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"I hate it, I really do. And also it's unfair. And after
all that expertise. What about that one when David Beckham kicked up that lump
of dead grass?''
I am discussing the ethics of the penalty shoot-out with one of Britain's
greatest living writers - Doris Lessing. She has more than 50 titles in every
conceivable genre to her name, and has had a stormy life spanning 85 years.
There is very little that Lessing doesn't care about. The latest evidence is
gathered in Time Bites, an anthology subtitled Views and Reviews.
From Sufism to Mugabe to cats to Ecclesiastes to great authors, there is
something here for everyone. As in the broad-ranging empathy of her fiction,
her overriding concern is to get to the heart of matter.
"I thought, I've got all this stuff lying around this house. I'm always coming
on it in drawers and in heaps. Why not collect it together [in a book]? Then I
can throw everything out.''
The house, where Lessing has lived for 24 years, stretches over three storeys on
a hill in West Hampstead in North London. She lives alone. In the large
L-shaped first-floor room where we talk there are books everywhere. If there is
an underlying theme to Time Bites - and it's so wide-roaming that there
probably isn't - it is the primacy of reading. "Books have been my life - I was
educated on them,'' she says. "And then suddenly in your old age you have these
people asking you to write about books that you've been in love with for years.
What a bonus that is.''
Not that it's all love and empathy with Lessing. In a preface to The Fox,
author DH Lawrence gets an emasculating review as a performer in the bedroom.
"When he writes about sex, you suddenly realise he doesn't really know very
much about it. All his set-pieces about sex - they're like the dreams of a
schoolboy, really. And the idea that sex can't be inspirational, spontaneous
and an act of God almost he regards as disgusting. God knows what he'd think
about vibrators. He'd die at the humiliation of it all.''
Here we get sidetracked into a discussion of whether such a piece of apparatus
makes the male obsolete. It will dismay all those women who tried to turn the
author of The Golden Notebook into a poster girl for feminism to learn
that she has never owned a vibrator.
"I like men,'' she says. "But I know women who have vibrators and it doesn't cut
out men at all. How did we get on to vibrators? Oh yes.
"What about Tolstoy and sex?
You don't sit down and think, what was Tolstoy like in bed. Unless he drew your
attention to it, which God knows he did.''
All right then, which male writer was good in bed? "It's very hard to say. I
haven't really thought about that.'' Dickens? "I've got a feeling he might have
been. How about George Meredith? Now he really liked women. Henry James we know
would have been useless.''
Lessing has a reputation for being stern, but this summer afternoon she is
wreathed in smiles. She turns forbidding only when haranguing film-makers for
misrepresenting female novelists. In Time Bites she deplores the casting
of "an exquisite girl with the beautiful clothes'' as Virginia Woolf in The
Hours.
She was also angered by Iris, the film about Iris Murdoch. "I knew her.
There's no need to summon up her ghost. It was a terrible thing to do and what
interested me was a good many of my sensitive literary friends couldn't see
anything wrong with it. I was terribly shocked.''
Of course her own life would make a stirring biopic: She spent her early years
on an isolated farm in southern Rhodesia; was married twice, abandoned the
children of her first marriage to take up with a German communist refugee
during the war; then left for London, a single mother with a third young child;
and had lifelong battles with her own mother.
No wonder people have repeatedly beaten a path to her door seeking permission to
make Doris: The Movie. "I've always said no. I don't see the point. They
could always read the books and find out what I'm like.'' She did once adapt
for television the Children of Violence
quintet about her fictional alter-ego Martha Quest. "I'm sorry no one's ever
made that because I think it would be good. But never mind. I don't care what
they do after I've gone. I'm not one of those writers that sits around worrying
about posthumous fame.''
By royal appointment: Doris Lessing jokes with Spain's Prince Felipe after he
presents her with the prestigious Principe de Asturias Literature Award
AFP
Lessing's memoirs take us up to 1962, just short of the publication of her most
ambitious novel, The Golden Notebook
. She has her own reasons for stopping there, but on meeting her you can see a
poetic justification.
That squaw-like physiognomy of hers has aged magnificently, but there is a part
of Lessing that has simply refused to grow old with it: She drinks Diet Coke,
she knows about trash television, and while she doesn't yet work on a computer,
she "will at some point or other''.
Out of the author of Time Bites time has hardly taken any bites at all.
The only sign of age is when she refers to Philip Larkin as "whatsisname''. But
then we've all been there.
In another writer you might ascribe her fearlessness to age but Lessing has
always been like this. She deplores political correctness and other assaults on
the language. In her new collection she describes visiting a school in America,
where she discovered that studying The Good Terrorist meant scouring it
for evidence of wrong thinking. "They just go in for extremes and I don't know
why that should be. They are a very hysterical nation. I wish we didn't always
adopt America's latest fashion but we do.''
This is pure Lessing: The practical essayist, the sensible thinker. With the
really big subjects, she knows exactly what the problem is, but understands the
impossibility of putting it right. This applies above all to the slow death of
reading.
"I keep trying to persuade myself that it's unimportant, the fact that this
culture is coming to an end, or probably is. So what? But when I think of the
sheer pleasure of it - that hurts too. At one time the respect for books and
reading was general. It's not there now. It's not literature and learning or
education that's respected, it is the glamour - God help us - of being a
writer.''
Lessing has another completed novel on the stockpile, but has not written a word
since January. Or not a word of fiction. "Once I couldn't have done that. I'd
have gone crazy even thinking suppose I never write another word? The world is
not going to be any poorer for it, except that I do enjoy telling stories. You
are writing from a much deeper part of yourself.''
Instead, she is working on a preface to Lady Chatterley's Lover. In view
of her damning words on Lawrence, should his fans prepare themselves for the
worst?
"It's a very flawed novel. But I keep thinking of the excitement when I first
read it,'' she says.
"What I like Lawrence for is his capacity for immersing you in the experience.
Scene after scene in that book I almost don't care what he wanted to say. I
don't know what we should value writers for, but certainly not for their
blueprints. We are always trying to make writers into something else. We don't
value them for what they actually offer.
"I've had every conceivable label [put on me]. I started off as a writer about
the colour bar, and then I was a communist, then I was a feminist, then I was a
mystic.''
And now? What is Doris Lessing now?
"What I always was. Just the same.''
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