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

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СКАЧАТЬ two were pretty and warm, and flirted with him.

      I try and imagine this as a scene in a film, but it is truly too terrible. There is a long, loaded table, flowers, wine, a banquet. There, the special people chosen from the farm to represent the Soviet farmers. There, we happy delegates, elated and pleased with ourselves, the way you get on such trips. There, the party officials, all affability. There, the old man in his smock, never taking his eyes off us. Albert Coppard is flirting. We make speeches. Douglas Young reminds us all of the sufferings of the Scottish farmers. Naomi talks about British farming practices, contrasting them severely with what we saw while driving through the fields.

      In the lavatory there is a framed copy of Kipling’s ‘If’. We are told that this is everyone’s favourite piece of poetry and they all know it by heart.

      The next time I saw ‘If’ on the back of a lavatory door was on a large rich farm in Kenya, where there were photographs of the Queen everywhere.

      We were taken to a building filled with presents to Stalin from his grateful subjects. It was sad, because they were mostly hideous, derivations or fallings-off from some genuine peasant or folk tradition, like carpets with his face occupying all the middle of them, or carved boxes or metalwork – all with his face. I left the others at it and went to sit outside. It was there I decided to try and write a story according to the communist formula, because I was becoming uncomfortably aware of our smugness and superiority. It would have very good and very bad characters in it, like Dickens. I wrote it. It was called ‘Hunger.’ It was about a youth from a village in Africa, risking his fortunes and his life going to the big city, this being a basic plot of our time, not only in Africa. The background came from Africans I knew, who would describe, when I asked, exactly how this or that was done in a village, how things were in the locations and shebeens of Salisbury. This story has been much translated and reprinted, and yet I am ashamed of it. Quite a few of my early stories I would like to see vanish away. What is wrong with that tale is sentimentality, which is often the sign of an impure origin: in this case, to write a tale with a moral.

      Naomi and I and Oksana are standing in St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, and Naomi is lecturing Oksana about the Russian lack of taste. Naomi suffered aesthetically throughout that trip. Everything was ugly and second-rate. If Arnold and I murmured something about the war, she would say, Nonsense, they are producing new materials and furniture, and they are hideous. She showed Oksana the patterns on the walls and ceilings and said. Why, when you’ve got this, do you put such hideous patterns on your dress materials? Oksana was confused. She did not know the patterns on the new cottons and silks were hideous. When Naomi showed her the Liberty skirt she had on, Oksana did not see why it was any better than the bales of cotton she had showed us that morning. She thought the patterns on the cathedral walls were old and old-fashioned. She asked me afterwards why, if Mrs Mitchison was a rich lady, she wore cotton and not silk. For of course, if you could afford it, you wore silk all the time. Oksana’s best dress was silk. ‘And very nice too,’ said Richard Mason gallantly. Arnold and I discussed how Naomi patronized our hosts and apparently did not know it, and how we could stop her. We actually took her to task. ‘Naomi, you’ve got to stop hurting their feelings like this. We won’t have it.’

      ‘But I simply cannot understand it,’ Naomi said, that voluminous voice booming.’ Why can’t they take good models for their furniture instead of that rubbish?’

      ‘But, Naomi,’ said intellectual Arnold, ‘that’s what happens when a peasant tradition is smashed: they model themselves on something modern. They had taste in the old ways, but they have to develop taste in the new.’

      ‘Well,’ drawled Naomi, ‘but I’m going to have my say. This delegation is supposed to be bridging gaps: I’m jolly well going to tell them about their atrocious taste.’

      ‘Then when we get home we’re going to tell the press that you spent your time patronizing the Russians about their aesthetic sense.’

      ‘But, Arnold, my dear boy, you surely can’t be serious.’

      ‘You’re hurting their feelings, Naomi,’ said Arnold, his eyes full of tears.

      In Leningrad they asked Naomi and me if we minded sharing a room. We thought this odd; it took me a long time to see that probably they wanted to overhear our conversations. It being August, the nights were not completely white, but almost; there were only a couple of hours of real dark. Exhausted, I flopped into bed, a double bed, and there was Naomi, prodding me, because she wanted me to tell her about my love life, so she could tell me about her lovers in the twenties. I thought this was like being back at school, naughty conversations in the dorm. She said young women these days had become real stick-in-the-muds. I went to sleep.

      Leningrad was a sad city, grey and elegant, full of watery perspectives, its walls pocked with bullet holes or cracked because of the attritions of the siege, in which ten years before one and a half million people died. We moved from palace to palace, all built in the style I know some people adore, all gilt curlicues and cupids, rosy flesh, pink and blue ribbons, medallions, a very festival of pouring and dimpling architecture. This was because Russian royalty had adored France and imported the style for palaces, and so even when we went to the Children’s House, it was a former palace, and the thought of sandpits or swings seemed in rather poor taste.

      We had a formal encounter with the Leningrad branch of the Soviet Writers, and there we were, in another of these frivolous rooms, for an occasion as sombre as any I remember. Naomi had said she was going to insist that the Leningrad writers produce the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko for our inspection. There were rumours in the West that he was dead – murdered. Arnold and I were horrified. First, why should any writer anywhere be produced like evidence in a law court? And then we did know that writers were, as it is now put, keeping a low profile – trying not to be noticed – and perhaps it would be the last thing he would welcome, being made a test case by the West. But Naomi insisted.

      I cannot remember the names of our hosts. The opening speeches were all sound and fury. Already we were weary of them, to the point where we were saying. Thank God we are going home soon; one more speech and –

      ‘Or one more toast.’

      ‘Or one more banquet.’

      After a while you literally cannot listen to these speeches. It is as if the rhetoric numbs your brain: the words – the sound – a narcotic. Speeches of this sort went on for the hours of the meeting but were interrupted by a young poet who, like a Quaker, from time to time feeling an impulse he could not disobey, had to jump to his feet and recite an ode to Stalin. Obviously, no one could object, at the risk of being accused of lèse-majesté, so that every time this happened, all the officials smiled benignly at the inspired infant and even clapped. Against this background Mikhail Zoshchenko was brought in and sat in the middle of the room, the Russians on one side, we on the other. He was a little thin man, yellow-skinned, and he looked ill, and was being brave, and dignified. Just as with the defiant old man at the collective farm, it was as if the atmosphere itself put protective arms around him. These officials, no matter how much they were vassals, lackeys, arse-lickers, were all under threat themselves, had seen many writers, friends or not, disappear into exile or the camps. Zoshchenko had been under official criticism – and that meant from themselves too – for a long time now. He had written small, very funny, very popular stories about the mishaps and anomalies of the lives of citizens living under communism, and a wonderful novella called, simply, People – and for a while had been officially applauded, but that did not last.

      While sitting before us, he agreed, when prodded by the chairman, that he certainly did still exist, was well and well-treated, and had seen the error of his ways; he had repented of his negative and critical early work, but he was now engaged on a three-volume novel СКАЧАТЬ