Doris Lessing

Paper Cuts has a good review of Doris lessing and her finally getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have not read her, and picked up Cleft, her latest book just last week, but did not finish reading it. The idea of the book was imagining a world without men, where women got pregnant following the lunar cycle.

‘I Would Have Become an Alcoholic or Ended in the Loony Bin’
By Dwight Garner


Doris Lessing at her home in London in 2002. Click to enlarge. (Photo: Jonathan Player for The New York Times)Doris Lessing is the winner, we know now, of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature - she’s the 11th woman to win the award in its 106-year history.
Her quote today, in the Guardian, was priceless: “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot. It’s a royal flush.”
Back in 1997, in Salon, I interviewed Lessing on the occasion of the publication of her (very good) memoir, “Walking in the Shade.” She always has good quotes on tap; here is a bit of that interview:
Were you surprised at the criticism you received after writing, in your first [memoir], about leaving the kids from your first marriage behind you?
Of course I wasn’t surprised. The thing was that this was a terrible thing to do, but I had to do it because I have no doubt whatsoever if I had not done it, I would have become an alcoholic or ended in the loony bin. I couldn’t stand that life. I just couldn’t bear it. It’s this business of giving all the time, day and night, trying to conform to something you hate. Nobody can do it without going crazy. My husband was a civil servant who became increasingly high in the ranks. He couldn’t afford a wife who had [radical ideas]. I wouldn’t have lasted. I became friends with the kids later, and the grandkids, and so on. I’m not pretending that anything terrible didn’t happen.

You said just now that if you’d stayed, you would have become an alcoholic. I want to pick up on that.
Or cracked up. One or the other.

You’ve written quite a lot about crackups, and yet you’ve said you’ve managed to avoid them yourself, perhaps by writing about them.
I think so, yes. I’ve never cracked up myself, but I’ve been very much involved with people who have been on the edge. So I ask myself if this wasn’t a way of holding it all at bay. If you’re looking after somebody who’s in terrible trouble, you can’t afford to crack up.
…
You write about all of these interesting, caring, passionate people who put so much work into their belief in communism, and what they got in return was Stalin. It was a cruel kind of a joke.
Well, that’s why socialism is, for our time, dead. Because young people say, “Right, all you Reds — look what you were supporting. China and the Soviet Union.” The interesting thing is to ask yourself this question: Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. That had a disastrous effect on — this is another cliché, forgive me — progressive thinking of every kind.

You compare that kind of progressive thinking to today’s political correctness, to use another cliché. How true is that?
I think it is true. I think the attitudes of mind behind it are the same.
What are those attitudes?
A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.

Your book is, in many ways, about falling out of love with communism. For you it was perhaps easier than most, because you cared far more about your writing than about politics. But it must have been difficult for a lot of people to admit that they were wrong about communism.
This process was going on right from the beginning. I’m talking about the Soviet Union — people seeing what it was like and leaving. Everywhere you went you met people who had been communists and understood perfectly well the perils of the dream, and were now angry with themselves for falling for it. I think [this interest in communism] was rooted in the First World War and people’s passionate identification with what had been done to the soldiers, which crossed all the national boundaries. I think that’s where a disgust and contempt for government began, at the level we see it now. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism. Anyway, that’s my thesis. It’s very oversimplified, as you can see.

Did your political experiences, and the fact that you led a vigorous exterior life, help you as a writer? Does a writer need to participate in the events of his or her day?
No. You see, I wasn’t like the ones for whom the Communist Party was literally their education, or their family. When communism collapsed, for these people it was such a tragedy. I wasn’t like that. I was definitely sorry for them. A lot of people committed suicide