Running Through Stories in My Mind Michael Thorpe

      Michael Thorpe’s interview was conducted June 23, 1980, in London and originally appeared in the Danish journal Kunapipi in 1982. Copyright © 1982 by Kunapipi. Reprinted with permission.

      Thorpe: Mrs. Lessing, perhaps we may begin by speaking a little about the relationship between your early life in Southern Rhodesia, growing up on the veld, and what you describe as the gift of your solitary childhood. If I may relate you to your heroine, Martha Quest, in one of your early novels, you describe “the gift of her solitary childhood on the veld” as “that knowledge of something painful and ecstatic, something central and fixed but flowing. A sense of movement, of separate things interacting and finally becoming one but greater. It was this which was her lodestone, even her conscience.” I would like to ask you if you would perhaps expand a little upon the sense in which you use the word “conscience” there, because I feel that this may not be altogether clear to many readers.

      Lessing: I’m using it in a sense that it is a feeling that you measure other things against. But it’s very hard to describe, of course, because what I was describing in Martha Quest was that kind of ecstatic experience that many adolescents do in fact have. It’s very common to adolescents, and I think perhaps it’s overvalued.

      Thorpe: Is it a romantic ecstasy?

      Lessing: Oh, I don’t know if it’s romantic, no, but it’s extremely common. You’ll find it described in a great deal of religious literature too. It’s not an uncommon thing, but it is a reminder perhaps that life is not quite so black and white or cut and dried as we sometimes make it, and if you have had this kind of thing happen to you then it’s something to refer back to, if you are about to make things too oversimplified.

      Thorpe: May I ask you if this conscience is the individual conscience of which you speak in the essay “A Small Personal Voice” where you speak of the importance of dealing with the individual conscience in its relationship with the collective. Is that a different conscience?

      Lessing: Well, I hadn’t thought of relating them, I must say. In “A Small Personal Voice” I was preoccupied at that particular time – it was the midfifties – with how being a member of political parties or groups or collectives of various kinds can in fact pervert you and make you tell lies. Now this was something that not only I, but very, very many people were thinking about at that time; indeed, all the people I knew at that time were thinking about it in one way or another. Some people in fact had suffered very deeply because of it. I lived in England, and I hadn’t suffered, but people from Europe, from the Communist countries, and from America, where the Cold War was something fairly savage, had done a lot of thinking, and that got into my essay because I was, and am, concerned at the way you can sell yourself out under pressure from other people. It’s extremely easy to do, particularly when you think you are in the right about something. This is the essence of politics. You know that you are in the right. It’s also the essence of religions which are right by definition. If I were to rewrite this essay, I wouldn’t perhaps put the emphasis now where I did then, but I still think that in a time when we are more and more institutionalized – because this is what is happening to us – more and more expected to be group people and members of collectives, it’s extremely important for us to try to decide what we think, what I think as an individual. It’s extremely hard to separate it, you know.

      Thorpe: The individual conscience, then, that you speak of in that essay is a moral conscience, and perhaps the conscience that you speak of in the novel referring to the ecstatic experience in childhood is a much deeper thing. But it seems to me that in your work the two are intimately related, that the sense in which we use the word “conscience” is perhaps a highly spiritual one rather than what I suppose many readers would take to be a matter of political viewpoint or leaning or even the orthodox moral conscience.

      Lessing: You see, I think one shouldn’t get these two things confused because dealing with ordinary life, day-to-day life, in our relationships with groups or institutions, I do not think one needs to use anything very high-flown or mystical. It seems to me that the problem there is rather different. It’s a question of the conditioned conscience there, what had been conditioned into me by society, and what the individual conscience, as far as we can be aware of it, is saying. This problem of the conditioned conscience is one that isn’t lightly pushed aside; just watch any child being brought up. From the moment this unfortunate being draws breath it is being told “you are good,” “you are bad,” “what a good little baby you are” – all this goes on throughout every person’s life and it’s always a question of what is convenient for the parents or society because every child is some kind of wild animal that has to be tamed; otherwise, no one can deal with it. It has to be, but there has to be a point where any one of us says all my “you-are-good, you-are-bad” comes from society. Now that is the conditioned conscience which, I think, is our biggest prisoner. You see, when you are standing face to face with your group, which happens more and more in this rather unpleasant world of ours, then you have to decide what is speaking, is it “you are a good little boy, you are a bad little boy,” that you are brought up with, because the collective and institution always talks to the good little boy or the bad little boy or good little girl. That is the strength of institutions and politics and states and armies and the lot. They can go straight into your childhood conditioning – ”Oh, he’s such a good little boy, such a good little girl.” That is where they get us all the time. And now this other conscience, this sense of something much deeper is something you build on, particularly as a writer. It’s something that you allow – I cook a lot – to simmer quietly there so that you look at it from time to time and see what it’s getting up to. I am of course talking about the unconscious.