I think a great many people do. I think we are probably at it all the time without knowing it. Ideas flow through our minds like water all the time. But my interest in the paranormal is not as kicks. I used to be terribly fascinated, but now I try to use it in a very quiet, sober sort of way. For example, I keep a diary where I note down the odd events, like coincidences and things, that I think are going to happen whether they do or not. I am quite objective about that, I don’t make things up. I use dreams all the time. I have done since I was a child. I use dreams in my work because I get ideas or I get warnings in my dreams about people or situations. I don’t know if that goes under paranormal or not, but humanity has been using dreams ever since it was born.
Bigsby: Moving to your more recent books, there are constant images of devastation, but on the other hand humanity seems to come out the other side of that devastation. It was true, of course, of The Four-Gated City. But in the latest books you move towards a simple faith, isn’t it, in something not fully perceived? Obedience to some sort of cosmic will?
Lessing: I don’t know about obedience. Do you choose to have obedience?
Bigsby: But I think you use the word “faith” yourself. That is what finally they are left with.
Lessing: I thought a lot about putting that word in because it has got religious connotations.
Bigsby: What is it they are believing in, then?
Lessing: Since the history of man began, has there been anything else but disaster, plagues, miseries, wars? Yet something has survived of it. Now our view is, of course, that we’re onwards and upwards all the time. I just have an open mind about all that. But I do think that if we have survived so much in the past we are survivors, if nothing else, and if nothing else we are extremely prolific. Has it ever occurred to you how prolific we are? We are worse than rabbits. We just breed; the world is full of babies. I like to think some of them will survive, perhaps even better. Also, is it possible that the radiation that we are going to inflict upon the world might make us mutate? We don’t know. There is now a theory that the dinosaurs died out not because of a shift of climates, but because of a different kind of radiation. We are bombarded by different kinds of radiation. Neutrons pour through us as we sit here, did you know? Well, you see, we don’t know what else pours through us and how we might react to a different kind of medicine.
Bigsby: So this is faith?
Lessing: Optimism.
Writing as Time Runs Out Michael Dean
Michael Dean’s interview was broadcast May 7, 1980, on BBC-2. Copyright © 1980 by British Broadcasting Corporation. Printed with permission.
Dean: You spent your formative years growing up in Rhodesia with English parents who imagined, at least half the time it seemed, that they were still in England. Was it a happy childhood?
Lessing: No, it wasn’t at all. Fighting every inch of the way I was. No, I had to. It was nobody’s fault. You have to get to be old like me before you can look back and understand your parents, and now I’m desperately sorry for my mother particularly.
Dean: You were a late developer and had no formal education as we understand it, leaving school at fourteen.
Lessing: That’s right.
Dean: Why?
Lessing: Well, it was part of fighting my poor mama. I went off and I was what is now called an au pair girl. I was a nursemaid in fact for about two and one-half years in Salisbury. I didn’t mind the work, because I liked looking after babies, but it was an awful waste of time. Then I went back and I wrote a novel or two on the farm, very fast and very bad.
Dean: What kind of novels?
Lessing: //One was a very mannered artificial book about Salisbury social life. I was seventeen.
Dean: Was there a political edge to your writing then?
Lessing: No, it was bad social satire.
Dean: I’m interested to know why and how you became different? I mean, the prevailing wind of that culture which was white supremacy wasn’t questioned I should imagine by the people you lived with.
Lessing: People say how remarkable it is that you saw through all that color-bar thing when you were so young. I do not feel that this was due to anything innate, anything on my part at all. I think it was simply that I had to be critical about everything, all my life. I can’t remember any time in my life where I wasn’t sitting looking at the grown-up scene, for example, and thinking, This must be some great charade they’ve all agreed to play. I was always seeing through what went on. That was the makings of a critic, you see. Now this is a bad thing as well, because it can be very sterile.
Dean: There’s an epigraph to your first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which goes I think, “it is by the failures and the misfits of a civilization that one can judge its weaknesses.” Have you always felt yourself sitting in judgment of your civilization?
Lessing: You see, this is a very crucial question. Yes, I have, and perhaps it’s not much use, but I think it was the way I was brought up. You must imagine my parents who were Tory and admiring Churchill when he was still some pain in the neck, you know, but soon afterwards he became a kind of cherubic saint with a cigar. He was no good, you see, because he prophesied the Second World War and said we should prepare for it and my parents who suffered terribly from the First World War, their entire lives were ruined by it, were torn up, you know. They were anguished by the approaching war and that no one was doing anything about it. Imagine them sitting in the middle of the bush – our nearest neighbors were three, four, seven miles away, listening to the BBC, eight o’clock news and Big Ben and angry because of English politics. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t heard people discussing politics. This was probably my earliest education.
Dean: You must have read widely and I’m sure voraciously as a child and as an adolescent.
Lessing: I read in Salisbury when I felt myself very shut up there. You know what it’s like, this dreadful provincial little hole. I read very strange novels, almost as a deliberate counterbalance, like Proust. There was a time when I think I must have been really quite an authority on Proust. It was such a relief to read something like that. Somebody once said Rhodesia was a combination of the Wild West and Tunbridge Wells. I would read my way from book to book. I found a book mentioned in one and then sent for it, to England, the Everyman’s Library. The excitement of these books arriving after waiting sometimes for six weeks was the marvelous moment in my life, when a new book, a parcel of books came, from England and I could start in. Sometimes they were absolutely useless to me because I hadn’t got to the stage of appreciating them.
Dean: I think you wrote once that Africa is an old fever, latent always in the blood. Are you still carrying that old fever?
Lessing: Yes, very much so. And I dream about it all the time with
