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: But hasn’t it been personally useful to you? Haven’t you been quarrying that disturbing kind of experience?
Lessing: Yes, but there was too much, you see. There’s no need to go on doing something when you’ve learnt better. I remember after I had a kind of somewhat informal psychotherapy.
What I was really doing, of course, although I didn’t see it at the time, was buying a friend. I needed someone desperately to talk to and accept me. This is what she did and this is what I needed. Anyway my last meeting with her was when I’d come to grief over some ridiculous love affair and I went to her and she looked at me and she said, “Have I really not taught you any better than that to repeat your mistakes?” Then there was a long silence and she said, “As for me, I’m going to die very soon and I’m totally occupied and preparing for a good death. Good morning,” and threw me out like a kitten into the harsh world, which I thank her for.
Dean: You anticipated Women’s Lib. You anticipated, I suppose, a new school of psychoanalysis, the Laing school; I suppose you’d call it, the divided self. And you in a sense anticipated a move towards the mystical.
Lessing: Can I say something about words in this area? There are great gaps in the English language where there are words like “spirit” or “soul” or “unconscious” or “collective unconscious.” When you start writing in this area the words are usually the property of some cult or other – “collective unconscious” belongs to Jungians. You might not want to have that association so you’re always wrestling with words that haven’t got the meaning you want them to have. This is my perhaps biggest single problem. There is not one of these words that you can use, and that is why I’ve gone so much off into metaphor, like Memoirs of a Survivor. Now my impulse behind that was I wanted to write about dreams. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that the word “dreams” is never used from start to finish in that book.
Dean: Could it be that there is a collective unconscious which we’re all, and writers especially, plugged into? How do you plug into it, if you’re a writer, of your sort?
Lessing: By chance, very often. The time I’ve done it most purely was in Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, which is the only book I’ve ever written which from start to finish was on this other wavelength. I don’t want to claim too much, to use the word “inspiration.” Something happened when I wrote the book. I hit some other level. And is it a legend or a myth or a fairy tale or a fantasy? That isn’t the word for what I’ve written, I think. You see, only I could have written The Golden Notebook, but I think Anon wrote this other book.
Dean: When you do get messages from what we’ll call the unconscious, your own or a collective mind, how do you discriminate between the nonsense and the good stuff?
Lessing: By experience, living it out, seeing if it turns out to be true or not. I think we are all studio sets with ideas flowing through us, just as neutrons and cosmic particles go shooting through us all the time that we sit here. When I wrote The Four-Gated City, I thought no one would speak to me by the time I finished because the ideas were so way out. I was thinking some pretty horrific thoughts about what was likely to happen in the world. I wrote that book sort of like half a page at a time and the rest of the time I was in bed with the covers over my head. That was what I was really thinking and I had to write it. But, as has happened to me so often before, by the time the book came out, these way-out ideas were all commonplace, you see. So this cheers me up every time I decide to write a book that is wild. I don’t waste time worrying about what people are going to think about it, because probably all these ideas will be in the newspapers.
Dean: You’re no respecter of academic critics. Are you a good critic of your own work?
Lessing: Yes, I think perhaps I am. After a short passage of time, I think I am pretty cool about it all. It’s not easy to be detached when you’re doing it, but shortly after, it sort of floats away from you and you can look at it.
Nearly all my books have weak patches, but that is because I’m the kind of writer I am, which means I’m always trying things out and I’m very seldom interested in the perfect book.
Dean: Anthony Burgess once criticized you as a writer by saying that he thought that you didn’t edit enough. You wrote too much, too many words. Is that fair, do you think?
Lessing: Probably. I’ve got a terrific, great facility. When I start I can write easily, and he’s probably quite right, yes. There is a place for novels that have ideas and shake people up and then die. It’s a different way of writing from Jane Austen, you see.
Dean: For someone who’s written so penetratingly about the relationships between the sexes and who’s written so perceptively about men, it’s a surprise to find you living alone now. Do you miss marriage?
Lessing: Well, you see I think I acquired the qualities to be married rather too late and by that time I’d rather lost interest in the whole business