Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ the Party was a home, a family, the future, his deepest and sanest self. He wasn’t at all like me – who had had choices. When I met him, his closest friends in Czechoslovakia, the friends of his youth, the top leadership of the Czech Communist Party, had just been made to stand in the eyes of the world as traitors to communism, and then eleven of them were hanged, Stalin the invisible stage manager. For Jack it had been as if the foundations of the world had collapsed. It was impossible for these old friends to have been traitors, and he did not believe it. On the other hand, it was impossible for the Party to have made a mistake. He had nightmares, he wept in his sleep. Like Gottfried Lessing. Again I shared a bed with a man who woke from nightmares.

      That was the second cataclysmic event of his life. His entire family – mother, father, and all his siblings, except one sister who had escaped to America – had died in the gas chambers.

      This story is a terrible one. It was terrible then, but taken in the context of that time, not worse than many others. In 1950 in London, everybody I met had come out of the army from battlefields in Burma, Europe, Italy, Yugoslavia, had been present when the concentration camps were opened, had fought in the Spanish war or was a refugee and had survived horrors. With my background, the Trenches and the nastiness of the First World War dinned into me day and night through my childhood. Jack’s story was felt by me as a continuation: Well, what can you expect?

      We understood each other well. We had everything in common. Now I assess the situation in a way I would then have found ‘cold’. I look at a couple and I think. Are they suited emotionally … physically … mentally? Jack and I were suited in all three ways, but perhaps most emotionally, sharing a natural disposition towards the grimmest understanding of life and events that in its less severe manifestations is called irony. It was our situations, not our natures, that were incompatible. I was ready to settle down for ever with this man. He had just come back from the war, to find his wife, whom he had married long years before, a stranger, and children whom he hardly knew.

      It is a commonplace among psychiatrists that a young woman who has been close to death, has cut her wrists too often, or has been threatened by parents, must buy clothes, be obsessed with clothes and with the ordering of her appearance, puzzling observers with what seems like a senseless profligacy. It is life she is keeping in order.

      And a man who has been running a step ahead of death for years – if Jack had stayed in Czechoslovakia it is likely he would have been hanged as a traitor, together with his good friends, if he hadn’t already perished in the gas chambers – such a man will be forced by a hundred powerful needs to sleep with women, have women, assert life, make life, move on.

      In no way can I – or could I then – accuse Jack of letting me down, for he never promised anything. On the contrary, short of actually saying, ‘I am sleeping with other women; I have no intention of marrying you,’ he said it all. Often joking. But I wasn’t listening. What I felt was: When we get on so wonderfully in every possible way, then it isn’t sensible for him to go away from me. I wasn’t able to think at all; the emotional realities were too powerful. I think this is quite common with women. ‘Really, this man is talking nonsense, he doesn’t know what is right for him. And besides, he says himself his marriage is no marriage at all. And obviously it can’t be, when he is here most nights.’ How easy to be intelligent now, how impossible then.

      If I needed support against my mother, soon I needed it because of Jack too. He was a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. He had wanted to be a neurologist, but when he started being a doctor in Britain, neurology was fashionable and ‘a member of a distant country of which we know nothing’ could not compete with so many British doctors, crowding to get in. So he went into psychiatry, then unfashionable. But soon it became chic, even more so than neurology. He was a far from uncritical practitioner. He was no fan of Freud, and this was not only because as a communist – or even an ex-communist – he was bound to despise Freud. He said Freud was unscientific, and this at a time when to attack Freud was like attacking Stalin – or God. One of my liveliest memories is of how he took me to Oxford to listen to Hans Eysenck lecture to an audience composed almost entirely of doctors from the Maudsley, all of them Freudians, about the unscientific nature of psychoanalysis. There he was, this large, bouncing young man, with his thick German accent, telling a roomful of the angriest people I remember that their idol had faults. (He has not lost his capacity to annoy: when I told a couple of young psychiatrists this tale, thinking it might amuse them – in 1994 – their cold response was: ‘He always was unsound.’) Jack admired him. He knew psychoanalysis had feet of clay. This scepticism included Mrs Sussman: And if Freud was unscientific, what could be said of Jung? But I didn’t go to Mrs Sussman for ideology, I said. And anyway, she used a pragmatic mix of Freud, Jung, Klein, and anything else that might come in appropriately. He did not find this persuasive; he said that all artists like Jung, but this had nothing to do with science: why not just go off and listen to lectures on Greek mythology? It would do just as well. He was unimpressed by my ‘Jungian’ dreams. And even less when I began dreaming ‘Freudian’ dreams. And I was uneasy myself. I was dreaming dreams to order. No one need persuade me of the influence a therapist has on a confused, frightened suppliant for enlightenment. One needs to please that mentor, half mother, half father, the possessor of all knowledge, sitting so powerfully there in that chair. ‘And now, my dear, what do you have to tell me today?’

      Some things I wouldn’t dare tell Jack. For instance, about that day when she remarked, after nothing had been said for a few minutes, ‘I am sure you do know that we are communicating even when we are not saying anything.’ This remark, at that time, was simply preposterous. As far as she was concerned, I was a communist and therefore bound to dismiss any thoughts of that kind as ‘mystical nonsense’. She was not talking about body language (that phrase, and the skills of interpreting people’s postures, gestures, and so forth, came much later). She was talking about an interchange between minds. As soon as she said it, I thought, Well, yes… accepting this heretical idea as if it was my birthright. But to say this to Jack … For though he might have been, now, painfully – and for him it had to be painful – critical of communism, he was a Marxist, and ‘mystical’ ideas were simply inadmissible.

      Jack attacked me for going to Mrs Sussman at all. He said I was a big girl now and I should simply tell my mother to go off and live her own life. She was healthy, wasn’t she? She was strong? She had enough money to live on?

      My mother’s situation was causing me anguish. She was living pitifully in a nasty little suburb with George Laws, a distant cousin of my father’s. He was old, he was an invalid, and they could have nothing in common. She kept up a steady pressure to live with me. There was nowhere else for her. She found her brother’s family – he had died – as unlikeable as she always had. She actually had very little money. Common sense, as she kept saying, would have us sharing a flat and expenses, and besides, I needed help with Peter. Her sole reason for existence, she said, was to help me with Peter. And she took Peter for weekends, sometimes, and on trips. From one, to the Isle of Wight, he returned baptized. She informed me that this had been her duty. I did not even argue. There was never any point. And of course it was very good, for me, when I could go off with Jack for three days. At these times she moved into the Church Street flat, where the stairs were almost beyond her. Joan did not mind my mother; she simply said. But she’s a typical middle-class matron, that’s all. Just as I didn’t mind her mother, with whom she found it difficult to get on. I could listen to her self-pitying, wailing tales of her life dispassionately – this was social history, hard times brought off the page into a tale of a beautiful Jewish girl from the poor East End of London surviving among artists and writers.

      Jack said I should simply put my foot down with my mother, once and for all.

      Joan was also involved – a good noncommittal word – with psychotherapy. Various unsuccessful attempts had ended in her returning from a session to say that no man who had such appalling taste in art and whose house smelled of overcooked cabbage could possibly know anything about the human soul. That was good for a laugh or two, СКАЧАТЬ