Читать книгу Putting the Questions Differently - Doris Lessing - Страница 11

Minda Bikman’s interview originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review March 30, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by Minda Bikman. Reprinted with permission.

Bikman: I found The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five to be a very different kind of novel from its predecessor, Shikasta.

Lessing: I can’t think of another novel like that one. It’s more a sort of legend than anything. It’s in that kind of territory, a legend or myth. There’s never been a book that I enjoyed writing as much as that one. It was a piece of cake, very unlike most of my books, which are agony. I really loved it. When I finished, I was sad that it was ended. But the relationships between these sorts of stylized men and women – that doesn’t strike you as even somewhat comic? Which was my intention, slightly.

Bikman: No, I found the relationships all too real. You described so well the problems men and women seem to encounter, the way people are locked into their perceptions of how things should be. But I found it rather sad that the Queen of Zone Three, the heroine of the novel, had to endure such suffering because her way of living no longer worked for her kingdom. I liked her way of life before it changed; I liked its lightness, its sense of ease.

Lessing: You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, also easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant. I’m not saying good or bad anything. I’m just saying that this is so, whereas the natural male way of going about things is this pompous discipline and lack of subtlety in relations. I’ve recently acquired a thought – but not too seriously, of course – which is: is it possible that women arrived on this planet from a different planet from men at some point? We have such difficulty in relating, in understanding each other. It’s just possible we’re different species altogether. Anyway, that was the idea when I wrote the archetypes of male and female.

Bikman: It has been reported that when you started writing Shikasta you thought it would be one book but that it expanded into five books. Is it definitely five books? Do you have the next three planned?

Lessing: There’s no specific number at all. People have announced that I’m doing three or five. I never had any such thought. What I think is that with this kind of structure, there is nothing to stop me from going on quite a bit until I get bored with it. Because there are all kinds of possibilities. I finished the third one just the other day. It is about a Sirian female offical who’s been one for many thousands of years, and the plot, if you can use that word, is that she slowly discovers through those long ages that, in fact, Canopus is a very much more highly developed empire than Sirius [both Sirius and Canopus developed life on Shikasta] because of course Sirius regards itself in many ways equally good. But this is how she learns how much she might still learn. She is very much an official. She is a bureaucrat, and she thinks like one. I made her a female because, after all, female bureaucrats are innumerable now and I haven’t noticed that they’re all that different from men in operation. Somewhere along the line, female good qualities get lost very often when women are put into positions of certain kinds of power.

I’ve noticed over and over again in these dominantly male structures that there are usually females tucked away, generally in subordinate positions. In fact, they play an extremely important part which no one recognizes – possibly not even they themselves. And I will quote an example that demonstrates it. A friend of mine got ill in Russia and was in hospital. It was a European hospital, with doctors on top, male and female, and wards and the whole lot, just as we’re familiar with. But she was struck more and more by the role played by the ward women, which we do not have in this country. They weren’t nurses so much. They were cleaners, and floated around – they brought meals and all that kind of thing. They had an enormous influence, and everybody relied upon them. Yet they were paid nothing at all, and nobody gave them much respect. In fact, it became evident to her that these females were a kind of bastion. Everything depended on these women for a sort of humanity and decency. Whenever I went into a big organization, I would look for these women. They can be anywhere, they can be at the top or the bottom, but they provide a quality without which the whole thing wouldn’t exist. That is in fact what I think women do generally.

I don’t have the old kind of feminist thoughts that I used to have. I mean, I’ve lost my moral indignation completely. I certainly try to understand what is happening. That’s quite different from trying to think what ought to be happening. The thing is that in trying to find what happens, you come to some very interesting conclusions. And one of mine is that this great suppressed class of women in fact keeps everything going. They are what makes things run. I do so much hate the way women who have children and run homes are put down all the time. Sometimes you meet a woman with four kids and you say, “What are you doing?” and she says, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m only a housewife.” It’s enough to make you cry when you know the work this woman does, how hard she has struggled with it all. Yet they’re so apologetic. They think they haven’t done anything. It’s awful. There isn’t any harder or more demanding job, or one that needs more quality. Middle-aged women, at the end of half a lifetime of working with children and so forth, are the most highly equipped people there are. They can turn their hands to absolutely anything. They can cope with God-knows-what human situations with tact and patience. I used this theme a little bit in Summer Before the Dark.

Bikman: In your novels, particularly the first four Children of Violence books, you write so incisively of the forces that shape women’s lives. Nearly every issue that the Women’s Movement in the United States has raised in the past decade is discussed in those novels and, somewhat less centrally, in the last Children of Violence book, The Four-Gated City. Do you have any idea how you developed those perceptions?

Lessing: It would be enough to say I’m a woman, after all? You know, it wasn’t my generation that invented feminism. My mother was a bit of a feminist. In fact, it was born, I think, with the French Revolution. You see, every generation suddenly invents everything.//

Bikman: Did the conditions of your growing up in Rhodesia contribute to your perceptions?

Lessing: I had a very isolated childhood. There were various reasons why I had to develop an extremely clear and critical mind. It was simply survival. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t in my life been ridiculously emotional. Without boring you with all the psychological details, my position in the family was such that I was very critical, and fairly early on. I had to be, because my mother and father were both in complicated emotional states. I was under terrible pressure as a child, which is true of every child, mind you, but I think it was slightly worse in my case. And then I was in this social set-up, which I disliked, this white-black thing. I can’t remember a time when it didn’t make me uneasy, even when I didn’t know why I was. I think most young people have an extremely clear eye as to what goes on, but women, particularly, tend to lose it when they become adolescents. Perhaps I lost it less than some.

Bikman: So you were able to see clearly the dynamic between white settlers and the black population?

Lessing: I wasn’t clearly seeing it at all. It took many years for me to see it. I think it had far more to do with the family set-up. I had to fight every inch of the way against a very difficult family situation. I’ve got several friends who had a fairly tough childhood, and every one of them has this extremely clear critical eye about what goes on – which is not always a good thing. It can make you very unhappy. You tend to be somewhat bleak, which I am. I think a good many children are born looking at the adult world – because they’ve been forced into it – with an extremely cold eye. And I had it, or I can’t remember any time I haven’t had it.

Bikman: Did you know when you began the Children of Violence series that it was going to be five books?

Lessing: Yes, I knew almost at once that it was five books, roughly sketched out in my mind. I didn’t know how it was going to end, of course. It got less and less realistic as it went on. A good deal of it was in fact autobiographical, but some of it was invented. I think most writers have to start very realistically because that’s a way of establishing what they are, particularly women, I’ve noticed. For a lot of women, when they start writing it’s a way of finding out who they are. When you’ve found out, you can start making things up.

Bikman: The idea of the perfect city appears in several of your books, even as early as Martha Quest, when Martha has a vision of a golden city. Shikasta, of course, is based on an ideal city that gives rise to harmony and serenity. Before Shikasta, the idea seems to have been most fully stated in The Four-Gated City. In writing Shikasta, did you consciously go back to The Four-Gated City and take that moment and expand it into a full-length book?

Lessing: No. You see, the whole concept of a city, four-gated or otherwise, is so archetypal, so in the mythology of all nations, when you start looking. You will find it’s nearly always a metaphor for states of mind, states of being. Anyway, my thought is a serious query about the effect the proportions of buildings have on the people who live in them. This is not a metaphorical thought at all. This is a practical thought, which I think about more and more. And I wonder if the violence, the antisocial attitudes we associate with high-rise buildings, the tower blocks [a reference to London’s council flats, or public housing], might have something to do not only with the fact that the people who live in them have no real responsibility for the building as a whole – which is what I think the sociologists have decided – but I’m wondering if buildings affect the mentality of people in ways we haven’t begun to research. This is my thought. This is my specific thought, not metaphorical. And I’ve used it in Shikasta as a query because I’m not making statements. You know, whenever one writes a book like Shikasta, it’s a series of queries – to myself, to other people – as ideas.

I think it will turn out that there is a whole science of building that we know nothing about, that we might have lost and that ancient civilizations might have known about. And that is how to affect the minds of people living in buildings. Ordinary people who will regard such a thought as “mystical” or silly will in fact say, “I cannot live in that house, it upsets me.” Or they’ll say it has a ghost or something. This kind of thought goes on in my mind at the moment. I can’t enter a building without wondering what other aspects it may have. But we don’t know. Look at cathedrals. They were built in ways which a great many people thought were very specific, to produce certain states of mind. Yet we don’t think like that any more.

And this leads me to the other thought. It is a commonplace way of thinking that we are the great high pinnacle of all kinds of sciences, but I think, on the contrary, we have lost a great deal of knowledge from the past. Far from being on a high pinnacle, we’re on a very low level indeed, in all kinds of ways. You mention buildings because they run throughout my work. Now you can go through a writer’s work and say, “Writer X is fascinated by the symbol” – I don’t know, a rose or a seagull. But what is interesting is not that there should be a rose or a seagull or a teacup or whatever, but what use is made of it, how it develops. Because it can be a metaphor in one book and it can be something quite specific in another.

Bikman: Do younger women writers seek you out?

Lessing: Yes, they do, and I like that very much. I enjoy all that. Mind you that I think women writers are pretty independent characters; they have to be. I wish we could stop talking in terms of men and women writers. Our whole language, the way we think, is set up for putting things into departments. We’ve got far more in common with each other than what separates us.

Bikman: I had access to a file of reviews of your books. I was unpleasantly surprised to see how often reviewers disliked your novels, especially the earlier ones.

Lessing: A reviewer will write a half-damning review of a book, but if the book turns out to have some lasting power, as The Golden Notebook has, they’ll forget all about their reservations and talk about how marvelous they thought that book was.

Bikman: The Golden Notebook – and you mention this in your introduction to the book – was taken up by many readers as a bible of what you refer to as the sex war.

Lessing: It was, and it was a great surprise to me. It shows how naive I was. I was very nastily reviewed in most countries, in fact. They’ve now forgotten that. It’s become a kind of boring, old classic, sitting there on the shelf. And men were angry. Now I get letters from men all the time about The Golden Notebook. But at one time it was classed as a “women’s book.” You see, people are very emotional. If a book upsets someone emotionally, they will very seldom come out with the real reason why they’re upset. They’ll deflect it onto something else. They won’t say, “I’m annoyed with this book because it described how I behaved to my second wife.” They’ll say, “This woman is in bad taste. She’s got no sense of” – I don’t know what, the proprieties or something.

Bikman: I’m also interested in what you said in The Golden Notebook about the pressures in relationships.

Lessing: Living with someone is very, very difficult. How hard it is. Solitude is that great, great luxury which you can hardly ever achieve. People don’t like other people who are perfectly happy by themselves and don’t want to get married and don’t want to do the things other people find essential. I get letters from these marvelous women in the States – I’ve got several pen pals – these naturally quirky, solitary and observant women, and they write me incredible letters, which I adore getting. I don’t answer them properly; I just write and say, “Thank you very much,” which I genuinely feel. But there’s someone living in the middle of America who writes these witty letters about why all her women friends have to get married all the time. It’s like a novel that goes on. I don’t know why people say letter-writing is dead. There are people writing letters by the ream.

Bikman: I’ve read that you wrote two novels before your first one was published. So you did start writing novels at a fairly early age?

Lessing: They were very bad. They really were quite appalling. I’ll tell you what I learned from it, though. One thing was fairly elementary. It was to type, because the first novel was in longhand and I couldn’t read it back. I wrote very fast, and I couldn’t read it. I just know it was awful. And the other thing is that I can write if I get into the groove; if I set things up right I can write easily. It’s a question of setting the stage or something. You have to learn to set up the conditions that are right for you personally.

Bikman: Aside from the novel you’ve just finished, which I think would hold a special place – do you have any novel that is a favorite, that you feel a lot of affection for?

Lessing: At the moment, I feel affection for The Marriages of Zones Three, Four, and Five, but I don’t know how it will strike me in ten years’ time. I might not like it by then. In the past, The Golden Notebook was the most useful to me personally, as a sort of education. But then, every novel’s got a different kind of part to play in your life. Some of my short stories I think are pretty good. But writing short stores doesn’t change you the way a novel does, because writing a novel is more of an intensive effort.

Bikman: Can we talk about the craft of writing?

Lessing: You’re not going to ask me how many hours a day I spend writing, are you? Time and again I get a novel sent to me which is nearly good; my thesis is that talent is in plentiful supply but people don’t stick with it. I send it right back and write, “Well, just do it again.” But they don’t.

Bikman: So you feel there has to be a tremendous persistence?

Lessing: Yes, persistence. And you have to remember that nobody ever wants a new writer. You have to create your own demand.