CONVERSATION WITH DORIS LESSING

	September 15, 2000
	Ray Suarez and author Doris Lessing discuss her latest book, "Ben, In The World."

RAY SUAREZ: It's been half a century since Doris Lessing published her first novel "The Grass is Singing." Since then, she's turned her unflinching gaze on a rapidly changing world and gained a worldwide reputation from her novels, and as a short story writer, poet, essayist, autobiographer, even as a librettist, writing operas with composer Philip Glass. Her latest work of fiction is "Ben in the World," a sequel to her 1988 novel "The Fifth Child." Doris Lessing joins us now. Since Ben is one of the most unusual characters I've ever read, I won't even try to describe him. I'm going to have you do it. DORIS LESSING, Author, "Ben in the World:" Well, he is a genetic throwback to some race that lived on this earth many, many thousands of years ago. So he is impossible. He's not, you know... this is not... this book is that kind of book which has a totally impossible premise, but is written as if it's real. It's that kind of book. RAY SUAREZ: Well, this genetic throwback is born to a middle-class family in contemporary Britain living in a suburb outside London. DORIS LESSING: Mm-hmm. RAY SUAREZ: Further complicating Ben's life and the lives of everybody around him. DORIS LESSING: Well, of course he ruins the family, because they can't accommodate him. And the first book ends when he virtually takes off and joins a gang of lay-abouts and leaves that to, and then he is on his own. The point about Ben is that he cannot cope with the modern world at all, and so he's always being victimized and exploited by people, but also being looked after by people with kind hearts. So he has this very varied experience. RAY SUAREZ: An unusual experience for someone who is so handicapped by his circumstance. He just sort of drifts along with the waves around him. DORIS LESSING: Well, what can he do? He... the only time that novel where he struck out for himself, he works on a building site where he is valued because of his enormous strength. He's got these great shoulders. But then, you see, they cheat him out of his wages, or most of them, and that is what happens to him. He's made use of. He can't defend himself really. RAY SUAREZ: But he must be a challenge for a writer. So much of the fiction of the last couple of decades has been very, very finely wrought portraits of the interior lives of characters. We learn about Ben from the reactions of everybody around him since we don't get, as readers, to penetrate very much into who he is or what he thinks. DORIS LESSING: Oh, we do sometimes. In fact, for example, when somebody very carelessly says that he has seen people like Ben, we realize just how desperately lonely this poor creature is, because he goes mad with joy. And we realize that all this time he's been looking for people like himself, but never finding them. And so there is this glimpse, from time to time, of how he's feeling. Like when... when he's around... have you ever known children who bang their heads against the wall? It's kind of neurotic. Apparently it doesn't matter. Well, Ben does it out of sheer despair, and it's sad, sad, sad. Gets on everybody's nerves and tells them how he's feeling. RAY SUAREZ: Why did you fell that you had unfinished business with Ben? The first book of the two is now 12 years old. You had to back to him. Why? DORIS LESSING: Well, you see, it started off as a joke, as so many things do. My German publisher said to me, you should write a sequel, because this child is extremely successful in Germany. It was a joke. Then I thought about it off and on, and I got intrigued by the problem of where, if Ben was by himself, he could survive, and what environment could he be? And I decided he would either have to be with criminals, who would use him, or be desperately poor people who couldn't say no because he was there, or he would be in prison, or in a scientific laboratory. There's not very much choice. In actual fact, I then came up with the idea that a filmmaker picks him up because he thinks he can make a film of Ben, but it comes to nothing. RAY SUAREZ: And he's used cruelly, as you mention, and then find people occasionally who love him in a way. DORIS LESSING: Yes. Well, an old lady right at the beginning of the book, a very old working-class woman, looks after him. But then she's very old. She can't keep him. You know, she's living on her pension, so he has to go. And at the end of the book, a poor, peasant woman from the Favellas, and her boyfriend look after him, in a, I think, a rather nice way. But they couldn't for long, you know. They couldn't take him on permanently. RAY SUAREZ: Right. You say Favellas, the slums of Brazil. But how he gets there, I guess people will have to read the book. DORIS LESSING: Have to find out. RAY SUAREZ: Do you still come at this with the same zest for creation or the same itch that needs to be scratched that you did when you were a young woman? DORIS LESSING: Yes, and even more so sometimes. The one I've just finished, really, quite possessed me. It was... a large part of it was about the 60's, a most debated decade. So it's a book about money and politics, basically. RAY SUAREZ: Do you have some settled thoughts about the 60's that when you were in the midst of it up to your chin you might not have been able to see? DORIS LESSING: Well, looking back, it's such a contradictory decade. It's a mixture of enormous idealism, because the idealism was genuine. But the kids, the adolescents, the young people were probably the most indulged people that have ever been on this earth. They were wooed by the advertisers of at least two continents. They had everything they wanted all the time. And that was a phenomenon that had never happened before. They were very, very uncritical of themselves, and at the same time this passion for a better world. So all these things are going on in a pretty complicated way, and I haven't mentioned drugs, because drugs... it was the first time the west had seen drugs on this scale...never before. RAY SUAREZ: Did they become very attractive adults in your view? DORIS LESSING: Some of them did. There were a great many casualties. I don't know if you realize how many of the 60's people ended up in mental hospitals and committing suicide. It wasn't... it was a very cruel decade. RAY SUAREZ: You were born in Persian. You grew up in Rhodesia. DORIS LESSING: Mm-hmm. RAY SUAREZ: These are two countries where, if we run through the globe or a map today, we won't find them. Is there a home place that you can go back to that's unchanging, that's fixed, or has your life been shaped by the fact that history does sweep places away? DORIS LESSING: I'm changing and fixed. Now that's a tall order for the world that we're in, isn't it? Have you ever thought of what someone like me has seen change in their lifetime? When I was a girl there were the Nazis, who were supposed to be living for 1,000 years; the Italian, Mussolini, Fascist; the soviet union; the British empire; all the European empires, with the exception of Germany, that is gone; white supremacy. All these things that seemed fixed and forever have all disappeared. So someone like me is not likely to believe easily in permanence. RAY SUAREZ: Do you still have a lot to say? DORIS LESSING: I want to write some more books. I'm a writer -- you know, what can I do? (Laughter) RAY SUAREZ: Doris Lessing, great to have you here. DORIS LESSING: Thank you, been very nice. Thanks.

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