其中談司湯達爾很精彩
談她與PHILIP GLASS 合作歌劇 和西方樂評界之惡劣等等
都很有見解
Time Bites: Views & Reviews
- 作者：Lessing, Doris May
- 出版社：Harpercollins
- 出版日期：2006年12月01日
- Doris Lessing, Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature Toward the end of his long life, Goethe said that he had only just learned how to read. In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing’s essays -- never before published in book form -- we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has herself learned, over the course of a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, to read the world differently. From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays span an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing’s clear-eyed vision and clearly expressed prose. This is a book about books and writers -- Stendhal and Muriel Spark, Pride and Prejudice, de Beauvoir and Ecclesiastes, Virginia Woolf -- but in its breadth and precision, Time Bites is also a map of the human spirit, of our hopes, fears, and basic needs; and on a more personal level, a map of the wonderful, searching mind of one of our greatest living writers.
Doris Lessing: interview
From African revolutionary to reluctant darling of the London establishment, author Doris Lessing has travelled a long way in her 88 years. Time Out finds the lauded author on feisty form, discussing mescaline, life as a feminist icon in China and why her latest novel will be her last -
'This governent's got the strangest attitude to organisations trying to help: I hate it!' says Lessing © Rob Greig -
Doris Lessing’s strangest sexual encounter was with theatre critic
Kenneth Tynan. ‘We knew each other off and on for years, and there was
never a spark of sexual feeling between us,’ she declares. ‘But one time
I had to stay the night with him because it was late. I wasn’t
expecting anything but a nice chat. I went to get ready for bed and when
I came back all these whips had appeared. What was really strange was
that he never said anything like, “Oh Doris, would you like a little
whipping?” And I never said, “Ken, what are all these whips for?” So we
chatted away about politics, went to sleep, then, in the morning, in
comes his secretary to tidy away the whips. It was so funny.’
I meet her at her West Hampstead home on a warm February afternoon, just two weeks after she has received the Nobel Prize for literature in London – the announcement of which she famously greeted with the words ‘I couldn’t care less’. Osteoporosis and its attendant back problems means that moving around isn’t easy, so it’s almost as much an act of defiance as a hospitable gesture when she insists on making tea for myself and the photographer in her tiny and characterfully cluttered kitchen. An army of olive oil bottles and jam jars has commandeered a third of a round table , while in the opposite corner of the room there’s a smaller invasion of cat-bowls.
Lessing is as indulgent towards cats as she is hostile towards sacred cows. Her post-Nobel declaration to Spanish paper El País that ‘September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible,’ stirred up a predictable furore. Then, five days before this interview, she took a swipe at racism in the US by telling a Swedish newspaper her fears that Barack Obama would be assassinated were he to be elected. Today her anger is aimed at the Labour government; she’s furious because it has imposed funding cuts on Book Aid International (BAI), an organisation which promotes literacy in developing countries by exporting secondhand books. In her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, her description of young black Zimbabweans teaching themselves to read off the back of jam jars in a country where it now costs several years’ wages to buy a paperback prompted Harper Collins to donate 10,000 books to schools in Zimbabwe. But funding to BAI has been cut. ‘This government’s got the strangest attitude to organisations trying to help: I hate it!’ she rails.
Although Lessing was born in Persia, it was famously Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, that shaped her. Her parents – Alfred, an amputee World War I veteran and Emily Maude, a nurse – moved to Africa to start up a farm when she was five. The richness of the landscape erupts into her early prose, yet despite its beauty – ‘if they got a government that had any nous, that country could be a bloody paradise’ – the social restrictions provoked her into early rebellion. When she left for London in 1949 she was twice divorced, had left behind two children with her first marriage (she once potently described the ‘Himalayas of tedium’ of young motherhood), had acquired a third child after marrying the German Communist Gottfried Lessing as ‘my revolutionary duty’, and was known as a communist and a lover of blacks.
After her first marriage, Lessing entered a circle of progressive intellectuals and communists. She thrived in this environment for, despite lacking a university education, she had a well-developed, forensic intelligence, and even after leaving the Communist Party in 1956 declared: ‘There is no group of people or type of intellectual I have met outside the [Communist] Party which isn’t ill-informed, frivolous and parochial, compared with certain types of intellectual inside the Party.’ Does she still believe that? ‘Yes, I do. There was a certain morality that went with being a communist.’ This could have its blackly funny sides: she recalls her friend, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, on a cultural delegation to Moscow when they were still unaware of Stalin’s mass murders ‘trying to get the Russians to accept that language is very dangerous. Can you imagine her – with her heavy Oxford accent – telling these crooks they had to be careful with the way they used their words?’
Books had helped shape her preconceptions of London, and when she arrived, some of it matched her expectations. ‘All the dock area was very Dickens and small parts of it still are. You know: rotting poles in the water, trailing ropes and little alleys where you can imagine appalling events.’ She arrived before the Clean Air Act of 1956, so was also privy to Dickensian fogs. ‘I remember going to the opera and Covent Garden was filled with that yellow smog. You could hardly see the stage. Yet there was [Mozart’s] Queen of the Night singing up there in the fog; it was the most magical thing I had ever seen. I sent a description to the New Statesman and was rebuked for finding pleasure in a fog that had also killed several people.’
Lessing has proved both more versatile and prolific than Dickens – today she has almost 60 works to her name, including poetry, science-fiction, drama, and opera – yet when she arrived here she had only written one novel, ‘The Grass is Singing’. Its enthusiastic reception was enough to propel her into London’s inner circle of writers and intellectuals. The roll-call of those she has either dealt with or befriended since reads like an essential guide to twentieth-century western culture: John Berger, Henry Kissinger, John Osborne, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell and Kenneth Tynan. Dramatist Arnold Wesker, still a friend, remembers her from the late ’50s as ‘stunningly beautiful; like everyone else, I was captivated by her. Part of her attraction was, of course, that she was about 15 years older and a prize-winning novelist, and I, a novice to literary life, could learn from her. She was a good cook and gave wonderfully cosy dinner parties where we picked food from an assortment of plates and sat cross-legged eating it. She was like the best of her characters: concerned about friends, hugely intelligent, a no-nonsense person. She was impatient with humbug and pretentiousness. If you were guilty of neither of these you were welcomed like family.’
Lessing’s first award was the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1954; since then she’s been shortlisted for the Man Booker five times, and won the WH Smith Literary Award and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize, among others. But, although that first success brought much needed money, it also delivered an emotional shock. Her lover at the time – a Czech psychiatrist she calles ‘Jack’ in her autobiography – responded to her news with the words ‘that’s it, that’s the end’.
‘It’s an absolutely male, instinctive response,’ she declares. ‘I was desperately hurt. I have a feeling it wouldn’t be that different now. He was the great love of my life and it did come to an end after that, even if not immediately.’
Their love affair is one of the many fictionalised strands in ‘The Golden Notebook’ (1962). Despite the success of such later works as ‘Briefing For A Descent into Hell’, ‘The Good Terrorist’ and her autobiographies, that remains her most celebrated. She has lashed out at attempts to frame her as a feminist icon because of it, but today concedes ‘a lot of tension went into that book; that’s why it keeps popping up. It’s just been reissued in China. What the hell they do with it there I don’t know!’ A pertinent comment on a book that traces a woman’s often sceptical analysis of communism as well as her fight for intellectual and sexual freedom.
Lessing, who travelled to China in the ’80s, is characteristically as interested in the country’s own literature as in its embracing of her writing. Her admiration for Xiaolu Guo, author of ‘A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers’, also shows how the relentlessly unclubbable Lessing is drawn to exiles: she has spent much time with them in London, and at one stage her home became a welcoming point for Africans escaping from countries that would later take them back as leaders. Today she talks about a prominent Zimbabwean businessman who turned down a position in Mugabe’s government and now lives in council accommodation in London (‘I’m not going to say where; the Mugabe regime has long fingers’). Back in the ’50s those she entertained included Kenneth Kaunda, the founding president of Zambia. One exile told her he had been warned about her by the British secret services; they asserted that she was involved in dangerous conspiracies with Arabs (‘That was such a joke – I wasn’t!’). She was also classed a ‘prohibited immigrant’ in Rhodesia, so despite now being one of literature’s most respected figures, she knows all about being considered a political undesirable.
It’s much to her delight, I’m sure, that ‘respectable’ is a word that dissolves when it comes too close into contact with Lessing. ‘Unpredictable’ is more appropriate for the woman who has had numerous lovers; dabbled in mescaline (‘I only took it once: my friend Naomi Mitchison had a very bad trip where for a year it looked as if people’s heads were rolling off their shoulders’); and abandoned atheism for a spiritual exploration that eventually led her to Sufism. Now this most prolific and joyously unpredictable of writers has written the novel she claims will be her last. ‘Alfred & Emily’ looks at how life might have turned out for her parents had it not been for World War I.
How does she think her own children might have wanted her life to be different? (John, the eldest, died of a heart attack in 1992 but Jean still lives in Africa and her younger son, Peter, lives with Lessing, and because of illness, is cared for by her.) She’s already remarked that she had to buy her house because Peter wanted stability and says the other two would ‘probably keep me at home, like a good mother’. She smiles, and gazes reflectively through the French windows, which open on to a postage stamp-sized roof terrace, fringed with lilac trees from the garden. ‘Look,’ she exclaims quietly, ‘the sun is going.’
‘Alfred & Emily’ will be published by Harper Collins on May 5 at £16.99.
《特別的貓》
作者：多麗斯 萊辛
原文作者：Doris Lessing
譯者：彭倩文
出版社：時報出版
出版日期：2006年12月14日
英 國文學大師多麗斯 萊辛: 萊辛有極度具象、栩栩如生的想像以及冷靜精確的觀察，她筆下的貓，是個生命感十足的世界。農場中的貓和城市中的貓有何不同？萊辛非洲農場的童年，有猛禽鷹 隼、雞群和毒蛇，貓群介於其間扮演什麼角色？大自然的法則如何運作？萊辛三歲時的小貓，為何會讓她整整過了25年之後，生活中才再度有貓容身的空間？在城 市中貓的生存又是怎麼一回事？城市不適合養貓？
作者簡介
多麗斯．萊辛（Doris Lessing，1919－）
英國現當代最重要的作家之一。
生於波斯（今伊朗），父母皆為英國人，5歲時隨家人遷往南非羅德西亞（今辛巴威）。家人原希望在南非務農致富，不過事與願違，她母親原期待著維多利亞式禮儀 有據的文化生活，將她送到天主教女子學校，她在非洲的野性中成長，不適應嚴格管教，14歲便輟學，之後不再接受正式教育，博覽群書充實自己。
1949年萊辛攜帶第一部小說手稿初回英國。這部《青草在歌唱》是她的處女作，1950 年在英國出版，一舉成功，並同時在美國及十個歐洲國家出版發行。她的國際聲譽由此建立，創作一發而不可收。
萊辛有十數部長篇小說，代表作有五卷本的《暴力的孩子》系列、負盛名的《金色筆記》、《黑暗來臨前的夏季》、《倖存者的回憶錄》等；短篇小說集《五》曾 獲得毛姆文學獎。1981 年獲奧地利的歐洲文學國家獎，1982 年獲得德意志莎士比亞文學獎，這七十多則短篇多收入了《第十九號房間》及《傑克．奧尼爾的誘惑》中。五卷本的小說系列《南船老人屋》的第一部《希卡斯塔》 於 1979 年出版。長篇小說《好恐怖主義者》獲得 1985 年的W．H．史密斯文學獎。
譯者簡介
彭倩文
淡江中文系畢業，紐約市立大學戲劇研究所肄業。現為專職翻譯。譯有《貓語錄》、《漢娜的女兒》、《愛上月亮的男人》、《辛德勒的名單》（以上四書時報出 版）、《別跟山過不去》、《黑獄來的陌生人》、《歐洲在發酵》、《法斯賓達的世界》、《搖滾樂社會學》、《哈利波特》系列、《納尼亞傳奇》系列、《法國中尉的女人》等。
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