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

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СКАЧАТЬ opened for our side. A middle-aged woman, in appearance not unlike a friendly terrier, she said she had been in Moscow during the twenties, she had had the most wonderful love affair, and why had the Soviet Union become hostile to Free Love? She remembered bathing nude in the Moskva River with her lover, and all kinds of good times. Once, the Soviet Union had been a beacon of progress in matters amorous, but ‘you have all become so reactionary’. Needless to say, Arnold and I were burning with shame and embarrassment. The seriousness of the occasion! Our responsibilities as representatives of our country! Now I wonder if this wasn’t a pretty good way of dealing with all the rhetoric and bombast, with an impossible situation.

      Then Douglas Young demanded to put the case for the exploited colonies, speaking for Scotland, England’s vassal. He wore a kilt at times during the trip, for dramatic emphasis. (He was very tall and very thin, and a kilt was even more dramatic on him than on an ordinary man.) On every possible occasion he stood up to speak for downtrodden and oppressed Scotland. I have no doubt he was a sincere Scottish nationalist, but he had his tongue in his cheek. The communists were obliged to rise to their feet and cheer him whenever he spoke of oppressed nations, so waves of noisy insincerity were continually disrupting whatever meeting we were having.

      The details of what both sides said have gone, but not my emotions. I was feeling a direct continuation of the emotions fed into me by my parents, particularly my father: You don’t understand the awfulness of… in this case, the Second World War as experienced by the Russians, by the Soviet Union – their feeling of isolation, which nobody could understand who had not been part of it. This was shared by Arnold, for very personal reasons. Emotionally, then, we were both identified with the Russians. Certain arguments – discussions they were not, rather the stating and restating of our so different positions – were repeated. They attacked with their creed: literature must further the progress of communism, the Communist Party’s right to decide what should be written and published, the Party’s responsibility for the glorious future of all humankind. We defended ours: the integrity of the individual conscience, individual responsibility, the duty of artists to tell the truth as they saw it. (No, this debate is far from over: the Communist position is represented now by the defenders of political correctness.) The Russians – most of them were Russians – put themselves beyond the possibility of serious debate when they said there was really no need for official censorship. ‘Communist writers develop an inner censor, which tells them what they may write.’ This inner censor seemed to us a terrifying thing: that they should defend it – no, boast of it – shocked us.

      Another problem was their attitude to Stalin. Stalin’s name could not be used without a string of honorifics – the Great, the Glorious, and so on. This was because the slightest whisper of criticism of Stalin would put them in a concentration camp. No, we did not understand this. We said that when we read in the reports of their assemblies that Comrade Stalin had spoken for five hours and the applause lasted for half an hour, we were incredulous. In our culture – we boasted – there could not be this kind of reverence for a leader. In fact, the very word ‘leader’ was an embarrassment. Decades later, with what chagrin did I read, during the reign of Thatcher, ‘wild applause for fifteen minutes’. Thus does Time punish our arrogances.

      A couple of coordinating meetings were attempted, by Arnold, between the members of the delegation: the ‘right wing’ – Naomi and Douglas – and the left wing, Coppard. Arnold and I would confer – hastily, for we were worn out by the intensity of the experience – in my room, late at night. Naomi wanted to issue a statement, on behalf of all of us, condemning the camps and extolling democracy. If she did this, A. E. Coppard threatened, he would demand his right to say – on behalf of all of us – that the Soviet Union was the hope for all the world, and the British people had been told lies by their government about the real nature of communism. Arnold undertook to take on Naomi and say that if she did what she wanted, we would all resign and go home. At the same time he would tell Douglas Young, who would be in Naomi’s room, that he must stop playing the jackass in his kilt. I must explain to Coppard that if he did what he wanted, we would all resign and Naomi would issue her statement. I did and he was terribly distressed. Our conversations went on in my room, or rather suite, which looked like a blown-up version of a Victorian parlour, all heavy plush tablecloths, heavy velvet curtains, ornate mirrors, thick carpets. He sat on one side of a vast table, I on the other. Alfred Coppard had been a poor boy, had always hated ‘the ruling class’, or ‘that lot up there’. He saw Britain as being run entirely for the benefit of the few; the formulations of communism seemed to him the merest common sense. He had become a Utopian Communist, as I had, ten years before. I felt for him. More, I loved him. He was a pure soul, incapable of understanding evil – if I may use that word at all. I have known few people as lovable as he was. Ever since the Wrotslav Peace Conference, which divided the world for him into two camps, good and bad, he had been in a kind of ecstasy.

But something must be said about the World Congress of Intellectuals at Wroclaw^*. It was the first of the big ‘peace’ congresses, and they went on in one form or another until the collapse of the Soviet Union, which inspired and stage-managed them. They were all the same, because there had to be total disagreement between the communists and the rest. I include here two cuttings from the Times, and from these can be deduced what all the other congresses, conferences, and meetings were like.

* Freudian’ dreams are altogether more personal and petty.

* The Sheffield Conference, November 1950, never took place, because the incoming delegates were refused visas; it was transferred to Warsaw.

* August 25–29, 1948

      INTELLECTUALS AND PROPAGANDA ACRIMONIOUS CONGRESS

      WROCLAW, Aug. 27 – The aggressive opening day’s speech of the Soviet writer Alexander Fadieev, in which he delivered a bitter attack of a political nature on American imperialism and certain facets of western culture, continued to plague the World Congress of Intellectuals to-day.

      Mr Fadieev’s speech set the tone for the entire proceedings, which have developed to a large extent into the usual futile acrimonious exchanges of Soviet and western viewpoints. To-day, for example, there was only one speech among nearly two dozen that held to the intellectual rather than the political level established by Mr Fadieev. This was delivered by the French writer M. Julien Benda, who urged that educators and historians should cease to glorify warmongers, ‘whether they won or whether they lost.’ Literature should concentrate on glorifying civilization, justice, and those who oppose destruction.

      Otherwise the day was filled by protagonists of one side or the other, and was noteworthy for a strong answer to Mr Fadieev by an American delegate, who said things of the Russians that are ordinarily not said in public in present-day Poland. He is Mr Bryn J. Hovde, director of the New School for Social Research in New York. Mr Fadieev’s speech, he said, if made by a responsible member of a Government, was of a kind that would be made ‘to give propaganda justification to a premeditated military attack.’ Mr Hovde said that Americans thought that, since temptations to imperialism went historically with wealth and power, the Soviet Union was ‘no more immune than we ourselves,’ and when it came to demanding her own way in the world, Americans thought that the Soviet Union took a back seat to nobody.

      The British speaker to-day was Professor J.B.S. Haldane, who said he agreed that the main threat of war came from America and the dangers of American imperialism. He criticized the Russians for failing to make available ‘full information on the facts of life in the Soviet Union,’ which he said was necessary in order to influence British intellectuals.

      INTELLECTUALS’ СКАЧАТЬ