The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ newspapers, worked for low salary on left paper. Or-leftish; for when he wanted to write an article on China, that pillar of the left, Rex, put him in a position where he had to resign. No money. At this point, regarded as a communist in the newspaper world, and therefore unemployable, his name comes up in the Hungarian Trial, as British agent conspiring to overthrow communism. Met him by accident, he was desperately depressed—a whispering campaign around the Party and near-Party circles, that he was and had been ‘a capitalist spy’. Treated with suspicion by his friends. A meeting of the writers’ group. We discussed this, decided to approach Bill, to put an end to this revolting campaign. John and I saw Bill, said it was obviously untrue Jack Briggs could ever be an agent, demanded he should do something. Bill affable, pleasant. Said he would ‘make enquiries’, let us know. We let the ‘enquiries’ pass; knowing this meant a discussion higher up the Party. No word from Bill. Weeks passed. Usual technique of Party officials—let things slide, in moments of difficulty. We went to see Bill again. Extremely affable. Said he could do nothing. Why not? ‘Well in matters of this case when there might be doubt…’ John and I angry, demanded of Bill if he, personally, thought it was conceivable Jack could ever have been an agent. Bill hesitated, began on a long, manifestly insincere rationalization, about how it was possible that anyone could be an agent, ‘including me’. With a bright, friendly smile. John and I left, depressed, angry—and with ourselves. We made a point of seeing Jack Briggs personally, and insisting that others did, but the rumours and spiteful gossip continue. Jack Briggs in acute depression, and also completely isolated, from right and left. To add to the irony, three months after his row with Rex about the article on China, which Rex said was ‘communist in tone’, the respectable papers began publishing articles in the same tone, whereupon Rex, the brave man, found it the right time to publish an article on China. He invited Jack Briggs to write it. Jack in an inverted, bitter mood, would not.

      This story, with variations more or less melodramatic, is the story of the communist or near-communist intellectual in this particular time.

      

      3rd Jan., 1952

      

      I write very little in this notebook. Why? I see that everything I write is critical of the Party. Yet I am still in it. Molly too.

      Three of Michael’s friends hanged yesterday in Prague. He spent the evening talking to me—or rather to himself. He was explaining, first, why it was impossible that these men could be traitors to communism. Then he explained, with much political subtlety, why it was impossible that the Party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into ‘objectively’ anti-revolutionary positions. He talked on and on and on until finally I said we should go to bed. All night he cried in his sleep. I kept jerking awake to find him whimpering, the tears wetting the pillow. In the morning I told him that he had been crying. He was angry—with himself. He went off to work looking an old man, his face lined and grey, giving me an absent nod—he was so far away, locked in his miserable self-questioning. Meanwhile I help with a petition for the Rosenbergs. Impossible to get people to sign it, except Party and near-Party intellectuals. (Not like France. The atmosphere of this country has changed dramatically in the last two or three years, tight, suspicious, frightened. It would take very little to send it off balance into our version of McCarthyism.) I am asked, even by people in the Party, let alone the ‘respectable’ intellectuals, why do I petition on behalf of the Rosenbergs but not on behalf of the people framed in Prague? I find it impossible to reply rationally, except that someone has to organize an appeal for the Rosenbergs. I am disgusted—with myself, with the people who won’t sign for the Rosenbergs, I seem to live in an atmosphere of suspicious disgust. Molly began crying this evening, quite out of the blue—she was sitting on my bed, chatting about her day, then she began crying. In a still, helpless way. It reminded me of something, could not think of what, but of course it was Maryrose, suddenly letting the tears slide down her face sitting in the big room at Mashopi, saying: ‘We believed everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won’t.’ Molly cried like that. Newspapers all over my floor, about the Rosenbergs, about the things in Eastern Europe.

      The Rosenbergs electrocuted. Felt sick at night. This morning I woke asking myself: why should I feel like this about the Rosenbergs, and only feel helpless and depressed about the frame-ups in communist countries? The answer an ironical one. I feel responsible for what happens in the West, but not at all for what happens over there. And yet I am in the Party. I said something like this to Molly, and she replied, very brisk and efficient (she’s in the middle of a hard organizing job): ‘All right, I know, but I’m busy.’

      Koestler. Something he said sticks in my mind—that any communist in the West who stayed in the Party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth. Something like that. So I demand of myself, what is my private myth? That while most of the criticisms of the Soviet Union are true, there must be a body of people biding their time there, waiting to reverse the present process back to real socialism. I had not formulated it so clearly before. Of course there is no Party member I could say this to, though it’s the sort of discussion I have with ex-Party people. Suppose that all the Party people I know have similarly incommunicable private myths, all different? I asked Molly. She snapped: ‘What are you reading that swine Koestler for?’ This remark is so far from her usual level of talk, political or otherwise, I was surprised, tried to discuss it with her. But she’s very busy. When she’s on an organizing job (she is doing a big exhibition of art from Eastern Europe) she’s too immersed in it to be interested. She’s in another role altogether. It occurred to me today, that when I talk to Molly about politics, I never know what person is going to reply—the dry, wise, ironical political woman, or the Party fanatic who sounds, literally, quite maniacal. And I have these two personalities myself. For instance, met Editor Rex in the street. That was last week. After the greetings were exchanged, I saw a spiteful, critical look coming on to his face, and I knew it was going to be a crack about the Party. And I knew if he made one, I’d defend it. I couldn’t bear to hear him, being spiteful, or myself, being stupid. So I made an excuse and left him. The trouble is, what you don’t realize when you join the Party, soon you meet no one but communists or people who have been communists who can talk without that awful dilettantish spite. One becomes isolated. That’s why I shall leave the Party, of course.

      I see that I wrote yesterday, I would leave the Party. I wonder when, and on what issue?

      Had dinner with John. We meet rarely—always on the verge of political disagreement. At the end of the dinner, he said: ‘The reason why we don’t leave the Party is that we can’t bear to say good-bye to our ideals for a better world.’ Trite enough. And interesting because it implies he believes, and that I must, only the Communist Party can better the world. Yet we neither of us believe any such thing. But above all, this remark struck me because it contradicted everything he had been saying previously. (I had been arguing that the Prague affair was obviously a frame-up and he was saying that while the Party made ‘mistakes’ it was incapable of being so deliberately cynical.) I came home thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind when I joined the Party was a need for wholeness, for an end to the split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all live. Yet joining the Party intensified the split—not the business of belonging to an organization whose every tenet, on paper, anyway, contradicts the ideas of the society we live in; but something much deeper than that. Or at any rate, more difficult to understand. I tried to think about it, my brain kept swimming into blankness, I got confused and exhausted. Michael came in, very late. I told him what I was trying to think out. After all he’s a witch-doctor, a soul-curer. He looked at me, very dry and ironic, and remarked: ‘My dear Anna, the human soul, sitting in a kitchen, or for that matter, in a double bed, is quite complicated enough, we don’t understand the first thing about it. Yet you’re sitting there worrying because you can’t make sense of the human soul in the middle of a world revolution?’ And so I left it, and I was glad to, but I was nevertheless feeling guilty because I was so happy not to think about it.

      I went to visit Berlin with Michael. He in search of old friends, dispersed СКАЧАТЬ