Putting the Questions Differently

The slightest involvement with the machinery of interviews has to convince you that no one cares about facts. How many have I sat through, uninterested in the questions I am asked, which I have probably answered dozens of times before. I do this, I hope, amiably, with every appearance of interest: before any interview or ‘promotion’ trip I resolve never to seem impatient or bored, and to answer every question as if for the first time. But more than once, an interviewer, sensing I am not totally enthralled, has leaned forward at the end to enquire if perhaps there is something not yet mentioned that I would like to discuss. But on saying ‘Yes – so and so — ’ a look at first of incredulity, and then of boredom settles on his or her face, because what I have just said is not exciting enough, does not feed myths about writers. But an interview is ‘dead’ if the interviewee tells the interviewer what to ask. Why bother to have an interview at all? (The publishers have an instant reply to this.) The point is, the interviewer’s questions do interest him, her, and represent in some way the readers. When a German interviewer flounced off, ‘If you are not going to talk about your personal life…’ she was right. That is what interested her and therefore her readers. (Her fault was not to say in advance that this is what she expected me to talk about.) But it is a remarkable fact that of what must now be hundreds of interviews all over the world – you would be surprised how many interviews a writer doing ‘promotion’ is expected to agree to – only two or three stay in my mind as good ones – that is, based on real insight. I am not joking when I say that writing about writers has long since lost the idea that truth should be the aim.

What is at stake here is vital to Mrs. Lessing’s concerns with contemporary thinking, or perhaps its absence. As one well-versed in the subversion of language by political ideologies, she is acutely aware of the need to escape the entrapment of received notions and the morass of professional jargon. From her point of view, her interviewers frequently pose questions that are nearly impossible to answer, largely because they are not really questions at all. They are assertions disguised as questions, mini-lectures to which she occasionally replies, “Well, you’ve already said it.” Beyond that, however, she is aggravated by the contemporary tendency to insist on putting everything into compartments, a sort of perverse legacy of nineteenth-century scientists who felt an inordinate pleasure in labeling and categorizing phenomena. In speaking with fellow-writer Brian Aldiss, she has a famous laugh at the expense of an unidentified but eminent critic, who kept repeating in a review of The Fifth Child on the radio, “But you can’t categorize this book; you can’t categorize it,” as though if we only could, then we would no longer have to think about it.

Mrs. Lessing has participated in a large number of interviews not merely because hers has been such a significant voice in the last thirty years, but because she is a genuinely international writer, as is evident in interviews conducted in places as far from her London home as Singapore and in interviews originally appearing in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, and Norwegian newspapers and magazines. She has been a much-sought-after speaker around the world. That should not be surprising, given her background.

Doris Tayler Lessing was born in 1919 of English parents in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran). Her father had survived the First World War with psychological as well as physical wounds. Like many veterans, he was dismayed by England and took a bank job in Persia, hoping to start over in a different country. In her words, he was something of a dreamer, and when he happened on an agriculture fair he suddenly decided to move his family to Southern Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then called. Mrs. Lessing grew up in Southern Africa, where Marxism attracted her, along with many other sensitive young whites, since it seemed the only political ideology addressing itself to racial injustice. In 1949, as a young woman in her late twenties, she left her second husband Gottfried Lessing and accompanied by their son Peter moved to London where she has continued to live. She brought with her the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing. It was not her first attempt at the novel, since as she has told her interviewers, she destroyed the manuscripts of two earlier apprentice works. Its critical success and modest royalties launched her as a writer. Years later, she has been amused at her innocence in assuming that she would be able to support herself and her son through writing, but then, as she remarks, writers in mid-century England seldom aspired to the huge sales and royalties to support extravagant life styles that young writers often hope for today.

During the ’50s and ’60s, The Grass Is Singing was followed by the five volumes of her Children of Violence series. The first three in the series – Martha Quest, A Ripple from the Storm, and A Proper Marriage – as she herself admits, drew heavily upon her own experience as a young woman. Her next novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), was not part of the Children of Violence series. Still probably her best-known work, The Golden Notebook began an accelerated movement away from the autobiographical impulse in her fiction. Unfortunately, her readers have often been unwilling to accept her assertion that the women characters are not Doris Lessing in disguise. Those readers have had particular difficulties with The Golden Notebook, which some American feminists tried to read as a bible of Women’s Liberation. As Mrs. Lessing repeats throughout the later interviews, she had quite different interests in her famous novel and has deeply resented its appropriation as a weapon of sexual politics. Indeed, one distinct theme in these interviews is Mrs. Lessing’s attempt to rescue her own fiction from her readers who often want to reduce its complexity to their own narrow points of view.

In many ways, The Four-Gated City is among Mrs. Lessing’s most important novels. Like The Golden Notebook, it is one of those novels written for readers in the future. She has often indicated her sadness that there are no nineteenth-century novels giving readers in this century a better understanding of a movement like Chartism, for example. She goes on to say that she had hoped The Golden Notebook would offer future readers a clearer sense of what sensitive, thinking people were concerned with in mid-century England. The Four-Gated City fulfills that need for the ’60s. However, it also points toward her continuing interests throughout the ’70s and ’80s, especially toward her interest in the “space fiction” that would precipitate a kind of crisis in her literary reputation.

Central to her later interests is the attempt to move out of the realist mode that brought her critical acclaim and a large readership for her earlier fiction. Briefing for a Descent into Hell and The Memoirs of a Survivor are the clearest evidence of that movement away from conventional realism toward “inner space.” Both are “difficult” novels because they demand more “willing suspension of disbelief” than many of her readers have been prepared for, even though fictional exploration of “insanity” in The Golden Notebook and the apocalyptical last section of The Four-Gated City point in that direction. And then, almost to demonstrate that she had not said farewell to the realist mode, The Summer Before the Dark appeared in 1973, between Briefing and Memoirs, creating difficulties once again for those bent upon “categorizing” her writing or smoothly plotting the course of her “career.”

More than anything, it was toward her problematical “space fiction” that The Four-Gated City pointed the direction. In 1979 she launched the Argos in Canopus series with the “novel” Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. If its readers were surprised and puzzled, it was in part because they had not paid enough attention to the increasing presence of science fiction on the literary scene in her watershed novel, The Four-Gated City. These same readers may also have misread Mrs. Lessing’s interest as an attempt to join the virtually universal chorus of scoffers at this “sci-fi,” to use the persistent “mainstream” and media term of amused disdain for a fiction damned in part for its popularity. She has preferred the term “space fiction” for the Canopus series, not because she wants to dissociate it from “science fiction,” but only because she admits to having too little formal training to claim that her writing is “science fiction.” As she indicates in the interviews that follow, she turned to space fiction because it alone offered her the opportunity to range freely in time and space and to find metaphors to express her concern with contemporary problems and issues.

The response to the Canopus series among her readers, both professional and “common,” has been astounding. In reviews of the novels, in critical articles, and in letters to Mrs. Lessing herself, many readers have indicated their dismay that she has been wasting her talent writing fantasy. Some who have been particularly dismayed are those readers still waiting for her to write another Golden Notebook, or at least a “women’s book,” like The Summer Before the Dark. She has persisted, however, past the second Canopus novel, The Marriages of Zones Three, Four, and Five, which is about as close as she has come in the series to pleasing that readership. The latest three novels in the Canopus series are more similar to Shikasta than to Marriages. One of these, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, has led to yet another new departure for her writing, the libretto for the opera of the same name, written in collaboration with Philip Glass, an artist whose work has also had its share of detractors.

The most recent of the Canopus novels deliberately ends without a clear sense of closure. As Mrs. Lessing indicates, she plans a sixth novel and perhaps even more in the series. She has been “sidetracked,” she says, by The Fifth Child and The Good Terrorist, as well as by African Laughter, her memoirs of four visits to Zimbabwe, and by the first volume of her autobiography. The two novels that “sidetracked” her might be misread as her bowing to the pressure of those readers bent upon returning her writing to the realist mode. Certainly, they are more realist than the fiction beginning with Briefing; they represent, however, in the clearest fashion, Mrs. Lessing’s insistence upon her own artistic integrity and the freedom to write in diametrically opposed modes, as they suit her differing interests as a writer.

Although she is perhaps best known as a novelist, we ought not to ignore her accomplishment in other genres. In addition to essays and memoirs, she has published well over a dozen collections of shorter fiction; indeed, her most recent work at this writing is The Real Thing (English title London Observed) a collection of short stories and sketches. As she comments in the interviews that follow, she has also had a love affair with the theater – Play with a Tiger was produced in London in the early ’60s – with all the passion and heartbreak implied by that commonplace metaphor.

Mrs. Lessing’s awareness of her own reputation and her frustrations with the “business” of being a writer are no more clearly evidenced than by the Jane Somers affair. Ten years ago, she decided to write and publish a novel under a pseudonym. She did so – twice – in what she later published in her own name as The Diaries of Jane Somers. In part she wanted to explore her suspicion that the publication of books had become commercialized to such a point that the exigencies of the marketplace and the “bottom line” had clearly obscured traditional interests in literary merit and cultural value. Those who know her writing were not taken in by what she has termed the “hoax” of the Jane Somers novels and, indeed, some became “co-conspirators,” if you will. Others were not so fortunate. Publishers’ readers and book reviewers who wrote the customarily “patronizing” – her term – encouragements of this hypothetical “first novelist” were obviously not amused, when they had damned with faint praise novels by Doris Lessing. Similarly, publishers who turned down the manuscripts without even sending them out to be professionally evaluated were not happy with what the “hoax” had demonstrated. As she became aware, the marketers of books were most concerned that as an unknown writer “Jane Somers” had no “personality” to help them to sell the book. Besides, would there be an “author” to be interviewed as part of their marketing strategies?

The series of conversations has been arranged chronologically from her interviews in the early ’60s to one as recent as 1993. The early interviews appear, despite Mrs. Lessing’s apprehension that her views have changed over the past two decades. Most of the interviews have already appeared in print, some in journals as well known as The Paris Review; others, however, have appeared in smaller magazines such as Kunapipi and Glimmer Train Stories, where they are less readily accessible. Some appear here for the first time as transcriptions of taped interviews, notably those with writers Studs Terkel, Brian Aldiss, and Claire Tomalin. The collection includes translations of interviews in French and German. These pose problems because of the obvious infelicities of style inherent in translations of translations; however, they contain valuable interchanges and emphasize the genuinely international nature of her readership.

The conversations appear with the permission of both those who hold rights to them and Mrs. Lessing, who had the opportunity to read and approve the manuscript. The interviews have been edited to enhance consistency in mechanics, notably American spelling, and to reduce the redundant or unimportant material endemic in the transcriptions of spoken versions of the language. Wherever passages have been omitted in reprinted interviews, the notation “//” indicates such omissions, especially when a hiatus in the text might otherwise be distracting. Occasionally, repeated passages have been preserved to serve as bridges from point to point, or, more importantly, to allow Mrs. Lessing to emphasize points. She herself says, “As I have said and it bears repeating…” or words to that effect. As she reminds us, interviews are an indication more often of the interviewer’s interests than the interviewee’s. However, the reader will discover in these conversations a range of responses to issues and concerns in Mrs. Lessing’s writing. Taken together, they represent a record of a life in writing.

EARL G. INGERSOLL

October 1993

Chronology (#ulink_eebf098e-e154-5ed6-a05e-e847568313b3)

1919

Born 22 October, in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran); parents, Alfred Cook Tayler and Emily Maud McVeagh. Her brother, Harry, was born in 1921.

1924

Moved with her family to a farm near the small town of Banket, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), where her father grew tobacco and corn.

1933

Ended her formal education at a Roman Catholic high school in Salisbury.

1939

Married Frank Wisdom, a civil engineer. Their children John and Jean remained with their father when their parents were divorced in 1943.

1943–49

Worked as a secretary and stenographer in Salisbury. Participated in a small political group with Marxist roots, but the Communist Party was not sanctioned by the colonial government.

1945–49

Married to Gottfried Lessing, a Marxist immigrant. Their son Peter, born in 1947, accompanied his mother to London when his parents’ marriage ended in divorce and his father returned to East Germany to assume a government post.

1950

The Grass Is Singing (Michael Joseph; New York, Crowell).

1951

This Was the Old Chiefs Country (Michael Joseph; New York: Crowell, 1952).

1952

Martha Quest, the first volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964).

1953

Five: Short Novels (Michael Joseph; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).

1954

A Proper Marriage, the second volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964). Received Somerset Maugham Award of the Society of Authors for Five: Short Novels.

1956

Retreat to Innocence (Michael Joseph; New York: Prometheus, 1959).

1957

The Habit of Loving (MacGibbon and Kee; New York: Ballantine, Crowell, Popular Library).

1958

A Ripple from the Storm, the third volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966).

1962

The Golden Notebook (Michael Joseph; New York, Simon & Schuster). Play with a Tiger: A Play in Three Acts (Michael Joseph).

1963

A Man and Two Women (MacGibbon and Kee; New York: Simon & Schuster, Popular Library).

1964