Putting the Questions Differently

Lessing: Yes, it was – an enormous capacity for acceptance. I think I still have it to an extent, but I don’t have it the way I had it. I don’t know how to put it. Something happens or you meet somebody and you just open your arms and say “right” to an idea or to a person or anything, or any event. But you can’t go on like that, you have to learn a different way.

Dean: Were you ever that romantic?

Lessing: Yes, I was.

Dean: And wounded by it?

Lessing: Oh, terribly. Yes, of course, I was. Well, the evidence is in my work, isn’t it? But it’s an awful waste of time all that banging and crashing around.

Dean: But hasn’t it been personally useful to you? Haven’t you been quarrying that disturbing kind of experience?

Lessing: Yes, but there was too much, you see. There’s no need to go on doing something when you’ve learnt better. I remember after I had a kind of somewhat informal psychotherapy.

What I was really doing, of course, although I didn’t see it at the time, was buying a friend. I needed someone desperately to talk to and accept me. This is what she did and this is what I needed. Anyway my last meeting with her was when I’d come to grief over some ridiculous love affair and I went to her and she looked at me and she said, “Have I really not taught you any better than that to repeat your mistakes?” Then there was a long silence and she said, “As for me, I’m going to die very soon and I’m totally occupied and preparing for a good death. Good morning,” and threw me out like a kitten into the harsh world, which I thank her for.

Dean: You anticipated Women’s Lib. You anticipated, I suppose, a new school of psychoanalysis, the Laing school; I suppose you’d call it, the divided self. And you in a sense anticipated a move towards the mystical.

Lessing: Can I say something about words in this area? There are great gaps in the English language where there are words like “spirit” or “soul” or “unconscious” or “collective unconscious.” When you start writing in this area the words are usually the property of some cult or other – “collective unconscious” belongs to Jungians. You might not want to have that association so you’re always wrestling with words that haven’t got the meaning you want them to have. This is my perhaps biggest single problem. There is not one of these words that you can use, and that is why I’ve gone so much off into metaphor, like Memoirs of a Survivor. Now my impulse behind that was I wanted to write about dreams. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that the word “dreams” is never used from start to finish in that book.

Dean: Could it be that there is a collective unconscious which we’re all, and writers especially, plugged into? How do you plug into it, if you’re a writer, of your sort?

Lessing: By chance, very often. The time I’ve done it most purely was in Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, which is the only book I’ve ever written which from start to finish was on this other wavelength. I don’t want to claim too much, to use the word “inspiration.” Something happened when I wrote the book. I hit some other level. And is it a legend or a myth or a fairy tale or a fantasy? That isn’t the word for what I’ve written, I think. You see, only I could have written The Golden Notebook, but I think Anon wrote this other book.

Dean: When you do get messages from what we’ll call the unconscious, your own or a collective mind, how do you discriminate between the nonsense and the good stuff?

Lessing: By experience, living it out, seeing if it turns out to be true or not. I think we are all studio sets with ideas flowing through us, just as neutrons and cosmic particles go shooting through us all the time that we sit here. When I wrote The Four-Gated City, I thought no one would speak to me by the time I finished because the ideas were so way out. I was thinking some pretty horrific thoughts about what was likely to happen in the world. I wrote that book sort of like half a page at a time and the rest of the time I was in bed with the covers over my head. That was what I was really thinking and I had to write it. But, as has happened to me so often before, by the time the book came out, these way-out ideas were all commonplace, you see. So this cheers me up every time I decide to write a book that is wild. I don’t waste time worrying about what people are going to think about it, because probably all these ideas will be in the newspapers.

Dean: You’re no respecter of academic critics. Are you a good critic of your own work?

Lessing: Yes, I think perhaps I am. After a short passage of time, I think I am pretty cool about it all. It’s not easy to be detached when you’re doing it, but shortly after, it sort of floats away from you and you can look at it.

Nearly all my books have weak patches, but that is because I’m the kind of writer I am, which means I’m always trying things out and I’m very seldom interested in the perfect book.

Dean: Anthony Burgess once criticized you as a writer by saying that he thought that you didn’t edit enough. You wrote too much, too many words. Is that fair, do you think?

Lessing: Probably. I’ve got a terrific, great facility. When I start I can write easily, and he’s probably quite right, yes. There is a place for novels that have ideas and shake people up and then die. It’s a different way of writing from Jane Austen, you see.

Dean: For someone who’s written so penetratingly about the relationships between the sexes and who’s written so perceptively about men, it’s a surprise to find you living alone now. Do you miss marriage?

Lessing: Well, you see I think I acquired the qualities to be married rather too late and by that time I’d rather lost interest in the whole business of being married. I certainly didn’t have any of the necessary qualities. I was much too impatient and always fighting about something.

But no, I don’t miss marriage. What I’m interested in now is real friendships, not just acquaintances. You can have thousands of acquaintances, but I think friendship is hard and takes a long time. That’s what I’m interested in.

Running Through Stories in My Mind Michael Thorpe (#ulink_dde3500c-8eba-50ec-b8d0-cc7cf1fdeab8)

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.

Thorpe: You have clarified an important point for me, and I think it gets to the heart of one of the problems that I think you have felt in the reception of your work. You have been at some pains to stress, for example, that the African stories are not about the color problem and that The Golden Notebook