Putting the Questions Differently

Lessing: Words are contaminated, full of traditional associations, above all in psychology, in religion, in the interior world.// Words such as “the unconscious,” “the ego,” “the id” … They are few and they’re all connected with factions, with specific groups. Hence, I find myself forced to write by analogy, in order to avoid the mundane. Memoirs of a Survivor is the direct result of my meditating about the inadequacy of language. I write as in legends or in fairy tales, by means of metaphors and analogies, but it is necessary to be careful, because what is not realistic is slippery ground. One must accumulate enough daily details in order that the reader isn’t lost, since he requires the presence of mundane details so that he can then respond to the irrational.

Torrents: Your questions about language coincide with those of the avant garde, which you don’t belong to; though they start with different presuppositions in trying to avoid the referential, they end in complete obscurity. Do you believe that your work, increasingly private as it is, can also end up so very obscure because of the lack of a common language?

Lessing: Not a single experience is totally private. What can happen to you or to me can happen to many others, and that is my response to the accusation of bourgeois individualism. Where is this individualism? No one has exclusive experiences or thoughts.

Torrents: Progressive internalization has a surprising result, the appearance of apocalyptic thought. In your most recent works there is evidence of our proximity to the end, to an Armageddon that is very close.

Lessing: We are already living it. The newspapers this past week gave some statistics from the FAO about infantile hunger. Some said that 37 million children will die before they are six months old, others 57 million, and this is without counting those who will die of malnutrition or progressive infirmity. This is the apocalypse, here and now.

Torrents: Can something be done to stop this disaster?

Lessing: I’m not sure. People believe that the situation is controlled, but this is not so. Some individuals can choose, but not groups or nations.

Torrents: You have frequently spoken about the writer’s “small personal voice” and of your duty to describe the immorality of the system. Do you still believe that this is possible?

Lessing: Possibly. Now I know that if I write faithfully what I think or feel at a particular moment, then I’ll get to the other matters. At times when I write, my obsessions seem to me to be madness, but when I finish a book, it’s already almost a common situation, because everything changes so rapidly. One can’t choose one’s readers; they choose us.

Torrents: But you have enjoyed the great talent of seeing things before they happen, such as collective obsessions and talk about racism, or feminism, or about putting the metaphysical before everything else … I’d like to ask you about your working routine.

Lessing: Writing is habit. I have disciplined myself to write very fast in short periods of time. It was the only way when my children were small and I could write only when they were in school or playing in the street. If I do not like what I write I discard it. I prefer throwing it away to editing it.

Torrents: I’d like to speak about women and their roles as mates. In your work there are many such women, but they’re never successful. Perhaps the only relationship that can work is the fleeting one, the one-night stand.

Lessing: It took me a long time to realize that I was not made for marriage. If I had known beforehand, I could have saved myself much sadness and anguish. As a young woman I believed that to lie down for one night without the heat of a man’s body was a monumental disaster, but I have slowly realized that it is not like that and have gone so far as to be self-sufficient, which implies a great loneliness because the majority of men, naturally, don’t like this attitude; it’s not needing them. I don’t believe that it’s worth the effort necessary in order to get near a man, in order to intend to form a couple. Men need to be taken care of, to have their egos treated tenderly. They like to be the center and to push the woman to the outside edge. Perhaps the young are different, more flexible. Everything changes so rapidly! I lost much time looking for my ideal man, my match, and now I believe that perhaps my failure lay in trying to make the kind of search appropriate to another historical period and that it’s no longer possible. But I have women friends who are attempting that. They treat men as men treat us. They are free, strong. They demand sex, but when they reach thirty the biological urge possesses them. They want to have children and everything is gone, and then they fall into a routine that will completely destroy them if they don’t maintain their alertness.

Torrents: Men don’t like it that we behave like them. Moreover, certain forms of the Women’s Liberation Movement have hardened masculine attitudes in the war between the sexes.

Lessing: The danger is in confusing liberation of one with the submission of another. I have a couple of liberated friends who have simply inverted roles and have husbands as servants. The Yankee model!

Torrents: Can it be that marriage doesn’t work?

Lessing: The needs of adults and those of children are different. That which is for us a dried-up institution, institutionalized frustration, is a necessity for the young who require a stable home, a constant relationship. They need their parents in a conventional way, the home and the routine, and the couple that cannot confront those responsibilities shouldn’t have children, because the only thing that they get, if they have them, their problem children, is mental turmoil, much sadness.

Torrents: But what you say is terrible, because procreation implies destruction, more or less spectacularly, of the adult and his possibilities, a total sacrifice.

Lessing: That has been my experience. The children who live only with the father or the mother suffer indescribably. We don’t have the right to get what we want at the expense of others, but people oblige themselves in continuously seeking happiness as if they had a right to it. Perhaps a happy marriage is possible, but only with a great effort, renewable everyday, and people aren’t disposed to make the effort or the sacrifice. We want it all to be simple, on a platter. As with prepared meals, soup in packages, fish without fishbones. They sweeten everything and at the end they all know it’s a trick. It’s not even necessary to chew! This is the sign of our time – to avoid pain, to accept that which exists, to demand happiness – but we have forgotten that no one owes us anything and that pain and sacrifice are necessary to find the right path, for moral equilibrium.

The Need to Tell Stories Christopher Bigsby (#ulink_04127883-5e9d-5f0b-90a6-a078029f2f35)

Christopher Bigsby’s interview took place April 23, 1980, and originally appeared in The Radical Imagination of the Liberal Tradition (London: Junction Press, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Christopher Bigsby. Reprinted with permission.

Bigsby: You once said there was a great deal that George Eliot didn’t understand because she was moral. What did you mean by that?

Lessing: Well, I think she was a victim, like many of the women of that time, of Victorian morality. Because she was “living in sin” with George Lewes there was a great pressure on her to be good. I noticed the same pressure on myself when I wrote The Golden Notebook. I am not being paranoid; you have got no idea of the kind of attack I got. It was really quite barbarous. They said I was a man-hater, a balls-cutter, particularly Americans. I noticed enormous pressure on me to be feminine and to be good and to be kind and sweet. Quite nauseating it was. I notice that other women who have gone through the same pressure confess to the same; they suddenly find themselves thinking, Oh God, I mustn’t do that because they will say I am a balls-cutter. Well, this has already gone because Women’s Lib has achieved so much. But to go back to George Eliot, I would be very surprised if she wasn’t falling over backwards to be good because of the pressure on her. I mean, it was no joke living in that society. It must have been dreadful.

Bigsby: You mention that you were alarmed or surprised by the reaction you got from men with respect to The Golden Notebook. Were you equally alarmed by the reaction you got from women?

Lessing: Oh, you are quite wrong in thinking that I only got attacks from men. I got a lot of support from men, from a few men, and the most vicious attacks from women, on the lines that I was letting the side down by revealing the kind of things that were said. I had never thought on those lines at all. Not only had I not thought that I was writing a women’s book but it had never crossed my mind to think anything of writing the kind of things down that I was writing. Women talk like this. Men talk about women, letting off steam in locker rooms and so on, but they don’t necessarily mean it. And when women sit around and say these things they don’t necessarily mean it either; it is letting off steam. It never crossed my mind when I wrote all that down, that it hadn’t really been done before. I thought, How is it that I am getting these violent reactions? What have I done? What have I said? And when I started to look around I couldn’t think of any novels voicing the kind of criticisms women have of men. Almost like breathing, you know, so deep-rooted.

Bigsby: In an essay called “A Small Personal Voice” which, admittedly, you wrote quite a long time ago now, you said that the highest point of literature was the novel of the nineteenth century, the work of the great realists. You also said that the realist novel was the highest form of prose writing. What led you to say that then and why did you move away from that position with The Golden Notebook and with most of your subsequent work?

Lessing: I was wondering myself not long ago why I reacted so strongly – something must have happened to make me react. I do remember having that set of thoughts about the nineteenth-century novel. I mean, it was magnificent, wasn’t it? What they had was a kind of self-assurance which I don’t think any one of us has got. Why don’t we have it?

Bigsby: Well, you did say that part of your admiration came from the fact that they shared what you called a climate of ethical judgment.

Lessing: That’s right. Well, they did. We don’t have anything like that.

Bigsby: On the other hand, you said of George Eliot that she didn’t understand certain things because she was moral.

Lessing: Well, there was a kind of womanly certitude in George Eliot which you would not find, let’s say, in Chekhov. There’s something tight there in judgment. I admire George Eliot enormously, I am not saying I don’t. But there is something too cushioned in her judgments.

Bigsby: In talking about a climate of ethical judgment were you suggesting that there is a necessary relationship between art and morality, or that there should be, that art is a moral force in some way?

Lessing: I don’t know if there should be. But if you write a book which you don’t see as moral believe me your readers do, and that’s something that I can’t ever quite come to terms with. Now The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five I almost regard as outside judgment because it’s a legend. It is full of forgiveness. Wouldn’t you say it was full of forgiveness? An old warrior of the sex war simply shrugs his shoulders and gives up and laughs; I mean, that is something.

Bigsby: Yes, I think it is, but reverting to this question of why you admire the nineteenth-century novel, why did you yourself move away from that tradition which you wanted to claim early on?

Lessing: Because it’s too narrow, that’s why, because we have gone beyond it. Let’s take Anna Karenina. What a marvelous book! It is all about the social problems which existed in a very narrow, bigoted society and which was completely unnecessary. In fact, a good deal of Victorian fiction can be classified like that. Look at Hardy, for example. These tragedies are mini-tragedies because they derive from fairly arbitrary social conditions; they are not rooted in any human nature. When you finish reading Anna Karenina you think, My God, here is this woman ruined and destroyed because of this stupid, bloody society and it does make it a smaller novel in my opinion. Because it is Tolstoy it is full of the most marvelous things but in actual fact the basic story is a story about nothing, about a local society, a very local, temporary set of social circumstances. My train of thought was that we now live with our heads in the middle of exploding galaxies and thinking about quasars and quarks and black holes and alternative universes and so on, so that you cannot any more get comfort from old moral certainties because something new is happening. All our standards of values have been turned upside down, I think. Not that I don’t think life doesn’t do that for you anyway because it seems to me there is a process of losing more and more conviction all the time. I really did have very firm opinions about all kinds of things even fifteen years ago, which I am unable to have now because the world has got too big, everything is too relative. What’s true in one society isn’t true in another. What is true for one time isn’t true five years later.

Bigsby: So in fact there are no fixed moral standards.

Lessing: No, I don’t think there can be any fixed moral standards. I mean, you can pay lip service to a fixed moral standard because it saves you trouble, which I am perfectly prepared to do. I have got a different attitude towards hypocrisy, perhaps.

Bigsby: Yet isn’t there a strong moral drive in your work, a sense of trying to stop a headlong rush towards disaster by deflecting your reader away from a dangerous path.

Lessing: When you say that, it sounds as though I believe I can do it.

Bigsby: I half-think you do.

Lessing: I think in the past I have had some such thoughts, that if enough writers write this, which God knows we do, if enough writers say, “For God’s sake, look at what is happening,” things might change. But I have gone back to a thought I had in the Children of Violence series right at the beginning. I reread Martha Quest recently. Do you remember the passage when she stands at the door and watches the prisoners walk past in handcuffs and thinks that this has been described now in literature for so long and nothing has changed. Well, you know, this is a very terrible thought for a writer to have, and this is another of these complexes I live with because with one-half of myself I think I don’t see the point of it, I don’t think we change anything.

Bigsby: That is the function of art then, is it, to change reality or to change the way people perceive reality?

Lessing: I think the function of real art, which I don’t aspire to, is to change how people see themselves. I wonder if we do. If we do it is very temporary. Let’s go back to the Russians. You can say that Turgenev and Tolstoy and all that crowd of giants, in fact, changed how people saw themselves. They did, but to what end? Because look at the Russians now. I have just finished reading a book called The Russians, by an American correspondent in Russia, and it is very clear there is very little difference between a communist society and a capitalist society. I think perhaps the communist society is worse, but there isn’t very much difference; they have got a new ruling class, a differently based class, but it is a highly privileged class that has got every intention of hanging on to its privileges, and a whole mass of serfs who get very little. And, as for freedom, there is as little of it as there was under the czars. So you ask yourself, I ask myself, if you can have a blaze of marvelous writers, which they had, all shouting the same thing, which they did, in one way or another, and yet they have so little effect, what then?

Now it so happens that I am a writing animal and I can’t imagine myself not writing; I literally get quite ill if I don’t write a bit. Perhaps that is my problem and not anyone else’s.

Bigsby: But I wonder if in a sense you don’t compound that determinism. Take a book like Shikasta. Contained in it is a version of world history, history as pathology, as degeneration, as movement towards catastrophe. But we discover that that movement is not chance, it is not arbitrary; it is actually the result of intervention, of manipulations by various distant star systems. That being so, aren’t you proposing a determinism in which it is impossible to resist this onward movement because it derives from outside of humanity?

Lessing: Well, you see, this is what I think I think, or what I think now. I don’t know what I will think in ten years’ time. I think, in fact, that we do not have much influence on events, but we think we do, we imagine we do. There is a marvelous Sufi story about the mouse who, through a series of accidents, becomes the owner of a cow. It has the end of a rope which goes around the cow’s neck in its mouth and as the cow wanders out across the countryside it cannot control the cow. But as the cow stops to eat some grass it shouts, “That’s right, eat up some grass,” and when the cow turns left it shouts, “That’s right, turn left.” Well, this is what I think we’re like because it seems to me self-evident. I know that is arrogant, but just look at the course of events. We are continually, and by “we” I am now talking about politicians, suggesting decisions to cope with the results of other decisions which have turned out quite differently from what was expected. We do not plan, we do not say what is going to happen.

Bigsby: And is there a governing manipulative force behind this?

Lessing: No, I don’t think so. But I do not see humanity as the great crown of all creation. Let’s put it this way: we are sending rockets at this moment around Jupiter. Why do we assume that we are the only people with technological knowhow when the astronomers and physicists talk in terms of planets, many many hundreds of thousands of inhabited planets. I mean, it is not some lunatic novelist who is talking. The novelist now cannot keep up with the physicists in what they say.

Bigsby: Isn’t there a danger, though, that if you accept this view you are in fact advising people that there is no point in playing a role in the social world or indeed in attempting to intervene in history at all? You are inviting them to be supine in the face of violence.

Lessing: No, I am not. Certainly I would never have anything to do with politics again unless I was forced at the point of a gun, having seen what happens.