The names of some writers invariably arise in interview situations; Chekhov appears to have become compulsory, as are Dickens, Tolstoy, Henry James, Joyce and, among the still living, Doris Lessing. Long read by women, now widely read by men, she has been described as a prophet, a feminist icon, a commentator, a radical polemicist, a truth teller.
Now 80, she sits on a low couch in her West Hampstead living room, and says: "I'm not a prophet or an icon." Once her initial shyness wears off, with it goes the resigned shrug which says "yet another interview, let's get it over with". Instead, Lessing, one of the most formidable writers of conscience - in the sense that she has encouraged readers to think, to feel, to question - soon proves a lively, engaging, girlish talker who appears to have read everything yet is keen to read more.
"I never set out to give messages. I have always told stories and a story can come from anything, something that happened, something you heard. The essence of literature is story," she says. Her fiction has been based on truth as she has seen and experienced it and above all, lived it. Few writers have written about life with such intensity and candour. Her emotional energy alone has set her apart. With a new book just published, Ben, in the World, the sequel to one of her most remarkable novels, The Fifth Child (1988), Lessing has completed yet another work and as ever is reading, reading, reading. "There are so many books to read. I have read for enjoyment all my life."
Reading made her a writer. Memories of her childhood in southern Rhodesia where she was brought at five after her parents left Persia (now Iran) are dominated by the long days she spent in her bedroom reading, escaping from the unhappiness of an unloved child angry with her self and her parents. Her tragic relationship with her mother seems a great grief to her, while her examination of it is remarkable. Even at her most detached, Lessing is unusually human.
She gives the impression of a person preoccupied by books, ideas, experience, the practicalities of food and the reality of living among people. Her accent sounds like a modified version of Queen Elizabeth - old-style BBC but with a hint of something else. There is no clutter, either mental or physical. Objects in general do not concern her.
Internationally famous with a huge body of published work, most of it in print, Lessing has never become the writer-as-public-figure, despite having been a communist for a time and having always been opinionated and blunt to the point of recklessness. She is engaged in that she thinks and remains aware. Nor does she exist in a self-contained universe in which the books come tumbling out.
Even after 50 years as a writer, most of it famous, much of it revered, she leaves no doubt about her ability to retreat into a private place where a book takes shape from an idea. She usually writes two drafts and when she refers to typing, she says: "Don't forget one of my jobs was as a typist."
Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. The story of the complex relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant which ends in violence, it was well reviewed. The young Lessing in London was a beautiful exotic from Africa who looked English. She was also a single mother, already a career writer. Short stories followed as did more, novels, non-fiction and even a libretto with Philip Glass of her The Making of the Representative for Planet 8.
In her house, books are the furniture. Close together are copies of Nicholas Boyle's biography of Goethe, and of Malcolm Bradbury's new novel, To the Hermitage, "It's very funny," she says of the Bradbury book. "I'm not finished it yet. I didn't know anything about Diderot, did you? It seems he's the one we should find out about." A paperback of the Letters of Jean Rhys 1931-1966 is lying on the floor. Lessing asks have I read them. "But you must; they're very interesting."
Writers ranging from Simon Schama to Jose Saramago interest her. She gives me a copy of Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Short titled A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, it won an international science prize and asks the same question Lessing would: why did history unfold so differently on different continents?
She is not uncritical of her work, but sees it as stages in the development of her understanding. "If you are the kind of writer I am - that is, one who uses the process of writing to find out what you think, and even who you are - then it is surely dishonest to kick down the step-ladder you came up by, but the fact is, I would be happy if some of the stories I wrote disappeared."
Her fiction draws partly from her life, partly from observation. There is no clear dividing line. She is Martha Quest from the Children of Violence quintet, and she is not. She is Anna Wulf, the young novelist of The Golden Notebook (1962), and she is not. Asking Lessing about her life is redundant; she has chronicled it herself in compelling volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997). "It's all in the books," she says in reply to questions. Those books were undertaken partly because she became aware of five biographies pending.
Considering the amount she has written, it must be curious for her to have received so much praise for autobiographies published so late in her life. Their tone is true to Lessing herself. The fact that the second volume takes the story only up to 1962 leaves the reader feeling Lessing set out to tell of the most important years in terms of history as much as her own life.
"I was part of an extraordinary time, the end of the British Empire in Africa, and the bit I was involved with was the occupation of a country that lasted exactly 90 years." "Yes I was one of a generation brought up on World War I and then as much formed by World War II." She is also an outsider, having come to England at 30, a country she had never been to but one to which she belonged as the child of English parents. Lessing, who lost her British citizenship on her first marriage, claimed it back at the time of her second divorce.
Then there is the question of whether she is an English or an African writer. Again, she is both and neither. The outsider question interests her. "English writing is full of outsiders," she says, mentioning Kazuo Ishiguro, who began his career writing as an English writer "and then it was pointed out to him, `look you're Japanese, why don't you write about that'."
Her fiction has been set in Africa and contemporary Britain while there is also a realm of "inner space" as explored in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) with their themes of mental breakdown paralleled by that of society. Much of it can be read as a social and to some extent political history of our century.
