A Small Personal Voice. Doris Lessing
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intelligent, well-informed, concerned people, who have taken the trouble to sit down and write to me. One might be in Johannesburg, one in San Francisco, one in Budapest. And here I sit, in London, reading them, at the same time, or one after another – as always, grateful to the writers, and delighted that what I’ve written can stimulate, illuminate, or even annoy. But one letter is entirely about the sex war, about man’s inhumanity to woman, and woman’s inhumanity to man, and the writer has produced pages and pages all about nothing else, for she – but not always a she – can’t see anything else in the book.
The second is about politics, probably from an old Red like myself, and he or she writes many pages about politics, and never mentions any other theme.
These two letters used, when the book was as it were young, to be the most common.
The third letter, once rare but now catching up on the others, is written by a man or a woman who can see nothing in it but the theme of mental illness.
But it is the same book.
And naturally these incidents bring up again questions of what people see when they read a book, and why one person sees one pattern and nothing at all of another pattern, and how odd it is to have, as author, such a clear picture of a book that is seen so very differently by its readers.
And from this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is that it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it, but his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.
And when a book’s pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author, then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.
Interview with Doris Lessing BY ROY NEWQUIST
N. In A Man and Two Women the enormous talent of Doris Lessing can be seen in full bloom. Few writers dig to the emotional heart of human involvement better than Miss Lessing, and several critics have observed, in one phrase or another, Miss Lessing’s almost uncanny grasp of human relationships: the actual, the artificial, and above all, her command of the vast area where the real and the contrived are blended into the bulk of our lives. To go back to the beginning of things I’ll ask Miss Lessing where she was born, reared, and educated.
LESSING: I was born in Persia because my father was running a bank there. He was in Persia because he was fed up with England. He found it too narrow after World War I. Unfortunately, I remember little about Persia consciously – though recently, under mescaline, I found that I remembered a great deal, that it had influenced me without my knowing it.
Then my father went to Southern Rhodesia on an impulse (which is how he ran his life), to farm. He had never been a farmer, but he took a very large tract of land – thousands of acres, in American terms – to grow maize. Thus I was brought up in a district that was populated sparsely, very sparsely indeed, by Scottish people who had left Scotland or England because it was too small for them. I spent most of my childhood alone in a landscape with very few human things to dot it. It was sometimes hellishly lonely, but now I realize how extraordinary it was, and how very lucky I was.
After this I went into town – a very small town that had about ten thousand white persons in it. The black population, of course, did not count, though it was fairly large. I married in my teens, when I was far too young, and had two children. That marriage was a failure and I married again. Let’s put it this way: I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married. I can’t blame the people I’ve been married to – by and large I’ve been at fault.
N. When did you start writing?
LESSING: I think I’ve always been a writer by temperament. I wrote some bad novels in my teens. I always knew I would be a writer, but not until I was quite old – twenty-six or -seven – did I realize that I’d better stop saying I was going to be one and get down to business. I was working in a lawyer’s office at the time, and I remember walking in and saying to my boss, ‘I’m giving up my job because I’m going to write a novel.’ He very properly laughed, and I indignantly walked home and wrote The Grass Is Singing. I’m oversimplifying; I didn’t write it as simply as that because I was clumsy at writing and it was much too long, but I did learn by writing it. It focused upon white people in Southern Rhodesia, but it could have been about white people anywhere south of the Zambezi, white people who were not up to what is expected of them in a society where there is very heavy competition from the black people coming up. Then I wrote short stories set in the district I was brought up in, where very isolated white farmers lived immense distances from each other. You see, in this background, people can spread themselves out. People who might be extremely ordinary in a society like England’s, where people are pressed into conformity, can become wild eccentrics in all kinds of ways they wouldn’t dare try elsewhere. This is one of the things I miss, of course, by living in England. I don’t think my memory deceives me, but I think there were more colourful people back in Southern Rhodesia because of the space they had to move in. I gather, from reading American literature, that this is the kind of space you have in America in the Midwest and West.
I left Rhodesia and my second marriage to come to England, bringing a son with me. I had very little money, but I’ve made my living as a professional writer ever since, which is really very hard to do. I had rather hard going, to begin with, which is not a complaint; I gather from my American writer-friends that it is easier to be a writer in England than in America because there is much less pressure put on us. We are not expected to be successful, and it is no sin to be poor.
N. I don’t know how we can compare incomes, but in England it seems that writers make more from reviewing and from broadcasts than they can in the United States.
LESSING: I don’t know. When I meet American writers, the successful ones, they seem to make more on royalties, but then they also seem to spend much more. I know a writer isn’t supposed to talk about money, but it is very important. It is vital for a writer to know how much he can write to please himself, and how much, or little, he must write to earn money. In England you don’t have to ‘go commercial’ if you don’t mind being poor. It so happens that I’m not poor any more, thank goodness, because it’s not good for anyone to be. Yet there are disadvantages to living in England. It’s not an exciting place to live, it is not one of the hubs of the world, like America, or Russia, or China. England is a backwater, and it doesn’t make much difference what happens here, or what decisions are made here. But from the point of view of writing, England is a paradise for me.
You see, I was brought up in a country where there is very heavy pressure put on people. In Southern Rhodesia it is not possible to detach yourself from what is going on. This means that you spend all your time in a torment of conscientiousness. In England – I’m not saying it’s a perfect society, far from it – you can get on with your work in peace and quiet when you choose to withdraw. For this I’m very grateful – I imagine there are few countries left in the world where you have this right of privacy.
N. This what you’re supposed to find in Paris.
LESSING: Paris is too exciting. I find it impossible to work there. I proceed to have a wonderful time and don’t write a damn thing.
N. To work from A Man and Two Women for a bit. The almost surgical job you do in dissecting people, not bodily, but emotionally, has made me wonder if you choose your characters from real life, form composites