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

by Doris Lessing

  I went on a trip with Jack to southern Germany. It is recorded in ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’. The mood in Germany was so bad then, so low, so angry. The experience depressed me, and so did writing the story. Some Germans have reproached me for writing it, but the point of the story is not Germany but Europe: it was all of us I was thinking of, Europe building itself up, knocking itself down, building, destroying, building…

  The nastiest of my recollections of Germany was of a woman coming up to me on a railway platform to complain that Germany had been divided. Her fatherland was cut in half. Did I know of this injustice? Was it fair? What had Germany done to be punished in this way? Other people came to join her, all assaulting me with voices full of the insincerity that goes with a consciously false position.

  Jack went to Germany partly out of political conviction. As a Marxist he refused to believe in national characteristics, national guilt, but this was the country that had murdered nearly all his family.

  I was full of conflict. I had been brought up on the First World War, and a good part of that was my father’s passionate identification with the ordinary German soldiers, who were victims of their stupid government, just like the Tommies. I had been married to a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. I had been brought up to believe that Hitler and the Nazis were a direct result of the Versailles Treaty and that if Germany had been treated with an intelligent generosity, there would have been no World War II. I believed—and still do—that the Second World War would have been prevented if we, Britain and France, had had the guts to stand up to Hitler early and had supported the anti-Nazi Germans, whom we consistently snubbed. Being in Germany then was so painful: I was divided, sorry for the Germans, and yet hearing German or seeing a sign in German still reminded me of the fear I felt in the war, though I believed this reaction to be stupid and irrational. There was a day, or rather a night, when, standing on a railway platform in Berlin and realising that every person on it was a cripple from the War—legless men, armless men, eyeless men, and all drunk, in that particular way of being drunk in war or bad times, a bitter drunkenness—I said to myself, Enough, stop tormenting yourself: this is like voluntarily rubbing one’s nose in one’s own vomit. What am I doing this for? What good does it do to me—or the Germans? And I did not go back to Germany for decades. And then Germany was whole again, and that landscape of misery and destruction had vanished. Please God, for ever.

  And now I have to record what was probably the most neurotic act of my life. I decided to join the Communist Party. And this at a time when my ‘doubts’ had become something like a steady, private torment. Separate manifestations of the horror that the Soviet Union had become were discussed, briefly, in lowered voices—the equivalent of looking over one’s shoulder to see if anyone could hear. I do not remember one serious, sit-down, in-depth discussion about the implications of what we were hearing. Rather, sudden burstings into tears: ‘Oh, it’s so horrible.’ Sudden storms of accusation: ‘It’s just anti-Soviet propaganda anyway.’ Marital quarrels, even divorces.

  People complain that old Reds ‘try to justify themselves’. These are nearly all young people, for older ones understand exactly why it was natural to be a communist. To explain, to ‘bear witness’, is not to justify.

  To spell out the paradox: All over Europe, and to a much lesser extent the United States, it was the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people who became communists. (Among these were a very different kind of people, the power-lovers.) These decent, kind people supported the worst, the most brutal tyranny of our time—with the exception of communist China. Hitler’s Germany, which lasted thirteen years, was an infant in terror compared to Stalin’s regime—and yes, I am taking into account the Holocaust.

  The first and main fact, the ‘mind-set’ of those times, was that it was taken for granted capitalism was doomed, was on its way out. Capitalism was responsible for every social ill, war included. Communism was the future for all mankind. I used to hear earnest proselytisers say, ‘Let me have anyone for a couple of hours, and I can persuade him that communism is the only answer. Because it is obvious that it is.’ Communism’s hands were not exactly clean? Or, to put it as the comrades did, ‘There have been mistakes’? That was because the first communist country had been backward Russia; but if the first country had been Germany, that would have been a very different matter! (The fact that the Soviet Union had inherited the oldest and most successful empire in the world was decades away from being noticed.) Soon, when the industrially developed countries became communist, we would all see a very different type of communism.

  I have been tempted to write a chapter headed ‘Politics’, so that it could be skipped by people who find the whole subject boring, but politics permeated everything then; the Cold War was a poisonous miasma. And yet it is hard from present perspectives to make sense of a way of thinking I now think was lunatic. Does it matter if one woman succumbed to lunacy? No. But I am talking of a generation, and we were part of some kind of social psychosis or mass self-hypnosis. I am not trying to justify it when I say that I now believe all mass movements—religious, political—are a kind of mass hysteria and, a generation or so later, people must say, But how could you believe…whatever it was?

  Belief—that’s the word. This was a religious set of mind, identical with that of passionate religious True Believers. Arthur Koestler and others wrote a book called The God That Failed, and now it is a commonplace to say that communism is a religion. But to use that phrase is not necessarily to understand it. What communism inherited was not merely the fervours but a landscape of goodies and baddies, the saved and the unredeemed. We inherited the mental framework of Christianity. Hell: capitalism; all bad. A Redeemer, all good—Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Purgatory: you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs (lagers, concentration camps, and the rest). Then paradise…then heaven…then Utopia.

  Yet I was far from a true believer. For one thing, Jack, the most serious love of my life, embodied the conflicts or, if you like, the ‘contradictions’ of communism: eleven of his closest friends, his comrades, his real family, had been hanged as traitors. When I said to Jack I was thinking of joining the Party, he said I was making a mistake—and it must have hurt him most horribly to say it. Yet he knew, having been through all those mills himself, it was a waste of time saying it. ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ was what I could have heard.

  Arthur Koestler said that every communist who stayed in the Communist Party in the face of all the evidence had a secret explanation for what was happening, and this could not be discussed with friends and comrades. Some of the communists I knew had decided that yes, the reported crimes were true—though of course not as bad as the capitalist press said—but that Comrade Stalin could not possibly know about what was going on. The truth was being kept from Uncle Joe. My rationalisation, my ‘secret belief’—and it certainly could not be discussed with anyone but Jack—was that the leadership of the Soviet Union had become corrupt but that waiting everywhere in the communist world were the good communists, keeping their counsel, and they would at the right time take power, and then communism would resume its march to the just society, the perfect society. There was just one little thing: I didn’t realise Uncle Joe had murdered them all.

  And then there was this business of Britain’s class system. It shocked me—as it does all colonials. Britain is two nations, all right…though it is a bit better now—not much. When I first arrived, my Rhodesian accent enabled me to talk to the natives—that is, the working class—for I was seen as someone outside their taboos, but this became impossible as soon as I began talking middle-class standard English: this was not a choice; I cannot help absorbing accents wherever I am. A curtain came down—slam. I am talking about being treated as an equal, not of the matey, rather paternal ‘niceness’ of the upper classes. And then I found that people who had suffered out the thirties on tea and bread and margarine and jam, who had been for years unemployed, who lived in filthy sl
ums, voted Tory.

  An incident: One of my RAF friends from Rhodesia took me to lunch and said, ‘You could learn to pass. Women are good at it.’ This was meant kindly: he had taken me out to lunch to say this. He did not understand when I said that I had no intention of learning to ‘pass’. People did not necessarily admire his kind. Only six or seven years later, with the advent of the (so-called) angry young men, that generation, it would become unnecessary to justify this stand, but then it was necessary. Uncomfortable, embarrassing for both sides.

  An incident: With another man, also ex-RAF, I went into a pub in Bayswater. It was the public bar. We stood at the counter, ordered drinks. All around the walls, men sat watching us. They were communing without words. One got up, slowly, deliberately, came to us, and said, ‘You don’t want to be here [rather, ’ere]. That’s your place.’ Pointing at the private bar. We meekly took ourselves there, joining our peers, the middle class. This kind of thing goes on now. Foreigners, returning natives, complain about the class system, but the British say—both classes—You don’t understand us, and continue as before. The working classes, the lower classes, have ‘internalised’ their station in life.

  When in this mood, a bitter criticism of Britain, my set of mind was identical—but I saw this only later—with that of the people who became communists in the thirties: because of that grim and grimy poverty. And, too, with the people who went off to the Spanish Civil War, because of anger when the French and British governments refused to supply arms to the legitimate government, while Hitler and Mussolini armed Franco. A deep shame persisted in many people I met then. (Does this kind of shame, over the behaviour of one’s government, still exist? I think not—an innocence has gone.) This shame caused some people to become traitors, and spies. The Spanish Civil War had left a painful legacy. People have forgotten how badly the refugees from Spain were treated, kept in camps near the border for years, as if they were criminals, to be punished. Well into the sixties, there were a couple of pubs in Soho where intensely poor Spaniards met to talk about how the world had forgotten them, and yet they had been the first to stand up to the Nazis, to the fascists. There are cynics who say that that was their crime.

  And so I joined ‘the Party’, which is how it was generally referred to. I hated having a Party card. I hated joining anything. I hated and hate meetings. I merely record this…a tangle of contradictory, lunatic emotions and behaviour. Later, so very much later, quite recently, in fact, an explanation of why so many people stuck with the Communist Party, long after they should have left, came to me. But for now, enough.

  There was another thing: I had seen too many of the kind who run around saying, ‘I am a communist,’ but wouldn’t dream of joining the Party. I despised them. Quite soon, in London, there would be a new generation of young people saying, ‘I am a communist,’ to shock the bourgeoisie, to annoy mummy and daddy, to give themselves and others an enjoyable frisson.

  I was interviewed by Sam Aaronivitch, cultural commissar. He was a very young man, lean, stern, military in style, with the grim, sardonic humour of the times. He had been a very poor boy, from the East End. The Young Communist League had been his education but not his nursery, because he was a Jew and one of a people of a Book. I have several times been told by children of the Jewish East End how they listened to fathers, uncles, elder brothers, even mothers, argue politics, philosophy, religion, around meal tables on which there might be hardly enough to eat. Why had ‘the Party’ chosen a young man who had read nothing of modern literature, and was not interested in the arts, to represent culture? The interview was in the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. (‘King Street says…’ ‘Those idiots in King Street…’ ‘I was summoned to King Street, but I told them that…’) He heard me out, like an officer interviewing a rookie, and said he was intrigued to meet an intellectual who wanted to join the Party, when most of them were leaving it, and he looked forward to reading my denunciations of the Party when I left. Then he took me on a tour of the East End, where he had grown up. Sam does not remember doing this, but it is one of the vividest of my memories of those early days in London. He was showing me a culture already dead, which he regretted, because of its guts and its cohesiveness. Sam has had a various life, or perhaps one should say lives: one of them as ‘the Balliol Marxist’. Sometimes we meet, when he is sprinting and I am ambling across Hampstead Heath. We reminisce: I remember this, he remembers that—for instance, that Peter used to spend weekends and play with his daughter Sabrina. He is now helping the Bangladeshi community who live in the streets where he grew up. The Bangladeshis in East London are people of a Book, but for some reason theirs does not do for them what the Jews’ Book did for them, producing the passionately polemical, intellectual, clever people who were able to rise above their poverty to invigorate the worlds of learning, business, and the arts. The children do not grow up hearing fathers, mothers, uncles, elder brothers, argue about religion, politics, literature; they do not hear poetry and bits from great novels quoted in support of arguments. When they go to school they do not do brilliantly, as did the poor Jews who lived before them in those streets.

  One of the reasons some found it hard to leave the Party was precisely because there were so many colourful, extraordinary people in it. Good people, generous, kind, clever.

  I shall mention two out of many. Once, when I was so short of money I didn’t know what to do, thought I would have to give up trying to live on my earnings and get a job, I got a letter quite out of the blue from people I did not know, communists, who wrote to say they had heard I was hard up, they liked my books, and enclosed one hundred pounds. That was a lot of money then. They did not want me to return it, but when I had enough, they would like me to send it on to someone who needed it, with the same request: to hand it on to someone in need. I shall be forever grateful to these people, whom I never met.

  A bit later, when feeling imprisoned by the stratifications of the class system, I asked the Communist Party to arrange a visit for me to a mining community. I found this village, Armsthorpe, near Doncaster, grim, depressing; and yet it had been recently built and the people in it felt themselves lucky compared with families living in some of the old villages. A miner, his wife, three adolescent children. He had been a communist for years, and so had she. The house was full of books: I saw no other books in the houses of the village. They listened to music on the radio, and plays. They talked about how Sybil Thorndike had brought a company to play Shakespeare to the miners in the middle of the war. Everyone in the community remembered this. These two had travelled to the Soviet Union and to other communist countries. That was before mass tourism; they were the only travelled people in the village. He was a father figure, or unofficial representative; people dropped in all the time to ask his advice. Everything he said about the mining community, about Britain, about his life—the usual story of bitter poverty in the twenties and thirties—was full of information and good sense. Everything he said about the Soviet Union and the communist world was nonsense. To have said to this man, What you admire so much is an illusion, and Stalin is a monster—that would have killed something in him: hope, a belief in humankind. This kind of dichotomy, on one side everything that was sound and sensible and honest, and on the other a mirage of lies, was common.

  I used to lie awake, for the two weeks of my visit, in the living room on a sofa immediately under their bedroom and hear him coughing just above my head. He had lung disease from the pit, and he knew he would die soon. He wouldn’t allow his children to go near the mines; it was a life for a dog.

  Walking with him through the street, I saw a group of young miners, just up from the pit, wearing cheap best suits and red scarves, having showered in the pithead baths. They were off to Doncaster for the evening. They greeted my host, nodded to me. The old miner was full of an angry tenderness for them: what were they eating, they didn’t look well, those scarves weren’t enough to keep them warm. You could see their affection for
him.

  I used this experience in a short story, ‘England Versus England.’

  My Party card was in fact delayed. I had been invited to go to the Soviet Union for the Authors World Peace Appeal: that kind of inspirational organisation flourished then. It had been started by Naomi Mitchison and Alex Comfort. Few people could be found who would go. The atmosphere was such that I got letters and telephone calls saying that I would disappear into a concentration camp. When I said that it was hardly likely that the Union of Soviet Writers would allow eminent guests to disappear—surely bad publicity for them?—I was told (like Moidi Jokl with Gottfried), ‘You don’t understand anything about communism. It would serve you right if you were bumped off.’

  There were six of us: Naomi Mitchison herself. Her cousin Douglas Young, because he understood Russian. Arnold Kettle, a well-known Marxist literary critic from Leeds University. A. E. Coppard, the short-story writer. Richard Mason, the author of The Wind Cannot Read, a best-selling novel from the war, about a young English soldier in love with a half-caste nurse. And myself, a very new writer. This, we knew, was hardly the level of literary repute the Russians must have been hoping to attract for the first visit of writers from the West since the war—this was 1952.

  There was a preliminary meeting, passionate and polemical, violent. Alex Comfort hated that there would be a communist on the delegation, Arnold Kettle, who would try to pull the wool over our eyes and feed us lies. Naomi refuted this. She knew Arnold, who was a sweet young man. A. E. Coppard, as innocent as a babe about politics, had gone to the Wrotslav Peace Conference and fallen in love with communism, as if he had been given a potion. The meeting developed into a plan with detailed instructions, from Alex Comfort, on how to outwit Arnold. I think Richard Mason was present.