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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ by the French and Polish organizing committees to find a road to peace opened in anything but a peaceful manner to-day. After the Foreign Minister, Mr Medzelewski, had welcomed the delegates, the Soviet writer, Alexander Fadieev, launched the work of the Congress with the usual bitter diatribe against ‘American Imperialism’ and for this occasion extended it to include ‘reactionary aggressive’ elements of American culture as well.

      Mr Fadieev also attacked schools of writing which ‘bred aggressive propaganda,’ and. naming T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, John dos Passos, Jean Paul Sartre, and Andre Malraux, he said: ‘If hyenas could type and jackals could use a fountain pen they would write such things’ as were produced by these men. The Soviet writer’s outburst drew a temperate but firm reply from Mr Olaf Stapledon, the Bntish author, who, reminding Mr Fadieev of the purpose of the Congress, said that if they were to reach any agreement they must all make a special effort ‘to enter into the other point of view.’

      Mr Stapledon said that no side could lay claim to all the truth and that both sides, not just one, were guilty of using ‘instruments which pervert the truth.’ He answered Mr Fadieev specifically on Mr Eliot, saying that while they might not agree with his politics he certainly was an important figure in British poetry.

      Mr Stapledon arranged a private meeting to-night between the British and Russian delegates to enable them to get to know each other better.

      The delegates from Britain were Sir John Boyd Orr, the dean of Canterbury, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, Professor J. D. Bernal, Professor C. H. Waddington, Professor Hyman Levy, Richard Hughes, Olaf Stapledon, Louis Golding, Rudand Brougham, Bernard Stevens, Felix Topolski, Dr Julian Huxley, A. J. P. Taylor, Denis Saurat, Edward Crankshaw. A starry list. (The Times list.)

      As for our Authors World Peace Appeal: Very late at night, after those interminable, exhausting banquets, those speeches, trips here and there – collective farm, children’s holiday camp, museums – Alfred Coppard and I sat in my room and exchanged talk which must have had the ears of our invisible listeners curling with disbelief. No, I said, no, you must not go on the radio and say that Stalin is the greatest man who ever lived, no, nor claim that Britain is a tyranny worse than any communist country. Do you really want us all to quarrel publicly and make a field day for our newspapers? ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t quarrel publicly,’ he said, ‘if that’s how we feel.’ From time to time he tried to kiss me, or fondle me. My stern sense of duty forbade amorous dalliance. Besides, he was old.

      It was also my duty to visit Richard Mason in his room and tell him that he simply must not announce on every possible occasion that he had never read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. Our hosts had read all of British literature – the writers among them really had – and he was shaming us all. ‘Who is Turgenev?’ he might drawl, if the name came up. I thought he was putting it on, that this was his equivalent of Douglas Young’s kilt. But he really had not read anything much. He claimed that he had become a writer by accident. A very young lonely soldier, he had lain wounded in a hospital in – I think – Burma, had fallen in love with his beautiful brown nurse, had written the story, as much from boredom as for anything, and it had become a best-seller. He claimed he found great literature boring. Was this true? But his phlegmatic, philistine persona concealed all kinds of sensibilities. Like us all, he was upset by what he saw in Moscow: its dreary streets, its empty shops, the bad clothes, its atmosphere – this was just before Stalin died. We used to beg our minder, one Oksana, a beautiful Georgian girl, to be allowed to wander about the streets as we pleased, but she was evidently afraid. We did manage little guilty trips when she wasn’t looking, but were recalled by her anxious scoldings: ‘What are you doing? You are not allowed …’

      In those streets of almost empty shops there were two exceptions. One was the bread shops, wonderful, redeeming the ugliness, crammed full of different breads, brown, white, black, great fat crusty loaves that smelled so good we wanted to eat them then and there. The other surprise was corset shops. There were scarcely any clothes, the shoes were flimsy or clodhopping, there was nothing frivolous or nice, or piquant, or fashionable, or colourful. But there were corset shops and, in each, one or two enormous bright pink or purple corsets, with stays like girders, and shiny pink ribbons. Not a bra in sight, though.

      Scenes, little bright-coloured scenes, which I wrote down when I came home after the trip, and used to come on, among ageing papers and old notebooks. ‘Good God, all that happened, it did happen…’

      We are in the Tretyakov – an art gallery – surrounded by vast pictures of grazing cows, happy peasants, agreeable landscapes. Naomi, a collector of modern art, stands in front of a herd of cows. ‘That is a very fine cow,’ she drawls in her Oxford voice, which for some reason is emphasized in Russia. Our guides, the museum officials, gaze at the cow. ‘A fine cow,’ she drawls, ‘but surely she needs milking?’ The official meets her innocent gaze, but it is more than his life is worth – literally – to laugh. ‘Soviet cows are well treated,’ he says severely. Naomi says, ‘I’ve got a cow in my herd just like that brown one.’ We, coming on behind, are smiling, and even risking a laugh, but the look on the man’s face stops us.

      It seems that the Soviet artists, who were allowed to paint only ‘healthy’ pictures, softened their situation, at least a little, by this ruse: A picture having been completed, they deliberately painted in a dog or an obviously out-of-place figure. When this picture was set in front of the officials who would say yea or nay, they were bound to criticise it, to cover themselves in case of criticism from high up. At which point the artist would come in. ‘Comrades, I’ve just seen – it’s that dog. I was wrong to put in that dog.’ ‘Very well, then, comrade, take out the dog.’ And the picture was passed. This sort of stratagem has turned out to be quite amazingly useful to me, in all kinds of contexts: suitably modified, of course.

      While on a trip to a collective farm, the official cars having turned off onto the farm road, Naomi asks if we may stop. Our cars, four or five of them, stop. We all get out, about twenty people, and stand on the track, looking across fields. It is August, very hot, the grain already harvested. ‘That’s a very nasty bit of erosion,’ says Naomi, pointing. And indeed, it is. ‘But our grain harvest for last year was very good on this farm.’ ‘Well, you won’t be getting good harvests for long, if you allow that kind of erosion,’ she says. In this way did her frustrated need to criticise much worse show itself.

      It was at this collective farm that I witnessed the bravest thing I have ever seen in my life.

      We, the six of us, and our hosts, headed by Alexei Surkov, stood facing a crowd of collective farmers. We were being introduced. An old man, dressed in a white peasant smock, like Tolstoy, stepped out and said he wanted to speak. At once the others attempted to hustle and scold him back into the group. He stood his ground, said he had to speak to us. A silence. Oksana was clearly frightened. The old man spoke. Oksana interpreted, and Douglas Young, our Russian speaker, stopped her. ‘No, you are not interpreting properly,’ he said, blandly, like a professor. The old man addressed him, and Douglas interpreted, while Oksana squeezed her hands together, as if she were praying. ‘You must not believe what you are told. Visitors from abroad are told lies. You must not believe what you are shown. Our lives are terrible. The Russian people – I am speaking for the Russian people. You must go back to Britain and tell everybody what I am saying. Communism is terrible –’ And he was pulled back by the others and surrounded, but he stood among them with his burning eyes fixed on us, while the others scolded him. That was remarkable – they scolded and fussed at him; they didn’t shrink away from a pariah. And throughout the long, toast-filled meal that followed, he sat silent, his eyes on us, while they scolded – affectionately, there was no doubt about that. Yet at that time people vanished into the Gulag for much less than what he had done. No crime could be worse than to say such things to foreigners. He would be arrested and disposed of, and he knew that this would happen.

      During this meal Coppard was enjoying СКАЧАТЬ