Putting the Questions Differently

Talking as a Person Roy Newquist

Roy Newquist’s interview originally appeared in Counterpoint (Rand McNally, 1964). Copyright © 1964 by Roy Newquist. Reprinted with permission.

Newquist: When did you start writing?

Lessing: I think I’ve always been a writer by temperament. I wrote some bad novels in my teens. I always knew I would be a writer, but not until I was quite old – twenty-six or -seven – did I realize that I’d better stop saying I was going to be one and get down to business. I was working in a lawyer’s office at the time, and I remember walking in and saying to my boss, “I’m giving up my job because I’m going to write a novel.” He very properly laughed, and I indignantly walked home and wrote The Grass Is Singing. I’m oversimplifying; I didn’t write it as simply as that because I was clumsy at writing and it was much too long, but I did learn by writing it. It focused upon white people in Southern Rhodesia, but it could have been about white people anywhere south of the Zambezi, white people who were not up to what is expected of them in a society where there is very heavy competition from the black people coming up.

Then I wrote short stories set in the district I was brought up in, where very isolated white farmers lived immense distances from each other. You see, in this background, people can spread themselves out. People who might be extremely ordinary in a society like England’s, where people are pressed into conformity, can become wild eccentrics in all kinds of ways they wouldn’t dare try elsewhere. This is one of the things I miss, of course, by living in England. I don’t think my memory deceives me, but I think there were more colorful people back in Southern Rhodesia because of the space they had to move in. I gather, from reading American literature, that this is the kind of space you have in America in the Midwest and West.

I left Rhodesia and my second marriage to come to England, bringing a son with me. I had very little money, but I’ve made my living as a professional writer ever since, which is really very hard to do. I had rather hard going, to begin with, which is not a complaint; I gather from my American writer-friends that it is easier to be a writer in England than in America because there is much less pressure put on us. We are not expected to be successful, and it is no sin to be poor.

Newquist: I don’t know how we can compare incomes, but in England it seems that writers make more from reviewing and from broadcasts than they can in the United States.

Lessing: I don’t know. When I meet American writers, the successful ones, they seem to make more on royalties, but then they also seem to spend much more.

I know a writer isn’t supposed to talk about money, but it is very important. It is vital for a writer to know how much he can write to please himself, and how much, or little, he must write to earn money. In England you don’t have to “go commercial” if you don’t mind being poor. It so happens that I’m not poor anymore, thank goodness, because it’s not good for anyone to be. Yet there are disadvantages to living in England. It’s not an exciting place to live; it is not one of the hubs of the world, like America, or Russia, or China. England is a backwater, and it doesn’t make much difference what happens here, or what decisions are made here. But from the point of view of writing, England is a paradise for me.

You see, I was brought up in a country where there is very heavy pressure put on people. In Southern Rhodesia it is not possible to detach yourself from what is going on. This means that you spend all your time in a torment of conscientiousness. In England – I’m not saying it’s a perfect society, far from it – you can get on with your work in peace and quiet when you choose to withdraw. For this I’m very grateful – I imagine there are few countries left in the world where you have this right of privacy.

Newquist: This is what you’re supposed to find in Paris.

Lessing: Paris is too exciting. I find it impossible to work there. I proceed to have a wonderful time and don’t write a damn thing.

Newquist: To work from A Man and Two Women for a bit. The almost surgical job you do in dissecting people, not bodily, but emotionally, has made me wonder if you choose your characters from real life, form composites or projections, or if they are so involved you can’t really trace their origins.

Lessing: I don’t know. Some people I write about come out of my life. Some, well, I don’t know where they come from. They just spring from my own consciousness, perhaps the subconscious, and I’m surprised as they emerge.

This is one of the excitements about writing. Someone says something, drops a phrase, and later you find that phrase turning into a character in a story, or a single, isolated, insignificant incident becomes the germ of a plot.

Newquist: If you were going to give advice to the young writer, what would that advice be?

Lessing: You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. This is hard to describe.

Newquist: What about reading as a background?

Lessing: I’ve known very good writers who’ve never read anything. Of course, this is rare.

Newquist: What about your own reading background?

Lessing: Well, because I had this isolated childhood, I read a great deal. There was no one to talk to, so I read. What did I read? The best – the classics of European and American literature. One of the advantages of not being educated was that I didn’t have to waste time on the secondbest. Slowly, I read these classics. It was my education, and I think it was a very good one.

I could have been educated – formally, that is – but I felt some neurotic rebellion against my parents who wanted me to be brilliant academically. I simply contracted out of the whole thing and educated myself. Of course, there are huge gaps in my education, but I’m nonetheless grateful that it went as it did. One bit of advice I might give the young writer is to get rid of the fear of being thought of as a perfectionist, or to be regarded as pompous. They should strike out for the best, to be the best. God knows, we all fall short of our potential, but if we aim very high we’re likely to be so much better.

Newquist: How do you view today’s literature? What about the recent trend toward introspection?

Lessing: Well, I haven’t been to America, but I’ve met a great many Americans and I think they have a tendency to be much more aware of themselves, and conscious of their society, than we are in Britain (though we’re moving that way). By a coincidence I was thinking this afternoon about a musical like West Side Story, which comes out of a sophisticated society which is very aware of itself. You wouldn’t have found in Britain, at the time that was written, a lyric like “Gee, Officer Krupke.” You have to be very socially self-conscious to write West Side Story.

Newquist: What do you feel about the fiction being turned out today? Does it share the same virtues and failings as theater or can it be considered separately?

Lessing: Quite separately. You want to know what contemporary writers I enjoy reading? The American writers I like, for different reasons, are Malamud and Norman Mailer – even when he’s right off center he lights rockets. And Algren. And that man who wrote Catch-22. And of course, Carson McCullers. But I only read the books that drift my way; I don’t know everything that comes out.

Newquist: How do you feel about critical reactions to your own works?

Lessing: I don’t get my reviews anymore. I read reviews if they turn up in the papers I get, but I go through them fast and try to pay little attention to what is said. I think the further I’m removed from this area – reviews, the literary squabble-shop – the better.// You see, the literary society in London is very small and incestuous. Everyone knows everyone. The writer who tosses a scrap of autobiography into an otherwise fictional piece (which writers always have done and always will do), he’s not credited with any imagination. Everyone says, “Oh, that character’s so and so,” and “I know that character.” It’s all too personal. The standards of criticism are very low. I don’t know about American critics, but in this country we have an abysmal standard. Very few writers I know have any respect for the criticism they get. Our attitude is, and has to be, Are the reviews selling books or not? In all other respects, the reviews are humiliating, they are on such a low level, and it’s all so spiteful and personal.

Newquist: Do reviews sell books in England?

Lessing: My publishers claim they help build a reputation and that indirectly they do sell books. This is probably true. But in Great Britain everything is much more cumulative and long-term than in America. One simply settles in for what you call the long haul. But “reputation” – what are reputations worth when they are made by reviewers who are novelists? Writers aren’t necessarily good critics. Yet the moment you’ve written a novel, you’re invited to write criticism, because the newspapers like to have one’s “name” on them. One is a “name” or one is not, you see. Oh, it’s very pleasant to be one, I’m not complaining, I enjoy it. But everyone knows that writers tend to be wrong about each other. Look at Thomas Mann and Brecht – they were both towering geniuses, in different ways, and they didn’t have any good word for each other.

Ideally we should have critics who are critics and not novelists who need to earn a bit to tide them over, or failed novelists. Is there such an animal, though? Of course, sometimes a fine writer is a good critic, like Lawrence. Look at something that happened last year – I wrote a long article for the New Statesman about the mess socialism is in. There was a half-line reference to X. To this day, people say to me, “that article you wrote attacking X.” This is how people’s minds work now. At the first night of one of Wesker’s plays, up comes a certain literary figure and says, his voice literally wet with anxiety, “Oh, Wesker is a much better playwright than Osborne. He is, isn’t he?” He felt that someone’s grave should be danced on. He was simply tired of voting for Osborne. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In and out.

You’re going to say the literary world has always been like this. But what I said about the theater earlier applies – nothing wrong with the audience who likes Who’s for Tennis? and the critics who do. It’s all theirs. But they should keep out of the serious theater. Similarly, of course, the literary world is always going to seethe with people who say, I’m bored with voting for X. But writers should try to keep away from them. Another bit of advice to a young writer – but unfortunately economics make it almost impossible to follow: Don’t review, don’t go on television, try to keep out of all that. But, of course, if one’s broke, and one’s asked to review, one reviews. But better not, if possible. Better not go on television, unless there is something serious to be said (and how often is that?). Better to try to remain what we should be – an individual who communicates with other individuals, through the written word.

Newquist: To return to A Man and Two Women. Which stories in this collection would you choose as personal favorites?

Lessing: That’s very difficult. I like the first one, titled “One off the Short List” because it’s so extremely cold and detached – that one’s a toughy. I’m pleased that I was able to bring it off the way I did. Then there were a couple of zany stories I’m attached to. The story about incest I liked very much – the one about the brother and the sister who are in love with each other. Not autobiographical at all, actually; perhaps I wish it were. And I like “To Room 19,” the depressing piece about people who have everything, who are intelligent and educated, who have a home and two or three or four beautiful children, and have few worries, and yet ask themselves “What for?” This is all too typical of so many Europeans – and, I gather, so many Americans.

Newquist: Perhaps life without challenge or excitement amounts to boredom.

Lessing: Life certainly shouldn’t be without excitement. The Lord knows that everything going on at the moment is exciting.

Newquist: But hasn’t boredom become one of our most acute social problems?

Lessing: I don’t understand people being bored. I find life so enormously exciting all the time. I enjoy everything enormously if only because life is so short. What have I got – another forty years of this extraordinary life if I’m lucky? But most people live as if they have a weight put on them. Perhaps I’m lucky, because I’m doing what I want all the time, living the kind of life I want to live. I know a great many people, particularly those who are well-off and have everything they are supposed to want, who aren’t happy.

Newquist: Right now a great many criticisms are leveled against bored Americans who have a surfeit of what they want. Is this true of England?

Lessing: I think that England is much more of a class society than America. This street I live on is full of very poor people who are totally different from my literary friends. They, in turn, are different from the family I come from, which is ordinary middle class. It isn’t simple to describe life in England. For instance, in any given day I can move in five, six different strata or groups. None of them know how other people live, people different from themselves. All these groups and layers and classes have unwritten rules. There are rigid rules for every layer, but they are quite different from the rules in the other groups.

Newquist: Then perhaps you maintain more individuality.

Lessing: The pressures on us all to conform seem to get stronger. We’re supposed to buy things and live in ways we don’t necessarily want to live. I’ve seen both forms of oppression, the tyrannical and the subtle. Here in England I can do what I like, think what I like, go where I please. I’m a writer, and I have no boss, so I don’t have to conform. Other people have to, though. But in Southern Rhodesia – well, there one can’t do or say what one likes. In fact, I’m a prohibited immigrant in South Africa and Central Africa, although I lived in Rhodesia twenty-five years. But then, the list of people who are prohibited in these areas is so long now.

I am not as optimistic as I used to be about oppressive societies. When I opened my eyes like a kitten to politics, there were certain soothing clichés about. One was that oppressive societies “collapsed under their own weight.” Well, the first oppressive society I knew about was South Africa. I lived close to it, and I was told that a society so ugly and brutal could not last. I was told that Franco and his Fascist Spain could not last.

Here I am, many decades later, and South Africa is worse than it was, Southern Rhodesia is going the same way, and Franco is very much in power. The tyrannical societies are doing very well. I’m afraid that the liberals and certain people on the Left tend to be rather romantic about the nature of power.

I’m not comparing tyranny to conformity. The point is that people who are willing to conform without a struggle, without protest to small things, who will simply forget how to be individuals, can easily be led into tyranny.

Newquist: But isn’t there strength in the middle road? In the area that lies between Fascism and Communism?

Lessing: I don’t know. I hope so, but history doesn’t give us many successful examples of being able to keep to the middle. Look at the difference between British and American attitudes toward Communism right now. Sections of America seem absolutely hypnotized by the kind of propaganda that’s fed to them. Now, if it is true that Communism is a violent threat to the world, then Britain – which has a different attitude – has been eating and working and sleeping for twenty years without developing ulcers, but America has ulcers. I would say that we are doing a better job of keeping to the middle of the road. You’ve got some rather pronounced elements who would like to head for the ditch or force a collision.

Hasn’t America been enfeebled by this hysterical fear of Communism? I don’t think you sit down to analyze what the word “Communist” means. You end up in the most ridiculous situations, as you did in Cuba. When you see what a great nation like America can do to muddle this Cuban thing you can only shrug your shoulders. Please don’t think I’m holding out any brief for my own government, but we’re in a lucky position. I mean, England is. We’re not very important, but America holds our fortunes in their large and not very subtle hands, and it’s frightening. When I went to Russia, in 1952, I came to the not-very-original conclusion that the Americans and Russians were very similar, and that they would like each other “if.” Now I see you moving closer and beginning to like each other, so now both of you are terrified of the Chinese, who will turn out (given fifteen years and not, I hope, too much bloodshed and misery) to be just like us, also. All of these violent hostilities are unreal. They’ve got very little to do with human beings.

Newquist: And very little to do with the arts?

Lessing: The arts, nothing! I was talking as a person, not a writer. I spent a great deal of my time being mixed up in politics in one way or another, and God knows what good it ever did. I went on signing things and protesting against things all the while wars were planned and wars were fought. I still do.

Newquist: To get back to your career, what are you working at now?

Lessing: I’m writing volumes four and five of a series I’m calling Children of Violence. I planned this out twelve years ago, and I’ve finished the first three. The idea is to write about people like myself, people my age who are born out of wars and who have lived through them, the framework of lives in conflict. I think the title explains what I essentially want to say. I want to explain what it is like to be a human being in a century when you open your eyes on war and on human beings disliking other human beings. I was brought up in Central Africa, which means that I was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is. I was the daughter of a white farmer who, although he was a very poor man in terms of what he was brought up to expect, could always get loans from the Land Bank which kept him going. (I won’t say that my father liked what was going on; he didn’t.) But he employed anywhere from fifty to one hundred working blacks. An adult black earned twelve shillings a month, rather less than two dollars, and his food was rationed to corn meal and beans and peanuts and a pound of meat per week. It was all grossly unfair, and it’s only part of a larger picture of inequity.

One-third of us – one-third of humanity, that is – is adequately housed and fed. Consciously or unconsciously we keep two-thirds of mankind improperly housed and fed. This is what the series of novels is about – this whole pattern of discrimination and tyranny and violence.

Newquist: You have mentioned becoming involved with mescaline. Could you describe this in more detail?

Lessing: I’m not involved with it. I took one dose out of curiosity, and that’s enough to be going on with. It was the most extraordinary experience. Lots of different questions arise, but for our purposes the most interesting one is: Who are we? There were several different people, or “I’s” taking part. They must all have been real, genuine, because one has no control over the process once it’s under way. I understand that experiences to do with birth are common with people having these drugs. I was both giving birth and being given birth to. Who was the mother, who was the baby? I was both but neither. Several people were talking and in different voices throughout the process – it took three or four hours. Sometimes my mother – odd remarks in my mother’s voice, my mother’s sort of phrase. Not the kind of thing I say or am conscious of thinking. And the baby was a most philosophic infant, and different from me.

And who stage-managed this thing? Who said there was to be this birth and why? Who, to put it another way, was Mistress of the Ceremony? Looking back, I think that my very healthy psyche decided that my own birth, the one I actually had, was painful and bad (I gather it was, with forceps and much trouble) and so it gave itself a good birth – because the whole of this labor was a progress from misery, pain, unhappiness, toward happiness, acceptance, and the birth “I” invented for myself was not painful. But what do I mean, we mean, when we say “my psyche” – or whatever phrase you might use in its place?

And then there’s the question of this philosophic baby, a creature who argued steadily with God – I am not a religious person, and “I” would say I am an atheist. But this baby who was still in the womb did not want to be born. First, there was the war (I was born in 1919) and the smell of war and suffering was everywhere and the most terrible cold. I’ve never imagined such cold. It was cold because of the war. The baby did not want to be born to those parents (and remember the baby who was also its own mother) and this is the interesting thing, it was bored. Not the kind of boredom described in my story “To Room 19.” But a sort of cosmic boredom. This baby had been born many times before, and the mere idea of “having to go through it all over again” (a phrase the baby kept using) exhausted it in advance. And it did not want, this very ancient and wise creature, the humiliation of being smothered in white flannel and blue baby ribbons and little yellow ducks. (Incidentally I’ll never again be able to touch or look at a baby without remembering that experience, how helpless a baby is, caged in an insipid world of comfort and bland taste and white flannel and too much warmth.) This creature said to God, Yes, I know that boredom is one of the seven deadly sins, but You created me, didn’t You? Then if You gave me a mind that goes limp with boredom at the experiences You inflict on me, whose fault is it? I’ll consent (this baby said) to being born again for the millionth time, if I am given the right to be bored.