Doris Lessing - Putting the Questions Differently

Raskin:You’re pessimistic, aren’t you? Don’t you think that my generation has been liberated, and is liberating much of the society? Our values aren’t commercial.

Lessing:I’m not saying that the youth have commercial values. In the 1960s the youth have had a great deal of freedom. It has been a wonderful moment in history. During the period of “flower power” I met some young Canadian poets who assured me that flowers were mightier than tanks. They talked sentimental rubbish. It’s too late for romanticism. Young people in this decade have been allowed freedom; they have been flattered and indulged, because they are a new market. Young people coming to the end of this era are hitting exactly what previous generations before them have hit – that awful moment when they see that their lives are going to be, unless they do something fast, like the lives of their parents. The illusion of freedom is destroyed. A large part of the student protest is indirectly due to the fact that after seven or eight years of lotus eating, young people suddenly realize that their lives may be as narrow, as confined, as commercially oriented, as the lives of their parents. They don’t want that life, but they feel trapped. This feeling can be good or bad depending how it’s used.//

Raskin:It seems to me that your political experience in Africa would be relevant to the experience of white and black radicals today. Could you say something about it?

Lessing:The Communist Party in South Africa was like a seven-year flower which blooms and vanishes. It came into existence in the ’20s but it spread and burgeoned toward the end of the ’30s. The Communist Party had an enormous effect on politics because it ignored the color bar. In the Communist Party white and black people worked together on the basis of equality. Unfortunately, there were more whites than blacks in the party. If there was a Communist Party there today it would have to be predominantly black. But I don’t see how blacks can organize anything coherent at the moment. What’s likely to happen is sporadic outbreaks of violence by heroic anarchists. Another weakness of the South African Communist Party was its attitude toward the Soviet Union. But it organized trade unions and blacks. When it was banned it went underground and collapsed. Only a handful of brave individuals survived.

Raskin:The black South African is much more exploited and oppressed than the Afro-American, I imagine.

Lessing:The Africans are fed lies day and night. Every African township has police spies and government informers. A great section of the African population is corrupt, bought off. The black worker, especially the miner, lives in what amounts to a concentration camp. He’s policed, doctored, fed, watched. He hasn’t got freedom. He’s well fed by African standards, but he’s a slave. South Africa is a fascist paradise. It’s one of the most brilliant police states in history.

Raskin:Some of the things you’ve said about radicals and repression remind me of the ending of The Golden Notebook, which has puzzled me. Could you explain it?

Lessing:When I wrote The Golden Notebook the left was getting one hammer blow after another. Everybody I knew was reeling because the left had collapsed. The scene at the end when Molly goes off and gets married and Anna goes off to do welfare work and joins the Labour Party was intended as a sign of the times. I was being a bit grim about what I observed about me. Women who had been active for years in socialist movements gritted their teeth and said, “Right, the hell with all this politics, we’ll go off and be welfare workers.” They meant it as a kind of joke, but they carried out their program. They did everything and anything that took them out of politics. Women who had refused to get married because they were dedicated to the cause made marriages which they would have found disgusting five years earlier. They regarded it as a kind of selling out. Brilliant Communist Party organizers went into business and entertainment and became rich men. This didn’t happen to everyone, but it happened to many Communists.

Raskin:Many of the New Left students are from Old Left families who are now well off. The sons of famous Establishment professors are in SDS. How do you see the generations?

Lessing:The strain of watching the horrors becomes so great that middle-aged people block them out. My generation doesn’t understand that young people have penetrated below the surface and have seen the horrors of our civilization. We’ve been so damned corrupted. Humanity has got worse and worse, puts up with more and more, gets more and more bourgeois. The youth have realized this.

I have always observed incredible brutality in society. My parents’ lives and the lives of millions of people were ruined by the First World War. But the human imagination rejects the implications of our situation. War scars humanity in ways we refuse to recognize. After the Second World War the world sat up, licked its wounds ineffectually, and started to prepare for the Third World War. To look at the scene today, to see what man has done to himself, is an incitement to young people to riot. I’m surprised that the New Left isn’t more violent.

I hope you don’t regard me as unduly bitter. Humanity is a brave lot of people. Everyone of my lot has had to fight on two fronts. Being a Red is tough. My personal experience isn’t bad, but friends of mine have been destroyed. The revolutionary movements they were working in sold them down the river. The ex-Communists of my lot have lost a certain kind of belief.

Raskin:What is it you’ve lost? Isn’t it possible that the political struggles of my generation can revive that belief?

Lessing:The ex-Communists of my lot can’t be surprised by anything. There is no horror that one cannot expect from people. We’ve learned that.

Well, yours is a new, young generation, and with a bit of luck the New Left won’t have the kind of hammering my generation did. Maybe it’ll be different. Maybe it’ll not be the way I think it will be. But you and your generation need a calm to negotiate the rapids.

Studs Terkel’s radio interview was conducted in Chicago June 10, 1969. Printed by permission of Studs Terkel.

Terkel:The passage which you just read from The Four-Gated City seems one of the keys to the book. Lynda, who is the wife of a friend of your protagonist Martha Quest, has been considered mad, and Martha finds out something, doesn’t she?

Lessing:Well, you see, I’ve done my homework on this point without ever planning to do it, because it so happened that for the last twenty years, without ever intending to do it, I have been ever involved with psychiatrists or social workers dealing in what we call “madness,” or have had very close friends who have been quote, unquote “mad” in one way or another. This is not anything that I had planned to do; it has just happened this way. What one experiences gets into one’s work!

When I wrote this book, although I had a fairly clear idea of certain things I wished to say, other things I discovered as I wrote. Lynda is the character who fascinates me the most in this book, because she is the crystallization of a great deal of experience in a form I never expected. I found out a great many things about what I think through Lynda. Lynda is like a lot of people I’ve known who spend their time in and out of mental hospitals. This is getting more and more common. I have no doubt at all that a lot of people will either be in mental hospitals themselves or have friends who are in and out of mental hospitals and live their lives in a twilight of drugs. I mean by “drugs” …