Читать книгу A Small Personal Voice - Doris Lessing - Страница 8

N. In A Man and Two Women the enormous talent of Doris Lessing can be seen in full bloom. Few writers dig to the emotional heart of human involvement better than Miss Lessing, and several critics have observed, in one phrase or another, Miss Lessing’s almost uncanny grasp of human relationships: the actual, the artificial, and above all, her command of the vast area where the real and the contrived are blended into the bulk of our lives. To go back to the beginning of things I’ll ask Miss Lessing where she was born, reared, and educated.

LESSING: I was born in Persia because my father was running a bank there. He was in Persia because he was fed up with England. He found it too narrow after World War I. Unfortunately, I remember little about Persia consciously – though recently, under mescaline, I found that I remembered a great deal, that it had influenced me without my knowing it.

Then my father went to Southern Rhodesia on an impulse (which is how he ran his life), to farm. He had never been a farmer, but he took a very large tract of land – thousands of acres, in American terms – to grow maize. Thus I was brought up in a district that was populated sparsely, very sparsely indeed, by Scottish people who had left Scotland or England because it was too small for them. I spent most of my childhood alone in a landscape with very few human things to dot it. It was sometimes hellishly lonely, but now I realize how extraordinary it was, and how very lucky I was.

After this I went into town – a very small town that had about ten thousand white persons in it. The black population, of course, did not count, though it was fairly large. I married in my teens, when I was far too young, and had two children. That marriage was a failure and I married again. Let’s put it this way: I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married. I can’t blame the people I’ve been married to – by and large I’ve been at fault.

N. When did you start writing?

LESSING: I think I’ve always been a writer by temperament. I wrote some bad novels in my teens. I always knew I would be a writer, but not until I was quite old – twenty-six or -seven – did I realize that I’d better stop saying I was going to be one and get down to business. I was working in a lawyer’s office at the time, and I remember walking in and saying to my boss, ‘I’m giving up my job because I’m going to write a novel.’ He very properly laughed, and I indignantly walked home and wrote The Grass Is Singing. I’m oversimplifying; I didn’t write it as simply as that because I was clumsy at writing and it was much too long, but I did learn by writing it. It focused upon white people in Southern Rhodesia, but it could have been about white people anywhere south of the Zambezi, white people who were not up to what is expected of them in a society where there is very heavy competition from the black people coming up. Then I wrote short stories set in the district I was brought up in, where very isolated white farmers lived immense distances from each other. You see, in this background, people can spread themselves out. People who might be extremely ordinary in a society like England’s, where people are pressed into conformity, can become wild eccentrics in all kinds of ways they wouldn’t dare try elsewhere. This is one of the things I miss, of course, by living in England. I don’t think my memory deceives me, but I think there were more colourful people back in Southern Rhodesia because of the space they had to move in. I gather, from reading American literature, that this is the kind of space you have in America in the Midwest and West.

I left Rhodesia and my second marriage to come to England, bringing a son with me. I had very little money, but I’ve made my living as a professional writer ever since, which is really very hard to do. I had rather hard going, to begin with, which is not a complaint; I gather from my American writer-friends that it is easier to be a writer in England than in America because there is much less pressure put on us. We are not expected to be successful, and it is no sin to be poor.

N. I don’t know how we can compare incomes, but in England it seems that writers make more from reviewing and from broadcasts than they can in the United States.

LESSING: I don’t know. When I meet American writers, the successful ones, they seem to make more on royalties, but then they also seem to spend much more. I know a writer isn’t supposed to talk about money, but it is very important. It is vital for a writer to know how much he can write to please himself, and how much, or little, he must write to earn money. In England you don’t have to ‘go commercial’ if you don’t mind being poor. It so happens that I’m not poor any more, thank goodness, because it’s not good for anyone to be. Yet there are disadvantages to living in England. It’s not an exciting place to live, it is not one of the hubs of the world, like America, or Russia, or China. England is a backwater, and it doesn’t make much difference what happens here, or what decisions are made here. But from the point of view of writing, England is a paradise for me.

You see, I was brought up in a country where there is very heavy pressure put on people. In Southern Rhodesia it is not possible to detach yourself from what is going on. This means that you spend all your time in a torment of conscientiousness. In England – I’m not saying it’s a perfect society, far from it – you can get on with your work in peace and quiet when you choose to withdraw. For this I’m very grateful – I imagine there are few countries left in the world where you have this right of privacy.

N. This what you’re supposed to find in Paris.

LESSING: Paris is too exciting. I find it impossible to work there. I proceed to have a wonderful time and don’t write a damn thing.

N. To work from A Man and Two Women for a bit. The almost surgical job you do in dissecting people, not bodily, but emotionally, has made me wonder if you choose your characters from real life, form composites or projections, or if they are so involved you can’t really trace their origins.

LESSING: I don’t know. Some people I write about come out of my life. Some, well, I don’t know where they come from. They just spring from my own consciousness, perhaps the subconscious, and I’m surprised as they emerge.

This is one of the excitements about writing. Someone says something, drops a phrase, and later you find that phrase turning into a character in a story, or a single, isolated, insignificant incident becomes the germ of a plot.

N. If you were going to give advice to the young writer, what would that advice be?

LESSING: You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. This is hard to describe.

N. What about reading as a background ?

LESSING: I’ve known very good writers who’ve never read anything. Of course, this is rare.

N. What about your own reading background?

LESSING: Well, because I had this isolated childhood, I read a great deal. There was no one to talk to, so I read. What did I read? The best – the classics of European and American literature. One of the advantages of not being educated was that I didn’t have to waste time on the second-best. Slowly, I read these classics. It was my education, and I think it was a very good one.

I could have been educated – formally, that is – but I felt some neurotic rebellion against my parents who wanted me to be brilliant academically. I simply contracted out of the whole thing and educated myself. Of course, there are huge gaps in my education, but I’m nonetheless grateful that it went as it did. One bit of advice I might give the young writer is to get rid of the fear of being thought of as a perfectionist, or to be regarded as pompous. They should strike out for the best, to be the best. God knows we all fall short of our potential, but if we aim very high we’re likely to be so much better.

N. How do you view today’s literature? and theatre?

LESSING: About theatre, well, I’m very annoyed right now by that phrase ‘kitchen sink’ that is being used so frequently. I don’t think it means very much. There are two kinds of theatre, and I don’t think they should be confused. People who want to see a roaring farce, like Sailor Beware, should enjoy it. It’s perfectly legitimate, and there’s nothing wrong with the theatre of entertainment.

The cathartic theatre, theatre that moves people in such a way that they or their lives are changed, or they understand more about themselves, is a totally different thing. The phrase ‘kitchen sink’ comes from critics who don’t know their jobs, or theatregoers who are being bullied into seeing things they don’t want to see. They should never go if they don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with a minority theatre and a minority literature.

N. What about the recent trend toward introspection?

LESSING: Well, I haven’t been to America, but I’ve met a great many Americans and I think they have a tendency to be much more aware of themselves, and conscious of their society, than we are in Britain (though we’re moving that way). By a coincidence I was thinking, this afternoon, about a musical like West Side Story, which comes out of a sophisticated society which is very aware of itself. You wouldn’t have found in Britain, at the time that was written, a lyric like ‘Gee, Officer Krupke.’ You have to be very socially self-conscious to write West Side Story.

N. What do you feel about the fiction being turned out today? Does it share the same virtues and failings as theatre or can it be considered separately?

LESSING: Quite separately. You want to know what contemporary writers I enjoy reading? The American writers I like, for different reasons, are Malamud and Norman Mailer – even when he’s right off centre he lights rockets. And Algren. And that man who wrote Catch-22. And of course, Carson McCullers. But I only read the books that drift my way, I don’t know everything that comes out.

N. How do you feel about critical reactions to your own works?

LESSING: I don’t get my reviews any more. I read reviews if they turn up in the papers I get, but I go through them fast and try to pay little attention to what is said. I think the further I’m removed from this area – reviews, the literary squabble-shop, the better. I got angry over reviews of The Golden Notebook. They thought it was personal – it was, in parts. But it was a very highly structured book, carefully planned. The point of that book was the relation of its parts to each other. But the book they tried to turn it into was: The Confessions of Doris Lessing. I remember I went down to my publishers’ office to look through the reviews, because they said I’d had a lot of good ones and I should see them. Well I remember thinking: It’s surely not possible that all these reviewers should have minds like gossip columnists. Because of the shape of the book, and the point of that shape, and what it meant, they weren’t interested.

You see, the literary society in London is very small and incestuous. Everyone knows everyone. The writer who tosses a scrap of autobiography into an otherwise fictional piece (which writers always have done and always will do), he’s not credited with any imagination. Everyone says, ‘Oh, that character’s so and so,’ and ‘I know that character.’ It’s all too personal. The standards of criticism are very low. I don’t know about American critics, but in this country we have an abysmal standard. Very few writers I know have any respect for the criticism they get. Our attitude is, and has to be, Are the reviews selling reviews or not ? In all other respects, the reviews are humiliating, they are on such a low level and it’s all so spiteful and personal.

N. Do reviews sell books in England ?

LESSING: My publishers claim they help build a reputation and that indirectly they do sell books. This is probably true. But in Great Britain everything is much more cumulative and long-term than in America. One simply settles in for what you call the long haul. But ‘reputation’ – what are reputations worth when they are made by reviewers who are novelists? Writers aren’t necessarily good critics. Yet the moment you’ve written a novel, you’re invited to write criticism, because the newspapers like to have one’s ‘name’ on them. One is a ‘name’ or one is not, you see. Oh, it’s very pleasant to be one, I’m not complaining, I enjoy it. But everyone knows that writers tend to be wrong about each other. Look at Thomas Mann and Brecht – they were both towering geniuses, in different ways, and they didn’t have any good word for each other.

Ideally we should have critics who are critics and not novelists who need to earn a bit to tide them over, or failed novelists. Is there such an animal, though? Of course, sometimes a fine writer is a good critic, like Lawrence. Look at something that happened last year – I wrote a long article for the New Statesman about the mess socialism is in. There was a half-line reference to X. To this day, people say to me, ‘that article you wrote attacking X.’ This is how people’s minds work now. At the first night of one of Wesker’s plays, up comes a certain literary figure and says, his voice literally wet with anxiety, ‘Oh, Wesker is a much better playwright than Osborne, he is, isn’t he?’ He felt that someone’s grave should be danced on. He was simply tired of voting for Osborne. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In and out.

You’re going to say the literary world has always been like this. But what I said about the theatre earlier applies – nothing wrong with the audience who likes Who’s for Tennis? and the critics who do. It’s all theirs. But they should keep out of the serious theatre. Similarly, of course, the literary world is always going to seethe with people who say, I’m bored with voting for X. But writers should try to keep away from them. Another bit of advice to a young writer – but unfortunately economics make it almost impossible to follow: Don’t review, don’t go on television, try to keep out of all that. But, of course, if one’s broke, and one’s asked to review, one reviews. But better not, if possible. Better not go on television, unless there is something serious to be said (and how often is that?). Better to try and remain what we should be – an individual who communicates with other individuals, through the written word.