Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962

by Doris Lessing

  Joan returned to London after the war, from America, with the child—and found she had nowhere to live. She saw this house, in Church Street, open to the sky, and thought, That’s my house. She brought in buckets of water and began scrubbing down the rooms, night after night, when she had done with work. War Damage sent in workmen to repair the house and found Joan on her knees, with a scrubbing brush.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Cleaning my house,’ she said.

  ‘But it isn’t your house.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘You’d better have documents to prove it, then.’

  She had no money. She went to her father and demanded that he guarantee a bank loan. He was disconcerted; people who have had to drag themselves up from an extreme of poverty may take a long time to see themselves as advantaged. With a guaranteed bank loan, and her determination, she got her house, where she is living to this day.

  All these vicissitudes had given her an instinct for the distress of others which was the swiftest and surest I have known. She knew how to help people. Her kindness, her generosity, was not sentimental but practical and imaginative. I had plenty of people to compare her with, because I was meeting people who had survived war, prison camps, every kind of disaster; my life was full of survivors, but not all of them had been improved by what had happened to them.

  Peter had been happy in the other house, and he enjoyed this one as much. Joan’s son, Ernest, then adolescent, was as wonderfully kind as Joan herself. He was like an elder brother. People who have brought up small children without another parent to share the load will know I have said the most important thing about my life then.

  If living in the other house was as strange to me as if I’d been immersed in a Victorian novel, life in Church Street, Kensington, was only a continuation of that flat in Salisbury where people dropped in day and night for cups of tea, food, argument, and often noisy debate. Going up or down the stairs, I passed the open door into the little kitchen, often crammed with comrades, having a snack, talking, shouting, or imparting news in confidential tones, for a great deal was going on in the communist world which was discussed in lowered voices and never admitted publicly. I was again in an atmosphere that made every encounter, every conversation, important, because if you were a communist, then the future of the world depended on you—you and your friends and people like you all over the world. The vanguard of the working class, in short. I was in conflict. Having lived with Gottfried Lessing, a ‘one hundred and fifty percenter’—a phrase used at that time in communist circles—I was weary of dogmatism and self-importance. When I was with Gottfried, who was now at the nadir of his life and, because of his low spirits, even more violently rude about people and opinions not communist, I was seeing a mirror of myself—a caricature, yes, but true. A line from Gerald Manley Hopkins haunted me.

  This, by Despair, bred Hangdog dull; by Rage,

  Manwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age.

  I would wake out of a dream, muttering, ‘“and their packs infest the age’”. Me: Hopkins was talking about me.

  I lived in a pack, was one of a pack. But when the comrades came up the stairs to the top of the house—and they often did, for up there lived a lively young woman and her delightful little boy, an exotic too, coming from Africa, which seemed always to be in the news these days—I found people interested in what I said about South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Anywhere outside communist circles, my information that Southern Rhodesia was not a paradise of happy darkies was greeted with impatience. You are so wrong-headed, those looks said. How patronised I have been by people who don’t want to know. But the comrades did want to know. An attraction of Communist Party circles was that if you happened to remark, ‘I have been in Peru, and…,’ people wanted to know. The world was their responsibility. I was finding this increasingly ridiculous, but the thing wasn’t so easy. I looked back to Salisbury, where we had assumed, for years, that what we did and thought was of world-shattering (literally) significance, but from the perspectives of London our little group there seemed embarrassing, absurd—yet I knew that these absurd people were the few, in all of white Southern Rhodesia, who understood the truth about the white regime: that it was doomed, could not last long. It was not our views but our effectiveness that was in question. And here I was again, being part of a minority, and a very small one, who knew they were in the right. This was the height of the Cold War. The Korean War had started. The communists were with every day more isolated. The atmosphere was poisonous. If, for instance, you doubted that America was dropping wads of material infected with germs—germ warfare—then you were a traitor. I was undermined with doubts. I hated this religious language, and I was not the only one. ‘Comrade So-and-so is getting doubts,’ a communist might say, with that sardonic intonation that was already—and would increasingly become—the tone of many conversations. But again, this was not simple, for it was certainly not only the comrades who identified with an idealised Soviet Union.

  Although I was not a member of the Communist Party, I was accepted by the comrades as one of them: I spoke the language. When I protested that I had been a member of a communist party invented by us in Southern Rhodesia, which any real Communist Party would have dismissed with contempt, they did not care—or perhaps they did not hear. It has been my fate all my life often to be with people who assume I think as they do, because a passionate belief, or set of assumptions, is so persuasive to the holders of them that they really cannot believe anyone could be so wrong-headed as not to share them. I could not discuss any ‘doubts’ I might have with Joan or anyone who came to that house—not yet, but, if I found the Party Line hard to swallow, there was something else, much stronger. Colonials, the children or grandchildren of the far-flung Empire, arrived in England with expectations created by literature. ‘We will find the England of Shelley and Keats and Hopkins, of Dickens and Hardy and the Brontës and Jane Austen, we will breathe the generous airs of literature. We have been sustained in exile by the magnificence of the Word, and soon we will walk into our promised land.’ All the communists I met had been fed and sustained by literature, and very few of the other people I met had. In short, my experience in Southern Rhodesia continued, if modified, not least because again I was having to defend my right to write, to spend my time writing, and not to run around distributing pamphlets or the Daily Worker. But a woman who had stood up to Gottfried Lessing—‘Why are you wasting your time? Writing is just bourgeois self-indulgence’—was more than equipped to deal with the English comrades. The pressure on writers—and artists—to do something other than write, paint, make music, because those are nothing but bourgeois indulgences, continued strong, and continues now, though the ideologies are different, and will continue, because it has roots in envy, and the envious ones do not know they suffer from a disease, know only that they are in the right.

  It did help that I was now one of the recognised new writers. The Grass Is Singing had got very good reviews, and was selling well, and was bought in other countries. The short stories, This Was the Old Chief’s Country, did well. Needless to say, I was attacked by the comrades for all kinds of ideological shortcomings. For instance, The Grass Is Singing was poisoned by Freud. At that stage I had not read much Freud. The short stories did not put the point of view of the organised black working class. True. For one thing, there wasn’t one. There is no way one can exaggerate the stupidity of communist literary criticism; any quote immediately seems like mockery or caricature—like so much of Political Correctness now.

  It was not only pressures from my own side that I had to resist.

  For instance, the editor of a popular newspaper, the Daily Graphic—it was not unlike the Sun—long since defunct, invited me to his office and offered me a lot of money to write articles supporting hanging, the flogging of delinquent children, harsher treatment for criminals, a woman’s place in the home, down with socialism, internment for communists. When I said I disagreed with all
these, the editor, a nasty little man, said it didn’t matter what my personal opinions were. If I wanted, I could be a journalist—he would train me—and journalists should know how to write persuasively on any subject. I kept refusing large sums of money, which got larger as he became more exasperated. I fled to a telephone in the street, where I rang up Juliet O’Hea. I needed money badly. She said on no account should I ever write one word I did not believe in, never write a word that wasn’t the best I could do; if I started writing for money, the next thing would be I’d start believing it was good, and neither of us wanted that, did we? She did not believe in asking for advances before they were due, but if I was desperate she would. And she would tell the editor of the Daily Graphic to leave me alone.

  There were other offers on the same lines, temptations of the Devil. Not that I was really tempted. But I did linger sometimes in an editor’s office out of curiosity: I could not believe that this was happening, that people could be so low, so unscrupulous. But surely they can’t really believe writers should write against their own beliefs, their consciences? Write less than their best, for money?

  The most bizarre result of The Grass Is Singing, which was being execrated in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, was an invitation to be ‘one of the girls’ at an evening with visiting members of the still new Nationalist government. I was too intrigued to refuse, fascinated that Southern African customs could hold good here: ‘The English cricket team is coming—just round up some of the girls for them.’ There were ten or so Afrikaners, ministers or slightly lesser officials, living it up on a trip to London. I knew them all by name, and only too well as a type. Large, overfed, jovial, they joked their way through a restaurant dinner, about all the ways they used to keep the kaffirs down, for it was then a characteristic of these ruling circles to be proud of being ‘slim’—full of cunning tricks. After dinner we repaired to a hotel bedroom, where I was in danger of being fondled by one or more. Another of ‘the girls’ told the men that I was an enemy and they should be careful of what they said. Why was I an enemy? was demanded, with the implicit suggestion that it was not possible to disagree with their evidently correct views. ‘She’s written a book,’ said this woman, or girl, a South African temporarily in London. ‘Then we’re going to ban it,’ was the jocular reply. One man, whose knee I was trying to refuse, said, ‘Ach, man, we don’t care what liberals read, what do they matter? The kaffirs aren’t going to read your little book. They can’t read, and that’s how we like it.’ The word ‘liberal’ in South Africa has always been interchangeable with ‘communist’.

  All the places where I had lived with Gottfried, in Salisbury, people had dropped in and out, and the talk was not only of politics, and of changing the world, but of war; in Church Street it was the same, except that here war was not all rumour and propaganda but men who had returned from battlefronts, so that we could match what really had happened with what we had been told was happening. Similarly, I was in a familiar situation with Gottfried, who disapproved of me more with every meeting. He was having a very bad time. He had believed he would easily get a job in London. He knew himself to be clever and competent: had he not created a large and successful legal firm, virtually out of nothing, in Salisbury? There were relatives in London, to whom he applied for work. They turned him down. He was a communist, and they were—or felt themselves to be—on sufferance in Britain, as foreigners. Or perhaps they didn’t like him. He was applying for jobs on the level which he knew he deserved. No one would even give him an interview. The joke was, ten years later it would be chic to be German and a communist. Meanwhile he was working for the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. This organisation owned a house in Kensington Square, where there were lectures on the happy state of the arts in the USSR. At every meeting the two back rows of chairs were filled with people who had actually lived under communism: they were trying to tell us how horrible communism was. We patronised them: they were middle-aged or old, they didn’t know the score, they were reactionary. A well-chosen epithet, flattering to the user, is the surest way of ending all serious thought. Gottfried earned very little money. He was being sheltered by Dorothy Schwartz, who had a large flat near Belsize Park Underground. The height—or depth—of the Cold War made him even more bitterly, angrily, coldly contemptuous of any opinion even slightly deviating from the Party Line. I was finding it almost impossible to be with him. I did not say to myself, But how did I stick him for so long? For we had had no alternative. About the child there were no disagreements. Peter spent most weekends with Gottfried and Dorothy. I would take him over there, sit down, have a cup of this or that, and listen to terrible, cold denunciations, then leave for two days of freedom. I went to the theatre a lot. In those days you queued in the mornings for a stool in the queue for the evening and saw the play from pit or gallery for the equivalent in today’s money of three or four pounds. I saw most of the plays on in London, in this way, sometimes standing. I continued madly in love with the theatre.

  I also went off to Paris. There is no way now of telling how powerful a dream France was then. The British—that is, people who were not in the forces—had been locked into their island for the war and for some years afterwards. People would say how they had suffered from claustrophobia, dreamed of abroad—and particularly of Paris. France was a magnet because of de Gaulle, and the Free French, and the Resistance, by far the most glamorous of the partisan armies. Now that our cooking and our coffee and our clothes are good, it is hard to remember how people yearned for France as for civilisation itself. And there was another emotion too, among women. French men loved women and showed it, but in Britain the most women could hope for was to be whistled at by workmen in the street, not always a friendly thing. Joan adored France. She had spent happy times there and spoke French well. Her father’s current girlfriend was French. Joan saw her as infinitely beautiful, while she was a mere nothing in comparison. This was far from the truth, but there was no arguing with her. (This was certainly not the only time in my life I have known a woman who wore rose-tinted spectacles for every woman in the world but herself.) Isn’t she gorgeous, she would moan over some woman less attractive than she was. She had had a very smart black suit made, with a tight skirt and a waistcoat like a man’s, which she wore with white shirts ruffled at throat and wrists. She actually went over to Paris to get it judged. There, men would compliment you on your toilette. She came back restored. Quite a few women I knew said that for the sake of one’s self-respect one had to visit Paris from time to time. This was not a situation without its little ironies. There was a newspaper cartoon then of a Frenchman, dressed in semi-battle gear, old jacket, beret, a Gauloise hanging from a lip, accompanying a Frenchwoman dressed like a model—a short stocky scruffy man, a tall slim elegant woman.

  When I went to Paris my toilette was hardly of the level to attract French compliments, but it was true every man gave you a quick, expert once-over—hair, face, what you were wearing—allotting you marks. This was a dispassionate, disinterested summing-up, not necessarily leading to invitations.

  A scene: I took myself to the opera, and in the foyer, at the interval, saw enter a very young woman, eighteen, perhaps, in what was perhaps her first evening dress, a column of white satin. She was exquisite, and so was the dress. She stood poised just in the entrance, while the crowd looked…assessed…judged. Not a word, but they might as well have been clapping. She was at first ready to shrink away with shyness but slowly filled with confidence, stood smiling, tears in her eyes, lifted on invisible waves of expert appreciation, approval, love. Adorable France, which loves its women, gives them confidence in their femininity—and that from the time when they are tiny girls.

  On this first trip I was in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, so cheap I could hardly believe it. Gottfried had said I should look up his sister’s husband’s mother. I did and found an elderly lady in old-fashioned clothes living in a tiny room high up under the roof of one of those tall ancient cold ho
uses. Through her I was admitted into a network of middle-aged and old women, without men, all poor, shabby, living from hand to mouth in maids’ rooms or in any corner that would let them fit themselves in. There they were, every one a victim of war, and some of them had lived in their little refuges through the war and, clearly, often did not know how they had managed it. They were witty and they were wise, and the best of company. As with the refugees in London then, it was hard to know what they lived on. I was served precious coffee in beautiful cups, by a stove that had to be fed with wood and coal—and whatever was burnable that could be picked up in the street, brought toiling up hundreds of cold stairs. Madame Gise had not heard from her son since the beginning of the war and said that he had chosen to despise her, because she was not a communist. She despised communists and communism. I said I was a kind of communist, and she said, Nonsense, you don’t know anything about it. These women, whose husbands or lovers or sons had been killed or had forgotten them: they were so brave, supporting each other in their poverty and when they were ill. Again, as in London, I was hearing tales of impossible survivals, endurances. Our talk in London of politics, all ideas and principles, of what went on in other countries, dissolved here into: ‘My cousin…Ravensbrook’; ‘My son was shot by the Germans for harbouring a member of the Resistance’; ‘I escaped from Germany…from Poland…from Russia…from Spain…’

  In Paris I bought a hat. This needs explanation. I had to: it was a need of the times. A Paris hat proved you had captured elegance itself. Madame Gise stood by me. Saying, No, not that one, Yes, that one, she was representing Paris itself, that shabby woman with a carefully counted out store of francs in her handbag. I never wore the hat. But I owned a Paris hat. Joan said, But what are you going to do with it?