It occurred to me that the reason I came to work for Jack, without knowing, was that I wanted to have my deep private preoccupations about art, about literature (and therefore about life), about my refusal to write again, put into a sharp focus, where I must look at it, day after day.
I have been discussing this with Jack. He listens and understands. (He always understands.) And he says: “Anna, communism isn’t four decades old yet. So far, most of the art it has produced is bad. But what makes you think these aren’t the first steps of a child learning to walk? And in a century’s time…” “Or in five centuries,” I say, teasing him—“In a century’s time the new art may be born. Why not?” And I say: “I don’t know what to think. But I’m beginning to be afraid that I’ve been talking nonsense. Do you realise that all the arguments we ever have are about the same thing—the individual conscience, the individual sensibility?” And he teases me saying: “And is the individual conscience going to produce your joyful communal unselfish art?” “Why not? Perhaps the individual conscience is also a child learning how to walk?” And he nods; and the nod means: Yes, this is all very interesting, but let’s get on with our work.
Reading all this mass of dead literature is only a small part of my work. Because without anyone intending it or expecting it, my work has become something quite different. It is “welfare work”—a joke Jack makes, I make; and also Michael: “How is your welfare work going, Anna? Saved any more souls recently?”
Before I start on the “welfare work,” I go down to the washroom, and make up my face, and wash myself between my legs, and wonder if the decision I have just come to, to leave the Party, is because I’ve been thinking more clearly than usual, out of the decision to record everything about today? In which case, who is that Anna who will read what I will write? Who is this other I whose judgement I fear; or whose gaze, at least, is different from mine when I am not thinking, recording, and being conscious. And perhaps tomorrow, when that other Anna’s eye is on me, I will decide not to leave the Party? For one thing, I am going to miss Jack—with whom else could I discuss, and without reservations, all these problems? With Michael, of course—but he is leaving me. And besides, it is always in bitterness. But what is interesting is this: Michael is the ex-communist, the traitor, the lost soul; Jack the communist bureaucrat. In a sense it is Jack who murdered Michael’s comrades (but then so did I, because I am in the Party). It is Jack who labels Michael a traitor. And it is Michael who labels Jack a murderer. And yet these two men (if they met they would not exchange one word out of mistrust) are the two men who I can talk to, and who understand everything I feel. They are part of the same experience. I stand in the washroom, putting scent on to my arms, so as to defeat the smell from the stale leak of blood; and suddenly I realise that what I am thinking about Michael and Jack is the nightmare about the firing party and the prisoners who exchange places. I feel dizzy and confused, and I go upstairs to my office and push away the great piles of magazines: Voks, Soviet Literature, Peoples for Freedom Awake! China Reborn, etc., etc. (the mirror into which I have been looking for over a year), and I think that I can’t read this again. I simply can’t read it. I’ve gone dead on it, or it on me. I’ll see what “welfare work” there is today. And as I reach this point Jack comes in, because John Butte has now gone back to H.Q., and he says: “Anna will you share my tea and sandwiches with me?” Jack lives on the official Party wage, which is eight pounds a week; and his wife earns about the same as a teacher. So he must economise; and one of the economies is, not going out to lunch. I say thank you, and I go into his office and we talk. Not about the two novels, because there is nothing further to be said: they will be published, and we both in our different ways feel ashamed. Jack has a friend who has just come back from the Soviet Union with private information about the anti-Semitism there. And rumours about murders, tortures, and every kind of bullying. And Jack and I sit and check every piece of information: Is that true? Does that sound true? If that is true then that means that…And I think, for the hundredth time, how strange it is that this man is part of the communist bureaucracy, and yet he knows no more than I, or any rank and file communist, what to believe. We finally decide, not for the first time, that Stalin must have been clinically mad. We sit drinking tea and eating sandwiches and speculate about whether, if we had lived in the Soviet Union during his last years, we would have decided it was part of our duty to assassinate him. Jack says no; Stalin is so much a part of his experience, his deepest experience, that even if he knew him to be criminally insane, when the moment came to pull the trigger he couldn’t do it: he would turn the revolver on himself instead. And I say I couldn’t either, because “political murder is against my principles.” And so on and so on; and I think how terrible this talk is, and how dishonest, sitting in safe, comfortable, prosperous London, with our lives and freedom in no danger at all. And something happens I get more and more afraid of—words lose their meaning. I can hear Jack and I talking—it seems the words come out from inside me, from some anonymous place—but they don’t mean anything. I keep seeing, before my eyes, pictures of what we are talking about—scenes of death, torture, cross-examination and so on; and the words we are using have nothing to do with what I am seeing. They sound like an idiotic gabbling, like mad talk. Suddenly Jack says: “Are you going to leave the Party, Anna?” I say: “Yes.” Jack nods. It is a friendly unjudging nod. And very lonely. There is at once a gulf between us—not of trust, because we trust each other, but of future experience. He will stay, because he has been in it so long, because it has been his life, because all his friends are in and will stay in. And soon, when we meet, we will be strangers. And I think what a good man he is, and the men like him; and how they have been betrayed by history—and when I use that melodramatic phrase, it is not melodramatic, it is accurate. And if I said it to him now, he would give his simple friendly nod. And we would look at each other in ironical understanding—there but for the grace of God, etc. (like the two men exchanging places in front of the firing squad).
I examine him—he sits on his desk, with a half-eaten dry and tasteless sandwich in his hand, looking, despite everything, like a Don—which is what he might have chosen to be. Rather boyish, bespectacled, pale, intellectual. And decent. Yes, that is the word, decent. And yet behind him, part of him, like myself, the miserable history of blood, murder, misery, betrayal, lies. He says: “Anna, are you crying?” “I might very easily,” I say. He nods, and says: “You must do what you feel you have to do.” Then I laugh, because he has spoken out of his British upbringing, the decent nonconformist conscience. And he knows why I am laughing, and he nods and says: “We are all the product of our experience. I had the ill-luck to be born as a conscious human being into the early “thirties.” Suddenly I am unbearably unhappy, and I say: “Jack, I’m going back to work,” and I go back to my office, and put my head down on my arms, and thank God that the stupid secretary has gone out to lunch. I think: Michael is leaving me, that’s finished; and although he left the Party years ago, he’s part of the whole thing. And I’m leaving the Party. It’s a stage of my life finished. And what next? I’m going out, willing it, into something new, and I’ve got to. I’m shedding a skin, or being born again. The secretary, Rose, comes in, catches me with my head on my arms, asks me if I’m ill. I say I am short of sleep and was having a nap. And I start on the “welfare work.” I’m going to miss it when I leave: I find myself thinking: I’m going to miss the illusion of doing something useful, and wonder if I really believe it is an illusion.
About eighteen months ago, in one of the Party magazines, there was a small paragraph to the effect that Boles and Hartley, this firm, had decided to publish novels as well as the sociology, history, etc., that is its main business. And all at once the office was flooded with manuscripts. We used to make jokes that every member of the Party must be a part-time novelist, but then it stopped being a joke. Because with every manuscript—some of them obviously hoarded in drawers for ye
ars, came a letter; and these letters have become my business. Most of the novels are pretty bad, either written by the banal Anon, or ordinarily incompetent. But the letters come out of a different climate altogether. I’ve been saying to Jack what a pity we couldn’t print a selection of fifty or so of these letters, as a book. To which he replies: “But my dear Anna, that would be an anti-party act, what are you suggesting!”
A typical letter: “Dear Comrade Preston: I don’t know what you think of what I’m sending you. I wrote it about four years ago. I sent it to a selection of the usual ‘reputable’ publishers—enuff said! When I saw Boles and Hartley had decided to encourage creative writing as well as the usual philosophical tracts I felt emboldened to try my luck again. Perhaps this decision is the long-awaited sign of a new attitude towards real creativity in the Party? Howsoever that may be, I await your decision with anticipation—needless to say! With comradely greetings. P.S. It is very hard for me to find time to write. I am secretary of the local Party Branch (dwindled in the last ten years from fifty-six members to fifteen—and most of the fifteen are sleeping members). I am active in my trade union. I am also secretary of the local musical society—sorry, but I’m afraid I think such evidences of local culture are not to be despised, though I know what H.Q. would say to that! I have a wife and three children. So in order to write this novel (if it deserves the name!) I got up every morning at four, and wrote for three hours before the children and my better half woke up. And then off to the office and heigh-ho for another day’s grind for the bosses, in this case the Beckly Cement Co. Ltd. Never heard of them? Well believe you me, if I could write a novel about them and their activities I’d be in dock for libel. Enuff said?”
And another: “Dear Comrade. With great fear and trembling I send you my stories. From you I expect a fair and just judgement—they have been sent back far too many times by our so-called cultural magazines. I’m glad to see that the Party has at last seen fit to encourage talent in its midst, instead of making speeches about Culture at every conference and never doing anything practical about it. All these tomes about dialectical materialism and the history of the peasants’ revolts are all very well, but how about the living article? I have had a good deal experience of writing. I started in the War (Second World) when I wrote for our Battalion Rag. I’ve been writing ever since when I’ve had the time. But there is the rub. With a wife and two children (and my wife fully agrees with the pundits of King Street that a comrade is better occupied distributing leaflets than wasting time scribbling) it means a running fight not only with her but with the local Party officials all of whom take a dim view when I say I want to take off time for writing. With comradely greetings.”
“Dear Comrade. How to start this letter is my greatest difficulty, and yet if I am reluctant and fear the effort I shall never know if you will find it in your heart to kindly help me, or put my letter into the waste-paper basket. I am writing as a mother first. I, like thousands of other women, had my home broken up during the latter stages of the war and had to fend for both my children, though that was just the time when I had finished a chronicle (not a novel) of my girlhood which was spoken very highly of by the reader of one of our best publishing firms (capitalist, I fear, and one must assume some prejudice of course—I made no secret of my political faith!). But with two children on my hands I had to give up all hope of expressing myself through the word. I was fortunate enough to get a post as house-keeper to a widower with three children, and so five years merrily passed, then he re-married (not very wisely, but that is another story) and I was no longer necessary to his household and I and my children had to leave. Then I got a job as dentist’s receptionist, and on £10 a week had to feed my children and myself and keep an outward semblance of respectability. Now my two boys are both working and my time is suddenly my own. I am forty-five years old but rebel against the idea that my life is over. Friends and/or comrades tell me my duty is to spend what spare time I have in the Party—to which I have remained faithful in my thoughts despite lack of time to be of practical use. But—dare I confess this?—my thoughts about the Party are confused and often negative. I cannot reconcile my early faith in the glorious future of mankind with what we read (though of course in the capitalist press—though it appears to be a case of no smoke without a fire?) and I believe I would better serve my true self by writing. Meanwhile time has passed in domestic chores and the business of earning a living and I am out of touch with the finer things of life. Please recommend to me what I should read, how I should develop myself, and how I can make up for lost time. With fraternal greetings. P.S. Both my sons went to grammar school, and both far beyond me, I fear, in their knowledge. This has given me a feeling of inferiority which it is hard to combat. I would appreciate more than I can express, your kindly advice and help.”
For a year I have been answering these letters, meeting the writers, giving practical advice. For instance, I asked the people who have to fight their local Party officials for time to write to come up to London. Then Jack and I take them out to lunch or tea and tell them (Jack is essential for this, because he is high up in the Party) to fight these officials, to insist that they are in the right to want time to themselves. Last week I helped a woman to the Legal Aid Bureau so that she might get advice about divorcing her husband.
While I deal with these letters, or with their writers, Rose Latimer works opposite, stiff with hostility. She is a typical Party member of this time; lower-middle-class by origin, the word “worker” literally fills her eyes with tears. When she makes speeches, and uses the phrases: The British Worker, or The Working Class, her voice goes soft with reverence. When she goes off into the provinces to organise meetings or make speeches, she returns exalted: “Wonderful people,” she says, “wonderful marvellous people. They are real.” A week ago I got a letter from the wife of a trade union official she, Rose, had spent the weekend with a year ago, returning with the usual hymn of marvellous real people. This wife complained she was at the end of her tether: her husband spent all his time either with his brother trade union officials or in the pub; and that she never got any help from him with her four children. The usual illuminating postscript added that they had had “no love-life” for eight years. I handed this letter, without comment, to Rose, and she read it and said quickly, defensive and angry: “I didn’t see anything of that when I was there. He’s the salt of the earth. They are the salt of the earth, these people.” And then, handing the letter back with a bright false smile: “I suppose you are going to encourage her to feel sorry for herself.”
I realise what a relief it will be to be rid of the company of Rose. I don’t often dislike people (or at least not longer than for a few moments) but I dislike her actively and all the time. And I dislike her physical presence. She has a long thin straggly neck and there are blackheads on it and traces of grime. And above this unpleasant neck, a narrow glossy pert head, like a bird’s. Her husband, also a Party official, a pleasant, not very intelligent man, is hen-pecked by her; and she has two children, whom she brings up in the most conventional middle-class way, fearful about their manners and their futures. She was once a very pretty girl—I was told that in the ’thirties she was “one of the glamour girls” of the Party. Of course she frightens me: I am frightened by her the way I am frightened by John Butte—what is to stop me becoming like her?
Looking at Rose, hypnotised by that dirty neck of hers, I remember I have special reasons today for worrying about my own cleanliness, and I make another visit to the washroom. When I get back to my desk the afternoon post has arrived, and there are two more manuscripts and with them, two more letters. One of the letters is from an old-age pensioner, a man of seventy-five, living alone and pinning his hopes on the belief that the publication of this book (it looks pretty bad) will “soften my old age for me.” I decided to go and visit him before remembering that I am quitting this job. Is someone going to do this work if I don’t? Probably not. Well, does it make all that difference?
In this year of “welfare work” I can’t imagine that the letters I’ve written, the visits I’ve paid, the advice I’ve given, even the practical help has made all that difference. Perhaps a little less frustration, a little less unhappiness—but this is a dangerous way of thinking, one too natural to me, and I’m afraid of it.
I go in to Jack, who is sitting alone, shirt-sleeved, his feet on the desk, smoking a pipe. His pale, intelligent face is concentrated and frowning, and he seems more than ever like a university lecturer at ease. He is thinking, I know, about his private work. His speciality is the history of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. He has written something like half a million words on the subject. But impossible to print it now, because he has written truthfully of the roles of people like Trotsky and similar people. He accumulates manuscript, notes, records of conversations. I tease Jack, saying: “In two centuries’ time the truth can be told.” He smiles calmly and says: “Or in two decades or five.” It does not trouble him at all that this detailed work will receive no practical recognition for years, perhaps not even in his lifetime. He once said: “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone fortunate enough to be outside the Party publishes all this first. But on the other hand, someone outside the Party won’t have the access I have to certain people and documents. So it cuts both ways.”
I say: “Jack, when I leave, will there be anyone to do something about all these people in trouble?” He says: “Well, I can’t afford to pay someone to do it. It’s not many comrades who can afford to live off royalties, like you.” Then he softens and says: “I’ll see what I can do about the worst cases.” “There’s an old-age pensioner,” I say; and I sit down and we discuss what might be done. Then he says: “I take it you’re not going to give me a month’s notice? I always thought you’d do this—decide to leave and then just walk out.” “Well, if I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be able to leave at all.” He nods. “Are you going to take another job?” “I don’t know, I want to think.” “Sort of go into retreat for a while?” “The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.” “Everyone’s mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?” “It should matter to us, surely?” (Meaning, it should matter to communists.) “But Anna, has it occurred to you that throughout history…” “Oh Jack, don’t let’s talk about history, about the five centuries, it’s such an evasion.” “No, it is not an evasion. Because throughout history, there have perhaps been five, ten, fifty people, whose consciousness truly matched their times. And if our consciousness of reality doesn’t fit our time, what’s so terrible about that? Our children…” “Or our great-great-great grandchildren,” I say, sounding irritable. “All right—our great-great-great-great grandchildren will look back and it will be perfectly clear to them that the way we saw the world, the way we see the world now, was incorrect. But then their view will be, of their time. It doesn’t matter.”
The Golden Notebook Page 42