Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing

“literary” nature than Vonnegut’s; but their similar concerns for the madness of society, its self-destructive tendencies, would account for her enthusiasm. She spoke of having heard that Vonnegut did not plan to write anymore – which I hadn’t heard, myself – and that this distressed her; she thought he was very good, indeed. She mentioned Slaughterhouse-Five as an especially impressive book of his.

      Less surprisingly, she felt a kinship with Norman Mailer, and believed that the critical treatment he received for Barbary Shore and The Deer Park was quite unjustified; “they’re good books,” she said. I mentioned that the exciting thing about Mailer – sometimes incidental to the aesthetic quality of his work – was his complete identification with the era in which he lives, his desire to affect radically the consciousness of the times, to dramatize himself as a spiritual representative of the times and its contradictions, and that this sense of a mission was evident in her writing as well. “In beginning the Martha Quest series, you could not possibly have known how it would end; and the sympathetic reader following Martha’s life cannot help but be transformed, along with Martha,” I said. Mrs. Lessing was understandably reticent about her own writing – and perhaps I embarrassed her by my own enthusiasm, though I did not tell her that she was quite mistaken in her feeling that her writing might not have the effect she desired: The Golden Notebook alone has radically changed the consciousness of many young women. Was there anyone else with whom she felt a kinship? She mentioned Saul Bellow, and of course D. H. Lawrence, and Nadine Gordimer. (Mrs. Lessing cannot return to the country of her childhood and girlhood, Southern Rhodesia, because she is a “prohibited immigrant”; homesick for the veld, she had her daughter send her several color photographs of African flowers, which are on display in her flat.) At the back of her mind, she said, is a work “about two men in prison,” which she is not writing (as Kurt Vonnegut was “not writing” for decades the story of the Dresden fire bombing which is the ostensible subject of Slaughterhouse-Five); perhaps this work, which she may someday do, is related to her Southern Rhodesian background.

      What most excited her about America was, during her visit, the spirit of liberality and energy in the young. She gave a lecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969, when that university was in a state of turmoil (a condition that the national press unaccountably overlooked, focusing news stories on Columbia and Berkeley), then flew to Stony Brook, which, though hardly a radical institution at the time, immediately erupted into student riots and rampages, brought on by a long history of police harassment over drugs. After visiting these two universities, Mrs. Lessing was scheduled to fly to – of all places – Berkeley, where she gave another lecture. She was most favorably impressed by the students, and young people in general, with whom she became acquainted. I asked her if she might like to teach full-time, but she said she would hesitate to take on a position of such responsibility (she had been offered a handsome job at City College, which she declined with regret), partly because she considered her own academic background somewhat meager. “I ended my formal education at the age of fourteen, and before that I really learned very little,” she said. It struck me as amazing: a woman whose books constitute a staggering accomplishment, who is, herself, undisputably a major figure in English literature of the twentieth century – should hesitate to teach in a university! It is rather as if a resurrected Kafka, shy, unobstrusive, humble, should insist that his works be taught by anyone else, any ordinary academic with ordinary academic qualifications, sensing himself somehow not equal to what he represents. Perhaps there is some truth to it. But I was forced to realize how thoroughly oppressive the world of professional “education” really is; how it locks out either overtly or in effect the natural genius whose background appears not to have been sufficient.

      Mrs. Lessing said that connections between English writers and universities were quite rare, but that in the United States it seemed very common. I explained that this was because of the existence of creative writing programs in the United States, which were not narrowly “academic,” but which allowed a writer-in-residence to meet with students once or twice a week, giving him much time for his own work. In England, many writers are forced to work in publishing houses or on magazines. The publishing world in London, Mrs. Lessing said, is always changing; editors are always switching publishers, publishing houses disappear and new ones appear.//

      I asked her if she was pleased, generally, with her writing and with its public response. Strangely, she replied that she sometimes had to force herself to write – that she often was overcome by the probable “pointlessness” of the whole thing. I asked Mrs. Lessing if she meant that her own writing seemed to her sometimes futile, or was it the role of literature in society.

      “I suppose one begins with the idea of transforming society,” she said, “through literature and then, when nothing happens, one feels a sense of failure. But then the question is simply why did one feel he might change society? Change anything? In any case, one keeps going.”

      I told Mrs. Lessing that her writing has worked to transform many individuals, and that individuals, though apparently isolated, do, in fact, constitute society. Her own writing, in my opinion, does not exist in a vacuum, but reinforces and is reinforced by the writing of some of her important (and nonliterary) contemporaries – Ronald Laing, Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Barry Commoner – and many other critics of the “self-destructing society.”

      “Yet one does question the very premises of literature, at times,” Mrs. Lessing said. “Has anything changed? Will anything change? The vocal opposition to the war in Vietnam, in America – has it forced any real change?”

      “I think there have been changes, alterations of consciousness,” I said.

      Mrs. Lessing received my opinion respectfully, but it seemed clear that she did not share it. She went on to remark that she felt rather out of touch with current writing since she kept to herself, generally, and did not make any attempt to keep up with all that was being written. She asked me about the English writers I admired. When I told her that I very much liked V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, she agreed that Naipaul was an excellent writer. “But somehow I don’t feel a rapport with him, the kind of sympathy I feel for someone like Vonnegut, even though he writes about a part of the world, Africa, I know very well.”

      Of the younger English writers I admired, only Margaret Drabble was a familiar name to Mrs. Lessing. She liked Miss Drabble’s writing but had not yet read The Needle’s Eye; I told her that I thought this novel shared some important themes with her own work – the conscious “creating” of a set of values by which people can live, albeit in a difficult, tragically diminished urban world.

      “Well, whether literature accomplishes anything or not,” Mrs. Lessing said, “we do keep going.”

      When I left Mrs. Lessing’s flat and walked back down the hill to the underground station, I felt even more strongly that sense of suspension, of unreality. It seemed to me one of the mysterious paradoxes of life, the inability of the truly gifted, the prophetic “geniuses” (an unforgivable but necessary word) to comprehend themselves, their places in history: rare indeed is the self-recognized and self-defined person like Yeats who seems to have come to terms not only with his creative productivity but with his destiny. Doris Lessing, the warm, poised, immensely interesting woman with whom I had just spent two hours, does not yet know that she is Doris Lessing.

      Yet it is natural, I suppose, for her not to know or to guess how much The Golden Notebook (predating and superseding even the most sophisticated of all the Women’s Liberation works) meant to young women of my generation; how beautifully the craftsmanship of her many short stories illuminated lives, the most secret and guarded of private lives, in a style that was never self-conscious or contrived. She could not gauge how The Four-Gated City, evidently a difficult novel for her to write, would work to transform our consciousness not only of the ecological disaster we are facing, the self-annihilating madness of our society which brands its critics as “mad,” but also of the possibilities of the open form of the novel itself. Never superficially experimental, Mrs. Lessing’s writing is profoundly experimental – exploratory – in its effort to alter our expectations about life and about the range of our own consciousness.

      Her books, especially the Martha Quest