The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ confessional? Anyway, since I’ve written it, I’m going to send it in.’ I told her she was mad. I said: ‘Supposing the British Communist Party ever gets into power, that document will be in the files, and if they want evidence to hang you, they’ve got it—thousands of times over.’ She gave me her small, almost sour smile—the smile she uses when I say things like this. Molly is not an innocent communist. She said: ‘You’re very cynical.’ I said: ‘You know it’s the truth. Or could be.’ She said: ‘If you think in that way, why are you talking of joining the Party?’ I said: ‘Why do you stay in it, when you think in that way too?’ She smiled again, the sourness gone, ironically, and nodded. Sat a while, thinking and smoking. ‘It’s all very odd, Anna, isn’t it?’ And in the morning she said: ‘I took your advice, I tore it up.’

      On the same day I had a telephone call from Comrade John saying that he had heard I was joining the Party, and that ‘Comrade Bill’—responsible for culture—would like to interview me. ‘You don’t have to see him of course, if you don’t feel like it,’ said John hastily, ‘but he said he would be interested to meet the first intellectual prepared to join the Party since the cold war started.’ The sardonic quality of this appealed to me and I said I’d see Comrade Bill. This although I had not, in fact, finally decided to join. One reason not to, that I hate joining anything, which seems to me contemptible. The second reason, that my attitudes towards communism are such that I won’t be able to say anything I believe to be true to any comrade I know, is surely decisive? It seems not, however, for in spite of the fact that I’ve been telling myself for months I couldn’t possibly join an organization that seems to me dishonest, I’ve caught myself over and over again on the verge of the decision to join. And always at the same moments—there are two of them. The first, whenever I meet, for some reason, writers, publishers, etc.—the literary world. It is a world so prissy, maiden-auntish; so class-bound; or, if it’s the commercial side, so blatant, that any contact with it sets me thinking of joining the Party. The other moment is when I see Molly, just rushing off to organize something, full of life and enthusiasm, or when I come up the stairs, and I hear voices from the kitchen—I go in. The atmosphere of friendliness, of people working for a common end. But that’s not enough. I’ll see their Comrade Bill tomorrow and tell him that I’m by temperament, ‘A fellow-traveller,’ and I’ll stay outside.

      The next day.

      Interview at King Street, a warren of little offices behind a facade of iron-protected glass. Had not really noticed the place before though I’ve been past it often enough. The protected glass gave me two feelings—one of fear; the world of violence. The other, a feeling of protectiveness—the need to protect an organization that people throw stones at. I went up the narrow stairs thinking of the first feeling: how many people have joined the British CP because, in England, it is difficult to remember the realities of power, of violence; the CP represents to them the realities of naked power that are cloaked in England itself? Comrade Bill turned out to be a very young man, Jewish, spectacled, intelligent, working-class. His attitude towards me brisk and wary, his voice cool, brisk, tinged with contempt. I was interested that, at the contempt, which he was not aware he was showing, I felt in myself the beginnings of a need to apologize, almost a need to stammer. Interview very efficient; he had been told I was ready to join, and although I went to tell him I would not, I found myself accepting the situation. I felt (probably because of his attitude of contempt), well, he’s right, they’re getting on with the job, and I sit around dithering with my conscience. (Though of course, I don’t think he’s right.) Before I left, he remarked, out of the blue, in five years’ time, I suppose you’ll be writing articles in the capitalist press exposing us as monsters, just like ‘all the rest.’ He meant, of course, by ‘all the rest’—intellectuals. Because of the myth in the Party that it’s the intellectuals who drift in and out, when the truth is the turnover is the same in all the classes and groups. I was angry. I was also, and that disarmed me, hurt. I said to him: ‘It’s lucky that I’m an old hand. If I were a raw recruit, I might be disillusioned by your attitude.’ He gave me a long, cool, shrewd look which said: Well, of course I wouldn’t have made that remark if you hadn’t been an old hand. This both pleased me—being back in the fold, so to speak, already entitled to the elaborate ironies and complicities of the initiated; and made me suddenly exhausted. I’d forgotten of course, having been out of the atmosphere so long, the tight, defensive, sarcastic atmosphere of the inner circles. But at the moments when I’ve wanted to join it’s been with a full understanding of the nature of the inner circles. All the communists I know—that is, the ones of any intelligence, have the same attitude towards ‘the centre’—that the Party has been saddled with a group of dead bureaucrats who run it, and that the real work gets done in spite of the centre. Comrade John’s remark for instance, when I first told him I might join: ‘You’re mad. They hate and despise writers who join the Party. They only respect those who don’t.’ ‘They’ being the centre. It was a joke of course, but fairly typical. On the underground, read the evening newspaper. Attack on Soviet Union. What they said about it seemed to me true enough, but the tone—malicious, gloating, triumphant, sickened me, and I felt glad I had joined the Party. Came home to find Molly. She was out, and I spent some hours despondent, wondering why I had joined. She came in and I told her, and said: ‘The funny thing is I was going to say I wouldn’t join but I did.’ She gave her small sourish smile (and this smile is only for politics, never for anything else, there is nothing sour in her nature): ‘I joined in spite of myself too.’ She had never given any hint of this before, was always such a loyalist, that I must have looked surprised. She said: ‘Well now you’re in, I’ll tell you.’ Meaning that to an outsider the truth could not be told. ‘I’ve been around Party circles so long that…’ But even now she couldn’t say straight out ‘that I knew too much to want to join’. She smiled, or grimaced instead. ‘I began working in the Peace thing, because I believed in it. All the rest were members. One day that bitch Ellen asked me why I wasn’t a member. I was flippant about it—a mistake, she was angry. A couple of days later she told me there was a rumour I was an agent, because I wasn’t a member. I suppose she started the rumour. The funny thing is, obviously if I was an agent I’d have joined—but I was so upset, I went off and signed on the dotted line…’ She sat smoking and looking unhappy. Then said again: ‘All very odd, isn’t it?’ And went off to bed.

      5th Feb., 1950

      It’s as I foresaw, the only discussions I have about politics where I say what I think are with people who have been in the Party and have now left. Their attitude towards me frankly tolerant—a minor aberration, that I joined.

      19th August, 1951

      Had lunch with John, the first time since I joined the Party. Began talking as I do with my ex-Party friends, frank acknowledgement of what is going on in Soviet Union. John went into automatic defence of the Soviet Union, very irritating. Yet this evening had dinner with Joyce, New Statesman circles, and she started to attack Soviet Union. Instantly I found myself doing that automatic-defence-of-Soviet-Union act, which I can’t stand when other people do it. She went on; I went on. For her, she was in the presence of a communist so she started on certain clichés. I returned them. Twice tried to break the thing, start on a different level, failed—the atmosphere prickling with hostility. This evening Michael dropped in, I told him about this incident with Joyce. Remarked that although she was an old friend, we probably wouldn’t meet again. Although I had changed my mental attitudes about nothing, the fact I had become a Party member, made me, for her, an embodiment of something she had to have certain attitudes towards. And I responded in kind. At which Michael said: ‘Well, what did you expect?’ He was speaking in his role of East European exile, ex-revolutionary, toughened by real political experience, to me in my role as ‘political innocent’. And I replied in that role, producing all sorts of liberal inanities. Fascinating—the roles we play, the way we play parts.

      15th Sept., 1951

      The case of Jack Briggs. Journalist on The Times. Left it at outbreak of war. At that time, unpolitical. Worked during the war for British intelligence. During this time influenced СКАЧАТЬ