Doris Lessing - The Reluctant Heroine imagine...

This programme contains very strong language

Very few people care about freedom, about the truth.

Very few people have guts,

the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend.

Without people without that sort of guts,

a free society dies.

Doris Lessing was a formidable woman.

Born in Africa, she arrived in Britain aged 30 in 1949

with her first book in her bag.

She's been passionately engaged with many of the social

and political struggles of the 20th century.

Prolific, prescient, she became one of the most influential

female writers of her time.

One of Britain's greatest novelists, Doris Lessing,

has died at the age of 94.

A winner of the Nobel Prize for literature,

she wrote more than 60 books over six decades.

BBC NEWS THEME PLAYS

BIRDSONG

Yesterday morning was a frost.

Imagine revisits an extraordinary encounter with Doris Lessing

in 2008.

Look at it now, it's come to life.

It was her last appearance on film.

In celebration of her life and work,

Imagine presents Doris Lessing - The Reluctant Heroine.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN SWEDISH

HE SPEAKS SWEDISH

..Doris Lessing.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Doris Lessing and her invalid son, Peter, are just back from the shops.

They find news men on their doorstep.

-Have you heard the news?

-No.

You've won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Oh, Christ.

Does that mean anything? Obviously you don't write books to win prizes.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one,

so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?

It's a royal flush. OK.

-I'll be back in one minute.

-OK.

-Thanks.

Where's Peter? I've lost him.

You often talk of having to put on a public face.

You call it the hostess.

The time I discovered about the hostess very clearly

was when I took mescaline once.

Two people were there to monitor me,

make sure I wasn't going to jump out the window.

I wish they'd left me alone

because I would have been able to understand more.

As it was, I simply presented, explained to them all the time.

I simply taught.

I should have been left in peace.

So that was the hostess.

I recognise when she walks on stage.

I'm going to have to think of nice things to say any minute.

You're quite a private person, aren't you?

But all of a sudden you're being inundated with people like me,

and lots of demands are being made on you,

and your new book's about to be published and all of that.

Dear me, you've made a habit of abusing your interviewers.

Really, have I done it so much?

The trouble is, you usually ask the same question.

You have to take a pride in the fact

that you're answering the same question in a different way.

However, let's go on.

You haven't asked any stupid questions as far as I can see.

The catastrophes and dilemmas of individuals,

the failures of individuals,

reflect the collapse of the society around them.

Is this your view of our society?

Yes. I think we are living in a collapsing society.

I think it's got about ten years to go.

Some very precarious patterns of civilisation we have set up

are going to dissolve,

which is why I feel all the time...unreal.

Do you imagine yourself being a very old woman, growing old?

I don't think we're going to live to be very old.

I don't think it matters very much, you understand?

Doris Lessing has to put up with the fact

that she's now officially a national treasure

and an international celebrity.

But this is not some grand, comfortable old lady writer.

She is too alarming, too radical and strange for that.

Writing literature comes out of a man or a woman

sitting alone in a room with the telephone off the hook,

probably with a cup of coffee, and in the good old days, a cigarette.

But the writer has become more and more of a personality.

Here I sit.

Don't imagine what you are looking at has anything to do with a person who writes anything - it hasn't.

If the person who is sitting here

has nothing to do with the person who writes the books,

what is that person like, the person who writes the books?

Believe me, it's not...

Why should I talk about it?

It's silent. It's quiet.

Last week at the Queen Elizabeth Hall,

people were clamouring at the door.

There was a sense that it was a living literary legend. You'd better come and see her.

Come and say hello to Doris.

We're being ushered towards Doris.

Shake the hand of the Nobel Laureate, somewhere.

He is the most beautiful... Tell me about it.

We've just met. I hear you are pretty feisty, actually.

That's what I was told.

That's a good word, yes.

I hear she was good.

Very good.

CHATTER

My son Peter said,

"It's very strange - here you are, writing away,

"then suddenly people notice you."

This is the thing in a nutshell, isn't it?

Can I just ask you one last thing?

You wrote in your Nobel acceptance speech...

-You not supposed to be doing an interview.

-OK. I'm sorry.

-Were you very surprised about this?

-I was.

I was told a long time ago by someone on the committee,

"We don't like you. You'll never get it."

So I never thought about it from that day on.

So of course it was a surprise.

Did you have to go to Stockholm?

-No.

-You couldn't?

-So you got it in the post?

-I'm going to get it tonight.

-They're giving it to you tonight? Is that what this is for?

-Yeah.

Have you met...

INDISTINCT

-PRESENTER:

-I'm absolutely delighted

to be able to welcome the ambassador of Sweden,

who is going to present Doris with the Nobel insignia.

Doris Lessing.

Your life work and your great pioneering effort

are today not fulfilled, but crowned with a prize you have long deserved.

The Swedish Academy sends you its warmest congratulations.

I have the great honour

of presenting the 2007 Noble Prize in Literature to Doris Lessing.

APPLAUSE

There isn't anywhere to go from here, is there?

Unless I could get a pat on the head from the Pope, perhaps?

Alternatively, my favourite fantasy, there I am at the gate of heaven,

and there is St Peter jingling his nasty keys, and he is saying to you,

"Doris, you know that you are there simply because you are standing in

"for all the other writers who work so hard and who don't get prizes?"

"Yes, sir." It's my fantasy, of course.

From what he says, you understand

that heaven approves of all the things we like.

Democracy, proportional representation, fairness, kindness.

All this, you see, it's not just...

No, we are... We are approved of by heaven.

Now, just a minute, I'm hearing another voice.

What is it?

It's Daddy, it's my father, and he's saying,

"You're getting a bit above yourself, my girl, we don't like it."

"Yes, Daddy, I heard, honestly, I am listening."

"Well, you'd better listen, hadn't you?" OK?

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Now 88, Doris is still haunted by voices from her childhood.

She's always retelling her own story.

This is from Doris's autobiography, Under My Skin.

"Our old friend, the truth - how much of it to tell? How little?

"It seems agreed this is the first problem of the self-chronicler."

"The older I get, the more secrets I have.

"Never to be revealed."

"And why all this emphasis on kissing and telling?"

"Kisses are the least of it."

Doris was born in Persia just after the First World War,

but she lived in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,

until she came to London 60 years ago.

Have you always lived in this area? Did you come to north...?

I have for the last 30 years.

I had a house in... What's it called?

This happens all the time, you see.

I know, it happens to me, too. North London?

Yes, it was down near...Somers Town.

That's where it was.

No sooner had I bought it and done it up,

then they compulsorily purchased it.

That sounds very Mugabe-like.

Exactly.

Do you get nostalgic still for Africa?

I get nostalgic for the bush.

Most of that's gone anyway.

What I was brought up with has gone completely.

I just wanted to show you these pictures of the house going up.

Can you imagine the bliss for us?

You see, these are the poles of the walls going in.

That's the stages of thatch.

We were playing in this.

I still remember it vividly.

Then it turned into that.

There you are with your brother, is that right?

I think so. The dogs must be around.

"My room was the third down from the top or end of the house.

"And it was very big and very light, for it had a large, low window

"and a door which I kept propped open with a stone

"so that I could look down on the hawks that hung over the fields,

"and watch them turn and slide down the currents of air

"with their stretched wings, motionless."

"The big field below the house was a mealy field.

"The plough share cutting smooth through the hard soil left a clean,

"shining surface, iridescent as if it had been oiled with dark oil.

"Sometimes, from the height of the house looking down,

"these clean shared surfaces caught the sun all over the field at the same moment

"so that 100 acres of clods glittered darkly together,

"flashing off a sullen light."

"And at such times, the hawks swerved off,

"high and away, frightened."

I love that passage.

It makes me think of the size of the world that Doris grew up in.

I think being allowed to roam free with her brother,

being in such a great space,

that may have given her both independence of mind

and a sense that she can look into the distance,

that she can see us small

and she can see what sense we make in those great spaces.

How much is Africa still part of her, do you think?

It's absolutely her soul.

It's not particularly a love of Africans as such,

certainly not of white Africans, but it's about the place.

As a nature writer she's rather underestimated.

She writes absolutely wonderfully about that.

-CLIPPED VOICE:

-The natives are loading up sacks of maize to be marketed in Europe.

And there goes a bullock.

The mealy train plunges down a cutting.

So, your father's dream was to make a fortune out of maize.

-He arrives here in 1924.

-This house was meant to be up for four years.

How long did you spend in it?

Oh, my God. About 20.

So the dream didn't really come true, did it?

To put it mildly, it didn't come true.

The whole thing was surreal.

My mother put down very smart, black, glossy linoleum

from one end of the house to the other.

As the wood decayed, they subsided,

so there were lumps and hollows everywhere.

Suddenly a shoot would come up from the linoleum,

and then you'd cut it down, but it came up again.

It was weird.

The spiders were my misery.

Just awful. The little bush monkeys used to play around in the rafters.

Can you imagine the bliss for a child?

I was nine years old then.

I miss these dogs terribly.

I suppose it's gone long ago, the house.

Burnt. It went in a fire. The whole thing went.

It was a paradise which now only exists in the game park.

Look what's arrived. It's your cat.

That cat could easily bite.

She's not a sweet little pussy.

No, I didn't think she would be.

Now, have you your garden, Doris, out there.

Yes, I used to do it all myself, but not any more. Alas.

Never mind.

Doris writes, "Every writer has a myth country.

"My myth, the bush I was brought up in.

"The old house built of earth and grass, the animals, the birds.

"Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth."

Yesterday morning was a frost.

This calendula was flat like a little bit of old rag.

-Look at it now, it's come to life.

-Yes. Rather mysterious, that garden.

Those steps at the bottom, God knows where they go. Where do they go?

They go up to the end to a place we feed the birds.

A lot of birds get fed up there.

Over the fence is a reservoir.

They want to build on it.

The entire neighbourhood is fighting them,

with committees and lawyers and God knows what,

because all the animals would go, hedgehogs, foxes, birds.

They'd all go. That's why we're fighting.

It's too cold out there.

Nature has always been bliss for Doris, but family life, never.

Oh, dear, oh, dear.

I know it's here, I put it out this morning.

That's me and my mother.

Look at this smiling, happy girl.

We are engaged in bitter warfare all the time.

She was always heavily made-up with thick powder

and this terrible dying duck look.

This is how she saw herself

and how she felt herself, poor woman.

Is it because she was so disappointed in her life

-that she wanted to live her life through you?

-Of course, yes.

She absolutely grabbed you.

Her survival depended on me being her.

This focus on you, it was utterly intolerable.

That's why I always feel terrible

when the Government comes up with some idea

about returning women to their kitchens.

These sick, terrible women, who should have been working.

They were perfectly clever women.

What were they doing sitting at home?

Driving their children mad.

She was really a misery.

When she went to bed for a year,

I think she decided she could not stand the life.

I can see from her point of view why not.

Basically, she thinks her parents should never have married.

That, she says wryly, would have saved a lot of unpleasantness.

So, in her new book, she gives her father a different wife.

"I enjoyed giving him someone warm and loving," she writes.

And in this reality, the First World War never happens.

These two had a terrible time because of the First World War.

So I've given them a life.

An ordinary, kind of conventional sort of life.

This is your father, isn't it?

He missed Passchendaele because his leg was shot off.

You see that wooden leg now, in the museums.

They had a couple of cases full of ancient wooden legs,

and there I saw my father's leg.

This amazing picture

of your mother tending your father.

There's a real romance to this.

You'd look at this picture and you would think this was a happy movie

about the nurse and the patient.

It took me a long time to think this,

but you know that women didn't get any husbands.

People have forgotten.

There were no men. They were all killed in the trenches.

I thought, "Hang on, one woman got a husband."

It was my mother. Why?

She was nursing him in hospital.

She just would not do what her father wanted,

because she was her father's brilliant daughter.

But you see, I know now. He wanted her to be him.

She said no and went off to be a nurse.

I wonder whether any of that was inherited.

-Well...

-Stubbornness, difficultness.

Yes, he shouted, "You may no longer consider yourself my daughter,"

and slammed the door.

It's like out of a bad novel.

I've given her opportunities to use her incredible talents.

We all used to joke and say she ought to be running a cabinet in England.

But you've given her no children, Doris.

Left to herself, she probably wouldn't have children.

I don't think so.

She wasn't... What is the word?

She wasn't a very...loving... That's a silly word.

I don't think she'd have missed children if she didn't have them.

This is the one that's important.

That's my father, me and my brother

and here is his wooden leg.

I like that picture, because everybody looks jolly.

My mother is not jolly in any of her pictures.

I sense also that there must have been a bond with you and your father.

Oh, yes, very much so.

He was very keen on my brother and I being allowed to stay up indefinitely

and look at the stars.

He was that kind of father.

Doris says, "I think my biggest influence was sitting outside our house, looking at the stars.

"You automatically start thinking in terms of millions of years

"if you take that point of view.

" 'Well', my father would say, 'If we blow ourselves up, there's plenty more where we come from.' "

She talks about sitting outside the house in Africa

and looking up at the sky.

It was on one of those nights she started reading a book

called The Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton.

It is the most extraordinary book,

about a man's soul who ventures out into the universe,

and comes upon the Star Maker.

The Star Maker is cold and indifferent.

And he's about to put our universe, which he regards as a failure,

on to a shelf, and start with a new and better universe.

Most novelists put their characters right in the centre of the world

and the world isn't much bigger than them.

What Doris does is pull back.

In Mara And Dann, she's talking about tens of thousands of years in the future.

And so I think people feel little.

They get a kind of metaphysical ache,

because aren't they important then?

I think she tells us we're very interesting, but not very important.

Maybe that makes people feel a chill.

So her father gave her the stars

which would inspire her science fiction.

But she now recognises she did get something from her mother too.

Her love of books.

This woman used to be telling us stories every night, for hours.

She ordered books all the way from England.

I remember so clearly what it meant to me

when these great parcels of books arrived.

What a thrill.

The books were so exciting.

I can't imagine my childhood without them.

I owe everything to her.

I was never educated, you see.

Without the books I'd have come to grief.

'She doesn't really think like other people.'

This means that her stories don't go in the direction that we think.

I think this might have something to do with the fact

she didn't have a university education.

Though Doris dropped out of school for good at 14,

she was devouring the great works of literature,

which would help her find her place in the tradition of European realism.

The books that she admires - the Russians, Proust, Thomas Mann,

whom she says is the last philosophical novelist.

But it's not true - I think she's the last one.

She's a great admirer of Tolstoy, whom she quotes:

"The function of art is to make that understood,

"which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible."

I quite agree with her.

It isn't just the pill being in a nice spoonful of sugar.

You understand things through people's lives

that you don't understand just through arguing.

She can pierce the heart.

She can deal with big themes but in a way that is true to us.

True to emotion as well as to intellect.

Doris always said it was great literature

that led her to reject the society around her.

She fled to the capital, Salisbury, now Harare,

leaving her parents and her childhood behind,

though she would always be haunted by them.

I've never read anything by anybody

who so much needed to leave their parents.

She clearly never did solve her relationship to her mother.

But it's a long battle.

You say that Alfred And Emily is going to be your last book. Is it?

I think so.

I get less and less time for writing.

My son is an invalid, so by the time I've fed him,

and taken him to the doctors and all this kind of thing,

I might get half an hour one day

and three quarters of an hour on another to do any work.

The last book, it was so difficult writing.

And I thought, is anything worth it, this struggle?

I wouldn't believe Doris, although it may be true.

I wouldn't believe that she's not going to write another novel.

I think it's her nature.

The son Doris cares for now is from her second marriage

to a German communist called Godfried Lessing.

They married during World War II.

He was an enemy alien,

which, as you can well imagine, wasn't very nice for my parents.

I couldn't have done anything more annoying, really.

But even more shocking at the time had been

leaving her first two children when she divorced her first husband.

-You leave your babies. What made you?

-I had to.

Now look, I've written about this at length, you know.

And I'm...

OK, I'll just...

We will quote from that, but as you're here and I'm here...

I left the family because I couldn't stand that life.

That white life in southern Rhodesia.

It was horrible.

It was sundowner parties and tea parties for the women.

That was my life.

And...I left.

I had to leave that.

Because if I didn't,

I would have been an alcoholic inside ten years, that I know,

or have a breakdown like my mother,

who was living a life she couldn't bear.

So I was right to leave. But I don't know what...

Well, I know what my kids would say about that.

They say, "Well, we understand why you left, but..."

That's my son, John. "But I don't mean to say I forgive you for it,"

he says, quite cheerfully.

There's my daughter Jean in Cape Town with my two granddaughters.

In a long run, it turned out all right.

Doris wrote, "I had switched off. I was protecting myself

"because I knew I was going to commit the unforgivable

"and leave two small children."

"I explained to them that they would understand later why I had left.

"I was going to change this ugly world.

"They would live in a beautiful and perfect world

"where there would be no race hatred, injustice and so forth.

"More important, I carried, like a defective gene,

"a kind of doom or fatality which would trap them as it had me

"if I stayed."

"Leaving, I would break some ancient chain of repetition.

"One day they would thank me for it.

"I was absolutely sincere.

"There isn't much to be said for sincerity in itself."

Doris had found a less conventional kind of family.

People who shared her radical ideas, the Communists.

It was like coming home, meeting the commies.

To talk about books that you'd read.

Most Rhodesians hadn't read anything more than a general's memoirs.

What bliss it was not to have to shut up.

Because you couldn't possibly say in ordinary Rhodesian society

that the system wasn't going to last,

that it was going to come to an end quite soon.

There I was with the reds, who understood exactly what I was saying.

Her first novel explored the tensions of the racist society

in which she'd been brought up.

When it was published in 1950,

it was an instant success in Europe and the USA.

James Baldwin's comment on this was, "It's a book and a half.

"That woman is a writing motherfucker."

And that's quite something when you're just out of your teens.

And your first book. It's just amazing.

This is from The Grass Is Singing.

"She watched the natives, swinging the sambok from her wrist

"so that it made snaky patterns in the red dust."

"Suddenly she noticed that one of the boys was not working.

"Then she said, 'Get back to work.'

"He looked at her with the expression common to African labourers,

"a blank look, as if he hardly saw her.

"As if there was an obsequious surface with which he faced her

"and her kind, covering an invulnerable and secret hinterland.

" 'I said, get back to work.'

"She could hear the other natives laughing a little

"from where they stood on the mealie dump.

"Their laughter, which was good-humoured,

"drove her suddenly mad with anger.

"She thought it was aimed at her.

"This man was shrugging and smiling

"and turning his eyes up to heaven as if protesting,

"but she'd forbidden him to speak his own language and then hers.

"So what was he to speak?"

Doris's mission is to enable people to speak and to read,

to make great literature available here in Britain and in Africa.

It's as vivid for her today as it ever was.

Somewhere in my mind, just behind my shoulder,

is this black girl who has to walk four miles

to get a little bit of water.

For some reason or another I identify with that girl.

There she is, pregnant,

and there's a dust storm, as there so often is.

With two little children, she has no hope whatsoever.

Cos a kindly lover won't arrive out of the sunset and rescue her.

Yet she's a clever girl.

She has no future, and I think of them.

I do.

You see, I see myself reflected when I go to Africa.

"Please give us a book, please send us books."

It is enough to break your heart, really.

In a lecture Doris wrote on winning the Nobel prize,

she laments that in Africa people are desperate to read,

even if they haven't eaten for days,

while in the West, the internet rules and we read less and less.

But many people here feel excluded from literature.

In Liverpool, there's a project which takes books to places

where they would not usually be read and reads them aloud in a group.

It was inspired by Doris Lessing.

I wrote to her after reading Shikasta.

It had the most astonishing effect on me.

I thought, "That's it now, everything's different.

"I don't know how I can leave the house tomorrow."

That was really frightening.

I felt very angry with her for having written a book that...

-Affected you so?

-Took everything away.

So I wrote this letter saying, "Why have you done this to me?"

She wrote back, and I have the letter.

When it fell through my door, I opened it up.

I couldn't believe it was a reply.

She says, "I'm not a teacher."

"It's very important you understand this."

Then she tells me to read. "Read more books."

"If you cannot get them or cannot afford them -

"I know they're expensive, as all books are now - I'll send you some.

"If you can afford them, so much the better."

I like the bit at the end. "If you travel with us, you'll have to learn

"things you do not want to learn in ways you do not want to learn them."

It was like an electric current and Jane wanted to pass it on,

so she started the reading groups,

which some of these people will be running.

To go and read Martha Quest by Doris Lessing

in the locked ward of a mental health trust.

Or to read Tobias Wolfe's This Boy's Life

in the YMCA with homeless men.

It's an interesting project.

A lot can happen.

"What she had been waiting for, like a revelation,

"was a pain, not a happiness."

"There was a slow integration

"during which she and the little animals, and the moving grasses,

"and the sun-warmed trees,

"and the slopes of shivering, silvery mealies,

"and the great dome of blue light overhead,

"and the stones of earth underneath her feet

"became one.

"She understood quite finally her smallness,

"the unimportance of humanity."

Could you offer that to people at Asylum Link?

Would people recognise the experience?

Yeah, I think it's something

that's outside of all the social constructs in the world.

It's just you and the rest of the universe.

I can imagine anyone having those thoughts.

Adolescence is the first time

that perhaps you let your mind wander into these dark places sometimes

and you think about things more deeply than you have done as a child.

But I think it can happen throughout life.

"For that moment, or space in time...

"But these are words, and if she understood anything,

"it was that words here

"were like the sound of a baby crying in a whirlwind."

It's always seemed strange

that someone who started off adult life as an active communist

is also so mystically inclined.

She is today, and she clearly was way back then,

as Martha Quest starting on her quest as a teenager in the bush.

Hers has been an incredible journey.

But always with the same drive to find meaning in existence.

In 1949 with her third child, Peter, but without his father,

Doris left Africa for England.

"The war still lingered in people's minds and behaviour," she wrote.

"There was a wariness, a weariness.

Single mother, suddenly successful first novelist,

she always felt an outsider.

She came into the complicated society

that is English intellectual life

and English class structures and all that.

She takes pleasure in saying, of course, "I come from outside,

"I stand outside, I can see from an angle that you can't see

"because you were born in it."

It's very useful to her.

Both really and as a pose.

Doris? Hi, we're here.

INTERCOM BUZZES

Good morning.

How are you this morning?

I'm distraught with too much of everything, that's what I am.

-Too much of everything.

-Sorry about that.

Doris still lives a little like an outsider today,

despite her success worldwide.

-Doris, that's yours.

-Thank you.

What's the name of the cat, by the way?

Yum-Yum.

It's because I thought it would be funny

to call a portly, middle-aged cat

-the name of that ravishing princess in The Mikado.

-Yes.

Most people don't see the joke.

She's Yum-Yum in the sense she looks like she's got an appetite.

I look back. I was so raw and so green when I came.

I trusted everybody and did the most amazingly stupid things.

-However...

-Tell me about the stupid things.

Well, there was one... spiv was the name for them then,

who made a beeline for me, because he knew a fool when he saw one.

He adored telling me some ghastly story.

I believed half of it, because it was always interesting, this spiv.

He also got money out of me.

I don't know how he did it.

Something in me...

That open palm, I can't resist dropping coins into it.

It was this green, charitable 30-year-old

who joined the British Communist Party

just as the Cold War was really kicking in.

It was a time for apocalyptic thinking.

We honestly believed the whole world would become Communist

and we'd become free and noble,

and there would be no sex problems,

there would be no poverty.

Did YOU honestly believe that?

Yes, I certainly did. I believed it for a short time. We all did.

I don't know how things were for you in the '50s,

but many people on the left would have said it was an incredible time,

because everything was exploding.

It was beginning to dawn on the comrades

that what they were saying about the Soviet Union was not true.

I was surrounded by people

having breakdowns or getting religion or something.

Everyone was in turmoil.

Some of those men were passionate communists

and suddenly their hearts were broken.

It was dreadful to see it, you know.

Because for them it meant the end of everything they'd ever cared about.

Could you ever have imagined then

a world in which communism is just a distant memory?

Does that sadden you?

It doesn't sadden me.

I think capitalism makes a much better job than communism does - did!

But we believed this rubbish, absolutely totally.

I think there's something about politics

that makes people mad, really.

This is where Doris often used to sit and write.

Her political experiences fed straight into her fiction.

I don't know if you've ever been on the left or not.

But if you have, you will remember the language, the jargon.

Pompous, awful language.

You talk about that Hospital for Rhetorical Disease.

Yes.

Really she's a joiner and a non-joiner.

She embarks and then she disembarks, doesn't she?

I don't know, Alan.

But, you know, you hate being labelled.

She has spurts of enthusiasm for something that,

if she joined it, it might improve the world an inch at a time.

But when she finds it just makes it worse, she gives up. Goes elsewhere.

She gets into prisons because Doris Lessing is a joiner.

She walks on the marches, she joins the Communist Party,

she glowers at the Communist Party from within.

She leaves the Communist Party, she analyses that prison

and off she goes to find another group to join.

When she came to Britain,

everybody was very frightened of the atom bomb.

That fear hung over us all in the '50s and early '60s.

She was absolutely a part of that.

That permeates a lot of her early work.

What we created was so extraordinary.

-The Aldermaston marches, do you remember them?

-Yes.

They were packed out with every conceivable kind of person,

from architects and Members of Parliament and poets.

People have forgotten about all that.

Doris Lessing, novelist and journalist

and a sponsor of the march on Aldermaston,

will be questioning the Home Secretary, Mr Butler.

I think a great many people are not so much worried about whether your government

or the Russians or the Americans are going to start a war,

but whether some trigger-happy general might start one by accident.

The possible future president of the United States only four years ago

was talking about using an atom bomb,

just quite casually, a conventional weapon.

What guarantee is there that another slightly off-balance general

might precipitate the whole world into war?

She has the passion to get into the event,

which a lot of people with a passion for words don't have,

but the little voice that's watching starts almost immediately.

If her character is going fervently on a march against nuclear war,

she says people are here because they like being in a group

and they're having a nice party

and they will have a nice party all the way to Aldermaston.

She'd become a spokesperson for what she believed in,

but she increasingly felt that wasn't what a writer should be.

A writer isn't the 39 articles or the Communist Manifesto.

A writer's a machine for exploring experience.

That's what writers do.

We plunge into experience

and come up with rubbish or pearls as the case may be.

You don't expect what comes up

to be something to be quoted.

-"Ah, she says..."

-I agree you with entirely.

She plunged into the political, sexual and emotional turmoil of the '50s,

becoming what she called a free woman.

Her mother's arrival on the scene had thrown her into crisis.

A friend said she should go to a therapist, "Or I would not survive.

"She was right. I was so desperate, I went.

"I think it saved me," she wrote.

She came up with what would be her most ground-breaking book.

APPLAUSE

"Sex.

"The difficulty of writing about sex for women

"is that sex is best when not thought about.

"Not analysed.

"They get irritable when men talk technically.

"It's out of self-preservation.

"They want to preserve the spontaneous emotion

"that is essential for their satisfaction.

"There's always a point, even with a perceptive and intelligent man,

"when a woman looks at him across a gulf.

"He hasn't understood."

I wrote it fast. I was so involved in it all.

And what it has got is, it's got a charge.

That is simply because of what was going on then.

It was published well before the women's liberation movement,

but it's often taken to be a specifically feminist book,

much to Doris's annoyance.

I was writing about fragmentation.

The second line in that book is,

"As far as I can see, everything is falling apart."

That is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about.

This is not what the feminists thought.

To this day, I am interested.

Why did they find it so extraordinary, The Golden Notebook?

All I was writing was what anyone could hear all the time.

Reading The Golden Notebook

women became conscious of the way they talked with each other,

or reflected on the way they talked with each other,

which she represented so beautifully and so well.

I first read The Golden Notebook in 1972

and it was around the time that we were starting Spare Rib magazine.

All through the novel, in fact, the theme is division.

Divisions of class and gender and race and nationality.

It's by going to something deeper than those categories

that you can transcend what you've been born with,

your identities that you've grown up with.

They all fall away,

but you actually have a bigger and fuller identity after that.

It was one of the most exciting things I'd read about the novel.

She decided that if the world was fragmented,

she would create a fragmented form.

So all the endless overlapping narratives

and each of them in a different idiom and a different style.

Yes, and each of them, she's saying she can't connect it

but actually she HAS connected it.

It's connected by being there between the covers.

"He says, 'Poor bastard, he's got a prick the size of a needle.

" 'Julia, I always thought you didn't love him.'

"Bob, thinking she hasn't heard - 'No, it's always worried him stiff.

" 'He's just got a small one.'

"Julia - 'But she never did love him.

" 'Anyone could see that just by looking at them together.'

"Bob, a bit impatient now.

" 'It's not their fault, poor idiots.

" 'Nature was against the whole thing from the start.'

"Julia: 'Of course it's her fault!

" 'She shouldn't have married him if she didn't love him.'

"Bob, irritated because of her stupidity,

"begins a long, technical explanation

"while she looks at me, sighs, smiles and shrugs."

You could never mistake Doris's view of women

for that of Jane Austen or indeed George Eliot or Daphne du Maurier.

She writes with a wonderfully acute sense of reality here.

This made her a truly modern writer.

Nobody had described women's lives like this before.

In spite of her own doubts, her legacy is partly feminist.

When you go anywhere with Doris, women come up to her and say,

"Mrs Lessing, you've never met me, you don't know who I am,

"but you've changed my life."

Thank you very much. A pleasure to meet you.

And it changed her life too.

When I wrote The Golden Notebook,

all kinds of extraordinary things happened to me,

which didn't fit into any of my philosophies, to put it mildly.

I could either have said, "They didn't happen,"

which is what a lot of people do,

or I could have said, "I am nuts,"

or I could have looked for answers.

You are now in an area where you talk about extrasensory perception,

where you talk about psychic communities,

a possibility of communicating with people from the future to the past.

A completely different area you are going into,

away from the old confident rationalism.

-You still believe in telepathy and any of those things?

-Yes.

Where did that understanding come from?

Well, experience.

We have all experienced it, haven't we?

All kinds of things go on that are not permitted in our philosophies.

We live with them and use them, some of us.

We don't have to be quite as hidebound. When I say we, I mean the human race.

We don't have to be as hidebound as we are.

Is this connected with your involvement with Sufism?

It's a kind of Eastern mysticism, isn't it?

You know, I don't want to talk about Sufism.

OK.

Because, you know, I have been involved in it for 30-odd years now.

I'm afraid of distorting the thing, which is very easy to do.

One of the characters says in The Golden Notebook,

"I despise people who don't experiment with their lives."

This is very brave.

How far is any of us prepared to experiment with our lives?

She experiments emotionally all the time.

I suspect if that if you had a graph of Doris's emotional life

it would be up and down like the Alps.

Clearly the notion of madness and psychological breakdown,

those are very important themes in all the books you wrote

in the '60s and '70s, from The Golden Notebook onwards.

I have always been, for some reason,

involved with people who are depressives or something.

I don't know why that is.

I've thought that probably it's a way of me...

keeping at a distance from lunacy,

because I'm often involved in dealing with someone else who's a lunatic.

It's not something I'd have chosen, it's something I've had to do.

In one novel, Doris writes,

"She sat thinking so intensely that the house around her vanished.

"The floorboards were giving way,

"houses, buildings, streets, blown away. Going, gone, an illusion."

And she talks of "sleep, that other country."

You dreamt a lot.

All my life.

All my life.

I have always relied on my dreams.

More and more now, because I use it a great deal for my work.

I know other writers do, but sometimes they don't say so,

because that makes you sound a bit loopy.

But I am too old to care about whether I'm called loopy or not.

Mara And Dann,

I was dreaming the whole first third of that book every night.

I would know what I was going to write the next day.

I don't know what I would do without dreaming.

This draws us into another area, which is your decision

to start to write science fiction or space fiction.

Start to write?

I had written The Memoirs Of A Survivor

and Briefing For A Descent Into Hell, which are not realistic.

Then when I went into the Shikasta series,

it was because you cannot write about millions of years, beginning...

"Fred Bloggs sat at a kitchen table, drinking a cup of Typhoo tea."

You have to do it differently.

She loved all those covers

where in the back there was a needle-like rocket ship

and in the front there was a stunning blonde.

Her sort of mischief, it appealed to her to write science fiction,

-to be part of this looked down upon group.

-Yes.

But such is science fiction's exclusion from the literary establishment,

that the chaps are naturally paranoid.

So many of them protested violently,

"Who's this woman, writing ordinary novels, invading our territory?"

So she got a warm reception from your colleagues

-in the science fiction world?

-A bit troublesome.

Then I persuaded her to come with me and be guest of honour in Florida

at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.

So, the ladies from all over the USA came to see Doris.

It was extraordinary.

Doris would sit there by the pool, chatting to these people.

Never again was there such a large attendance

at the Conference of the Fantastic.

Even when we had Stephen King.

So how do you rate Doris as science fiction writer?

The novels are oddly handmade and indeed home-made.

I find that an endearing quality.

She got away with it, didn't she? She got the Nobel prize.

The stars, the vast spaces that Doris got from Africa and her father

have continued to feed into science fiction and fables.

Analogies for our world and all its ills.

FEMALE OPERA SINGER:

In the '80s and '90s, Doris collaborated with Philip Glass

on operas based on her science fiction series.

They expressed her fears for the future of humanity.

She does seem to have a speeded-up sense of time.

That leads us to her other great theme, which is the death of civilisations.

That has really come through in the later work.

This is great storytelling, this is epic storytelling,

but it's also about our future as a species.

What's your sense of where the world is going?

You thought you wouldn't be alive by this point in life.

-Are you a pessimist?

-It depends how you define the world.

An optimist is someone who thinks

everything is basically all right.

It'll be fine and we're not going to have

millions dying in Africa and there won't be global warming.

Whereas I think a lot of these things are indeed going to happen.

We're ruining the oceans, which is the beginning of the ruining of everything.

I think we are a disastrous species.

We destroy everything.

But a minority of us will survive whatever catastrophe it was.

This, I think, is optimism.

-HE LAUGHS

-Well, it's a glimpse, anyway.

Survival, global and personal.

In a way, Alfred And Emily is about surviving her mother.

And now, half a century after her death,

beginning to realise they do have things in common.

I thought I might tell you about energy,

which I have been blessed with.

I know this sounds improbable,

but more than once I finished a book,

there's no reason for me to do anything but enjoy myself.

What I do, is I go to Shannon in Ireland, book a car

and drive up and down that coast

at as much speed as one can get on those roads.

I have done that not once, but half a dozen times.

It's this physical energy, and where do I get it from?

It's from my mother. She was eaten up by it.

That's probably why she went crazy.

She had too much energy and not enough to use it on.

That's what I think.

You have to move, and of course you have to write.

I only thought about it last night.

I was thinking about my mother's energy and where did it go to.

It went into me, because I used to have it.

I haven't got it now, alas.

I don't know about that.

You once said,

"One has to accept loneliness - it's the human condition,

"no matter how many parties or churches we belong to."

Do you still feel that way?

Yes, we are always inside this tower, aren't we?

We are not communicating as much as we might do.

How have we done?

We're very much the same kind of person, you know,

so we haven't done too badly, have we?

I want to tell you something.

This is a little memory.

I was on the farm and night after night,

I would stand with honey on my fingertips

and moths would fly out of the bush and settle on my hand and drink.

What a memory.

I remember then I used to weep with gratitude, I don't know why.

These beautiful things would just come and drink honey off my hand.

Nothing like that can ever happen to you again when you've grown up.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd