The Grass Is Singing

The Grass is Singing Doris Lessing, broadcast September 2001 James Naughtie: The Grass is Singing was written quite a long time ago in the 40s, over four or five years and it was Doris Lessing's first novel - the beginning of a great literary career.

The Grass is Singing is set in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia then of course, and it captures the quality of Doris Lessing's early life in Africa. The book starts with the announcement of a murder. Mary Turner has been killed, according to the paper, by her houseboy who was thought to be in search of valuables, so the community unfolds before our eyes. The Turners kept themselves to themselves, we learn about the place where she lived and then we go back to her life as a flashback. She grew up in a South Africa where her life was bound to be constrained. Her marriage to Dick Turner is conventional 'he might have been anybody', they had very little in common. She even tries at one point to run away. She has mental difficulties. But she develops a very interesting and absorbing relationship with the black house boy, Moses. There's sexual attraction, but such a thing as consummation is unimaginable in her society. He's going to be sent away, but tragedy intervenes. On the Turner's last day on the farm she rushes onto the veranda, Moses is there, he stabs her and we're back to where we started with Mary's death. It's a story of course about Southern Africa and the chasm between the races and Doris Lessing has said about racism: 'Colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination, it prevents us from seeing ourselves and every creature that breathes under the sun.'

Doris Lessing, I must ask the obvious question first: It must been strange for you to go back to a book you wrote 50 years ago.

Doris Lessing: What you do, is you simply go back into that person you were when you wrote it. You swallow up all that time and go back.

JN: What's the difference between the person then and the person now?

DL: That's a good question. What I'm amazed at is I was 25 when I wrote that book and I would have thought it was an older person's book. 25 is quite young. This is quite a mature book for a young woman, and a very green one, let me tell you. So, I'm quite amazed that I knew all that about human nature....[As for characters I like] I liked Dick Turner [Mary's husband] who I was very sorry for.... [Mary] hated nature in any form, loathed sex and she should never have been anywhere in the bush. Her problem was that she couldn't stand any natural process. So how can this be a marriage? It wasn't a marriage... [I wasn't trying to change things]. I never believed in trying to change things. I just wanted to write my first novel, because I was known by friends as a writer, and all I'd written was some short stories and it was time I wrote a novel. I had these various ideas and this one struck me very powerfully around then. I came on this little cutting which is in the book and it reminded me of something. You must imagine these farms scattered over a big area, they hardly ever met, these farmers and their wives and when they did, they sat and talked and there was a little girl listening, namely me, about 9 or 10, listening to every word. And one of the things they talked about one afternoon was that there was a new arrival on the next farm... the farmer's wife who allowed the 'cook boy', I'm using the language of that time, to button up her dress from the back and to brush her hair. There is no way of conveying how many taboos she was breaking... it was a terrible thing she was doing.

JN: But you talk of it as if you still feel the pin-prick of excitement of a young child hearing the unmentionable spoken of by the grown-ups

DL: I didn't understand why they were so upset. I didn't know of this taboo. There was a lot of sexual goings on between white men and black women, but the idea that a white woman would have sexual relations with a black man was absolutely unthinkable then. So that was why this woman Mary's relationship with Moses was so dangerous.

JN:What were her feelings about Moses, do you think?

DL: A very powerful un-admitted attraction and a hatred and fear which is what has been bread into her. This is a conventional girl, and there she was, in this farm dependent on this man, so no wonder she went crazy. She was a woman who is unable to handle life, basically. And I knew someone like this, who I did use in this book, whose every instinct was to shrink away from everything. The idea of handling a child! Can you imagine Mary Turner with a child? It's enough to make you shudder...

JN: The structure of the book is such that we read the report of her murder, we then go back to her early life we follow her through, we know that it's going to end in disaster impending doom is written into it, so we're engaged in that process from the first page...you know you're being taken back on this journey to everything that made this moment happen.

DL: It looks very tidy and willed now, but this book was two thirds longer than it actually is. This was a sub-plot. I had a great satirical book about the farm assistant. There's a familiar figure then; the white young man arrives in this very racial society, totally shocked and does one of two things: they leave if they can very fast, and many of them did or if they stayed they conformed and turned much worse than the locals, this was another cliché - he'd have to swallow what he hated and turn himself into his own opposite. But I thought I'd have one come out and neither leave nor conform. And I thought it would be a very funny book, which it could be, but unfortunately I didn't have the skills then to write it... so I had this great two thirds of this failed satirical book and I had a little book in the middle. At one point I just threw away the two thirds and there was the book. JN:Because what you've produced is a very sad book. You must feel a terrible sense of poignancy about that part of Africa

DL: Yes of course I do and all the people like me feel terrible about it. But when we were visualising the liberation of whatever part of Africa it was we always visualise people, nice liberals…why were we so stupid... I am now absolutely amazed that we had any such ideas. Why should these people be different from any other possessors of power, they were like the Tudors, ruthless and grasping somewhat less talented. It's a very great indictment of people like us who were so very very woolly-minded as I see it. You lucky people will never have any idea of how these people were talked at, they were shouted at, nagged at… and it's still going on now. So Moses would have been talked to as you wouldn't talk to a dog, any servant would have been, so for him to force her to talk to him wiht some sort of decency is a kind of a triumph.