True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  This seemed a subject worth my while to take as seriously as I could. From this point of view Red Plenty is not a perverse project. It was supposed to be a way of registering the scale of the change narratively, imaginatively, by restoring at least some of the weight of what had vanished. By immersing people in Before, I wanted to remind us of the strangeness of After; to point out that our present looks at least as odd from the vantage point of the past as vice versa.

  Perversity did then immediately re-enter with the decision to take the voyage to the heart of dullness. I play on purpose in the book with a kind of deliberate inversion of the familiar stereotype of Russian novels. I have relocated the intense drama, the anguishes, the thwarted hopes, from the private lives of the characters to the fate of the system itself – though I hope I’ve left space for the characters to be plausibly happy and unhappy too. It has meant, in a curious way, reading Soviet life with a sort of deliberate naivety: taking the system at its official valuation in order then to keep crashing it into the obstructions of the actual.

  It’s had one other consequence too. I have certainly done my best to take my female characters seriously, and to make them something other than the orbital appurtenances of the men: but the book’s commitment to following out the public business and the public claims of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union has also meant that I’m echoing, albeit satirically, the priorities of an intensely patriarchal society. This was a place that required the economic participation of women, but removed none of the traditional family burdens from them; didn’t promote them, didn’t give them positions of power, didn’t bother to save their labour with domestic technology, and celebrated International Women’s Day as an occasion for the gallant presentation, by men, of little bouquets. Any profession women dominated, like medicine, was by definition a low-status profession, and even the rare woman with a senior and prestigious job was expected to function as her colleagues’ skivvy too. For example: I thought about bringing in as a character the pioneer Akademgorodok sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaya, who was an early and significant adviser to Gorbachev. I didn’t in the end – it would have been too diffusing to bring in another discipline, on top of economics and computer science and so on – but I got a nice email recently from a retired American academic who had dined at her flat in Akademgorodok in the mid-1980s. She was the only woman present, as well as the grandest person in the room: and after the meal, the men chatted while she went to the kitchen and washed up. That’s the world Red Plenty reproduces.

  2. Mirrorball

  One of the things I have been entertained by over the last couple of years has been the steady trickle of reviews by Trotskyists which explain that, despite my hostility to socialism, I accidentally offer a portrait of it which makes the reader feel a bit sceptical about capitalism too. Through mighty feats of self-denial I have managed not to write in and say: yes, and isn’t it lucky the way that major rivers so often run right through the middle of cities?

  For the record, I absolutely did intend Red Plenty’s USSR to function as a distorting mirror in which the reader would be able to recognise realities much closer to home in time and place. The backing for the mirror, as it were, is the historical USSR’s strange and genuine Americophilia: the angrily unrequited love of Khrushchev’s generation for the USA as they distantly understood and misunderstood it, the continent apart from the zero-sum rivalries of the Old World, where the ketchup came from, and the burgers, and the ice cream, and the roller coasters, and the Buick plants, and the Taylorist management techniques. (All of which the Soviet Union imported.) And I have strengthened the similarity as much as I can with small decisions of vocabulary and emphasis. This USSR, written in English, is deliberately as American in nomenclature as I can make it, with a layer of distractingly explicit ideological speech stripped out of Soviet reality to reveal what apparatchiks calling each other ‘comrade’ can hide: that Khrushchev and co. are, above all, managers. Bloodstained ones, yes, but still recognisable mid-twentieth-century organisation men, working for a bureaucratised conglomerate so vast it stretches to the edge of their world (and denies them any guidance from an exterior world of prices). I wanted it to be possible to read Soviet life as a kind of Dilbert cartoon printed all the way to the margins, a saga of corporate idiocy from which the citizens of the USSR never got to go home, because, with the firm and the country being coterminous, the management could pursue them twenty-four hours a day with bullshit about productivity and lean inventory management. For that matter, it makes perfect sense to think of the gridlocked planned economy as following a parodically over-achieving version of the Toyota Way, where you go one better on just-in-time and arrive at always-too-late.

  But I wanted something more disquieting than just a funhouse glass in which the Other was displayed as a dysfunctional exaggeration of Self. That would be much too comfortable. Instead I had in my mind as an ideal a kind of impossible mirrored surface in which, whatever you brought to the book, you’d see something to recognise, and something you hadn’t bargained for as well, which the recognition would entail. I wanted anyone, with any variety of politics, to be able to see their own face looming dimly in the metalled surface of events. So for a start I tried to eliminate as many markers of my own views as possible; and then, as a matter of literary ambition as well as of satiric reach, to try and make the human sympathy of the book for the characters as impersonally near-universal as I could, so you couldn’t as a reader track liking or warmth as a surrogate for authorial endorsement; and then, as an exercise in critical self-discipline, to try to see an irony for every conceivable assertion, an exception for every truth, a complication for every simplicity. The Marxian utopia had to be genuinely attractive. The Hayekian objection to it had to be allowed its full disruptive force. Kantorovich’s work-around of the price mechanism had to have its beauty demonstrated. I was trying to stitch together a sort of story that paid more attention than usual to the economic motives for human behaviour, but, even there, I wanted my account of causes to be as broad and open as possible, and not to collapse without residue into any single one of the rival diagrams of economic behaviour. Basically, I wanted to be awkward. I could take advantage of fiction’s built-in tolerance of overdetermination, in which multiple possible causes for an outcome can be allowed to exist alongside each other without being resolved, or even given definitive weights. Storytelling lets you bring negative capability into economics. And this effort to stay plural in my understanding of the story, though it was a conscious discipline, didn’t feel as I was doing it like some willed suspension of a more naturally argumentative or analytical state. My interest in the things I write about seems to be a narrative one, deep down. Far more than as paraphraseable ideas, I tend to perceive material that excites me in terms of possible patterns of story; often ironic ones. It would not be possible to overstate my incompetence at dealing with any of the science in Red Plenty in a quantitative or even genuinely abstract way. Person after person who was kind enough to talk to me for the book encountered a mumbling, stumbling individual who, not being able to talk in the language of maths, had no way to convey the scribbled cloud of nouns joined by arrows in his head.

  But of course the book is not opinionless, and the ironic reflections of the present it offers back are not universal, or anything like it. It clearly channels its ironies within very definite bounds, and the non-fictional sections are blatantly partial in their shaping of Soviet history. You can tell the limits of my capacity for negative capability by who the book doesn’t work for, politically. Conservatives can find their faces glimmering in the mirrorball, and so can social democrats and independently minded Marxists; but Trotskyists can’t, probably because, of all the critiques of Soviet history, the one that doesn’t interest me at all is Trotsky’s. I’m with Keynes, where Trotsky is concerned: ‘He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have already been solved – that a plan exists, and nothing remains except to put it into operation.�
�� If you can’t even see that there’s a deep and rich unanswered technical question in the Soviet record, then all that’s left to talk about are the tedious differences between Stalin’s and Trotsky’s cults of will. I think, myself, that the Bolsheviks in both their varieties were a bunch of murdering scumbags, who turned Marx’s bad habit of rhetorical contempt, via Lenin, into a warrant for ending arguments with a bullet to the skull, and who diverted what should have been the civilised history of twentieth-century socialism towards atrocity and disaster. But I do them the justice of taking them seriously, as conductors of humanity’s longest, largest-scale experiment in the non-market operation of an industrial economy: and that’s where there’s still something worth talking about.

  What I meant the book to indict by reflection, to satirise by reflection, was the whole family of schemes of dangerous perfection. The quality that capitalist idylls share with communist ones is the illusion of control, whether the control is to be exercised through Gosplan’s card indexes or through the Black–Scholes formula for option pricing. In each case the mistake is to take the map for the territory, to proceed as if the system – either system – were fully specified, and could be reliably manipulated through its formalisations. A genuinely doctrineless conservatism, some kind of really thoroughgoing little-platoons preference for the small and local and unsystematisable, would escape the mocking reflection, I suppose, as would the socialism without doctrines which is my politics too.

  Oops. Oh come on, though; of course the book is written from the left. Why would anyone who wasn’t on the left have enough at stake, feel enough of a sense of unfinished business, to go picking through the rubble that was left when the twentieth-century wind stopped blowing out of paradise, to see if there was anything there that was worth salvaging? Despite the occasional suggestion12 that I might have written the whole 450 pages to put young Occupy activists off socialism – we bourgeois liberals are fiendish, and patient – I have to report that the Soviet model was already sufficiently dead not to need assassinating again. If the book has an ideological objective, it is simply that I would like the issue of economic alternatives to become a little more prominent again. I am almost entirely a nice, demand-managing, taxes ’n’ labour unions European parliamentary social democrat. But the other little piece of me wants to know if we can’t, some day, do better than that.

  3. Pretending to be Russian, pretending (not) to be a novelist

  As anyone who has ever encountered the pink Englishness of me in the flesh will testify – aha, title for a future memoir: Pink Englishness – I am not even slightly Russian. I don’t speak Russian or read Russian. I’ve visited the places I write about, but I haven’t ever lived in them. I don’t have close Russian friends. Nor do I have the alternative route in of intimacy with the science of the story. My only qualification is a kind of gift for pattern recognition, for seeing where, in the distributed mass of events and ideas and personalities, there is narrative sense to be made. Everything in the book had to be second-hand. Everything was obtained by reading, by staring as hard as I could through the narrow aperture available to me, and by using every last scrap of the pertinent experience I have had, to what has sometimes felt like a ridiculous degree. It wasn’t just that I contrived to use the whole buffalo. I didn’t even leave a smear of blood on the pavement where the buffalo had been. It was all turned into black pudding. There are things in Red Plenty that originate in remarks taxi drivers made to me. Yes, I am the Thomas Friedman of Khrushchev’s USSR. So, while the book is, indeed, ‘evidence-based’ in the sense that the factual, the real, has been the fundamental stimulus to my imagination, the book’s relationship to fact is a little complex; and the first complication that needs to be admitted is that it is not evidence-based in the sense of being a considered, selective response to some large, patient massing of data. The book does not represent a selection of detail drawn from a deep knowledge of the Soviet Union. It contains substantially everything I found out, with the directions in which I went looking for data often being dictated by my sense, in advance, that there was a piece of the narrative that needed to be supported. As the great Serbian writer Danilo Kiš said, when an interviewer praised the undetectability of the invented components in his Borgesian memorial to the Gulag, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, ‘Really? They seemed very visible to me.’ Red Plenty is like the Ob Sea that the Akademgorodok scientists swim in: convincing as a pocket ocean in terms of width, but only a few feet deep at any point. It contains just enough facts, at any point, to make it hold together.

  And how much ‘just enough’ is, was always a literary judgement. It was a world-building consideration, of a kind familiar to anyone writing SF or fantasy, and asking themselves what the minimum level of detail is that a reader can be fed to seed her or his imagination with a perception of solidity. The secret of even the thingiest SF, the most solid-walnut-to-the-knuckles fantasy, is that you don’t need much to summon worlds out of air, so long as the details are the right ones. But – and I’m wary here of rushing too fast into the question of what kind of fiction the book is, which flattering genre claim to succumb to – there was also always the pressure on fact-selection, on imaginative shaping, exerted by the need to arrange the world of the USSR for comprehension. Red Plenty isn’t just a book by an outsider. It’s primarily for outsiders too. The explanatory load on the book kept pushing it towards trying to clarify the whole social function of some category of event we were just seeing one of. Most novels, I felt as I was writing, were not so foreign to the modes of human interchange they portrayed that they had to explain the basic definitions of things as they went along. It was as if I had to dip my steel-nibbed pen into the inkwell and say:

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife; a wife being the female partner in a pair-bonded relationship for life, sanctioned by religion and integrated into systems of inheritance, child-rearing and regulated sexuality; a fortune being a quantity of money at a high multiple of the society’s average income, usually but not invariably available as a liquid resource; money being . . .

  Here was a large reason for the first sentence of the book. When I wrote, ‘This is not a novel. It has too much to explain to be one of those’, I was partly teasing. And partly I was negotiating a particular difficulty that had arisen during the original publication, which made it important to assert that, whatever it was, it wasn’t a failed novel. But I meant it, too. I was – am – genuinely uncertain over whether, as a piece of writing in which individual experience ceaselessly takes second place to idea, and some kind of documentary purchase on the world is being asserted, it should really qualify. Heaven knows, I have been glad to be contradicted by my friend the Californian SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who says that sentence makes him laugh because there’s always too much to explain; that it’s the fate of the novel, every time, to digest down a load of heterogeneous stuff until it becomes a story. And if my having done my best to through-imagine it all as a kind of concrete (and viscose) poetry saves it in other people’s eyes from occupying the place I feared it had in the uncanny valley, zombyishly half-alive itself – I’m certainly not going to argue. All right, it’s a novel.

  But – historical novel, or SF? I think the two genres are basically isomorphic. They share the increase in the story’s explanatory load, and in the need to create familiarity from a standing start for the reader, and in the increased prominence of world-as-character. In terms of characteristic difficulties, they share the problem of how to make characters something other than just an expression of researched or invented perspectives. They both aim to transport. Where they differ is in whether they transport us to a combination of human possibilities which has already existed, or to one that only might exist, elsewhere or -when. Since the Soviet Union in 1960 existed all too solidly, it looks like an open and shut case for the historical. And yet . . .

  4. Otherwise

  And yet it w
as a haunted solidity I was after. Solidity with a spectre in it, which nevertheless had power to promise, torment, console, frighten, cost, cause. Some people have read Red Plenty under the misapprehension that they are getting an alt-hist spectacular, in which cybernetics will come to save planning at the last possible moment, and the sky will fill with happy citizens in autogiros. This is an accidental artefact of Red Plenty’s marketing, and of the decision to lead the descriptions of it with what-iffery. But I’m not at all sorry. In some respects it’s a kind of ideal reading for the book, allowing you to take literally and therefore at full expectant force what has to be metaphorical, a ghost you can be confident of seeing through, if you read it in the usual way, in the firm persuasion that the Cold War is going to be won by Ronald Reagan. (Joke.) By taking on the past’s expectation as a real possibility (within the world of the text) you accidentally transport yourself to something approaching the subject-position, as I understand it, of actual mathematical-economical true believers in the Soviet Union, looking forward in hope from 1962. You put yourself into a state of the world which, like all states of the world, is partially composed of what it is and partially of what might be. Counterfactuals aren’t just an implied presence in historical explanations. They’re surely also the form, or one of them, in which we put our sense at any particular moment that a potential is present for things to change. They are the floating home of ‘otherwise’.