into your sense of the changes of the mind?
Lessing: I took mescaline once. I’ve taken pot a bit. Drugs give us a glimpse of the future; they extricate us from the cage of time. When people take drugs they discover an unknown part of themselves. When you have to open up, when you’re blocked, drugs are useful, but I think it’s bad for people to make them a way of life because they become an end in themselves. Pot should be used with caution, but not banned. I’m against all this banning. I think people can expand and explore their minds without using drugs. It demands a great deal of discipline. It’s like learning a craft; you have to devote a lot of time, but if you can train yourself to concentrate you can travel great distances.
Raskin: In your fiction you explore large tracts through dreams, don’t you?
Lessing: Dreams have always been important to me. The hidden domain of our mind communicates with us through dreams. I dream a great deal and I scrutinize my dreams. The more I scrutinize, the more I dream. When I’m stuck in a book I deliberately dream. I knew a mathematician once who supplied his brain with information and worked it like a computer. I operate in a similar way. I fill my brain with the material for a new book, go to sleep, and I usually come up with a dream which resolves the dilemma.
Raskin: The dreams in The Golden Notebook are points of intensity and fusion, aren’t they? Anna sees fragments – a lump of earth from Africa, metal from a gun used in Indochina, flesh from people killed in the Korean War, a Communist party badge from someone who died in a Soviet prison – all of which represent crises in contemporary life.
Lessing: The unconscious artist who resides in our depths is a very economical individual. With a few symbols a dream can define the whole of one’s life, and warn us of the future, too. Anna’s dreams contain the essence of her experience in Africa, her fears of war, her relationship to Communism, her dilemma as a writer.
Raskin: Do you think that the Freudian concepts are valid?
Lessing: There are difficulties about the Freudian landscape. The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down. But the unconscious can be what you make of it, good or bad, helpful or unhelpful. Our culture has made an enemy of the unconscious. If you mention the word “unconscious” in a room full of people you see the expressions on their faces change. The word recalls images of dread and threat, but other cultures have accepted the unconscious as a helpful force, and I think we should learn to see it in that way too.
Raskin: How did you create the character of Mrs. Marks, “Mother Sugar,” in The Golden Notebook?
Lessing: My own psychotherapist was somewhat like Mrs. Marks. She was everything I disliked. I was then aggressively rational, antireligious, and a radical. She was Roman Catholic, Jungian, and conservative. It was very upsetting to me at the time, but I found out it didn’t matter a damn. I couldn’t stand her terminology, but she was a marvelous person. She was one of those rare individuals who know how to help others. If she had used another set of words, if she had talked Freud talk, or aggressive atheism, it wouldn’t have made a difference.//
Raskin: You’ve also been at the center of many political conflicts. Near the end of The Golden Notebook Anna says that “at that moment I sit down to write someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulder and stops me… It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the FLN. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?” I feel a tension between my life as a writer and my political activity. Could you tell me how you have felt about this situation?
Lessing: // I am intensely aware of, and want to write about, politics, but I often find that I am unable to embody my political vision in a novel. I want to write about Chinese peasants, the Algerians in the FLN, but I don’t want to present them in false situations. I don’t want to leave them out either. I find it difficult to write well about politics. I feel that the writer is obligated to dramatize the political conflicts of his time in his fiction. There is an awful lot of bad socialist literature which presents contemporary history mechanically. I wanted to avoid that pitfall.
In the scene from The Golden Notebook, which you’ve mentioned, I was trying to introduce politics and history into Anna’s world.
I’m tormented by the inadequacy of the imagination. I’ve a sense of the conflict between my life as a writer and the terrors of our time. One sits down to write in a quiet flat in London and one thinks, Yes, there’s a war going on in Vietnam. The night before last, when we were having dinner here, the police were raiding the university and arresting students.
Raskin: How do you view the future?
Lessing: I’m very much concerned about the future. I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction, and I think that science-fiction writers have captured our culture’s sense of the future. The Four-Gated City is a prophetic novel. I think it’s a true prophecy. I think that the “iron heel” is going to come down. I believe the future is going to be cataclysmic.
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:
