A Small Personal Voice

But unfortunately it is nearly always too late.

It did look for a while as if the recent student rebellions might change things, as if the students’ impatience with the dead stuff they are taught might be strong enough to substitute something more fresh and useful. But it seems as if the rebellion is over. Sad. During the lively time in the States, I had letters with accounts of how classes of students had refused their syllabuses, and were bringing to class their own choice of books, those that they had found relevant to their lives. The classes were emotional, sometimes violent, angry, exciting, sizzling with life. Of course this only happened with teachers who were sympathetic, and prepared to stand with the students against authority – prepared for the consequences. There are teachers who know that the way they have to teach is bad and boring. Luckily there are still enough, with a bit of luck, to overthrow what is wrong, even if the students themselves have lost impetus.

Meanwhile there is a country …

Where thirty or forty years ago, a critic made a private list of writers and poets which he, personally, considered made up what was valuable in literature, dismissing all others. This list he defended lengthily in print, for The List instantly became a subject for much debate. Millions of words were written for and against – schools and sects, for and against, came into being. The argument, all these years later, still continues … No one finds this state of affairs sad or ridiculous …

Where there are critical books of immense complexity and learning, dealing, but often at second or third hand, with original work – novels, plays, stories. The people who write these books form a stratum in universities across the world – they are an international phenomenon, the top layer of literary academia. Their lives are spent in criticizing, and in criticizing each other’s criticism. They at least regard this activity as more important than the original work. It is possible for literary students to spend more time reading criticism and criticism of criticism than they spend reading poetry, novels, biography, stories. A great many people regard this state of affairs as quite normal, and not sad and ridiculous …

Where I recently read an essay about Antony and Cleopatra by a boy shortly to take A levels. It was full of originality and excitement about the play, the feeling that any real teaching about literature aims to produce. The essay was returned by the teacher like this: ‘I cannot mark this essay, you haven’t quoted from the authorities.’ Few teachers would regard this as sad and ridiculous …

Where people who consider themselves educated, and indeed as superior to and more refined than ordinary nonreading people, will come up to a writer and congratulate him or her on getting a good review somewhere but will not consider it necessary to read the book in question, or ever to think that what they are interested in is success …

Where when a book comes out on a certain subject, let’s say star-gazing, instantly a dozen colleges, societies, television programmes, write to the author asking him to come and speak about star-gazing. The last thing it occurs to them to do is to read the book. This behaviour is considered quite normal, and not ridiculous at all …

Where a young man or woman, reviewer, or critic, who has not read more of a writer’s work than the book in front of him, will write patronizingly, or as if rather bored with the whole business, or as if considering how many marks to give an essay, about the writer in question – who might have written fifteen books, and have been writing for twenty or thirty years – giving the said writer instruction on what to write next, and how. No one thinks this is absurd, certainly not the young person, critic, or reviewer, who has been taught to patronize and itemize everyone for years, from Shakespeare downwards.

Where a Professor of Archaeology can write of a South American tribe which has advanced knowledge of plants, and of medicine and of psychological methods: ‘The astonishing thing is that these people have no written language …’ And no one thinks him absurd.

Where, on the occasion of a centenary of Shelley, in the same week and in three different literary periodicals, three young men, of identical education, from our identical universities, can write critical pieces about Shelley, damning him with the faintest possible praise and in identically the same tone, as if they were doing Shelley a great favour to mention him at all – and no one seems to think that such a thing can indicate that there is something seriously wrong with our literary system.

Finally … this novel continues to be, for its author, a most instructive experience. For instance. Ten years after I wrote it, I can get, in one week, three letters about it, from three intelligent, well-informed, concerned people, who have taken the trouble to sit down and write to me. One might be in Johannesburg, one in San Francisco, one in Budapest. And here I sit, in London, reading them, at the same time, or one after another – as always, grateful to the writers, and delighted that what I’ve written can stimulate, illuminate, or even annoy. But one letter is entirely about the sex war, about man’s inhumanity to woman, and woman’s inhumanity to man, and the writer has produced pages and pages all about nothing else, for she – but not always a she – can’t see anything else in the book.

The second is about politics, probably from an old Red like myself, and he or she writes many pages about politics, and never mentions any other theme.

These two letters used, when the book was as it were young, to be the most common.

The third letter, once rare but now catching up on the others, is written by a man or a woman who can see nothing in it but the theme of mental illness.

But it is the same book.

And naturally these incidents bring up again questions of what people see when they read a book, and why one person sees one pattern and nothing at all of another pattern, and how odd it is to have, as author, such a clear picture of a book that is seen so very differently by its readers.

And from this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is that it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it, but his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.

And when a book’s pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author, then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

Interview with Doris Lessing BY ROY NEWQUIST (#ulink_01d003f5-388a-5032-8f76-3213966f5bc4)

N. In A Man and Two Women the enormous talent of Doris Lessing can be seen in full bloom. Few writers dig to the emotional heart of human involvement better than Miss Lessing, and several critics have observed, in one phrase or another, Miss Lessing’s almost uncanny grasp of human relationships: the actual, the artificial, and above all, her command of the vast area where the real and the contrived are blended into the bulk of our lives. To go back to the beginning of things I’ll ask Miss Lessing where she was born, reared, and educated.

LESSING: I was born in Persia because my father was running a bank there. He was in Persia because he was fed up with England. He found it too narrow after World War I. Unfortunately, I remember little about Persia consciously – though recently, under mescaline, I found that I remembered a great deal, that it had influenced me without my knowing it.

Then my father went to Southern Rhodesia on an impulse (which is how he ran his life), to farm. He had never been a farmer, but he took a very large tract of land – thousands of acres, in American terms – to grow maize. Thus I was brought up in a district that was populated sparsely, very sparsely indeed, by Scottish people who had left Scotland or England because it was too small for them. I spent most of my childhood alone in a landscape with very few human things to dot it. It was sometimes hellishly lonely, but now I realize how extraordinary it was, and how very lucky I was.

After this I went into town – a very small town that had about ten thousand white persons in it. The black population, of course, did not count, though it was fairly large. I married in my teens, when I was far too young, and had two children. That marriage was a failure and I married again. Let’s put it this way: I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married. I can’t blame the people I’ve been married to – by and large I’ve been at fault.

N. When did you start writing?

LESSING: I think I’ve always been a writer by temperament. I wrote some bad novels in my teens. I always knew I would be a writer, but not until I was quite old – twenty-six or -seven – did I realize that I’d better stop saying I was going to be one and get down to business. I was working in a lawyer’s office at the time, and I remember walking in and saying to my boss, ‘I’m giving up my job because I’m going to write a novel.’ He very properly laughed, and I indignantly walked home and wrote The Grass Is Singing. I’m oversimplifying; I didn’t write it as simply as that because I was clumsy at writing and it was much too long, but I did learn by writing it. It focused upon white people in Southern Rhodesia, but it could have been about white people anywhere south of the Zambezi, white people who were not up to what is expected of them in a society where there is very heavy competition from the black people coming up. Then I wrote short stories set in the district I was brought up in, where very isolated white farmers lived immense distances from each other. You see, in this background, people can spread themselves out. People who might be extremely ordinary in a society like England’s, where people are pressed into conformity, can become wild eccentrics in all kinds of ways they wouldn’t dare try elsewhere. This is one of the things I miss, of course, by living in England. I don’t think my memory deceives me, but I think there were more colourful people back in Southern Rhodesia because of the space they had to move in. I gather, from reading American literature, that this is the kind of space you have in America in the Midwest and West.

I left Rhodesia and my second marriage to come to England, bringing a son with me. I had very little money, but I’ve made my living as a professional writer ever since, which is really very hard to do. I had rather hard going, to begin with, which is not a complaint; I gather from my American writer-friends that it is easier to be a writer in England than in America because there is much less pressure put on us. We are not expected to be successful, and it is no sin to be poor.

N. I don’t know how we can compare incomes, but in England it seems that writers make more from reviewing and from broadcasts than they can in the United States.

LESSING: I don’t know. When I meet American writers, the successful ones, they seem to make more on royalties, but then they also seem to spend much more. I know a writer isn’t supposed to talk about money, but it is very important. It is vital for a writer to know how much he can write to please himself, and how much, or little, he must write to earn money. In England you don’t have to ‘go commercial’ if you don’t mind being poor. It so happens that I’m not poor any more, thank goodness, because it’s not good for anyone to be. Yet there are disadvantages to living in England. It’s not an exciting place to live, it is not one of the hubs of the world, like America, or Russia, or China. England is a backwater, and it doesn’t make much difference what happens here, or what decisions are made here. But from the point of view of writing, England is a paradise for me.

You see, I was brought up in a country where there is very heavy pressure put on people. In Southern Rhodesia it is not possible to detach yourself from what is going on. This means that you spend all your time in a torment of conscientiousness. In England – I’m not saying it’s a perfect society, far from it – you can get on with your work in peace and quiet when you choose to withdraw. For this I’m very grateful – I imagine there are few countries left in the world where you have this right of privacy.

N. This what you’re supposed to find in Paris.

LESSING: Paris is too exciting. I find it impossible to work there. I proceed to have a wonderful time and don’t write a damn thing.

N. To work from A Man and Two Women for a bit. The almost surgical job you do in dissecting people, not bodily, but emotionally, has made me wonder if you choose your characters from real life, form composites or projections, or if they are so involved you can’t really trace their origins.

LESSING: I don’t know. Some people 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?