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Nissa Torrents’s interview originally appeared in La Calle #106, April 1–7, 1980. The following translation was prepared by Paul Schlueter and appeared in the Doris Lessing Newsletter 4 (Winter 1980). Copyright © 1980 by Paul Schlueter. Reprinted with permission.

Torrents: It has been said that since 1962, or since The Golden Notebook, your work has changed direction, that it has inclined toward mysticism and has changed radically.

Lessing: I don’t agree. I recently had to reread all my work for reprinting, and in my first work, The Grass Is Singing, all my themes already appear. Critics tend to compartmentalize, to establish periods, to fragmentize, a tendency that university training reinforces and that seems very harmful to me. At first, they said that I wrote about the race problem, later about Communism, and then about women, the mystic experience, etc., etc., but in reality I am the same person who wrote about the same themes. This tendency to fragmentize, so typical of our society, drives people to crisis, to despair, and that is what I intended to describe in The Golden Notebook. I always write about the individual and that which surrounds him.

Torrents: Yes, but along the way a person discards choices that don’t work, politics, for example.

Lessing: I have never thought that politics resolved anything, nor have I ever defended any definite political position. I have simply limited myself in writing about people who are active politically.

Torrents: Like you yourself. Have you thought of returning to Zimbabwe now that things seem to be on the road to straightening themselves out?

Lessing: I do not intend to return. We served a certain purpose in the 1950s because we insisted on being witnesses to the problem of Rhodesia and to the injustices that were committed there. At that time in England, there was talk of all the colonies except Rhodesia. There was a curtain of silence that ran all the way to the left, which wasn’t able to understand African politicians who quixotically believed in honor and were convinced that in England they knew nothing of arbitrariness and repression as practiced by the white colonists. Later African politicians learned that honor has no place in the modern world.

Torrents: Your characters always go looking for new values, renouncing old, traditional values and revealing the gulf that exists between public values and private practice. It’s a permanent search for one’s own equilibrium.

Lessing: We all do that. Nobody now accepts established values and everyone looks for personal morality. At least, that is, until we weaken and return to the church, or to the churches.

Torrents: I don’t believe so. The majority still accepts for the sake of convenience that which was traditionally established. What you propose is to travel perpetually on a tightrope, and not everyone is so brave.

Lessing: Everybody that I know acts like this, including the time when we were Communists and when we maintained a political morality. Personal morality was exclusively private. We questioned everything, especially the male-female relationship, and it’s there on the left where feminine liberation began to make this search, through this kind of critical doubting.

Torrents: But this constant exercising of moral judgment leads your characters to complete loneliness.

Lessing: I don’t believe that it would be a worse kind of loneliness than that experienced by a married woman. One has to accept loneliness; it’s the human condition, and no matter how many parties or churches we belong to, we cannot deny this central truth. Political parties and religions are above all social structures, refuges. One must take risks and not think of the loneliness that awaits us. Otherwise, life is impossible.

Torrents: You’re very severe; you push your characters to the limit, toward the point of irrationality where a sense of direction and accumulated experience can’t help us.

Lessing: But that isn’t a disaster, only a way of seeing things more clearly. We all have extraordinary, non-rational capacities that we use to communicate in a very subtle way. Without these the world would be destroyed. Even physicians, who are the most obstinate in accepting this type of experience, are beginning to work with the metaphysical. The best scientists, those on the highest levels, always come closer and closer to the mystical. Much of what Einstein said could have been said by a Christian mystic, St. Augustine, for example. Science, which is the religion for today, looks for the metaphysical, as with Catholics of old. Hence the boom in science fiction, which reflects this preoccupation and which moves in the world of the non-rational.

Torrents: You’ve always been interested in that. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, in your exploration of schizophrenia and of the savage treatment that society dispenses to its “crazies,” you seem to follow Foucault in considering that treatment to be the central metaphor of social repression.

Lessing: Not entirely. I don’t believe, as does Szasz, that mental illness doesn’t exist. It does exist, but it’s also true that the label corresponds to the discomforts that it causes the establishment. I have read narratives about war in which the protagonists, imprisoned or famished, experienced sensations similar to schizophrenia, and this has made me think that under certain conditions we could all exhibit signs of “abnormality.” The dark is in us, and if we lower the barriers it will penetrate us and we’ll show the symptoms.

Torrents: Your encounter with Idries Shah and Sufism was fundamental, because it established your interest in the irrational. When did this occur?

Lessing: At the beginning of the 1960s and as a result of the experiences that came to me in writing The Golden Notebook. When I wrote that I was a Marxist and a rationalist, but I experienced many things I could not explain. I believe that people try to deny a large part of their experience for fear of those who would call them crazy, but I decided the contrary. I read a book of Idries Shah’s, The Searchers; I realized that it answered many of my questions, and since then I have studied it sufficiently.//

Torrents: You have complained about the poverty of language as an instrument.

Lessing: Words are contaminated, full of traditional associations, above all in psychology, in religion, in the interior world.// Words such as “the unconscious,” “the ego,” “the id” … They are few and they’re all connected with factions, with specific groups. Hence, I find myself forced to write by analogy, in order to avoid the mundane. Memoirs of a Survivor is the direct result of my meditating about the inadequacy of language. I write as in legends or in fairy tales, by means of metaphors and analogies, but it is necessary to be careful, because what is not realistic is slippery ground. One must accumulate enough daily details in order that the reader isn’t lost, since he requires the presence of mundane details so that he can then respond to the irrational.

Torrents: Your questions about language coincide with those of the avant garde, which you don’t belong to; though they start with different presuppositions in trying to avoid the referential, they end in complete obscurity. Do you believe that your work, increasingly private as it is, can also end up so very obscure because of the lack of a common language?

Lessing: Not a single experience is totally private. What can happen to you or to me can happen to many others, and that is my response to the accusation of bourgeois individualism. Where is this individualism? No one has exclusive experiences or thoughts.

Torrents: Progressive internalization has a surprising result, the appearance of apocalyptic thought. In your most recent works there is evidence of our proximity to the end, to an Armageddon that is very close.

Lessing: We are already living it. The newspapers this past week gave some statistics from the FAO about infantile hunger. Some said that 37 million children will die before they are six months old, others 57 million, and this is without counting those who will die of malnutrition or progressive infirmity. This is the apocalypse, here and now.

Torrents: Can something be done to stop this disaster?

Lessing: I’m not sure. People believe that the situation is controlled, but this is not so. Some individuals can choose, but not groups or nations.

Torrents: You have frequently spoken about the writer’s “small personal voice” and of your duty to describe the immorality of the system. Do you still believe that this is possible?

Lessing: Possibly. Now I know that if I write faithfully what I think or feel at a particular moment, then I’ll get to the other matters. At times when I write, my obsessions seem to me to be madness, but when I finish a book, it’s already almost a common situation, because everything changes so rapidly. One can’t choose one’s readers; they choose us.

Torrents: But you have enjoyed the great talent of seeing things before they happen, such as collective obsessions and talk about racism, or feminism, or about putting the metaphysical before everything else … I’d like to ask you about your working routine.

Lessing: Writing is habit. I have disciplined myself to write very fast in short periods of time. It was the only way when my children were small and I could write only when they were in school or playing in the street. If I do not like what I write I discard it. I prefer throwing it away to editing it.

Torrents: I’d like to speak about women and their roles as mates. In your work there are many such women, but they’re never successful. Perhaps the only relationship that can work is the fleeting one, the one-night stand.

Lessing: It took me a long time to realize that I was not made for marriage. If I had known beforehand, I could have saved myself much sadness and anguish. As a young woman I believed that to lie down for one night without the heat of a man’s body was a monumental disaster, but I have slowly realized that it is not like that and have gone so far as to be self-sufficient, which implies a great loneliness because the majority of men, naturally, don’t like this attitude; it’s not needing them. I don’t believe that it’s worth the effort necessary in order to get near a man, in order to intend to form a couple. Men need to be taken care of, to have their egos treated tenderly. They like to be the center and to push the woman to the outside edge. Perhaps the young are different, more flexible. Everything changes so rapidly! I lost much time looking for my ideal man, my match, and now I believe that perhaps my failure lay in trying to make the kind of search appropriate to another historical period and that it’s no longer possible. But I have women friends who are attempting that. They treat men as men treat us. They are free, strong. They demand sex, but when they reach thirty the biological urge possesses them. They want to have children and everything is gone, and then they fall into a routine that will completely destroy them if they don’t maintain their alertness.

Torrents: Men don’t like it that we behave like them. Moreover, certain forms of the Women’s Liberation Movement have hardened masculine attitudes in the war between the sexes.

Lessing: The danger is in confusing liberation of one with the submission of another. I have a couple of liberated friends who have simply inverted roles and have husbands as servants. The Yankee model!

Torrents: Can it be that marriage doesn’t work?

Lessing: The needs of adults and those of children are different. That which is for us a dried-up institution, institutionalized frustration, is a necessity for the young who require a stable home, a constant relationship. They need their parents in a conventional way, the home and the routine, and the couple that cannot confront those responsibilities shouldn’t have children, because the only thing that they get, if they have them, their problem children, is mental turmoil, much sadness.

Torrents: But what you say is terrible, because procreation implies destruction, more or less spectacularly, of the adult and his possibilities, a total sacrifice.

Lessing: That has been my experience. The children who live only with the father or the mother suffer indescribably. We don’t have the right to get what we want at the expense of others, but people oblige themselves in continuously seeking happiness as if they had a right to it. Perhaps a happy marriage is possible, but only with a great effort, renewable everyday, and people aren’t disposed to make the effort or the sacrifice. We want it all to be simple, on a platter. As with prepared meals, soup in packages, fish without fishbones. They sweeten everything and at the end they all know it’s a trick. It’s not even necessary to chew! This is the sign of our time – to avoid pain, to accept that which exists, to demand happiness – but we have forgotten that no one owes us anything and that pain and sacrifice are necessary to find the right path, for moral equilibrium.