Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing

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       Learning to Put the Questions Differently Studs Terkel

      Studs Terkel’s radio interview was conducted in Chicago June 10, 1969. Printed by permission of Studs Terkel.

      Terkel: The passage which you just read from The Four-Gated City seems one of the keys to the book. Lynda, who is the wife of a friend of your protagonist Martha Quest, has been considered mad, and Martha finds out something, doesn’t she?

      Lessing: Well, you see, I’ve done my homework on this point without ever planning to do it, because it so happened that for the last twenty years, without ever intending to do it, I have been ever involved with psychiatrists or social workers dealing in what we call “madness,” or have had very close friends who have been quote, unquote “mad” in one way or another. This is not anything that I had planned to do; it has just happened this way. What one experiences gets into one’s work!

      When I wrote this book, although I had a fairly clear idea of certain things I wished to say, other things I discovered as I wrote. Lynda is the character who fascinates me the most in this book, because she is the crystallization of a great deal of experience in a form I never expected. I found out a great many things about what I think through Lynda. Lynda is like a lot of people I’ve known who spend their time in and out of mental hospitals. This is getting more and more common. I have no doubt at all that a lot of people will either be in mental hospitals themselves or have friends who are in and out of mental hospitals and live their lives in a twilight of drugs. I mean by “drugs” …

      Terkel:…sedatives, tranquilizers …

      Lessing:…that cycle of chemical things which people get put full of. These people, I maintain, are probably not mad at all, or a great many of them are not or never have been mad. Just before I left England, I met a doctor who’d been working in America, and he said that there is a different approach here to schizophrenia. In England people can go to a doctor and be told that they’re schizophrenic, but it’s happening less and less here, I’m told. This “disease” – in quotes again, because I don’t think it is one – has been broken down, and almost as it were spirited away by words as if it ceases to exist because doctors say it doesn’t exist and because they dish out drugs. I think what’s going to happen in the next – all right, for argument’s sake, let’s say – ten years is a lot of rethinking is going to take place about what schizophrenia is. I think we’re going to have a lot of surprising conclusions to what schizophrenia is, and what we are, in fact, doing is to suppress and torment – I can use very strong language about this because I have dear friends who go through this misery and it’s hard to be cool about seeing people being tormented. In short, a lot of perfectly normal people, with certain capacities, are being classed as “ill.”

      Terkel: Let’s dwell on this. This seems to be the recurring theme. You deal with certain circles, literary people, people in the midst of cataclysmic events – the time of Suez and after – writers in difficulty. Martha Quest is searching, is she not, throughout? She wants to find out what it’s about, really, who she is.

      Lessing: Yes, that’s what we’re all doing. I chose that name when I started the first book in this series twenty years ago almost blindly, you know. I reread Martha Quest, the first volume, recently and I was fascinated to see that all those themes are there which bear right throughout this cycle.

      Terkel: But the cycle and these themes have developed because in the meantime things have happened in the world in these twenty years too, right along with it – to you as an individual as well as to the world itself – that make your themes all the more critical and pertinent now.

      Lessing: I understood that when I chose the title for the sequence, Children of Violence. Violence is now a vogue СКАЧАТЬ