Doris Lessing: Conversations

by Doris Lessing, Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor)

In these twenty-four provocative interviews, Doris Lessing talks frankly to a variety of interviewers--among them Joyce Carol Oates and Studs Terkel--about a wide range of subjects that concern her deeply. We hear about her early years in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), her involvement in Marxist politics, her views on feminism and "space fiction," and her own work, especially The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist . Included is a recent talk on the failure of Communism. These interviews, informed by Lessing's unfailing intelligence and refreshing directness, present an invaluable and up-to-date view of the mind and art of a distinguished contemporary writer.

Genres: Nonfiction

250 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2000

About the author

Doris Lessing was born into a colonial family. both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and later had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(Extracted from the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995. Full text available on www.dorislessing.org).

Reviews

[Ming · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a pleasure to read the thoughts of someone who is both sharp and sensible, and not given to dogmatism. That's something rare (I won't say increasingly rare - my feeling is that it's always been difficult to find ppl who don't find strong emotional reactions, particularly those that pivots on ideological convictions, more satisfying than the persistent exercise of common sense. Now, someone might object and say that common sense is lazy and presupposes a lot of bad things so why put so much confidence in it? But this is a strawman made possible by the language ambiguity: falling back on status quo thinking is obviously not what I mean by the persistent exercise of common sense) and I'm grateful that this collection of interviews exist. In general, where I have some personal experience to go off of, I pretty much agree with most of what she says about political correctness, about the function of writers, race relations etc., where I don't (e.g. paranormal experience, Sufism) I still find what she has to say valuable and interesting. Reading Lessing makes me feel more and more myself - it's like having a conversation with my future self who's decided to lean in backwards through time and tap me on the shoulder to tell me something.

All in all, I think the selection of interviews is pretty good, and I like seeing how certain themes and preoccupations persist throughout the years, and how Lessing approaches them from slightly different angles each time she's asked her opinion on this. The only interview I didn't like and (in my opinion) should have been cut was the Q&A one by Tan Gim Ean - the questions just weren't very good.

A useful quote from one of the interviews on the relation between political correctness and literature:

This political correctness business - I think that it's so silly, most of it, and it's bound to pass. Probably I shouldn't say this, because I'll be lynched, but your country is intellectually an extremely hysterical country. The great movements arise and disappear over the horizon, and I think this one will too. In the meantime I think it's doing a lot of damage, because literature shouldn't be treated as a kind of blueprint for a better way of correct thinking. This isn't what literature is about at all.

But also this one from another:

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movement, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists, or feminists, or whatever does not make they any less rabble-rousers.

Language has a tendency to take over people's minds and dictate what they think, particularly in political contexts. So a useful question to ask oneself before one rushes headlong into some ideology or revolutionary fervour or another: what is jargon good for and what is it not good for? If there is a temptation to refuse to consider this question, resist that temptation by recognising that it is purely a methodological question. Damage, words, control, and patterns of civilisation.