Writing is habit. I have disciplined myself to write very fast in short periods of time. It was the only way when my children were small and I could write only when they were in school or playing in the street. If I do not like what I write I discard it. I prefer throwing it away to editing it.
Torrents: I’d like to speak about women and their roles as mates. In your work there are many such women, but they’re never successful. Perhaps the only relationship that can work is the fleeting one, the one-night stand.
Lessing: It took me a long time to realize that I was not made for marriage. If I had known beforehand, I could have saved myself much sadness and anguish. As a young woman I believed that to lie down for one night without the heat of a man’s body was a monumental disaster, but I have slowly realized that it is not like that and have gone so far as to be self-sufficient, which implies a great loneliness because the majority of men, naturally, don’t like this attitude; it’s not needing them. I don’t believe that it’s worth the effort necessary in order to get near a man, in order to intend to form a couple. Men need to be taken care of, to have their egos treated tenderly. They like to be the center and to push the woman to the outside edge. Perhaps the young are different, more flexible. Everything changes so rapidly! I lost much time looking for my ideal man, my match, and now I believe that perhaps my failure lay in trying to make the kind of search appropriate to another historical period and that it’s no longer possible. But I have women friends who are attempting that. They treat men as men treat us. They are free, strong. They demand sex, but when they reach thirty the biological urge possesses them. They want to have children and everything is gone, and then they fall into a routine that will completely destroy them if they don’t maintain their alertness.
Torrents: Men don’t like it that we behave like them. Moreover, certain forms of the Women’s Liberation Movement have hardened masculine attitudes in the war between the sexes.
Lessing: The danger is in confusing liberation of one with the submission of another. I have a couple of liberated friends who have simply inverted roles and have husbands as servants. The Yankee model!
Torrents: Can it be that marriage doesn’t work?
Lessing: The needs of adults and those of children are different. That which is for us a dried-up institution, institutionalized frustration, is a necessity for the young who require a stable home, a constant relationship. They need their parents in a conventional way, the home and the routine, and the couple that cannot confront those responsibilities shouldn’t have children, because the only thing that they get, if they have them, their problem children, is mental turmoil, much sadness.
Torrents: But what you say is terrible, because procreation implies destruction, more or less spectacularly, of the adult and his possibilities, a total sacrifice.
Lessing: That has been my experience. The children who live only with the father or the mother suffer indescribably. We don’t have the right to get what we want at the expense of others, but people oblige themselves in continuously seeking happiness as if they had a right to it. Perhaps a happy marriage is possible, but only with a great effort, renewable everyday, and people aren’t disposed to make the effort or the sacrifice. We want it all to be simple, on a platter. As with prepared meals, soup in packages, fish without fishbones. They sweeten everything and at the end they all know it’s a trick. It’s not even necessary to chew! This is the sign of our time – to avoid pain, to accept that which exists, to demand happiness – but we have forgotten that no one owes us anything and that pain and sacrifice are necessary to find the right path, for moral equilibrium.
The Need to Tell Stories Christopher Bigsby
Christopher Bigsby’s interview took place April 23, 1980, and originally appeared in The Radical Imagination of the Liberal Tradition (London: Junction Press, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Christopher Bigsby. Reprinted with permission.
Bigsby: You once said there was a great deal that George Eliot didn’t understand because she was moral. What did you mean by that?
Lessing: Well, I think she was a victim, like many of the women of that time, of Victorian morality. Because she was “living in sin” with George Lewes there was a great pressure on her to be good. I noticed the same pressure on myself when I wrote The Golden Notebook. I am not being paranoid; you have got no idea of the kind of attack I got. It was really quite barbarous. They said I was a man-hater, a balls-cutter, particularly Americans. I noticed enormous pressure on me to be feminine and to be good and to be kind and sweet. Quite nauseating it was. I notice that other women who have gone through the same pressure confess to the same; they suddenly find themselves thinking, Oh God, I mustn’t do that because they will say I am a balls-cutter. Well, this has already gone because Women’s Lib has achieved so much. But to go back to George Eliot, I would be very surprised if she wasn’t falling over backwards to be good because of the pressure on her. I mean, it was no joke living in that society. It must have been dreadful.
Bigsby: You mention that you were alarmed or surprised by the reaction you got from men with respect to The Golden Notebook. Were you equally alarmed by the reaction you got from women?
Lessing: Oh, you are quite wrong in thinking that I only got attacks from men. I got a lot of support from men, from a few men, and the most vicious attacks from women, on the lines that I was letting the side down by revealing the kind of things that were said. I had never thought on those lines at all. Not only had I not thought that I was writing a women’s book but it had never crossed my mind to think anything of writing the kind of things down that I was writing. Women talk like this. Men talk about women, letting off steam in locker rooms and so on, but they don’t necessarily mean it. And when women sit around and say these things they don’t necessarily mean it either; it is letting off steam. It never crossed my mind when I wrote all that down, that it hadn’t really been done before. I thought, How is it that I am getting these violent reactions? What have I done? What have I said? And when I started to look around I couldn’t think of any novels voicing the kind of criticisms women have of men. Almost like breathing, you know, so deep-rooted.
Bigsby: In an essay called “A Small Personal Voice” which, admittedly, you wrote quite a long time ago now, you said that the highest point of literature was the novel of the nineteenth century, the work of the great realists. You also said that the realist novel was the highest form of prose writing. What led you to say that then and why did you move away from that position with The Golden Notebook and with most of your subsequent work?
Lessing: I was wondering myself not long ago why I reacted so strongly – something must have happened to make me react. I do remember having that set of thoughts about the nineteenth-century novel. I mean, it was magnificent, wasn’t it? What they had was a kind of self-assurance which I don’t think any one of us has got. Why don’t we have it?
Bigsby: Well, you did say that part of your admiration came from the fact that they shared what you called a climate of ethical judgment.
Lessing: That’s right. Well, they did. We don’t have anything like that.
Bigsby: On the other hand, you said of George Eliot that she didn’t understand certain things because she was moral.
Lessing:
