Читать книгу Putting the Questions Differently - Doris Lessing - Страница 14

Michael Dean’s interview was broadcast May 7, 1980, on BBC-2. Copyright © 1980 by British Broadcasting Corporation. Printed with permission.

Dean: You spent your formative years growing up in Rhodesia with English parents who imagined, at least half the time it seemed, that they were still in England. Was it a happy childhood?

Lessing: No, it wasn’t at all. Fighting every inch of the way I was. No, I had to. It was nobody’s fault. You have to get to be old like me before you can look back and understand your parents, and now I’m desperately sorry for my mother particularly.

Dean: You were a late developer and had no formal education as we understand it, leaving school at fourteen.

Lessing: That’s right.

Dean: Why?

Lessing: Well, it was part of fighting my poor mama. I went off and I was what is now called an au pair girl. I was a nursemaid in fact for about two and one-half years in Salisbury. I didn’t mind the work, because I liked looking after babies, but it was an awful waste of time. Then I went back and I wrote a novel or two on the farm, very fast and very bad.

Dean: What kind of novels?

Lessing: //One was a very mannered artificial book about Salisbury social life. I was seventeen.

Dean: Was there a political edge to your writing then?

Lessing: No, it was bad social satire.

Dean: I’m interested to know why and how you became different? I mean, the prevailing wind of that culture which was white supremacy wasn’t questioned I should imagine by the people you lived with.

Lessing: People say how remarkable it is that you saw through all that color-bar thing when you were so young. I do not feel that this was due to anything innate, anything on my part at all. I think it was simply that I had to be critical about everything, all my life. I can’t remember any time in my life where I wasn’t sitting looking at the grown-up scene, for example, and thinking, This must be some great charade they’ve all agreed to play. I was always seeing through what went on. That was the makings of a critic, you see. Now this is a bad thing as well, because it can be very sterile.

Dean: There’s an epigraph to your first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which goes I think, “it is by the failures and the misfits of a civilization that one can judge its weaknesses.” Have you always felt yourself sitting in judgment of your civilization?

Lessing: You see, this is a very crucial question. Yes, I have, and perhaps it’s not much use, but I think it was the way I was brought up. You must imagine my parents who were Tory and admiring Churchill when he was still some pain in the neck, you know, but soon afterwards he became a kind of cherubic saint with a cigar. He was no good, you see, because he prophesied the Second World War and said we should prepare for it and my parents who suffered terribly from the First World War, their entire lives were ruined by it, were torn up, you know. They were anguished by the approaching war and that no one was doing anything about it. Imagine them sitting in the middle of the bush – our nearest neighbors were three, four, seven miles away, listening to the BBC, eight o’clock news and Big Ben and angry because of English politics. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t heard people discussing politics. This was probably my earliest education.

Dean: You must have read widely and I’m sure voraciously as a child and as an adolescent.

Lessing: I read in Salisbury when I felt myself very shut up there. You know what it’s like, this dreadful provincial little hole. I read very strange novels, almost as a deliberate counterbalance, like Proust. There was a time when I think I must have been really quite an authority on Proust. It was such a relief to read something like that. Somebody once said Rhodesia was a combination of the Wild West and Tunbridge Wells. I would read my way from book to book. I found a book mentioned in one and then sent for it, to England, the Everyman’s Library. The excitement of these books arriving after waiting sometimes for six weeks was the marvelous moment in my life, when a new book, a parcel of books came, from England and I could start in. Sometimes they were absolutely useless to me because I hadn’t got to the stage of appreciating them.

Dean: I think you wrote once that Africa is an old fever, latent always in the blood. Are you still carrying that old fever?

Lessing: Yes, very much so. And I dream about it all the time with terrible nostalgia and a sort of anguish, because that’s finished, I think; and you know, I haven’t been allowed to go there, for I’m a prohibited immigrant. Now here my head and my heart are absolutely like this, as they often are, but here particularly, because while my head applauds like this, out goes my heart. I weep like a small child, you see, that I’m shut out of my country. Now when I say this to an African he very probably laughs, and I’m on his side. But there are some things, you see, that you can do nothing about.

Dean: What is it that your heart grieves for?

Lessing: It’s a beautiful place, and the Africans, you see. I know it’s very suspect for the daughter of a white settler, which is what I am, you see, to talk about Africans in this way, but I see that Van der Post also does, so I’m in good company. I miss the Africans so much; they’re such beautiful people. They’ve got this marvellous grace and good humor and charm, and I miss it.

Dean: I’m going to wrench you away from Africa now rather cruelly. The year is 1949. You’re arriving in England, a source of so much of your culture, with the scars of two marriages, I think, and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in your suitcase. This was post-war London, very austere, very gray. Was it a shock to you?

Lessing: Yes, it was. It was so gray and lightless and grim and unpainted and bombed. It took a lot of getting used to. And of course I had very little money and fairly difficult circumstances. I had a small child. You see, I recently discovered I was a one-parent family, which everyone knows was quite hard.

Dean: Something you wrote that seemed to me to be terribly heartfelt was on experiencing England for the first time: everybody was so kind, so decent, so bloody dull.

Lessing: Well, it was dull. You see the colonies are full of very outsize characters. There’s plenty of room for everyone’s eccentricities to blossom, and here there isn’t space for it. You find people being eccentric behind closed doors. You get to know them, then you find these marvelous maniacs living their quiet, mad lives, but it’s not out in the open at all.

Dean: When The Grass Is Singing was published and acclaimed, did your life change? Did you earn a lot of money?

Lessing: No, I didn’t at all. I had a £150 advance and at that time I had a job as a typist again to earn a bit of money, and I didn’t know it was impossible to live on what you earned by writing, so I tossed up the job and sold my clothes – all that kind of thing, chiefly evening dresses. You see, we danced in Rhodesia, in Zimbabwe, we danced; I didn’t in London, so I sold all that kind of thing and got on with writing short stories. The publisher Michael Joseph kept ringing me up to say, “We have reprinted The Grass Is Singing,” and I said, “Oh good.” You see, I thought that everyone was reprinted.

Dean: In the early ’50s you published Martha Quest, which is the story of a young girl growing into maturity through sex and marriage, disastrously, and coming to grips for the first time with social and political realities. This has the shape and feel obviously of autobiography. Is there much of you there?

Lessing: Yes, some of it; you mean the character. Yes, this pugnacious intolerant character, yes absolutely, of course, that’s me. But this whole series gets less autobiographical as it goes on. Don’t forget that halfway through the series I wrote The Golden Notebook, which completely changed me, you see. It wasn’t that I wrote five volumes one after the other.

Dean: How did you come to write The Golden Notebook?

Lessing: A friend of mine kept notebooks and they were on politics, psychology, her husband, children, job, and I thought that was the oddest thing. When you’re living a life, you don’t live in this kind of way at all, do you? It’s just inhuman. There’s something wrong with someone who thinks like this. So I used this, when I was working out the shape of The Golden Notebook. As you know, there’s this framework, the absolutely conventional novel. Five bits of conventional novel and all this chaos in the middle. One thing I was saying was this feeling of despair, which every writer feels when they’ve finished a novel, that you haven’t been able to say it because life is too complex ever to be put into words. That’s one thing I was saying through the structure of this book.

I’d constructed this whole book on my experience, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what I knew women were thinking and feeling, but it never crossed my mind that I was writing about feminism or what is now called Women’s Lib, because I thought I was doing the opposite. I had thought my way into the conclusion that we all split ourselves off into little bits all the time; there’s something in the human mind that makes these divisions. It’s something probably wrong with us. Seriously. You smile, but I really do think there might be something wrong with us the way we are always making categories about things that should be like men/women, for instance. Of course there’s a great truth there, and I’m not arguing about that, but perhaps we’re not all that different where it matters, like in our inner selves.

Dean: How did women respond to The Golden Notebook?

Lessing: A lot of them were very angry and wrote me a lot of very bitchy letters on these lines: Why are you betraying us? Why are you giving away our secrets? Really very malevolent some of them were. I got a lot of support from men; you see, my male friends were supporting me all along the way, which is quite interesting.

In The Golden Notebook, I really tried to write a book which would capture certain vital ideas that were all to do with socialism in one way or another. The idea was that people might look back in 100 years’ time, if they’re interested, and find a record of the kind of things people thought about and talked about during these years. The Golden Notebook was a failure in a formal sense, because as usual I take on too much. It was so ambitious, it couldn’t help but fail.

Dean: But it became a great deal more than what you intended it to be, didn’t it?

Lessing: Oh, it spilled all over the place, didn’t it? I don’t mind because I don’t believe all that much in perfect novels. What’s marvelous about novels is they can be anything you like. That is the strength of the novel. There are no rules.

Dean: I’m making a mistake as I speak, I know, because inevitably I’m identifying you with the character who writes the notebooks in The Golden Notebook, Anna, so I’m probably putting her words into your mind. But when she writes about naiveté as spontaneous creative faith, a kind of innocence if you like, the capacity especially for females to believe in someone or something against all the evidence, isn’t there something of you in this? I mean, in your Marxism you believe you’re the dynamic of hope, I suppose, isn’t this you? Was it you?

Lessing: Yes, it was – an enormous capacity for acceptance. I think I still have it to an extent, but I don’t have it the way I had it. I don’t know how to put it. Something happens or you meet somebody and you just open your arms and say “right” to an idea or to a person or anything, or any event. But you can’t go on like that, you have to learn a different way.

Dean: Were you ever that romantic?

Lessing: Yes, I was.

Dean: And wounded by it?

Lessing: Oh, terribly. Yes, of course, I was. Well, the evidence is in my work, isn’t it? But it’s an awful waste of time all that banging and crashing around.

Dean: But hasn’t it been personally useful to you? Haven’t you been quarrying that disturbing kind of experience?

Lessing: Yes, but there was too much, you see. There’s no need to go on doing something when you’ve learnt better. I remember after I had a kind of somewhat informal psychotherapy.

What I was really doing, of course, although I didn’t see it at the time, was buying a friend. I needed someone desperately to talk to and accept me. This is what she did and this is what I needed. Anyway my last meeting with her was when I’d come to grief over some ridiculous love affair and I went to her and she looked at me and she said, “Have I really not taught you any better than that to repeat your mistakes?” Then there was a long silence and she said, “As for me, I’m going to die very soon and I’m totally occupied and preparing for a good death. Good morning,” and threw me out like a kitten into the harsh world, which I thank her for.

Dean: You anticipated Women’s Lib. You anticipated, I suppose, a new school of psychoanalysis, the Laing school; I suppose you’d call it, the divided self. And you in a sense anticipated a move towards the mystical.

Lessing: Can I say something about words in this area? There are great gaps in the English language where there are words like “spirit” or “soul” or “unconscious” or “collective unconscious.” When you start writing in this area the words are usually the property of some cult or other – “collective unconscious” belongs to Jungians. You might not want to have that association so you’re always wrestling with words that haven’t got the meaning you want them to have. This is my perhaps biggest single problem. There is not one of these words that you can use, and that is why I’ve gone so much off into metaphor, like Memoirs of a Survivor. Now my impulse behind that was I wanted to write about dreams. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that the word “dreams” is never used from start to finish in that book.

Dean: Could it be that there is a collective unconscious which we’re all, and writers especially, plugged into? How do you plug into it, if you’re a writer, of your sort?

Lessing: By chance, very often. The time I’ve done it most purely was in Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, which is the only book I’ve ever written which from start to finish was on this other wavelength. I don’t want to claim too much, to use the word “inspiration.” Something happened when I wrote the book. I hit some other level. And is it a legend or a myth or a fairy tale or a fantasy? That isn’t the word for what I’ve written, I think. You see, only I could have written The Golden Notebook, but I think Anon wrote this other book.

Dean: When you do get messages from what we’ll call the unconscious, your own or a collective mind, how do you discriminate between the nonsense and the good stuff?

Lessing: By experience, living it out, seeing if it turns out to be true or not. I think we are all studio sets with ideas flowing through us, just as neutrons and cosmic particles go shooting through us all the time that we sit here. When I wrote The Four-Gated City, I thought no one would speak to me by the time I finished because the ideas were so way out. I was thinking some pretty horrific thoughts about what was likely to happen in the world. I wrote that book sort of like half a page at a time and the rest of the time I was in bed with the covers over my head. That was what I was really thinking and I had to write it. But, as has happened to me so often before, by the time the book came out, these way-out ideas were all commonplace, you see. So this cheers me up every time I decide to write a book that is wild. I don’t waste time worrying about what people are going to think about it, because probably all these ideas will be in the newspapers.

Dean: You’re no respecter of academic critics. Are you a good critic of your own work?

Lessing: Yes, I think perhaps I am. After a short passage of time, I think I am pretty cool about it all. It’s not easy to be detached when you’re doing it, but shortly after, it sort of floats away from you and you can look at it.

Nearly all my books have weak patches, but that is because I’m the kind of writer I am, which means I’m always trying things out and I’m very seldom interested in the perfect book.

Dean: Anthony Burgess once criticized you as a writer by saying that he thought that you didn’t edit enough. You wrote too much, too many words. Is that fair, do you think?

Lessing: Probably. I’ve got a terrific, great facility. When I start I can write easily, and he’s probably quite right, yes. There is a place for novels that have ideas and shake people up and then die. It’s a different way of writing from Jane Austen, you see.

Dean: For someone who’s written so penetratingly about the relationships between the sexes and who’s written so perceptively about men, it’s a surprise to find you living alone now. Do you miss marriage?

Lessing: Well, you see I think I acquired the qualities to be married rather too late and by that time I’d rather lost interest in the whole business of being married. I certainly didn’t have any of the necessary qualities. I was much too impatient and always fighting about something.

But no, I don’t miss marriage. What I’m interested in now is real friendships, not just acquaintances. You can have thousands of acquaintances, but I think friendship is hard and takes a long time. That’s what I’m interested in.