A Small Personal Voice. Doris Lessing
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I write about come out of my life. Some, well, I don’t know where they come from. They just spring from my own consciousness, perhaps the subconscious, and I’m surprised as they emerge.
This is one of the excitements about writing. Someone says something, drops a phrase, and later you find that phrase turning into a character in a story, or a single, isolated, insignificant incident becomes the germ of a plot.
N. If you were going to give advice to the young writer, what would that advice be?
LESSING: You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. This is hard to describe.
N. What about reading as a background ?
LESSING: I’ve known very good writers who’ve never read anything. Of course, this is rare.
N. What about your own reading background?
LESSING: Well, because I had this isolated childhood, I read a great deal. There was no one to talk to, so I read. What did I read? The best – the classics of European and American literature. One of the advantages of not being educated was that I didn’t have to waste time on the second-best. Slowly, I read these classics. It was my education, and I think it was a very good one.
I could have been educated – formally, that is – but I felt some neurotic rebellion against my parents who wanted me to be brilliant academically. I simply contracted out of the whole thing and educated myself. Of course, there are huge gaps in my education, but I’m nonetheless grateful that it went as it did. One bit of advice I might give the young writer is to get rid of the fear of being thought of as a perfectionist, or to be regarded as pompous. They should strike out for the best, to be the best. God knows we all fall short of our potential, but if we aim very high we’re likely to be so much better.
N. How do you view today’s literature? and theatre?
LESSING: About theatre, well, I’m very annoyed right now by that phrase ‘kitchen sink’ that is being used so frequently. I don’t think it means very much. There are two kinds of theatre, and I don’t think they should be confused. People who want to see a roaring farce, like Sailor Beware, should enjoy it. It’s perfectly legitimate, and there’s nothing wrong with the theatre of entertainment.
The cathartic theatre, theatre that moves people in such a way that they or their lives are changed, or they understand more about themselves, is a totally different thing. The phrase ‘kitchen sink’ comes from critics who don’t know their jobs, or theatregoers who are being bullied into seeing things they don’t want to see. They should never go if they don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with a minority theatre and a minority literature.
N. What about the recent trend toward introspection?
LESSING: Well, I haven’t been to America, but I’ve met a great many Americans and I think they have a tendency to be much more aware of themselves, and conscious of their society, than we are in Britain (though we’re moving that way). By a coincidence I was thinking, this afternoon, about a musical like West Side Story, which comes out of a sophisticated society which is very aware of itself. You wouldn’t have found in Britain, at the time that was written, a lyric like ‘Gee, Officer Krupke.’ You have to be very socially self-conscious to write West Side Story.
N. What do you feel about the fiction being turned out today? Does it share the same virtues and failings as theatre or can it be considered separately?
LESSING: Quite separately. You want to know what contemporary writers I enjoy reading? The American writers I like, for different reasons, are Malamud and Norman Mailer – even when he’s right off centre he lights rockets. And Algren. And that man who wrote Catch-22. And of course, Carson McCullers. But I only read the books that drift my way, I don’t know everything that comes out.
N. How do you feel about critical reactions to your own works?
LESSING: I don’t get my reviews any more. I read reviews if they turn up in the papers I get, but I go through them fast and try to pay little attention to what is said. I think the further I’m removed from this area – reviews, the literary squabble-shop, the better. I got angry over reviews of The Golden Notebook. They thought it was personal – it was, in parts. But it was a very highly structured book, carefully planned. The point of that book was the relation of its parts to each other. But the book they tried to turn it into was: The Confessions of Doris Lessing. I remember I went down to my publishers’ office to look through the reviews, because they said I’d had a lot of good ones and I should see them. Well I remember thinking: It’s surely not possible that all these reviewers should have minds like gossip columnists. Because of the shape of the book, and the point of that shape, and what it meant, they weren’t interested.
You see, the literary society in London is very small and incestuous. Everyone knows everyone. The writer who tosses a scrap of autobiography into an otherwise fictional piece (which writers always have done and always will do), he’s not credited with any imagination. Everyone says, ‘Oh, that character’s so and so,’ and ‘I know that character.’ It’s all too personal. The standards of criticism are very low. I don’t know about American critics, but in this country we have an abysmal standard. Very few writers I know have any respect for the criticism they get. Our attitude is, and has to be, Are the reviews selling reviews or not ? In all other respects, the reviews are humiliating, they are on such a low level and it’s all so spiteful and personal.
N. Do reviews sell books in England ?
LESSING: My publishers claim they help build a reputation and that indirectly they do sell books. This is probably true. But in Great Britain everything is much more cumulative and long-term than in America. One simply settles in for what you call the long haul. But ‘reputation’ – what are reputations worth when they are made by reviewers who are novelists? Writers aren’t necessarily good critics. Yet the moment you’ve written a novel, you’re invited to write criticism, because the newspapers like to have one’s ‘name’ on them. One is a ‘name’ or one is not, you see. Oh, it’s very pleasant to be one, I’m not complaining, I enjoy it. But everyone knows that writers tend to be wrong about each other. Look at Thomas Mann and Brecht – they were both towering geniuses, in different ways, and they didn’t have any good word for each other.
Ideally we should have critics who are critics and not novelists who need to earn a bit to tide them over, or failed novelists. Is there such an animal, though? Of course, sometimes a fine writer is a good critic, like Lawrence. Look at something that happened last year – I wrote a long article for the New Statesman about the mess socialism is in. There was a half-line reference to X. To this day, people say to me, ‘that article you wrote attacking X.’ This is how people’s minds work now. At the first night of one of Wesker’s plays, up comes a certain literary figure and says, his voice literally wet with anxiety, ‘Oh, Wesker is a much better playwright than Osborne, he is, isn’t he?’ He felt that someone’s grave should be danced on. He was simply tired of voting for Osborne. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In and out.
You’re going to say the literary world has always been like this. But what I said about the theatre earlier applies – nothing wrong with the audience who likes Who’s for Tennis? and the critics who do. It’s all theirs. But they should keep out of the serious theatre. Similarly, of course, the literary world is always going to seethe with people who say, I’m bored with voting for X. But writers should try to keep away from them. Another bit of advice to a young writer – but unfortunately