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

by Doris Lessing

  He was very busy, being convener of his coven and adviser to them all on emotional and magical matters. He could not visit Ireland as often as he wanted. Kept in Brighton by witching pressures, he sent his best friend over to County Clare to tell the girl to hold on, time was passing, if slowly, and soon…Yes, the classic tale was told again, and he came to see me, all bitterness and betrayal. ‘And he’s not a witch, he’s not one of us, it makes no difference to him if he has sex with a virgin. And it wasn’t even serious, it was just an affair, and she’s going to university next year.’

  This was not his only obsession. He wanted to have sex with little girls: this was not part of his search for a virgin, since little girls were of no use for his road to spiritual development. ‘Everyone can see what little girls want,’ he said. ‘Even a child of five or six, she’ll stand there pointing her wee-wee at you, wriggling about, asking for it. Well, if that isn’t what they are asking for, what, then?’ he demanded, but never looking directly at me, always off somewhere, at a wall where perhaps his fantasies were projected, and meanwhile his aggrieved voice went on…and on: ‘You can see what they want, but if you lay a finger on them, it’s prison.’

  I don’t know what happened. I never saw his name in the newspapers. Sometimes I wonder, does this sad soul, now at least seventy years old, between nights of dancing naked on the downs under the moon, still pursue his dream up and down the British Isles and Ireland? ‘Are you a virgin? Will you keep yourself for me?’…Don’t you see, if you put something to someone fair and square, she always understands.

  Now here is a real difficulty. There is a general agreement that sexual liberation began in the sixties. Philip Larkin the poet said it: Sex began in ’63. He said it sarcastically, though when he is quoted, that seems to be forgotten. I meet people who say how repressed, how sex-frightened they were in the fifties, and if I tell my little tale about the white witch in search of a virgin, they are incredulous. But I don’t remember any seasons of denial, people hovering timidly around beds fenced with prohibition. During the war, of course, sex flourished, because in wartime it always does, but it was romantic, because of imminent and possibly deadly partings. And in the fifties everyone seemed to be at it. ‘Then that must have been your lot in London,’ come the protests. ‘Oh, if only I’d been the right age for the sixties. I spent all my time dreaming about girls.’ Or men, as the case might be.

  The novels of that time from the provinces—always an accurate picture of the times—don’t record sexual dearth.

  The whole thing is a mystery to me. Some things have to remain mysteries. I can only record that people seemed to be having a pretty good time: joy was unconfined—if joy is the right word, but of that later.

  My most improbable visitor was Henry Kissinger. It was like this. Wayland Young,* still a long way from becoming Lord Kennet, had become a kind of liaison between the American Left and the British Left. This was probably because he had appeared in so many newspaper photographs on the Aldermaston Marches, for no one could resist this attractive family—handsome Wayland, his lovely wife, all the pretty children—so democratically marching with the multitudes. Henry Kissinger wanted to meet representative members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Most of the Left were busy with an election. I had said finally and firmly, No, I will not canvass for the Labour Party, beg money for good causes, sell the New Left Review, make speeches (‘Whither the Left?’ or ‘What Price Britain?’). My job in this world is to write, and if you don’t like it you can lump it. I had fought that battle in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, against much tougher opponents than anything London could come up with. So I was free to see Kissinger. I was not an adequate representative of the New Left but was of the Campaign for Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament (these were not distinctions likely to impress an American, for whom then we were all communists anyway). And Henry Kissinger might be German—for it was a healthy young German who bounded up those hideous cement stairs and into the flat—but he was also a crew-cut prosperous American, who seemed too large and fresh and glistening for these unattractive surroundings. It is hard to convey the flavour of this encounter, because the atmosphere of that time is now so utterly gone. This is always the difficulty, trying to record the past. Facts are easy: this and that happened; but out of the context of an atmosphere, much behaviour—facts—social and personal, seems, simply, lunatic. While the Cold War had become muted in Britain—mostly because the new youth thought it silly, and anyway the Cold War had never been as deadly in Britain—in the States it was still at its height. Americans leaving their homeland for political reasons described what was happening, and the British young found it all incredible. The Communist Party in the States was always tiny, and its thoughts and feelings did not emanate far outside it, but in Europe ‘everyone’ had been a communist or been in a communist ambience. To have been a communist but not now to be one was normal and described most of the people one met. But the Americans have never understood this. Now, when you read accounts of Edgar Hoover of the FBI or Angleton of the CIA, it is evident that these gentlemen were fighting windmills, because they knew nothing of how ordinary communists thought and behaved. That is the most striking thing now about that time. Day and night, week in, week out, Hoover and his henchmen, Angleton and his, fought the enemy communism but would not have recognised a communist if they had met one. In Europe there were a thousand shades and degrees of opinion, of experience. In Europe, to say, But I ceased to be a Communist because of The Purges…the Stalin-Hitler Pact…the invasion of Finland…the Show Trials in Czechoslovakia…the suppression of the uprising in Berlin…in Hungary—all this was a Via Dolorosa well understood by everyone, but as far as the Americans were concerned, once a Red, always a Red.

  Henry Kissinger reminded me of Eysenck of that Oxford lecture now so long ago. He had a thick German accent, he radiated energy and decision—and, too, wariness and disapproval. As far as the U.S. papers were concerned, the entire movement for nuclear disarmament was communist, and to say to him that only a tiny minority of members was communist was mere hair-splitting.

  Our conversation soon crystallised around one word. He said that a nuclear weapon had been evolved which could be accurately targetted to kill a hundred thousand people. He called it a ‘kitten bomb’. He kept using the phrase, kitten bomb. I was shocked and said that anyone who could use the word ‘kitten’ to describe such a weapon of war showed a lack of moral feeling and sensitivity and that just about summed everything which was wrong with American foreign policy. He said I was sentimental and unrealistic and understood nothing about Realpolitik. We were not quarrelling: to quarrel with someone, you have to have something in common. I experienced him as a harsh, abrasive, aggressive force, terrifying because of what he represented, and he experienced me as a sanctimonious wincing idiot who was using the language of humanism in the service of world communism. This encounter lasted about an hour and confirmed the worst prejudices we had about each other.

  In fact, I admired the man for making the attempt. No other conservative American tried to understand the enemy—the Left. And it was brave. Kissinger had not yet achieved the summits of his success, but he had a lot to lose. I could just imagine the headlines in the States: ‘Kissinger Under the Influence of the Kremlin.’ ‘Communism Corrupts Kissinger.’ ‘The Communist Trojan Horse and Kissinger.’ No, I certainly do not exaggerate. How to convey now the lunacies of that time? The nearest to it is what we see when reports come from inside movements of the Muslim hardliners: a dark unreason, a murderous hate of the unknown. That is how Americans saw communism, whether in or out of the communist countries. And that is how large numbers of Europeans, whether left-wing or not, saw the States. A violent and terrifying unreason.

  Another American sent to visit me by Wayland Young was William Phillips, he who had founded the Partisan Review in the thirties and edited it ever since. He had a wistful admiration for the British New Left, seeing them as a movement which might succeed in creatin
g a socialist Britain. He became and has remained a good friend. The irony was that once I had been a Stalinist. He had been more of a Trotskyist, and in the States had fought the Stalinists, a battle which from the outside seemed like a spotlit bout between combatants inside a very small ring. Ancient differences seemed irrelevant now: ancient differences came so soon to seem irrelevant.

  The Partisan Review began essentially as an organ of the anti-Stalinist Left and has always conducted the most passionate political polemics, but from the start it had another face. Some of the best and best-known American writers and poets were first published in the Partisan Review, and contributors from abroad too. That is why I read the Partisan Review—and still read it. And it was why many British people read it, those from the Left and people who were not at all socialist. I would glance through the polemics—feeling that I ought to be interested—to get to the literature.

  William Phillips was a dry, well-read, ironic man, very American but fed as much from Europe. Long years later, when I confessed that I had never been really interested in the politics of the Partisan Review, I think he was disappointed. But the fact is, again and again in my lifetime, the vicious vituperations, the polemics, the dialectics, the sophistries, of politics have become vapour and mist, while what remains is the literature and the art, which at the time might have been merely tolerated by the politicos.

  J. P. Donleavy was around and about in London in those days, the author of the scandalous The Ginger Man, yet another incarnation of the irreverent out-to-shock maverick, in the line of Lucky Jim and of Hurry on Down, but Donleavy, with a fine feeling for the unexpected, presented himself like a duke in exile, a grave, mournful, elegant man who with Murray Sayle enlivened our days with tales of improbable adventure. I remember him best for the tenderest little moment. It is early evening, the starlings are squealing around the roofs, and Donleavy drops in. He has been at the BBC, where he had felt an impulse to salute a muse, in my person. ‘Oh, sit down, have a drink—my Muse is exhausted for today.’ He indicated a carrier bag, which had in it four large bottles of milk stout. ‘Good Lord, you haven’t taken to tippling milk stout?’

  ‘No, I’m on my way home, to take these to the wife. Any woman who has had to spend the day with the babbies needs her milk stout, and if there was such a thing as milk of ambrosia I’d buy it for her, every day, the poor, poor woman. And she’ll be in need of some civilised conversation when the babes are in bed.’

  Murray Sayle sometimes dropped in, for as with all natural entertainers, there were times when he had to have an audience. Once, he telephoned to say it was an urgent matter, and when he arrived it turned out that he had just turned thirty. We sat in a pub garden—at any rate, out-of-doors somewhere—for most of the day, while he explained to me that women had no idea of what a terrible thing it was for a man to be thirty. It was the end of youth. I am sure I was sympathetic, for his distress was real, even if he was being, as ever, very funny. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I had just become forty, and I had not thought to apply to him or anyone else for sympathy. I did not say, ‘Damn it, Murray, what are your sorrows compared to mine?’

  And so, too, with Kenneth Tynan, by whom I was summoned to mourn the passing of time. We sat in his flat most of the day, while his secretary brought this and that in the way of restoratives, and Ken said he was thirty but had already reached the summits of achievement, being a theatre critic for the Observer. At first I thought he was mocking himself, as he so often did, but no, he meant it. I did suggest that there surely were other summits he might aim for, while we exchanged words but not feelings, for there are times when the little horizons of the British simply stun observers into a sort of despair. He meant it; he meant every word: He saw himself as a brilliant projectile hurled against the philistinism of the British theatre but already falling back, having reached too high too soon.

  Was I a particular friend of Ken’s? I never thought so, but that was because his guard was so perfect, the glitter of wit, and you did not feel you had got any closer to him. I had to deduce that I must be in some special niche, perhaps as a kind of elder sister, for several times he called me over for what he probably thought of as a heart-to-heart.

  Ken lived in Mayfair, in Mount Street, with Elaine Dundy, his then wife. The flat was decorated in what I thought was bathetic chic. The wallpaper was Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and there was a chair covered in fake tiger skin. The flat was often full of the currently trendy. If you went to a party there, everybody was in the news or reflected some kind of fame. People who have to collect the well known are in fact suffering from insecurity, but I didn’t see that then.

  I always found Ken fragile, vulnerable, like an elegant grey silky moth, with his large prominent greeny eyes and his bony face. He was tall and much too thin. I wanted to put my arms around him and say, There, there. Hardly appropriate for a young king of the theatre. People were afraid of him, because he had such power. I enjoyed his wit but thought his judgements too often pulled out of good sense by dogma. He was archetypically that character who liked to shock by saying he was a communist or a Marxist, while he would rather die than actually join the Party. These people always have a kind of political innocence, or ignorance, because their thoughts are all in the air—are never brought down to earth. For instance, Athol Fugard, who is one of the original playwrights of our time, did not fit into Ken’s political agenda. There were other mistakes too. But Ken’s theatre writing was brilliant, it coruscated, and there has been nothing like it since.

  When you met him at a party or somewhere, he would deliver himself of some witticisms, but with difficulty, because of his stutter and his hoarse breathing, while he watched your face for the reaction. He might explain he had been polishing them up that day, because ‘you mustn’t think that wits like me and Oscar Wilde don’t have to work at it.’

  Ken’s marriage with Elaine Dundy was ending, in sound and fury, often conducted in restaurants, so you might see Ken at one table, white-faced and bitter but full of the energy of battle, hurling reproaches at Elaine at another table. She was more than able to hold her own.

  He enjoyed the public show of himself, like an extension of theatre. He was a public man. Often when he telephoned me I knew I had had a good review or at least was in the newspapers. I was critical about it then, but now we take that kind of thing for granted, for we are more and more manipulated from outside. Fans may write, ‘I loved that book,’ or unfriends, ‘I hated that book,’ but usually it is, ‘I saw that review.’ The stimulus is the review, not the book.

  Ken went off to New York, and for six weeks I was theatre critic for the Observer, to be succeeded by the next on the list of his friends whom he had designated to hold the fort until he came back. I enjoyed the experience, mostly because of seeing plays I normally wouldn’t see. I had had no idea of the variety of plays on. And that was long before the fringe theatre, theatre in pubs, shows of all kinds in pubs. Some kinds of plays seem to have disappeared, a certain kind of farce, for instance, like the Whitehall farces, skilful, brilliant theatre. I suppose those audiences now would be satisfied with television. There were not nearly as many musicals. I came out of the experience with the conclusion that some critics did not review plays according to their class and kind, but patronised plays that were good of their sort though not for highbrow audiences. Surely it is not helpful to review something like Carry on, Nurse as if it were a failed attempt at Hedda Gabler.

  Ken was heartbreaking. When he died so horribly, and so much too young, of emphysema, my feelings about his always ominous brilliance turned out to be justified, but that was hardly a consolation. There are people whose deaths leave an unfillable empty space.

  John Osborne. He was as much involved with a disintegrating marriage as was Ken. I was at a restaurant dinner with John, Mary Ure, and…who? There was a fourth. John sniped steadily through the meal at beautiful Mary, who was in tears. Just like Jimmy Porter and Alison, whom Mary had recently bee
n playing.

  I knew three of John’s wives, Penelope Gilliatt better than the others. At a certain dinner at the Gilliatt flat in Mayfair, there was John Osborne, his mistress Jocelyn Rickards, Ken Tynan, and one of his mistresses. Clancy was there too: though we had broken up, we were often asked together. Clancy, for a while, was part of fashionable London, whether he likes it or not. The Gilliatt marriage was breaking up, the Osborne marriage had broken up. Penelope was more than pretty, she was beautiful, your classic red-haired beauty: milky skin, green eyes, slinky figure. John was in love with her the way some men are in love, as if they are preparing for a session at the dentist. Doctor Gilliatt I liked very much and admired: he was a quiet man, watching his wife being charmed away from him but not showing what he felt.