0:00:02 > 0:00:05This programme contains very strong language
0:00:05 > 0:00:07Very few people care about freedom, about the truth.
0:00:07 > 0:00:09Very few people have guts,
0:00:09 > 0:00:11the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend.
0:00:11 > 0:00:15Without people without that sort of guts,
0:00:15 > 0:00:16a free society dies.
0:00:19 > 0:00:21Doris Lessing was a formidable woman.
0:00:21 > 0:00:26Born in Africa, she arrived in Britain aged 30 in 1949
0:00:26 > 0:00:28with her first book in her bag.
0:00:31 > 0:00:34She's been passionately engaged with many of the social
0:00:34 > 0:00:36and political struggles of the 20th century.
0:00:37 > 0:00:42Prolific, prescient, she became one of the most influential
0:00:42 > 0:00:44female writers of her time.
0:00:48 > 0:00:50One of Britain's greatest novelists, Doris Lessing,
0:00:50 > 0:00:52has died at the age of 94.
0:00:52 > 0:00:55A winner of the Nobel Prize for literature,
0:00:55 > 0:00:58she wrote more than 60 books over six decades.
0:00:58 > 0:01:02BBC NEWS THEME PLAYS
0:01:04 > 0:01:06BIRDSONG
0:01:06 > 0:01:08Yesterday morning was a frost.
0:01:08 > 0:01:12Imagine revisits an extraordinary encounter with Doris Lessing
0:01:12 > 0:01:14in 2008.
0:01:14 > 0:01:16Look at it now, it's come to life.
0:01:16 > 0:01:19It was her last appearance on film.
0:01:19 > 0:01:21In celebration of her life and work,
0:01:21 > 0:01:26Imagine presents Doris Lessing - The Reluctant Heroine.
0:01:30 > 0:01:33ANNOUNCEMENT IN SWEDISH
0:01:33 > 0:01:34HE SPEAKS SWEDISH
0:01:34 > 0:01:37..Doris Lessing.
0:01:37 > 0:01:38CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
0:01:40 > 0:01:44Doris Lessing and her invalid son, Peter, are just back from the shops.
0:01:44 > 0:01:47They find news men on their doorstep.
0:01:47 > 0:01:50- Have you heard the news?- No.
0:01:50 > 0:01:52You've won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
0:01:52 > 0:01:54Oh, Christ.
0:01:54 > 0:01:58Does that mean anything? Obviously you don't write books to win prizes.
0:01:58 > 0:02:02I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one,
0:02:02 > 0:02:07so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?
0:02:07 > 0:02:09It's a royal flush. OK.
0:02:09 > 0:02:12- I'll be back in one minute. - OK.- Thanks.
0:02:12 > 0:02:16Where's Peter? I've lost him.
0:02:16 > 0:02:18You often talk of having to put on a public face.
0:02:18 > 0:02:20You call it the hostess.
0:02:20 > 0:02:24The time I discovered about the hostess very clearly
0:02:24 > 0:02:27was when I took mescaline once.
0:02:28 > 0:02:30Two people were there to monitor me,
0:02:30 > 0:02:33make sure I wasn't going to jump out the window.
0:02:33 > 0:02:34I wish they'd left me alone
0:02:34 > 0:02:37because I would have been able to understand more.
0:02:37 > 0:02:42As it was, I simply presented, explained to them all the time.
0:02:42 > 0:02:44I simply taught.
0:02:44 > 0:02:47I should have been left in peace.
0:02:47 > 0:02:50So that was the hostess.
0:02:50 > 0:02:53I recognise when she walks on stage.
0:02:53 > 0:02:57I'm going to have to think of nice things to say any minute.
0:02:57 > 0:02:59You're quite a private person, aren't you?
0:02:59 > 0:03:03But all of a sudden you're being inundated with people like me,
0:03:03 > 0:03:06and lots of demands are being made on you,
0:03:06 > 0:03:09and your new book's about to be published and all of that.
0:03:09 > 0:03:13Dear me, you've made a habit of abusing your interviewers.
0:03:13 > 0:03:15Really, have I done it so much?
0:03:15 > 0:03:20The trouble is, you usually ask the same question.
0:03:22 > 0:03:24You have to take a pride in the fact
0:03:24 > 0:03:28that you're answering the same question in a different way.
0:03:28 > 0:03:30However, let's go on.
0:03:30 > 0:03:33You haven't asked any stupid questions as far as I can see.
0:03:56 > 0:03:59The catastrophes and dilemmas of individuals,
0:03:59 > 0:04:01the failures of individuals,
0:04:01 > 0:04:04reflect the collapse of the society around them.
0:04:04 > 0:04:06Is this your view of our society?
0:04:06 > 0:04:08Yes. I think we are living in a collapsing society.
0:04:08 > 0:04:10I think it's got about ten years to go.
0:04:10 > 0:04:15Some very precarious patterns of civilisation we have set up
0:04:15 > 0:04:18are going to dissolve,
0:04:20 > 0:04:24which is why I feel all the time...unreal.
0:04:24 > 0:04:28Do you imagine yourself being a very old woman, growing old?
0:04:28 > 0:04:31I don't think we're going to live to be very old.
0:04:34 > 0:04:38I don't think it matters very much, you understand?
0:04:56 > 0:04:59Doris Lessing has to put up with the fact
0:04:59 > 0:05:01that she's now officially a national treasure
0:05:01 > 0:05:04and an international celebrity.
0:05:04 > 0:05:08But this is not some grand, comfortable old lady writer.
0:05:08 > 0:05:12She is too alarming, too radical and strange for that.
0:05:12 > 0:05:17Writing literature comes out of a man or a woman
0:05:17 > 0:05:20sitting alone in a room with the telephone off the hook,
0:05:20 > 0:05:24probably with a cup of coffee, and in the good old days, a cigarette.
0:05:24 > 0:05:28But the writer has become more and more of a personality.
0:05:28 > 0:05:29Here I sit.
0:05:29 > 0:05:35Don't imagine what you are looking at has anything to do with a person who writes anything - it hasn't.
0:05:35 > 0:05:36If the person who is sitting here
0:05:36 > 0:05:40has nothing to do with the person who writes the books,
0:05:40 > 0:05:43what is that person like, the person who writes the books?
0:05:43 > 0:05:45Believe me, it's not...
0:05:47 > 0:05:49Why should I talk about it?
0:05:49 > 0:05:51It's silent. It's quiet.
0:06:02 > 0:06:04Last week at the Queen Elizabeth Hall,
0:06:04 > 0:06:06people were clamouring at the door.
0:06:06 > 0:06:10There was a sense that it was a living literary legend. You'd better come and see her.
0:06:10 > 0:06:12Come and say hello to Doris.
0:06:15 > 0:06:17We're being ushered towards Doris.
0:06:17 > 0:06:21Shake the hand of the Nobel Laureate, somewhere.
0:06:21 > 0:06:24He is the most beautiful... Tell me about it.
0:06:27 > 0:06:31We've just met. I hear you are pretty feisty, actually.
0:06:31 > 0:06:33That's what I was told.
0:06:33 > 0:06:35That's a good word, yes.
0:06:35 > 0:06:37I hear she was good.
0:06:37 > 0:06:38Very good.
0:06:38 > 0:06:39CHATTER
0:06:39 > 0:06:41My son Peter said,
0:06:41 > 0:06:45"It's very strange - here you are, writing away,
0:06:45 > 0:06:50"then suddenly people notice you."
0:06:50 > 0:06:53This is the thing in a nutshell, isn't it?
0:06:53 > 0:06:55Can I just ask you one last thing?
0:06:55 > 0:06:58You wrote in your Nobel acceptance speech...
0:06:58 > 0:07:02- You not supposed to be doing an interview.- OK. I'm sorry.
0:07:02 > 0:07:04- Were you very surprised about this?- I was.
0:07:04 > 0:07:07I was told a long time ago by someone on the committee,
0:07:07 > 0:07:09"We don't like you. You'll never get it."
0:07:09 > 0:07:12So I never thought about it from that day on.
0:07:12 > 0:07:14So of course it was a surprise.
0:07:14 > 0:07:16Did you have to go to Stockholm?
0:07:16 > 0:07:18- No.- You couldn't?
0:07:18 > 0:07:22- So you got it in the post? - I'm going to get it tonight.
0:07:22 > 0:07:26- They're giving it to you tonight? Is that what this is for?- Yeah.
0:07:26 > 0:07:29Have you met...
0:07:29 > 0:07:31INDISTINCT
0:07:34 > 0:07:36- PRESENTER:- I'm absolutely delighted
0:07:36 > 0:07:39to be able to welcome the ambassador of Sweden,
0:07:39 > 0:07:43who is going to present Doris with the Nobel insignia.
0:07:46 > 0:07:47Doris Lessing.
0:07:47 > 0:07:52Your life work and your great pioneering effort
0:07:52 > 0:07:58are today not fulfilled, but crowned with a prize you have long deserved.
0:07:58 > 0:08:03The Swedish Academy sends you its warmest congratulations.
0:08:03 > 0:08:05I have the great honour
0:08:05 > 0:08:12of presenting the 2007 Noble Prize in Literature to Doris Lessing.
0:08:12 > 0:08:14APPLAUSE
0:08:26 > 0:08:28There isn't anywhere to go from here, is there?
0:08:28 > 0:08:32Unless I could get a pat on the head from the Pope, perhaps?
0:08:33 > 0:08:39Alternatively, my favourite fantasy, there I am at the gate of heaven,
0:08:39 > 0:08:45and there is St Peter jingling his nasty keys, and he is saying to you,
0:08:45 > 0:08:50"Doris, you know that you are there simply because you are standing in
0:08:50 > 0:08:56"for all the other writers who work so hard and who don't get prizes?"
0:08:56 > 0:08:58"Yes, sir." It's my fantasy, of course.
0:08:58 > 0:09:01From what he says, you understand
0:09:01 > 0:09:05that heaven approves of all the things we like.
0:09:05 > 0:09:10Democracy, proportional representation, fairness, kindness.
0:09:10 > 0:09:12All this, you see, it's not just...
0:09:12 > 0:09:19No, we are... We are approved of by heaven.
0:09:20 > 0:09:23Now, just a minute, I'm hearing another voice.
0:09:23 > 0:09:25What is it?
0:09:25 > 0:09:28It's Daddy, it's my father, and he's saying,
0:09:28 > 0:09:33"You're getting a bit above yourself, my girl, we don't like it."
0:09:33 > 0:09:36"Yes, Daddy, I heard, honestly, I am listening."
0:09:36 > 0:09:39"Well, you'd better listen, hadn't you?" OK?
0:09:39 > 0:09:41Thank you.
0:09:41 > 0:09:45APPLAUSE
0:09:53 > 0:09:57Now 88, Doris is still haunted by voices from her childhood.
0:09:57 > 0:10:00She's always retelling her own story.
0:10:03 > 0:10:07This is from Doris's autobiography, Under My Skin.
0:10:07 > 0:10:13"Our old friend, the truth - how much of it to tell? How little?
0:10:13 > 0:10:18"It seems agreed this is the first problem of the self-chronicler."
0:10:19 > 0:10:23"The older I get, the more secrets I have.
0:10:23 > 0:10:25"Never to be revealed."
0:10:27 > 0:10:30"And why all this emphasis on kissing and telling?"
0:10:31 > 0:10:34"Kisses are the least of it."
0:10:38 > 0:10:42Doris was born in Persia just after the First World War,
0:10:42 > 0:10:46but she lived in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,
0:10:46 > 0:10:49until she came to London 60 years ago.
0:10:52 > 0:10:55Have you always lived in this area? Did you come to north...?
0:10:55 > 0:10:57I have for the last 30 years.
0:10:57 > 0:11:00I had a house in... What's it called?
0:11:02 > 0:11:04This happens all the time, you see.
0:11:04 > 0:11:06I know, it happens to me, too. North London?
0:11:06 > 0:11:08Yes, it was down near...Somers Town.
0:11:10 > 0:11:12That's where it was.
0:11:12 > 0:11:14No sooner had I bought it and done it up,
0:11:14 > 0:11:17then they compulsorily purchased it.
0:11:21 > 0:11:23That sounds very Mugabe-like.
0:11:23 > 0:11:25Exactly.
0:11:26 > 0:11:30Do you get nostalgic still for Africa?
0:11:30 > 0:11:32I get nostalgic for the bush.
0:11:32 > 0:11:35Most of that's gone anyway.
0:11:35 > 0:11:38What I was brought up with has gone completely.
0:11:45 > 0:11:50I just wanted to show you these pictures of the house going up.
0:11:50 > 0:11:53Can you imagine the bliss for us?
0:11:53 > 0:11:56You see, these are the poles of the walls going in.
0:11:56 > 0:11:58That's the stages of thatch.
0:11:59 > 0:12:01We were playing in this.
0:12:01 > 0:12:03I still remember it vividly.
0:12:03 > 0:12:05Then it turned into that.
0:12:05 > 0:12:07There you are with your brother, is that right?
0:12:07 > 0:12:11I think so. The dogs must be around.
0:12:18 > 0:12:22"My room was the third down from the top or end of the house.
0:12:22 > 0:12:26"And it was very big and very light, for it had a large, low window
0:12:26 > 0:12:29"and a door which I kept propped open with a stone
0:12:29 > 0:12:33"so that I could look down on the hawks that hung over the fields,
0:12:33 > 0:12:37"and watch them turn and slide down the currents of air
0:12:37 > 0:12:40"with their stretched wings, motionless."
0:12:42 > 0:12:47"The big field below the house was a mealy field.
0:12:47 > 0:12:50"The plough share cutting smooth through the hard soil left a clean,
0:12:50 > 0:12:56"shining surface, iridescent as if it had been oiled with dark oil.
0:12:56 > 0:12:59"Sometimes, from the height of the house looking down,
0:12:59 > 0:13:04"these clean shared surfaces caught the sun all over the field at the same moment
0:13:04 > 0:13:08"so that 100 acres of clods glittered darkly together,
0:13:08 > 0:13:10"flashing off a sullen light."
0:13:12 > 0:13:16"And at such times, the hawks swerved off,
0:13:16 > 0:13:19"high and away, frightened."
0:13:22 > 0:13:25I love that passage.
0:13:25 > 0:13:30It makes me think of the size of the world that Doris grew up in.
0:13:31 > 0:13:35I think being allowed to roam free with her brother,
0:13:35 > 0:13:37being in such a great space,
0:13:38 > 0:13:42that may have given her both independence of mind
0:13:42 > 0:13:45and a sense that she can look into the distance,
0:13:45 > 0:13:46that she can see us small
0:13:46 > 0:13:51and she can see what sense we make in those great spaces.
0:13:54 > 0:13:56How much is Africa still part of her, do you think?
0:13:56 > 0:13:59It's absolutely her soul.
0:13:59 > 0:14:02It's not particularly a love of Africans as such,
0:14:02 > 0:14:06certainly not of white Africans, but it's about the place.
0:14:06 > 0:14:09As a nature writer she's rather underestimated.
0:14:09 > 0:14:12She writes absolutely wonderfully about that.
0:14:12 > 0:14:17- CLIPPED VOICE:- The natives are loading up sacks of maize to be marketed in Europe.
0:14:17 > 0:14:18And there goes a bullock.
0:14:20 > 0:14:23The mealy train plunges down a cutting.
0:14:24 > 0:14:27So, your father's dream was to make a fortune out of maize.
0:14:27 > 0:14:32- He arrives here in 1924.- This house was meant to be up for four years.
0:14:32 > 0:14:34How long did you spend in it?
0:14:34 > 0:14:37Oh, my God. About 20.
0:14:38 > 0:14:41So the dream didn't really come true, did it?
0:14:41 > 0:14:43To put it mildly, it didn't come true.
0:14:43 > 0:14:46The whole thing was surreal.
0:14:46 > 0:14:50My mother put down very smart, black, glossy linoleum
0:14:50 > 0:14:53from one end of the house to the other.
0:14:53 > 0:14:56As the wood decayed, they subsided,
0:14:56 > 0:14:59so there were lumps and hollows everywhere.
0:14:59 > 0:15:02Suddenly a shoot would come up from the linoleum,
0:15:02 > 0:15:04and then you'd cut it down, but it came up again.
0:15:04 > 0:15:06It was weird.
0:15:07 > 0:15:08The spiders were my misery.
0:15:08 > 0:15:14Just awful. The little bush monkeys used to play around in the rafters.
0:15:14 > 0:15:17Can you imagine the bliss for a child?
0:15:18 > 0:15:20I was nine years old then.
0:15:21 > 0:15:24I miss these dogs terribly.
0:15:25 > 0:15:27I suppose it's gone long ago, the house.
0:15:27 > 0:15:31Burnt. It went in a fire. The whole thing went.
0:15:32 > 0:15:37It was a paradise which now only exists in the game park.
0:15:39 > 0:15:41Look what's arrived. It's your cat.
0:15:41 > 0:15:43That cat could easily bite.
0:15:43 > 0:15:45She's not a sweet little pussy.
0:15:45 > 0:15:46No, I didn't think she would be.
0:15:51 > 0:15:54Now, have you your garden, Doris, out there.
0:15:54 > 0:15:59Yes, I used to do it all myself, but not any more. Alas.
0:15:59 > 0:16:01Never mind.
0:16:06 > 0:16:09Doris writes, "Every writer has a myth country.
0:16:09 > 0:16:11"My myth, the bush I was brought up in.
0:16:11 > 0:16:16"The old house built of earth and grass, the animals, the birds.
0:16:16 > 0:16:21"Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth."
0:16:22 > 0:16:26Yesterday morning was a frost.
0:16:26 > 0:16:31This calendula was flat like a little bit of old rag.
0:16:31 > 0:16:36- Look at it now, it's come to life. - Yes. Rather mysterious, that garden.
0:16:36 > 0:16:40Those steps at the bottom, God knows where they go. Where do they go?
0:16:40 > 0:16:44They go up to the end to a place we feed the birds.
0:16:44 > 0:16:46A lot of birds get fed up there.
0:16:46 > 0:16:48Over the fence is a reservoir.
0:16:48 > 0:16:51They want to build on it.
0:16:51 > 0:16:54The entire neighbourhood is fighting them,
0:16:54 > 0:16:57with committees and lawyers and God knows what,
0:16:57 > 0:17:01because all the animals would go, hedgehogs, foxes, birds.
0:17:01 > 0:17:05They'd all go. That's why we're fighting.
0:17:05 > 0:17:07It's too cold out there.
0:17:09 > 0:17:14Nature has always been bliss for Doris, but family life, never.
0:17:14 > 0:17:16Oh, dear, oh, dear.
0:17:16 > 0:17:20I know it's here, I put it out this morning.
0:17:20 > 0:17:22That's me and my mother.
0:17:22 > 0:17:24Look at this smiling, happy girl.
0:17:24 > 0:17:29We are engaged in bitter warfare all the time.
0:17:29 > 0:17:33She was always heavily made-up with thick powder
0:17:33 > 0:17:35and this terrible dying duck look.
0:17:35 > 0:17:38This is how she saw herself
0:17:38 > 0:17:41and how she felt herself, poor woman.
0:17:41 > 0:17:44Is it because she was so disappointed in her life
0:17:44 > 0:17:47- that she wanted to live her life through you?- Of course, yes.
0:17:47 > 0:17:51She absolutely grabbed you.
0:17:51 > 0:17:55Her survival depended on me being her.
0:17:55 > 0:18:00This focus on you, it was utterly intolerable.
0:18:00 > 0:18:04That's why I always feel terrible
0:18:04 > 0:18:06when the Government comes up with some idea
0:18:06 > 0:18:08about returning women to their kitchens.
0:18:08 > 0:18:13These sick, terrible women, who should have been working.
0:18:13 > 0:18:15They were perfectly clever women.
0:18:15 > 0:18:17What were they doing sitting at home?
0:18:17 > 0:18:19Driving their children mad.
0:18:20 > 0:18:23She was really a misery.
0:18:23 > 0:18:25When she went to bed for a year,
0:18:25 > 0:18:29I think she decided she could not stand the life.
0:18:29 > 0:18:31I can see from her point of view why not.
0:18:36 > 0:18:39Basically, she thinks her parents should never have married.
0:18:39 > 0:18:42That, she says wryly, would have saved a lot of unpleasantness.
0:18:44 > 0:18:47So, in her new book, she gives her father a different wife.
0:18:47 > 0:18:52"I enjoyed giving him someone warm and loving," she writes.
0:18:52 > 0:18:57And in this reality, the First World War never happens.
0:18:57 > 0:19:00These two had a terrible time because of the First World War.
0:19:00 > 0:19:03So I've given them a life.
0:19:03 > 0:19:07An ordinary, kind of conventional sort of life.
0:19:08 > 0:19:11This is your father, isn't it?
0:19:11 > 0:19:14He missed Passchendaele because his leg was shot off.
0:19:16 > 0:19:19You see that wooden leg now, in the museums.
0:19:19 > 0:19:25They had a couple of cases full of ancient wooden legs,
0:19:25 > 0:19:27and there I saw my father's leg.
0:19:30 > 0:19:33This amazing picture
0:19:33 > 0:19:36of your mother tending your father.
0:19:36 > 0:19:38There's a real romance to this.
0:19:38 > 0:19:42You'd look at this picture and you would think this was a happy movie
0:19:42 > 0:19:44about the nurse and the patient.
0:19:44 > 0:19:48It took me a long time to think this,
0:19:48 > 0:19:52but you know that women didn't get any husbands.
0:19:52 > 0:19:53People have forgotten.
0:19:53 > 0:19:56There were no men. They were all killed in the trenches.
0:19:56 > 0:20:00I thought, "Hang on, one woman got a husband."
0:20:00 > 0:20:01It was my mother. Why?
0:20:01 > 0:20:03She was nursing him in hospital.
0:20:05 > 0:20:08She just would not do what her father wanted,
0:20:08 > 0:20:12because she was her father's brilliant daughter.
0:20:12 > 0:20:17But you see, I know now. He wanted her to be him.
0:20:17 > 0:20:19She said no and went off to be a nurse.
0:20:19 > 0:20:21I wonder whether any of that was inherited.
0:20:21 > 0:20:25- Well...- Stubbornness, difficultness.
0:20:25 > 0:20:29Yes, he shouted, "You may no longer consider yourself my daughter,"
0:20:29 > 0:20:31and slammed the door.
0:20:31 > 0:20:34It's like out of a bad novel.
0:20:36 > 0:20:43I've given her opportunities to use her incredible talents.
0:20:43 > 0:20:47We all used to joke and say she ought to be running a cabinet in England.
0:20:47 > 0:20:50But you've given her no children, Doris.
0:20:53 > 0:20:57Left to herself, she probably wouldn't have children.
0:20:57 > 0:20:58I don't think so.
0:20:58 > 0:21:02She wasn't... What is the word?
0:21:02 > 0:21:06She wasn't a very...loving... That's a silly word.
0:21:06 > 0:21:09I don't think she'd have missed children if she didn't have them.
0:21:12 > 0:21:14This is the one that's important.
0:21:14 > 0:21:18That's my father, me and my brother
0:21:18 > 0:21:20and here is his wooden leg.
0:21:21 > 0:21:25I like that picture, because everybody looks jolly.
0:21:25 > 0:21:28My mother is not jolly in any of her pictures.
0:21:28 > 0:21:32I sense also that there must have been a bond with you and your father.
0:21:32 > 0:21:34Oh, yes, very much so.
0:21:34 > 0:21:39He was very keen on my brother and I being allowed to stay up indefinitely
0:21:39 > 0:21:41and look at the stars.
0:21:41 > 0:21:43He was that kind of father.
0:21:44 > 0:21:51Doris says, "I think my biggest influence was sitting outside our house, looking at the stars.
0:21:51 > 0:21:55"You automatically start thinking in terms of millions of years
0:21:55 > 0:21:57"if you take that point of view.
0:21:57 > 0:22:03" 'Well', my father would say, 'If we blow ourselves up, there's plenty more where we come from.' "
0:22:04 > 0:22:09She talks about sitting outside the house in Africa
0:22:09 > 0:22:11and looking up at the sky.
0:22:11 > 0:22:15It was on one of those nights she started reading a book
0:22:15 > 0:22:19called The Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton.
0:22:22 > 0:22:26It is the most extraordinary book,
0:22:26 > 0:22:31about a man's soul who ventures out into the universe,
0:22:31 > 0:22:35and comes upon the Star Maker.
0:22:35 > 0:22:39The Star Maker is cold and indifferent.
0:22:39 > 0:22:45And he's about to put our universe, which he regards as a failure,
0:22:45 > 0:22:49on to a shelf, and start with a new and better universe.
0:22:53 > 0:22:56Most novelists put their characters right in the centre of the world
0:22:56 > 0:22:59and the world isn't much bigger than them.
0:22:59 > 0:23:01What Doris does is pull back.
0:23:03 > 0:23:08In Mara And Dann, she's talking about tens of thousands of years in the future.
0:23:08 > 0:23:11And so I think people feel little.
0:23:11 > 0:23:13They get a kind of metaphysical ache,
0:23:13 > 0:23:15because aren't they important then?
0:23:15 > 0:23:19I think she tells us we're very interesting, but not very important.
0:23:19 > 0:23:22Maybe that makes people feel a chill.
0:23:23 > 0:23:25So her father gave her the stars
0:23:25 > 0:23:28which would inspire her science fiction.
0:23:28 > 0:23:32But she now recognises she did get something from her mother too.
0:23:32 > 0:23:34Her love of books.
0:23:34 > 0:23:37This woman used to be telling us stories every night, for hours.
0:23:39 > 0:23:43She ordered books all the way from England.
0:23:43 > 0:23:46I remember so clearly what it meant to me
0:23:46 > 0:23:50when these great parcels of books arrived.
0:23:50 > 0:23:52What a thrill.
0:23:52 > 0:23:54The books were so exciting.
0:23:54 > 0:23:57I can't imagine my childhood without them.
0:23:58 > 0:23:59I owe everything to her.
0:24:01 > 0:24:04I was never educated, you see.
0:24:04 > 0:24:06Without the books I'd have come to grief.
0:24:06 > 0:24:09'She doesn't really think like other people.'
0:24:09 > 0:24:13This means that her stories don't go in the direction that we think.
0:24:14 > 0:24:17I think this might have something to do with the fact
0:24:17 > 0:24:19she didn't have a university education.
0:24:19 > 0:24:23Though Doris dropped out of school for good at 14,
0:24:23 > 0:24:26she was devouring the great works of literature,
0:24:26 > 0:24:30which would help her find her place in the tradition of European realism.
0:24:30 > 0:24:35The books that she admires - the Russians, Proust, Thomas Mann,
0:24:35 > 0:24:38whom she says is the last philosophical novelist.
0:24:38 > 0:24:40But it's not true - I think she's the last one.
0:24:40 > 0:24:43She's a great admirer of Tolstoy, whom she quotes:
0:24:43 > 0:24:45"The function of art is to make that understood,
0:24:45 > 0:24:49"which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible."
0:24:49 > 0:24:50I quite agree with her.
0:24:50 > 0:24:54It isn't just the pill being in a nice spoonful of sugar.
0:24:54 > 0:24:57You understand things through people's lives
0:24:57 > 0:25:01that you don't understand just through arguing.
0:25:01 > 0:25:02She can pierce the heart.
0:25:02 > 0:25:06She can deal with big themes but in a way that is true to us.
0:25:07 > 0:25:11True to emotion as well as to intellect.
0:25:13 > 0:25:15Doris always said it was great literature
0:25:15 > 0:25:18that led her to reject the society around her.
0:25:18 > 0:25:21She fled to the capital, Salisbury, now Harare,
0:25:21 > 0:25:24leaving her parents and her childhood behind,
0:25:24 > 0:25:27though she would always be haunted by them.
0:25:27 > 0:25:29I've never read anything by anybody
0:25:29 > 0:25:34who so much needed to leave their parents.
0:25:34 > 0:25:39She clearly never did solve her relationship to her mother.
0:25:39 > 0:25:41But it's a long battle.
0:25:42 > 0:25:46You say that Alfred And Emily is going to be your last book. Is it?
0:25:46 > 0:25:48I think so.
0:25:48 > 0:25:51I get less and less time for writing.
0:25:51 > 0:25:54My son is an invalid, so by the time I've fed him,
0:25:54 > 0:25:58and taken him to the doctors and all this kind of thing,
0:25:58 > 0:25:59I might get half an hour one day
0:25:59 > 0:26:02and three quarters of an hour on another to do any work.
0:26:02 > 0:26:05The last book, it was so difficult writing.
0:26:05 > 0:26:09And I thought, is anything worth it, this struggle?
0:26:10 > 0:26:13I wouldn't believe Doris, although it may be true.
0:26:14 > 0:26:18I wouldn't believe that she's not going to write another novel.
0:26:18 > 0:26:22I think it's her nature.
0:26:22 > 0:26:26The son Doris cares for now is from her second marriage
0:26:26 > 0:26:29to a German communist called Godfried Lessing.
0:26:29 > 0:26:31They married during World War II.
0:26:31 > 0:26:33He was an enemy alien,
0:26:33 > 0:26:38which, as you can well imagine, wasn't very nice for my parents.
0:26:38 > 0:26:41I couldn't have done anything more annoying, really.
0:26:42 > 0:26:45But even more shocking at the time had been
0:26:45 > 0:26:49leaving her first two children when she divorced her first husband.
0:26:50 > 0:26:52- You leave your babies. What made you?- I had to.
0:26:52 > 0:26:56Now look, I've written about this at length, you know.
0:26:56 > 0:26:57And I'm...
0:26:57 > 0:26:59OK, I'll just...
0:26:59 > 0:27:03We will quote from that, but as you're here and I'm here...
0:27:03 > 0:27:09I left the family because I couldn't stand that life.
0:27:10 > 0:27:13That white life in southern Rhodesia.
0:27:13 > 0:27:15It was horrible.
0:27:15 > 0:27:18It was sundowner parties and tea parties for the women.
0:27:18 > 0:27:19That was my life.
0:27:19 > 0:27:23And...I left.
0:27:23 > 0:27:25I had to leave that.
0:27:25 > 0:27:26Because if I didn't,
0:27:26 > 0:27:30I would have been an alcoholic inside ten years, that I know,
0:27:30 > 0:27:33or have a breakdown like my mother,
0:27:33 > 0:27:35who was living a life she couldn't bear.
0:27:35 > 0:27:38So I was right to leave. But I don't know what...
0:27:38 > 0:27:43Well, I know what my kids would say about that.
0:27:43 > 0:27:46They say, "Well, we understand why you left, but..."
0:27:46 > 0:27:50That's my son, John. "But I don't mean to say I forgive you for it,"
0:27:50 > 0:27:52he says, quite cheerfully.
0:27:53 > 0:27:56There's my daughter Jean in Cape Town with my two granddaughters.
0:27:58 > 0:28:03In a long run, it turned out all right.
0:28:09 > 0:28:14Doris wrote, "I had switched off. I was protecting myself
0:28:14 > 0:28:17"because I knew I was going to commit the unforgivable
0:28:17 > 0:28:19"and leave two small children."
0:28:21 > 0:28:25"I explained to them that they would understand later why I had left.
0:28:25 > 0:28:28"I was going to change this ugly world.
0:28:28 > 0:28:31"They would live in a beautiful and perfect world
0:28:31 > 0:28:35"where there would be no race hatred, injustice and so forth.
0:28:35 > 0:28:38"More important, I carried, like a defective gene,
0:28:38 > 0:28:43"a kind of doom or fatality which would trap them as it had me
0:28:43 > 0:28:44"if I stayed."
0:28:48 > 0:28:53"Leaving, I would break some ancient chain of repetition.
0:28:53 > 0:28:55"One day they would thank me for it.
0:28:55 > 0:28:58"I was absolutely sincere.
0:28:58 > 0:29:01"There isn't much to be said for sincerity in itself."
0:29:07 > 0:29:11Doris had found a less conventional kind of family.
0:29:11 > 0:29:15People who shared her radical ideas, the Communists.
0:29:15 > 0:29:18It was like coming home, meeting the commies.
0:29:18 > 0:29:20To talk about books that you'd read.
0:29:20 > 0:29:24Most Rhodesians hadn't read anything more than a general's memoirs.
0:29:26 > 0:29:31What bliss it was not to have to shut up.
0:29:31 > 0:29:34Because you couldn't possibly say in ordinary Rhodesian society
0:29:34 > 0:29:37that the system wasn't going to last,
0:29:37 > 0:29:39that it was going to come to an end quite soon.
0:29:39 > 0:29:43There I was with the reds, who understood exactly what I was saying.
0:29:47 > 0:29:52Her first novel explored the tensions of the racist society
0:29:52 > 0:29:54in which she'd been brought up.
0:29:54 > 0:29:56When it was published in 1950,
0:29:56 > 0:30:00it was an instant success in Europe and the USA.
0:30:00 > 0:30:03James Baldwin's comment on this was, "It's a book and a half.
0:30:03 > 0:30:06"That woman is a writing motherfucker."
0:30:06 > 0:30:10And that's quite something when you're just out of your teens.
0:30:10 > 0:30:12And your first book. It's just amazing.
0:30:12 > 0:30:15This is from The Grass Is Singing.
0:30:18 > 0:30:22"She watched the natives, swinging the sambok from her wrist
0:30:22 > 0:30:26"so that it made snaky patterns in the red dust."
0:30:27 > 0:30:32"Suddenly she noticed that one of the boys was not working.
0:30:32 > 0:30:35"Then she said, 'Get back to work.'
0:30:37 > 0:30:41"He looked at her with the expression common to African labourers,
0:30:41 > 0:30:44"a blank look, as if he hardly saw her.
0:30:44 > 0:30:48"As if there was an obsequious surface with which he faced her
0:30:48 > 0:30:53"and her kind, covering an invulnerable and secret hinterland.
0:30:53 > 0:30:57" 'I said, get back to work.'
0:30:57 > 0:30:59"She could hear the other natives laughing a little
0:30:59 > 0:31:02"from where they stood on the mealie dump.
0:31:02 > 0:31:05"Their laughter, which was good-humoured,
0:31:05 > 0:31:07"drove her suddenly mad with anger.
0:31:07 > 0:31:10"She thought it was aimed at her.
0:31:10 > 0:31:12"This man was shrugging and smiling
0:31:12 > 0:31:14"and turning his eyes up to heaven as if protesting,
0:31:14 > 0:31:18"but she'd forbidden him to speak his own language and then hers.
0:31:18 > 0:31:20"So what was he to speak?"
0:31:32 > 0:31:35Doris's mission is to enable people to speak and to read,
0:31:35 > 0:31:41to make great literature available here in Britain and in Africa.
0:31:41 > 0:31:45It's as vivid for her today as it ever was.
0:31:48 > 0:31:51Somewhere in my mind, just behind my shoulder,
0:31:51 > 0:31:55is this black girl who has to walk four miles
0:31:55 > 0:31:57to get a little bit of water.
0:31:59 > 0:32:02For some reason or another I identify with that girl.
0:32:04 > 0:32:06There she is, pregnant,
0:32:06 > 0:32:09and there's a dust storm, as there so often is.
0:32:09 > 0:32:14With two little children, she has no hope whatsoever.
0:32:16 > 0:32:21Cos a kindly lover won't arrive out of the sunset and rescue her.
0:32:24 > 0:32:26Yet she's a clever girl.
0:32:26 > 0:32:28She has no future, and I think of them.
0:32:28 > 0:32:30I do.
0:32:32 > 0:32:37You see, I see myself reflected when I go to Africa.
0:32:37 > 0:32:41"Please give us a book, please send us books."
0:32:41 > 0:32:43It is enough to break your heart, really.
0:32:50 > 0:32:53In a lecture Doris wrote on winning the Nobel prize,
0:32:53 > 0:32:56she laments that in Africa people are desperate to read,
0:32:56 > 0:32:58even if they haven't eaten for days,
0:32:58 > 0:33:02while in the West, the internet rules and we read less and less.
0:33:04 > 0:33:08But many people here feel excluded from literature.
0:33:08 > 0:33:12In Liverpool, there's a project which takes books to places
0:33:12 > 0:33:16where they would not usually be read and reads them aloud in a group.
0:33:16 > 0:33:18It was inspired by Doris Lessing.
0:33:19 > 0:33:22I wrote to her after reading Shikasta.
0:33:22 > 0:33:25It had the most astonishing effect on me.
0:33:25 > 0:33:29I thought, "That's it now, everything's different.
0:33:29 > 0:33:32"I don't know how I can leave the house tomorrow."
0:33:32 > 0:33:35That was really frightening.
0:33:35 > 0:33:39I felt very angry with her for having written a book that...
0:33:39 > 0:33:43- Affected you so? - Took everything away.
0:33:43 > 0:33:47So I wrote this letter saying, "Why have you done this to me?"
0:33:47 > 0:33:49She wrote back, and I have the letter.
0:33:49 > 0:33:52When it fell through my door, I opened it up.
0:33:52 > 0:33:55I couldn't believe it was a reply.
0:33:59 > 0:34:01She says, "I'm not a teacher."
0:34:03 > 0:34:05"It's very important you understand this."
0:34:05 > 0:34:09Then she tells me to read. "Read more books."
0:34:09 > 0:34:12"If you cannot get them or cannot afford them -
0:34:12 > 0:34:17"I know they're expensive, as all books are now - I'll send you some.
0:34:17 > 0:34:21"If you can afford them, so much the better."
0:34:22 > 0:34:26I like the bit at the end. "If you travel with us, you'll have to learn
0:34:26 > 0:34:32"things you do not want to learn in ways you do not want to learn them."
0:34:32 > 0:34:36It was like an electric current and Jane wanted to pass it on,
0:34:36 > 0:34:38so she started the reading groups,
0:34:38 > 0:34:40which some of these people will be running.
0:34:40 > 0:34:44To go and read Martha Quest by Doris Lessing
0:34:44 > 0:34:46in the locked ward of a mental health trust.
0:34:46 > 0:34:49Or to read Tobias Wolfe's This Boy's Life
0:34:49 > 0:34:52in the YMCA with homeless men.
0:34:52 > 0:34:54It's an interesting project.
0:34:54 > 0:34:57A lot can happen.
0:34:57 > 0:35:01"What she had been waiting for, like a revelation,
0:35:01 > 0:35:04"was a pain, not a happiness."
0:35:06 > 0:35:08"There was a slow integration
0:35:08 > 0:35:14"during which she and the little animals, and the moving grasses,
0:35:14 > 0:35:16"and the sun-warmed trees,
0:35:16 > 0:35:20"and the slopes of shivering, silvery mealies,
0:35:20 > 0:35:23"and the great dome of blue light overhead,
0:35:23 > 0:35:26"and the stones of earth underneath her feet
0:35:26 > 0:35:29"became one.
0:35:29 > 0:35:33"She understood quite finally her smallness,
0:35:33 > 0:35:36"the unimportance of humanity."
0:35:40 > 0:35:44Could you offer that to people at Asylum Link?
0:35:44 > 0:35:47Would people recognise the experience?
0:35:47 > 0:35:50Yeah, I think it's something
0:35:50 > 0:35:54that's outside of all the social constructs in the world.
0:35:54 > 0:35:58It's just you and the rest of the universe.
0:35:58 > 0:36:03I can imagine anyone having those thoughts.
0:36:03 > 0:36:05Adolescence is the first time
0:36:05 > 0:36:09that perhaps you let your mind wander into these dark places sometimes
0:36:09 > 0:36:13and you think about things more deeply than you have done as a child.
0:36:13 > 0:36:16But I think it can happen throughout life.
0:36:17 > 0:36:21"For that moment, or space in time...
0:36:21 > 0:36:23"But these are words, and if she understood anything,
0:36:23 > 0:36:25"it was that words here
0:36:25 > 0:36:28"were like the sound of a baby crying in a whirlwind."
0:36:43 > 0:36:46It's always seemed strange
0:36:46 > 0:36:49that someone who started off adult life as an active communist
0:36:49 > 0:36:51is also so mystically inclined.
0:36:51 > 0:36:54She is today, and she clearly was way back then,
0:36:54 > 0:36:59as Martha Quest starting on her quest as a teenager in the bush.
0:36:59 > 0:37:01Hers has been an incredible journey.
0:37:03 > 0:37:06But always with the same drive to find meaning in existence.
0:37:08 > 0:37:12In 1949 with her third child, Peter, but without his father,
0:37:12 > 0:37:15Doris left Africa for England.
0:37:25 > 0:37:29"The war still lingered in people's minds and behaviour," she wrote.
0:37:29 > 0:37:32"There was a wariness, a weariness.
0:37:32 > 0:37:35Single mother, suddenly successful first novelist,
0:37:35 > 0:37:37she always felt an outsider.
0:37:39 > 0:37:42She came into the complicated society
0:37:42 > 0:37:45that is English intellectual life
0:37:45 > 0:37:48and English class structures and all that.
0:37:49 > 0:37:53She takes pleasure in saying, of course, "I come from outside,
0:37:53 > 0:37:57"I stand outside, I can see from an angle that you can't see
0:37:57 > 0:38:00"because you were born in it."
0:38:00 > 0:38:02It's very useful to her.
0:38:02 > 0:38:04Both really and as a pose.
0:38:04 > 0:38:08Doris? Hi, we're here.
0:38:08 > 0:38:10INTERCOM BUZZES
0:38:13 > 0:38:15Good morning.
0:38:15 > 0:38:16How are you this morning?
0:38:16 > 0:38:20I'm distraught with too much of everything, that's what I am.
0:38:20 > 0:38:23- Too much of everything. - Sorry about that.
0:38:26 > 0:38:30Doris still lives a little like an outsider today,
0:38:30 > 0:38:33despite her success worldwide.
0:38:33 > 0:38:35- Doris, that's yours.- Thank you.
0:38:37 > 0:38:39What's the name of the cat, by the way?
0:38:39 > 0:38:40Yum-Yum.
0:38:40 > 0:38:44It's because I thought it would be funny
0:38:44 > 0:38:46to call a portly, middle-aged cat
0:38:46 > 0:38:50- the name of that ravishing princess in The Mikado.- Yes.
0:38:50 > 0:38:53Most people don't see the joke.
0:38:53 > 0:38:58She's Yum-Yum in the sense she looks like she's got an appetite.
0:39:00 > 0:39:05I look back. I was so raw and so green when I came.
0:39:06 > 0:39:09I trusted everybody and did the most amazingly stupid things.
0:39:09 > 0:39:12- However... - Tell me about the stupid things.
0:39:12 > 0:39:17Well, there was one... spiv was the name for them then,
0:39:17 > 0:39:22who made a beeline for me, because he knew a fool when he saw one.
0:39:26 > 0:39:29He adored telling me some ghastly story.
0:39:29 > 0:39:34I believed half of it, because it was always interesting, this spiv.
0:39:36 > 0:39:38He also got money out of me.
0:39:38 > 0:39:40I don't know how he did it.
0:39:40 > 0:39:41Something in me...
0:39:43 > 0:39:47That open palm, I can't resist dropping coins into it.
0:39:48 > 0:39:51It was this green, charitable 30-year-old
0:39:51 > 0:39:53who joined the British Communist Party
0:39:53 > 0:39:56just as the Cold War was really kicking in.
0:39:59 > 0:40:02It was a time for apocalyptic thinking.
0:40:02 > 0:40:06We honestly believed the whole world would become Communist
0:40:06 > 0:40:09and we'd become free and noble,
0:40:09 > 0:40:12and there would be no sex problems,
0:40:12 > 0:40:14there would be no poverty.
0:40:14 > 0:40:16Did YOU honestly believe that?
0:40:16 > 0:40:20Yes, I certainly did. I believed it for a short time. We all did.
0:40:21 > 0:40:24I don't know how things were for you in the '50s,
0:40:24 > 0:40:28but many people on the left would have said it was an incredible time,
0:40:28 > 0:40:31because everything was exploding.
0:40:35 > 0:40:37It was beginning to dawn on the comrades
0:40:37 > 0:40:41that what they were saying about the Soviet Union was not true.
0:40:41 > 0:40:43I was surrounded by people
0:40:43 > 0:40:47having breakdowns or getting religion or something.
0:40:47 > 0:40:49Everyone was in turmoil.
0:40:52 > 0:40:55Some of those men were passionate communists
0:40:55 > 0:40:58and suddenly their hearts were broken.
0:40:58 > 0:41:00It was dreadful to see it, you know.
0:41:00 > 0:41:05Because for them it meant the end of everything they'd ever cared about.
0:41:09 > 0:41:11Could you ever have imagined then
0:41:11 > 0:41:14a world in which communism is just a distant memory?
0:41:14 > 0:41:16Does that sadden you?
0:41:16 > 0:41:18It doesn't sadden me.
0:41:18 > 0:41:22I think capitalism makes a much better job than communism does - did!
0:41:22 > 0:41:27But we believed this rubbish, absolutely totally.
0:41:27 > 0:41:30I think there's something about politics
0:41:30 > 0:41:32that makes people mad, really.
0:41:34 > 0:41:37This is where Doris often used to sit and write.
0:41:37 > 0:41:41Her political experiences fed straight into her fiction.
0:41:41 > 0:41:44I don't know if you've ever been on the left or not.
0:41:44 > 0:41:49But if you have, you will remember the language, the jargon.
0:41:49 > 0:41:51Pompous, awful language.
0:41:51 > 0:41:54You talk about that Hospital for Rhetorical Disease.
0:41:54 > 0:41:56Yes.
0:41:58 > 0:42:01Really she's a joiner and a non-joiner.
0:42:01 > 0:42:04She embarks and then she disembarks, doesn't she?
0:42:04 > 0:42:05I don't know, Alan.
0:42:05 > 0:42:08But, you know, you hate being labelled.
0:42:08 > 0:42:12She has spurts of enthusiasm for something that,
0:42:12 > 0:42:18if she joined it, it might improve the world an inch at a time.
0:42:19 > 0:42:25But when she finds it just makes it worse, she gives up. Goes elsewhere.
0:42:25 > 0:42:30She gets into prisons because Doris Lessing is a joiner.
0:42:30 > 0:42:34She walks on the marches, she joins the Communist Party,
0:42:34 > 0:42:37she glowers at the Communist Party from within.
0:42:37 > 0:42:41She leaves the Communist Party, she analyses that prison
0:42:41 > 0:42:44and off she goes to find another group to join.
0:42:49 > 0:42:50When she came to Britain,
0:42:50 > 0:42:53everybody was very frightened of the atom bomb.
0:42:56 > 0:43:01That fear hung over us all in the '50s and early '60s.
0:43:06 > 0:43:07She was absolutely a part of that.
0:43:07 > 0:43:10That permeates a lot of her early work.
0:43:12 > 0:43:16What we created was so extraordinary.
0:43:16 > 0:43:18- The Aldermaston marches, do you remember them?- Yes.
0:43:18 > 0:43:23They were packed out with every conceivable kind of person,
0:43:23 > 0:43:28from architects and Members of Parliament and poets.
0:43:28 > 0:43:30People have forgotten about all that.
0:43:34 > 0:43:37Doris Lessing, novelist and journalist
0:43:37 > 0:43:39and a sponsor of the march on Aldermaston,
0:43:39 > 0:43:42will be questioning the Home Secretary, Mr Butler.
0:43:42 > 0:43:46I think a great many people are not so much worried about whether your government
0:43:46 > 0:43:50or the Russians or the Americans are going to start a war,
0:43:50 > 0:43:54but whether some trigger-happy general might start one by accident.
0:43:54 > 0:43:59The possible future president of the United States only four years ago
0:43:59 > 0:44:01was talking about using an atom bomb,
0:44:01 > 0:44:04just quite casually, a conventional weapon.
0:44:04 > 0:44:09What guarantee is there that another slightly off-balance general
0:44:09 > 0:44:12might precipitate the whole world into war?
0:44:12 > 0:44:15She has the passion to get into the event,
0:44:15 > 0:44:19which a lot of people with a passion for words don't have,
0:44:19 > 0:44:23but the little voice that's watching starts almost immediately.
0:44:23 > 0:44:29If her character is going fervently on a march against nuclear war,
0:44:30 > 0:44:33she says people are here because they like being in a group
0:44:33 > 0:44:35and they're having a nice party
0:44:35 > 0:44:38and they will have a nice party all the way to Aldermaston.
0:44:41 > 0:44:45She'd become a spokesperson for what she believed in,
0:44:45 > 0:44:48but she increasingly felt that wasn't what a writer should be.
0:44:48 > 0:44:52A writer isn't the 39 articles or the Communist Manifesto.
0:44:52 > 0:44:56A writer's a machine for exploring experience.
0:44:56 > 0:44:59That's what writers do.
0:44:59 > 0:45:01We plunge into experience
0:45:01 > 0:45:05and come up with rubbish or pearls as the case may be.
0:45:05 > 0:45:09You don't expect what comes up
0:45:09 > 0:45:12to be something to be quoted.
0:45:12 > 0:45:14- "Ah, she says..." - I agree you with entirely.
0:45:17 > 0:45:21She plunged into the political, sexual and emotional turmoil of the '50s,
0:45:21 > 0:45:24becoming what she called a free woman.
0:45:24 > 0:45:29Her mother's arrival on the scene had thrown her into crisis.
0:45:29 > 0:45:33A friend said she should go to a therapist, "Or I would not survive.
0:45:33 > 0:45:36"She was right. I was so desperate, I went.
0:45:36 > 0:45:38"I think it saved me," she wrote.
0:45:40 > 0:45:44She came up with what would be her most ground-breaking book.
0:45:44 > 0:45:46APPLAUSE
0:45:52 > 0:45:55"Sex.
0:45:55 > 0:45:57"The difficulty of writing about sex for women
0:45:57 > 0:46:00"is that sex is best when not thought about.
0:46:00 > 0:46:02"Not analysed.
0:46:02 > 0:46:05"They get irritable when men talk technically.
0:46:05 > 0:46:07"It's out of self-preservation.
0:46:07 > 0:46:10"They want to preserve the spontaneous emotion
0:46:10 > 0:46:14"that is essential for their satisfaction.
0:46:14 > 0:46:18"There's always a point, even with a perceptive and intelligent man,
0:46:18 > 0:46:21"when a woman looks at him across a gulf.
0:46:21 > 0:46:23"He hasn't understood."
0:46:24 > 0:46:27I wrote it fast. I was so involved in it all.
0:46:29 > 0:46:32And what it has got is, it's got a charge.
0:46:32 > 0:46:36That is simply because of what was going on then.
0:46:36 > 0:46:40It was published well before the women's liberation movement,
0:46:40 > 0:46:44but it's often taken to be a specifically feminist book,
0:46:44 > 0:46:46much to Doris's annoyance.
0:46:46 > 0:46:48I was writing about fragmentation.
0:46:48 > 0:46:51The second line in that book is,
0:46:51 > 0:46:54"As far as I can see, everything is falling apart."
0:46:54 > 0:46:57That is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about.
0:46:57 > 0:46:59This is not what the feminists thought.
0:46:59 > 0:47:02To this day, I am interested.
0:47:02 > 0:47:08Why did they find it so extraordinary, The Golden Notebook?
0:47:08 > 0:47:12All I was writing was what anyone could hear all the time.
0:47:12 > 0:47:14Reading The Golden Notebook
0:47:14 > 0:47:18women became conscious of the way they talked with each other,
0:47:18 > 0:47:21or reflected on the way they talked with each other,
0:47:21 > 0:47:24which she represented so beautifully and so well.
0:47:24 > 0:47:28I first read The Golden Notebook in 1972
0:47:28 > 0:47:31and it was around the time that we were starting Spare Rib magazine.
0:47:31 > 0:47:34All through the novel, in fact, the theme is division.
0:47:34 > 0:47:38Divisions of class and gender and race and nationality.
0:47:38 > 0:47:41It's by going to something deeper than those categories
0:47:41 > 0:47:45that you can transcend what you've been born with,
0:47:45 > 0:47:47your identities that you've grown up with.
0:47:47 > 0:47:49They all fall away,
0:47:49 > 0:47:53but you actually have a bigger and fuller identity after that.
0:47:53 > 0:47:57It was one of the most exciting things I'd read about the novel.
0:47:57 > 0:48:01She decided that if the world was fragmented,
0:48:01 > 0:48:03she would create a fragmented form.
0:48:03 > 0:48:05So all the endless overlapping narratives
0:48:05 > 0:48:08and each of them in a different idiom and a different style.
0:48:08 > 0:48:11Yes, and each of them, she's saying she can't connect it
0:48:11 > 0:48:13but actually she HAS connected it.
0:48:13 > 0:48:17It's connected by being there between the covers.
0:48:19 > 0:48:23"He says, 'Poor bastard, he's got a prick the size of a needle.
0:48:23 > 0:48:27" 'Julia, I always thought you didn't love him.'
0:48:27 > 0:48:31"Bob, thinking she hasn't heard - 'No, it's always worried him stiff.
0:48:31 > 0:48:34" 'He's just got a small one.'
0:48:34 > 0:48:36"Julia - 'But she never did love him.
0:48:36 > 0:48:39" 'Anyone could see that just by looking at them together.'
0:48:39 > 0:48:42"Bob, a bit impatient now.
0:48:42 > 0:48:44" 'It's not their fault, poor idiots.
0:48:44 > 0:48:48" 'Nature was against the whole thing from the start.'
0:48:48 > 0:48:50"Julia: 'Of course it's her fault!
0:48:50 > 0:48:53" 'She shouldn't have married him if she didn't love him.'
0:48:53 > 0:48:56"Bob, irritated because of her stupidity,
0:48:56 > 0:48:58"begins a long, technical explanation
0:48:58 > 0:49:04"while she looks at me, sighs, smiles and shrugs."
0:49:06 > 0:49:08You could never mistake Doris's view of women
0:49:08 > 0:49:13for that of Jane Austen or indeed George Eliot or Daphne du Maurier.
0:49:15 > 0:49:20She writes with a wonderfully acute sense of reality here.
0:49:20 > 0:49:22This made her a truly modern writer.
0:49:22 > 0:49:27Nobody had described women's lives like this before.
0:49:27 > 0:49:32In spite of her own doubts, her legacy is partly feminist.
0:49:32 > 0:49:36When you go anywhere with Doris, women come up to her and say,
0:49:36 > 0:49:39"Mrs Lessing, you've never met me, you don't know who I am,
0:49:39 > 0:49:41"but you've changed my life."
0:49:41 > 0:49:44Thank you very much. A pleasure to meet you.
0:49:44 > 0:49:46And it changed her life too.
0:49:46 > 0:49:48When I wrote The Golden Notebook,
0:49:48 > 0:49:51all kinds of extraordinary things happened to me,
0:49:51 > 0:49:55which didn't fit into any of my philosophies, to put it mildly.
0:49:55 > 0:49:58I could either have said, "They didn't happen,"
0:49:58 > 0:50:01which is what a lot of people do,
0:50:01 > 0:50:04or I could have said, "I am nuts,"
0:50:04 > 0:50:07or I could have looked for answers.
0:50:07 > 0:50:11You are now in an area where you talk about extrasensory perception,
0:50:11 > 0:50:13where you talk about psychic communities,
0:50:13 > 0:50:17a possibility of communicating with people from the future to the past.
0:50:17 > 0:50:20A completely different area you are going into,
0:50:20 > 0:50:23away from the old confident rationalism.
0:50:23 > 0:50:26- You still believe in telepathy and any of those things?- Yes.
0:50:26 > 0:50:29Where did that understanding come from?
0:50:29 > 0:50:31Well, experience.
0:50:31 > 0:50:34We have all experienced it, haven't we?
0:50:34 > 0:50:38All kinds of things go on that are not permitted in our philosophies.
0:50:38 > 0:50:41We live with them and use them, some of us.
0:50:41 > 0:50:46We don't have to be quite as hidebound. When I say we, I mean the human race.
0:50:46 > 0:50:49We don't have to be as hidebound as we are.
0:50:49 > 0:50:52Is this connected with your involvement with Sufism?
0:50:52 > 0:50:55It's a kind of Eastern mysticism, isn't it?
0:50:55 > 0:50:58You know, I don't want to talk about Sufism.
0:50:58 > 0:51:01OK.
0:51:01 > 0:51:07Because, you know, I have been involved in it for 30-odd years now.
0:51:07 > 0:51:11I'm afraid of distorting the thing, which is very easy to do.
0:51:11 > 0:51:15One of the characters says in The Golden Notebook,
0:51:15 > 0:51:18"I despise people who don't experiment with their lives."
0:51:18 > 0:51:20This is very brave.
0:51:20 > 0:51:24How far is any of us prepared to experiment with our lives?
0:51:24 > 0:51:26She experiments emotionally all the time.
0:51:26 > 0:51:29I suspect if that if you had a graph of Doris's emotional life
0:51:29 > 0:51:31it would be up and down like the Alps.
0:51:31 > 0:51:36Clearly the notion of madness and psychological breakdown,
0:51:36 > 0:51:40those are very important themes in all the books you wrote
0:51:40 > 0:51:43in the '60s and '70s, from The Golden Notebook onwards.
0:51:43 > 0:51:45I have always been, for some reason,
0:51:45 > 0:51:49involved with people who are depressives or something.
0:51:49 > 0:51:51I don't know why that is.
0:51:51 > 0:51:56I've thought that probably it's a way of me...
0:51:56 > 0:51:57keeping at a distance from lunacy,
0:51:57 > 0:52:01because I'm often involved in dealing with someone else who's a lunatic.
0:52:03 > 0:52:07It's not something I'd have chosen, it's something I've had to do.
0:52:10 > 0:52:13In one novel, Doris writes,
0:52:13 > 0:52:18"She sat thinking so intensely that the house around her vanished.
0:52:18 > 0:52:21"The floorboards were giving way,
0:52:21 > 0:52:25"houses, buildings, streets, blown away. Going, gone, an illusion."
0:52:26 > 0:52:29And she talks of "sleep, that other country."
0:52:31 > 0:52:33You dreamt a lot.
0:52:33 > 0:52:35All my life.
0:52:35 > 0:52:37All my life.
0:52:39 > 0:52:42I have always relied on my dreams.
0:52:42 > 0:52:47More and more now, because I use it a great deal for my work.
0:52:47 > 0:52:51I know other writers do, but sometimes they don't say so,
0:52:51 > 0:52:54because that makes you sound a bit loopy.
0:52:54 > 0:52:57But I am too old to care about whether I'm called loopy or not.
0:52:57 > 0:52:59Mara And Dann,
0:52:59 > 0:53:03I was dreaming the whole first third of that book every night.
0:53:03 > 0:53:06I would know what I was going to write the next day.
0:53:09 > 0:53:11I don't know what I would do without dreaming.
0:53:13 > 0:53:18This draws us into another area, which is your decision
0:53:18 > 0:53:21to start to write science fiction or space fiction.
0:53:21 > 0:53:23Start to write?
0:53:23 > 0:53:26I had written The Memoirs Of A Survivor
0:53:26 > 0:53:31and Briefing For A Descent Into Hell, which are not realistic.
0:53:31 > 0:53:34Then when I went into the Shikasta series,
0:53:34 > 0:53:40it was because you cannot write about millions of years, beginning...
0:53:40 > 0:53:45"Fred Bloggs sat at a kitchen table, drinking a cup of Typhoo tea."
0:53:45 > 0:53:46You have to do it differently.
0:53:46 > 0:53:49She loved all those covers
0:53:49 > 0:53:52where in the back there was a needle-like rocket ship
0:53:52 > 0:53:55and in the front there was a stunning blonde.
0:53:55 > 0:54:01Her sort of mischief, it appealed to her to write science fiction,
0:54:01 > 0:54:04- to be part of this looked down upon group.- Yes.
0:54:04 > 0:54:10But such is science fiction's exclusion from the literary establishment,
0:54:10 > 0:54:13that the chaps are naturally paranoid.
0:54:13 > 0:54:16So many of them protested violently,
0:54:16 > 0:54:22"Who's this woman, writing ordinary novels, invading our territory?"
0:54:22 > 0:54:25So she got a warm reception from your colleagues
0:54:25 > 0:54:27- in the science fiction world? - A bit troublesome.
0:54:27 > 0:54:33Then I persuaded her to come with me and be guest of honour in Florida
0:54:33 > 0:54:38at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.
0:54:38 > 0:54:44So, the ladies from all over the USA came to see Doris.
0:54:44 > 0:54:46It was extraordinary.
0:54:46 > 0:54:51Doris would sit there by the pool, chatting to these people.
0:54:51 > 0:54:54Never again was there such a large attendance
0:54:54 > 0:54:56at the Conference of the Fantastic.
0:54:56 > 0:55:00Even when we had Stephen King.
0:55:00 > 0:55:03So how do you rate Doris as science fiction writer?
0:55:03 > 0:55:10The novels are oddly handmade and indeed home-made.
0:55:10 > 0:55:13I find that an endearing quality.
0:55:15 > 0:55:19She got away with it, didn't she? She got the Nobel prize.
0:55:23 > 0:55:28The stars, the vast spaces that Doris got from Africa and her father
0:55:28 > 0:55:31have continued to feed into science fiction and fables.
0:55:31 > 0:55:35Analogies for our world and all its ills.
0:55:36 > 0:55:39FEMALE OPERA SINGER:
0:55:42 > 0:55:46In the '80s and '90s, Doris collaborated with Philip Glass
0:55:46 > 0:55:49on operas based on her science fiction series.
0:56:05 > 0:56:09They expressed her fears for the future of humanity.
0:56:10 > 0:56:13She does seem to have a speeded-up sense of time.
0:56:13 > 0:56:18That leads us to her other great theme, which is the death of civilisations.
0:56:18 > 0:56:20That has really come through in the later work.
0:56:20 > 0:56:24This is great storytelling, this is epic storytelling,
0:56:24 > 0:56:27but it's also about our future as a species.
0:56:27 > 0:56:29What's your sense of where the world is going?
0:56:29 > 0:56:32You thought you wouldn't be alive by this point in life.
0:56:32 > 0:56:36- Are you a pessimist?- It depends how you define the world.
0:56:36 > 0:56:39An optimist is someone who thinks
0:56:39 > 0:56:43everything is basically all right.
0:56:43 > 0:56:45It'll be fine and we're not going to have
0:56:45 > 0:56:48millions dying in Africa and there won't be global warming.
0:56:48 > 0:56:53Whereas I think a lot of these things are indeed going to happen.
0:56:53 > 0:56:57We're ruining the oceans, which is the beginning of the ruining of everything.
0:56:57 > 0:57:00I think we are a disastrous species.
0:57:00 > 0:57:04We destroy everything.
0:57:04 > 0:57:08But a minority of us will survive whatever catastrophe it was.
0:57:08 > 0:57:10This, I think, is optimism.
0:57:10 > 0:57:14- HE LAUGHS - Well, it's a glimpse, anyway.
0:57:22 > 0:57:25Survival, global and personal.
0:57:27 > 0:57:30In a way, Alfred And Emily is about surviving her mother.
0:57:30 > 0:57:33And now, half a century after her death,
0:57:33 > 0:57:37beginning to realise they do have things in common.
0:57:37 > 0:57:40I thought I might tell you about energy,
0:57:40 > 0:57:42which I have been blessed with.
0:57:43 > 0:57:46I know this sounds improbable,
0:57:46 > 0:57:50but more than once I finished a book,
0:57:50 > 0:57:53there's no reason for me to do anything but enjoy myself.
0:57:53 > 0:57:58What I do, is I go to Shannon in Ireland, book a car
0:57:58 > 0:58:01and drive up and down that coast
0:58:01 > 0:58:04at as much speed as one can get on those roads.
0:58:04 > 0:58:08I have done that not once, but half a dozen times.
0:58:08 > 0:58:10It's this physical energy, and where do I get it from?
0:58:10 > 0:58:13It's from my mother. She was eaten up by it.
0:58:13 > 0:58:16That's probably why she went crazy.
0:58:16 > 0:58:19She had too much energy and not enough to use it on.
0:58:19 > 0:58:20That's what I think.
0:58:20 > 0:58:24You have to move, and of course you have to write.
0:58:27 > 0:58:29I only thought about it last night.
0:58:29 > 0:58:32I was thinking about my mother's energy and where did it go to.
0:58:32 > 0:58:37It went into me, because I used to have it.
0:58:37 > 0:58:38I haven't got it now, alas.
0:58:38 > 0:58:40I don't know about that.
0:58:42 > 0:58:44You once said,
0:58:44 > 0:58:48"One has to accept loneliness - it's the human condition,
0:58:48 > 0:58:51"no matter how many parties or churches we belong to."
0:58:51 > 0:58:54Do you still feel that way?
0:58:54 > 0:58:58Yes, we are always inside this tower, aren't we?
0:58:58 > 0:59:02We are not communicating as much as we might do.
0:59:02 > 0:59:04How have we done?
0:59:04 > 0:59:06We're very much the same kind of person, you know,
0:59:06 > 0:59:08so we haven't done too badly, have we?
0:59:28 > 0:59:29I want to tell you something.
0:59:29 > 0:59:31This is a little memory.
0:59:31 > 0:59:35I was on the farm and night after night,
0:59:35 > 0:59:38I would stand with honey on my fingertips
0:59:38 > 0:59:43and moths would fly out of the bush and settle on my hand and drink.
0:59:43 > 0:59:44What a memory.
0:59:44 > 0:59:47I remember then I used to weep with gratitude, I don't know why.
0:59:47 > 0:59:52These beautiful things would just come and drink honey off my hand.
0:59:52 > 0:59:56Nothing like that can ever happen to you again when you've grown up.
1:00:23 > 1:00:26Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd