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

by Doris Lessing

  I sat in the audience for the musical South Pacific. I was with friends my age. Slowly I became uneasy, then distressed, then outraged. Yes, we were all feeling the same. We had been brought up on books and plays protesting about the horrors of war. Here we were watching an insipid tale that had the Second World War as a background—the war in the Pacific, that terrible, murderous war, but here shown as something to be taken for granted, nothing very much compared to this paradise island, sexy American troops, a love affair, a mild message about race. No one else in the audience seemed to mind. It was one of the times when you realise that there has been, without your even knowing it, a change of moral values, and you have been left behind, stranded on some rather ridiculous outpost. I felt the same over Hiroshima, Mon Amour, with its images of death and tortured bodies mingled with bodies writhing in sex. A new sensibility, to my mind infinitely corrupted and sick.

  Nothing has changed more than attitudes towards love, sex, marriage—all that. Throughout the fifties there emanated from the United States an air of discouragement, sadness, dismay about what was going on between men and women. There was desperation, of a quiet patient kind. A film, whose name I have forgotten, was about a man and a woman both looking for love—real love, and that was the point. This was in New York. These two wandered through the city, which was cold and hostile to them, and while they were often in the same street, or bar, or restaurant, they never met. They were made for each other, born to fall into each other’s arms—‘Here you are, at last’—but the great wilderness, the city, kept them apart. There has never been a more powerful vision of loneliness than that film. All that has changed: the sixties blew away those grey and sorrowful miasmas.

  An adviser on food, one Dr. Gelfand, backed by government and medical experts, pronounced that the good diet must consist of protein and fat, and a minimum of carbohydrate. Meat, butter, milk and cheese and eggs, would see us all through to a healthy death. Men needed 3,500 to 4,000 calories a day, women 2,500 to 3,000. There were two kinds of protein: first-class protein, mostly meat, which is what the world’s populations should aim at, and second-class protein, pulses, vegetable protein, which—if you came to think of it—were eaten only by second-class people. This dogma ruled for at least ten years.

  American white men were insulting their own women, and white women generally, for being unsexy, hardly women at all: real women were black and knew how to move—particularly their butts.

  Coffee bars, so recently born, the only refuge for young people, unless they wanted to use pubs, were thriving up and down the land but were often closed, and harassed, by the police, who had not understood the arrival of youth culture. They were all having such a good time: can’t have that.

  Walking up through Trafalgar Square, I passed a little knot of demonstrators outside the South African Embassy. A girl thrust some pamphlets at me. Believing I did not need information about South Africa, I shook my head. She shouted abuse at me, ‘fascist’ being the least of it.

  A Commonwealth Exhibition of Art was ignored by all the critics. I was asked by West Indian friends to try and persuade them at least to go and have a look. I rang up newspaper after newspaper, wrote letters. The trouble was, these rooms filled with large colourful pictures, full of verve and vitality, were not what the critics then were admitting as art. Even the one or two critics who did go dismissed it. The uninstructed and uninformed public did not go at all.

  In the sixties appeared a book about the fifties, called The Fifties, and the references to me were inaccurate, so I supposed those to other people were too. The author had not bothered to interview any of us and was so inexperienced he seemed to imagine that the ‘names’ on the letterheads of organisations were the people who did the actual work. I wrote to complain, and his reply was, ‘I see you don’t like me very much,’ not, ‘I am sorry I wrote such a shoddy book.’ I was shocked, not realising—well, none of us did—that this indifference to fact was shortly to become general in reporting.

  There was a community or commune in Kent, begun in the thirties by architects, all communists or part of the socialist fervours of the time. The idea was to create an exemplary way of living. The men worked in London, where they had toeholds, and commuted either every day or at weekends. By now everyone reading this will be able to supply what follows, but the effort foundered on something no one then expected. The men were happy, the children adored living in this extended family in the country, but the women were discontented. That was a surprise and a disappointment to everyone. I was told of it, with a humorous sadness, by one of the men, who said why was it that something that was a heaven for the men and the children could be such a martyrdom for the women?

  Television and radio announcers still insisted on mispronouncing foreign names, presumably to show our independence. This was a source of embarrassment to some of us, who hated our country showing itself like a lout among the nations.

  This country was still seen by visitors as so gentle and polite and civilised, compared with others.

  Langham Street

  WI

  FOUR YEARS AFTER I HAD BEEN ASSURED IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE THE law could change, it was changed, and I was no longer a protected tenant. When I asked the lawyer how this could be, he said, Well, these things happen. At once a developer arrived to look at my flat. One very large room, two medium-sized rooms, two small ones, and a kitchen the right size to sit in, drinking coffee and talking, were to become twelve rooms: my big room alone would make four. Quite soon I would be gone and thinking of young Australians in their vagabond phase shut into these little boxes of rooms, for this whole area—Earls Court—would become Little Australia.

  And so where was I to live? In 1958, nine years after I came to London, I found that if my earnings were evened out, they were the same as the average worker’s wage—twenty pounds a week, I think it was. My unconcerned, it-will-all-come-right-in-the-end attitude towards money has always suited my way of life but proved a handicap at times when I needed to find a place to live. As everyone knows, writers’ earnings are chancy and you never know what you will have coming in next year. I remember an income tax official coming to see me at Joan’s house, to say, Why haven’t you paid your tax? I told him that last year I had earned enough to pay tax, but not this year, with three hundred pounds. He was nice about it, found ways of seeing me through, but as with all regularisers and invigilators, my precarious life made him uneasy, and he thought I should be aiming at a steady income, perhaps as a secretary.

  By now I was having opportunities to earn money in ways other than writing novels and stories: radio and television were beckoning. On the whole I resisted their blandishments. In those days we believed that to write for money was to sell your soul, dilute the precious honey, offend your Muse, who would punish you by making you incapable of seeing the difference between good and bad writing, so that you would end up as a hack. We were right, but such is the climate now that it is hard even to mention these dear old-fashioned ideas. And we still believed that a writer should be private, quiet, resist publicity.

  My mother had left me a thousand pounds. She had also left a house in a suburb of Salisbury, which she had been renting out. I told my brother I didn’t want my share of the house, he could have it. I knew that dividing up the house and furniture would lead to unpleasantness and difficulties. I also said I didn’t want any of the photographs, the canteens of silver cutlery, the silver presentation trays. Now, that was a bad mistake, not least because my brother valued them so little that when I asked many years later where they were, he did not know, had forgotten how the big silver tray had stood on the writing desk (made of petrol boxes) in the old farmhouse, insisting on its Englishness, or how the photographs in their silver frames had stood about near the fluted silver vases for sweet peas, next to plough parts and bits of rock that might turn out to have gold in them.

  I would be able to afford a modest rent or mortgage. I began one of those intensive day-after-day periods of home-hunti
ng which have taken me to so many parts of London that I can hardly go down a street anywhere without thinking, Look, there’s that house; I could have been living there all this while.

  Two places stand out from that time. One was a house in Flood Street, Chelsea, where there were two floors of faded crumbling dingy dusty rooms. It was cheap, but although so many famous people had lived in Flood Street, the place depressed me. I would need yet again to spend weeks painting and mending and dyeing, and besides, there was that name, Flood—and the Thames was running at the bottom of the street. The other house was in Royal Crescent in Holland Park, very far from the fashionable place it is now. For one thing, it had been bombed, or looked as if it had. The house was clean, had been painted. But why was it so cheap? I was tempted, said I would go back, but as I reached the gate the woman from the next house beckoned me over and told me in a low voice—one eye on the estate agent, who was standing sulkily by—that if I bought the house it would be down about my ears in a year: the dry rot and wet rot had been festooning the walls and ceilings like rotten mushrooms, and the builders had simply scraped it off and painted everything white.

  I was saved by my publisher. I already had two publishers, then not as common as it soon would be. Needing money, I had asked for an advance for a collection of short stories, The Habit of Loving, but Michael Joseph would not give it to me. This was stupid of them, for my previous collection, This Was the Old Chief’s Country, had done well and was still selling. Tom Maschler, still at McGibbon and Kee, was waiting for just such an opportunity and gave me the money, though I expect Howard Samuels—the owner—was consulted. Howard Samuels was a millionaire, but no ordinary millionaire: for he was a socialist, a close friend of Aneurin Bevan, and he helped Tribune, the organ of the left wing of the Labour Party. He was self-made, and publishing was his real love, after politics. He owned Holbein Mansions in Langham Street, near the BBC. He offered me a flat in it, for five pounds a week. This was a very low rent, not only for that area—within walking distance of theatreland, Soho, Oxford Street, Mayfair, the river—but for anywhere in London then. The flat was tiny, six small rooms, and the building was hideous, with a grey bare cement staircase. On the fourth floor you opened the door to a narrow corridor, which bisected the flat. Opposite the door was a minute kitchen, then the bathroom, with its hissing and clattering gas geyser, and two other little rooms on that side. On the street side was my tiny bedroom, and a larger room, the living room. There was no way that flat could be made more than tolerable. Both Clancy and Tom Maschler helped me to move. There was far too much furniture from the Warwick Road flat, so I gave it away to anyone hard up enough to want it, and took with me a couple of beds, a table, and some chairs. And the bookcases. My bedroom was a box. Three walls were bright pink, with panels of whimsical birds on the fireplace wall. I painted the room white, a task for a morning, since it was small, but the fireplace was so hideous I could not stop looking at it, and I painted the fireplace wall dark plum colour, to try and make it disappear. To this day people say, Do you remember when you painted your bedroom black? I think the analogy must be when a painter puts a little patch of red on his canvas and, if you haven’t looked too closely, you think: the picture with all that red in it. The only nice thing in the room was a big window, with beautiful dark-blue cotton curtains, and they made a good restful light. I ran up all the curtains on the ancient Singer sewing machine.

  I thought the low rent and living in that area justified any ugliness, but Peter hated the place. He had hated Warwick Road, but at least there had been space. From the moment we got into this new flat, he was begging me to buy a house. He wanted security. A house meant security. The bank also was putting pressure on me to buy a house or a flat. Astonishing, for this doesn’t happen in other parts of Europe. In Britain, if you have a mortgage, then you are a good citizen, and the banks smile. I was afraid of the regular commitment, and besides, I had to find money for school fees. Peter was now at boarding school. He was twelve when he went. I did not like doing it, remembering what I felt going to boarding school, but twelve years old is not seven. And in fact it was a good decision. Many children who are miserably unhappy sent to boarding school at six or seven like it when they are older.

  There were two prostitutes living in that building, but I didn’t notice until Clancy told me. Both conformed to pattern, but they were different patterns. One was, or had been, a little fluffy blonde, and her rooms were full of rosy corners, pink curtains, pink pouffes, pink eiderdowns, flirtatious dolls and fluffy toys. She used to wait for me in her doorway, so that she could waylay me and complain about Helen. Otherwise I did not see her, for it seemed she worked not in this area but in Soho. I put her into a story called ‘Mrs. Fortescue’. Helen was dark-skinned, with black Gauguin hair and dark eyes full of the knowledgeable ‘scepticism’ so prized by Clancy and other Americans I knew. This ‘scepticism’ in a woman signalled that she knew the score, knew how to look after herself, and this meant damage limitation for both partners. I had only to mention to American visitors that two of the ‘girls’ were in the building for them to feel they were near the source of real experience. I liked Helen, and we would exchange friendly words. She had been, I was told, a good friend to Howard Samuels when he was a lonely and lost young man, and that was why she had the best flat in the building and why he would always look after her. Sometimes, down in the street outside the building, you would see a fluffy old whore, like a terrier with a bow around its neck, and a languid elegant dark worldly whore pass each other with cool disliking looks.

  The streets around Langham Street invited curiosity and casual strolling. Here was the centre of the rag trade. You did see, looking down through railings, semi-underground rooms full of badly paid girls running up dresses and blouses on their machines, but most of this work had moved elsewhere. The shops were wholesale, designed to attract not shoppers but buyers, and if you glanced in, there were scenes of intense competitive bargaining. This business was mostly Jewish, and there was a restaurant to feed the trade. In Warwick Road the cheap good food was Indian, but here it was Jewish. In four years, when I would move again, the good cheap restaurants would be Greek. This restaurant was always full. I took a lot of people there, but the one I remember best is Mordecai Richler, who tried to persuade me to like stuffed chicken necks, but I said it must be that he was eating nostalgic memories of childhood. Clancy was there often. American visitors loved the place, because in those days people in show business and in publishing were often Jewish and had come from the Bronx, to the extent that when you heard ‘I was brought up in the Bronx,’ it was like the refrain of a song, or like one of those novels that have a large poor family struggling to live, but the clever children, all stuffed with literature and literary ambitions, are destined to escape and astonish the world. And the American visitors who were not Jewish said this homely restaurant with its family atmosphere, once common in New York was now disappearing, and so they felt they were visiting their own history.

  The area was noisy and alive in the day but deserted at night, except for a couple of pubs and a restaurant that took advantage of the law which said that nudity was immoral if the naked ones were in movement, but moral if motionless. Patrons were supplied with pencils and paper and invited to exercise their artistic talents. A naked girl was wheeled in and held a pose for twenty minutes, and then she was removed while the eaters applauded and showed each other their sketches, and another girl arrived, as often as not goose-pimpled from cold. The eaters were encouraged to keep sketching, because if a policeman dropped in to check that a girl was not moving a muscle, then all those flying or dawdling pencils proved artistic intent. The police dropped in often. This restaurant was a great success with all Americans. It is a surprising thing that all the fifties and sixties Americans visiting London headed straight for Soho, prostitutes, and nude clubs. When you said, For heaven’s sake, you have plenty of prostitutes in every one of your big cities, they said it was not the same. The Rus
sians too. Each visiting delegation of Russians—this was the era of Delegations, each one chaperoned by a guide who was really the KGB—was at once taken to Soho to see capitalist degeneracy in action, in the same spirit as, in Moscow, The Red Poppy ballet included a long and sexy scene in a capitalist nightclub, to show how disgusting the West was. Communist Russia was forbidden these delights; prostitutes and sex shows were possible only under capitalism, so the flocks of the Russians to Soho were understandable.

  Soho sex clubs had more attractions than one. The licensing law closed drinking places for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but in the clubs, alcohol was legal. Drinking men joined one of these clubs if unable to bear the deprivation. Reuben Ship took me to one, and I was the only woman in the audience. I sat and watched the show, but Reuben was at the bar, with his back to the platform. One girl remains in my mind: she was Irish, large and beautiful, and new to the work. She was supposed to writhe around and then shake her breasts so that the tassels on her nipples swung, but she was finding it all so funny that she could not resist making a joke of it, and ended by offering her large betasseled tits to the audience like puddings resting on her two hands, and they shook with her laughter at herself, and the men, and at the whole business. The men were not pleased: deadly dark concentration, full of latent hostility, was their mode, and she was breaking the atmosphere and making them ridiculous. The patron hauled her off and scolded her while she giggled. She lost the job, but then she became a barmaid in the local, where her sense of fun was an asset.