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

by Doris Lessing

  My love to you both, let’s be friends, do come and see me.

  I liked meeting your friend Tom. He was nice.

  Love,

  Doris

  It leads the strangest life, The Golden Notebook.

  I meet women who say, ‘I read The Golden Notebook in the sixties. It changed my life. My daughter read it and now my granddaughter.’

  This business of a book changing one’s life. That can only mean that one is ready to change and the book tips up a balance.

  In Rio once, I was sitting outside my hotel on the pavement, as one may do in southern climes. Girls from the favelas come to sit there, sometimes all day over a single coffee or a fruit drink, because for the price of a decent dress they are out of squalor and poverty for a while—a week or so. The waiters tolerate them, turn a blind eye if—not very often—they find a customer. Too many girls, not enough customers. Two of the girls were at a near table, and one called across, ‘My friend wants to tell you something. She doesn’t speak English. She loves you.’ But no, what she wanted to tell me was that she loved The Golden Notebook. How did the book find its way into one of the worst slums in the world? I was infinitely touched, grateful.

  In China the book has been printed twice, in editions of eighty thousand, small for them, with their vast population, huge for us. Both times it sold out in a couple of days, to women, for there, too, it is a woman’s book. The lives of women are so hard I am glad the book is of use to them, never mind about what the book is ‘really’ about.

  But that is China. I do object when the feminists claim my books as their property in the States, or Britain, because another letter I get quite often says, ‘At university I didn’t read you because the feminists said Keep Out. But then I read one of your books and saw that they aren’t just for women.’

  And so now, forty years on, this controversial book which so upset publishers and reviewers has become a kind of classic, taken for granted. The other day I was greeted by sixteen-year-olds from a London school, saying their teacher had said they must read The Golden Notebook. ‘We love it,’ they said.

  And another young woman, from Eastern Europe, when I had finished lecturing about something or other, said she and her friends were reading The Golden Notebook, and ‘It’s fascinating, reading about all those old times.’

  Sometimes I hear the book has been prescribed in history or political courses, and this pleases me, for after all, that is where I began, wanting to write a chronicle of the times. And that is where, if the book lasts at all, its value will be found. For I do think, whatever I failed at, or succeeded in, it is an honest and truthful and reliable account of how we all were at that time. It could not be written now, because a novel has to come out of some matrix of atmosphere, or feeling, or thought, and now that all seems so remote. It is hard to believe they happened, ‘all those old times’.

  Now the most bizarre of The Golden Notebook’s many lives. It became a text for deconstructionists. This book, born directly out of so much blood, sweat, and particularly tears, a little intellectual game? You have to laugh; there’s nothing else to be done.

  Writing The Golden Notebook changed me. Writing any book changes you: this has to be so, if you think about it. On the lowest level, if you are thinking hard about a subject, information and insights on that subject seem to come in from everywhere: books arrive in your life, you hear it on the radio, in conversations, and on television. This is a fact, it is true, you can rely on it—and there is no ‘scientific’ explanation for it. Yet. But I am not talking about this kind of rapid information-getting. Writing that novel changed the way I thought and more fundamentally than thinking. When I began it, while I had thrown out communism, all of the mind-sets of communism remained. Now, that set of mind not only defined communists and ex-communists but had become the property of people who had never been communist or even socialist. Before the fifties had ended, I was reading leading articles in the ‘capitalist press’, impeccably conservative articles but using communist jargon: concrete steps, contradictions, demos, the interpenetration of opposites, the class war, and all the rest. We were observing that continually repeating process, the ways of thinking of an excluded or even ostracised minority spreading gently up and down and around and about until they have become part of the ‘climate of opinion’.

  For some decades now there has been something I call the ‘package’, the accepted, fashionable package which every young person emerging from our western education has been taught to accept as the only possible one. This is less true than it was, for the ideas of later-excluded minorities are permeating it. First of all, Marxism, one of the fifty-seven varieties of Marxism, and this even when it is not recognised as Marxism. Then, the belief that human society is destined to become even better in every way, and particularly materially: more and more material prosperity is everybody’s future—there will be ever more cars, refrigerators, comfort, security, an upwardly moving escalator on which everyone in the world is standing. (But this one has become less persuasive.) This is materialism, a chicken in every pot—the United States’ hard-times political slogan, displacing ‘pie in the sky’. A chicken in every pot, everywhere—but that is as out of reach as ever. Then, the largest item in the package, philosophical materialism, the God-is-dead, Science-is-king materialism.

  Anyone who does not subscribe to this last one—for it is as strong as ever—is patronised as feeble-minded and a coward. There is a sneer, implicit or overt, when someone says, ‘I do not understand people who believe in God.’ They may even say, ‘Uneducated people, yes.’ God to them becomes a kind of insurance policy against the terrors of eternity for those who cannot face extinction. Yet those who puff themselves up by this kind of contempt never seem to reflect that many of the people who believe in God believe in hellfire and all kinds of painful damnation, as well as in paradise. The Muslims, for instance, and certain extreme Christian sects. Surely this should be seen as courage, not cowardice? It is a stage people go through, despising the believers in God. I did. I remember my smugness and my feeling I was saying something original that had cost thought.

  Necessary subclauses to this agenda were that South Africa was a wicked tyranny—true—which could only end in a bloodbath, ‘a night of the long knives’: untrue. Southern Rhodesia was in the process of coming to be seen in the same light. The United States was the world’s chief enemy, a tyranny much worse than the Soviet Union, which still, despite all the revelations, occupied a haloed spot in many people’s minds. A contempt for our own country, Britain, so deeply felt it had not, then, been examined at all, showed itself in a steady nagging denigration of everything British. This was the other side of ‘British is best’. Taken for granted was that real politics went on somewhere else, because real politics mean unrest, violence, riots, and revolution, and Britain—then—did not go in for that kind of thing: we were peaceful, nonviolent, believed in settling matters by the vote—contemptible; and, then, did not go in for extremes of opinion. At the slightest hint of revolution, or even unrest somewhere else, as many British ‘activists’ as could afford it were off to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or moments of excitement in Paris.

  By the time I had finished The Golden Notebook I had written my way out of the package, but it was not that I came to the last sentence and shouted, ‘Eureka, I have got it at last!’ I began by noticing that when I was with certain comrades and ex-comrades and even ordinarily middle-of-the-road political friends, they radiated complacency, not to say conceit, because of this ‘package’. To believe in continual upward progress, the materialist escalator, was proof of good intentions and concern for the human race; to have thrown God out of the window and to stand alone in the face of the cold universe was to be brave and indomitable. To believe in revolution meant you were courageous, particularly if, in your secret fantasies, you defied torturers and survived concentration camps.

  I am sure there was not, anywhere in the world, a communist who did not prepare, in fa
ntasy, for interrogation, torture, imprisonments, the camps, and this in countries where revolution was nowhere on the agenda. ‘There is just one thing, Comrade Investigator’—a sarcastic drawl. ‘We all know about the interrogator who is kind and friendly, to be replaced by a sadistic swine. You forget, we live in countries where there is freedom of information. Yes, of course I shall confess to everything. Everyone knows that no one stands up to torture. But what you don’t seem to realise is that no one outside this country will believe a word of it. Everyone in the world knows how you [the Soviet Union, China, and so forth] torture people into confession. Really, you oughtn’t to be so naive, so ignorant.’ If this kind of fantasy was in millions (many millions) of minds, what kind of effect did it have on general thinking?

  It is a strange business, changing your mind about what you think—rather, having your mind changed for you. You wake up one morning and think, Goodness, I used to think like that, didn’t I?—but you hardly know how it happened. It is a process that goes on all the time, whether you have put yourself in the way of ideas and beliefs or not.

  The package had come to seem thin, gimcrack, superficial, and above all blown together most arbitrarily, shreds from the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, orts and fragments from Cromwell’s time or the industrial revolution, articles of faith from Marx or from Lenin. I knew exactly the moment when I had shed religion and God: it was when my mother, upset that her child had a crush on the Virgin Mary—that is what it amounted to—recited a list of the misdeeds of the Roman Catholics, all of which could be matched by the Protestants; and with what relief I heaved the whole itchy and uncomfortable burden off my shoulders for the brave stoicism of atheism. I knew that I had accepted the Marxist package for no deeper reason than that the communists I met in Southern Rhodesia had actually read the books I had, were in love with literature, and because they were the only people I knew who took it for granted that the white regime was doomed. But if I had been born in another place, at another time, I would with equal ease have accepted whatever ‘package’ was the correct one there and then.

  And there was another thing. I had experiences writing the book which did not fit in with tenets of the package. I hate the word ‘inspiration’, distrust all claims to elevated experiences, but had written things not in my personal experience, which were coming true. I don’t want to list them, because people’s hunger for strangeness is so strong that the most modest claims become exaggerated into whole cosmologies.

  Many writers have the experience of describing events or thoughts which they have invented but which later come true. To put me well beyond the possibility of being taken seriously by people who still regard the package as the only possible way of looking at the world, I think that enveloping our level of thinking, apart from it but sometimes penetrating it, is a stratum of thought or being, a wavelength, and that writers often ride along on it, perhaps only for moments. This is the explanation, I believe, of that common phenomenon when several writers come up at the same time with the same theme or title or idea, believing they are unique and original and no one else can possibly have thought of it. This has happened to me more than once. Somewhere close to us is a sea of ideas, a finer level of vibration, and this makes itself felt, no matter how much this is denied by conceited materialists.

  It seems to me that when I wrote The Golden Notebook I had so thoroughly reached the end of a whole spectrum of ideas, thoughts, and feelings that the world I had excluded as ‘impossible’, as ‘reactionary’, was surrounding me, pressing in, making its claim.

  I began a systematic search for something different. I did not know where to look or how. Because that excluded world is represented in our culture by dubious practices and beliefs, like séances, horoscopes, fortune-telling, and so forth, I was again and again put off, but persevered, and followed up every lead I could—a reference in a book, something overheard, a remark on the radio. For instance, Yeats led me to the Golden Dawn, but Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley led me out again. That, I knew, was not what I was looking for—magic and mystery and bizarre behaviour. All this went on for months, and parallel to my ordinary life; there was no one I could discuss it with, for everyone I knew clutched tight to the package, whether on the left or, even, the right. I described this search in the person of Martha in The Four-Gated City, but shortened it, neatened it, simplified it—you simply cannot put the untidiness of life into a novel if you don’t want people to yawn and throw it aside. I was again in the situation I had been in as a girl: I had to keep quiet about what I was thinking.

  I was at once struck by one basic, overriding fact—that here was a world of ideas and belief that I had scarcely even heard of, let alone been seriously introduced to. Though I had not had anything like a good education, I had read widely, been part of the intellectual ferments of the time, met a wide range of people, but nowhere had there been even a hint of what I was discovering now—that is, if I wanted to exclude the sickly ‘spiritualism’ of the last days of the communist group in Southern Rhodesia.

  Nowhere in our education, our culture, was there so much as a whisper about the great religions, the great spiritual traditions, of the East. In our own culture, at its heart, is the inner spiritual tradition of Christianity, writers like St. John of the Cross, or Mother Julian of Norwich, with books like The Cloud of the Unknowing, but these were surely unusual individuals, with a particular temperamental endowment, shared, I think, by very few, and it is mostly religious people who know about them.

  I think that this lacuna at the heart of our education—absolute then, but things have changed a little—was the reason young people brought up on the jaunty, cocky, conceited, shallow intellectualism of the West had no defences when they encountered an Eastern tradition and even the most deteriorated form of it. In the sixties, just dawning, again and again we saw highly educated youngsters suddenly succumbing to charlatanism and gurus and cults of all sorts, to the astonishment and despair of their parents, but it was because whole areas of their minds had been left uncultivated, ready to give root room to any old weed. As I said in my story The Temptation of Jack Orkney.

  I read first of all the various traditions of Buddhism. Very soon Buddhism was to become attractive to large numbers of people, and it still is. (At the time, we had scarcely heard of it. It is really hard to convey the absolute general ignorance and the sterility of our ideas just before the sixties.) Buddhism is attractive to the violent and warlike West. Then, various aspects of Hinduism, to me appealing because of its polytheism, its heteromorphism, just like Roman Catholicism, absorbing gods and saints into itself according to the culture it finds itself in. But I am not an Indian. I know that this is no barrier to the numbers of souls putting on lungis, saris, red forehead spots, and so forth, in ashrams in India and elsewhere. But I was reading all the great Eastern classics—the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the various Zen scriptures; I was reading for information, and with enjoyment and pleasure, and above all for guidance, but for ever came out by the same door I went in. There was, however, one fact that emerged from all this, a basic one, and it was that one needs a teacher. No teacher, no guide, and you may be sure of trouble. At that time, it was merely the one solid thing I was clutching on to in a sea of differing voices and paths, but since then it has become far from theoretical, because for years I was to watch rash people exploring these dangerous regions without a guide and coming to every kind of grief, going mad temporarily or permanently being the most common.

  If there is one thing we pride ourselves on in the West, it is our independence. This was not something I was even aware of, until I challenged myself over it. It comes hard, surrendering precious self-reliance, particularly when your life has been that—fighting for it, defending it, struggling to regain it when it is lost, temporarily, as when you become a communist. If you are a woman it is particularly hard, because the pressures on you are so strong, particularly internal ones, emotional ones, more insidious than the external pressures.r />
  The ‘gurus’ offering themselves in the late fifties and early sixties were not persuasive reasons to surrender. I did in fact sample one, partly from curiosity, and found myself sitting opposite his local representative, who offered me what amounted to psychotherapy, on such a low level that I retrospectively admired Mrs. Sussman. Psychotherapy then was very ‘far out’, ‘way out’—phrases just coming in—very distant from our present conditions, where every second person you meet is a counsellor, and particularly those (it is hard to refrain from pointing out) whose own emotional lives have been particularly disastrous.

  I decided to keep my eyes and ears open, and continue my search. Meanwhile an unpleasant truth about myself—the first of very many—was knocking at the door. It was that these Paths, or Ways, I was investigating were sometimes called Disciplines. And I had no self-discipline—yes, I was exaggerating, in those days when the enormity of what I was confronting overcame me—apart from one: I did have the self-discipline to set myself to work every day, and I knew that some people found that hard. I had been able to adapt my life, my work patterns, to accommodate my son: I could say that at the centre of my life had always been his needs, his patterns of school, holidays, comings and goings. But what else? Well, nothing, when I looked at myself coolly.

  Food preoccupied me, whether I was going to eat it or not eat it. That is hardly unusual in our lavish times, but I was becoming increasingly aware of just how much time I spent thinking about it. And besides, you may be on a diet yourself, but if you are a good cook, and enjoy making feasts for others, that is still thinking about food.

  I was not drinking as I had for that short time, but wine was part of my life, and I could hardly say I denied myself.

  I smoked fifty or sixty cigarettes a day and could not have believed that one day soon I would simply stop.

  (All the Paths I had investigated till then assumed the necessity of asceticism.)