Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing

with contemporary problems and issues.

      The response to the Canopus series among her readers, both professional and “common,” has been astounding. In reviews of the novels, in critical articles, and in letters to Mrs. Lessing herself, many readers have indicated their dismay that she has been wasting her talent writing fantasy. Some who have been particularly dismayed are those readers still waiting for her to write another Golden Notebook, or at least a “women’s book,” like The Summer Before the Dark. She has persisted, however, past the second Canopus novel, The Marriages of Zones Three, Four, and Five, which is about as close as she has come in the series to pleasing that readership. The latest three novels in the Canopus series are more similar to Shikasta than to Marriages. One of these, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, has led to yet another new departure for her writing, the libretto for the opera of the same name, written in collaboration with Philip Glass, an artist whose work has also had its share of detractors.

      The most recent of the Canopus novels deliberately ends without a clear sense of closure. As Mrs. Lessing indicates, she plans a sixth novel and perhaps even more in the series. She has been “sidetracked,” she says, by The Fifth Child and The Good Terrorist, as well as by African Laughter, her memoirs of four visits to Zimbabwe, and by the first volume of her autobiography. The two novels that “sidetracked” her might be misread as her bowing to the pressure of those readers bent upon returning her writing to the realist mode. Certainly, they are more realist than the fiction beginning with Briefing; they represent, however, in the clearest fashion, Mrs. Lessing’s insistence upon her own artistic integrity and the freedom to write in diametrically opposed modes, as they suit her differing interests as a writer.

      Although she is perhaps best known as a novelist, we ought not to ignore her accomplishment in other genres. In addition to essays and memoirs, she has published well over a dozen collections of shorter fiction; indeed, her most recent work at this writing is The Real Thing (English title London Observed) a collection of short stories and sketches. As she comments in the interviews that follow, she has also had a love affair with the theater – Play with a Tiger was produced in London in the early ’60s – with all the passion and heartbreak implied by that commonplace metaphor.

      Mrs. Lessing’s awareness of her own reputation and her frustrations with the “business” of being a writer are no more clearly evidenced than by the Jane Somers affair. Ten years ago, she decided to write and publish a novel under a pseudonym. She did so – twice – in what she later published in her own name as The Diaries of Jane Somers. In part she wanted to explore her suspicion that the publication of books had become commercialized to such a point that the exigencies of the marketplace and the “bottom line” had clearly obscured traditional interests in literary merit and cultural value. Those who know her writing were not taken in by what she has termed the “hoax” of the Jane Somers novels and, indeed, some became “co-conspirators,” if you will. Others were not so fortunate. Publishers’ readers and book reviewers who wrote the customarily “patronizing” – her term – encouragements of this hypothetical “first novelist” were obviously not amused, when they had damned with faint praise novels by Doris Lessing. Similarly, publishers who turned down the manuscripts without even sending them out to be professionally evaluated were not happy with what the “hoax” had demonstrated. As she became aware, the marketers of books were most concerned that as an unknown writer “Jane Somers” had no “personality” to help them to sell the book. Besides, would there be an “author” to be interviewed as part of their marketing strategies?

      The series of conversations has been arranged chronologically from her interviews in the early ’60s to one as recent as 1993. The early interviews appear, despite Mrs. Lessing’s apprehension that her views have changed over the past two decades. Most of the interviews have already appeared in print, some in journals as well known as The Paris Review; others, however, have appeared in smaller magazines such as Kunapipi and Glimmer Train Stories, where they are less readily accessible. Some appear here for the first time as transcriptions of taped interviews, notably those with writers Studs Terkel, Brian Aldiss, and Claire Tomalin. The collection includes translations of interviews in French and German. These pose problems because of the obvious infelicities of style inherent in translations of translations; however, they contain valuable interchanges and emphasize the genuinely international nature of her readership.

      The conversations appear with the permission of both those who hold rights to them and Mrs. Lessing, who had the opportunity to read and approve the manuscript. The interviews have been edited to enhance consistency in mechanics, notably American spelling, and to reduce the redundant or unimportant material endemic in the transcriptions of spoken versions of the language. Wherever passages have been omitted in reprinted interviews, the notation “//” indicates such omissions, especially when a hiatus in the text might otherwise be distracting. Occasionally, repeated passages have been preserved to serve as bridges from point to point, or, more importantly, to allow Mrs. Lessing to emphasize points. She herself says, “As I have said and it bears repeating…” or words to that effect. As she reminds us, interviews are an indication more often of the interviewer’s interests than the interviewee’s. However, the reader will discover in these conversations a range of responses to issues and concerns in Mrs. Lessing’s writing. Taken together, they represent a record of a life in writing.

      

      EARL G. INGERSOLL

      October 1993

       Chronology

      1919

      Born 22 October, in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran); parents, Alfred Cook Tayler and Emily Maud McVeagh. Her brother, Harry, was born in 1921.

      1924

      Moved with her family to a farm near the small town of Banket, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), where her father grew tobacco and corn.

      1933

      Ended her formal education at a Roman Catholic high school in Salisbury.

      1939

      Married Frank Wisdom, a civil engineer. Their children John and Jean remained with their father when their parents were divorced in 1943.

      1943–49

      Worked as a secretary and stenographer in Salisbury. Participated in a small political group with Marxist roots, but the Communist Party was not sanctioned by the colonial government.

      1945–49

      Married to Gottfried Lessing, a Marxist immigrant. Their son Peter, born in 1947, accompanied his mother to London when his parents’ marriage ended in divorce and his father returned to East Germany to assume a government post.

      1950

      The Grass Is Singing (Michael Joseph; New York, Crowell).

      1951

      This Was the Old Chiefs Country (Michael Joseph; New York: Crowell, 1952).

      1952

      Martha Quest, the first volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964).

      1953

      Five: Short Novels (Michael Joseph; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).

      1954

      A Proper Marriage, the second volume of Children of Violence (Michael Joseph; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964). Received Somerset Maugham Award of the Society of Authors for Five: Short Novels.

      1956

      Retreat to Innocence (Michael Joseph; New York: Prometheus, 1959).

      1957

      The Habit of Loving (MacGibbon and Kee; New York: Ballantine, Crowell, Popular Library).

      1958

      A Ripple from