interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH DORIS LESSING

Doris Lessing's two volumes of autobiography -- "Under My Skin" (1995) and "Walking in the Shade" (published this fall) -- are striking exceptions to the rule that even extraordinary novelists tend to lead rather ordinary lives. It's impossible to read these books (a third installment is planned) without feeling the rude, healthy glow of a life fully lived.

Both books are full of Lessing's shrewd, no-nonsense language and observations. "Under My Skin" evoked her bumptious childhood in Southern Rhodesia (she was the child of British parents) as well as her two failed marriages, her burgeoning political awareness and her growing sense that she would have to abandon the comfortable arc of her life in order to become a writer. "Walking in the Shade" picks up Lessing in 1949, when she moved to London with her young son shortly after the publication of her first novel, "The Grass is Singing," and follows her through 1962. In "Walking in the Shade," we witness Lessing flexing her muscles, displaying the restless intellect that would become the hallmark of her literary career. Few are the writers whose work has been as influential, and as difficult to pin down. Lessing's work includes "The Grass is Singing," a critique of racial politics in Rhodesia; that novel was followed, over the course of 17 years, by the five autobiographical novels in her "Children of Violence" series, including "Martha Quest" and "The Four-Gated City." In 1962, Lessing published "The Golden Notebook," her most famous, controversial and stylistically daring novel, which influenced a generation of female readers and writers. Lessing has also ventured into science fiction in a series called "Canopus in Argos: Archives." Her more recent work includes "The Good Terrorist" (1986), a satire about romantic politics, and "Love, Again" (1996) about, among other things, the possibilities of romance and love at an advanced age.

Writing may be a solitary occupation, but "Walking in the Shade" makes it clear that Lessing found time for other things. The book is one of the best accounts yet of how communism dominated the intellectual life of the time, and Lessing often found herself in the political forefront. But this supple memoir is also full of more personal preoccupations. Lessing evokes the feel of drab, gray postwar London; she also captures what it was like to be a single parent in the 1940s and 1950s. The book is crammed with friends and lovers (many of them well-known), and it is an elegy to an almost forgotten time -- the beginning of the sexual revolution, when almost everyone drank too much, smoked too much and had perhaps just a bit too much sex.

Lessing spoke with Salon in New York, where she was promoting "Walking in the Shade." Now 79, Lessing remains vigorous -- with her center-parted hair that's pulled back into a bun and her steely eyes, she seems like a tightly wound earth mother. Among the many subjects she spoke about were the current state of publishing, the trouble with feminism, the death of Princess Diana and how a generation fell out of love with communism.

When you move to London from Southern Rhodesia, at the beginning of this book, it is 1949. You're not only a single mother but a woman who has been twice married and divorced. Was there a social stigma attached to these things?

The term "single parent" had not yet been coined, but there were other single parents around. We didn't know we were peculiar. I was already an oddball, in any event, beginning in Southern Rhodesia. Not because of my marriages, but because I was a Kaffir-lover and a Red. A Kaffir-lover being a million times worse than being a Red in that society. I was very disliked for that reason. The few of us who had those views were hated and ostracized.

Uncle Joe [Stalin] was very much a favorite amongst us. It was OK, us being Reds during the war, because we were all on the same side. But then the Cold War started. Almost overnight we became enemies of people who were close friends -- they crossed the street to avoid us. When I came to England, it was very down because of the war. Everybody I met had just come back from some fighting front or had been through the war. It was a pretty grim scene, really. London was unpainted and gray and flat. The coffee was undrinkable. The food was unspeakable. And the clothes were ghastly. I was very excited to be there for cultural reasons. But the war had created a frame of mind which now is very hard to put yourself back into. Nobody cared about having any money, because nobody had any money. You didn't think about it particularly. And what is now common -- defining yourself by what you wore or what you owned or what you ate -- that absolutely would be considered vulgar in the extreme.

You write somewhere that you had a particularly hard time conveying two things -- one, the atmosphere of the Cold War, and two, how different the publishing scene was.

These are the two most difficult things, I think.

Why the Cold War?

It permeated everything. There was a perpetual war-fear. I was reminded of it the other day when a man, now middle-aged, said, "Do you realize that my entire childhood and the childhood of all us children was terror of the bomb?" It was a very poisonous atmosphere, very paranoid. It meant that everyone's reactions were extreme. Either for or against.

Capitalism was dead. It was done and finished. And the future was socialist or communist. We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks -- everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people. That's what interests me.

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