Doris Lessing’s Art of Fiction Interview
The brilliant Iran-born, Zimbabwe-raised, British author Doris Lessing — who beat out Philip Roth for the Nobel Prize in 2007 and reacted with a simple “Oh, Christ” — died at home on Sunday at the age of 94. I was rereading her 1988 Art of Fiction interview yesterday, in which she’s deeply and wonderfully resistant to any sort of cult-of-the-author thing (“I think people are always looking for gurus. It’s the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It’s quite terrifying”) as well as that old bugbear, the Prospective End of Book Culture.
Well, don’t forget, I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle. In hard times, who knows if we’re going to have that luxury or not?
She is hilarious in this anecdote:
I did take mescaline once. I’m glad I did, but I’ll never do it again. I did it under very bad auspices. The two people who got me the mescaline were much too responsible! They sat there the whole time, and that meant, for one thing, that I only discovered the “hostess” aspect of my personality, because what I was doing was presenting the damn experience to them the whole time! Partly in order to protect what I was really feeling. What should have happened was for them to let me alone. I suppose they were afraid I was going to jump out of a window. I am not the kind of person who would do such a thing! And then I wept most of the time. Which was of no importance, and they were terribly upset by this, which irritated me. So the whole thing could have been better. I wouldn’t do it again. Chiefly because I’ve known people who had such bad trips. I have a friend who took mescaline once. The whole experience was a nightmare that kept on being a nightmare — people’s heads came rolling off their shoulders for months. Awful! I don’t want that.
“I wept most of the time, which was of no importance.” A visionary feminist sentence if I’ve ever heard one. Here’s one last bit; RIP, Doris.
People don’t realize how quickly they’re going to be old, either. Time goes very fast.