Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

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The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My Castaway this week is a writer. She published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in nineteen fifty, having brought the manuscript with her to London from Southern Rhodesia. It was there she'd been brought up, married, and divorced, and from where she was eventually exiled because of what the authorities called her subversive activities.

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Altogether she's published about thirty books, novels, essays, and short stories, and to some critics she is quite simply Britain's greatest living writer. She's embraced many themes. In nineteen sixty two the Golden Notebook was greeted, despite her protestations, as a battle cry for women's liberation. In'88, The Good Terrorist won the WH Smith Award and was shortlisted for the booker.

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Now seventy four, she lives alone in North London, and has, she says, about three books left in her. She is Doris Lessing. Um what are the three books? You've you've just finished a volume of autobiography. That's volume one.

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But I don't see how there can ever be a volume too, because

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Uh well, I just invite you to consider it. The number of people I have known who are all still alive. Now the

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The book I've just finished, Everyone is Dead, or they don't care. So you don't believe in dishing the dirt? No, I absolutely do not.

Doris Lessing1:39

So it is easy.

Doris Lessing1:41

Yeah.

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I suppose the other reason for writing your autobiography is that if you don't, other people will write your biography and as long as you're still around and able to write it yourself, it must be very annoying if they want to do that. Well, there is a young woman writing one now. I tried to stop her, but I've given up. I thought, okay, if you can't beat them, join them. So that's why I'm writing it. But also annoying if you're capable of doing it yourself, because however well researched, there are bound to be inaccuracies or presumptions, false presumptions, aren't there?

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I also think they mace up things quite a lot.

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I think writers are are pegs to hang people's fantasies on increasingly. Sometimes I think, Well, does it matter? And then other times I get quite exasperated, so

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I don't know if this autobiography is going to improve things or not because it's.

Doris Lessing2:24

I

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I don't think it's it's what people would expect, actually. It's a you know, I was a very raw young woman.

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out of the bush. I've now become sort of elderly and respectable.

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It isn't at all like that. I want to talk to you about a bit of the rawness in a minute, but let me also ask you about being being a set text, as it were, or being the subject of people's theses. What at university, what w what's your reaction to that when people write to you and say they're studying you for two years? Sorrow, because I think the world is is full of the most wonderful books and they ought to be reading all these wonderful books and not

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studying one book or one writer for two years, because, apart from anything else, it puts them off literature. But you don't believe, do you, that you should be given a list of books that you ought to read? I mean, you don't think it's a i it's a sin if you've never read Middlemarch, do you?

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No, but I do think people are going to miss a lot of fun if they don't.

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What about your music? Or are you as unprescriptive about that?

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Yes, I think I am. I find myself

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suddenly finding new discoveries and falling in love with something for a bit and then going on something else. So your eight records are a a bit of that. A few memories and a few new discoveries. Yes. What's the first one?

Doris Lessing3:44

Yeah, few memories and

Doris Lessing3:46

Yeah.

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The very first one is Cleolane looking for another pure love.

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And Clear Lane has uh given me such pleasure in my life. I think she's

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A truly delectable singer.

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I've never heard her sing anything that didn't give me pleasure, so I thought we would begin with her.

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Looking for another

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Looking for another pure love

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In Mala

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Never tears or sorrows came before me in my mind

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Cleolane and Lookin' for Another Pure Love. Is that sort of music you play at the top of your house?

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I play anything at the top of my heart. I I'm afraid a lot of it is background music. I um have it on when I'm walking up and down usually and thinking. Did you always intend to be a writer? No, you know, I when I say that I became a writer'cause I wasn't equipped to be anything else, people laugh, but it's the truth.

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No, I I left school when I was fourteen.

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I was totally untrained for anything.

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And um I when I started to write, I was married, I had a small child, and

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I was writing all the time.

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I sort of became a writer because I was writing, really.

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But it was obviously in you. You you were an avid reader as a child. Yes, and you read all the time. Out of boredom or? Oh, no.

Doris Lessing5:19

Yes, mate.

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I read because I adored it, and still do.

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So you became a writer because you were a writer, but you also ripped up your first two novels, didn't you?

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I ripped up a lot more than that, yes, I ripped them up.

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And uh lots of short stories. You've gone on ripping them up? Yes, I ripped one up last year. Deed Lawrence once said it was much better to rewrite something than to tinker with it. And I'm sure that's right, because you have a kind of um I don't know what, a kind of a wave length you get on to if things are going well. But wouldn't you, you know, if you decided that you really ought to begin again, why don't you just tuck it away somewhere, you never know, you might uh i if you've spent that long honing the sentences and walking up and down thinking about it, isn't it a terrible thing just to throw it away?

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You do have a pen or two afterwards within I think.

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all the theses that might be written about it, and I'm pleased.

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You don't want it to go into the general study of Doris Lessing.

Doris Lessing6:14

General study

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But when you first came to this country, as I said, as an adult, you were thirty years old, you brought the manuscript of The Grass is Singing with You it was published, it was an instant success. Were you surprised?

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I was so green then.

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that when the publishers rang up and said

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You're being reprinted. This happened about four times for publication. That's the grasses singing. And I didn't I thought, oh, well, yes, that's the whole had happened to everybody.

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and they thought I was extremely blase.

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I just didn't know it didn't happen to everyone. But y you believed, did you, that because you were saying you were a writer, ultimately you would be published,'cause that's what happened to writers.

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Yes. I find it very hard now to understand my state of mind. My confidence was amazing. I just knew I was going to be a writer and I'd be published. There's a phrase that has disappeared. It's called Someone is In for the Long Haul. It's a nineteen fifties phrase. I've always been in for the Long Haul.

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But why? I d I really don't understand.

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Let's have record number two.

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That is uh drum music.

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When I was a very little girl I used to lie in bed and listen to the drums being beaten in what was then called a compound.

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And while my mother played

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A the Moonlight Sonata.

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Or

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I don't know what Schubert or something.

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And for a long time I believed that these things belonged together. I remember the shock when I realized that

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African drum music and chopin were not part of the same phenomenon.

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Drum rhythms from the Ungora Rombe dance. So you would have been about five, I think, Doris Lessing, when you and your parents arrived in Rhodesia in the mid twenties. Can you remember that arrival?

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I remember quite a a bit about it, but the nicest memory is being in the ox wagon, which was more like the ones you see in American films, you know, the ones where they trek across the wagon tracks. Yes. There it was that kind of wagon.

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and it had sixteen oxen, and a driver,

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And it we took I cannot remember exactly probably four or five days to go from outside Salisbury to where we were going to farm. And I remember lying in the wagon watching the hurricane lamp swing back and forth and seeing the dark bush and the stars. And that was the beginning

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Oh.

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my love affair with Africa, because I remember very clearly how I felt.

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And and all the family's belongings were in that covered wagon? Well, no, there were not everything, because my mother went out expecting a different kind of life. That the piano.

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The silver, all the things proper for a conventional middle class life, had to come on.

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By um train. And and Liberty Prince. Yes, Liberty Prince. And um Persian rugs and visiting cards, I think. Visiting cards and very beautiful clothes.

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And and your nearest neighbours there were presumably miles away.

Doris Lessing9:44

Blairs

Presenter9:45

The very nearest was uh just over two miles, and then there was four miles and five miles and six miles. But why hadn't she realized, your mother, that life was going to be like that? Had had it been so written up and so advertised that somehow

Doris Lessing9:50

But what

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She had no concept of the reality.

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I think probably it was because Kenya was very glamorously presented then.

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You know, like white mischief, that kind of.

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Glamour.

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Not that she'd have approved of all those goes going on, of course, but

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M

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I I really don't understand it. But you thought it was going to be colonial and country clubs. Sort of more like what you'd experienced in Persia, really.

Doris Lessing10:19

But you can't.

Doris Lessing10:20

And country clubs.

Doris Lessing10:24

Really?

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And um why had your parents decided in the first place to go out there? What had induced them? My father wanted to be a farmer. And then when he went to the Empire Exhibition and they had these very misleading notices

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become rich in five years growing maize, he fell for it, I'm afraid, and his dreams were not fulfilled.

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put it mildly, they were not fulfilled. He had a very, very bad time, and so did my mother. My mother slowly went

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quite mad with exasperation, and I am so sorry for her now. She had two children who um disappointed her absolutely.

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and a husband who drifted off into illness.

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and she was a woman of immense capability and energy, and it was all frittering away on nothing.

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Did you disappoint her even then, as children? Very much so, yes. Why?

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Well my brother

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Who was her love?

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and her passion went off like all the little boys. He became a lean bush boy. He went he spent his time in the bush.

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very laconic and silent and

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interested only in animals and what he saw. He didn't care about her. Well I mean, little boys have to do this.

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And um

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I fought her all the time. I had to for survival because all her energy went into me.

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So uh now I I'm as I say I'm very sorry for her.

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that I was certainly

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I just had to get away, then.

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Let's have record number three.

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Yes, that is um

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I've got you under my skin, and I've chosen that out of the many I might have chosen.

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From uh all that.

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ravishing seductive music uh from that time.

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uh which we danced to throughout the war.

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I think of it as war music.

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And it's um

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Also the title of my first volume of my autobiography, I call it Under My Skin.

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I would love to have called it smoke gets in my eyes, but I couldn't make it fit, so

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Uh

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Uh

Speaker 312:26

I've got you under my skin.

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I've got you deep in the heart of me.

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So deep in my heart, you're really a part of me.

Speaker 312:49

I've got you under my skin.

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Bing Crosby and I've got you under my skin. Music that you dance to.

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I danced, it seems to me now, every night for about three or four years. Um

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It's very powerful music, you know, this kind of thing. Very sentimental. Always yearning and longing and wanting. That's what I how I now think of it.

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That's what I did for

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Did I say, three or four years, and then I stopped and became extremely severe and very political. What sort of age at all? What sort of age was that then? When when did politics twenty-three?

Doris Lessing13:24

Consider the answer.

Doris Lessing13:28

Pollard train.

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But but you must have been aware quite early on uh the way that you lived on the farm and presumably the land that your father had had belonged to the black man, and he was then used as the worker on the farm and paid a pittance. I mean, there must have been a point quite early on when you spotted the injustices going on.

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People always seem to think that around about the age nine I said, Ah, this is a profoundly unjust society.

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with a small minority.

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dominating a large black majority and it should come to an end.

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Units.

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Completely different thing.

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Knowing something is very wrong.

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but not knowing what is wrong and actually being able to describe it. It was years before I could describe it. What did you say when you started to speak out against it when you upset the natives, which is what you were accused of doing? Yes, that was Lord Mulvern, who was previously Doctor Huggins, who was the family doctor.

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and when I went to see him,

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In nineteen fifty six, he said to me, I'm not going to have you upsetting my natives, which He was Prime Minister then, was he? I've forgotten he was Prime Minister at that time. I've forgotten what he was. They were always changing functions. He was Prime Minister then, I think. But what did you say? What what sort of thing were you saying? I mean, how did you say that? I was saying by then I knew how to describe it.

Doris Lessing14:44

I would say

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I we were I and others were saying that the blacks were being

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exploited for their labor by

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white people and this was a rotten and

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Oppressive system, which it was, and it should stop. I mean, I was quite an accomplished orator, I have to tell you. I was quite.

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Good at this kind of thing. I'm now quite shocked at myself. Are you?

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But it wasn't something it did did any good apart from anything else.

Doris Lessing15:14

But it was a very good thing.

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But it resulted certainly ultimately in your being um exiled.

Doris Lessing15:22

Yes, I was

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Southern Rhodesia. It was only last year that I got permission to travel to South Africa when I liked. But that had quite a deep psychological effect on you, didn't it?

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Yes, it did. I was very um unhappy.

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in ways that I don't understand. I I don't understand at all. I used to cry in my sleep about being

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Shut out of this country where I'd been brought up. But it was quite irrational because I I didn't want to live there anyway, because I found it extremely boring. So it was obviously on some level I don't understand at all. Record number four.

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Now we have Barney Pigard.

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Playing

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with such moo. Tea for two. I I love

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the clarinet always, and I love this piece because it is so joyful and gay and exciting and to me it sums up so much of the pleasure I got for jazz. I was besotted with jazz for about again for three or four years and listened to very little else.

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BARNY BIGARD with Louis Armstrong and the All Stars playing T for Two.

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You'd come to this country, Doris Lessing, with a small sum and forty pounds in your pocket, but believing it, I think, to be the grail, the place where everybody who thought they were anybody should come. Everything was possible here. Were you disappointed?

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No, I wasn't disappointed. I had quite a tough time to begin with, because I didn't have much money. But then I didn't expect very much. It's

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That's the point.

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I knew it would be all right in the long run. But did it live up to your expectations in the short run? It was grey and miserable.

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and unpainted and full of war damage, and the food was atrocious.

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I don't think anybody now would believe how awful London was then, when I first arrived forty nine.

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But it uh it recovered in the fifties.

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But you were you were on your own. You'd had two disastrous marriages. You were a single parent. I mean, you obviously weren't very good at marriage. No.

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And I think I would have been good later on.

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I certainly wasn't then. I was very angeled. But you never married again?

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No.

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I had some very nice love of fats though.

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But never any desire to be married or?

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But you know a sort of

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Well, it never seemed appropriate. Um, let's put it like that. But you're also used to being on your own. I mean, as you said just now, you you'd left home at fourteen, hadn't you?

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Which is very early, very young. I like being by myself. I really enjoy being by myself.

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But you'd done that, I think, to escape from your mother, hadn't you?

Doris Lessing18:57

Yeah.

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When I left home and I wasn't being I went off to be a nursemaid. It's now called Au Paire because it's rather genteel. I was a nursemaid for a bit.

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And uh I did a lot of other jobs. I was a typist in legal firms. I was a chauffeur very briefly.

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and other things of that kind. A bit like Martha Quest, really. Yeah, exactly. But you know, when you're writing a novel, everything has to be tidied up and oversimplified.

Doris Lessing19:17

But yeah, it takes a nice career.

Presenter19:22

You can't put everything into a novel. But then people read your novels and think it was your life. That's when they're semi-autobiographical in that way.

Speaker 419:23

And

Speaker 419:24

But then

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Well, my autobiography, I have been extremely kind to the thesis writers. I've said, this bit is true, this bit isn't true.

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They worry you, the thesis, right?

Doris Lessing19:38

They they would

Doris Lessing19:39

Bang.

Presenter19:40

But talking about with mentioning about getting away from your mother, you also have said before now that you married very young, I think when you were twenty the first time. I mean, again, going back to Martha Quest, uh she wanted to get married again because her mother was so possessive. Is that what you felt, that you you the only way you could be your own person would be to establish yourself under another roof in a permanent sort of fashion?

Presenter20:02

Yes, but you know, I don't think that's exactly rare. I would say at least half the young women get married for that reason. But but

Doris Lessing20:08

Yeah.

Speaker 420:08

Reason

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Perhaps not half the young women who get married have such suffocating mothers as as Martha Quest's, for example. I mean, wa was your mother that bad wanting the whole children.

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You know she was a very intelligent woman, and I still don't understand why it was she didn't see this, because she herself was a very independent woman.

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Her attitude was, I have sacrificed myself for my children, which no woman now would be unsophisticated enough to say.

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And therefore

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The unspoken thing was, Therefore you ought to let me run your life for you because you're both so feckless.

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Actually, we were both rather competent.

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But has and has that therefore changed your attitude to motherhood? Do you think you are a very different you must have been, as a result of that, a very different sort of mother from your own mother? Yes, but you know, if you are a a very lax and the word is permissive mother, you're likely to get accused later on by your offspring for not having had more discipline.

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You can't win. I don't think you can win. Do you think you've been a good mother?

Doris Lessing21:09

She can't win.

Doris Lessing21:10

Hey.

Speaker 421:11

Okay.

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In some ways, yes, but not really, no. I'm not

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I'm no, this is too complicated, you know, this, um, what makes a good mother and what doesn't make a good mother.

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Next piece of music.

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This is Bach. It's the concerto in D major for three violins, which I only recently discovered in a music shop, and I fell instantly in love with it.

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And I've been playing it ever since.

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Part of Basque Concerto in D major for three violins, arranged by Christopher Hogwood for the Academy of Ancient Music.

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The Golden Notebook, which you published in 1962, was immediately appropriated by the women's movement, wasn't it? It was interpreted as the the trumpet call for women's lib.

Doris Lessing23:00

An edges

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That is now a myth, an actual fact.

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It was um received very sourly, both here and in the States.

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And it was only later the women's movement

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caught up with it. Some of the most bitchy reviews I got about the Golden Oak Book were written by women.

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and some of the most generous by men, interestingly. But ultimately it's it's believed to have been about the sex war, isn't it? And and but you've always said that it well, it it wasn't. Well, what can I say? You see, I thought

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I can truly say when I wrote it, it never crossed my mind that it was about this subject. I thought I was writing about the folly

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of dividing things off into

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You know, male, female, black, white, old, young, and so on and so on. This is what I thought I was writing about. But quite clearly I wasn't because it has become a part of the women's movement. But it was also about politics. I mean, the women in it were politically active. It was also about mental illness, wasn't it? Didn't you once try to invoke

Doris Lessing23:58

Yeah, so

Presenter24:04

Madness in yourself.

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Yes, I didn't only try, I did with great efficiency. How did you do? Well

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It so happened that in my house at that time was a girl who was in fact quite crazy because she was in love and hadn't eaten or eaten or slept. It was obvious to me she was crazy because she hadn't eaten or slept. So I thought, let's try it. And I tried it, and it was quite the most terrifying experience of my life, because, you know, rather light heartedly I said, Right, let's do this.

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and I invoked what I call the

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the uh self-hater, this figure which people

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who are mad are persecuted by this hammering voice that you are terrible, horrible.

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And not fit to live, and all this kind of thing, which is obviously a culturally.

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created figure which is in you, but it's very easy to imagine that it's outside of you. How long did it take to to to come in there for about three days of not eating and not sleeping.

Presenter25:02

But how did you come back from the 2008?

Doris Lessing25:04

Uh

Speaker 425:04

Oh, well that

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Frightening. At a certain point I had to go back to ordinary life, and I said, Right, enough of this.

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And I go back well, it took me a good three weeks to become normal, and that was a terrifying bit.

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One always comes back to asking about the Golden Notebook. Do you do you think it's the best book? A lot of people say it is, that you that you've ever written?

Presenter25:25

I personally don't think so. I think the Four Gate City is better, for example, and I think, um

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A book that has never ever succeeded, which is Briefing for Descent into Hell, is probably one of my best.

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Do you ever reread yourself?

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Yes, I reread briefing recently and I thought, well, that wasn't so bad.

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Um

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Chiefly because, yet again, I've I was told that the Golden Notebook was the best thing I ever wrote. I don't think it is.

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Next record.

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It mozzaretz like a menza de tito. It was only a month ago or less.

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I was in um Mexico for the British Council because I do think it's the British Council.

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And um

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When I was in Mexico City there's th there there was um

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a little festival about four hours hours' drive south.

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And there I found the most exquisite little town. It had hundreds of little silver mines, and was one of the sources of Spanish wealth. What I found was an opera house,

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A very European opera house, and there was this opera, which is not exactly what I expected. And you probably know the curtain goes up on three young women, two in drag, Mozart, Mozart costume. But it's really an opera about a Roman emperor who somewhat improbably forgives his nearest and dearest for wanting to murder him.

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And while this was going on in the Opera House outside in this beautiful town, all the descendants of the people who worked in the silver mines were living it up and having a whale of a time. And this appealed to my sense of the improbable.

Presenter27:59

Sylvia McNair singing an aria from the second act of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito, with the English Baroque soloists conducted by John Elliott Gardner.

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You went back to um southern Rhodesia, to Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing, in the early eighties. Your ban had been lifted, Mugabe was in power. Was it an emotional return for you?

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Yes, it was very emotional.

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But what was very upsetting was that I went back expecting to walk into the bush and to hear it.

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full of the birds I heard when I was

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girl or even when I left.

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and the animals and

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They were not there. And that

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It was heartbreaking.

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And politically?

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Well, they have created a um very corrupt ruling class in the space of ten years.

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A lot of extremely exuberant and unashamed parrots they are.

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What surprises me now was that we didn't expect it. Why should they behave differently from everyone else? I mean, there's always a when there's a civil war, there's always this this happens. And what about the white population now? Oh well, they are

Doris Lessing29:07

Oh well.

Presenter29:10

Many of them have left.

Presenter29:12

and good written to many of them. Some of them should leave because they're incapable of changing. It's uh

Presenter29:19

Tragic. You know, these people are absolutely inflexible.

Presenter29:23

Others have changed and uh

Presenter29:27

of being very useful.

Presenter29:29

But, you know

Presenter29:30

It's a tragedy that they simply cannot.

Presenter29:33

let themselves behave in a decent way, most of them. It's um What do you mean? They get up

Presenter29:39

They simply will not allow themselves to treat Africans as human beings. They can't do it.

Presenter29:44

Most of them.

Presenter29:46

So are you at root uh pessimistic about the future of Zimbabwe?

Presenter29:53

They're an extraordinarily lively and inventive and exuberant lot. You've only got to be there for a short time. You see how

Presenter30:02

I can't see themsel see them being defeated by this actually. I think they'll probably get it together. And I think probably South Africa will too. That doesn't look like it at the moment.

Presenter30:12

Record number seven.

Presenter30:14

Here we have uh Philip Blas's opera A Connachten.

Presenter30:20

And I heard it because I wrote an opera with him later called A Making of the Representative for Planet Eight with Philip Glass, which is at the E and O.

Presenter30:29

But that has not been

Presenter30:30

Recorded yet.

Presenter30:32

So I've chosen this hymn too often because I think it's a very beautiful piece of music.

Speaker 430:39

Just the

Speaker 430:49

Oh God, who is all

Speaker 431:06

Uh

Presenter31:37

Hymn to Arten from Philip Glass's opera Achnarten sung by Paul Eswood with the Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davis.

Presenter31:46

You work, Doris Lessing, as you were saying, at the top of your very tall house in North London. We keep saying it's very tall, because apparently there's this great view across the whole of London towards the hills of Kent, isn't there? Yes. On a clear day you can see right across London.

Presenter31:59

Uh they're all these London gardens, these long thin gardens, they're full of cats and birds and things, they're they're wonderful in the summer.

Presenter32:07

And there's a Victorian reservoir.

Presenter32:10

You know, the Victorians built their reservoirs underground, surrounded by enormous trees, and might just as well be in the country.

Speaker 432:16

Hmm.

Presenter32:16

It's the nearest you get to those big African views. It's wonderful up there. And it's solitude, and that's what you like, isn't it? Yes, I do.

Doris Lessing32:22

Yeah.

Speaker 432:22

July

Presenter32:24

I very much like being by myself.

Doris Lessing32:24

I know you might

Presenter32:26

Peace and quiet. Do you work at night or in the early hours?

Presenter32:30

I like best to work in the mornings, from about eight to twelve, that's my best time.

Presenter32:36

In the late afternoon it's sometimes good.

Presenter32:39

But you need time and space, obviously, to think and to walk up and down, as you say. I I ask you all of this'cause it it does sound as if you you know, you might be the perfect castaway,'cause you're also very practical, aren't you? You're a good customer.

Presenter32:52

I think I would rather enjoy being a castaway. Would you? Yes. And you you don't

Presenter32:57

Either need security, do you? Isn't that? No. Mind you, I would try and escape a bit, I think. Would you? It's a question of principle.

Presenter33:06

But how? Ah well that's you'll see. When I ask for my luxury, I have to discuss it, whether it's permissible. Well, not if it's practical, it will not be. But you are, you are. I mean, just to press the point of saying, you are the perfect castaway, aren't you? I mean, you it would be exactly what you want. It's exactly what you like, a desert island, isn't it? Yes, I would. I would I'd enjoy it.

Presenter33:28

Last record.

Presenter33:31

This is a fairly recent passion of mine. I again I found this in a record shop by chance.

Presenter33:37

It is um

Presenter33:39

Truver music, it's the

Presenter33:41

Very ancient, it's I think it's 13th century, and this is a song.

Presenter33:46

by a young man. It it's sung by a count of ten, I think.

Presenter33:50

um, who is a prisoner of the Saracens, and he's dreaming.

Presenter33:54

of his love and I thought this would be perfect music.

Presenter33:57

On a desert island.

Speaker 434:00

But suffering drills.

Speaker 434:06

Can I see or come like you?

Speaker 434:14

Sasha and me?

Speaker 434:21

Ma for you.

Doris Lessing34:21

For you

Speaker 434:23

Who are

Speaker 434:27

Uh

Speaker 434:33

The recall some more murku.

Speaker 434:40

Lapland

Presenter34:52

Chanteret pour moncourage, a thirteenth century song from northern France sung by Richard Levitt with the early music quartet conducted by Thomas Binkley.

Presenter35:02

All the way from T for Two to the thirteenth century, it's a pretty eclectic bunch of eighth this. Were were you surprised when you got it down to your final eight?

Presenter35:11

I was rather. But you know that it's extremely hard to choose eight, isn't it? But if you could only take one of them, which one would you choose? I think I would choose the last one. I think it's most haunting music, this.

Presenter35:23

These trivials

Presenter35:25

And what about your book?

Presenter35:26

Well, I would take a thousand and one nights, because it's very long.

Presenter35:31

And it has lots of ideas in it for escape actually. It's full of tricks and escapes.

Presenter35:37

And I love it.

Presenter35:39

And the luxury. This is where we have to negotiate. Could I have a magic carpet?

Doris Lessing35:40

This is

Presenter35:44

Oh. Because I could use it for island hopping. I know it would not be right to try and escape on it, but I could island hop perhaps a little. But you'd stick in the area, would you? Yes. Oh, that's all right. That'll be all right. Yes, I think you can have a magic covet. I'll probably get into trouble, but I say you can have one. Thank you. Doris Lessing, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your visit island issues. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Doris Lessing35:53

Yes.

Doris Lessing35:56

Good.

Doris Lessing35:58

It can happen.

Doris Lessing36:13

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.