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

by Doris Lessing

  These enormous publishing firms, the international empires, are very good for the big blockbusters, the best-sellers, and even the serious and already well-known writers, who are well-treated and cherished. I am one of them and I am grateful for it. Tucked away among the accountants and the moneymen are people who care passionately about literature, but they tend to develop a hunted look and may be heard to murmur, “I used to care passionately about literature, but these days I have no time to read.” For they are badly overworked. Good books are published, good writers survive, but all the pressures are against the small, or rare, or special books. Every one of us who care about literature cherishes a list of books that are out of print, or not published at all, or published but the editors have not troubled to sell them. In the long run, the neglect of these difficult-to-sell books will badly affect publishing as a whole. Once upon a time the publishers knew very well how important these difficult books were, a little spring of bubbling vitality. Some of us remember wistfully the days when a publisher might say: ‘Neither you nor I will make a penny out of this book, but it should be published.’

  The other big change is ‘promotion’. Writers sadly joke that having written a book, we then have to sell it. This is no joke. It took three and a half months of my life—of writing time—to ‘promote’ Under My Skin in Britain and in America, in Holland and Ireland and France. The old publishers understood that writers need peace, quiet, need to be left alone, not expected to be public people. So now we develop split personalities. One, the real person, stooges around in our rooms, as always, wool-gathering, dreaming, dredging substance out of our own deepest selves. The other puts on a smile and goes forth to be ‘a personality’.

  The change began with the stinginess of publishers, who did not want to spend money on advertising. They relied on reviews. Then writers were asked for interviews. These cost the publishers nothing. Newspapers and magazines need to fill space. It was a snowball process. Writers became known for their lives, their personalities, became celebrities. The more this happened, the more we were in demand for interviews, for ‘profiles’. About ten years or so ago, the literary festivals took off. They are a success, and there are new ones with every year. They frankly rely on the writer as personality. To them come thousands of readers, not all of whom care more for the books than for the personality. It does not mean that the reader, having sat through a talk by the celebrity, at once goes off to buy the book: one often substitutes for the other. The obsession with the autobiographical element in a writer’s work here reaches its fulfilment: having seen Shelley plain, what need to read the work?

  Then there are the signings, the most irrational of all the phenomena associated with promotion. You give a lecture, conduct a seminar, then you sit at a table while long queues patiently wait for a signature. They value this signature yet must see that it is as valuable as anything that comes off a mass production line. They know that this writer must be signing hundreds, thousands, of books a year. They at last arrive in front of the writer, hold out a book, which they may or may not have just bought—for often they bring in copies from their libraries—and say, Please put For Marie, For Bobbie, For Marcelle, For Jack, please put Happy Birthday Pat, Happy Christmas Jorge. The writer, who has begun with a fierce concern for the honour of literature, and who might even once have refused inane messages, since she has never heard of Marie, Bobbie, and the rest, is broken down by the demand, will do anything to put an end to the miserable business. She, he, is privately thinking, for the sake of sanity, that once writers shyly signed a book for a good friend: Cassandra, from Jane. Dorothy, from William. What would they have said to these production lines? I have been asked to sign six thousand copies of a new book: I refused. But I did sign three thousand once. What for? Secretly I think, If I sign enough copies, if we all do, then quite soon the readers will see the ludicrousness of it. A couple of summers ago there was a joke going around the Oxford students: ‘I have the only unsigned copy of…’ How can anyone possibly value these signatures? You think of the long patient lines of people waiting for a signature who have actually seen the author sitting there, speaking for almost an hour, they have heard her take questions. They know, after all, that they and the author share the same human frame, that she must be utterly exhausted and secretly cursing them. But on they come.

  In a hotel in Sicily, the manager stood behind the desk, held out one of my books in front of me, ordered, ‘For my mother, Maria. Then put, With respectful wishes.’ Meanwhile he held his hand over my room key: I would not be given it until I signed.

  In Washington I spoke for a most serious literary organisation. Invited to supper afterwards by the committee, I had not even sat down when in front of me appeared a pile of my books, and I heard, ‘You are going to have to sign for your supper.’ A jest.

  In the mid-fifties, this happened: Michael Joseph sold his firm to a big conglomerate, but only on condition that if it was resold, the people working for it must be consulted. Shortly afterwards the firm was sold to—I think—the Illustrated London News, and the first the staff knew about it was when the news came through on the ticker tape. Some resigned. We all thought this was outrageous. Now we have reached the point when dozens of editors, of people, can be axed from a publishing firm and given a couple of weeks to leave. No thought is given to the tenuous relationships being built up between writer and editor. These days, the editors working in a publishing firm are treated as roughly as any writer has ever been.

  It is an interesting fact, perhaps the most revealing of all, that writers are never consulted when firms change hands. We sign contracts with one firm, perhaps on the basis of its reputation, or of liking for or trust in a certain editor, but this counts for nothing. We are so much baggage now, commodities like the books we write.

  In those early days it was a rare thing to get this letter, soon to become common: ‘I am afraid I must tell you that I am leaving this firm and going to——. I am sorry, because I have so much enjoyed working with you. I hope you will soon have lunch with me. I would like to think that one day we may work together again.’ At the very beginning, before publishing firms were bought and sold like bags of groceries and editors moved from firm to firm, writers were expected to stay ‘loyal’ to a publisher. But writers, very soon seeing what was going on, became as loyal as their publishers and moved to suit themselves, usually after an editor with whom they had built up trust. But when that ‘loyalty’ went, something much deeper than a legal contract was being undermined.

  The worst thing that has happened to literature was when the very rich, multimillionaires, took a fancy to owning publishing firms. A power trip: which of them cares about literature? And at once they forced publishing to become like any other branch of industry. None of the great publishing empires make much money, so we may hope that the very rich men soon lose interest and with luck—or am I merely dreaming?—these unnatural associations of publishing firms fall apart again. In this realm, small is indeed the most beautiful. Perhaps we may return to a state where publishers care if the books are well produced and even properly copyedited. Readers will have noticed that books are not as they once were: they are full of errors. This is because, cutting corners as they have to now, under orders from the accountants, publishers often neglect to employ a copy editor, unless a writer takes a stand and insists.

  It certainly does not do anything to feed the confidence and self-respect of the writer, knowing that it is of no interest to the publisher that the print is full of errors, the paper and the format of the cheapest.

  But it is not just a question of money. Somewhere here is something dark and dubious; an unacknowledged need is being fed. Humiliation cannot go much further than being sent on a trip to some bookshop, let’s say in Manchester (or Detroit), to be sat in front of a pile of books, but no one turns up to buy a book, let alone have it signed. I have seen young writers put through this misery.

  Or take a Book Fair. Each publisher has a row of writers
waiting to sign books. The well-known writers will have their queues. But the less well known—and they can be just as good—sit for an hour, two hours, with no one coming near them. What is that about? Not to sell books, surely? No, it is that a publisher is displaying his writers to the other publishers: Look what I’ve got in my stable.

  At the Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto, I saw this: I came into the reception area and saw Michael Holroyd, one of the best of our literary biographers. He was white, dazed with exhaustion. His publishers had flown him on three separate trips from Toronto to different cities in the States, to ‘promote’ his Bernard Shaw books. A TV interview had been cancelled in one, but he knew about it only when he arrived in the studio. At the second, he was interviewed by someone who wanted to know about Lynne Reid Banks: but he happens to be married to Margaret Drabble. At the third, the interviewer did not know what he had written. It was an interview of more than usual imbecility. This kind of exploitation—and humiliation—of the writer is taken for granted.

  Only last week it was reported that someone said: ‘They should crawl along ditches and through mud.’ Meaning authors promoting books. And now there it is, plain and out in the open. Publishers, even the best of them, have moments when they find it irritating, even unbearable, that that quality in a writer which produces good work is uncontrollable. Everything else can be controlled but not that. But you can send these writers who are so pleased with themselves trotting about signing books or giving idiotic interviews. You can jump them through those hoops and put it in the contract too. Publishers often try to dispense with writers altogether. They come up with schemes where novels are concocted to a formula, from plots fed into a computer. But oddly enough, these novels do not have the juice or essence which is the basis of all their publishing. They cannot bear this. The fact that writers themselves find it pretty irritating, often enough, that their best work is elusive does not console them.

  A scene: A group of powerful New York publishers sit around the dinner table in a fashionable restaurant. They forget that a poor little writer (not me) is present. They are boasting about their power. ‘We make them and we break them.’ Or perhaps they haven’t forgotten about the author: they need a witness to their displays.

  A most famous New York publisher nursed a fantasy of how he would have ‘his’ authors all safely immured in a line of little cottages, like horses. We would be locked in all day, to get on with our work, and allowed out for three or four hours in the evening, to pursue our unimportant little lives, but locked up again at twelve. A joke!

  Yet the will-o’-the-wisp, that firefly, creative excellence, remains elusive. The film industry tries to buy it. Since films began, the process has gone on. There is a novel with this quality. The film-maker buys the novel. The writer, if already seasoned by experience, may smile a little. The film-makers heap compliments on the writer. This marvellous astounding wonderful original book…just trust us, you’ll see. The writer continues to smile, and cherishes her own thoughts. The writer reads the first draft of the film. Just for the sake of the thing, she or he may say, But that doesn’t have much to do with my novel, does it? At this point the film-maker will start to murmur about compromise. The word integrity appears: ‘The essential integrity of the story…’ If the writer is an innocent, she (or he) will ask, truly bewildered, But why buy my book at all, if then you don’t use it, or only make a travesty of it? Why not write a script of your own, from scratch? But—and this is the point—film-makers, the whole industry, are really believers in magic, though they don’t know it. The novel has a certain something—what can it be?—a presence, a fascination, and they have bought the book to get their hands on it. They think that even if they change the story, or idea, so that it has little to do with the original, some of the charm, or power, will stick. And sometimes they are right.

  Do they understand this? Probably not. These powerful wheelers and dealers are remarkably ignorant about their own processes. One thing they don’t understand is that their industry runs on high-octane emotional energy which they themselves create. Anyone coming from the sober world of literature into films will be astounded by the crises, the tears, the threats, the hysterics, the telephone calls at three in the morning, all the unreal melodramas that accompany film-making. What is it all about? They are manufacturing their own fuel, that’s all. They don’t understand, either, how they wastefully use it.

  A writer may, and often does, experience this. On the fax machine or by express messenger will arrive (‘Very Urgent, Immediate Delivery’) yards of print, thus: ‘I have just read your wonderful marvellous fantastic novel. I was kept up all night…’ And this will go on for hundreds of words. But the emotion of enthusiasm has already gone into the message, has been used up. The sender, a week later, will pick up the novel, turn it over. ‘I’ve gone off it. Funny.’

  When Bob Gottlieb advised me, as a youngish writer, ‘The only advice I can give any writer is this: “Take the money and run”’, I thought it cynical. But he was right. Unless you fancy an excursion into that phantasmagoric world where nothing is as it seems.

  It may be thought that I have gone on too much about publishing and publishers. But how may one write about the life of a writer without it? There are two very great difficulties about writing this book. If it is hard to convey the atmosphere of the Cold War, which was like a poison affecting everything, and which now seems like a sort of lunacy, then it is as hard to describe the difference between the atmosphere that pervaded publishing when I began writing, and what it is now. Young writers—or readers—can have no idea of what you are talking about, if you say, ‘In those days publishing was governed by a respect for real literature.’ ‘What do you mean?’ demands this imaginary interlocutor. For they do not know what you mean, since nothing they have experienced can have taught them and many really do not know the difference between a good and a bad book. A single example of the change: in those days periodicals like The Observer would review only serious books, would be ashamed to give room to reviews of the second-rate. If this young person who has never known anything different sees in a newspaper described as ‘A quality paper’ columns of review space for some bodice-ripper or a sex-and-violence epic and one paragraph for let’s say a reprint of Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, then he or she will know what to think.

  I shall repeat an essential, the essential fact. There are books that can be only for a minority, and no amount of puffing and promotion will change that, but these are the best, and—secretly, quietly and unobtrusively—the most influential, setting a tone and standard for the time.

  I was now on the invitation list of the Soviet Embassy. On occasions like the Anniversary of the Revolution, Red Army Day, and so forth, there were enormous receptions. I went to about five or six of them. I did not enjoy them. Why did I go, then? A revolutionary duty can be a continuation of the duty parents and grandparents owed to the church. Now I can hear my father’s ‘Oh Lord, do I have to go?’ when my mother wanted to go to the church service at Banket. A comrade: ‘Are you going to the Soviet Embassy, Doris?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Inside an ornate room—amazing how the representatives of the insulted and injured have to be housed in glitter and glamour—were waiting for us an inordinate number of Soviet officials. They were nearly all spies, but we did not know that then. There were also Party members and fellow travellers. These included some remarkable people. One was D. J. Bernal, the scientist, who had made original contributions to crystallography and had inspired a generation of students, communist or not, who revered him forever as a teacher. As early as the late 1930s, he was exhorting British communists to comprehend that there was a gap between the arts and the sciences and how damaging it was. This was one of the major themes of communist discussion. There were many debates, lectures, and study groups. I think I even gave a talk myself to the group in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. This idea was later taken up by C. P. Snow, who made it his own. The pro
cess is of much wider interest. Again and again, ideas that have been confined to a minority, particularly if it is an attacked and beleaguered one, take wing and permeate a whole culture. Within ten years, phrases born in communism had become part of general currency: concrete steps—we must take concrete steps—intrinsic contradictions, demos, fascists, all the rest of the dreary jargon, could be found in editorials in the Times.

  J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Mitchison’s brother, wrote pieces for the Daily Worker explaining new discoveries in science. It was he who thrilled us all with ‘The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.’ I knew people who bought the paper for these articles and read not a word of the rest. Later he went to India, where he educated a generation of Indian scientists. People like these were originals and, like all their kind, shared the characteristic that when they talked about the Soviet Union, every word was rubbish. A question: Do some people need to be identified with a hated minority position in order to flower in other ways? There were colourful characters like the Red Dean, Hewlitt Johnson, who had written a meretricious book called The Socialist Sixth of the World and was one of the brightest feathers in the Party’s cap, since he was at the heart of the religious Establishment.

  No one could say the guests were a boring lot, but I found the atmosphere oppressive. I hated the smugness that went with being in this position—we, the clever minority, supporting the defamed and unjustly attacked defender of the world’s working class. But then something happened that put me off going again. A couple of men in military uniform came and said I was to be introduced to a very important visitor from Moscow. They took me, one on each side, to stand in front of a general—I’ve forgotten his name. Around him were aides I thought of as military staff, but of course they were KGB. He was a squarish, solid man, with eyes like ice, and he was talking entirely in communist jargon: ‘The working class…fascist imperialists…peace fronts…exploited masses…advancing the cause of communism.’ I wasn’t really listening. What was wrong with me? Was I going to faint? I was cold, and my palms sweated. There was the queerest sensation at the back of my neck—the short hairs there were standing up. I was scared. I was terrified. He was frightening me to death. This has never happened to me since. I think this was where I came closest—touch close—to the murderous horrors of the Soviet Union. I did not discuss the incident with anyone. It was too ‘subjective’, as the comrades said about anything not at once explainable. Unfortunately, some of the most important encounters in one’s life, changing you, can seem so minor they are hardly worth mentioning. I did not go to one of these big receptions at the Soviet Embassy again.