A Conversation With Doris Lessing

Funding for this series is provided by the Herb Alpert Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and by Mutual of America. For over half a century, people from all walks of life have turned to Mutual of America for retirement and pension products. There was quite a stir in my neighborhood the other night at Barnes and Noble Bookstore on Broadway, here in New York. People were lining up to meet Doris Lessing and to listen to her read from her latest novel, The Sweetest Dream. Julia gently turned the handle of Sylvia's door and stepped into a room where Moonlight

lay across Sylvia and just reached the young man on the floor. At 83, Doris Lessing is one of the world's most celebrated and distinguished writers. Reminded her of a terrible and admissible unhappiness Born in Persia and raised in Africa, Doris Lessing has transformed her remarkable life into a literary tour de force, first gaining worldwide attention in 1962 with her novel The Golden Notebook. All in all, she's written 24 novels, two operas, three plays, six works of nonfiction, plus a two-volume autobiography, one book of poetry, and fourteen collections of short stories. Before Doris Lessing returned to London where she's been living since 1949, we talked about her life and work. I'm intrigued by this character in The Sweetest Dream. Old Julia, she's the matriarch of the household where the young people are gathering and she says, you can't have two dreadful wars and then say, that's it, and now everything will get back to normal. They're screwed

up, our children. They're the children of war. Well, that's what I think they were. I think terrible events like war leave a kind of bruise on the national psyche. You know, you can't have a war as terrible as World War II and say, right, and I'll finish. That's, I don't know, we're all going to be sweet and kind now. It isn't like that. You have people who have been formed by war and are frightened and are damaged, and it takes some time for that to work out. I think that the 1960's young people, not all of them, of course, obviously not. A lot of them were, have been damaged by war, and a lot of them came right afterwards. You know, we've forgotten the heavy toll of the 60's, the people who landed out in loonybins, the people who committed suicide. You can see the 1960, 1960's casualties around now, if you look, you meet them. They're usually recognizable by a kind of, oh, everything is wonderful, it'll come right in the end,

ethos, which I find very irritating. But they're very often vague and fuzzy, fuzzy, and I'm often thinking, hang on a minute, was that too much pot? But that's just an old woman speaking. Too much pot? Yes. An older woman speaking. An old woman speaks Too much pot. because they, some of them are very woolly. Describe the house for me, that is the setting for The Sweetest Dream, and how you organized it, how, what happened there? Well, it's a ?homestead? house, a big one, much bigger than the one in fact I had. They're big houses you knew were on layered, and this particular house had Julia, the grandmother on the top, with her perfect life, everything just so, and then underneath it there were the sons' rooms and their lives, and underneath that was Francis's life, and then the enormous living room with the red sofa, which is very important emotionally for the kids. They had all these

rendezvous on the sofa, and underneath that was the kitchen, which of course it's always a real heart of the house, so. Is the house in The Sweetest Dream, the house that you lived in? No. In the 60's? No, it was bigger than the one I had, but it was the same plan. And was life the same? I mean, you were, in effect, the house mother of all these kids coming in and out. LESSING: Well, I was, you see, but it didn't seem to be so astonishing, because there were some quite a few of us, you know, it was a time. Well, now this is a question. Why is it that, at a certain time, it's natural for some things to happen, and it's quite impossible for the same things to happen ten years later. Does anyone know how to answer that? It was perfectly natural, then, for me to have a house and kids coming in and out, and now it will be thought, well, they're affected, perhaps, so. MOYERS: Well, the river moves on and leaves us at a different place on the bank.

LESSING: It does, you see. MOYERS: And we're different people when we're there, aren't we? LESSING: What we'd think is that we're different people with a lot of other people at the same time. That's what's fascinating. There's a [inaudible] time and atmosphere, and that's one of the hardest things, you know, and a journalist says, tell me about something or other. You can't, because the atmosphere, you can't convey it. It's gone. MOYERS: In The Sweetest Dream, you certainly have the environment, the atmosphere of that house and that time. That's what it is, evocative of the 60's. Not the 60's, I lived, I was in Government LESSING: But can you say, yes, you were not living that life at all. You'd never been a flower child. MOYERS: Well, I never was a flower child. LESSING: Well, you missed out, perhaps. MOYERS: What did I miss? LESSING: They seemed to have quite a lot of fun. MOYERS: But you said they were damaged children. LESSING: They were, but they had fun, too. They had all the music they used to go after these rock festivals and things like that. They did have a good time. MOYERS: Did you? LESSING: Not very.

I was terribly bothered about them. But you know, I have been told by good friends that I am very narrow-minded and an old grouch. They say that they remember the 60's, it was a complete pleasure. They discovered sex. You know, because every generation discovers sex for the first time. And there was always music and they were liberated and they got away from their parents and I talk rubbish. I've been told this. So maybe they're right. MOYERS: Was there an aha moment, a eureka moment, Archimedes might have said, when you knew that you had to write, when there was no option left for you, you knew you were going to spend your life writing, whether successfully or not. Was there such a moment? LESSING: Well, I was writing all my childhood and I wrote two novels and I was 17, which were terrible and I got sad, tore them up. You know, the thing was, I had no education. MOYERS: You left school at age 14, 14. right? LESSING: And I wasn't trained for anything. MOYERS: What was there in a young girl, you know, 12, 13, 14 or 15, that said, I want to write?

LESSING: I was at that time being in what we now called an au pair. I was a nursemaid and it was pretty boring. So I thought, well, let's try and write a novel. I wrote two. I went back to the farm and wrote two novels. MOYERS: In Africa. LESSING: This was in Africa. MOYERS: But where did that idea come from? Had you read a lot? LESSING: Had somebody... I never stopped reading, you know? I read and read and read and it was what saved me and educated me. So writing a novel seemed to be a way out. MOYERS: So a bored little girl? LESSING: I think probably I've never been so bored in my life as pushing a pram 'round a park on those interminable afternoons, composing poetry in my head [laughs] and thinking, well, this will come to an end at some point. MOYERS: How was it you started reading as a very young child? How did that happen?

LESSING: Well, my mother, I have to thank for that. She ordered books from England. This is the middle of Africa. She ordered books by the bushel for me. And when I look back and think of what she bought, I'm so impressed. She, and all the American children's books and all the English children's books and there's a bookcase for the books of the classics. So that's what I did. I read. MOYERS: As you talk, I think of the traumatic century you lived through, all those events. You were born right at the end of the first Great War. You lived through the Great Depression. You lived through the Second World War. You lived through the nuclear era, the Cold War, the genocide, the collapse of the British Empire. I mean, does anything remain of the world you knew when you were young? LESSING: Nothing. Nothing at all. The World War I, I'm a child of World War I, and I really know about the children of war because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father physically and both mentally and emotionally.

So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of the continual harping on the war, the obsessive talking about the trenches and the generals and so on. And I used to listen, it was- it was terrible, you know, these men were, had been so traumatized. Of course, outwardly, they were very civilized and good and kind and everything, but in actual fact, they were war victims. MOYERS: Your father couldn't stop talking? LESSING: No. He was obsessed with it. He had a very bad, what we now call a nervous breakdown, shell shock, after the war. He was very ill mentally, as well as, you know, they shot his leg off. He was in hospital for a year. I don't think he ever got over it. MOYERS: I was touched when we asked you to bring some pictures and you brought several photographs of your father.

Would you tell me about these? LESSING: I look at him and I think that's a young man. When I was a child, there was a soldier, that's what I saw, a soldier. But in actual fact, it's a very vulnerable face, isn't it? MOYERS: And this one? LESSING: Well, there, he was in the Royal Free Hospital in London when they cut off his leg and the sister there is my mother. She was a ward sister, and so they got married. My father, after having finished with hospital and all that, he couldn't stand England, like many of them couldn't. He asked for a job -- he was working in the bank before the war. He was sent to Persia as a bank manager in a place called Kermanshah. My mother adored Persia, but my father not so much. And when they came to England, they saw the Empire Exhibition, 1924, and the Stand for Rhodesia said, you could grow maize and get rich. Now my father always wanted to be a farmer, that was his great dream.

So out the went. How they went out was just, you know, My mother had visions of, I don't know, what, Happy Valley in Kenya. She took out all these beautiful dresses from Harrod's and wonderful hats and visiting cards and a piano, a governess for the children. My father had no money whatsoever. He had £1,000, I think, and his war pension. And she found herself on an unstumped land, a completely unused land in the middle of Rhodesia, not even a house built. MOYERS: Here you are, is that in Rhodesia? LESSING: There I am, age 14, looking a bit reluctant, that's me not wanting to be photographed, as usual. [laughter] MOYERS: I had a daughter like that, and this. LESSING: Now that's what I was brought up in. And this house was built to last for two years, because it was made of adobe with a thatched roof.

MOYERS: Were you happy in this house? LESSING: When I think of the luck I had, you knew it was like living what we would call a game park. Every conceivable animal excepting lions had gone, elephants had gone. All the animals were there. And If you looked out from here, it was down at the fields, the birds, the hawk circling. You looked up and there were hawks circling everywhere. Well they're not there now, unfortunately, they've gone. MOYERS: All things human-given time go badly, said Andre Gide. LESSING: I'm afraid he's right. I'm afraid you see what I look back on has disappeared. It's gone. MOYERS: You identified very early with the Blacks of Rhodesia. And I wondered what was there that inspired you to argue against your own privilege? LESSING: Well I didn't see it quite like that. Who's that had to leave the country to Cape Town before I could see it clearly

MOYERS: South Africa. LESSING: Yes, I went, I was down in Cape Town and I met a Quaker actually, and she, she threw away some sentences about this ridiculous country with its, with these conceded whites who think that they're going to. And I thought God, it was an eye-opener, and they're exploited blacks. It's not that I didn't know they were exploited, but I needed to have it put into context. MOYERS: Why must we go away to see what is happening where we are? LESSING: Because you can be as critical as you like, but you're still in it. I was absolutely in it. And I had, I had nothing to compare it with, don't forget, except in what I read in books, which was powerful. But suddenly hearing this whole system being dismissed that contemptuously, I thought, my god, she's absolutely right. And that was the beginning. MOYERS: I've often wondered if the fish knows the ocean is polluted. LESSING: Exactly. Yes. MOYERS: You've seemed to struggle in all of your work with idealism and illusions versus human nature and reality.

I think of what, to me, is perhaps the most moving and revealing paragraph in any of your works. It's the novel, The Fifth Child. I mean, this infant, in Harriet's womb, who turns out to be a savage thing, a monster. I can't read that without being reminded of what you're talking about, the fragility of happiness. You create this attractive family, and then you destroy it. LESSING: Well, I did, of course, for the contrast. I mean, if I put Ben into a favela or some- somewhere or other, there wouldn't have been any dramatic effect. I had to create a good family for him to be born into. I wanted to write a version of that very ancient fable, you know, the fairies, but an alien into the human cradle, that was, instead of being the fairies, he's a throwback to some past race.

I wrote a successor to that book called Ben in the World. MOYERS: I didn't see that. LESSING: Well, Ben, I got intrigued about where poor Ben could be accepted. MOYERS: Ben is this child born in the fifth, he's the fifth child, born with this terribly, what is it? LESSING: He's a throwback, you see, what happened was what sparked it off, I was reading articles about, at the time when they were saying that we possibly had Neanderthal genes. And this really got, I thought, well, if Neanderthal genes, why not, why not dwarves? Why not? Because I'm convinced that some of these races lived in the past, that we just called them fancy names, little races, little races, now they're called Pygmies in Africa. So I thought, well, why not have a throwback to a past race? And someone would be perfectly viable on the hillside, in cave somewhere, put him into a civilized life, and of course, he would destroy it. So I created Ben, which, well it's a pretty horrible book, isn't it?

MOYERS: It is a horrible book, he's a monster, he's deformed, and yet, I wondered, were you writing out of an act of pure imagination, pure speculation, and the joy of just making something up? Or is this the way she sees the world? The idealism that we expect becomes the cruel savage that destroys us. LESSING: No, you see, people always read messages into things, which I don't intend. When I wrote that book, the journalist came and said, oh, of course, it's about the Palestine situation. Oh, Of course, it's about genetic research, and I kept saying no, no, it's a story, I'm a storyteller. One of the things that sparked it off was I was sitting in a dentist waiting room, and reading of stuff as you do, and there was a letter from a woman to some agony aunt, and the letter went like this, it said, "I know you can't do anything to help me, but I must tell someone or I will go mad.

We had three children, and my fourth was born, this little girl. And she is a little Satan. Our lives have been completely destroyed by her. She is a little devil, but sometimes at night, I go into the room and I look at that pretty little face on the pillow, and I long to cuddle her, but I don't, because I know what would come up into my arms would be a spitting, hissing little devil". Now that got to me. Notice the religious language in that, which she probably wasn't conscious of. So I-I just had to write it. MOYERS: It must be infuriating for people like me, for anybody, to read into your book, something you never intended or even thought of, perhaps until the question is asked. LESSING: Well, I didn't, you see, now I see the problem, because everyone has been taught to see simple messages in books, but you do know where it goes back to? And of course it goes back to Christianity originally, but it's a communist idea, you know, writers are the engineers of the human soul, long- long ago, all this was going on, and essentially socialism and all that stuff.

But the fact is it's permeated our culture, so you can hardly meet a literary graduate who doesn't want a simple message. I mean, like, things should be good or bad, like a Western. MOYERS: A Western? [chuckles] Why did you say this goes back to Christianity? LESSING: Well, communism inherits a great deal from Christianity, and it's certainly inherited this message about literature being a means of influencing people. MOYERS: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Gospel were meant to persuade. LESSING: Exactly. We see the thing is that nothing ever comes born out of nothing. Communism is born out of Christianity, and a lot of things have been born out of communism, which we hardly recognize as communist. MOYERS: I would like you to read something, not because I want to, you tell me what the meaning of it is, it's just simply because I want to hear the author read the story.

It's from The Fifth Child. Would you read that? LESSING: Sure. But another layer of thoughts or feelings ran deeper. She said to David, we are being punished, that's all. What for? He demanded, already on guard because of a tone in her voice he hated. For presuming, for thinking we could be happy, happy because we decided we would be. Rubbish, he said, angry. This Harriet made him angry. It was a chance, anyone could have got Ben. It was a chance gene and that's all. Well, I don't think so, she stubbornly held on. We were going to be happy, no one else is, I never seemed to meet them, but we were going to be. And so down came the thunderbolt. Stop it, Harriet. Don't you know where that sort leads, pograms, punishments, witch burnings, and angry gods? He was shouting at her.

And scapegoats, said Harriet, don't forget the scapegoats. He said, vindictive Gods from thousands of years ago. He hotly contended, disturbed to his depths, she could see, punishing gods, distributing punishments for insubordination. Well, who are we to decide, we were going to be this or that? Who? We did. Harriet and David. We took the responsibility for what we believed in and we did it. Then, bad luck, that's all. We could easily have succeeded. We could have had just what we planned, eight children in this house, and everyone happy. MOYERS: Now, what's going on there? This is Harriet and David, the parents of Ben. LESSING: What's going on, you're asking me? Well, this book, you know, does raise some interesting questions. Like, when Harriet goes to rescue Ben from a ?scarcely? place, which I saw incidentally, I'm not going to say what country.

She is behaving as our culture tells her she, you know, we look after the weak. We don't allow people to die if they're incapacitated or hurt in any way. She was behaving according to our lights, but in doing so, she broke up her family. There was a choice there, she was of course also a mother. I only thought of that afterwards I have to say. I wasn't having this clever thought and I was writing, I was writing a story. MOYERS: You only thought of what? LESSING:That it raised some quite deep questions, this story. MOYERS: You didn't know that when you were writing it? LESSING: You know, it is very enjoyable writing a story. You get this idea, it takes hold of you, and then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it, and much later, you think, oh yes.

That's an interesting question. MOYERS: But I don't think, see, I don't think I'm that far off then when I say that there is meaning in this. Not only for me, the reader, but for you, the author. I mean, we do what you did with Ben, with all of our dreams and hopes very often. God, whatever you mean by that, does that. I took this to be a metaphor for God, let there be light, and let there be life, and look what happened to it. LESSING: I wasn't going for metaphors, you know. And if you need to start thinking like that, you'll never write a word. MOYERS: Why? Because you write out of a different part of the brain. I think actually you write from here somewhere in your solar plexus. If you need to start examining everything you write, and my God, that's that message and that's, then you wouldn't be able to write anything. MOYERS: You'd be a communist writing a pamphlet- Exactly- or a Christian writing a gospel. LESSING: Yes. MOYERS: But this line, the vindictive gods from thousands of years ago, that's an astonishing line to me.

Because I think one of the things we have in common is that I wish we could put these vindictive Gods from a thousand years ago away permanently. LESSING: And I think they're still very powerful, particularly when we go to war. You know that for many, many thousands of years probably, they believed that there was a God who demanded blood. Blood. He had to be fed blood. And various cultures had this belief. I don't think that's necessarily gone. It's amazing how easily leaders talk about blood when the war drums start beating. I think a lot of very powerful old things move in us that we don't know about. MOYERS: Old myths? LESSING: Yes, myths or drives or... I didn't think that the past is as dead as we think it is. MOYERS: Yes, Faulkner said it's not even the past. LESSING: It's true, some of it. MOYERS: A couple of questions to finish the discussion about The Fifth Child. When I

read this, I couldn't help but think about, you know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I couldn't think about Adolf Hitler and his mother. Here's a story of an upper-middle class family whose benign view of the world is shattered by the violent death of this child who is monstrous in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong, demanding, and brutal. And everything is upended because of that. LESSING: Well you see, you might have known families where a child that doesn't fit in and is born and then the entire family is taken over by it, him, her. Not that I was thinking about that when I wrote it, but it's true. I had a great many letters after this book from young parents who said that they were so frightened by it in case that they might get similar creature in their family. The only thing is that I wasn't thinking of it as a human child at all.

MOYERS: What were you thinking about it as? LESSING: Throwback. In Ben in the World... MOYERS: The sequel to this? LESSING: Yes, Ben actually sees his people, but they're thousands of years ago on a rock face, they're painted on a rock face in South America. And that's a bit of a heartbreak because you see, I was thinking about Ben, he's the only as it grows up, he knows, he's the only creature like himself. There's nothing like him anywhere and the loneliness of it. He must always be looking out for something like himself. MOYERS:How do you explain the love of a mother that persists in this book for a child who is a monster? LESSING: I don't know, I was thinking... I can't imagine any mother seeing a child she's given birth to in that situation and leaving him there.

It's just you can't, couldn't do it. Even... And anyway in any way, in the end, you see, the family comes together again, they don't sound incapable of creating happy endings. The family healed itself when Ben goes, but I can't imagine leaving anybody in that situation. You would leave a dog in that situation, would you? MOYERS: No, and while I recognize that this is delicate, you do make me ask a question that I know you've wrestled with all your life and everyone who talks to you asks about it and I don't want to invade the boundaries. I don't want to... Your privacy is more important than the answer to this question. And yet, you know, you yourself had to leave your two children in Africa and get away. And did you think they ever understood why you did that? LESSING: Yes, they did. They're astonishingly understanding, both of them, all my son John said to me, I knew why you had to do it.

It doesn't mean to say, I forgive you for it he said in a gruff kind of a way. Yeah, they did understand perfectly well. But you see, that is something I had to do. What I'm impressed about is the fact that I had the strength to do it because I was very raw, absolutely isolated. The fact that I was able to do it now impresses me because it was something I had to do. MOYERS: You were old at the time? LESSING: In my 20's sometime. MOYERS: And they were old? LESSING: Very young. MOYERS: Well, I know we all do things sometimes that we feel we have to save ourselves. That's the first commandment in a sense. We have to save ourselves if we're going to be any good. And I was wondering was that the struggle you felt you really had to do it to save yourself? It wasn't that they were. It wasn't that you didn't like them. LESSING: There was nothing wrong with the children. They were very nice. The thing is, I did have a pretty clear picture of what would happen if I... if I didn't leave, but even now I have a clearer picture of it. MOYERS: How so?

LESSING: Well, you see, I sometimes ask myself, supposing I didn't leave what would have happened. Well, hating the system as I did, I would have been impossible for my husband who was a civil servant. MOYERS: Hating the apartheid system? Apartheid South Africa. MOYERS: I know, but... LESSING: Same idea. Yeah, He was a civil servant, civil servant can't have wives who rush around saying that the system is no good, can they? So I would have to shut up. I would have had to. I mean, it was impossible. But what would have happened to me, I have no doubt whatsoever, is that I would have become an alcoholic, because I hated that life so bitterly. The whole... You have no idea. I think you visited. MOYERS: Yes, I went to Rhodesia when it was still a deeply segregated and oppressive society. LESSING: Well, it was such a... In every way, this dreadful provincialism about everything, obsession about race, no conversation ever took place that

didn't end up about the kaffirs, about the TKTKT ?monts?. MOYERS: The blacks? LESSING: That's... You know, about their behavior, you know, the cookboy did this or the houseboy did that. It was a suffocating society. Awful. MOYERS: And you just felt I've got to get out. I'm going to drown. LESSING: Yeah. And I was right. I was absolutely right to go. MOYERS: Readers who don't even know you, but that, this puzzles them. LESSING: Well, they've probably never lived in a society that they hated every second. MOYERS: No, I think that's true. LESSING: I mean, no, I would have been done in by it. or I could have had a mental breakdown. You cannot live hating everything around you. It's... Well, the other thing, of course, you can do is to become part of it. Now, something very interesting happened when I left in '56. I knew a group of people who were extremely critical of the system, but very... I went back in...

When would I go back? [inaudible] went back in '56, and the same people had become as alcoholics. Or they had become 100% supporters of the regime, much more... Well, of course, because they were compensating. So, suddenly, my critical friends had become war horses for the whites. Who I would have... Something like that would have happened to me. MOYERS: Did you ever sit your children down or write them and tell them exactly what you're telling me? LESSING: Oh, often, yes, we talked about, yeah, of course. You know, they weren't mad about the system either, as they grew older. MOYERS: But you left them in it? LESSING: Well, I couldn't have taken them with me. I was earning 15 quid a month. You know, you can't bring up kids on it. Anyway, they were left, you know, in a very satisfactory situation. MOYERS: Their life was comfortable. LESSING: Yeah, it was okay. MOYERS: Just that you weren't there. LESSING: Well, you know one can go on like this about this situation.

It was a terrible thing I did, and I had to do it. MOYERS: Well, you remind me of something you said in volume one of your autobiography. Quote, "Nothing in history suggests that we may expect anything but wars, tyrants, sickness, bad times, calamities, while good times are always temporary. Why are we so bitterly surprised", you write, "when our country, the world, lurches into yet another muddle or catastrophe?" You ask, "who promised us better when we were promised better? I mean, why is it that so many people in our time", you write, "have felt all the emotions of betrayed children?" LESSING: Well, now that fascinates me. Where did it come from? Particularly the 1960's kids onwards. Everyone seemed to think they had been promised paradise, who promised it to them? And you meet people, I meet people who are genuinely aggrieved that things are not perfect,

that they haven't had paradise. But where along wi-, do you think it could be advertising? Possibly. Everyone who has kids who've been generations have now grown up with everything promised to them on the box and newspapers. Maybe it's that. MOYERS: Or maybe they haven't lived long enough, like you. When you've lived that long, you see the cycles. LESSING: You certainly do, and it's a bit, rather frightening in the moment. You know, I was thinking this morning, when there's a war, we have war memorials to the dead, and once a year we do all that. And we might even remember the wounded. But nobody ever thinks about the psychologically wounded. And there are enormous numbers of them after every war. Nobody thinks about them, or that cost when they start a war.

When you see the faces of some of your warlords, full of elation, which is a horrifying symptom of war, elation, excitement, and you think, are you actually thinking about the results of this? They're not, you know, they're not thinking. MOYERS: Isn't it the mission of writers to give us a vision? LESSING: No, I don't think writers should have missions. I genuinely do not think so. No, because if you're going to start doing that, you start writing from another part of your brain, a pamphlet part of your brain. Why should writers produce, I think writers are very good critics. Most writers are. There's another aspect of literature, which I think people forget. You know, we're talk good and bad literature, fine, all of these criteria. But what we forget is that novels are continuely introducing areas of life that we haven't thought

of before, that hadn't really been in public consciousness until that novel. It's happened particularly in America, I remember some of your great novelists. Who ever would have ever known about the Deep South without your great Southern novelists? There had been a few paragraphs, the newspapers. Or the great Russians We know all about Russia because of the novelists. And I think that is a function of the novel we forget. MOYERS: And think of the novels out of South Africa that told us what life was like when no documentary could do that. LESSING: No. Well, there- the very first one was Alan Payton's, right? Cry The Beloved Country. LESSING: Do you remember the last line of that book? MOYERS: No. LESSING: It said it will be a terrible thing that when we have turned to loving, that is the whites, they have turned to hating, and there's a nasty ring to that. MOYERS: We keep having wars despite the fact that great novelists tell us the truth about wars. LESSING: Well, we don't have much effect, do we?

Do you know when I first recognized that horrible truth? I was standing in Southern Rhodesia, I was very young, I was, I don't think I was even 19. At the door of my little room I was in being a telephone operator. And watching the night's bag of prisoners, the Africans who have been caught up without our passes, handcuffed, walking down the street with the jailers, white, in front and back. And I looked at that and I thought, right, well, this was described in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and all the others. So what have they achieved is what I thought? It didn't stop me writing novels though. I think we might have a limited effect on a small number of people. I hope a good one. MOYERS: But you keep writing. Yes, I do, I have to. .

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