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

by Doris Lessing

  I sat in one armchair, and he in another, and he talked into the past. Sometimes he would slightly raise his fingers from the wrist of a hand, which rested on the arm of the chair, and that meant there was more he could say but he was afraid of invisible listeners: the KGB bugged all hotel rooms their protégés were put in.

  The day-by-day struggle to live during the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War…I sat and thought that it was not easy for anyone in Britain to imagine such hardship, such cold. Later he loved another woman, who worked in the Hermitage, in Leningrad, but he was living somewhere outside Moscow. It was hard to get permission to travel then, even for a prominent writer, but he did sometimes take the train to Leningrad—Anna Karenina’s train, he reminded me—and she got the day off from her work. She had survived the siege of Leningrad, and she was very thin and weak, and not well. In her room they sat together all day and talked or were silent, and then he took the train back to Moscow. There was no need even to talk, he said. It was enough to be together. That was how that love went on, but she died too.

  He also talked a lot about politics, about the times under Stalin. ‘I never betrayed anyone,’ he insisted, over and over again, raising his voice and giving angry looks at the telephone, where he believed the KGB bug must be. ‘We were all compromised, every one of us. You don’t understand, people like you in the West. There was no possibility of saying no to them. But when I was interrogated I would not speak about other writers—and that was what they wanted. They wanted to frighten us, that’s why they interrogated us, even if he had decided not to send us to prison.’

  He also wanted to warn me about the dangers of politics for writers. ‘You are still young. I was young too, once. I was a boy genius. I was a peasant boy. Gorky noticed me. He said I was a genius. He and I were alike. We were both from poor families. We both liked to walk by ourselves through the villages. He walked all over Russia, and so did I. Sometimes I was months by myself, walking. The peasants fed me. But later Gorky was destroyed—they killed him—and so was I, but in a different way. I have spent my life on committees. That is where my genius went. I always tell young writers, Don’t go on committees, they’ll finish you. And that’s what I am telling you too.’

  ‘Ah, but you see, I learned that long ago.’

  ‘That’s good. That’s very good. But it’s easy for you. You can say no. It is hard for us to say no.’

  He told a story of how, when he was on a country road in some province, Gorky saw him, stopped his car, made him get in. ‘I want you to see something. You’ll see an important man today.’ Some writers were meeting in a country house, and Stalin had sent word that he would drop in. He did. He listened to their deliberations, all flattering to him. Then Gorky stood up and spoke directly to Stalin, telling him that everything that had been said was false. Conditions were terrible for the people. ‘We were sitting there in that fine house, but all around, people were suffering. And the writers were suffering too. The Party’s ideas about literature were wrong and not good for writers.

  ‘We were holding our breaths,’ said Marshak. ‘We were all of us white with terror. I was shaking—I was a very young man, and these were all big, important people to me, and Gorky was treating them as if they were just naughty children. And no one ever defied Stalin. You don’t understand, you people here. Then Stalin stood up, very deliberately, and he said he was glad there was one honest man present—Comrade Gorky. “All the rest of you are liars, and you only say things to please me.” Then he went off with his guards.’

  I have heard this story about other dictators. Clearly, we need to hear about this ‘one honest man’.

  I was fond of Samuel Marshak, and I think he was of me. But what he needed was someone to listen to him, pay him attention. He was lonely. Yet this was an important Soviet writer.

  He wanted to meet Peter. Next time he came, we met in the daytime, had tea in a park, went shopping to buy Marshak some shoes, for all the visiting Russians bought shoes and good clothes. He loved Peter, and Peter liked him. He gave Peter a very fine knife and some of his children’s poems, in Russian. He wrote some verses for Peter, but I don’t know what happened to them. Later Marshak’s son, a physicist, used to come, and I was telephoned from the embassy: would I take him shopping for shoes and clothes?

  I do not see how any writer could have a worse fate than Samual Marshak’s. To be a peasant boy with genius—or even talent—at that time, was to be seen as the inheritor of a glorious future. To be Gorky’s protégé was to be accepted by the most famous writer in Russia. Gorky steadily fought Lenin over the inhumanity of his policies, procuring the release of hundreds of political prisoners, and then he fought Stalin too: it would have been easy for Marshak to feel allied with the good side of the Revolution, for it was then still possible to think there was one. Slowly he was absorbed into the structure of oppression, but hardly knew it was happening. By the time he knew he was trapped, it was too late. Easy to say, for people who have never lived with the experience of political terror, ‘He should have opted out.’ How? He would have been sent to die in the Gulag, like dozens of other writers. ‘I never wrote what I should have written,’ he said. ‘I could have been like Gorky. Really my talent was for realistic writing. I should have written what I was seeing around me.’ Samuel Marshak, to this day, arouses the most extraordinary degree of contempt among Russian intellectuals. They seem to want to spit (a very Russian expression of contempt, enshrined in the language) at the sound of his name: he was a Stalin Prize winner, he was synonymous with Soviet power. They are reluctant even to allow that he made good translations of Burns, Shakespeare, others. But surely the sad and humble old man I knew was as much a victim as Maxim Gorky, who was murdered by Stalin?

  An incident not without its comedy was when the cultural attaché said he would like to meet me and discuss…what? Probably literature. I behaved as I would with anyone and asked him to lunch. When he arrived he found me alone, with the table laid for two—this was still in Joan’s house. He had expected other guests, a real luncheon party. He surveyed the heaps of books and papers everywhere and said, ‘You are a real writer, I can see that.’ He was nervous, and I pretended not to notice. I was thinking, I’m damned if I’m going to change my ways to fit in with their stupid ideas. ‘I cannot have lunch here with you alone,’ he said. ‘It might be misunderstood.’

  ‘Oh, why?’ said I, disingenuously. He was a nice sort of man, not at all like an official. I took him to the French Pub, which had a good restaurant upstairs, and told him the story of the Free French and this pub, and how on the Fourteenth of July people danced in the street. He liked all that. He didn’t want to talk about literature at all and confessed that he was bored by culture; he hoped I didn’t think the worse of him. What he liked was the circus. He went as often as he could. He was glad I was not shocked, for he knew that as a cultural attaché he should know about books. When we parted he said that he was sorry, but he had to inform me that I was not a communist at all, I was a Tolstoyan. No, this was not a compliment.

  And now an occasion that gave up its full flavour only later. I was invited to the Soviet Embassy for lunch to meet Paul Robeson, the singer, a very public communist and having a bad time of it in the United States. As usual, I went thinking, Oh, Lord, I suppose I have to. There were as many Soviet officials as there were guests. About sixteen people sat down to lunch including Pamela Hansford Johnson and C. P. Snow, who, if not actually a Party member, was much trusted by the Russians.* James Aldridge was there with his wife, Dina. James Aldridge’s novel The Diplomat was regarded in the Soviet Union as a great work of literature, but James was not much known in Britain. The Diplomat was full of what used to be known as ‘progressive ideas’ and was not a good book. The sad thing was that he had written a beautiful little novel called The Hunter, about the wilds of Canada, where he had been brought up. But this novel, the real one, the good one, was mostly ignored in the Soviet Union, and ignored here because he was such
a public communist.

  I was sitting next to Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of And Quiet Flows the Don, and The Don Flows Down to the Sea. The first is an epic novel of the fighting in the civil war between the Reds and the Whites, a wonderful book. I had read it as a girl, when still on the farm. The only word for this man is macho, positively a comic-opera he-man. Vibrations of dislike instantly flowed between us. He asked me if I had read his books. Yes, I did. Did I like them? Yes, but I preferred And Quiet Flows the Don to the second novel. Why did I? Since he had paid me the compliment of asking for my opinion, I told him I thought the first was full of vigour and invention, and the love story was wonderful, but the second didn’t come up to the first. Suddenly he was furious. He said that if he had me in his country he would get on his horse, tie me behind it, and make me run until I fell down, and he would drag me behind him until I cried for mercy, and then he would have me flogged. That was the treatment for women like me. I said that I didn’t doubt he would do all that. We exchanged this kind of jest for a while. It was only later I discovered that he had stolen the first novel from some unfortunate young writer and, when it turned out to be such a success, read with admiration throughout the world, had tried to match it with The Don Flows Down to the Sea.*

  Over coffee I talked with Paul Robeson and his wife. I decided they were both stupid, because they were talking entirely in communist jargon: capitalist lies, fascist imperialists, running dogs, democratic socialism (the Soviet Union), peace-loving peoples. Not one word was said in normal speech. But I hadn’t understood something, which was that this language was often employed either deliberately or instinctively, at moments of threat, even for days or weeks at a time. He was at the Soviet Embassy, officials were hovering about, and he was dependent on the goodwill of the Soviet Union because his own country was treating him so badly. When politics and public life become as polarised as they were then, then people may seem stupid. So I can say that I have met and talked with one of the great singers of our time and, with equal truth, that I didn’t.

  Talking to Robeson taught me how different the American Left was from the British Left. But as I’ve said, the Americans are a people of extremes. I do find it odd that this is never admitted, let alone discussed. Some kind of national ‘image’, or sets of images, get in the way: the poor boy, or girl, who can become president…young people from indigent backgrounds working their way through college to become rich and famous…a chicken in every pot (now that is a cheapened symbol of plenty)…Jefferson, Lincoln, and all that. But it is a country that catches fevers and runs high temperatures. When we talk about the ‘shared language’—English—as a barrier, because of some differing (though not very many) word usages, that is surely itself another barrier, obscuring the truth, which is that the barrier is national temperaments, or dispositions. At the moment, a suggestion that there can be national temperaments or characteristics may hardly be said aloud in the United States, because of political correctness. And that proves my point.

  The American communists were more communist, fanatical, party-line, and paranoid than anyone I ever knew in Britain. They produced more of what the Communist Party itself called the ‘one hundred and fifty percenters’—and certainly not with admiration, for they knew that the extreme communist flipped over easily into his or her opposite, the communist-hater. No British communist was ever treated with the harshness the American government used towards Paul Robeson and some other American communists.

  And now enter Clancy Sigal. As if off a film set. He was in the style of young Americans then, jeans, sweatshirt, a low-slung belt where you could not help but see a ghostly gun. The lonely outlaw. The lone sheriff battling against the bad men.

  Someone had telephoned to say that this American was in town, he needed a place to stay, could I let him a room. I said my career as a landlady had not encouraged me to try again. Comrade Whoever-it-was said wasn’t I ashamed not to help a comrade out, when I had an empty room?

  He was unlike the Americans I had met to date, most of them publishers or film people. They were then formal, correct, hair short-back-and-sides, and as if inside invisible armour. They watched their words. They spoke slowly. The phrase stiff upper lip might have been invented to describe Americans then, particularly the men, for it seemed a spell had been put on their mouths: they could hardly move them. You would see an American a hundred yards away, and from the set of his lips you would know him. Was this because of McCarthy? Had he frightened them into a tight-lipped and general conformity, even if they had nothing to do with left-wing politics? But soon this type of American disappeared, and they all became loose and laid back—as a style.

  Clancy was a heroic figure, made one not only by a thousand film epics and the heroes and heroines of the Left, who inhabited his imagination like close friends, but, too, because of the great figures of American history. He had recently made that journey which was obligatory for young Americans, traversing the United States by car, by himself, crazy as a loon, conversing with Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Sacco and Vanzetti, Jefferson, Mother Bloor, John Brown, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, Speransky, Bukharin, Trotsky, and anyone else who turned up.

  Clancy was a mirror of everything I was beginning to be uneasy about in myself. Only beginning—and that is the difficulty. Coming events cast their shadows before. But looking back from the perspective of those events, it is easy to be dishonest. Some tiny passing shade of feeling, a mere cloud shadow, may ten years later become a storm of revelation: about yourself, about others, about a time. Or may have dissolved and gone.

  What I was beginning to be unhappy about was left-wing romanticism, not to say sentimentality, by no means confined to communists, and in fact it permeates the left wing. It is the sentimentality that so often accompanies the extremes of brutality, or can lead to it. Attitudinising. The Red Flag carried to fire-storming heights by dying heroes. The Storming of the Bastille, the Storming of the Winter Palace…both these last mythologized out of any resemblance to the truth. I could fill a page or two here—what am I saying?—a volume, several volumes.

  What was, is, important to this layer of the Left was always the dramatic, indeed, the melodramatic, never some small sober unremarkable work or effort. There are in the Left (and elsewhere) people labouring for a lifetime to improve some small aspect of life for everybody, but never in the Left I had been part of. Clancy’s history of the United States was all heroic battles, and often bloody confrontations with government. Miners against callous mine owners—no, I’m not saying there were not callous mine owners, and people have forgotten just how brutal they often were. John Brown’s mouldering body. The courtrooms where Clarence Darrow fought for liberalism and the truth. The soup kitchens of the Great Depression. Clancy’s vision put them in the centre of the stage, excluded anything else.

  There is a history of Britain that is all heroism and big events. Clancy knew it as well as he did the American saga, and in neither was the story of some woman or man working for years to change some small law or other.

  My ‘doubts’—and these were separate from the ‘revelations’ from the Soviet Union—have to be recorded here, though they were then so uneasy and so unsure of themselves.

  Sometimes I survey my current thoughts and wonder which of them—some of them new, with the overemphasis of outline that befits an untried idea, still not worn into shape by events, some astounded at their own effrontery—will turn out to have been the ones I should have been listening to, developing. Which of them will seem absurd, and even pathetic, in a decade or so?

  Clancy was pretty ill when he arrived, just about holding himself together. He had come from Paris, where a close friend, an American woman living in Paris, told him he was crazy. People had been telling him he was for years. ‘Clancy, you have got to face up to it.’ He had just decided that there might be something in what they said. He made no secret about finding in me a good substitute for a psychotherapist. He was younger than I was.

  By
the same cold but useful gauge I used for Jack, Gottfried, and others, Clancy and I were ill suited emotionally—that above all—and sexually, but that was because the cool, cut-off distancing of so many Americans then from emotion was inhibiting; but intellectually it was a match, all right, for a time. First of all, he had read everything. His mother, a Russian immigrant to the States, a very poor woman, saw herself—as did his father—as heir of the world’s great revolutionary movements, and by definition that included literature. Both father and mother were labour agitators and trade union organisers, often losing their jobs and having to move on. Bringing up their child had always taken second place to the Revolution. In short, Clancy was a survivor, one of the extremest I’ve known. ‘No wonder you’re screwed up,’ I’d say to him, and he’d say to me, ‘Lady, I’m not screwed up; everybody else is.’