by Jenny Diski
There were three major external influences in Doris’s life. The first, communism, lasted until 1956, when like many people, she left the Party. That period is laid out in great detail in The Golden Notebook (Joan is there, answering the phone, sitting on the bottom stair by the kitchen, both in real life and in the novel): a powerful thing about Doris’s earlier novels, including The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City, is that they present a period and a certain kind of thinking of the time accurately; not so much the later books, such as The Good Terrorist, which also presents people she knew, but shockingly and, I think, faithlessly disguised by using them to tell a story that she knew very little about. The second, psychology, was waning by the time I arrived, and Doris had discovered Sufism. She had been looking around the specialist occult bookshops like Watkins, and going to meetings of various groups that claimed they had the real truth about our planet. She did some hatha yoga and stood on her head every day, and read and spoke to fellow browsers in the bookshops. Finally she came up with a group called Subud; a ‘real’ teacher was about to arrive in England and set up teaching groups from the shards left behind in Paris and London after Gurdjieff died. This one coming – Idries Shah, as it turned out – was the real thing. A world teacher, Doris told me excitedly. I asked how she would know, but she was intuitively sure that the people at Subud had their fingers on the pulse. Still, how would she know he really was ‘the’ teacher, and not just another guru, of whom there were already some, and who would become a raga-storm as the 1960s moved towards their end? That was the point, Doris said, one would know if one allowed oneself to be insightful and not emotional. The mind had to be made ready, sensitive enough with preparation.
Mescaline was legal at the time, and the manufacturers in Switzerland were giving it away to ‘artists and writers’. I recall a long day sitting in my room listening to screams and dramatic laughter down below as two friends in the occult business took her through ‘rebirthing’. It was as scary for me as it was for Doris, I think. I wasn’t sure she wasn’t dead or mad for evermore until the next day. In the meantime, I went to school and didn’t do enough work for my A-levels, spent most of my school day in the café in the park opposite and met lovers at lunchtime, while Doris read and listened to teaching stories and did whatever exercises they did to open up their hearts/minds to the truth. In the evenings she would tell me the latest news from the metaphysical world.
Sufism lasted, as far as I can tell, for the rest of Doris’s conscious life. In later years she never spoke to me about ‘the Work’, as it was called. I wasn’t sure whether this was from disappointment about the teaching or from her understanding that I was a failure and therefore to be kept in the dark. She told me when Shah died of heart failure in 1996, but only for my information. No questions allowed. No weeping, no distress. After all, we were all here on borrowed time, waiting for the penny to drop. Shah set up groups and organisations, and Roger, our small daughter and I often spent a Saturday or Sunday first in his house in a leafy village not too far from London and then at Langton House near Tunbridge Wells, another suburb of perfect respectability. The house was, I suppose, formerly the old landowner’s house, large and walled, with outbuildings and a huge garden. Things were various. People in groups went at weekends to manicure the gardens and on Saturday night to have a group meal and listen to Shah’s table talk, which was, if you listened properly, Doris said, his real teaching. There were public lectures, generally on historical or philosophical topics. The lecturers were academics or highly regarded journalists and writers, who, as far as I know, had nothing to do with the Sufis, or even knew that they were speaking under their aegis, but were paid to lecture by the Institute for Cultural Research, set up by Shah. Sometimes I thought that there were secret Sufis, dotted around the place keeping the planet from exploding. I remember a lecture about Vico, a lecture by Richard Gregory on the physiology of perception, for all the world as if a Pelican book had come to life, and a rather baffled aged British traveller to Eastern Parts, who talked with all the ease of his upbringing of ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ while I squeezed someone’s hand in order to contain my embarrassment. A mixed bunch, but not at all uninteresting and nothing to do with the occult. There were what seemed to be Women’s Institute days, when people brought and sold cakes and biscuits, and tea was available from an urn.
We were marshalled along by Doris, sometimes instructed to take one of her irritating adoratas from California or thereabouts in our car. They spoke of Doris as if she were a source of wisdom, and her every move significant and the car journeys felt very long. But it all seemed harmless, and as I said interesting in its spotty way. Part of the teaching is that the teaching is scattered among the quotidian tasks of life. That didn’t seem too terrible an idea. My daughter enjoyed the trips to Langton, and made a firm weekly friend of a boy about the same age. They were often asked to pick out the winner of the raffle on stage. Once or twice there were full-blown parties, the first a ‘three-day party’ inside the grounds of the house, which I remember as hypnotic fun: at three a.m. with everything slow and sleepy, Ward Swingle, who started the a cappella group, sat down at the piano in the food tent and began to play and sing ‘September Song’. That was something.
For all I could see, apart from Doris going off to weekly ‘meetings’, weekends gardening and having the weekend meal, and meditating every Thursday for an hour, when I sometimes joined her in front of a mandala, it was a reasonable way to fill up a life without getting in the way of work (it was a while before the Sufi beliefs fully showed up in Doris’s books as ‘inner space fiction’). ‘It’s not meditating,’ she would say firmly as we began to breathe deeply and evenly. ‘We are still in nursery school. This is just learning to concentrate.’ This also made sense to me. We were doing elementary mindfulness as we would think of it now: counting breaths as we looked at the mandala and watching out for thoughts which we noticed and let pass like clouds, not allowing ourselves to dwell on them. I still do it (minus the mandala) under its umbrella as mindfulness. It’s handy, helps with pain and sometimes depression. At least while you’re doing it. As to the groups that Shah told Doris I wasn’t stable enough to attend, Doris never mentioned what went on in them, though she often gave out the news Shah dropped during his Saturday evening after-dinner table talk, in which there was more apparently than met the eye. Like our being overrun by the Russians and then the Chinese. Bombs would fall, civilisation would end. Quite like most TV series now, it was all quietly but firmly apocalyptic.
One hilarious day, Doris turned up with a sagging plastic bag of silver ingots. About eight of them, which she handed to me. She had also given Peter a bagful. ‘These are for when it gets really bad. People will always want silver and you can exchange it for food.’ I was stunned: people would exchange food for lumps of silver? I said that someone would need them more and I would exchange my teaching experience for a bowl of porridge and I didn’t want them. She insisted, so that my daughter and I would survive. (She must have cared for me in some way.) I used two or three as paperweights and doorstops, and within barely a month or so, the bottom fell out of silver.
Doris told me these things because she didn’t have anyone else nearby who wouldn’t laugh and she wasn’t supposed to discuss the meetings with others in the group. Sometime earlier she said I shouldn’t tell a mutual friend of ours about the forthcoming end of the world, because it would be hard for a ‘young woman with a baby to take it’. Although ten years younger, I evidently could because I didn’t have a baby. I suppose she was right. I hadn’t had a child then. I listened and then waited for the world to end. Doris taking Russian A-level arose from this, so she could ‘read the signposts’. I declined to join her, but Peter was brought in on it. At the end of the course Doris got an A and Peter failed. Another needless cruelty. From then on Peter went deeper into fantasy, telling Doris’s admirers that he was a physicist or CEO of some groundbreaking company. He started using ‘we’ about Doris’s books and her
agents and publishers. Most of her friends were now from her Russian course. When that finished, most of them stopped being visitors.
When I thought I’d better get off the drugs I was taking, Doris (who regarded me as Lazarus having risen from the dead at this point) offered me the small basement flat in her house. I asked about joining one of Shah’s groups. The idea of being cut loose from all my society, plus dumping mind-calming drugs, scared me. A nice study group seemed just the thing. In the druggy world, I was part of something, really for the first time. I discovered I could inject speed and sit in a room with other people and feel I belonged. Well . . . That was when the message came back from Shah via Doris that I was not ‘psychologically stable enough’ to belong to a group. So – oh Jesus – I had to prove my stability. This was the ‘learning to be a secretary and get a job’ period. I couldn’t think of anything more stable to do. I wasn’t much good. Deference didn’t work for me, nor did making cups of tea, or having to pretend that I had a full day’s work, when actually it could all be done in two hours and the rest of the day had to be spent pretending to be busy. Only a year or so later, tired of waiting for approbation, I thought, like many others in the 1970s, that teaching ‘hopeless’ kids in a ‘hopeless’ school was about the most useful thing I could do. I went to a teacher training college (no A-levels, or degree, so I had to get a teaching certificate) and landed in a comprehensive school in Hackney full of wild and angry young women. These days it’s a monument to good working practices, but then, when Hackney wasn’t the Hackney anyone under my age could imagine, it was more a matter of social work, ducking chairs and getting classes of thirty calm enough to listen to what sometimes appealed to them. Mostly information about their bodies and sex.
After Shah died, it wasn’t clear whether the Work was continuing or not. I’m fairly sure I’d let her down by not devoting myself to getting right for the Work. I’d given up and thought there wasn’t anything I could do where being a nut job didn’t mosey along beside me whatever I did. Nor did I think I very much wanted to be part of ‘all that’. Online they say that Shah had said that all the teaching was in his books. So I suppose the groups went on as I’ve described, or they collapsed. Perhaps a little of both. Perhaps that was what Doris meant when she said to a friend, who passed it on, that as far as she was concerned, taking drugs and living my own life, I was already dead. Or she meant exactly what she said. There really wasn’t much in Shah’s teaching to complain about. It required some work, reading, thinking, some entertaining stories, no mention of God or Allah to frighten modern Westerners away, while providing some pleasant public functions. There was an embargo on being social with one another outside of the Work, but most of Doris’s friends were now involved in the Work – partly because those who sniffed at Shah as a charlatan (there were plenty about) were ousted from Doris’s address book. ‘Well, he/she had their chance,’ Doris would shrug. It felt pitiless. From time to time she would say to me, crossly, that they weren’t there to have fun together but to learn.
There was really only one thing that made me firmly keep away from ‘the Work’. When Peter was about thirty, so in the mid-1970s, I said to Doris that Peter was in a terrible state, overweight, taking no exercise, speaking nonsense, and shouldn’t she try and get him to see someone. She said that they were all charlatans, and in any case, there was nothing wrong with Peter psychologically; and then she said that Shah had specifically told her that she should leave Peter to stay home and do nothing because when he became forty he would come right. He’d seen it happen before. This, I think, remained Doris’s justification for keeping Peter in their small flat and then buying him a flat next to her larger new house. A door was knocked through between Doris’s kitchen and the hallway outside Peter’s bedroom, so he didn’t have far to walk for breakfast. Peter’s fortieth birthday came and went. He became alarmingly anti-social, walked around without trousers or pants, shat where he stood or sat, abused women and generally anyone standing in his eyeline, and essentially turned into the monstrous baby that someone (he or Doris) wanted him to be. Who to blame for that? Doris and Shah; even if I have no right to be angry, even if it was my fault for ousting him from the nest, or in this case keeping him in the nest – for not even trying. And of course, it’s not my business, as I was told by Doris, who was telling everyone that it was. Going to visit her, even after she had had the stroke that left her smiley and virtually wordless, the old nameless fury bubbled up as my feet hit the pavement, walking towards their house or the hospital, and came to a peak as I rang the doorbell, latterly bringing cakes, as all her visitors did. Peter by then was diabetic and had a district nurse come in to give him insulin injections, but before her stroke, Doris was feeding him exactly what diabetics are supposed not to eat, chocolates, sticky puddings, potatoes, squash, heavy stews, cake, though later she kept the cake for herself, pulling it to her in case anyone else thought they were getting any. Once Doris had her stroke and they both had full-time carers in, they were more careful with his diet.
Shah was charismatic, attractive, charming and sometimes stern. One long weekend, before he died, I found myself surrounded by shocked people who were off to spend three days walking with their light bags towards the buried sewer pipe where Shah and a Welsh university had asked volunteers to spend three (I think) days, in order to test humidity and CO2 levels, while also being a demonstration of how small isolated groups work. When Roger said he couldn’t go I took his place. (This was the occasion when Shah asked me if I thought he was a male chauvinist pig for offering to carry my bag. That was the full extent of my conversations with Shah.) The stay in the sewer pipe was interesting mainly for the almost clockwork way in which everyone behaved according to the textbooks: leadership locking of horns from alpha males, women presiding over making the place nice and getting the ‘food’ ready (pot noodles mostly). It was another by-law of the Work that it wasn’t to be judged by its followers, but it did for me. On the last day, when suggestions for improvements were being listed, one of the women suggested it would be a good idea if women wore pink and men wore blue. ‘So we can tell them apart,’ I muttered, having no inkling of the coming gender-queer furore, and then bit my tongue. One thing you don’t do in small secluded groups is show dismay. It was to circumvent any aggression, she said. I certainly needed colour coding, my aggression levels were going through the steel roof. I wrote her suggestion down in the diary I’d agreed to keep and mentally disappeared into a novel. Where was the wisdom in these people who had been going to groups and meditating for decades before Shah arrived? If you can’t tell anything about a mystical group by its adherents, how else are you to judge it? Of course there were the silent Sufis, living in the world (not of it), making sure that things didn’t get out of hand, which was why, Doris said, the Cold War had not erupted into a killing fest. Also, the crumbs under my bed keep the elephants away.
What I started disliking more and more about the Sufis was that sense of belonging to an elite, of a small group of people – most of them privately educated and wealthy – who thought they had access to a secret that others didn’t, and who were smiling patronisingly as one smiles at a child. Rather like the Sufi who, on hearing of Doris’s death just weeks after Peter’s, told me that at last they were together for ever. That was a shocker. Peter was never to get away from his mother, not even in eternity. I disliked this petty confidence so much that I had already given strict instructions to people around me that Doris was not to be allowed anywhere near my deathbed, even if it meant barricading the doors. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Here I am, on my death sofa, with Doris gone before, and in Cambridge, where any other deathbed-lovers from my time with the Sufis would have a slightly more difficult job getting to me.
I’m not as fond of David Bowie as most people seem to be. I’m certainly not dancing a reel in the streets. Some good songs, an enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with
children and grandchildren to leave. But that more than anything made me tear up during the tribute programmes. What distressed him most about dying, said this icon of narcissism once, was the thought of missing watching his daughter grow up: ‘It just doubles me up in a kind of grief.’ That’s certainly the key that gets the endocrine glands flowing down my cheeks. That’s the unbearable loss. Everything else can be made sense of. The loss of the future children and grandchildren is unbearable, although quite in order, quite in the way of things. It’s as simple as pushing a button, and I’m lost in no man’s land. The insoluble grief. Not that there’s anything to be done about any of it.
Doris died, at home. She caught an infection, and was left unmedicated as she had wished. We got her a hospital bed and the local palliative care team looked after her. She became increasingly comatose until she stopped breathing one morning and was pronounced dead. It was that afternoon that one of the Sufis phoned to assure me that Peter and Doris would always be together. I wasn’t in my most graceful frame of mind. ‘Dear Christ, I hope not!’ I had a picture of Doris gunning it up towards Peter, and each failing ever to get away from the other. Like the Pleiades. Always away from and towards their doom, shrieking, ‘Will you never leave me alone?’, while they fruitlessly fled for the hills, hiding behind a passing cloud (those beautiful cigarette packets in a lovely shade of pink and gentle clouds of smoke) and running for them there hills, saying: ‘Leave me be. Even here? What have I done?’ While a voice boomed: ‘You didn’t make enough effort; no, scratch that, you’ll never get away, you didn’t fight for your freedom when you had it.’ Oh lord, what a terrible vision. Out and then in. Each dying then recovering.