Lessing Interview

8/3/2019 Lessing Interview

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An Interview with Doris LessingAuthor(s): Stephen Gray and Doris LessingReviewed work(s):Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 17, No. 3, Special Focus on Southern Africa(Autumn, 1986), pp. 329-340Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3819219 .

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AN INTERVIEWWITH DORIS LESSING*Stephen GrayI'd like to startwithyour earlydays,whenyou werepublishingyour irstshortstories, n Trek nJohannesburgn 1948andelsewhere.Someoftheseyou'venotpicked up in collections.ohannesburg asyour iterarycenter hen.Yes, I rememberendingthemoff. Well, it wasn'tonlyJohannesburg;therewasa CapeTownperiodical,but I can't rememberwhat it wascalled,whereI senta ratheralse,sophisticatedtory,asI recall.Andthen therewas the Trekman withwhomI hada veryentertainingor-respondence.ButI don't think therewereverymanystories,youknow.Abouthalfa dozenor a dozen.Didyou at somestagesortthrough hem?I supposeI musthavedone. Oneturnedup the otherday.It waspub-lished n Salisbury, nd I'd completely orgottenabout t. ButI don'tthinkanyof themaremuchgood, arethey?Well,you werewritingmanystoriespriorto 1950, theyearafteryou*Recordedn Londonon 14November1983.


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330 Stephen Graycame to London and when The GrassIs Singing came out as a fully ac-complished work. Wereyou always going to be a writer?Well, you must remembermy circumstances.I was singularlybeset byeverythingin Salisbury,as it was then: I had a job for nearlythe wholetime, and at best I had a half-time job. I was a kind of typist for Han-sard, and I typed for special commissions. But most of the time I wasworkingin a legal office. And that was my political era; looking back, Icannot understandhow we didn't all die of overwork. So writing wasn'tall that easy. I wrote those-odd stories, and I was continuallywritingpoetry, but verylittle of it is any good. Perhapsfour or five are worthremembering.You haven't suppressedthose, haveyou?Well, not suppressedthem, but I'd be very happy if they were forgotten.There was a man at ZimbabweUniversitywho wanted to publish themall, and I was appalled becausethey're not worth publishing. Here iswhere I come up against academics-I don't see this point at all of pre-servingsecond-rate stuff of writers,but no academic would ever agreewith me about that.As a "Rhodesian," as they werecalled, what wereyour earlyexperiencesof what was then the Union of South Africa?Well, I neverhad the money to pop back and forth, but I did spendsome times in South Africa. I was there in 1937 for two months-in richJohannesburg,stayingwith a familywho waswith the Chamber of Mines.And Johannesburgwas a greatshock to me, but I did useful things. Iworkedin a dressshop for a week, and I workedin a cafe for a few weeks,and I've never been able to understandhow anybodycan stand it, stand-ing all day and night. I didn't meet anybody, of course, but whites, be-cause one didn't. I didn't startmeeting blacksuntil I came to London.The next time in South Africawas two months in Cape Town earlyinthe war, with my sonJohn-but there's nothing to be said about thatbecauseI was in a hotel with no money and a small child-but I did getabout Cape Town a good deal. Then I was in Cape Town again for threemonths in 1946, and among other things I workedfor The Guardian,the Communist newspaper, in the subscription department. That was anextremely lively lot of people, but I was only a verysmall secretaryortypist. I didn't meet the great gods, as they were then seen; all of themare now here in England. But I did for the first time, in the course of mywork, get taken to all kinds of horrible factories and farms, and I saw


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331 INTERVIEWWITH DORIS LESSING

something that I'd never seen before. I'd not have been able to imaginewhat I saw: these terriblybadly paid factoryworkers,and farmerswhopaid some of their wages in drink. That was all useful because how wouldI come into contact with that otherwise?I also met quite a few artists nthat time, and that was for me-a veryrawgirl from the sticks-abso-lutely marvelous. And then I was there again for two or three monthson my way out-yet again in Houghton, again in richJohannesburg.Icould write a novel about that becausemy hosts were Communists! Youcan't improveon life! It's so improbable. Then Cape Town again, andin the most amazing boardinghouse,which I've written about in In Pur-suit of the English, which was incredible, and I often think about it.In your fiction you rathergeneralize about your "Rhodesian"experienceand your "South African" experience, blending them into one.I don't think there wasverymuch difference between the Rhodesianex-perience and the South Africanexperience. The GrassIs Singing is veryRhodesian because it was based on the life of the districtwhich I wasbrought up in, but I'm sure that could have happened in South Africa.How do you accountfor its overnightfame, once it waspublished here?Well, it was the second book on those parts. The first was Paton's Cry,the Beloved Country-that had just come out, and then came mine. Iwas just extremely lucky in my timing. But it certainlywasn't as simpleas that, because The GrassIs Singing was bought by a South Africanpublisher, with a verycrookedtype of deal, although I didn't know itthen, and they didn't do anything about it. Then I was here and sentsome short stories to CurtisBrown, and a woman there wrote backandsaid did I have a novel. And I said I did, but it was contractedin SouthAfrica, and she instantlysmelled a rat. When she saw the contract,shewas so shocked she wrote and said they should either let me go or bebrought up before some court. The court didn't exist, but they let mego, and she sold me instantly to MichaelJoseph. And it was an instantsuccess, but the joke was I didn't know it. I was so rawand green, andin any case I had so many problems at that time, that when they usedto ring me up and saywe've printed again, we've printedagain, I thoughtthat happenedto everybody. was ever so blase about it. So it did verywell.It seems to me much sparser han that other workyou weredoing at thetime. Did you edit and edit down?No, that book wasonly a third of a much longerone. That was a subplot,


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332 StephenGrayactually. But the theme which interestedme, and still does, was aboutthe idealistic young-usually English-man who arrives n a place likeRhodesia and is appalled by everything,and rushes aroundfor a few weeks,sayinghow terrible.And then leaves,which they did; or succumbed,andthen usuallybecameworse than the locals. Dick Marstonwas in fact thehero of the originalbook. But because of my complete lack of experienceof England it was very bad. I tore it up, I'm glad to say. But what hap-pened was that this enormousmanuscriptwasgoing around.This wasnojoke becauseit was going backand forth by sea afterthe war. You knowhow long publisherstake, and they would send backvaguelyfriendlyletterswith it. And then I looked at it again, and I saw that a lot of it was awful-and I just had to take The Grass s Singing out of it. The originalwassupposedlycomic in the main part, but I didn't have the equipment towrite it.Wheredidyoufind the remaining lot?The GrassIs Singing itself was based on somebody I knew-though Isuppose not an uncommon type. Don't forget I was brought up on theveld, and then I came into Salisburyand met people who never put theirnoses out of town, unless they went on some picnic or other. One of thepeople I knew was a woman who used to go on a picnic and sit with herankles together and her skirtdown in case some beetle might crawlonher. She hated the veld with such a passion. And I thought, supposingthis woman by some tragedymarried a farmer.Then, of course, therewas the storythat I began the book with. There was this inexplicablemurder-I can't rememberwhat yearit could have been.But the mainimpact oday s the Mary-Moseselationship.You see, if you take a veryinadequate, a very psychologically rail womanand put her in an environment like that, of course, she's going to be-come dominated by a strongpersonality.It doesn't reallymatterwhoit would be, blackor white. You know how a novel gets made up fromso many different things. And I rememberlistening as a child to the peo-ple talking on the verandaabout this woman, a neighbor who allowedher servant to do her dressup the back and to brushher hair. Now thiswas so-I don't have to tell you-so impossible; I remember now thenote in their voices of sheer awe-was she mad, what was wrong withher?-there was a note of doom, horror.I don't rememberwho this ter-rible woman who allowed this servant to button her up was. But I don'thave to tell you how to them it was impossible. What would this black


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333 INTERVIEWITHDORISLESSINGman have thought? And so the storycoalescedaround the Marstonchar-acter, who wouldn't have understood a word of all that.Didyou approve of the recent movie of The GrassIs Singing?I thought it was too sensational. I thought Karen Black was wrong; she'sone of the sexiest women in the world, I would say; and there's my poorMaryTurner,who doesn't understandanything about sex or life. But Idon't see many moviemakersbeing honest enough to cast MaryTurner.Did you read other local authorslike Olive Schreinera lot before writingThe GrassIs Singing, and did you feel part of a group?No. Not really. Of courseI'd read Schreiner.But I hadn't read PaulineSmith-I didn't know she existed. And I read the GertrudePages-theones that go in for verylush descriptionsof landscape. Schreiner'sAfricanFarmreallyhad an enormous impact on me.They deal with the one myth-system of the whiteperson landing in. theveld. Then there's virtuallythe opposite system, in the 'Jim Comesto

Joburg" worksabout a tribesmanlanding in town. In a short novel likeHunger you deal with that. Hadn't you read works ike William Plomer'snovella, Ula Masondo, dealing with that?Well, the funny thing is I'd never heard of him either, until I came toLondon. I readhim afterI got here. I wasveryisolated, and lots of thingshave happened in southern Africa which hadn't then. There was no feel-ing of continuity; nobody said you should read Plomer or-whoever.Thenyou were ratherself-inventing. But the interestingthing is you'veworked myths that many of yourforerunnershad worked as well.Yes, but who could not write about the Africancoming to town, becauseit's such a story.But in a novella like Eldoradoyou situate your characters o consciouslybetween London, the metropolitancenter, andJohannesburg, the indus-trial nexus to the south, as if you wanted to see them especiallysocio-logicallyand mythically.Well, it did have a kind of myth quality-Johannesburg, the wicked city.But a lot of people had come to Rhodesia from the Rand, often because


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334 Stephen Grayof lung trouble, you see. We got TBs from London and a lot who'd hadother lung problems from the mines. I don't know if this all still goeson; I should think the conditions are better on the mines. But in Loma-gundi, because it's gold country, there were a lot of small miners-run-ning small mines for a time. There was one just acrossfrom our ridgecalled the Muriel, from which we could hear the mine-stamps. So I'vemet an awful lot of these small miners. You know, Banket, where I wasbrought up, was populated mostly by lower middle-classfarmers,a lotof them Scottishpeople, and then on the other side, on the sand veldwhere they could have horses, there were that fast lot, all English-eventhen to me it was myth stuff. Although a lot of these farmerswere gettingricherby the minute, one didn't think of them as getting rich or com-fortable, and their houses stayedfarmers'houses. But I was told whenI visited Zimbabwe last yearthat Banket is now the synonymfor richfarming; the sons of my contemporariesand their children are veryrich.I must say I'd like to see what it looks like now. But actuallygoing backto my myth-countryis what I'm afraid of.How awarewereyou of a mythicaldimension in your early Africanstoriesand novellas?There was this mythicalconsciousnessabout. Forexample, this wickedcity of Johannesburg-it representedsomething bad, and gold, and dis-ease, with people always coming up with their shot lungs. That wasn'trealism at all-it was how people spoke of it. So perhapsI did have thisfeeling of living through some kind of almost invented world. And don'tforget that if you put people on farms, fairlyremote from one another-and they have to be a bit peculiaranyway,or they wouldn't be there-they become outsize. Becauseeverythingthey do becomes known; it'sall, as it were, on stage. And fairly ordinarypeople, even, become amaz-ing, particularly o a child, whom I now see had a particularly trongsense of drama.Onceyou arrivedhereyou diversified rom stories and novels into theater,whichyou couldn't do back in Salisbury-Harare.Yes, I had a couple of plays on, and one of them is going to be on againin Germanythis year-Play with a Tiger. But the thing is, that wheneverI got involved with the theater, it was alwaysdisastrous.I won't bore youwith the long and verycomic story. But it suddenly occurredto me thatthe energy I put into theater was reallyunbelievable, and it never reallycame out right. I thought why, when I can write novels and have it allmy own way, why do I torment myself like this. But it's been a hard


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335 INTERVIEWITHDORISLESSINGdecision.I was thenso passionate bouttheater,so involvedwithit; butnowI'm not. I wasstagestruck henI firstcameto London.You knowthe story;youmust haveheard romall of us pooremigres,of standingforhours o get a seatandthenstanding hroughout performance,ndcomingout reeling,drunkwith it all. Well, yousee, all thatmagichasgonea bit.So the novelbecame he dominantormfor you. Andyou vedroppedthe storiesas well now?

No, I haven't;I'll probablywritesomemore. But nowI'm terriblyn-volved n this Canopuseries,aboutwhichthere'sso muchhard eeling.It's the kids wholikeit; the olderpeopledon't like it.But eventhe Canopuseriesderivesvery tronglyromyourAfrican ast.I certainly ouldn'thavewrittenShikastawithout t because herearewhole sectionsn Shikastahat arestraightrom Africa.And TheMakingof theRepresentativeor Planet8 as well.Butthat'sall snowandice.Yes,but there's he memoryof a beautiful,warm,pastoralandscapethatresonateshrough t. And thefearful controlfroman outsidesystemwhichseems to me is all about colonization.Butthe wholesequences basedon colonization.Thisis history, sn't it?All historys the historyof empires isingandfalling.You'reat whatpoint in the sequence?Well, I havewrittenotherthingsas well. AndI'm not saying 'm notgoingto writeanymoreshortstories; 'm writingone now. But whatI'm interestedn, yousee, is breaking own these forms hatwe set upforourselves-youknow,youhaveto have a novel,and there'sa poemthere,anda shortstory here,andthere'san essay here.Whydoes ithave to be likethat?Because ome of the greatbooks,forexampleofthe MiddleEast,arejust compendiumsf all kindsof things,andthey'reveryrich. In Shikasta-I don't know f you'venoticed t, in fact-buttherearethingsthatarevirtuallyhortstories. would like to havean-othershot at a work- I'm thinkingabout t now as a novel-whichwould haveall thesedifferent hings n it. But it's terribly ifficult.


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336 Stephen GrayBut wasn t the great watershedfor you The Golden Notebook, which con-tained everything n it from the germs of stories to completestoriesto par-allel stories-and everythingelse. Thereyou wereexplodingthe novelformopen.But it was quite controlled, you know. But one of the things that bookwas about was the difference between realityand the novel, becausetheframe of that book was a short, self-containednovel. But what I wassayingwas that this is what went into that short, contained novel. Everywriter's tormented by this kind of thing becausewe know that as soon asyou startframing a novel, then things get left out. But what gets leftout . . . it's painful, really, isn't it, because you can never really do it!Well, you certainlymade an attempt at it. But now you've come backto writinga much less abundant, more allegorical type of writing, andthe myth has come back to the surfaceagain.Have you read The Marmagesbetween Zones Three,Four, and Five?-that's pure myth, that one.But thereyou're trying to give the essence ofform, ratherthan explod-ing it.I don't think I've got that kind of energy anymore.You know, I wroteThe Golden Notebook in a year. I can't believe it now, but I did. And Ilook at it and can't believe it. But then everythingand my life waschang-ing and so, being a writer, it expresseditself in that book. But there's asense, you know, in which one is surprisedby what comes out. You canset a thing up as much as you like, but it's different when you do it.But in The Golden Notebook you incorporatedexactlythat; its excite-ment is that it alwaysseems to be created as one readsit.You see, I had this rough framework.I said I want this tight structure,so I did the structure.But what came out in between was somethingelse, and not alwaysforeseen. It was almost out of control. And I wasfeeling despairbecauseI couldn't find a way of saying what I then knewabout life. I know it sounds ridiculousbecause it was so late, but it was averyexplosive time because a lot of people around me had had theirheartsbrokenpolitically.Mine, because I'm a cynicalsoul, was not brokenbut I was surroundedby people who were in breakdownsor turning intotheir own opposites, from being dedicated, 100 percent Communistsinto brilliant businessmen. It was quite extraordinaryo see what was


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337 INTERVIEW ITHDORISLESSINGhappening. And a lot of Americans and Canadians were in London, whohad left becauseof what can only be called persecutions.And I was meet-ing people who will not at all hit the historybooks, as far as I can see-that sort of rank-and-fileperson, fairlydedicated, not necessarilyCom-munist-who were literallydriven mad or to suicide by the FBIdroppinground once a week, once a week, with this steady-well-persecution,but that's anotherstory. Anyway, I was meeting this type of person, andpeople from all over Europe who knew about the real horrorsunderCommunism, and so that method had been exploded. And in my ownlife I was at the end of my forties, and my own life was up for grabs.You can't plan this happening; it happens. And I consciouslythink, ifthat kind of concentrationof psychologicalpressureand events shouldhappen again, I'd then write another book with that pressurebehind it.But until that happens . . . you can't plan it. So, I'm alwayslistening,as it were.But what wasyour inner need to go into your Canopusseries, with itsimmense, many-perspectived cale, using everything rom realistic lives tosciencefiction, which has such a poor public image these days?It may get bad publicity, but let me tell you I'm read in hundreds ofthousands by everyonein Europeunder thirty, so I can't reallycomplainabout my readership.But areyou just castingoff realism as a mode?I had cast it off, hadn't I?-with The Memoirsof a Survivorand Brief-ing for a Descent into Hell. And I think Briefingis one of my best books.Anyway, what happened was that with CanopusI didn't plan a newseries;I planned one book. I wanted to write the Bible as sciencefictionbecausesomebody had said to me that nobody had ever done this verysimple thing, which was to read the Old Testament and the New and theApocryphaand the Koranright through; it's a continuing story, it's thesame play, with the same cast of characters.And wow! zap! pow! youthink, my God, things just slot into place. Becauseyou have these threereligions that tear each other to bits-what nonsense; they're the samereligion, in fact, in different installments. And so I thought, supposingI made this science fiction becausewhat they have in common is "mes-sengers" or prophetswho come and say to human beings, "You stinkinglot of no-goodniks, pull your socksup and do better, or else." I thought,how about writing this from the point of view of such a visitor, or seriesof visitors. It was only when I got half way through the book, Shikasta,that I realized I'd created a marvelousformatwhich I'd be mad to jet-


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338 Stephen Graytison-the archives.I'd got half way through when I realized that I wasgoing to use this again.Do you have.aplan for the entire sequence?No . . . Well, I've got so many things I could write. But it's not con-tinuous becauseMariages has got little to do with the others. It's simplyan interesting, useful formula that I can use. What the continuity is isthat the format releasessome kind of energyin me. Forexample, I waitedfor yearsto write The Marrmages,nd I couldn't-I couldn't do it. Thenthat format made it possible.So there will be more?There'll certainlybe one more, but I don't know if there'll be anymore after that, unless I'm terribly inspired by something. But I reallyenjoy writing them. I also enjoy what happens to them when they comeout because that form provokesthe most violent extremes-it's quiteextraordinary!There are people whom you'd assumeare sane and bal-anced who will scream, "The publisherswho published this should beshot!" Or, "Fan as I am of Doris Lessing,I will never read anothernovelof hers as long as I live!" There's absolutelya lack of proportion.As I understandt, in TheMakingof theRepresentativeou havetheprovocativeidea that characterand role are not alwaysrelated, that therole can be passed on andpeople are really interchangeable.Haven't youdetached the individualfrom a personal destiny here?The idea behind that is that we have functions, and when we do some-thing it's a function that we share with other people who do that. Like,for a long time I've seen "the writer" as a kind of function of humanity;I feel connected with other writers becauseI feel that in a sense we areone, doing perhaps slightly different things.But you're now talking of people in terms offunction instead of in termsof the previous individualpsyche, which is very ar from your social realistmode of thinking.You know, you can't go on writing the same thing. But I reallydothink there's a really big gap in sensibility between older people andyounger people today. Why is it that youngerpeople, everywhereI go,read this serieswith such ease? It's a language they understand, and theolder people don't. I think that what has happened is that the younger


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339 INTERVIEW ITHDORISLESSINGpeople have been brought up on a bigger specterabout the earth. Theydon't identify themselveswith a town or even a continent; they identifythemselves with Planet Earth.The moment you have a shot of the earthfrom space-a beautifully colored bubble floating in space-then there'sa new sensibility; there has to be. And also I'm getting older, and I thinkthat as you get older you get verymuch less personalabout everything.You simply recognize that what you're doing is what other people do, atthe same time and under the same circumstances.You don't think thatI, the laborious, amazing individual, am doing this, and I'm the onlyperson doing it.How do you feel then about your role as a storyteller?We're memories. We are the function of memory, it seems to me.It's still quite a lonely activity, sitting at a typewriter.Yes, it is.Do you feel any specialaffinityfor writersnow working n the samefield?I don't feel any more affinity for them than I do for realist writers be-cause just becauseI used to write a veryrealisticfiction doesn't meanI've floated awayfrom it. It's all part of the same thing. But what in-terests me about The Representative s that all my speculationsin the"who-am-I" department are in there; you couldn't put those in an or-dinarynovel, but it's quite easy to put them in that type of book.And you couldn't get there with social realism?The convention would only allow that in dreamsequences. But I thinkthis is what happens with everybody.You start off with your life and theneed to define yourselfand this frightful struggle to make this statementof what you are, to find out what it is. Then you do sort of float awayfrom that-instead of being embedded in it, you see yourselffrom adistance.Do you feel yourself a woman writeror a writer who is a woman?I don't feel at all when I'm writing that I am a woman writing. I don'tthink it's a good thing to do that. I know, you see, that there's this mat-ter of great bitternessamong women writers.Their argumentis that it'sabsolutelyessentialto write as a woman as long as you arepersecuted.


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340 StephenGrayWell, I disagree absolutely becauseI think you may be a second-classcitizen, which we certainlyare, but it doesn't prevent you from being a

human being as well. It's anotherprison to think I am a woman writingthis. It means that you deliberatelynarrowall your sensibilities. But I dosee why women have to do it.But you've been given so many labels at different times in your career.Did you everfeel yourself an Africanwriter?No. I've never felt anything but me. First, there was this now-obsoletephrase, I was a "color-bar"writer;that is how I was presented. Andthen it changed and I was a Communist writer-they didn't say I was awriterabout Communism, and those are two verydifferent things. Thenthere was a whole string of things that I've been-one of them was fem-inist-that was The Golden Notebook, and they hadn't bothered to readit. Then there was the Sufi label, and they've dropped that one, I'm gladto say-oh yes, then mysticism. And now it's the space fiction label,which reallyincludes everything, so I suppose it's all right. I don't knowwhat they'll think of next!

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