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

by Doris Lessing

  Another near restaurant was one I couldn’t possibly have afforded then, but Howard Samuels took his authors there. It was the Spanish Club, and it was all dark-brown shiny panelling and red leather, very masculine, very heavy in style. There Howard Samuels and Aneurin Bevan, Howard Samuels and Jenny Lee,* Howard Samuels and the Labour Party Left—but not the New Left—sat for hours over the solid Spanish food and then drank peach brandy. Howard liked being a host. He was a handsome, emotional, mercurial man, and such a man must have his Sancho Panza, and there he was, Reginald Davis-Poynter, who was his right-hand man in McGibbon and Kee. Reggie was calm, sensible, large, and kind, and he looked after Howard. And looked after me too, as his author, as long as I was, when Tom Maschler left.

  And now I became for a short time that disgraceful thing a middle-aged woman buying half-bottles of whisky from the off-licence.

  When I moved to Langham Street it was not at all like the move to Warwick Road, where I so foolishly believed I would be living with Jack. Clancy and I were breaking up—had been for months or, you could say, from the moment we began. For one thing, we had so little in common. And then he had never made any secret of his wanting to live by himself and have girls. But what my mind knew went on intelligently, on a level far from those depths where my emotions—no, this was deeper than emotions, or feelings—were. Again I was being dragged along like a fish on a line. With Clancy I hit the extremes in myself and had from the start, and this had nothing very much to do with Clancy the person. Partly it was because he was in ‘breakdown’—that useful word which I am not going to define here. For one thing it is described (not defined) in The Golden Notebook. You cannot live with someone in breakdown, even if in a casual and undemanding way, without becoming involved, though it might be only in imagination. It was that old business of being dragged along, will-less. This was like the feeling I had when I got married for the first time, when the war drums were beating in 1939. I seemed to have no will; my intelligence watched what I did but was helpless. My surface behaviour accorded with: ‘Oh no, Clancy and I are good friends; that’s all it is now.’ And we were good friends. But underneath I was all the betrayed woman, the abandoned one, I suffered and mourned and dragged myself about, with no more will than I needed to keep myself going and the fact that I despised myself made it all worse.

  And there was Peter, who instead of dropping in and out, as he had when at school in London, or being there for long stretches, was now at boarding school, and there would be defined half-terms and holidays. But I felt as if this was the beginning of an end. Peter had been the one constant in my life, my ballast, what I held on to through thick and thin—which is of course why he had had to go away from me, because it was not good for him—but now he wasn’t there.

  I was working hard—it was The Golden Notebook—because there never has been a time when I wasn’t, and I saw friends and acquaintances. But all the time I was being pulled along by something dark and out of sight.

  And there was something else. Clancy had decided to trust a doctor who prescribed large doses of LSD. He did not treat his patients in hospital, but they arrived at his rooms in the mornings, were given a dose—and were thrown out again in the evening, about six. That is, when they were still high, crazy, out of control. I thought then it was criminal, and I think so now. This happened a couple of times a week, and I was in a frenzy of anxiety. Joan was worried too. We would ring each other up:

  ‘Has Clancy arrived at your place?’

  ‘No, I thought he was with you.’

  He might turn up to say to either of us, ‘I need to lie down.’ Or we didn’t know where he was. Well, he survived all that, so I suppose that doctor could say, ‘What are you making such a fuss about? He was all right, wasn’t he?’ But he could easily have not been all right. I knew that this panic I felt, the anxiety, was because I was reliving my father, drifting away into death but kept alive towards the end on injections of insulin and God knows what drugs. But what is the good of knowing something if that doesn’t affect how you behave? I seem to have lived through far too many times when I was watching my behaviour, or feelings, with my intelligence—satirically, disapprovingly, anxiously—but was not able to stop.

  I went to see Mrs. Sussman again, after three or four years’ interval. She sat listening to me, her cheek resting on her palm. The connection between us had been cut, all right. She seemed a long way off. She said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to teach you any better sense.’ Then she said, ‘I am a very old woman. I am going to die soon. I am preparing myself for my death. Good morning.’ It was salutary, learning that one would reach a stage when all these emotions became, simply, irrelevant.

  This time my drinking was serious. I never counted the drinking that went on in my first marriage as serious. It was stupid, ill considered, and you’d think designed to do the maximum amount of damage—drinking for hours sometimes and not eating. But that was drinking because I was with people who drank, in a culture that not only permitted but admired hard drinking. And when I left that marriage I stopped. I had been in London for two years or more when it occurred to me, I’ve scarcely had a drink since I came. I had no money, and no one around me was drinking. Then I met the Canadians and drank again, but nothing like as much as in old Southern Rhodesia, with Frank Wisdom.

  There is probably a recognised clinical condition: the middle-aged woman who slides into drinking, feeling abandoned, unloved, unwanted. This is what I had become. I would go into the off-licence, buy a half-bottle of whisky, and get through it before I slept. Not every night. And I did this particularly after I had been to visit Peter at his school. But this time it had become a craving, not social drinking. One morning I rolled out of bed and crawled on my hands and knees to the bathroom, to be sick. This shocked me into sobriety again. I thought, Now, this time I really am an alcoholic. Stop. And so I did. I no longer went to the off-licence for whisky. I did not get drunk by myself. Yet for that period, probably three or four months, that was what I was, an alcoholic.

  Am I saying that men don’t slide into alcoholism? Not, surely, in the same way. It is very common, seeing some woman whose marriage has broken up, or a love affair, or whose children have grown up and left, becoming a drinker, and the people watching think, Well, she’ll get over it. And usually she does.

  I know that writing, Doris Lessing crawled on her hands and knees to the lavatory to be sick, is asking for trouble. This is a problem for authors: certain ideas, words, phrases, that stand up out of the page, because we are sensitised to them. Sometimes the choice is between not mentioning something at all, because you know it will probably be exaggerated, and putting it in, in the interests of truth.

  I mentioned this problem in The Golden Notebook. For instance, menstruation. Before that book I don’t think menstruation had been in novels, and in The Golden Notebook it certainly got disproportionate attention from reviewers. But then menstruation lost its impact, and the word (and the idea) took its place in the print of a page and was not much noticed. Masturbation is another that has lost the power to shock. Almost. It depends on the context. Nabokov, in Ada, describes how his hero masturbates because he does not want to seduce a girl who is longing for him, and he is making himself safe. It shocks, because of the cruelty to the girl. Not because of the act. But not long ago, it would have been the act.

  Drinking too much for three or four months seems now the least interesting of my memories of that time, because what is in my mind is something like the shimmer of sheet lightning, a glamour, for 1958 was the International Geophysical Year, and there hasn’t been a year like it for excitement, for wonder. With every bit of news came new information, about space and space travel and, too, from the Antarctic, for me always an Ultima Thule, a beckoning place. That was the year the world decided to hold Antarctica in common, for all humankind, to co-operate in exploration and discovery everywhere, not only in Antarctica, to share knowledge. Sometimes I meet people and 1958 comes up. ‘My God, what a y
ear that was! There couldn’t ever be anything as exciting.’

  In Langham Street I was just a short walk from the New Left and their purlieus, on the other side of Oxford Street, and sometimes they dropped in. I had become a sort of aunt figure, definitely a member of the Old Guard.

  By now they had created the New Left Review, which I confess I found unreadable, though I was officially a supporter and at least on the board. There is a certain kind of academic polemical writing that is lifeless—an easy word to use and a hard one to define. The writing comes out of ratiocination, like a machine producing ideas fed by other ideas, and seldom has anything to do with what is actually going on ‘in life itself’. But this fact is one that the polemicists seldom notice. What did all those yards, those acres, of analysis and argument and disputation actually do? Or change? Did they affect British socialism? Make a new Britain? Become part of the policies of political parties? It is taken for granted that when there is a ‘new’ wave, then it must have its journal, and the new young ones chop logic and write think pieces, but mostly it all goes on in a vacuum. The reply to that is usually: ‘But it is creating a climate of opinion and indirectly changes thinking.’ It certainly produced people who later wrote books whose ideas were not in the New Left Review, for they had moved on, and I suppose one could argue that the books were developments of those brave new articles. When a new wave has gone skipping or thundering past, and you ask the people who composed it, Well, what did you actually achieve? the reply nearly always is, ‘But I learned such a lot.’ And this is what I say when asked, about the communist group in Southern Rhodesia, What did that running around and making speeches and magazines and policies actually achieve? ‘I learned a lot.’ Now I believe the need to learn is the most powerful passion we have, and the deepest, and that young people, when they start magazines, or new waves, or communes, are really making situations where they can learn a lot in a short time. Nearly all these young ones ended up in universities and are now professors and write books and articles and are on television and the radio. They have nothing of the old passionate certainties left.

  One person who came to my flat asking for money, a canvasser for the Cause, just as I had been fifteen years before, was Ralph Samuel. There he sat, intoxicated with his own persuasiveness, while facts and figures outlining dizzying possibilities whirled around our heads. He was an engaging youth, whose wild descriptions of the Britain my money would help create caused him suddenly, and in the very midst of his fantasies, to stop and then put his head back and laugh. At himself.* Well, I thought, our lot, at the height of self-intoxication, would have been incapable of that honest laugh. These youngsters were altogether more open-minded and less fanatic than we were, even if they did see Trotsky as no less a beacon for all humanity than once Stalin was. They were better balanced, they weren’t crazy, as I now think we were. The reason was, they did not have the war going on, all killings and catastrophes and propaganda. For that is how I see our lot now—war crazed—even if we were hundreds or thousands of miles from the actual fighting.

  Separately from the New Left crowd went on the activities that would lead to the Aldermaston Marches and then the Committee of a Hundred. I was invited to a meeting at Canon Collins’s house, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament came into being. In that room that night were a lot of people, nearly all luminaries of the Left and well beyond the Left. I sat there thinking, Oh, Lord, not again, which is what I always felt in meetings then. No new organisation, no matter how well intentioned, no matter the standing of its founders, turns out as expected. It seemed to me surprising that this (to me basic) fact was not being recognised. And the older I get, the more surprising it becomes. I did not take part in the discussion; I was a listener and a supporter. As I left the room, Bertrand Russell was standing at the door, and he stopped me and said with an authoritarian nod, like a governess, ‘Now I hope you are going home and to bed with your lover.’ I had never met him before. I thought him impertinent and silly. I did not understand the incident. Later I did. He had been one of the Bloomsbury group, or on the fringes of it. These people were everything that was admirable and excellent, particularly in their loyalty to each other always, through their lives, but they had this silly streak. They reacted to the Victorians’ hypocrisies and silences about sex by using the word ‘bugger’ at every opportunity, to show their freedom from cant, and they galloped around drawing rooms chanting naughty words. All that was understandable in the context but left residual foolishness in unlikely places. I thought, Silly old philosopher.

  Soon there was the first of the Aldermaston Marches, which went from London to Aldermaston, not the other way, as the later marches did.* There had been marches and ‘demos’ almost every weekend for years, communist or labour, and I was in a permanent condition of neurotic guilt because I seldom went. But this was different, it was The Bomb, and I was not the only one to feel like this. Not many marchers left London that day, only a few hundred or so, like so many marches and demos—the core of the faithful, with their children. But there was something about this march, and people kept joining all along the route. At every underground station there were more, people jumped off buses to join in, and by the end of the second day there were thousands. News of the march reached the newspapers and the television news. And so the march grew and grew, and the organisers were taken by surprise. Right at the end, when we were marching into Aldermaston, the entire committee of the Communist Party was on either side of the route, watching. They had miscalculated: nuclear disarmament was not on their agenda, but here were these multitudes of citizens. There were many contemptuous remarks that day about the comrades, who, we said, were about to adjust the ‘line’ to events, thus finally proving their feebleness.

  The first march attracted people from all over Britain; those in succeeding years, people from Europe and America. The marches united the whole spectrum of the Left and far beyond. If you stood for an hour watching the marchers, the banners were a map of socialist Britain. There were even Tory groups. Multiformity, that was the note of the marches. And many were there not primarily because of The Bomb but because of a general concern for the condition of Britain. With every year the marchers got younger, and by the end you would think this was another children’s crusade. Going on the Aldermaston March became the equivalent of an initiation ritual: Only the other day I met a woman who said, ‘My mother wouldn’t let me go, and I’ll never forgive her.’ But the first few marches had of every age, size, sort, and colour, and it was a cheerful, optimistic, and often very funny crowd. Not to say irreverent. The Tom Lehrer songs were as much the anthem of the march as ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘Down by the Riverside’ and ‘Jerusalem’. Christopher Logue made his personal banner ‘Eat More Food’, and that earned him satirical cheers. John Wain, who didn’t approve of the march at all, stood on a bridge that crossed the route, looking down, and, while friends waved up to him, shouting, ‘Come and join us,’ tragically shook his head. Ken Tynan ambled along, attracting disciples, and at lunchtime, when we stopped for picnics, little crowds of theatre people gathered to overhear his witticisms. Often an older person would walk surrounded by young ones and give what amounted to a seminar on politics, civics, history, literature, film. I saw the marches as a peripatetic extension of a university or school course.

  The most heartbreaking and delightful of all the banners was the little one fixed on top of a frail pushchair propelled by a pretty young woman, a brave amateur effort, low down among the great trade-union banners, Labour Party banners, Nuclear Disarmament banners: ‘Clydeside Says NO’…‘Cornwall says NO’…‘Greenwich Says NO’…‘Ban the Bomb’…all in black on white, but hers said: ‘Caroline Says NO’. If I were to choose one image that summed up the years of marches, it would be that one. Or perhaps Wayland Young and his wife, surrounded by their infants and children, in pushchairs and prams, on his back and in their arms.

  On one march, Randolph Churchill greeted t
he marchers with a wind-up gramophone on which he was playing patriotic music, but the din was so great he was taken to be a supporter and then, when his furious gestures made his position clear, invited to join us and have his mind changed.

  Journalists joined the marches for the purpose of getting quotes which would make the whole business ridiculous.

  It was reckoned that when, after the first year, the marches ended in Trafalgar Square, there were half a million or so people there. Some weaker souls gave up in Hyde Park, which was a sea of picnics, but sometimes there were feasts in welcoming houses. Peter Piper’s and Anne Piper’s house on the river provided caldrons of soup and sandwiches to what seemed like dozens of people, some of whom had slept uncomfortably in schools and town halls along the route. Most of us older ones went home to sleep in our beds and took the train out to wherever the march had reached the night before. I wrote of the Aldermaston phenomenon in The Four-Gated City.

  Meanwhile there had appeared the Committee of a Hundred, whose aim it was to convert this vast and incoherent movement into a weapon (their word) for directly assaulting, damaging, and in every way undermining nuclear installations, relevant embassies, and the police who tried to stop them. It was obvious that these hundreds of thousands of people, many of them only mildly political, would never commit themselves to ‘direct action’, and so it had to be equally obvious that this was a plan to split and disrupt the movement for nuclear disarmament. In other words, the heirs of Lenin were with us again. It is not necessary to have read Lenin or even to have heard of him to be his heir.

  It was evident that very soon the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament would find itself discredited by reports and rumours of violence, and there were plenty of journalists waiting for their opportunities.