On the death of the writer Doris Lessing
"A part of me always remained an outsider": the writer Doris Lessing (1919 - 2013).
She was born in 1919 in Persia, grew up in the English colony of southern Rhodesia in the midst of rampant racism, and as a young woman she was a fan of communism, settling in post-war Europe in 1949, where she lived became a passionate anti-ideologist. As a writer, it was the great distances that fascinated Doris Lessing. Their stories often have a visionary character, are either projected far into the future or far back in history. On November 17, 2013, the Nobel Prize winner died at the age of 94 in London.
Five years ago, we met the author of the famous "Golden Notebook" for an interview in her small whitewashed terraced house in the west of London. The conversation about men and women, wars and catastrophes testifies that with Doris Lessing not only the great old lady of English literature, but also one of the brightest thinkers of our time has left us.
Doris Lessing in an interview: "Loneliness is a luxury"
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Do you have more imagination than others, Miss Lessing?
Doris Lessing: It's so boring to live in a world that has become completely manageable. I have always liked to think of fantastic worlds. This means greater freedom in writing. Maybe that's because I grew up in a wilder world: in the southern Rhodesian bush. So I never quite became an Englishwoman, a part remained a stranger and outsider. For a writer, this view from the outside is very good.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: And what do you see now? Everywhere is just talk about the climate catastrophe. Many years ago you yourself wrote about the ecological destruction of the earth and the dangers associated with it.
Doris Lessing: Yes, in my book "General Dann", for example, I tell how people look back on civilization after an ecological catastrophe. They look at us, their past. Us who are so incredibly smart and progressive, destroying us ourselves. The people in the book are refugees. War, civil war, famine, drought - everyone flees from anything. The world is just going in this direction, accelerated by global warming. If this continues, there will be more refugees in the foreseeable future. But I do not realize that the world is adjusting to it.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Perhaps we lack the foresight. You, on the other hand, have often proved this.
Doris Lessing: I have always had this gift for premonitions and foresight. Sometimes I know how things will be in five years. I suppose that's from my youth. At that time I was surrounded by war victims; my father was an invalid, my mother cared for injured people in the hospital. Then came the Second World War with all its omens. I learned not to be surprised by these horrors, but always ready for them.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Visionaries are mostly tragic figures, they carry the burden of their knowledge on their shoulders. Does that also apply to you?
Doris Lessing: Yes, I carry these wars around with me all my life. The strange thing is: instead of disappearing at some point, they become heavier in old age. The consequences of these wars, what they have brought with them, are becoming more and more conscious.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Are the problems of our world today greater than 60, 70 years ago when you yourself were young?
Doris Lessing: When I was young, the world-dominating themes were Nazi Germany, Mussolini, the British Empire, the Soviet Union. While I've always been aware that the world is changing fast, that at the end of my life, none of this would ever exist, I would never have thought. Today, America is considered indestructible - which it is not. But this political ups and downs is not really the big problem.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: But?
Doris Lessing: Much worse are epidemics, diseases and especially the ecological disaster. Then the religious ideologies, the fanatics. We Englishmen are in the line of fire, you Germans are not that. Dear Blair has pulled us into the Iraq war. There will come more, in Iraq it will not be better, but worse. We old people have seen so much; But we do not know what all this will do to the young people. That worries me.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Are you in contact with young people?
Doris Lessing: I get a lot of letters from young people. Yesterday, there was one who wrote: Send me your mail, then we can chat. Good God, this time in front of the computer.But to me the boys seem less ideological and more open than the old ones. There is tremendous xenophobia among them - in a country like ours, where everyone in their DNA probably has some black or Indian blood.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Did we even understand people of the late 20th century?
Doris Lessing: Yes. I think so. We are already aware of the dangers, but we do not know how to handle them. In questions like the climate, it seems to us slowly becoming clear that we have to stand together worldwide.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: That sounds quite optimistic.
Doris Lessing: Optimistic can be at most in the long-term perspective. When you realize how adaptable our species is and what wars, what natural catastrophes it has already endured - and still exists! But yes, maybe I'm just more optmistic than usual. It's always related to what I'm writing right now (laughs). Even as I was working on the book The Divide, people said to me that they thought it was pretty funny, and that's right, that's it.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: In your new novel "The Gap" you start the thought experiment, the humanity in the beginning consisted only of women. They describe a community that gives birth to their children without men, after the cycles of the moon, until a boy is mistakenly born here and there. How did you come to this?
Doris Lessing: It fascinates me to go back in time to the time when the world was still a place where different evolutionary steps took place simultaneously. Have you heard of this Pacific Island where you have discovered stunted people? A people of little people, such a thing usually appears only in fairy tales. It may well be that there were such peoples and somewhere else a society made up only of women. About two years ago, I read in the papers that there was evidence that the human genus was originally female. That inspired me.
"The Society of Young Children is the Most Terrible Boredom"
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Women who are among themselves, you once said, caring for each other, celebrate, give each other gifts. And then the men come in, want their ego to be petted - and now the stress starts.
Doris Lessing: Is not that the case? (laughs) Men and women are extremely different, because hardly anyone would contradict me. In the beginning is the difference: women give birth, all life comes from them. Men can not do that. That was not invented by me or society. It is natural.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: The women's movement here often disagrees. Since one sees the gender difference as socially determined.
Doris Lessing: We women are the ones giving birth and raising - that's so fundamental to me that it's not worth discussing. On the other hand, relatively new is that women have freedom of choice on this point. For two generations, that's how it has been since the pill was taken. Women used to have a child every year. And today? Do women choose something different? It is flat to say that, but as you can see, young women are still looking for a husband above all else. Amazing! It seems to me that women are capable of more. But most people do not care much about swinging to the height of their potential.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Many women today feel torn between children and work.
Doris Lessing: It comes down to the one question: do you make your own money? As long as you do not have your own money, you are not free.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Would life be simpler if the sexes remained among themselves and educated only the children together - as you imagine it in "The Gap"?
Doris Lessing: That does not work either. One saw it in Israel in the kibbutzim. The parents do not stick to it. They do not make it.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: So no alternative to the nuclear family?
Doris Lessing: Men and women go their own way. Take a look around at a party: the women are standing together in one corner and the men in the other. There is a strong connection to your own gender.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: What connects men and women can therefore be reduced to sex. On the game of mutual attraction?
Doris Lessing: having fun together. Naturally!
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Good, but does not freedom also lonely?
Doris Lessing: But loneliness is a luxury! You have to fight for it. In my view, loneliness is something difficult to acquire and then something difficult to obtain.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: What exactly do you mean by loneliness?
Doris Lessing: In the meantime, it is well known that being a woman does not automatically mean having mother's needs and feelings. In the past, women only had the choice to go or marry the terrible way of an old maiden, which meant having children. And what if she did not really care about the kids? What a nightmare. There must have been many such women. There are men who are more maternal than some women.That you as a woman do not have to take on this role because you probably do not want it seems to me hard work. By loneliness I do not mean sad involuntary aloneness, but on the contrary, something blessed. I never got that in my life, just imagine that: the perfect freedom of self-determination, dearest kindness. , , (laughs) never. , ,
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: That's amazing. Your older two children grew up with your first husband - without you. When you came to London, you had your third child with you, your youngest son Peter, whom you brought up alone.
Doris Lessing: Recently a great-grandchild of mine was here in the house. A young woman in my circle of friends, who is undecided whether she should have children or not, got along with it - for fourteen days mother, father and grandparents were under the spell of this baby: Was it asleep? Was it hungry? And she wondered: why should I take this voluntarily? It was a sweet baby, the son of my granddaughter, but this whole theater - what a nightmare!
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: And how did you experience your own motherhood?
Doris Lessing: I like to be with children, and yet I know that was the biggest, most terrible boredom of my life back in the early 1940s, when I was sitting in Salisbury with two young children. For me there is no boredom comparable to this one; the company of little children, even if they are cute.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Boredom seems to be an unbearable idea for you to this day. Every two years a new book is published. Where do you get the energy from?
Doris Lessing: You have no idea! My energy is completely gone. Nothing more. I used to write four books in one year and three months. Unimaginable today.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: Well, but ...
Doris Lessing: ... okay, but let me tell you, the truth is, I can barely scrape the energy to write. Younger people can hardly bear that one can become so weak and then say: that's the way it is. It scares them.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde-woman.de: The other way around, it also encourages you to see someone like you.
Doris Lessing: You mean, because I'm still alive !? In England, that is, once 75, then you have earned all the medals and is constantly praised only for the fact that you are still alive.
Reading Tips: A selection of the works of Doris Lessing
The divide (2007) Doris Lessing's latest work takes place at the beginning of humanity. It describes a fantastic society free of mythical things and free of men. When the first boy is born and considered a monster by the exclusively female people of the "Columns", he must die. As more follow him, the feminine society must acknowledge that their harmony is in danger and their world gets mixed up. Doris Lessing: The gap
, 240 pages, 19.95 EUR, paperback, Hoffmann and Campe, ISBN: 3455400752)
"The Golden Notebook" (1962) is considered the main work of Doris Lessing. At the center of this classic novel of the women's movement are two emancipated, politically engaged, courageous and intellectual women. The story is based on four notebooks of the two protagonists. These describe in many situations the long road to equality. Doris Lessing: The golden notebook, 799 pages, 12,90 EUR, Paperback, Fischer, ISBN: 3596253969
"An African Tragedy" (1949) The debut work by Doris Lessing is about a forbidden black and white love. The book begins with a fictional newspaper article that states that the wife of a farmer, Mary Turner, was found murdered. Suspected is a black servant who is also ready to confess quickly. The murder is dismissed as a typical crime of a black and enlightened in the course of the book. Doris Lessing: African tragedy, 247 pages, 8.90 EUR Paperback, Fischer, ISBN: 3596257476
"A sweet dream" (2003) Frances Lennox's house in Hampstead is always open for lost children, for messed-up teens, even for her ex-husband Johnny. A loser in life, but a brilliant showpiece communist. You can read this book as an autobiography. Because she did not want to hurt people, it has become a novel. Perhaps the reason why the book - a passionate account of communism and a precise contemporary document about the dark side of "swinging London" - has become a bit cumbersome. Doris Lessing: A sweet dream, 527 pages, 24.90 EUR, Hardcover, Hoffmann and Campe, ISBN: 3455043879
"Ben in the world" (2000) The novel is a consistent continuation of Doris Lessing's novel "The Fifth Child". A shocking and fascinating reading journey into the depths of the human psyche. Doris Lessing: Ben in the world, 208 pages, 9 euros, paperback, btb Verlag, ISBN-10: 3442727413
