Lessing: Well, every one of us has to live through our parents, and ourselves, and come out the other side. I don’t know if that makes sense. There’s no good sidestepping one’s parents.
Hendin: I think that’s true. But you’ve written so marvelously of the friendships between women, and yet mothers and daughters in your books don’t seem to get on very well, do they? I suppose that’s true in my case as well.
Lessing: Bernard Shaw once said that mothers should bring up sons, and daughters should be brought up by their fathers, because this was the natural bond and the other was unnatural. I’m not saying I agree with that, but it certainly does seem to be quite hard for parents and children of the same sex to get on together. Not always, of course. But it’s a problem.
Hendin: Why, would you say?
Lessing: Well, it’s biological, again. There’s nothing mystical about it.
Hendin: What’s biological, the attitude?
Lessing: The daughter threatens the mother and the son the father, in the most primitive and backward and animal-like way. You can observe it in any herd of animals, let alone human beings. Most of our behavior is not very advanced, is it? We like to fancy that it is. You can see the sort of competition going on between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters in any family. It’s quite a primitive sort of thing.
Hendin: I think so. I always thought that Martha’s mother was one of the most particularly envious and resentful mothers one could have.
Lessing: I think perhaps it was that generation. I don’t think that women of this generation are so bad because most of them have work. They enjoy their work much more, whereas it was much rarer for women of that generation to have work. And that’s terribly important, not to be out on a limb when you’re fifty, without anything to do. It seems to me that every woman should be very careful that that shouldn’t happen, and nowadays women are indeed very careful that that shouldn’t happen, and that’s why things are better.
Hendin: In the beginning of The Golden Notebook, Anna says: “The point is that as far as I can see everything is cracking up.” Did you have anything particular in mind, or did she, at the time?
Lessing: Yes, it’s no more than what we’ve already talked about. It seems to me that her and our civilization is falling apart. I think that this is what is happening around us, as we sit here. We’re on the top of a slippery slide, and what’s going to be at the bottom I don’t know. Why am I talking of it as if it’s in the future? It’s not in the future; it’s happening now. We’re always talking about physical catastrophes. Just before I left England I was listening to the radio, and there was the President of the World Bank, or some such institution, calmly quoting figures of people who are going to die this year, of hunger. I mean there are millions of people, two-thirds of the people in the world, who don’t get enough to eat, and will be stunted permanently by this, because as you probably know, if a child doesn’t get the right protein at the right time, his brain will be permanently stunted by it. Now this is a quite formidable fact, but they’re always talking about catastrophes as if they are going to happen in the future. Perhaps we should ask how bad does a catastrophe have to be before it becomes a catastrophe.
Hendin: In the title story to your new book, The Temptation of Jack Orkney, Jack Orkney, the main character, how would you describe him? Well, you do describe him.
Lessing: I use fifty thousand words describing him, don’t I?
Hendin: I know. An old guard hero of the left wing, I suppose? No, that’s too pejorative. But, at any rate, a dedicated socialist? When his father dies he begins to dream of his own death in a way, and with a peculiar horror and sweetness at the same time bound up with it. But his personal tragedy is played off against the tragedy in Bangladesh, and the protest that he’s been having to organize against it. Do you see a relation between the personal loss and the public tragedy?
Lessing: Well, it is in the story, isn’t it? Not more than that, no.
Hendin: Well, again, I was wondering. There are two things really. First, the relation between the public and the private, and the way these events shape our dreams, our lives.
Lessing: I don’t know that this story is about the relationship between the public and the private, you see. What I’m describing there is the person who has been like a revolutionary or a left-winger all his life, and then finds himself to be a member of the establishment. This happens to every generation, of course. But what has happened, we see it very sharply in England and Europe; I don’t know about here. It would be different here because the era of McCarthy made a fairly thorough weed-out of your left wing, but in England and in Europe, you would see in all countries, a group of men and women, middle-aged men and women, who in their prime were revolutionaries of one kind or another. I don’t mean to say necessarily Communists. On the contrary. They could have been all kinds. Or not even political. They could have been “world changers,” to use a silly phrase. What has happened to them is what happens to everybody – they’ve become institutions. Now, a set of mental attitudes shared in common by this generation is fairly easy to describe. They’re all believers that society can be endlessly manipulated to achieve good ends. I’m not saying “socialists,” because they include people who aren’t socialists. They were all rationalists and atheists of one kind or another, or most of them were. They tended to have liberal ideas about sex, and so on. Very often their private lives were quite different from their liberal theories. There is a whole series of limited liberal attitudes, shared by all of them. Well, in any place, take one of these men and confront him with the death of his father – because such people tend to be petrified by the idea of death – it’s not a fact that can be assimilated easily into their way of thinking. At his father’s death he starts to dream, which he’s never done before in his life. At the end of the story, this man has turned his back on an opportunity that was offered to him of opening doors on himself, to explore different ways of thinking. In the story he has a door opened for him, even though he doesn’t want it; in fact he’s going to go on dreaming. It is a pretty important door to have opened, because it’s a way of learning a very great deal about oneself, and about this other dimension.
Hendin: Dreams do seem to find more and more of a part in your work.
Lessing: I don’t think they play any more of a part than they have always done. In The Grass Is Singing, for example, the first novel I ever wrote, they play quite an important part. They’ve always played an important part in my life, you see. I’ve found them very useful in my work. In The Summer Before the Dark, I built dreams right into the story, so that the way out for this woman was in fact through her dreams of this magical seal that she found on this hillside. I’m doing a lot of research on dreams at the moment, and I read about it when anything comes my way. It’s possible that we’re not asking the right questions about them, because, after all, dreaming’s not a new phenomenon. It’s a capacity that human beings have always had and in some cultures used quite consciously. Some people in our culture use them quite consciously. There’s a great deal already known about dreams if the scientists would like to look slightly sideways from their straight and narrow path, and read and study what’s already available. But unfortunately they do tend to be somewhat hide-bound, many of them, and they’re not prepared to consider as evidence material that doesn’t fit neatly into their own little boxes. However, I think that even scientists seem to be improving in this direction. So I have hopes. Let’s put it this way. I think a lot of research that is interesting is quite a waste because a lot of it we already know. It’s already around, and has been for thousands