for I’m a prohibited immigrant. Now here my head and my heart are absolutely like this, as they often are, but here particularly, because while my head applauds like this, out goes my heart. I weep like a small child, you see, that I’m shut out of my country. Now when I say this to an African he very probably laughs, and I’m on his side. But there are some things, you see, that you can do nothing about.
Dean: What is it that your heart grieves for?
Lessing: It’s a beautiful place, and the Africans, you see. I know it’s very suspect for the daughter of a white settler, which is what I am, you see, to talk about Africans in this way, but I see that Van der Post also does, so I’m in good company. I miss the Africans so much; they’re such beautiful people. They’ve got this marvellous grace and good humor and charm, and I miss it.
Dean: I’m going to wrench you away from Africa now rather cruelly. The year is 1949. You’re arriving in England, a source of so much of your culture, with the scars of two marriages, I think, and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in your suitcase. This was post-war London, very austere, very gray. Was it a shock to you?
Lessing: Yes, it was. It was so gray and lightless and grim and unpainted and bombed. It took a lot of getting used to. And of course I had very little money and fairly difficult circumstances. I had a small child. You see, I recently discovered I was a one-parent family, which everyone knows was quite hard.
Dean: Something you wrote that seemed to me to be terribly heartfelt was on experiencing England for the first time: everybody was so kind, so decent, so bloody dull.
Lessing: Well, it was dull. You see the colonies are full of very outsize characters. There’s plenty of room for everyone’s eccentricities to blossom, and here there isn’t space for it. You find people being eccentric behind closed doors. You get to know them, then you find these marvelous maniacs living their quiet, mad lives, but it’s not out in the open at all.
Dean: When The Grass Is Singing was published and acclaimed, did your life change? Did you earn a lot of money?
Lessing: No, I didn’t at all. I had a £150 advance and at that time I had a job as a typist again to earn a bit of money, and I didn’t know it was impossible to live on what you earned by writing, so I tossed up the job and sold my clothes – all that kind of thing, chiefly evening dresses. You see, we danced in Rhodesia, in Zimbabwe, we danced; I didn’t in London, so I sold all that kind of thing and got on with writing short stories. The publisher Michael Joseph kept ringing me up to say, “We have reprinted The Grass Is Singing,” and I said, “Oh good.” You see, I thought that everyone was reprinted.
Dean: In the early ’50s you published Martha Quest, which is the story of a young girl growing into maturity through sex and marriage, disastrously, and coming to grips for the first time with social and political realities. This has the shape and feel obviously of autobiography. Is there much of you there?
Lessing: Yes, some of it; you mean the character. Yes, this pugnacious intolerant character, yes absolutely, of course, that’s me. But this whole series gets less autobiographical as it goes on. Don’t forget that halfway through the series I wrote The Golden Notebook, which completely changed me, you see. It wasn’t that I wrote five volumes one after the other.
Dean: How did you come to write The Golden Notebook?
Lessing: A friend of mine kept notebooks and they were on politics, psychology, her husband, children, job, and I thought that was the oddest thing. When you’re living a life, you don’t live in this kind of way at all, do you? It’s just inhuman. There’s something wrong with someone who thinks like this. So I used this, when I was working out the shape of The Golden Notebook. As you know, there’s this framework, the absolutely conventional novel. Five bits of conventional novel and all this chaos in the middle. One thing I was saying was this feeling of despair, which every writer feels when they’ve finished a novel, that you haven’t been able to say it because life is too complex ever to be put into words. That’s one thing I was saying through the structure of this book.
I’d constructed this whole book on my experience, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what I knew women were thinking and feeling, but it never crossed my mind that I was writing about feminism or what is now called Women’s Lib, because I thought I was doing the opposite. I had thought my way into the conclusion that we all split ourselves off into little bits all the time; there’s something in the human mind that makes these divisions. It’s something probably wrong with us. Seriously. You smile, but I really do think there might be something wrong with us the way we are always making categories about things that should be like men/women, for instance. Of course there’s a great truth there, and I’m not arguing about that, but perhaps we’re not all that different where it matters, like in our inner selves.
Dean: How did women respond to The Golden Notebook?
Lessing: A lot of them were very angry and wrote me a lot of very bitchy letters on these lines: Why are you betraying us? Why are you giving away our secrets? Really very malevolent some of them were. I got a lot of support from men; you see, my male friends were supporting me all along the way, which is quite interesting.
In The Golden Notebook, I really tried to write a book which would capture certain vital ideas that were all to do with socialism in one way or another. The idea was that people might look back in 100 years’ time, if they’re interested, and find a record of the kind of things people thought about and talked about during these years. The Golden Notebook was a failure in a formal sense, because as usual I take on too much. It was so ambitious, it couldn’t help but fail.
Dean: But it became a great deal more than what you intended it to be, didn’t it?
Lessing: Oh, it spilled all over the place, didn’t it? I don’t mind because I don’t believe all that much in perfect novels. What’s marvelous about novels is they can be anything you like. That is the strength of the novel. There are no rules.
Dean: I’m making a mistake as I speak, I know, because inevitably I’m identifying you with the character who writes the notebooks in The Golden Notebook, Anna, so I’m probably putting her words into your mind. But when she writes about naiveté as spontaneous creative faith, a kind of innocence if you like, the capacity especially for females to believe in someone or something against all the evidence, isn’t there something of you in this? I mean, in your Marxism you believe you’re the dynamic of hope, I suppose, isn’t this you? Was it you?
Lessing: Yes, it was – an enormous capacity for acceptance. I think I still have it to an extent, but I don’t have it the way I had it. I don’t know how to put it. Something happens or you meet somebody and you just open your arms and say “right” to an idea or to a person or anything, or any event. But you can’t go on like that, you have to learn a different way.
Dean: Were you ever that romantic?
Lessing: Yes, I was.
Dean: And wounded by it?
Lessing: Oh, terribly. Yes, of course, I was. Well, the evidence is in my work, isn’t it? But it’s an awful waste of time all that banging and crashing around.
Dean:
