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Josephine Hendin’s interview was conducted in New York on WBAI Radio December 30, 1972. The transcription was prepared and edited by Patricia Featherstone. Printed with the permission of Bill Thomas, Director, Pacifica Radio Archive.

Hendin: In The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Short Stories one thing that interested me particularly was your story “Report on a Threatened City,” where creatures from another planet come down to earth to warn everyone of an imminent disaster, and no one seems to want to pay attention. When they try to warn the young people they’re in a state which you describe as “disabling despair.” You say while they are more clear-headed than their elders, more able to voice and maintain criticisms of the wrongs and faults of society, they’re not able to believe in their own effectiveness or ability to do anything about it. Is this how you see young people?

Lessing: Well, not all of them, of course. But I do think, certainly in England, I don’t know about this country, that there are large numbers of young people who might have been political perhaps a few years ago, but who seem to be perhaps numbed. Well, I’m not surprised, if you look at what’s going on everywhere. Let’s put it this way: I’m very glad that I’m not twenty, because I don’t think I would be able to regard what’s going to happen with all that equanimity. About what goes on here, as I say, I don’t know at all. Quite a common thing to see in England is groups of young people living together on some basis or another, often quite informalized. They don’t say, “I’m going to set up a group of young people.” It’s what seems to happen. A feature of this is that people tend to be unambitious and work out some kind of rather relaxed, informal sort of style of living, which is very interesting to see because it’s quite different from anything that my generation did, for example.

Hendin: When you say you don’t think you’d be able to regard what’s going to happen with such equanimity, in this particular story it’s a kind of doom. At least in a specific city that is going to happen, and in The Four-Gated City you prophesy a kind of apocalyptic war. Is that what you see as coming?

Lessing: This story is about San Francisco, of course. There was a program on British television, it must have been about eighteen months ago, and I read an article about the same time, and what fascinated me about this was that the citizens of San Francisco didn’t seem to know the situation they were living in, yet one can have programs on British television or erudite articles about it. I mean, the fact that all the amenities are on the San Andreas fault, everything from fire stations to hospitals, and in fact the posts that are supposed to cope with emergencies will be the first to go if there’s an earthquake. Well, it was a fascinating thought that the people who were going to be involved didn’t know what they were in for. And this just sparked off that story. But I gather that since then things are not really much better. If you write something like that, people send you articles and comments, and I gather that the citizens of San Francisco don’t know very much more than they did then. But it’s quite freely discussed in other parts of the world, much more than it is in San Francisco. And that is the interesting thing about that, that we don’t face the situation that is perhaps intolerable. We decide not to look at it straight. Maybe it’s a basic human tendency or something of the kind. This is possibly what’s going on in New York, because when I came here in 1969 everything was much sharper, more aggressive, more tense, and the newspapers were much more sharp and clear. But this time, when manifestly the external situation hasn’t changed in the slightest, I find the newspapers rather bland compared to the English newspapers, and everything seems to be rather good-natured, from which I deduce that things have been swept under the carpet because it’s too painful to look at them. I may be wrong about that. But it’s possible at least that that’s what’s happening.

You asked about the ending of The Four-Gated City. I’m not saying that’s a blue-print, but I think something of the kind is likely to happen. One doesn’t need to have a crystal ball to see that this is what’s going to happen. You just have to read [a newspaper]. There’s a paper in England, for example, called The New Scientist, which is written in language that non-mathematical dopes can understand, you see, like me. You’ve just got to read that for a couple of months to see that far from the danger of war receding, it’s sharpened, that far from our ecological problems being better, they’re worse, and so on. When I wrote The Four-Gated City, I thought that I was perhaps going out on such a limb that no one would ever speak to me again. By the time it was published it was all old hat, things were moving so fast. But the fact that they’re old hat doesn’t mean to say that anything’s changed very much. The problems that we, I mean the human race, have to solve are every bit as bad as they were. The fact that we’re not looking at them, or it doesn’t seem to be that we’re looking at them, doesn’t make them any better.

Hendin: I was wondering how you would write about your idea that things seem to be more good-natured here, with the proliferation of small groups, each of which has their own special interests. I’m thinking in the main of those groups which are concerned with improving the environment, with the great number of women’s organizations which want to improve the lot of women in this country, and with the proliferation of various kinds of black power groups showing a spectrum of all degrees of militancy.

Lessing: This kind of bitty approach to these enormous problems is not enough, and what we need is something that perhaps the human race is not evolved enough to do, which is some kind of overall scheme which seizes the problems, and looks at them as global problems, and not the problems of individual countries, let alone of groups. As I say, this is not me talking, because whereas previously, when I had such thoughts that I really thought were quite extraordinary, and indeed, perhaps shamefully pessimistic and so on, it turns out that this is the kind of thinking of people in very responsible positions who, in fact, say extremely clearly things like: “If within ten years we don’t do so and so and so and so, the situation will be out of control.” Now what they suggest should be done in ten years is usually precisely this ability of humanity as a whole to look at itself as a whole, and to face its problems as a whole. This is in fact what is necessary.

Hendin: Is what you call the “disabling despair” of the young in some way a reaction to the sense that this is not going to be done?

Lessing: This is what some sections of young people seem to do. Do you know, I do find this difficult, when a sentence or statement from a story is quoted to you: “You say so and so,” and in actual fact it is out of context.

Hendin: Fair enough. To get back to the context of the story, which is interesting in itself in terms of the form, you describe the situation as it evolves around the visit of creatures from another planet to the Earth. And in a number of your books you’ve been interested, it seems to me, in using this – whether as a metaphor or whether you see it as a possibility – the idea of space travel, and beings from another planet coming here. I was wondering what significance you felt this had.

Lessing: I don’t see why it’s impossible. If there were beings from another planet here I doubt whether we would recognize them. It wouldn’t take very much, would it, some day for intelligent creatures to disguise themselves in such a way that they wouldn’t be recognized.

Hendin: I get the feeling sometimes in many of your stories that people see each other as though they were space travelers looking at aliens on another planet – that somehow the distance between people is sufficiently great, or between people and the lives they are leading. The sense of disillusionment becomes so great that there’s a feeling of immense distance.

Lessing: This whole business of using people from outer space is a very ancient literary device, isn’t it? It’s the easiest way of trying to make the readers look at a human situation more sharply.

Hendin: But somehow it seems to reflect the same sense of distance that so many of the characters in your books have in relation to themselves and to the worlds they live in. It seems to be bound up with the whole sense of estrangement, for example, that Martha Quest has, in so many of those situations where she’s there and not there, and in situations in which she feels alien, whether as a girl growing up, on this farm in central Africa or in London, when the disaffection with the Communist Party is at its highest – a sense of being a part of something which she has no deep emotional connection to. I was wondering whether or not you didn’t have in mind the idea of being spaced out and yet involved in something. In “Not a Very Nice Story,” you talk about people’s sense that feeling is all-in-all. You say, “We feel, therefore we are.”

Lessing: The story was about two married couples who were all close friends, a set of affairs which continued for years. Two of the people in the situation have what is known as an adulterous relationship. What I was asking in the story was, “What in fact is love?” because these two were not supposed to be in love, or lovers, but they were lovers, but their relationship was extremely cool and practical. This was an anecdote told to me by someone, by one of the men actually, involved in this foursome, and I was extremely shocked. He wanted to know why I was shocked. He said that these two marriages were in fact very successful marriages, and the children were all happy, well adjusted, etc., and so on. I was shocked by the deception. Having listened to him for some time, I asked myself, “All right, why am I shocked?” And out of this question I wrote this story, which simply made a statement. I haven’t taken any sides or anything of that kind. I’m still shocked by the situation; yet I still ask questions – about the nature of marriage, which I find hard to admire, the institution thereof. I’m always interested in the patterns that people try to evolve themselves. But this one, please note, nobody consciously evolved. It happened in life, and it happened in my story, much to the surprise of all the people involved in it.

Hendin: I’m tempted to ask what you think the nature of marriage is.

Lessing: Well, there must be something very wrong with this Mum and Dad and two children, or it wouldn’t break up all the time. I used to have a great many theories about marriage, sex, love, and all this kind of thing. But everything is going to change. Sometimes I think that maybe some form of polygamy or group marriage would be a good thing. But then, whenever you have thoughts like this, of course, you end up with the problem of the children, because children are the most conservative creatures in existence, and they get very upset if they don’t get what everybody else has. One can either say it doesn’t matter that it’s hard on the children, or you’re not going to do it because it’s hard on the children, but one has to face the fact that children tend to pay the price for any experimenting that adults do.

Hendin: In The Summer before the Dark, you describe the situation of a woman whose children are pretty much grown up, and who, looking back on her life, seems to feel that a great many of the personal questions which seemed at one time so important, whether to love this man or that, whether to marry, aren’t very meaningful.

Lessing: When you get middle-aged, which I am, it’s fairly common to look back, and to think that a lot of the sound and fury that one’s been involved in perhaps wasn’t all that necessary. Or you can say this is just emotional middle-aged spread, or something of the kind. But it could also possibly be quite a useful frame of mind to be in. I discuss this with my friends who have reached the same age. There is quite often a sense of enormous relief of having emerged from a great welter of emotionalism.

Hendin: But it’s more than that for Kate, a sense that personal relations were not as important as she had thought – that the sense of strength to be derived from feeling at peace with oneself, apart and alone, is what’s important. She dreams of carrying a seal through all kinds of misfortunes and protecting it as though the seal in some way is bound up with the most important part of herself, which gets carried through whatever storms occur in marriage, or raising a family, and is preserved intact.

Lessing: I don’t think that I’m saying that this woman was repudiating anything she’d done. She’d simply moved on to a different state in herself, which is a different thing altogether, really. You know, we’re very biological animals. We tend always to think that if one is in a violent state of emotional need, it is a unique emotional need, or state. In actual fact, it’s probably just the emotions of a young woman of twenty-three whose body is demanding that she should have children. It’s hard for some people to take, because we’re all brought up to have this fantasy about ourselves, that everything we feel and think is uniquely and gloriously our own. Ninety percent of the unique and marvelous and wonderful thoughts are, in fact, expressions of whatever state we happen to be in.

Hendin: Kate becomes friendly with a young girl in that novel, Maureen, who’s trying to decide what to do with her life, and she decides that at the end it really doesn’t seem to matter whether she marries one man or another.

Lessing: Maureen tends to be more passive than not, and getting married was very much on her plate. A lot of young women think of marriage in terms not of a man, but of a way of living. When young women think about getting married, what they’re choosing when they choose a man is often a way of life. Maureen had quite a lot of choices and she wasn’t really mad about any of them. I know a lot of girls who don’t want to get married at twenty-four. It would be interesting to see how they’re thinking at thirty, but that’s another thing. But it is interesting the number of young women I know who don’t want to get married at all. They don’t want to have children. Well, they’re trying to cheat on their biology, and as I say, it would be nice to see what happens.

Hendin: Couldn’t it also be an alternative to marriage?

Lessing: Yes. When I find a very determined young woman of twenty-four who announces she’s got no intention of ever getting married, and looks as if she’s going to stick to it, I’m interested because I’m wondering if in fact women are changing their nature or not.

Hendin: In The Golden Notebook, Anna or Molly says that she thinks there must be a completely new kind of woman.

Lessing: No, I think that maybe they are not new kinds of women at all. They are women very much conditioned to be one way who are trying to be another, or what they think is something different. But the way we think and the way we feel are usually pretty well at loggerheads for most people. These conversations between women in The Golden Notebook and other places are always being taken out and quoted as if they are blueprints of mine or a political program. Well, they’re not. They’re accounts of the kinds of states of mind women get into.

Hendin: In Martha Quest, there’s a comment about people coming to books of different kinds for cues to life. Do you think this is the way a great many people have come to read your books?

Lessing: I think people now go to sociological books more than novels for cues of how to live their life. I used to go particularly to novels to find out how I ought to live my life. But, to my loss, I see now I didn’t find out.

Hendin: About the way we think and the way we feel being at loggerheads, one thing that always interested me about Martha Quest’s life was, why does she do it? Suddenly given her freedom at a certain point, why does she get married to a man she scarcely seems to love, and who she’s aware of not being in love with?

Lessing: Well, this was a very general situation about men, and don’t forget that that was the war. The more I look back at that war, the more I think that everyone was insane, even people not involved in it. And I’m not being rhetorical. I think that everyone was crazy round about then. And the rest of the behavior that went on was more crazy than usual. I don’t want to suggest that human beings are sane in between wars; we manifestly are not, but that was a very terrible war, you know. This is a thing I keep coming back to. We go through a terrible experience, it comes to an end, and it is as if it hasn’t happened, or it simply gets pushed off into words. It becomes verbalized. The First World War degraded and demoralized us terribly and the Second World War did it more thoroughly, and we have not got over either of these wars. The children of that war were profoundly affected by it. We tend to ignore this. We get steadily more and more demoralized, and barbarized, by the things we do, but we don’t like to really look at this fact. So, if in the middle of the Second World War a young woman, or very many young women, got married somewhat light-heartedly, it’s just a very minor symptom of the general lunacy.

Hendin: Well, in what ways do you think the war affected trust in relations and the way people see themselves and each other? Is it the bomb, or simply the accessibility of so much violence through films?

Lessing: No, it’s just one very small thing. I remember towards the end of the Second World War, after we’d had four and a half years of horror, non-stop, of the most vicious propaganda from both sides we were still capable of being shocked by the fact that the Russians publicly hanged Nazis. Well, no one would even lift an eyelid now to look at the photographs. Twenty years on, we’ve become so used to worse. That’s the horrible truth. We’re just not shocked at anything.

Hendin: The characters, then, in The Four-Gated City in particular, seem to be as acute in terms of their ability to sense what’s going on about them. Particularly, I think, the character you describe as being mad, being insane, Lynda, and I think in that portion of the book when Martha selfconsciously drives herself mad. Do you think they’re the only people who remain in touch with these things?

Lessing: The person in that book who has much more of a grasp of what’s going on, physically if you like, is a man. He has a kind of a blueprint of what’s going on everywhere, separating him off from what he thinks and does, from the others. These people were really into their own experiences with each other. People living together, who know each other very well, form some kind of a whole. They experience things through each other, and what one of them discovers becomes the property of the others usually. But also there are many different layers of ourselves. I mean, we know something in one part of ourselves that we don’t know in another.

Hendin: There is a feeling in that book of being collective, not personal and unique. Even when Martha decides to go mad she describes it as being plugged into the self-hater, as though this were some almost universal force, which anyone would encounter.

Lessing: This figure is very prominent in many schizophrenics. That’s a word I don’t like but these labels will have to do. You’ll find very many “mad people” saying: “They hate me. They’re talking about me all the time. They want to destroy me.” There are endless variations on this particular theme. This figure is common to very many people who are off-balance. I don’t think it’s very hard to explain either. All you have to do is to watch any mother bringing up her child; from the time this child is born this goes on: “Be a good boy and do this. Be a good girl and do this. You’re a bad boy. You’re a bad girl. If you do that I won’t love you. If you do that so-and-so will be angry.” This “conscience” is partly the externalization of what its parents can’t stand, mostly its manner. This figure, the self-hater, which mad people describe continually, and express continually as this very powerful destroying force, is this lifetime of conditioning.

It’s very easy to send oneself round the bend for a couple of days. I did it once, out of curiosity. I do not recommend it. I’m a fairly tough character, and I’ve been in contact with a very large number of people who’ve been crazy, and I know quite a lot about it. I sent myself round the bend by not eating and not sleeping for a bit. There’s nothing remarkable about this process. It’s a process deliberately used by medicine men and witch doctors in “primitive societies” all over the world. It’s a process that can be described, let’s say, by prisoners in a prisoner-of-war camp, who’ve been not eating and not sleeping, and they start hallucinating, or have various kinds of experiences of dissociation and so on, or they discover this figure I call a self-hater. I could go on indefinitely. It’s described plentifully in religious literature, both Christian and Eastern.

But what makes a difference is the society you’re in, and how this is accepted by the people around you. If in Africa somebody would turn up saying that they felt disassociated from themselves and heard voices, they wouldn’t be clapped into the nearest loony bin, drugged silly, and given electric convulsive therapy. Now when I, and I may say I’m not the only person who’s done this, deliberately sent myself round the bend to see what it was like, I instantly encountered this figure I call the self-hater. Now since I know, as I say, a little bit about it, I didn’t rush off to the nearest doctor and say: “Oh doctor, I’m hearing voices and I hate myself, and the voices say they want to kill me,” because I knew what was going on. But it is an extremely powerful figure, very frightening, and I’m not surprised that in this very unsophisticated society, unsophisticated psychologically, somebody experiencing this for the first time is scared, loses balance and goes off to the doctor, and I’m afraid to say, in very many cases is then lost. Because what happens is that a person who turns up at the out-patients or whatever, is slammed full of drugs, and then he’s diagnosed as being remote or incapable of contact, or can’t be reached, he’s slammed full of more drugs, and the end of this can very well be in some ghastly snake pit somewhere. I understand that in this country you have as many as in ours. But what is frightening is not the snake pits, because they’re out in the open and people know about them. What is frightening is what goes on in the name of orthodox and general treatment. This is where I think so much damage is caused out of ignorance and stupidity.

Hendin: In the way Martha deals with it, though, she gets quite a bit out of her experience. Whatever she encounters in herself seems to be a source of strength and insight. Do you think that this kind of experience has a positive value?

Lessing: You’ve put a whole lot of things together there. In the first place, Martha’s experience was not an account of mine. But it was similar in some respects. Yes, of course, I got a lot out of it because you learn a great deal about yourself. For one thing, one learns a lot about why some of one’s nearest and dearest land in loony bins.

About the Briefing for a Descent into Hell, one of the starting off points for that was that it occurred to me that so many of the things described by people who are mad are the same. They use the same phrases. They’re fantastically stereotyped in fact, these experiences, and I was trying to think of different interpretations. Now, it is quite possible that this is distorted. It’s an attempt to express something which she’s trying to get through, from somewhere else. It’s probable that there’s another dimension, very close to the one that we’re used to, and that people under stress open doors to it, and experience it, in a very violent, unpleasant, or dangerous and possibly permanently damaging way. Briefing for a Descent into Hell was an attempt to suggest what in fact this experience could be.

Hendin: Going back to Martha’s experience in the novel, I always wondered – this experience she has occurs right after she has seen her mother after so many years – since in describing it you mention the reproving voice of the mother of childhood as being bound up with it, do you think in some way the connection between …

Lessing: No, not necessarily. This figure, this reproving “do this, don’t do that figure” is internalized, and I don’t think it’s got anything to do with what time an actual mother turns up.

Hendin: I think that’s quite true. But I wonder, in some ways, if to Martha the visit of the mother seems to ruin the time that she’s been having in London, and precipitates a kind of break in her conception of things. Interesting that she sends her mother to her analyst. I thought that was a wonderful scene.

Lessing: I must say, Martha’s not the only person to have done that. I’ve heard about it quite often. It’s using your support figure to say to your parent: “She says so and so.” It helps one out, I suppose.

Hendin: To move away a little bit from the novel, do you see something in the way mothers and daughters get on together, and the way women of one generation create or help create women of the next, as somehow maintaining some particularly painful bond? In other words, are they selfhaters, who feel they must marry, but in some way don’t want to, but that it’s inevitable? Is this something mothers contribute to their daughters?

Lessing: Well, every one of us has to live through our parents, and ourselves, and come out the other side. I don’t know if that makes sense. There’s no good sidestepping one’s parents.

Hendin: I think that’s true. But you’ve written so marvelously of the friendships between women, and yet mothers and daughters in your books don’t seem to get on very well, do they? I suppose that’s true in my case as well.

Lessing: Bernard Shaw once said that mothers should bring up sons, and daughters should be brought up by their fathers, because this was the natural bond and the other was unnatural. I’m not saying I agree with that, but it certainly does seem to be quite hard for parents and children of the same sex to get on together. Not always, of course. But it’s a problem.

Hendin: Why, would you say?

Lessing: Well, it’s biological, again. There’s nothing mystical about it.

Hendin: What’s biological, the attitude?

Lessing: The daughter threatens the mother and the son the father, in the most primitive and backward and animal-like way. You can observe it in any herd of animals, let alone human beings. Most of our behavior is not very advanced, is it? We like to fancy that it is. You can see the sort of competition going on between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters in any family. It’s quite a primitive sort of thing.

Hendin: I think so. I always thought that Martha’s mother was one of the most particularly envious and resentful mothers one could have.

Lessing: I think perhaps it was that generation. I don’t think that women of this generation are so bad because most of them have work. They enjoy their work much more, whereas it was much rarer for women of that generation to have work. And that’s terribly important, not to be out on a limb when you’re fifty, without anything to do. It seems to me that every woman should be very careful that that shouldn’t happen, and nowadays women are indeed very careful that that shouldn’t happen, and that’s why things are better.

Hendin: In the beginning of The Golden Notebook, Anna says: “The point is that as far as I can see everything is cracking up.” Did you have anything particular in mind, or did she, at the time?

Lessing: Yes, it’s no more than what we’ve already talked about. It seems to me that her and our civilization is falling apart. I think that this is what is happening around us, as we sit here. We’re on the top of a slippery slide, and what’s going to be at the bottom I don’t know. Why am I talking of it as if it’s in the future? It’s not in the future; it’s happening now. We’re always talking about physical catastrophes. Just before I left England I was listening to the radio, and there was the President of the World Bank, or some such institution, calmly quoting figures of people who are going to die this year, of hunger. I mean there are millions of people, two-thirds of the people in the world, who don’t get enough to eat, and will be stunted permanently by this, because as you probably know, if a child doesn’t get the right protein at the right time, his brain will be permanently stunted by it. Now this is a quite formidable fact, but they’re always talking about catastrophes as if they are going to happen in the future. Perhaps we should ask how bad does a catastrophe have to be before it becomes a catastrophe.

Hendin: In the title story to your new book, The Temptation of Jack Orkney, Jack Orkney, the main character, how would you describe him? Well, you do describe him.

Lessing: I use fifty thousand words describing him, don’t I?

Hendin: I know. An old guard hero of the left wing, I suppose? No, that’s too pejorative. But, at any rate, a dedicated socialist? When his father dies he begins to dream of his own death in a way, and with a peculiar horror and sweetness at the same time bound up with it. But his personal tragedy is played off against the tragedy in Bangladesh, and the protest that he’s been having to organize against it. Do you see a relation between the personal loss and the public tragedy?

Lessing: Well, it is in the story, isn’t it? Not more than that, no.

Hendin: Well, again, I was wondering. There are two things really. First, the relation between the public and the private, and the way these events shape our dreams, our lives.

Lessing: I don’t know that this story is about the relationship between the public and the private, you see. What I’m describing there is the person who has been like a revolutionary or a left-winger all his life, and then finds himself to be a member of the establishment. This happens to every generation, of course. But what has happened, we see it very sharply in England and Europe; I don’t know about here. It would be different here because the era of McCarthy made a fairly thorough weed-out of your left wing, but in England and in Europe, you would see in all countries, a group of men and women, middle-aged men and women, who in their prime were revolutionaries of one kind or another. I don’t mean to say necessarily Communists. On the contrary. They could have been all kinds. Or not even political. They could have been “world changers,” to use a silly phrase. What has happened to them is what happens to everybody – they’ve become institutions. Now, a set of mental attitudes shared in common by this generation is fairly easy to describe. They’re all believers that society can be endlessly manipulated to achieve good ends. I’m not saying “socialists,” because they include people who aren’t socialists. They were all rationalists and atheists of one kind or another, or most of them were. They tended to have liberal ideas about sex, and so on. Very often their private lives were quite different from their liberal theories. There is a whole series of limited liberal attitudes, shared by all of them. Well, in any place, take one of these men and confront him with the death of his father – because such people tend to be petrified by the idea of death – it’s not a fact that can be assimilated easily into their way of thinking. At his father’s death he starts to dream, which he’s never done before in his life. At the end of the story, this man has turned his back on an opportunity that was offered to him of opening doors on himself, to explore different ways of thinking. In the story he has a door opened for him, even though he doesn’t want it; in fact he’s going to go on dreaming. It is a pretty important door to have opened, because it’s a way of learning a very great deal about oneself, and about this other dimension.

Hendin: Dreams do seem to find more and more of a part in your work.

Lessing: I don’t think they play any more of a part than they have always done. In The Grass Is Singing, for example, the first novel I ever wrote, they play quite an important part. They’ve always played an important part in my life, you see. I’ve found them very useful in my work. In The Summer Before the Dark, I built dreams right into the story, so that the way out for this woman was in fact through her dreams of this magical seal that she found on this hillside. I’m doing a lot of research on dreams at the moment, and I read about it when anything comes my way. It’s possible that we’re not asking the right questions about them, because, after all, dreaming’s not a new phenomenon. It’s a capacity that human beings have always had and in some cultures used quite consciously. Some people in our culture use them quite consciously. There’s a great deal already known about dreams if the scientists would like to look slightly sideways from their straight and narrow path, and read and study what’s already available. But unfortunately they do tend to be somewhat hide-bound, many of them, and they’re not prepared to consider as evidence material that doesn’t fit neatly into their own little boxes. However, I think that even scientists seem to be improving in this direction. So I have hopes. Let’s put it this way. I think a lot of research that is interesting is quite a waste because a lot of it we already know. It’s already around, and has been for thousands of years in fact.

Hendin: At one point, in describing Kate sitting in a restaurant, you say, “She knew now, she had to know at last, that all her life she’d been held upright by an invisible fluid.” Do you think that’s true of women in general?

Lessing: Really it’s true of everyone in general. But it’s certainly true of women because we’ve been taught to attract attention all our lives. You’re taught to be attractive and to dress attractively. For example, I notice that Women’s Lib women tend to be attractive and to dress attractively. They don’t despise the attention-attracting devices that women have always used. I’m not saying that they should. Far from it. I think a good deal of the depression and the mental breakdown of the middle-aged women are due to the fact they suddenly find they’re not able to command attention the way they’ve always been able to command it. Let’s put it like this: an attractive young woman finds it very hard to appreciate what she really is from her appearance, because she has only to walk into a room, or to put herself into an attention-getting situation, to find, in fact, that she can regulate the kind of attention she gets, fairly clearly. You only have to discover the difference between what you really are and your appearance when you get a bit older, which is a most fascinating experience. It really is. It’s one of the most valuable experiences that I personally have ever had. A whole dimension of life suddenly slides away, and you realize that what, in fact, you’ve been using to get attention, or command attention, has been what you look like, sex appeal or something like that. Once again it’s something that belongs to the condition of being a young woman. It’s a biological thing, yet for half your life or more, you’ve been imagining that this attention has been attracted by yourself. It hasn’t. It’s got totally and absolutely and unopposedly nothing to do with you. It really is the most salutary and fascinating experience to go through. It really is most extraordinarily interesting.

Hendin: What do you think of the Women’s Movement?

Lessing: Well, I know very little about it because I’m not involved in it. I’ve met some of the liberation women, and I like them very much personally, but I really do feel that I’ve said all I have to say about this in The Golden Notebook, and some of the things I said about Martha. One can’t go on being preoccupied with the same problem, or the same set of problems. I don’t want to say I’m bored by it, though that’s partly true. It’s just that you work your way out of something, and you go on to something else.

Hendin: Many of the women in the movement would feel that way too. But I think they would see working their way out of it in maybe slightly different terms. I have a feeling that you stress a kind of individualistic approach, more than they would.

Lessing: Well, being a writer is a very individualistic thing, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m not altogether sure that I hold with all this, the dogma that everything has to be done in groups. This is only one of the ways of setting up one’s life or one’s politics. It’s a new dogma, you know, one has to be in groups, but why?

Hendin: I think some of the most important parts of life are lived alone and apart from everyone, men and women alike.

Lessing: That’s right.

Hendin: I once heard you lecture, and you described the situation of a writer having to battle against and confront the world’s indifference. Did you find when you first started writing that there was an audience for your work?

Lessing: You’re putting it very melodramatically. I put it much more clearly than that. I said that when a writer starts, nobody has the slightest interest in reading what he or she has to say, that a writer has to create an audience. I didn’t say anything about battling or anything like that, which I think adds to this somewhat romantic myth about writers being heroic, battling away. I’m always against this romanticizing of situations or people because as soon as you start doing that you lose the capacity to look at a situation coolly, and to see what’s really going on. And there’s far too much of this glamorization of writers and the writing situation.

Hendin: How do you feel about your own career as a writer?

Lessing: Well, I have right here a quotation which I took off the wall from the wall-newspaper downstairs, and it reads: “The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible,” and that was written by Tolstoy. And that is what I feel about writing.