Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing
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the farm, very fast and very bad.
Dean: What kind of novels?
Lessing: //One was a very mannered artificial book about Salisbury social life. I was seventeen.
Dean: Was there a political edge to your writing then?
Lessing: No, it was bad social satire.
Dean: I’m interested to know why and how you became different? I mean, the prevailing wind of that culture which was white supremacy wasn’t questioned I should imagine by the people you lived with.
Lessing: People say how remarkable it is that you saw through all that color-bar thing when you were so young. I do not feel that this was due to anything innate, anything on my part at all. I think it was simply that I had to be critical about everything, all my life. I can’t remember any time in my life where I wasn’t sitting looking at the grown-up scene, for example, and thinking, This must be some great charade they’ve all agreed to play. I was always seeing through what went on. That was the makings of a critic, you see. Now this is a bad thing as well, because it can be very sterile.
Dean: There’s an epigraph to your first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which goes I think, “it is by the failures and the misfits of a civilization that one can judge its weaknesses.” Have you always felt yourself sitting in judgment of your civilization?
Lessing: You see, this is a very crucial question. Yes, I have, and perhaps it’s not much use, but I think it was the way I was brought up. You must imagine my parents who were Tory and admiring Churchill when he was still some pain in the neck, you know, but soon afterwards he became a kind of cherubic saint with a cigar. He was no good, you see, because he prophesied the Second World War and said we should prepare for it and my parents who suffered terribly from the First World War, their entire lives were ruined by it, were torn up, you know. They were anguished by the approaching war and that no one was doing anything about it. Imagine them sitting in the middle of the bush – our nearest neighbors were three, four, seven miles away, listening to the BBC, eight o’clock news and Big Ben and angry because of English politics. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t heard people discussing politics. This was probably my earliest education.
Dean: You must have read widely and I’m sure voraciously as a child and as an adolescent.
Lessing: I read in Salisbury when I felt myself very shut up there. You know what it’s like, this dreadful provincial little hole. I read very strange novels, almost as a deliberate counterbalance, like Proust. There was a time when I think I must have been really quite an authority on Proust. It was such a relief to read something like that. Somebody once said Rhodesia was a combination of the Wild West and Tunbridge Wells. I would read my way from book to book. I found a book mentioned in one and then sent for it, to England, the Everyman’s Library. The excitement of these books arriving after waiting sometimes for six weeks was the marvelous moment in my life, when a new book, a parcel of books came, from England and I could start in. Sometimes they were absolutely useless to me because I hadn’t got to the stage of appreciating them.
Dean: I think you wrote once that Africa is an old fever, latent always in the blood. Are you still carrying that old fever?
Lessing: Yes, very much so. And I dream about it all the time with terrible nostalgia and a sort of anguish, because that’s finished, I think; and you know, I haven’t been allowed to go there, for I’m a prohibited immigrant. Now here my head and my heart are absolutely like this, as they often are, but here particularly, because while my head applauds like this, out goes my heart. I weep like a small child, you see, that I’m shut out of my country. Now when I say this to an African he very probably laughs, and I’m on his side. But there are some things, you see, that you can do nothing about.
Dean: What is it that your heart grieves for?
Lessing: It’s a beautiful place, and the Africans, you see. I know it’s very suspect for the daughter of a white settler, which is what I am, you see, to talk about Africans in this way, but I see that Van der Post also does, so I’m in good company. I miss the Africans so much; they’re such beautiful people. They’ve got this marvellous grace and good humor and charm, and I miss it.
Dean: I’m going to wrench you away from Africa now rather cruelly. The year is 1949. You’re arriving in England, a source of so much of your culture, with the scars of two marriages, I think, and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in your suitcase. This was post-war London, very austere, very gray. Was it a shock to you?
Lessing: Yes, it was. It was so gray and lightless and grim and unpainted and bombed. It took a lot of getting used to. And of course I had very little money and fairly difficult circumstances. I had a small child. You see, I recently discovered I was a one-parent family, which everyone knows was quite hard.
Dean: Something you wrote that seemed to me to be terribly heartfelt was on experiencing England for the first time: everybody was so kind, so decent, so bloody dull.
Lessing: Well, it was dull. You see the colonies are full of very outsize characters. There’s plenty of room for everyone’s eccentricities to blossom, and here there isn’t space for it. You find people being eccentric behind closed doors. You get to know them, then you find these marvelous maniacs living their quiet, mad lives, but it’s not out in the open at all.
Dean: When The Grass Is Singing was published and acclaimed, did your life change? Did you earn a lot of money?
Lessing: No, I didn’t at all. I had a £150 advance and at that time I had a job as a typist again to earn a bit of money, and I didn’t know it was impossible to live on what you earned by writing, so I tossed up the job and sold my clothes – all that kind of thing, chiefly evening dresses. You see, we danced in Rhodesia, in Zimbabwe, we danced; I didn’t in London, so I sold all that kind of thing and got on with writing short stories. The publisher Michael Joseph kept ringing me up to say, “We have reprinted The Grass Is Singing,” and I said, “Oh good.” You see, I thought that everyone was reprinted.
Dean: In the early ’50s you published Martha Quest, which is the story of a young girl growing into maturity through sex and marriage, disastrously, and coming to grips for the first time with social and political realities. This has the shape and feel obviously of autobiography. Is there much of you there?
Lessing: Yes, some of it; you mean the character. Yes, this pugnacious intolerant character, yes absolutely, of course, that’s me. But this whole series gets less autobiographical as it goes on. Don’t forget that halfway through the series I wrote The Golden Notebook, which completely changed me, you see. It wasn’t that I wrote five volumes one after the other.
Dean: How did you come to write The Golden Notebook?
Lessing: A friend of mine kept notebooks and they were on politics, psychology, her husband, children, job, and I thought that was the oddest thing. When you’re living a life, you don’t live in this kind of way at all, do you? It’s just inhuman. There’s something wrong with someone who thinks like this. So I used this, when I was working out the shape of The Golden Notebook. As you know, there’s this framework, the absolutely conventional novel. Five bits of conventional novel and all this chaos in the middle. One thing I was saying was this feeling of despair, which every writer feels when they’ve finished a novel, that you haven’t been able to say it because life is too complex ever to be put into words. That’s one thing I was saying through the structure of this book.
I’d constructed this whole book on my experience, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what I knew women were thinking and feeling, but it never crossed my mind that I was writing about feminism or what is now called Women’s Lib, because I thought I was doing the opposite. I had thought my way into the conclusion that we all split ourselves