Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing
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characters; they have to be. I wish we could stop talking in terms of men and women writers. Our whole language, the way we think, is set up for putting things into departments. We’ve got far more in common with each other than what separates us.
Bikman: I had access to a file of reviews of your books. I was unpleasantly surprised to see how often reviewers disliked your novels, especially the earlier ones.
Lessing: A reviewer will write a half-damning review of a book, but if the book turns out to have some lasting power, as The Golden Notebook has, they’ll forget all about their reservations and talk about how marvelous they thought that book was.
Bikman: The Golden Notebook – and you mention this in your introduction to the book – was taken up by many readers as a bible of what you refer to as the sex war.
Lessing: It was, and it was a great surprise to me. It shows how naive I was. I was very nastily reviewed in most countries, in fact. They’ve now forgotten that. It’s become a kind of boring, old classic, sitting there on the shelf. And men were angry. Now I get letters from men all the time about The Golden Notebook. But at one time it was classed as a “women’s book.” You see, people are very emotional. If a book upsets someone emotionally, they will very seldom come out with the real reason why they’re upset. They’ll deflect it onto something else. They won’t say, “I’m annoyed with this book because it described how I behaved to my second wife.” They’ll say, “This woman is in bad taste. She’s got no sense of” – I don’t know what, the proprieties or something.
Bikman: I’m also interested in what you said in The Golden Notebook about the pressures in relationships.
Lessing: Living with someone is very, very difficult. How hard it is. Solitude is that great, great luxury which you can hardly ever achieve. People don’t like other people who are perfectly happy by themselves and don’t want to get married and don’t want to do the things other people find essential. I get letters from these marvelous women in the States – I’ve got several pen pals – these naturally quirky, solitary and observant women, and they write me incredible letters, which I adore getting. I don’t answer them properly; I just write and say, “Thank you very much,” which I genuinely feel. But there’s someone living in the middle of America who writes these witty letters about why all her women friends have to get married all the time. It’s like a novel that goes on. I don’t know why people say letter-writing is dead. There are people writing letters by the ream.
Bikman: I’ve read that you wrote two novels before your first one was published. So you did start writing novels at a fairly early age?
Lessing: They were very bad. They really were quite appalling. I’ll tell you what I learned from it, though. One thing was fairly elementary. It was to type, because the first novel was in longhand and I couldn’t read it back. I wrote very fast, and I couldn’t read it. I just know it was awful. And the other thing is that I can write if I get into the groove; if I set things up right I can write easily. It’s a question of setting the stage or something. You have to learn to set up the conditions that are right for you personally.
Bikman: Aside from the novel you’ve just finished, which I think would hold a special place – do you have any novel that is a favorite, that you feel a lot of affection for?
Lessing: At the moment, I feel affection for The Marriages of Zones Three, Four, and Five, but I don’t know how it will strike me in ten years’ time. I might not like it by then. In the past, The Golden Notebook was the most useful to me personally, as a sort of education. But then, every novel’s got a different kind of part to play in your life. Some of my short stories I think are pretty good. But writing short stores doesn’t change you the way a novel does, because writing a novel is more of an intensive effort.
Bikman: Can we talk about the craft of writing?
Lessing: You’re not going to ask me how many hours a day I spend writing, are you? Time and again I get a novel sent to me which is nearly good; my thesis is that talent is in plentiful supply but people don’t stick with it. I send it right back and write, “Well, just do it again.” But they don’t.
Bikman: So you feel there has to be a tremendous persistence?
Lessing: Yes, persistence. And you have to remember that nobody ever wants a new writer. You have to create your own demand.
Testimony to Mysticism Nissa Torrents
Nissa Torrents’s interview originally appeared in La Calle #106, April 1–7, 1980. The following translation was prepared by Paul Schlueter and appeared in the Doris Lessing Newsletter 4 (Winter 1980). Copyright © 1980 by Paul Schlueter. Reprinted with permission.
Torrents: It has been said that since 1962, or since The Golden Notebook, your work has changed direction, that it has inclined toward mysticism and has changed radically.
Lessing: I don’t agree. I recently had to reread all my work for reprinting, and in my first work, The Grass Is Singing, all my themes already appear. Critics tend to compartmentalize, to establish periods, to fragmentize, a tendency that university training reinforces and that seems very harmful to me. At first, they said that I wrote about the race problem, later about Communism, and then about women, the mystic experience, etc., etc., but in reality I am the same person who wrote about the same themes. This tendency to fragmentize, so typical of our society, drives people to crisis, to despair, and that is what I intended to describe in The Golden Notebook. I always write about the individual and that which surrounds him.
Torrents: Yes, but along the way a person discards choices that don’t work, politics, for example.
Lessing: I have never thought that politics resolved anything, nor have I ever defended any definite political position. I have simply limited myself in writing about people who are active politically.
Torrents: Like you yourself. Have you thought of returning to Zimbabwe now that things seem to be on the road to straightening themselves out?
Lessing: I do not intend to return. We served a certain purpose in the 1950s because we insisted on being witnesses to the problem of Rhodesia and to the injustices that were committed there. At that time in England, there was talk of all the colonies except Rhodesia. There was a curtain of silence that ran all the way to the left, which wasn’t able to understand African politicians who quixotically believed in honor and were convinced that in England they knew nothing of arbitrariness and repression as practiced by the white colonists. Later African politicians learned that honor has no place in the modern world.
Torrents: Your characters always go looking for new values, renouncing old, traditional values and revealing the gulf that exists between public values and private practice. It’s a permanent search for one’s own equilibrium.
Lessing: We all do that. Nobody now accepts established values and everyone looks for personal morality. At least, that is, until we weaken and return to the church, or to the churches.
Torrents: I don’t believe so. The majority still accepts for the sake of convenience that which was traditionally established. What you propose is to travel perpetually on a tightrope, and not everyone is so brave.
Lessing: Everybody that I know acts like this, including the time when we were Communists and when we maintained a political morality. Personal morality was exclusively private. We questioned everything, especially the male-female relationship, and it’s there on the left where feminine liberation began to make