Putting the Questions Differently

I don’t have the old kind of feminist thoughts that I used to have. I mean, I’ve lost my moral indignation completely. I certainly try to understand what is happening. That’s quite different from trying to think what ought to be happening. The thing is that in trying to find what happens, you come to some very interesting conclusions. And one of mine is that this great suppressed class of women in fact keeps everything going. They are what makes things run. I do so much hate the way women who have children and run homes are put down all the time. Sometimes you meet a woman with four kids and you say, “What are you doing?” and she says, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m only a housewife.” It’s enough to make you cry when you know the work this woman does, how hard she has struggled with it all. Yet they’re so apologetic. They think they haven’t done anything. It’s awful. There isn’t any harder or more demanding job, or one that needs more quality. Middle-aged women, at the end of half a lifetime of working with children and so forth, are the most highly equipped people there are. They can turn their hands to absolutely anything. They can cope with God-knows-what human situations with tact and patience. I used this theme a little bit in Summer Before the Dark.

Bikman: In your novels, particularly the first four Children of Violence books, you write so incisively of the forces that shape women’s lives. Nearly every issue that the Women’s Movement in the United States has raised in the past decade is discussed in those novels and, somewhat less centrally, in the last Children of Violence book, The Four-Gated City. Do you have any idea how you developed those perceptions?

Lessing: It would be enough to say I’m a woman, after all? You know, it wasn’t my generation that invented feminism. My mother was a bit of a feminist. In fact, it was born, I think, with the French Revolution. You see, every generation suddenly invents everything.//

Bikman: Did the conditions of your growing up in Rhodesia contribute to your perceptions?

Lessing: I had a very isolated childhood. There were various reasons why I had to develop an extremely clear and critical mind. It was simply survival. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t in my life been ridiculously emotional. Without boring you with all the psychological details, my position in the family was such that I was very critical, and fairly early on. I had to be, because my mother and father were both in complicated emotional states. I was under terrible pressure as a child, which is true of every child, mind you, but I think it was slightly worse in my case. And then I was in this social set-up, which I disliked, this white-black thing. I can’t remember a time when it didn’t make me uneasy, even when I didn’t know why I was. I think most young people have an extremely clear eye as to what goes on, but women, particularly, tend to lose it when they become adolescents. Perhaps I lost it less than some.

Bikman: So you were able to see clearly the dynamic between white settlers and the black population?

Lessing: I wasn’t clearly seeing it at all. It took many years for me to see it. I think it had far more to do with the family set-up. I had to fight every inch of the way against a very difficult family situation. I’ve got several friends who had a fairly tough childhood, and every one of them has this extremely clear critical eye about what goes on – which is not always a good thing. It can make you very unhappy. You tend to be somewhat bleak, which I am. I think a good many children are born looking at the adult world – because they’ve been forced into it – with an extremely cold eye. And I had it, or I can’t remember any time I haven’t had it.

Bikman: Did you know when you began the Children of Violence series that it was going to be five books?

Lessing: Yes, I knew almost at once that it was five books, roughly sketched out in my mind. I didn’t know how it was going to end, of course. It got less and less realistic as it went on. A good deal of it was in fact autobiographical, but some of it was invented. I think most writers have to start very realistically because that’s a way of establishing what they are, particularly women, I’ve noticed. For a lot of women, when they start writing it’s a way of finding out who they are. When you’ve found out, you can start making things up.

Bikman: The idea of the perfect city appears in several of your books, even as early as Martha Quest, when Martha has a vision of a golden city. Shikasta, of course, is based on an ideal city that gives rise to harmony and serenity. Before Shikasta, the idea seems to have been most fully stated in The Four-Gated City. In writing Shikasta, did you consciously go back to The Four-Gated City and take that moment and expand it into a full-length book?

Lessing: No. You see, the whole concept of a city, four-gated or otherwise, is so archetypal, so in the mythology of all nations, when you start looking. You will find it’s nearly always a metaphor for states of mind, states of being. Anyway, my thought is a serious query about the effect the proportions of buildings have on the people who live in them. This is not a metaphorical thought at all. This is a practical thought, which I think about more and more. And I wonder if the violence, the antisocial attitudes we associate with high-rise buildings, the tower blocks [a reference to London’s council flats, or public housing], might have something to do not only with the fact that the people who live in them have no real responsibility for the building as a whole – which is what I think the sociologists have decided – but I’m wondering if buildings affect the mentality of people in ways we haven’t begun to research. This is my thought. This is my specific thought, not metaphorical. And I’ve used it in Shikasta as a query because I’m not making statements. You know, whenever one writes a book like Shikasta, it’s a series of queries – to myself, to other people – as ideas.

I think it will turn out that there is a whole science of building that we know nothing about, that we might have lost and that ancient civilizations might have known about. And that is how to affect the minds of people living in buildings. Ordinary people who will regard such a thought as “mystical” or silly will in fact say, “I cannot live in that house, it upsets me.” Or they’ll say it has a ghost or something. This kind of thought goes on in my mind at the moment. I can’t enter a building without wondering what other aspects it may have. But we don’t know. Look at cathedrals. They were built in ways which a great many people thought were very specific, to produce certain states of mind. Yet we don’t think like that any more.

And this leads me to the other thought. It is a commonplace way of thinking that we are the great high pinnacle of all kinds of sciences, but I think, on the contrary, we have lost a great deal of knowledge from the past. Far from being on a high pinnacle, we’re on a very low level indeed, in all kinds of ways. You mention buildings because they run throughout my work. Now you can go through a writer’s work and say, “Writer X is fascinated by the symbol” – I don’t know, a rose or a seagull. But what is interesting is not that there should be a rose or a seagull or a teacup or whatever, but what use is made of it, how it develops. Because it can be a metaphor in one book and it can be something quite specific in another.

Bikman: Do younger women writers seek you out?

Lessing: Yes, they do, and I like that very much. I enjoy all that. Mind you that I think women writers are pretty independent 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 (#ulink_ead27308-c860-52f5-b3a4-f8578c0d9151)

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 this search, through this kind of critical doubting.

Torrents: But this constant exercising of moral judgment leads your characters to complete loneliness.

Lessing: I don’t believe that it would be a worse kind of loneliness than that experienced by a married woman. One has to accept loneliness; it’s the human condition, and no matter how many parties or churches we belong to, we cannot deny this central truth. Political parties and religions are above all social structures, refuges. One must take risks and not think of the loneliness that awaits us. Otherwise, life is impossible.

Torrents: You’re very severe; you push your characters to the limit, toward the point of irrationality where a sense of direction and accumulated experience can’t help us.

Lessing: But that isn’t a disaster, only a way of seeing things more clearly. We all have extraordinary, non-rational capacities that we use to communicate in a very subtle way. Without these the world would be destroyed. Even physicians, who are the most obstinate in accepting this type of experience, are beginning to work with the metaphysical. The best scientists, those on the highest levels, always come closer and closer to the mystical. Much of what Einstein said could have been said by a Christian mystic, St. Augustine, for example. Science, which is the religion for today, looks for the metaphysical, as with Catholics of old. Hence the boom in science fiction, which reflects this preoccupation and which moves in the world of the non-rational.

Torrents: You’ve always been interested in that. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, in your exploration of schizophrenia and of the savage treatment that society dispenses to its “crazies,” you seem to follow Foucault in considering that treatment to be the central metaphor of social repression.

Lessing: Not entirely. I don’t believe, as does Szasz, that mental illness doesn’t exist. It does exist, but it’s also true that the label corresponds to the discomforts that it causes the establishment. I have read narratives about war in which the protagonists, imprisoned or famished, experienced sensations similar to schizophrenia, and this has made me think that under certain conditions we could all exhibit signs of “abnormality.” The dark is in us, and if we lower the barriers it will penetrate us and we’ll show the symptoms.

Torrents: Your encounter with Idries Shah and Sufism was fundamental, because it established your interest in the irrational. When did this occur?

Lessing: At the beginning of the 1960s and as a result of the experiences that came to me in writing The Golden Notebook. When I wrote that I was a Marxist and a rationalist, but I experienced many things I could not explain. I believe that people try to deny a large part of their experience for fear of those who would call them crazy, but I decided the contrary. I read a book of Idries Shah’s, The Searchers; I realized that it answered many of my questions, and since then I have studied it sufficiently.//

Torrents: You have complained about the poverty of language as an instrument.