A Small Personal Voice

LESSING: I don’t get my reviews any more. I read reviews if they turn up in the papers I get, but I go through them fast and try to pay little attention to what is said. I think the further I’m removed from this area – reviews, the literary squabble-shop, the better. I got angry over reviews of The Golden Notebook. They thought it was personal – it was, in parts. But it was a very highly structured book, carefully planned. The point of that book was the relation of its parts to each other. But the book they tried to turn it into was: The Confessions of Doris Lessing. I remember I went down to my publishers’ office to look through the reviews, because they said I’d had a lot of good ones and I should see them. Well I remember thinking: It’s surely not possible that all these reviewers should have minds like gossip columnists. Because of the shape of the book, and the point of that shape, and what it meant, they weren’t interested.

You see, the literary society in London is very small and incestuous. Everyone knows everyone. The writer who tosses a scrap of autobiography into an otherwise fictional piece (which writers always have done and always will do), he’s not credited with any imagination. Everyone says, ‘Oh, that character’s so and so,’ and ‘I know that character.’ It’s all too personal. The standards of criticism are very low. I don’t know about American critics, but in this country we have an abysmal standard. Very few writers I know have any respect for the criticism they get. Our attitude is, and has to be, Are the reviews selling reviews or not ? In all other respects, the reviews are humiliating, they are on such a low level and it’s all so spiteful and personal.

N. Do reviews sell books in England ?

LESSING: My publishers claim they help build a reputation and that indirectly they do sell books. This is probably true. But in Great Britain everything is much more cumulative and long-term than in America. One simply settles in for what you call the long haul. But ‘reputation’ – what are reputations worth when they are made by reviewers who are novelists? Writers aren’t necessarily good critics. Yet the moment you’ve written a novel, you’re invited to write criticism, because the newspapers like to have one’s ‘name’ on them. One is a ‘name’ or one is not, you see. Oh, it’s very pleasant to be one, I’m not complaining, I enjoy it. But everyone knows that writers tend to be wrong about each other. Look at Thomas Mann and Brecht – they were both towering geniuses, in different ways, and they didn’t have any good word for each other.

Ideally we should have critics who are critics and not novelists who need to earn a bit to tide them over, or failed novelists. Is there such an animal, though? Of course, sometimes a fine writer is a good critic, like Lawrence. Look at something that happened last year – I wrote a long article for the New Statesman about the mess socialism is in. There was a half-line reference to X. To this day, people say to me, ‘that article you wrote attacking X.’ This is how people’s minds work now. At the first night of one of Wesker’s plays, up comes a certain literary figure and says, his voice literally wet with anxiety, ‘Oh, Wesker is a much better playwright than Osborne, he is, isn’t he?’ He felt that someone’s grave should be danced on. He was simply tired of voting for Osborne. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In and out.

You’re going to say the literary world has always been like this. But what I said about the theatre earlier applies – nothing wrong with the audience who likes Who’s for Tennis? and the critics who do. It’s all theirs. But they should keep out of the serious theatre. Similarly, of course, the literary world is always going to seethe with people who say, I’m bored with voting for X. But writers should try to keep away from them. Another bit of advice to a young writer – but unfortunately economics make it almost impossible to follow: Don’t review, don’t go on television, try to keep out of all that. But, of course, if one’s broke, and one’s asked to review, one reviews. But better not, if possible. Better not go on television, unless there is something serious to be said (and how often is that?). Better to try and remain what we should be – an individual who communicates with other individuals, through the written word.