever one writes a book like Shikasta, it’s a series of queries – to myself, to other people – as ideas.
I think it will turn out that there is a whole science of building that we know nothing about, that we might have lost and that ancient civilizations might have known about. And that is how to affect the minds of people living in buildings. Ordinary people who will regard such a thought as “mystical” or silly will in fact say, “I cannot live in that house, it upsets me.” Or they’ll say it has a ghost or something. This kind of thought goes on in my mind at the moment. I can’t enter a building without wondering what other aspects it may have. But we don’t know. Look at cathedrals. They were built in ways which a great many people thought were very specific, to produce certain states of mind. Yet we don’t think like that any more.
And this leads me to the other thought. It is a commonplace way of thinking that we are the great high pinnacle of all kinds of sciences, but I think, on the contrary, we have lost a great deal of knowledge from the past. Far from being on a high pinnacle, we’re on a very low level indeed, in all kinds of ways. You mention buildings because they run throughout my work. Now you can go through a writer’s work and say, “Writer X is fascinated by the symbol” – I don’t know, a rose or a seagull. But what is interesting is not that there should be a rose or a seagull or a teacup or whatever, but what use is made of it, how it develops. Because it can be a metaphor in one book and it can be something quite specific in another.
Bikman: Do younger women writers seek you out?
Lessing: