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

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СКАЧАТЬ that I refused invitations to go on Peace or Cultural Delegations – it was the beginning of the era of delegations to all the communist countries. I remember invitations to China, Chile, Cuba, others. Writers considered sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to communism were always being invited. The trouble is not that you fall for the official Party Line but that you like the people you meet, become one with them in sympathetic imagination, identify with their sufferings. This must be a version of what happens when terrorists capture hostages, who soon become one with their hosts, by osmosis. The communist governments always used the prestige of their visitors to impress their captive populations, but the said populations were in fact too wise to be impressed. Debates about whether one should or should not go to oppressive countries as official visitors went on then, go on now. When I went to China for the British Council in 1993, with Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd, Western journalists who operated in the East approached me to say I was wrong to go. But some Chinese, in London including one who had been in Tiananmen Square, did not understand when asked if I should go. ‘Why should you not go?’

      ‘Because the people will think we admire the Chinese government.’

      ‘No one will think that. But it is important for the writers and intellectuals to see writers from the West. They feel isolated.’

      No sooner had I got back to London than I was sent my Party card and approached by John Sommerfield to join the Communist Party Writers’ Group. By now I was regretting my impulse to join the Party. I did know it was a neurotic decision, for it was characterized by that dragging helpless feeling, as if I had been drugged or hypnotized – like getting married the first time because the war drums were beating, or having babies when I had decided not to – pulled by the nose like a fish on a line. Going to the Soviet Union had stirred up emotions much deeper than the political. My thoughts and my emotions were at odds. I was a long way off seeing, as I do now, that ‘supporting the Soviet Union was only a continuation of early childhood feelings – war, the understanding of suffering, identification with pain: the knowledge of good and evil. I only knew that here was a deeply buried thing which was riding me like a nightmare.

      What I was thinking – attempts at cool objectivity – was something else. I told an ex-Party friend of mine this experience: On parting with Oksana, so poor, so hardworking, with so few clothes or trinkets, I wanted to give her a little gilt-mesh bracelet, from Egypt. It was nothing much. She went pale with … could that be terror? Surely not. She stammered out frantic fearful refusals. What was that all about? I asked my expert friend, who said with the furious impatience we use for people who are still in positions we have just outgrown – he had only very recently left the Party – ‘Don’t be so naive. If she was seen with that bracelet, she would be accused by the KGB – who were of course instructing her every day – of taking bribes from the decadent evil Western capitalist world. It could get her sent to a labour camp.’

      And why was it so many of the writers we met insisted on talking about the royal family? They went on and on: how interested they were in our Queen, such a good institution – for Britain, of course, not for them – and how much they admired us. Why on earth should writers in the Soviet Union care about the British royal family? ‘Obviously,’ was the reply, ‘they could not say openly how much they hate communism. They said it indirectly, hoping you would have the gumption to understand.’

      The Writers’ Group was about to fall apart under the weight of its contradictions. Ah, with what nostalgia I use that old jargon … but how useful were those contradictions, always on our lips, while we tried to keep hold of the roller coaster of those days.

      Remarkable people, they were. First, John Sommerfield. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War and written a book, Volunteer in Spain, describing various actions he had taken part in. It was dedicated to John Comford, his friend, who had died there. He had also written good short stories, Survivors. He was a tall, lean man, pipe-smoking, who would allow to fall from unsmiling lips surreal diagnoses of the world he lived in, while his eyes insisted he was deeply serious. A comic. He knew everything about English pubs, had written a book about them. It was he who took me to the Soho clubs, saying that their great days were over, the war had been their heyday. He was married to Molly Moss, the painter. Like everyone else then, they had no money. They bought for a couple of hundred pounds a little Victorian house in Mansfield Road, NW3, and filled it full of her paintings, and Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac which could be bought for a few shillings because everything Victorian was unfashionable. This cherished little treasure house, a jewel box of a house, was pulled down with hundreds of others in those great days for architecture, the sixties, and replaced with some of the ugliest blocks of flats in London. During one hard winter, when the Sommerfields were broke, their big tomcat caught pigeons for them, which they stewed, giving him half of what he caught.

      The meetings were held in my room because, since I had a child, it was hard for me to go out. Also because I had informed John Sommerfield that I loathed meetings and had had enough of them to last my life. He said. In that case we’ll come to you and you can’t get out of it. John had said that when you joined the CP it was a good principle to say that there was something you couldn’t do, like taking buses or being out at night. Why? To let them know they couldn’t put anything over on you. ‘But no, you cannot say you won’t go to the meetings.’ Them? The Party, King Street.

      All the writers shared this attitude to King Street, not much different in spirit from David Low’s cartoon trade-union horse, a great lump of obstinate stupidity. The loyalty that they could not feel for ‘the Party’ was deflected to the Soviet Union, which of course could not be anything like as stupid as King Street.

      Montagu Slater was a smallish, quick, lively, clever man, and many-sided. He had done the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. He was under pressure, because he had written a book about the Kenyan war, then at its height, exposing the machinations and dirty tricks of the British government against Jomo Kenyatta, and was being reviled by the newspapers: ‘What can you expect from a communist?’ Everything he said was true, but soon it didn’t matter, because Kenyatta won the war in Kenya and in no time at all had become a Grand Old Man, revered by everyone, not least the whites in Kenya.

      Jack Beeching was a poet, with a wife and new baby. I visited them in Bristol, with Peter. They had no money and were in an old, run-down flat in a terrace now beyond the means of anyone not rich. Enormous, beautiful, freezing rooms. I haven’t said much about the cold in those days, when houses were often heated with a bar or two of tiny electric fires, sometimes no heat at all. The five of us – Jack, his wife, the new baby, Peter, and I – huddled like refugees under sweaters and blankets in the centre of the great room, where the draughts blew about like cold winds. Jack is still alive in Spain, writing poetry and history.

      Jack Lindsay, the Australian, was perhaps the purest example I know of a good writer done in by the Party. He was a polymath, knowledgeable on a variety of subjects, and wrote two kinds of novel. One was party-line orthodox, factories and workers and the proletariat, the other fanciful, whimsical novels, like Iris Murdoch, but nothing like as good. They might have been written by two different writers. He also wrote biographies.

      Asked by some researcher about Randall Swingler, I said he was not a member of the Writers’ Group but later found he was. I simply did not remember him. Perhaps he was never there: I was told as I wrote this that he had said the Writers’ Group was nothing but a sink of lost talent. What did impress me about him was that he and his wife bought a cottage in Essex for five pounds, without running water, light, telephone, heat, or toilet. A paradise in summer, but in winter? There they lived, solving the problems of poverty, for years. Then Essex cottages became fashionable …

      Soon after our return from the Soviet Union, there was the last of the great fogs. Truly you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. Naomi was having a reunion for the people on the trip, in the Mitchison flat on the Embankment. I was standing СКАЧАТЬ