Putting the Questions Differently - Doris Lessing

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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.

       The Need to Tell Stories Christopher Bigsby

      

      

      Christopher Bigsby’s interview took place April 23, 1980, and originally appeared in The Radical Imagination of the Liberal Tradition (London: Junction Press, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Christopher Bigsby. Reprinted with permission.

      Bigsby: You once said there was a great deal that George Eliot didn’t understand because she was moral. What did you mean by that?

      Lessing: Well, I think she was a victim, like many of the women of that time, of Victorian morality. Because she was “living in sin” with George Lewes there was a great pressure on her to be good. I noticed the same pressure on myself when I wrote The Golden Notebook. I am not being paranoid; you have got no idea of the kind of attack I got. It was really quite barbarous. They said I was a man-hater, a balls-cutter, particularly Americans. I noticed enormous pressure on me to be feminine and to be good and to be kind and sweet. Quite nauseating it was. I notice that other women who have gone through the same pressure confess to the same; they suddenly find themselves thinking, Oh God, I mustn’t do that because they will say I am a balls-cutter. Well, this has already gone because Women’s Lib has achieved so much. But to go back to George Eliot, I would be very surprised if she wasn’t falling over backwards to be good because of the pressure on her. I mean, it was no joke living in that society. It must have been dreadful.

      Bigsby: You mention that you were alarmed or surprised by the reaction you got from men with respect to The Golden Notebook. Were you equally alarmed by the reaction you got from women?

      Lessing: Oh, you are quite wrong in thinking that I only got attacks from men. I got a lot of support from men, from a few men, and the most vicious attacks from women, on the lines that I was letting the side down by revealing the kind of things that were said. I had never thought on those lines at all. Not only had I not thought that I was writing a women’s book but it had never crossed my mind to think anything of writing the kind of things down that I was writing. Women talk like this. Men talk about women, letting off steam in locker rooms and so on, but they don’t necessarily mean it. And when women sit around and say these things they don’t necessarily mean it either; it is letting off steam. It never crossed my mind when I wrote all that down, that it hadn’t really been done before. I thought, How is it that I am getting these violent reactions? What have I done? What have I said? And when I started to look around I couldn’t think of any novels voicing the kind of criticisms women have of men. Almost like breathing, you know, so deep-rooted.

      Bigsby: In an essay called “A Small Personal Voice” which, admittedly, you wrote quite a long time ago now, you said that the highest point of literature was the novel of the nineteenth century, the work of the great realists. You also said that the realist novel was the highest form of prose writing. What led you to say that then and why did you move away from that position with The Golden Notebook and with most of your subsequent work?

      Lessing: I was wondering myself not long ago why I reacted so strongly – something must have happened to make me react. I do remember having that set of thoughts about the nineteenth-century novel. I mean, it was magnificent, wasn’t it? What they had was a kind of self-assurance which I don’t think any one of us has got. Why don’t we have it?

      Bigsby: Well, you did say that part of your admiration came from the fact that they shared what you called a climate of ethical judgment.

      Lessing: That’s right. Well, they did. We don’t have anything like that.

      Bigsby: On the other hand, you said of George Eliot that she didn’t understand certain things because she was moral.

      Lessing: Well, there was a kind of womanly certitude in George Eliot which you would not find, let’s say, in Chekhov. There’s something tight there in judgment. I admire George Eliot enormously, I am not saying I don’t. But there is something too cushioned in her judgments.

      Bigsby: In talking about a climate of ethical judgment were you suggesting that there is a necessary relationship between art and morality, or that there should be, that art is a moral force in some way?

      Lessing: I don’t know if there should be. But if you write a book which you don’t see as moral believe me your readers do, and that’s something that I can’t ever quite come to terms with. Now The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five I almost regard as outside judgment because it’s a legend. It is full of forgiveness. Wouldn’t you say it was full of forgiveness? An old warrior of the sex war simply shrugs his shoulders and gives up and laughs; I mean, that is something.

      Bigsby: Yes, I think it is, but reverting to this question of why you admire the nineteenth-century novel, why did you yourself move away from that tradition which you wanted to claim early on?

      Lessing: Because it’s too narrow, that’s why, because we have gone beyond it. Let’s take Anna Karenina. What a marvelous book! It is all about the social problems which existed in a very narrow, bigoted society and which was completely unnecessary. In fact, a good deal of Victorian fiction can be classified like that. Look at Hardy, for example. These tragedies are mini-tragedies because they derive from fairly arbitrary social conditions; they are not rooted in any human nature. When you finish reading Anna Karenina you think, My God, here is this woman ruined and destroyed because of this stupid, bloody society and it does make it a smaller novel in my opinion. Because it is Tolstoy it is full of the most marvelous things but in actual fact the basic story is a story about nothing, about a local society, a very local, temporary set of social circumstances. My train of thought was that we now live with our heads in the middle of exploding galaxies and thinking about quasars and quarks and black holes and alternative universes and so on, so that you cannot any more get comfort from old moral certainties because something new is happening. All our standards of values have been turned upside down, I think. Not that I don’t think life doesn’t do that for you anyway because it seems to me there is a process of losing more and more conviction all the time. I really did have very firm opinions about all kinds of things even fifteen years ago, which I am unable to have now because the world has got too big, everything is too relative. What’s true in one society isn’t true in another. What is true for one time isn’t true five years later.

      Bigsby:

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