The safeguard against tyranny, now, as it always has been, is to sharpen individuality, to strengthen individual responsibility, and not to delegate it.
Doris Lessing
The calm, dispassionate, judicious tone of this letter is very different to anything being said privately then.
It was written in 1956 and was published in The New Reasoner. At once the CP responded, through Maurice Cornforth, saying to Edward that this must have been a personal letter and he shouldn’t have published it. The fact that they could have thought this confirmed how little they understood the emotions raging in the ranks. There was a ferment of meetings, telephone calls, threats from King Street, and the batch of letters I have here would be fascinating, I am sure, to those who lived through all that, but boring to those who didn’t.
The second letter: I had intended to write a satirical little novel, Excuse Me While I’m Sick, making fun of the new surly iconoclasts, Kingsley Amis et al. (Later John Wain became a good friend.) But I lost interest.
58 Warwick Rd
London SW 5
21 Feb. 1957
My dear Edward,
First, some practical points.
(a) Excuse me while I’m sick. Don’t feel bad that I may feel bad because you don’t like it. I’ve rather lost interest anyway. I think, were I to finish it, it would be a quite interesting small novel, which would appeal to a certain number of people; but quite obviously its mood is right out of key with what a very large number of people are feeling who would be its natural readers. Such a book, a sort of intellectual jape, is of value set against a background of accepted moral values. In the absence of any such background, perhaps it is better left. I think in one way it is a pity this book is not going to be finished. But a piece of polemical writing, even if on the surface a frivolous one, is half the magazine it is published in, and clearly the New Reasoner is not the magazine.
But of course our different attitudes over this are a reflection of a much deeper difference, which is why I am finding this letter so hard to write…
But first, about the suggestions in your, I think, second letter. I like the suggested article by Alex Werth. I would be interested in a piece by Hervé. I would very much like to read a bit of Not by Bread Alone, but you must be sure first that it hasn’t been translated and published as a whole first—I shall be surprised if it doesn’t appear here very soon. They always do publish this sort of thing fast. Like The Thaw, for instance. And they did the Visitors on the radio very quickly.
I think autobiography is a good idea. A really truthful bit of writing about experience in the C.P. at some stormy point would be invaluable, but I shall be very surprised if people are ready to be truthful writers or readers. The instinctive defence against being truthful is so very strong.
I think it would be interesting to have a serious description by someone like Kingsley Amis of his experience with the C.P.* It would be typical of the experience of hundreds of thousands of people vis à vis the C.P. But these angry young men have nothing philosophically to utter. Why should they have? They are all artists, not philosophers.
But now my dear Edward—there are a lot of points in particularly your middle letter.
That poem ‘Plea for the Hated Dead Woman’* was written ten years ago, and has nothing whatsoever to do with any recent political situation. It was written in a mood when I was hating my mother.
As for my recent novel, Retreat to Innocence,† I think it was a bad book, because I wasn’t facing up to any essential issue—I wasn’t being truthful with myself, although I imagined I was, and so it’s softcentred and sentimental. I don’t hold with it. Though it’s got some good bits in it.
But what I am trying to say is more complicated than all this:
Look, when I read your letters I feel as if you were reaching out for some kind of final word or statement from me; as if you wanted something of me, and I ask myself, why? And what is it?
But above all, our moods are very different.
I know full well that all my reactions now are because (if I may use this word I hate so much) I am an artist, and I’ve exhausted all the experience and emotions that are useful to me as an artist in the old way of being a communist. Someone said flippantly that people left the C.P. because they got bored. You know—Frank Pitcairn, always forget his real name. But he said it because he is an artist.
I shall wither and die and never write another word if I can’t get out of this straitjacket of what we’ve all been thinking and feeling for so long.
But this is not a political attitude, and this is why I don’t think you ought to ask me for clarification.
And I suspect you of being an artist, in which case you ought to be finding out what you think by writing it.
It seemed to me the other afternoon that you and Randall shared the same attitude, which was that unless you could present yourselves and justify yourselves as you have been during the last fifteen or whatever years it is, you would have let yourselves down? But all of us have been involved in this thing that has been so corrupting, and there is nothing to justify that which interests people who have not been involved in it. You, Edward Thompson and Randall Swingler don’t stand or fall by your explanations now…. If you think this is a very emotional way to take your demand for philosophical clarity, then I retort that your attitude is at bottom not at all a demand for a philosophy, but a terrible need to explain yourselves.
You have been a pure and high-minded communist, and until recently wouldn’t accept the evil in it, and your idealism is hurt and your picture of yourself is damaged.
Get thee to thy typewriter, dear Edward. You can communicate your experience in art, and as such it can be communicated. But what has your lost feeling got to do with philosophies?
We are living in a time, I am convinced, when there aren’t likely to be any philosophies one can pay allegiance to. Marxism is no longer a philosophy, but a system of government, differing from country to country.
Which is a good thing. Any philosophy which lasts longer than fifty years must be a bad one, because everything changes so fast.
I know I am a socialist, and I believe in the necessity for revolution when the moment is opportune. But whether the economists like Ken and John, or the historians are right as Marxists, I don’t know. How should one know? It seems to me that a great many of the concepts we have called Marxist and which are shared by people who aren’t Marxists are simply the reflection of the pressures of the time we live in.
I don’t want to make any more concepts. For myself, I mean.
I want to let myself simmer into some sort of knowledge, but I don’t know what it is.
Do you think there is something to be said for the point of view that being a communist has never been (except for a very few people) a question of intellectual standpoint, but rather a sort of sharing of moral fervours?
I haven’t got any moral fervour left. No one who feels responsible for the bloodbaths and cynicism of the last thirty years can feel morally indignant about the bloodymindedness of capitalism? I can’t, anyway.
What I feel is an immense joy and satisfaction that the world is going so fast, that the peasant in China no longer starves, that people all over the world care enough for their fellow human beings to fight for what they feel, at the time, to be justice. I feel a sort of complicated gigantic flow of movement of which I am a part, and it gives me profound satisfaction to be in it. But what has this got to do with political attitudes?
I want to write a lot of books.
And the stale aroma of thirty years of dead political words makes me feel sick.
I know quite well, since you are looking for something from me, this letter will make you feel let down. But I can’t help it. You shouldn’t go asking people like me for certainties.
I feel as I’ve been let out of a prison.
But above all I am convinced you should get yourself in front of a typewriter and ask yourself what you think.
Love,
Doris
The background to all this was the issue: Should Edward Thompson, John Saville, and the rest get themselves expelled from the Party? I obviously thought not. Yet while all this went on, my conversations with Clancy and others were the purest ‘Trotskyism’. Somewhere we ‘revisionists’ still believed that the Party could be purified and reformed. Edward was demanding meetings—open meetings with the leadership to get ‘everything out into the open’, which was very much a keynote of the time. Hard to believe now that as late as ’56, ’57, it could come as a revelation to these intelligent people that ‘King Street’ lied, rigged meetings, manipulated votes. All kinds of people were going to King Street demanding the truth and nothing but the truth. There was Haimi Levy, who had gone to the Soviet Union, having told King Street he was going whether they said yes or not, and there met with the infamous Suslov. Haimi wanted to discuss the treatment of the Jews in the Soviet Union. Hundreds—hundreds of thousands—had been murdered, tortured, persecuted. Suslov continued to repeat, throughout the interview, that there was no Jewish question in the Soviet Union, because there were no Jews. Haimi returned to London, demanded that the Party should publicly ‘come clean’, and when they refused, he joined Edward Thompson, John Saville, and others.
I clearly wanted the ‘revisionists’ not to put themselves in a position where they would be kicked out, because the Party would then be even worse than it was.
Before these letters came from Dorothy Thompson I had forgotten I went to see Gollan. Now I do remember I found him unimpressive. John Gollan succeeded Harry Pollitt as leader of the Communist Party. Pollitt was solid, honest, in so far as it was possible to be, and respected outside the CP. He was a product of the British working-class movement and its struggles against the very hard times of the twenties and thirties. Gollan was a product of the Communist Party—not at all the same thing. I never met anyone who did not respect Harry Pollitt, but people did not have much time for Gollan.
Yet while all this was going on, I was wondering how I could leave the Party without a fuss. That was because journalists lay in wait for defectors, and there would be headlines: So-and-so reveals the truth about the Communist Hell—meaning the British Communist Party. I wasn’t going to provide fuel for any headlines, if I could help it. So what was I doing busybodying about, going to see Johnny Gollan and writing letters to Edward Thompson, some at least in the tones of an affectionate but rather bossy elder sister? Alas, the truth must be: the enjoyment of political intrigue, being at the centre of things—in short, power, even in this minuscule way.
Facts: There were several meetings at my flat, a convenient venue for people coming in from outside London. The people I remember clearly are Edward Thompson, John Saville, Haimi Levy, Randall Swingler.
I remember nothing about those impassioned debates, but the atmosphere remains with me, vigorous, often acrimonious, and of course full of the enjoyment of political battle. Of course we would have talked about the invasion of Hungary, but this has become, with the passing of time, the event people remember now. For us, living through all that, Hungary was the culmination of a series of ugly events, one being the Soviet suppression of the uprising in East Berlin in—I think—1953.
I was sick, because of the tension of it all, and was not the only one.
I wrote a short story for The New Reasoner, ‘The Sun Between Their Feet’, which I think is one of my better stories. I saw it then as my comment about the failures of communism, but now rather as on the vanity of human wishes.
I had nothing to do with the grind and effort of running the magazine, for that was left mostly to Edward and John.
We all still believed in Revolution as an article of faith.*
A ferment of change…a gale…a hurricane…began with the dramas of 1956. Rather, the rapid changes that had been going on, mostly out of sight, certainly out of public sight, became visible. The Youth were back. Those of us who had complained of the indifference of youth towards politics now found young people vociferously everywhere and often knocking—no, banging—at our doors, to get our support for a hundred wondrous political plans. At a complaint that they were finding you lacking in fervour, you might murmur, ‘You see, this is far from my first Dawn—and I’m sorry, but I’ve learned to distrust fervour.’ An unattractive posture, as I knew, for I had only to look back at my own first dawn—and surely that could not have been only fifteen years?—and see one’s own flashing eyes, and burning beliefs, and dislike of temperate and temporising and humorous elders.
‘They’re all Trots, you know,’ one of us might say to another, perhaps on the telephone, announcing news to some former Stalinist. ‘Well, fair enough,’ he or she might stoutly say. ‘After all, they could hardly be Stalinists these days.’ ‘Why do they have to be any sort of ist?’ But that was going too far.
But for some people this was not at all a time of euphoria and renewal. Let us take Haimi Levy, who went to confront ‘the Party itself in Moscow’ about the fate of the Jews. He was a poor Jew from the East End. The Young Communist League and then the Communist Party had been everything for him and for many like him—university, education, rescue from the kind of poverty that does not exist now anywhere in Britain. He had a brother, equally clever. The family could afford to support only one of them through university. The brothers tossed for it. Haimi Levy went to university and became the brilliant and respected professor of mathematics at Imperial College, while his brother went into business and also did well, supporting Haimi financially and otherwise with the utmost tenderness. The brothers helped each other all their lives. For Haimi the collapse of communism was no mere temporary blow. He died soon afterwards, I am sure from the pain of disillusionment. And there were others like him, with broken hearts.
A Meeting
General de Gaulle was restricting the freedom of the French Press. There was a protest meeting in London: de Gaulle was becoming a dictator. It was an afternoon meeting, and I remember it for two reasons, one because it was there I had a glimpse of the past. Isaac Deutscher was speaking. He wore clothes of a military sort, and he strode onto the platform, looking sternly ahead into the future, and stood orating in a heavy rhetorical style, while his right fist rhythmically punched the air. Lenin himself! we were all thinking; here was the Old Guard incarnated. What did he say? I have no idea. The other reason the occasion stays in my mind is that as I took my place on the platform to defend democracy, a man shouted from the audience: ‘Have you just got out of bed?’ Sympathetic laughter. I was indignant, having worked hard all morning. But I was wearing a red skirt and a black shirt, and doubtless fitted a template. Ah, La Pasionaria. Ah, Rosa Luxemburg. How the ghosts of these and similar women haunt the minds of left-wing men! (Not so much the women.) But I was then becoming more uneasy every day about our heroic imaginations, the intrepid postures. Who else was on the platform? I only remember Spike Milligan, day to Deutscher’s night, who made a humorous mild sensible speech deprecating excess. I felt with him, because I knew he was there although he hated politics. As we speakers went to the door, there was Spike Milligan beside me, a hero to me as to everybody else because of The Goon Show. Seeing that I was about to say something invasive of his privacy, he shot out a hand: ‘And so we meet again’—sharply withdrew it—‘for the first time.’ This startled my mental machinery into dislocation, and I could say nothing. I determined then and there to use the same technique when attacked by fans, but one has to be Spike Milligan for it to work. The point is, it isn’t humiliating, as when, newly arrived in London, at an occasion at the PEN Club I found Eleanor Farjeon towering beside me and told her that her tales had meant so much to me when I was a child. At which she murmured, ‘You see, I wrote them especially for you.’ I swore then that I would never ever be as unkind myself to some respectful fan, and I hope I never have been, despite temptation.
Another Meeting
The newly formed New Left Review organised a meeting almost certainly called �
��Whither Britain’ or ‘Britain at the Crossroads’. I was on the platform with some others, speaking my thoughts, when a man stood up in the audience and asked, ‘How can you justify standing there giving us your opinions when you and your lot have been so wrong about everything?’
A very good question. One answer could be: ‘Why are you sitting there listening to us?’ Or, ‘But there is a lot we have been right about.’ Or, ‘But everyone was a communist.’
But we were bearing witness. Why? This can only be because we felt we were representative of others. ‘This has been my experience and that of many other people.’ Is it that we do not trust our own experience until we know other people have felt it too? Surely that is because we live through times of such very great and often sudden change. You want to know what friends are thinking these days, for it goes without saying that they are not thinking what they did last time you met. (‘How do you see it all now?’) Yet there have been societies, so we are told, when everyone thought the same for centuries. There probably still are pockets of such people. An American friend, Uzbek by inheritance, went to look up her roots, as we all feel impelled to do, and found that the clan or tribe, from where her grandparents had come, were living exactly as they had done, were traders and shopkeepers and were much involved with horses. Their lives centred around long, companionable communal meals where people sat talking. A relaxed sort of life, and surely beneficial, otherwise it wouldn’t have gone on for so long. But meanwhile she, a little splinter from the clan, had been like a leaf in a whirlwind of modern people, with nothing staying the same for five minutes.
There are public figures whose fame is mainly because of how often and thoroughly their minds have changed about everything. ‘The winds of change blew into my head, and just look how it rearranged the furniture.’ We bear witness. ‘I used to think this, now I think this.’ As if ideas were anchors.
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