A Conversation with Doris Lessing (1966)
1973; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1207464
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoI spent a weekday afternoon in October, 1966, with Doris Lessing, drinking wine and coffee, eating, talking. Whatever questions I might have had in my head disappeared into my embarrassment about not being able to operate the small tape recorder I was carrying. But Doris was, it turned out, as helpless as I, and son Peter had to be called on for manly assistance. It was a perfectly inappropriate scene. Here was the allegedly feminist author of The Golden Notebook, stirring a great pot of soup on the stove, calling for her twenty-year-old son to emerge from his downstairs bed-sitting room to help the American lady (also allegedly feminist). I don't know what I had expected, but surely not this friendly, attractive, slightly scattered woman. Surely not this small and comfortably dishevelled kitchen at the front of a narrow row house on a working-class street in north central London. Surely not the half-filled cat's dishes on the floor. Why not? Why had I not expected to feel comfortably able to relax for an afternoon of talk-once Peter had made the tape recorder work? Probably because Doris Lessing's stories don't make me feel comfortable. They're tough-minded, thoroughly unsentimental, sometimes cruel, often pessimistic, at least about personal relations. What comedy they offer is painful, black. And though I admire her books,
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