extent transforms the reader as he reads. I think it is true of our greatest writers that their effect on us is delayed, that it may take years for us to understand what they have done to us. Doris Lessing possesses a unique sensitivity, writing out of her own intense experience, her own subjectivity, but at the same time writing out of the spirit of the times. This is a gift that cannot be analyzed; it must only be honored.
The Capacity to Look at a Situation Coolly Josephine Hendin
Josephine Hendin’s interview was conducted in New York on WBAI Radio December 30, 1972. The transcription was prepared and edited by Patricia Featherstone. Printed with the permission of Bill Thomas, Director, Pacifica Radio Archive.
Hendin: In The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Short Stories one thing that interested me particularly was your story “Report on a Threatened City,” where creatures from another planet come down to earth to warn everyone of an imminent disaster, and no one seems to want to pay attention. When they try to warn the young people they’re in a state which you describe as “disabling despair.” You say while they are more clear-headed than their elders, more able to voice and maintain criticisms of the wrongs and faults of society, they’re not able to believe in their own effectiveness or ability to do anything about it. Is this how you see young people?
Lessing: Well, not all of them, of course. But I do think, certainly in England, I don’t know about this country, that there are large numbers of young people who might have been political perhaps a few years ago, but who seem to be perhaps numbed. Well, I’m not surprised, if you look at what’s going on everywhere. Let’s put it this way: I’m very glad that I’m not twenty, because I don’t think I would be able to regard what’s going to happen with all that equanimity. About what goes on here, as I say, I don’t know at all. Quite a common thing to see in England is groups of young people living together on some basis or another, often quite informalized. They don’t say, “I’m going to set up a group of young people.” It’s what seems to happen. A feature of this is that people tend to be unambitious and work out some kind of rather relaxed, informal sort of style of living, which is very interesting to see because it’s quite different from anything that my generation did, for example.
Hendin: When you say you don’t think you’d be able to regard what’s going to happen with such equanimity, in this particular story it’s a kind of doom. At least in a specific city that is going to happen, and in The Four-Gated City you prophesy a kind of apocalyptic war. Is that what you see as coming?
Lessing: This story is about San Francisco, of course. There was a program on British television, it must have been about eighteen months ago, and I read an article about the same time, and what fascinated me about this was that the citizens of San Francisco didn’t seem to know the situation they were living in, yet one can have programs on British television or erudite articles about it. I mean, the fact that all the amenities are on the San Andreas fault, everything from fire stations to hospitals, and in fact the posts that are supposed to cope with emergencies will be the first to go if there’s an earthquake. Well, it was a fascinating thought that the people who were going to be involved didn’t know what they were in for. And this just sparked off that story. But I gather that since then things are not really much better. If you write something like that, people send you articles and comments, and I gather that the citizens of San Francisco don’t know very much more than they did then. But it’s quite freely discussed in other parts of the world, much more than it is in San Francisco. And that is the interesting thing about that, that we don’t face the situation that is perhaps intolerable. We decide not to look at it straight. Maybe it’s a basic human tendency or something of the kind. This is possibly what’s going on in New York, because when I came here in 1969 everything was much sharper, more aggressive, more tense, and the newspapers were much more sharp and clear. But this time, when manifestly the external situation hasn’t changed in the slightest, I find the newspapers rather bland compared to the English newspapers, and everything seems to be rather good-natured, from which I deduce that things have been swept under the carpet because it’s too painful to look at them. I may be wrong about that. But it’s possible at least that that’s what’s happening.
You asked about the ending of The Four-Gated City. I’m not saying that’s a blue-print, but I think something of the kind is likely to happen. One doesn’t need to have a crystal ball to see that this is what’s going to happen. You just have to read [a newspaper]. There’s a paper in England, for example, called The New Scientist, which is written in language that non-mathematical dopes can understand, you see, like me. You’ve just got to read that for a couple of months to see that far from the danger of war receding, it’s sharpened, that far from our ecological problems being better, they’re worse, and so on. When I wrote The Four-Gated City, I thought that I was perhaps going out on such a limb that no one would ever speak to me again. By the time it was published it was all old hat, things were moving so fast. But the fact that they’re old hat doesn’t mean to say that anything’s changed very much. The problems that we, I mean the human race, have to solve are every bit as bad as they were. The fact that we’re not looking at them, or it doesn’t seem to be that we’re looking at them, doesn’t make them any better.
Hendin: I was wondering how you would write about your idea that things seem to be more good-natured here, with the proliferation of small groups, each of which has their own special interests. I’m thinking in the main of those groups which are concerned with improving the environment, with the great number of women’s organizations which want to improve the lot of women in this country, and with the proliferation of various kinds of black power groups showing a spectrum of all degrees of militancy.
Lessing: This kind of bitty approach to these enormous problems is not enough, and what we need is something that perhaps the human race is not evolved enough to do, which is some kind of overall scheme which seizes the problems, and looks at them as global problems, and not the problems of individual countries, let alone of groups. As I say, this is not me talking, because whereas previously, when I had such thoughts that I really thought were quite extraordinary, and indeed, perhaps shamefully pessimistic and so on, it turns out that this is the kind of thinking of people in very responsible positions who, in fact, say extremely clearly things like: “If within ten years we don’t do so and so and so and so, the situation will be out of control.” Now what they suggest should be done in ten years is usually precisely this ability of humanity as a whole to look at itself as a whole, and to face its problems as a whole. This is in fact what is necessary.
Hendin: Is what you call the “disabling despair” of the young in some way a reaction to the sense that this is not going to be done?
Lessing: This is what some sections of young people seem to do. Do you know, I do find this difficult, when a sentence or statement from a story is quoted to you: “You say so and so,” and in actual fact it is out of context.
Hendin: Fair enough. To get back to the context of the story, which is interesting in itself in terms of the form, you describe the situation as it evolves around the visit of creatures from another planet to the Earth. And in a number of your books you’ve been interested, it seems to me, in using this – whether as a metaphor or whether you see it as a possibility – the idea of space travel, and beings from another planet coming here. I was wondering what significance you felt this had.
Lessing: I don’t see why it’s impossible. If there were beings from another planet here I doubt whether we would recognize them. It wouldn’t take very much, would it, some day for intelligent creatures to disguise themselves in such a way that they wouldn’t be recognized.
Hendin: I get the feeling sometimes in many of your stories that people see each other as though they were space travelers looking at aliens on another planet – that somehow the distance between people