Putting the Questions Differently

The Inadequacy of the Imagination Jonah Raskin

Jonah Raskin’s interview was conducted on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in spring 1969. It originally appeared in New American Review 8 (1970) and was reprinted in A Small Personal Voice, ed. Paul Schlueter (Knopf, 1977). Copyright © 1970 by Jonah Raskin. Reprinted with permission.

Raskin: I felt that in your most recent novel, The Four-Gated City, you wanted to reach out directly to the new audience which has been shaped by television and the atmosphere of violence.

Lessing: I want to reach the youth. Maybe because I was determined to reach people the form of the book has been shot to hell. The first version was too long, and the second time I wrote it the form changed. I’ve had Children of Violence set up for twenty years. By the time I wrote the last volume I’d put myself into a damned cage, but it’s probably better now that I’ve heaved the rules out.//

Raskin: How do drugs fit 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: The Africans are fed lies day and night. Every African township has police spies and government informers. A great section of the African population is corrupt, bought off. The black worker, especially the miner, lives in what amounts to a concentration camp. He’s policed, doctored, fed, watched. He hasn’t got freedom. He’s well fed by African standards, but he’s a slave. South Africa is a fascist paradise. It’s one of the most brilliant police states in history.

Raskin: Some of the things you’ve said about radicals and repression remind me of the ending of The Golden Notebook, which has puzzled me. Could you explain it?

Lessing: When I wrote The Golden Notebook the left was getting one hammer blow after another. Everybody I knew was reeling because the left had collapsed. The scene at the end when Molly goes off and gets married and Anna goes off to do welfare work and joins the Labour Party was intended as a sign of the times. I was being a bit grim about what I observed about me. Women who had been active for years in socialist movements gritted their teeth and said, “Right, the hell with all this politics, we’ll go off and be welfare workers.” They meant it as a kind of joke, but they carried out their program. They did everything and anything that took them out of politics. Women who had refused to get married because they were dedicated to the cause made marriages which they would have found disgusting five years earlier. They regarded it as a kind of selling out. Brilliant Communist Party organizers went into business and entertainment and became rich men. This didn’t happen to everyone, but it happened to many Communists.

Raskin: Many of the New Left students are from Old Left families who are now well off. The sons of famous Establishment professors are in SDS. How do you see the generations?

Lessing: The strain of watching the horrors becomes so great that middle-aged people block them out. My generation doesn’t understand that young people have penetrated below the surface and have seen the horrors of our civilization. We’ve been so damned corrupted. Humanity has got worse and worse, puts up with more and more, gets more and more bourgeois. The youth have realized this.

I have always observed incredible brutality in society. My parents’ lives and the lives of millions of people were ruined by the First World War. But the human imagination rejects the implications of our situation. War scars humanity in ways we refuse to recognize. After the Second World War the world sat up, licked its wounds ineffectually, and started to prepare for the Third World War. To look at the scene today, to see what man has done to himself, is an incitement to young people to riot. I’m surprised that the New Left isn’t more violent.

I hope you don’t regard me as unduly bitter. Humanity is a brave lot of people. Everyone of my lot has had to fight on two fronts. Being a Red is tough. My personal experience isn’t bad, but friends of mine have been destroyed. The revolutionary movements they were working in sold them down the river. The ex-Communists of my lot have lost a certain kind of belief.

Raskin: What is it you’ve lost? Isn’t it possible that the political struggles of my generation can revive that belief?

Lessing: The ex-Communists of my lot can’t be surprised by anything. There is no horror that one cannot expect from people. We’ve learned that.

Well, yours is a new, young generation, and with a bit of luck the New Left won’t have the kind of hammering my generation did. Maybe it’ll be different. Maybe it’ll not be the way I think it will be. But you and your generation need a calm to negotiate the rapids.

Learning to Put the Questions Differently Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel’s radio interview was conducted in Chicago June 10, 1969. Printed by permission of Studs Terkel.

Terkel: The passage which you just read from The Four-Gated City seems one of the keys to the book. Lynda, who is the wife of a friend of your protagonist Martha Quest, has been considered mad, and Martha finds out something, doesn’t she?

Lessing: Well, you see, I’ve done my homework on this point without ever planning to do it, because it so happened that for the last twenty years, without ever intending to do it, I have been ever involved with psychiatrists or social workers dealing in what we call “madness,” or have had very close friends who have been quote, unquote “mad” in one way or another. This is not anything that I had planned to do; it has just happened this way. What one experiences gets into one’s work!

When I wrote this book, although I had a fairly clear idea of certain things I wished to say, other things I discovered as I wrote. Lynda is the character who fascinates me the most in this book, because she is the crystallization of a great deal of experience in a form I never expected. I found out a great many things about what I think through Lynda. Lynda is like a lot of people I’ve known who spend their time in and out of mental hospitals. This is getting more and more common. I have no doubt at all that a lot of people will either be in mental hospitals themselves or have friends who are in and out of mental hospitals and live their lives in a twilight of drugs. I mean by “drugs” …

Terkel:…sedatives, tranquilizers …

Lessing:…that cycle of chemical things which people get put full of. These people, I maintain, are probably not mad at all, or a great many of them are not or never have been mad. Just before I left England, I met a doctor who’d been working in America, and he said that there is a different approach here to schizophrenia. In England people can go to a doctor and be told that they’re schizophrenic, but it’s happening less and less here, I’m told. This “disease” – in quotes again, because I don’t think it is one – has been broken down, and almost as it were spirited away by words as if it ceases to exist because doctors say it doesn’t exist and because they dish out drugs. I think what’s going to happen in the next – all right, for argument’s sake, let’s say – ten years is a lot of rethinking is going to take place about what schizophrenia is. I think we’re going to have a lot of surprising conclusions to what schizophrenia is, and what we are, in fact, doing is to suppress and torment – I can use very strong language about this because I have dear friends who go through this misery and it’s hard to be cool about seeing people being tormented. In short, a lot of perfectly normal people, with certain capacities, are being classed as “ill.”

Terkel: Let’s dwell on this. This seems to be the recurring theme. You deal with certain circles, literary people, people in the midst of cataclysmic events – the time of Suez and after – writers in difficulty. Martha Quest is searching, is she not, throughout? She wants to find out what it’s about, really, who she is.

Lessing: Yes, that’s what we’re all doing. I chose that name when I started the first book in this series twenty years ago almost blindly, you know. I reread Martha Quest, the first volume, recently and I was fascinated to see that all those themes are there which bear right throughout this cycle.

Terkel: But the cycle and these themes have developed because in the meantime things have happened in the world in these twenty years too, right along with it – to you as an individual as well as to the world itself – that make your themes all the more critical and pertinent now.

Lessing: I understood that when I chose the title for the sequence, Children of Violence. Violence is now a vogue word; it’s a cliché: we’re living in a violent time. When I chose it, it was far from being that.

Terkel: It’s as though in a sense the writer is a prophet; you were prescient in that sense. You as a writer, as a creative spirit, obviously were sensing something in the world in which you were living.

Lessing: I don’t think that writers have any more sense than anyone else, actually. We can express things better. Our function as writers, I maintain, is to express what other people feel. If we’re any good, it’s because we’re like other people and can express it.

Terkel: Then it’s a question of art and craft, and you must express what is a universal feeling is what you’re saying, in a way. Getting back to Lynda and Martha, obviously you are expressing what many, particularly sensitive people are feeling.

Lessing: More and more, you see – I looked at the figures recently, but I’ve nearly forgotten because my head for figures is appalling – but I know the proportion of our hospital beds now occupied by people who are quote, unquote “mad” is unbelievable, something like half. And it’s going up all the time. But the capacity for the human race to take things for granted is what’s so terrible. We say that the number of people going mad is going up because of the “greater stress” people are under. But what is this supposed “greater stress” that they’re under? What in effect is happening to make people become sensitive in this particular way? Do we ask the right questions about it? Is it enough to say that we’re driven mad by motorcars and the tension of society? What else is happening to us?

Terkel: In The Four-Gated City too you dwell on various events that overtake the country. You also dwell on personal relationships, as well as the new generation of children who make this tremendous leap forward. Is it because the leaps are so overwhelming today too?

Lessing: We can’t talk about this without throwing out a whole lot of generalizations, which I shall now throw out. You see, I don’t think that I say anything madly original, but I do think perhaps that I’m better at putting facts together; I think I’m quite good at seeing things in juxtaposition.

If I say that two world wars haven’t done humanity any good – it’s not a very original observation – but do we remember at all times, do we actually wonder what effect two world wars have had on some young person in university who is driving the authorities mad by his behavior? I’m astounded by the lack of imagination of some older people. I don’t like this business of “generation gap” – it’s a great cliché: there’s a gap between some members of the younger generation and some members of the older generation. But a large number of the older generation talk about young people as if the young people have inherited the same world they inherited. And they have not, and the world is so terrible – and marvelous. Its possibilities are so incredible. And these young people are reacting very intensely to a situation which no generation has had to face before, including a very strong possibility of never getting to live to be thirty or forty. They all know this. And if their mothers and fathers don’t realize that this is a part of their thinking, then they’re very stupid and very insensitive. I think they’re a marvelous generation, not that I’m one to dish out the praise because I think they’ve got great lacks as well.

Terkel: You say “lacks,” and your book, through Lynda, is almost a plea for the imagination of possibilities. You speak of a “lack of imagination.” The “lack of imagination of possibilities” obviously fascinates you.

Lessing: Yes, I think we’re living in a time that’s like the middle of an atom blast, with everything bad and good happening together, because we don’t know what’s going to come out of what we’re living through now. Everything’s changing so fast that we can’t grasp the changes. This is the essential thing. The kids are trying at least to grasp them, and they haven’t sunk back in some drunken, suburban haze, which is what some of their elders are doing.

Terkel: The elders live in a martini haze, and yet they condemn the young for what they might describe as the “pot scene.” The young see a double standard, don’t they?

Lessing: Yes, they do. What I’m troubled about the youth is that they’re too complacent. It’s an interesting thing to say since they’re always being as bold as they are. But none of them has ever experienced fighting in an atmosphere which is against them. I know that the police beat them up and authority hates them and a lot of the older generation hates them with real vindictiveness, this is true – but the fact is that there is a freemasonry among the young: they stand by each other, support each other, approve of each other, even though they may disagree with each other. I think what’s likely to happen in this country and other parts of the world – in fact, it’s inevitable – is that it’s not going to continue to be that a large mass of the youth are more or less of one mind.

A large section of that youth are going to be bought by authority and bribed probably by flattery. You’re going to find the fighters down to a minority, because it’s always like this. There’s never been a time when the fighting’s not been done by a minority, and the mass of the citizens are staid, conservative, and frightened. What are these kids then going to do? At the moment I don’t see youth thinking about how they’re going to react when they haven’t got this mass support of their own generation. I don’t think they realize what it’s like to be out on a limb fighting by themselves.

Our generation knows this very well, because we’ve seen it, we’ve lived through it. We know very well that when the heat gets turned on, people run, and when it gets unpleasant a few people remain fighting. And when public opinion – that’s the point – turns against something, not many people last. This, these kids haven’t had yet, and this is why I think they’re very vulnerable, because they don’t know yet.

For instance, I’m taking that group of people which I think is the most savagely brutal and stupid lot in the world – white South Africans – who are at the same time, if you meet them, kindly, friendly, nice human beings. I remember, when the Second World War ended, the Fascists in Nazi Germany who we knew were everything that history says they were, and I then met them and they were no different from you or me; they’d been in a different historical set-up – that’s all. Until these kids know that there isn’t one of us who, put in a different set-up, wouldn’t be brutal, savage, exploitive, they know nothing about how history works.

There is no original virtue in being twenty-two on a college campus. To be young is a minimal requirement – after all, everyone’s been young; it’s a grace, but not a very long-lasting one. Have they, in fact, been doing their homework and looking at how many large groups of people in the world now are living in Fascist countries, to be condemned by the same standards that they use to condemn society in America? Have they asked what’s going to happen to them in ten years’ time, when the heat goes up? Because if they’ve not thought this out, then they’re as good as defeated.

Terkel: This is a theme without ending – the theme of man and circumstance. In Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its subtitle “The Banality of Evil” – and we face now too the evil of banality – she says that Eichmann was indeed not a beast: he was a man who acted beastly. Isn’t this what you’re saying, that the possibilities are within?

Lessing: Yes, can you imagine in 100 years’ time, if anyone is alive then, that anyone’s going to look back to the Second World War and say, “Oh, those beastly Germans”? They’re going to say that the world allowed a certain type of government to take power in Germany, and a very small group of people in other countries protested what was going on; but we’re all going to be implicated in this kind of guilt. And they’re going to look back on what we’re living through now and say, “These people allowed” – I’m not going to list the horrors, because we all know them – “to happen,” even though we’re terribly nice, good, kind, charming, delightful people. Right?

Terkel: We come here to this question of the individual. I remember my own experience, and again this is all reflected in The Four-Gated City, hearing a group of men in South Africa, all of them charming, genial, singing the Schubert lied, “Das Lindenbaum,” all Afrikaaners, accepting and bolstering apartheid in its most horrendous forms. But, as you say, personally, because I was white, they were charming, wholly removed from the world around them.

Lessing: Bernard Shaw said somewhere the most terrifying thing: “Is it really necessary for Christ to be killed in every generation to save those who have no imagination?” Well, is it? People are so unprepared for the fact that a man can be a nice person as an individual yet support the most appalling policies. This shouldn’t happen after what the human race has experienced.

Terkel: You’re talking about roots too, aren’t you? You’re really talking about a knowledge of the past, knowing what happened and why it happened?

Lessing: Well, you said last night that these kids behave as if history started three years ago, and that’s what their hang-up is, because it hasn’t.

Terkel: It comes back to that again.

Lessing: I really don’t want to go on about the kids, because I admire them and I think they’re very brave. I feel differently. There are so many of my generation who are against them and who are vindictive. I’m not prepared to criticize them too much.

Terkel: Before we return to The Four-Gated City, you’ve been traveling for about five weeks now through America, and you said that somewhere in the Midwest you saw some incredible antagonism toward the young by our contemporaries.

Lessing: Yes, I met it absolutely nakedly. I think a great many older people are envious, and critical because they’re envious. But I hadn’t before ever met the naked hatred of the young that I met in the Midwest: they hated young people. It’s really ugly to see it. And these are teachers who are supposed to be teaching these kids.

Terkel: And you were saying that one of the reasons you think is envy of a certain joyousness among the young.

Lessing: Yes, there’s a great style and joy and a good humor – that’s the great thing they’ve got.

Terkel: Getting back to The Four-Gated City, could I ask you how you chose that title?

Lessing: It’s a phrase that comes out of mythology, and it’s in the Bible, spread all over the folklore of every conceivable part of the world. I chose it because the structure of Children of Violence goes in fours – each book is divided into four – and this is four again. It’s a very ancient symbol, and also I had a dream in which I saw what I later discovered to be an Egyptian theme: the sacred cow stands on great white legs and the hind legs are the people of the city. It was a beautiful dream, in technicolor – just at the time I was trying to work out what I was going to call this book.

Terkel: There’s an old Negro spiritual called “Twelve Gates to the City.” I take it this theme is universal, this matter of gates.

You spoke of there not being enough imagination. Earlier we were talking about the horrors of behavioral scientists who follow a certain pattern, manipulative people, and you were saying there’s another aspect of life that these men never even dream of, and many of us don’t – possibilities of experiencing.

Lessing: Yes, they treat human beings as if they were rats; they do their research on rats and pigeons. They can’t ask the right questions. But I think it’s a mistake to attack and criticize a phenomenon which is not going to be very important in five years’ time, because these people are very little people. I gather they’re quite important in the scientific structure, but I’ll lay a bet, any sum you care to mention, that what they stand for will be dead in a very short time because they’re too small, too limited, too narrow-minded to… This is the problem in these discussions: there’s never enough time to go into these matters.

I think that one of the things that’s happening everywhere is that we’re breeding new kinds of imagination and ways of thinking and experiencing. Actually they’re very old and we find them in cultures we tend to describe as primitive; they’re backward technologically, but they’re not backward in any other way and probably more advanced than ours. What is going to happen, I think, is a discovery that many ways of experiencing and sensing the world which we describe as superstitious are not anything of the kind. If you look at what’s going on everywhere – well, your country has a genuine feeling of new possibilities – you find these surprising people who would describe themselves as rationalists and die to defend that old-fashioned label are using ways of perceiving that our culture doesn’t admit: one of them is the use of dreams, which actually is rather respectable in our society, so it gets made use of; but also different forms of extrasensory perception are being seriously researched and accepted. And have you really ever thought about how the atmosphere’s changed about something like telepathy in ten years? Of all places it was the Soviet Union that suddenly made the announcement that they were experimenting into the use of telepathy for space travel. Now this sounds like space fiction – I’m a great reader of space fiction. Here in space fiction you find some novel so incredible that you think it’s a fantasy and it’s in the newspaper the next day.