Putting the Questions Differently - Doris Lessing

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Perhaps life without challenge or excitement amounts to boredom.

      Lessing: Life certainly shouldn’t be without excitement. The Lord knows that everything going on at the moment is exciting.

      Newquist: But hasn’t boredom become one of our most acute social problems?

      Lessing: I don’t understand people being bored. I find life so enormously exciting all the time. I enjoy everything enormously if only because life is so short. What have I got – another forty years of this extraordinary life if I’m lucky? But most people live as if they have a weight put on them. Perhaps I’m lucky, because I’m doing what I want all the time, living the kind of life I want to live. I know a great many people, particularly those who are well-off and have everything they are supposed to want, who aren’t happy.

      Newquist: Right now a great many criticisms are leveled against bored Americans who have a surfeit of what they want. Is this true of England?

      Lessing: I think that England is much more of a class society than America. This street I live on is full of very poor people who are totally different from my literary friends. They, in turn, are different from the family I come from, which is ordinary middle class. It isn’t simple to describe life in England. For instance, in any given day I can move in five, six different strata or groups. None of them know how other people live, people different from themselves. All these groups and layers and classes have unwritten rules. There are rigid rules for every layer, but they are quite different from the rules in the other groups.

      Newquist: Then perhaps you maintain more individuality.

      Lessing: The pressures on us all to conform seem to get stronger. We’re supposed to buy things and live in ways we don’t necessarily want to live. I’ve seen both forms of oppression, the tyrannical and the subtle. Here in England I can do what I like, think what I like, go where I please. I’m a writer, and I have no boss, so I don’t have to conform. Other people have to, though. But in Southern Rhodesia – well, there one can’t do or say what one likes. In fact, I’m a prohibited immigrant in South Africa and Central Africa, although I lived in Rhodesia twenty-five years. But then, the list of people who are prohibited in these areas is so long now.

      I am not as optimistic as I used to be about oppressive societies. When I opened my eyes like a kitten to politics, there were certain soothing clichés about. One was that oppressive societies “collapsed under their own weight.” Well, the first oppressive society I knew about was South Africa. I lived close to it, and I was told that a society so ugly and brutal could not last. I was told that Franco and his Fascist Spain could not last.

      Here I am, many decades later, and South Africa is worse than it was, Southern Rhodesia is going the same way, and Franco is very much in power. The tyrannical societies are doing very well. I’m afraid that the liberals and certain people on the Left tend to be rather romantic about the nature of power.

      I’m not comparing tyranny to conformity. The point is that people who are willing to conform without a struggle, without protest to small things, who will simply forget how to be individuals, can easily be led into tyranny.

      

      Newquist: But isn’t there strength in the middle road? In the area that lies between Fascism and Communism?

      Lessing: I don’t know. I hope so, but history doesn’t give us many successful examples of being able to keep to the middle. Look at the difference between British and American attitudes toward Communism right now. Sections of America seem absolutely hypnotized by the kind of propaganda that’s fed to them. Now, if it is true that Communism is a violent threat to the world, then Britain – which has a different attitude – has been eating and working and sleeping for twenty years without developing ulcers, but America has ulcers. I would say that we are doing a better job of keeping to the middle of the road. You’ve got some rather pronounced elements who would like to head for the ditch or force a collision.

      Hasn’t America been enfeebled by this hysterical fear of Communism? I don’t think you sit down to analyze what the word “Communist” means. You end up in the most ridiculous situations, as you did in Cuba. When you see what a great nation like America can do to muddle this Cuban thing you can only shrug your shoulders. Please don’t think I’m holding out any brief for my own government, but we’re in a lucky position. I mean, England is. We’re not very important, but America holds our fortunes in their large and not very subtle hands, and it’s frightening. When I went to Russia, in 1952, I came to the not-very-original conclusion that the Americans and Russians were very similar, and that they would like each other “if.” Now I see you moving closer and beginning to like each other, so now both of you are terrified of the Chinese, who will turn out (given fifteen years and not, I hope, too much bloodshed and misery) to be just like us, also. All of these violent hostilities are unreal. They’ve got very little to do with human beings.

      

      Newquist: And very little to do with the arts?

      Lessing: The arts, nothing! I was talking as a person, not a writer. I spent a great deal of my time being mixed up in politics in one way or another, and God knows what good it ever did. I went on signing things and protesting against things all the while wars were planned and wars were fought. I still do.

      Newquist: To get back to your career, what are you working at now?

      Lessing: I’m writing volumes four and five of a series I’m calling Children of Violence. I planned this out twelve years ago, and I’ve finished the first three. The idea is to write about people like myself, people my age who are born out of wars and who have lived through them, the framework of lives in conflict. I think the title explains what I essentially want to say. I want to explain what it is like to be a human being in a century when you open your eyes on war and on human beings disliking other human beings. I was brought up in Central Africa, which means that I was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is. I was the daughter of a white farmer who, although he was a very poor man in terms of what he was brought up to expect, could always get loans from the Land Bank which kept him going. (I won’t say that my father liked what was going on; he didn’t.) But he employed anywhere from fifty to one hundred working blacks. An adult black earned twelve shillings a month, rather less than two dollars, and his food was rationed to corn meal and beans and peanuts and a pound of meat per week. It was all grossly unfair, and it’s only part of a larger picture of inequity.

      One-third of us – one-third of humanity, that is – is adequately housed and fed. Consciously or unconsciously we keep two-thirds of mankind improperly housed and fed. This is what the series of novels is about – this whole pattern of discrimination and tyranny and violence.

      

      Newquist: You have mentioned becoming involved with mescaline. Could you describe this in more detail?

      Lessing: I’m not involved with it. I took one dose out of curiosity, and that’s enough to be going on with. It was the most extraordinary experience. Lots of different questions arise, but for our purposes the most interesting one is: Who are we? There were several different people, or “I’s” taking part. They must all have been real, genuine, because one has no control over the process once it’s under way. I understand that experiences to do with birth are common with people having these drugs. I was both giving birth and being given birth to. Who was the mother, who was the baby? I was both but neither. Several people were talking and in different voices throughout the process – it took three or four hours. Sometimes my mother – odd remarks in my mother’s voice, my mother’s sort of phrase. Not the kind of thing I say or am conscious of thinking. And the baby was a most philosophic infant, and different from me.

      And who stage-managed this thing? Who said there was to be this birth and why? Who, to put it another way, was Mistress of the Ceremony? Looking back, I think that my very healthy psyche decided that my

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