Doris Lessing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17
November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer
and short story writer. Her novels included The Grass is Singing (1950), the
sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The
Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively
known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In
doing so the Swedish
Academy described her as
"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and
visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing
was the eleventh woman and the oldest person to ever receive the Nobel Prize in
Literature.
Lessing's largest literary archive is held by the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research
Center, at the University
of Texas at Austin. The 45 archival boxes of Lessing's
materials at the Ransom
Center contain nearly all
of her extant manuscripts and typescripts up to 1999. Original material for
Lessing's early books is assumed not to exist because she kept none of her
early manuscripts. Other institutions, including the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa, hold smaller collections.
Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2537/the-art-of-fiction-no-102-doris-lessing
Doris Lessing was interviewed at the home of Robert
Gottlieb, in Manhattan’s
east forties. Her editor for many years at Knopf, Mr. Gottlieb was then the
editor of The New Yorker. Ms. Lessing was briefly in town to attend some
casting sessions for the opera Philip Glass has based on her novel The Making
of the Representative for Planet 8, for which she had written the libretto.
Plans for the opera had been in more or less constant flux, and it was only
after a minor flurry of postcards—Ms. Lessing communicates most information on
postcards, usually ones from the British
Museum—that the
appointment was finally arranged.
While the tape recorder was being prepared, she said, “This
is a noisy place here, when you think we’re in a garden behind a row of
houses.” She points across the way at the townhouse where Katharine Hepburn
lives; the talk is about cities for a while. She has lived in London for almost forty years, and still
finds that “everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!” More
speculatively, as she has remarked elsewhere, “I would not be at all surprised
to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t
guess.” She spoke about spending six months in England before the age of five,
saying, “I think kids ought to travel. I think it’s very good to carry kids
around. It’s good for them. Of course it’s tough on the parents.”
The interview was conducted on the garden patio.
Silvery-streaked dark hair parted in the middle and pulled back in a bun, a
shortish skirt, stockings, blouse, and jacket, she looked much like her
book-jacket photos. If she seemed tired, it was hardly surprising considering
the extent of her recent travels. She has a strong, melodious voice, which can
be both amused and acerbic, solicitous and sarcastic.
INTERVIEWER
You were born in Persia,
now Iran.
How did your parents come to be there?
DORIS LESSING
My father was in the First World War. He couldn’t stick England
afterwards. He found it extremely narrow. The soldiers had these vast
experiences in the trenches and found they couldn’t tolerate it at home. So he
asked his bank to send him somewhere else. And they sent him to Persia, where
we were given a very big house, large rooms and space, and horses to ride on.
Very outdoors, very beautiful. I’ve just been told this town is now rubble.
It’s a sign of the times, because it was a very ancient market town with
beautiful buildings. No one’s noticed. So much is destroyed, we can’t be
bothered. And then they sent him to Tehran,
which is a very ugly city, where my mother was very happy, because she became a
part of what was called the “legation set.” My mother adored every second of
that. There were dinner parties every night. My father hated it. He was back
again with convention. Then in 1924, we came back to England where something called the
Empire Exhibition (which turns up from time to time in literature) was going on
and which must have had an enormous influence. The southern Rhodesian stand had
enormous maize-cobs, corncobs, slogans saying “Make your fortune in five years”
and that sort of nonsense. So my father, typically for his romantic
temperament, packed up everything. He had this pension because of his leg, his
war wounds—minuscule, about five thousand pounds—and he set off into unknown
country to be a farmer. His childhood had been spent near Colchester,
which was then a rather small town, and he had actually lived the life of a
farmer’s child and had a country childhood. And that’s how he found himself in
the veld of Rhodesia.
His story is not unusual for that time. It took me some time, but it struck me
quite forcibly when I was writing Shikasta how many wounded ex-servicemen there
were out there, both English and German. All of them had been wounded, all of
them were extremely lucky not to be dead, as their mates were.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps a minor version of the same thing would be our Vietnam
veterans coming back here and being unable to adjust, completely out of
society.
LESSING
I don’t see how people can go through that kind of
experience and fit in at once. It’s asking too much.
INTERVIEWER
You recently published a memoir in the magazine Granta
which, according to its title, was about your mother. In some ways it really
seemed to be more about your father.
LESSING
Well, how can one write about them separately? Her life was,
as they used to say, devoted to his life.
INTERVIEWER
It’s astonishing to read about his gold-divining, his grand
plans, his adventures . . .
LESSING
Well, he was a remarkable bloke, my father. He was a totally
impractical man. Partly because of the war, all that. He just drifted off, he
couldn’t cope. My mother was the organizer, and kept everything together.
INTERVIEWER
I get the feeling that he thought of this gold-divining in a
very progressive and scientific way.
LESSING
His idea was—and
there’s probably something true about it somewhere—that you could divine gold
and other metal if you only knew how to do it. So he was always experimenting.
I wrote about him actually, in a manner of speaking, in a story I called
“Eldorado.” We were living in gold country. Gold mines, little ones, were all
around.
INTERVIEWER
So it wasn’t out of place.
LESSING
No! Farmers would always keep a hammer or a pan in the car,
just in case. They’d always be coming back with bits of gold-bearing rock.
INTERVIEWER
Were you around a lot of storytelling as a child?
LESSING
No . . . the Africans told stories, but we weren’t allowed
to mix with them. It was the worst part about being there. I mean I could have
had the most marvelously rich experiences as a child. But it would have been
inconceivable for a white child. Now I belong to something called a
“Storytellers’ College” in England.
About three years ago a group of people tried to revive storytelling as an art.
It’s doing rather well. The hurdles were—I’m just a patron, I’ve been to some
meetings—first that people turn up thinking that storytelling is telling jokes.
So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling is like an
encounter group. There’s always somebody who wants to tell about their personal
experience, you know. But enormous numbers of real storytellers have been
attracted. Some from Africa—from all over the
place—people who are still traditional hereditary storytellers or people who
are trying to revive it. And so, it’s going on. It’s alive and well. When you
have storytelling sessions in London
or anywhere, you get a pretty good audience. Which is quite astonishing when
you think of what they could be doing instead—watching Dallas or something.
INTERVIEWER
What was it like coming back to England? I remember J. G. Ballard,
coming there for the first time from Shanghai,
felt very constrained; he felt that everything was very small and backward.
LESSING
Oh yes! I felt terribly constricted, very pale and damp;
everything was shut in, and too domestic. I still find it so. I find it very
pretty, but too organized. I don’t imagine that there’s an inch of the English
landscape that hasn’t been dealt with in some way or another. I don’t think
there is any wild grass anywhere.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any deep urges or longings to go back to some
kind of mythical African landscape?
LESSING
Well, I wouldn’t be living in that landscape, would I? It
wouldn’t be the past. When I went back to Zimbabwe three years ago, which was
two years after independence, it was very clear that if I went I would be from
the past. My only function in the present would be as a kind of token.
Inevitably! Because I’m the “local girl made good.” Under the white regime I
was very much a baddie. No one had a good word to say for me. You’ve got no
idea how wicked I was supposed to be. But now I’m “okay.”
INTERVIEWER
Were you bad because of your attitude to blacks?
LESSING
I was against the white regime. There was a total color bar.
This phrase has completely gone now: “color bar.” The only contact I had with
blacks was what I had with servants. As for the political Africans it is very
difficult. It’s very hard to have a reasonable relationship with black people
who have to be in at nine o’clock because there’s a curfew, or who are living
in total poverty and you are not.
INTERVIEWER
In the Granta memoir there’s the image of you as a child,
toting guns around, shooting game . . .
LESSING
Well, there was a great deal of game around then. There’s
very little these days, partly because the whites shot it out.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have a desire to be a writer in those early days?
You mention hiding your writings from your mother, who tried to make too much
of them.
LESSING
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a
great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother. She was
always wanting us to be something. For a long time she wanted me to be a
musician, because she had been a rather good musician. I didn’t have much
talent for it. But everybody had to have music lessons then. She was always
pushing us. And, of course, in one way it was very good, because children need
to be pushed. But she would then take possession of whatever it was. So you had
to protect yourself. But I think probably every child has to find out the way
to possess their own productions.
INTERVIEWER
I just wondered if you thought of yourself as becoming a
writer at an early age.
LESSING
Among other things. I certainly could have been a doctor. I
would have made a good farmer, and so on. I became a writer because of
frustration, the way I think many writers do.
INTERVIEWER
Because you’ve written novels in so many different modes, do
people feel betrayed when you don’t stick in one camp or another? I was
thinking of the science fiction fans, quite narrow-minded, who resent people
who write “science fiction” who don’t stick within their little club.
LESSING
Well, it is narrow-minded, of course it is. Actually, the
people who regard themselves as representatives of that community seem now to
want to make things less compartmentalized. I’ve been invited to be guest of
honor at the World Science Fiction Convention, in Brighton.
They’ve invited two Soviet science fiction writers too. In the past there’s
always been trouble; now they’re hoping that glasnost might allow their writers
to actually come. Actually, it never crossed my mind with these later books
that I was writing science fiction or anything of the kind! It was only when I
was criticized for writing science fiction that I realized I was treading on
sacred ground. Of course, I don’t really write science fiction. I’ve just read
a book by the Solaris bloke, Stanislav Lem. Now that’s real classic science
fiction . . . full of scientific ideas. Half of it, of course, is wasted on me
because I don’t understand it. But what I do understand is fascinating. I’ve
met quite a lot of young people—some not so young either, if it comes to
that—who say “I’m very sorry, but I’ve got no time for realism” and I say “My
God! But look at what you’re missing! This is prejudice.” But they don’t want
to know about it. And I’m always meeting usually middle-aged people who say,
“I’m very sorry. I can’t read your non-realistic writing.” I think it’s a great
pity. This is why I’m pleased about being guest of honor at this convention,
because it does show a breaking down.
INTERVIEWER
What I most enjoyed about Shikasta was that it took all the
spiritual themes that are submerged or repressed or coded in science fiction,
and brought them up into the foreground.
LESSING
I didn’t think of that as science fiction at all when I was
doing it, not really. It certainly wasn’t a book beginning, I don’t know, say,
“At three o’clock on a certain afternoon in Tomsk, in 1883 . . .”—which is, as
opposed to the cosmic view, probably my second most favorite kind of opening,
this kind of beginning!
INTERVIEWER
You’ve written introductions for many collections of Sufi
stories and prose. How did your interest and involvement with Sufism come
about?
LESSING
Well, you know, I hate talking about this. Because really,
what you say gets so clichéd, and it sounds gimmicky. All I really want to say
is that I was looking for some discipline along those lines. Everyone agrees
that you need a teacher. I was looking around for one, but I didn’t like any of
them because they were all “gurus” of one kind or another. Then I heard about
this man Shah, who is a Sufi, who really impressed me. So I’ve been involved
since the early sixties. It’s pretty hard to summarize it all, because it’s all
about what you experience. I want to make a point of that because a lot of people
walk around saying “I am a Sufi,” probably because they’ve read a book and it
sort of sounds attractive. Which is absolutely against anything that real Sufis
would say or do. Some of the great Sufis have actually said, “I would never
call myself a Sufi—it’s too large a name.” But I get letters from people,
letters like this: Hi, Doris! I hear you’re a
Sufi too! Well, I don’t know what to say, really. I tend to ignore them.
INTERVIEWER
I imagine that people try to set you up as some sort of
guru, whether political or metaphysical.
LESSING
I think people are always looking for gurus. It’s the
easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It’s quite terrifying. I once saw
something fascinating here in New
York. It must have been in the early seventies—guru
time. A man used to go and sit in Central Park,
wearing elaborate golden robes. He never once opened his mouth, he just sat.
He’d appear at lunchtime. People appeared from everywhere, because he was
obviously a holy man, and this went on for months. They just sat around him in
reverent silence. Eventually he got fed up with it and left. Yes. It’s as easy
as that.
INTERVIEWER
Let me ask you one more question along these lines. Do you
think that reincarnation is a plausible view?
LESSING
Well, I think it’s an attractive idea. I don’t believe in it
myself. I think it’s more likely that we “dip into” this realm on our way on a
long journey.
INTERVIEWER
That this planet is merely one single stop?
LESSING
We’re not encouraged—I’m talking about people studying with
Shah—to spend a great deal of time brooding about this, because the idea is
that there are more pressing things to do. It’s attractive to brood about all
this, of course, even to write books about it! But as far as I was concerned,
in Shikasta the reincarnation stuff was an attractive metaphor, really, or a
literary idea, though I understand that there are people who take Shikasta as
some kind of a textbook.
INTERVIEWER
Prophecy, perhaps?
LESSING
It was a way of telling a story—incorporating ideas that are
in our great religions. I said in the preface to Shikasta that if you read the
Old Testament and the New Testament and the Apocrypha and the Koran you find a
continuing story. These religions have certain ideas in common, and one idea
is, of course, this final war or apocalypse, or whatever. So I was trying to
develop this idea. I called it “space fiction” because there was nothing else
to call it.
INTERVIEWER
I have the feeling that you are an extremely intuitive kind
of fiction writer, and that you probably don’t plan or plot out things
extensively, but sort of discover them. Is that the case, or not?
LESSING
Well, I have a general plan, yes, but it doesn’t mean to say
that there’s not room for an odd character or two to emerge as I go along. I
knew what I was going to do with The Good Terrorist. The bombing of Harrod’s
department store was the start of it. I thought it would be interesting to
write a story about a group who drifted into bombing, who were incompetent and
amateur. I had the central character, because I know several people like
Alice—this mixture of very maternal caring, worrying about whales and seals and
the environment, but at the same time saying, “You can’t make an omelette without
breaking eggs,” and who can contemplate killing large numbers of people without
a moment’s bother. The more I think about that, the more interesting it
becomes. So I knew about her; I knew about the boyfriend, and I had a rough
idea of the kinds of people I wanted. I wanted people of different kinds and
types, so I created this lesbian couple. But then what interested me were the
characters who emerged that I hadn’t planned for, like Faye. And then Faye
turned into this destroyed person, which was surprising to me. The little bloke
Phillip turned up like this: Right about then I was hearing about an extremely
fragile young man, twenty-one or twenty-two, who was out of work, but was
always being offered work by the authorities. I mean, loading very heavy rolls
of paper onto lorries, in fact! You’d think they were lunatics! So he always
got the sack at the end of about three days. I think it’s quite a funny book.
INTERVIEWER
Really?
LESSING
Well, it is comic, in a certain way. We always talk about things
as if they are happening in the way they’re supposed to happen, and everything
is very efficient. In actual fact, one’s experience about anything at all is
that it’s a complete balls-up. I mean everything! So why should this be any
different? I don’t believe in these extremely efficient terrorists, and all
that.
INTERVIEWER
Conspiracies, and so on?
LESSING
There’s bound to be messes and muddles going on.
INTERVIEWER
Do you work on more than one fictional thing at a time?
LESSING
No, it’s fairly straight. I do sometimes tidy up a draft of
a previous thing while I’m working on something else. But on the whole I like
to do one thing after another.
INTERVIEWER
I’d imagine then that you work from beginning to end, rather
than mixing around . . .
LESSING
Yes, I do. I’ve never done it any other way. If you write in
bits, you lose some kind of very valuable continuity of form. It is an
invisible inner continuity. Sometimes you only discover it is there if you are
trying to reshape.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a feeling of yourself as having evolved within
each genre that you employ? For instance, I thought the realistic perspective
in The Good Terrorist, and even sometimes in the Jane Somers books, was more
detached than in your earlier realism.
LESSING
It was probably due to my advanced age. We do get detached.
I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the
form you use. It’s not that you say, “I want to write a science fiction book.”
You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
INTERVIEWER
Are you producing fairly continuously? Do you take a break
between books?
LESSING
Yes! I haven’t written in quite a while. Sometimes there are
quite long gaps. There’s always something you have to do, an article you have
to write, whether you want to or not. I’m writing short stories at the moment.
It’s interesting, because they’re very short. My editor, Bob Gottlieb, said,
quite by chance, that no one ever sends him very short stories, and he found
this interesting. I thought, “My God, I haven’t written a very short story for
years.” So I’m writing them around 1,500 words, and it’s good discipline. I’m
enjoying that. I’ve done several, and I think I’m going to call them “London Sketches,”
because they’re all about London.
INTERVIEWER
So they’re not parables, or exotic in any way?
LESSING
No, not at all. They’re absolutely realistic. I wander about
London quite a
lot. And any city, of course, is a theater, isn’t it?
INTERVIEWER
Do you have regular working habits?
LESSING
It doesn’t matter, because it’s just habits. When I was
bringing up a child I taught myself to write in very short concentrated bursts.
If I had a weekend, or a week, I’d do unbelievable amounts of work. Now those
habits tend to be ingrained. In fact, I’d do much better if I could go more
slowly. But it’s a habit. I’ve noticed that most women write like that, whereas
Graham Greene, I understand, writes two hundred perfect words every day! So I’m
told! Actually, I think I write much better if I’m flowing. You start something
off, and at first it’s a bit jagged, awkward, but then there’s a point where
there’s a click and you suddenly become quite fluent. That’s when I think I’m
writing well. I don’t write well when I’m sitting there sweating about every
single phrase.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of a reader are you these days? Do you read
contemporary fiction?
LESSING
I read a great deal. I’m very fast, thank God, because I
could never cope with it otherwise. Writers get sent enormous amounts of books
from publishers. I get eight or nine or ten books a week which is a burden,
because I’m always very conscientious. You do get a pretty good idea of what a
book’s like in the first chapter or two. And if I like it at all, I’ll go on.
That’s unfair, because you could be in a bad mood, or terribly absorbed in your
own work. Then there are the writers I admire, and I’ll always read their
latest books. And, of course, there’s a good deal of what people tell me I
should read. So I’m always reading.
INTERVIEWER
Could you tell us more about how you put the Jane Somers
hoax over on the critical establishment? It strikes me as an incredibly
generous thing to do, first of all, to put a pseudonym on two long novels to
try to show the way young novelists are treated.
LESSING
Well, it wasn’t going to be two to begin with! It was meant
to be one. What happened was, I wrote the first book and I told the agent that
I wanted to sell it as a first novel . . . written by a woman journalist in London. I wanted an
identity that was parallel to mine, not too different. So my agent knew, and he
sent it off. My two English publishers turned it down. I saw the readers’
reports, which were very patronizing. Really astonishingly patronizing! The
third publisher, Michael Joseph (the publisher of my first book), was then run
by a very clever woman called Phillipa Harrison, who said to my agent, “This
reminds me of the early Doris Lessing.” We got into a panic because we didn’t
want her going around saying that! So we took her to lunch and I said, “This is
me, can you go along with it?” She was upset to begin with, but then she really
enjoyed it all. Bob Gottlieb, who was then my editor at Knopf in the States,
guessed, and so that was three people. Then the French publisher rang me up and
said, “I’ve just bought a book by an English writer, but I wonder if you
haven’t been helping her a bit!” So I told him. So in all, four or five people
knew. We all expected that when the book came out, everyone would guess. Well,
before publication it was sent to all the experts on my work, and none of them
guessed. All writers feel terribly caged by these experts—writers become their
property. So, it was bloody marvelous! It was the best thing that happened!
Four publishers in Europe bought it not
knowing it was me, and that was nice. Then the book came out, and I got the
reviews a first novel gets, small reviews, mostly by women journalists, who
thought that I was one of their number. Then “Jane Somers” got a lot of fan
letters, mostly nonliterary, from people looking after old people and going
crazy. And a lot of social workers, either disagreeing or agreeing, but all
saying they were pleased I’d written it. So then I thought, “Okay, I shall
write another one.” By then I was quite fascinated with Jane Somers. When
you’re writing in the first person, you can’t stray too far out of what is
appropriate for that person. Jane Somers is middle class, English, from a very
limited background. There are very few things more narrow than the English
middle class. She didn’t go to university. She started working very young, went
straight to the office. Her life was in the office. She had a marriage that was
no marriage. She didn’t have children. She didn’t really like going abroad.
When she went abroad with her husband, or on trips for her firm and her office,
she was pleased to get home. She was just about as narrow in her experience as
you can get. So in the writing, I had to cut out all kinds of things that came
to my pen, as it were. Out! Out! She’s a very ordinary woman. She’s very
definite in her views about what is right and what is wrong.
INTERVIEWER
What to wear . . .
LESSING
Everything! I have a friend who is desperately concerned
with her dress. The agonies she goes through to achieve this perfection I
wouldn’t wish on anyone! Jane Somers was put together from various people.
Another was my mother. I wondered what she would be like if she were young now,
in London. A
third one was a woman I knew who used to say, “I had a perfectly happy
childhood. I adored my parents. I liked my brother. We had plenty of money. I
loved going to school. I was married young, I adored my husband”—she goes on
like this. But then, her husband dies suddenly. And from becoming a rather
charming child-woman, she became a person. So I used all these things to make
one person. It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the
first person about someone very different from you.
INTERVIEWER
Your original idea with the Jane Somers books was to probe
the literary establishment?
LESSING
Yes. I’ve been close to the literary machine now for a long
time. I know what’s good about it and what’s bad about it. It’s not the
publishers I’ve had it in for so much as the reviewers and the critics, whom I
find extraordinarily predictable. I knew everything that was going to happen
with that book! Just before I came clean I had an interview with Canadian
television. They asked, “Well what do you think’s going to happen?” and I said,
“The English critics are going to say that the book is no good.” Exactly! I had
these sour nasty little reviews. In the meantime the book did very well in
every other country.
INTERVIEWER
In your preface to Shikasta you wrote that people really
didn’t know how extraordinary a time this was in terms of the availability of
all kinds of books. Do you feel that in fact we’re going to be leaving the
culture of the book? How precarious a situation do you see it?
LESSING
Well, don’t forget, I remember World War II when there were
very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look
at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of
miracle. In hard times, who knows if we’re going to have that luxury or not?
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel any sense of responsibility in presenting these
prophesies aside from telling a good story?
LESSING
I know people say things like, “I regard you as rather a
prophet.” But there’s nothing I’ve said that hasn’t been, for example, in the
New Scientist for the last twenty years. Nothing! So why am I called a prophet,
and they are not?
INTERVIEWER
You write better.
LESSING
Well, I was going to say, I present it in a more interesting
way. I do think that sometimes I hit a kind of wavelength—though I think a lot
of writers do this—where I anticipate events. But I don’t think it’s very much,
really. I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if
someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent
of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different
way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which
means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever do any of those sixties’ experiments with
hallucinogens, that sort of thing?
LESSING
I did take mescaline once. I’m glad I did, but I’ll never do
it again. I did it under very bad auspices. The two people who got me the
mescaline were much too responsible! They sat there the whole time, and that
meant, for one thing, that I only discovered the “hostess” aspect of my
personality, because what I was doing was presenting the damn experience to
them the whole time! Partly in order to protect what I was really feeling. What
should have happened was for them to let me alone. I suppose they were afraid I
was going to jump out of a window. I am not the kind of person who would do
such a thing! And then I wept most of the time. Which was of no importance, and
they were terribly upset by this, which irritated me. So the whole thing could
have been better. I wouldn’t do it again. Chiefly because I’ve known people who
had such bad trips. I have a friend who took mescaline once. The whole
experience was a nightmare that kept on being a nightmare—people’s heads came
rolling off their shoulders for months. Awful! I don’t want that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you travel a great deal?
LESSING
Too much; I mean to stop.
INTERVIEWER
Mostly for obligations?
LESSING
Just business, promoting, you know. Writers are supposed to
sell their books! Astonishing development! I’ll tell you where I’ve been this
year, for my publishers: I was in Spain
. . . Barcelona and Madrid, which is enjoyable, of course. Then
I went to Brazil,
where I discovered—I didn’t know this—that I sell rather well there.
Particularly, of course, space fiction. They’re very much into all that. Then I
went to San Francisco.
They said, “While you’re here, you might as well . . .”—that phrase, “you might
as well”—“pop up the coast to Portland.”
You’ve been there?
INTERVIEWER
No, never.
LESSING
Now there is an experience! In San Francisco, they’re hedonistic, cynical,
good-natured, amiable, easygoing, and well-dressed—in a casual way. Half an
hour in the plane and you’re in a rather straight-laced formal city that
doesn’t go in for casual behavior at all. It’s amazing, just up the coast
there. This is what America’s
like. Then I went to Finland
for the second time. They’ve got some of the best bookstores in the world!
Marvelous, wonderful! They say it’s because of those long, dark nights! Now I’m
here. Next I’m going to be in Brighton, for
the science fiction convention. Then I won a prize in Italy called the Mondello Prize, which they give
in Sicily. I
said, “Why Sicily?” and they said, deadpan, “Well, you see, Sicily’s
got a bad image because of the Mafia . . .” So I’ll go to Sicily, and then I shall work for all the
winter.
INTERVIEWER
I hear you’ve been working on a “space opera” with Philip
Glass.
LESSING
What happens to books is so astonishing to me! Who would
have thought The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 would turn into an
opera? I mean it’s so surprising!
INTERVIEWER
How did that come about?
LESSING
Well, Philip Glass wrote to me, and said he’d like to make
an opera, and we met.
INTERVIEWER
Had you known much of his music before?
LESSING
Well, no I hadn’t! He sent some of his music. It took quite
a bit of time for my ears to come to terms with it. My ear was always expecting
something else to happen. You know what I mean? Then we met and we talked about
it, and it went very well, which is astonishing because we couldn’t be more
different. We just get on. We’ve never had one sentence worth of difficulty
over anything, ever. He said the book appealed to him, and I thought he was
right, because it’s suitable for his music. We met, usually not for enormous
sessions, a day here and a day there, and decided what we would do, or not do.
I wrote the libretto.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever done anything like that before?
LESSING
No, never with music.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have music to work from?
LESSING
No, we started with the libretto. We’ve done six versions of
the story so far, because it is a story, unlike most of the things he does. As
something was done, he would do the music, saying he’d like six more lines here
or three out there. That was a great challenge.
INTERVIEWER
Can you say anything about your next project?
LESSING
Yes, my next book is a little book. It’s a short story that
grew. The joke is that a short novel in England is very much liked. They’re
not terribly popular here in the U.S. They like big books here.
Getting your money’s worth. It’s about a very ordinary family that gives birth
to a goblin. And this is realism. I got the idea from two sources. One was this
fantastic writer called Loren Eiseley. He wrote a piece—I can’t remember what
it was actually about—where he’s walking up the seashore in the dusk, and on a
country road he sees a girl that he says is a Neanderthal girl: a country girl
in a country district, nothing very much to be asked of her, hardly noticed
except as a stumpy girl with a clumsy skull. It’s just the most immensely
touching, sad piece. It stuck in my mind, and I said, “If Neanderthals, why not
Cro-Magnons, why not dwarves, goblins, because all cultures talk about these
creatures?” The other source was the saddest piece in a magazine, from a woman
who wrote in and said, “I just want to write about this or I shall go crazy.”
She’d had three children, I think. Her last child, who was now seven or eight,
had been born, she said, a devil. She put it in those terms. She said that this
child had never done anything but hate everyone around. She’s never done
anything normal, like laugh or be happy. She destroyed the family, who couldn’t
stand her. The mother said, “I go in at night and I look at this child asleep.
I kiss her while she’s asleep because I don’t dare kiss her while she’s awake.”
So, anyway, all this went into the story. The main point about this goblin is,
he’s perfectly viable in himself. He’s a normal goblin. But we just cannot cope
with him.
INTERVIEWER
Is the space series going to continue?
LESSING
Yes. I haven’t forgotten it. If you read the last one, The
Sentimental Agents—which is really satire, not science fiction—you’ll see that
I’ve ended it so that I’ve pointed it all to the next volume. [The book ends in
the middle of a sentence.] In the next book, I send this extremely naive agent
off to . . . What’s the name of my bad planet?
INTERVIEWER
Shammat?
LESSING
Yes, to Shammat, in order to reform everything. It’s going
to be difficult to write about Shammat because I don’t want to make it much
like Earth! That’s too easy! I have a plot, but it’s the tone I need. You know
what I mean?
INTERVIEWER
Do you do many public readings of your own work?
LESSING
Not very many. I do when I’m asked. They didn’t ask me to in
Finland.
I don’t remember when was the last. Oh, Germany last year, my God! That was
the most disastrous trip. It was some academic institution in Germany. I said
to them, “Look, I want to do what I always do. I’ll read the story and then
I’ll take questions.” They said, the way academics always do, “Oh you can’t
expect our students to ask questions.” I said, “Look, just let me handle this,
because I know how.” Anyway, what happened was typical in Germany: We met
at four o’clock in order to discuss the meeting that was going to take place at
eight. They cannot stand any ambiguity or disorder—no, no! Can’t bear it. I
said, “Look, just leave it.” The auditorium was very large and I read a story
in English and it went down very well, perfectly okay. I said, “I will now take
questions.” Then this bank of four bloody professors started to answer
questions from the audience and debate among themselves, these immensely long
academic questions of such tedium that finally the audience started to get up
and drift out. A young man, a student sprawled on the gangway—as a professor
finished something immensely long—called out, “BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.”
So with total lack of concern for the professors’ feelings I said, “Look, I
will take questions in English from the audience.” So they all came back and
sat down, and it went well . . . perfectly lively questions! The professors
were absolutely furious. So that was Germany. Germany's the worst, it really is;
the end.
INTERVIEWER
Recently, you’ve turned to writing nonfiction.
LESSING
Well, I’ve just written a book, a short book, about the
situation in Afghanistan.
I was there looking at the refugee camps, because what happens is that men
usually go for the newspapers, and men can’t speak to the women because of the
Islamic attitudes. So we concentrated on the women. The book’s called The Wind
Blows Away Our Words, which is a quote from one of their fighters, who said,
“We shout to you for help but the wind blows away our words.”
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever worry about what sort of authority you could
bring to such an enormous story, being an outsider visiting only for a short
time?
LESSING
Do journalists worry about the authority they bring,
visiting countries for such a short time? As for me, rather more than most
journalists, I was well briefed for the trip, having been studying this
question for some years knowing Afghans and Pakistanis (as I made clear in the
book) and being with people who knew Farsi—this last benefit not being shared
by most journalists.
INTERVIEWER
Your methods of reportage in that book have been the target
of some criticism by American journalists, who charge that your trip to Afghanistan was
sponsored by a particular pro-Afghan organization. How do you respond to that?
LESSING
This is the stereotypical push-button criticism from the
left, from people who I do not think can expect to be taken seriously, for I
made it clear in the book that the trip was not organized by a political organization.
I went for something called Afghan Relief, set up by some friends, among them
myself, which has helped several people to visit Pakistan, but not with money. I
paid my own expenses, as did the others I went with. The point about Afghan
Relief is that it has close links with Afghans, both in exile and fighting
inside Afghanistan, and
includes Afghans living in London,
as advisors. These Afghans are personal friends of mine, not “political.”
Afghan Relief has so far not spent one penny on administration; all the
fund-raising work, here and in Pakistan,
is done voluntarily. To spell it out: no one has made anything out of Afghan
Relief except the Afghans.
INTERVIEWER
From the tag that you used for the Jane Somers book: “If the
young knew / If the old could . . .” Do you have any things you would have done
differently, or any advice to give?
LESSING
Advice I don’t go in for. The thing is, you do not believe I
know everything in this field is a cliché, everything’s already been said, but
you just do not believe that you’re going to be old. People don’t realize how
quickly they’re going to be old, either. Time goes very fast.
Author photograph by Nancy Crampton.