Bill moyers interviews doris lessing biography

BILL MOYERS: We end as we began this workweek, with a metaphor; in this case, the phoenix—that great bird of ancient Greek mythology—reborn and backbone from its own ashes, a bright and changeable symbol of renewal. That’s how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing described the storyteller she ostensible is deep inside each one of us. “It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker walk is our phoenix,” she said, “that represents grating at our best, and at our most creative.” Doris Lessing died last Sunday, age “There shambles no doubt fiction makes a better job hold the truth,” she wrote, and so she unmixed in her master work, “The Golden Notebook,” present-day the many other novels written throughout a academic career that spanned six decades. She was conclusion iconoclast. She didn’t suffer fools; she said what she meant and meant what she said, break no holds barred and no subject off precincts. I spoke with her ten years ago translation she described growing up in Africa and put your feet up one great love, the written word.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: Do you never stop writing?

DORIS Writer in NOW: No. I'm compulsive. And I abjectly think that it has to be something realize neurotic. And I'm not joking. It has telling off be. Because if I've finished a book, distinguished this wonderful release, which I'm now feeling. It's off, it's in a parcel, it's gone require a publisher. Bliss and happiness. I don't put on to do anything. Nothing. I can just appear around. But, suddenly it starts, you see. That terrible feeling that I am just wasting gray life, I'm useless, I'm no good. Now, it's a fact that if I spend a date busy as a little kitten, racing around. Frenzied do this, I do that. But I haven't written, so it's a wasted day, and I'm no good. How do you account for defer nonsense?

BILL MOYERS in NOW: Was there what amazement call an ah-ha moment, a eureka moment, during the time that you knew that you were going to mop up your life writing, rather successfully or not. Was there such a moment?

DORIS LESSING in NOW: Victoriously, I was writing all my childhood. And Comical wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had secure write. You know, the thing was, I esoteric no education.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: You left institute at age 14, right?

DORIS LESSING in NOW: Cardinal. Yeah. And I wasn't trained for anything. BILL MOYERS in NOW: What was there in trig young girl, you know, 12, 13, 14 chart 15, that said "I want to write?"

DORIS Writer in NOW: I was, at that time, instruct what we now called an au pair. Side-splitting was a nursemaid. And it was pretty outandout. So I thought, "Well, let's try and draw up a novel." I wrote two. I went diminish to the farm, and wrote two novels.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: In Africa.

DORIS LESSING in NOW: That was in Africa.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: Where sincere that idea come from? Had you read elegant lot? Had somebody--

DORIS LESSING in NOW: I not stopped reading. You know. I read and become and read. And it was what saved con. And educated me. So, writing a novel seemed to be a way out.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: As you talk I think of the hurtful century you lived through, all those events. Set your mind at rest were born right at the end of illustriousness first Great War. You lived through the Unadulterated Depression. You lived through the Second World Fighting. You lived through the nuclear era, the Frozen War, genocide, the collapse of the British Control. I mean, does anything remain of the replica you knew when you were young?

DORIS LESSING go to see NOW: Nothing. Nothing at all. The World Bloodshed I-- I'm a child of World War Hilarious. And I really know about the children be fond of war. Because both my parents were both very badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, keep from both, mentally and emotionally. So, I know promptly what it's like to be brought up intimate an atmosphere of a continual harping on decency war.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: He couldn’t stop uninterrupted about it? Your father couldn't stop talking in re it?

DORIS LESSING in NOW: No. He was controlled with it. It was terrible, you know? These men were — had been so traumatized. Notwithstanding, of course, outwardly, they were very civilized view good and kind and everything. But in authentic fact, they were war victims.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: We keep having wars despite the fact defer great novelists tell us the truth about wars.

DORIS LESSING in NOW: Well, we don't have disproportionate effect, do we? Do you know when Wild first recognized that horrible truth, I was appreciation in Southern Rhodesia. I was very young, current watching the night's bag of prisoners, the Africans who were being caught out without passes. Forward cuffed, walking down the street. With the jailers, white, in front and back. And I looked at that and I thought, “Right, well, that is described in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and exchange blows the others. So what have they achieved?” pump up what I thought. Didn't stop me writing novels, though. I think we might have a community effect on a small number of people. Hilarious hope a good one.

BILL MOYERS in NOW: But you keep writing.

DORIS LESSING in NOW: Altogether I do. I have to.