Putting the Questions Differently - Doris Lessing

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short, curving street of single and semidetached homes, with brick or stone walls that shield their gardens from the street. There is a fragrant smell of newly-mown grass in the air, and the profusion of flowers and full-leafed trees seem out of place in the cold. Upstairs, the large room that serves Mrs. Lessing as both a dining room and a workroom looks out upon a yard of trees, delicate foliage that is illuminated by sunshine just as I am shown into the room.

      It is a room of spacious proportions: at one end a wide windowsill given over to trays of small plants, at the other end an immense writing desk covered with books and papers. The flat – fairly large by London standards – is well-lived-in and comfortable, filled with Mrs. Lessing’s own furniture, rugs, pillows, and many shelves and tables of books.

      Doris Lessing is direct, womanly, very charming. She wears her long, graying black hair drawn into a bun at the back of her head; her face is slender and attractive, exactly the face of the photographs, the “Doris Lessing” I had been reading and admiring for so long. Meeting her at last I felt almost faint – certainly unreal – turning transparent myself in the presence of this totally defined, self-confident, gracious woman. I had arrived at Kilburn half an hour early, in order to wander around, to see the neighborhood in which she lived; and now, meeting her at last, I marveled at how easily the space between us had been crossed. Surely everything must seem to me a little enchanted.

      When I had left the Kilburn underground station, however, I had paused at a news agent’s stand to read in amazement of the attempted assassination of George Wallace. I explained to Mrs. Lessing that I was still stunned by the news – that I hardly knew what to think – that I felt depressed and confused by this latest act of violence. And, like many Americans in foreign countries, I felt a sense of shame.

      Mrs. Lessing spoke very sympathetically of the problems of violence in contemporary culture, especially in America. “But everyone had guns when I was a child, on the farm,” she said, referring to her childhood in Southern Rhodesia. “They went out and shot snakes; it seemed quite natural, to kill. No one ever seemed to ask: Why? Why kill? It seemed entirely natural.” She asked me some very perceptive questions about the political climate in the United States: whether anyone would take Wallace’s place (since it seemed, this morning, that Wallace might not recover), whether I thought the long, courageous years of effort of the antiwar protesters had really done much good? She seems more sympathetic, generally, with the United States – or with the liberal consciousness of the United States – than with England; when I remarked upon this, she said that her writing seemed to her better understood in the United States.

      “In England, if you publish regularly, you tend to be written off,” she said. “In America, one has the impression of critics scrutinizing each performance – as if regarding one’s efforts at leaping hurdles, overcoming obstacles, with interest.”

      I asked about the response in England to a recent novel, the very unusual Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971). “The readers who best understood it were the young,” she said.

      Briefing for a Descent into Hell is “inner space fiction” (Mrs. Lessing’s category), and shows a remarkable sympathy with the “broken-down” psyche. It is the record of the breakdown of a professor of classics, his experience of a visionary, archetypal world of myth and drama, his treatment at the hands of conventional psychiatrists, and his subsequent – and ironic – recovery into the mean, narrow, self-denying world of the “sane.” An afterword by the author makes the fascinating observation that the defining of the “extraordinarily perceptive” human being as abnormal – he must have “something wrong with him” – is the only response one can expect, at present, from conventional medical practitioners. I asked Mrs. Lessing if she were sympathetic with the work of Ronald Laing, whose ideas resemble her own.

      “Yes. We were both exploring the phenomenon of the unclassifiable experience, the psychological ‘breaking-through’ that the conventional world judges as mad. I think Laing must have been very courageous, to question the basic assumptions of his profession from the inside…In America, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in The Manufacture of Madness, has made similar claims. He has taken a very revolutionary position.”

      Mrs. Lessing has known people who have experienced apparently “mystical” insights. After the publication of that iconoclastic book, The Golden Notebook (1962), she received many letters from people who have been in mental asylums or who have undergone conventional psychiatric treatment but who, in Mrs. Lessing’s opinion, were not really insane – not “sick” at all.

      I asked whether the terms “mystical” and “visionary” weren’t misleading, and whether these experiences were not quite natural – normal.

      “I think so, yes,” she said. “Except that one is cautioned against speaking of them. People very commonly experience things they are afraid to admit to, being frightened of the label ‘insane’ or ‘sick’ – there are no adequate categories for this kind of experience.”

      Because this is a problem I am encountering in my own writing, I asked Mrs. Lessing whether she felt it was extremely difficult to convey the sense of a “mystical” experience in the framework of fiction, of any kind of work intended to communicate naturalistically to a large audience. She agreed, saying that in England, at least, there is a tendency for reviewers to dismiss viewpoints that are not their own, that seem outside the ordinary response. I mentioned that Colin Wilson, in treating most sympathetically the writings of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (in his New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution), received at least one review that attempted to dismiss him as “clever,” and that I believed this quite symptomatic of English literary reviews in general. Mrs. Lessing, who has met Colin Wilson, said that reviewers and critics have been intent upon paying him back for his early, immediate success with The Outsider, written when he was only twenty-three; but that he is erudite, very energetic, and an important writer. However, critical response to a book like his, or any book which attempts to deal sympathetically with so-called “mystical” experiences, will meet opposition from the status quo.

      One of the far-reaching consequences of Doris Lessing’s two recent books, Briefing and The Four-Gated City, will be to relate the “mystical” experience to ordinary life, to show that the apparently sick – the “legally insane” – members of our society may, in fact, be in touch with a deeper, more poetic, more human reality than the apparently healthy. But both novels are difficult ones, and have baffled many intelligent readers. When I first read The Four-Gated City, in order to review it for the Saturday Review, I was astonished at the author’s audacity in taking a naturalistic heroine into a naturalistic setting, subjecting her to extraordinary experiences, and bringing her not only up to the present day but into the future – to her death near the end of the twentieth century. I could not recall ever having read a novel like this. And it is the more iconoclastic in that the novel is the last of a five-part series, Children of Violence, begun in 1952, tracing the life of Martha Quest, an obviously autobiographical heroine.

      I asked Mrs. Lessing what she was working on at present, if she were continuing this exploration of the soul; but she said that, no, in a way she might be accused of a slight “regression,” in that the novel she has just finished concerns a woman whose marriage has disintegrated and whose life is suddenly hollow, without meaning. “The title is The Summer Before the Dark, and the woman in it, the woman who loses her husband, goes to pieces in a way I’ve witnessed women go to pieces.” Her own marriages, she mentioned, were not very “permanent,” and did not permanently affect her; but this phenomenon of a woman so totally defined by her marriage has long interested her. More immediately, she was planning a collection of short stories: the American edition to be called The Temptation of Jack Orkney, and the English edition The Story of an Unmarrying Man. She was arranging a visit to the United States for a series of five lectures, to be delivered at The New School, and she was very much looking forward to the trip – she wanted to visit friends, and to travel, if possible, to the Southwest.

      Her last trip to the United States was in 1969, when she gave a number of lectures at various universities. At that time she met Kurt Vonnegut, “a bloke I got on with very

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