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

by Doris Lessing

  She had been sent there to work but had not been found suitable. ‘It could have been me,’ she would mourn, taking from her handbag fresh cuttings about the murders. ‘I could have been that corpse they found, couldn’t I, dear?’

  HOW WE WERE THINKING: THE ZEITGEIST

  First of all, the National Health Service, the Welfare State. What pride in it, what elation—and what confidence! The best thing was still the young doctors setting up group practices. Most but not all were socialists of various kinds. Memories of the thirties were close, documented by The Stars Look Down, Love on the Dole, The Citadel, novels which everyone had read. Whole families could be brought low because of the illness of one member. That terrible poverty in the 1930s, that cruel indifference to suffering on the part of Britain’s rulers—but now there was the welfare state. Pensions meant old age was no longer a threat. (Forty years later a government can say blandly, But we can’t afford it—and cut benefits that the citizens imagined they had been paying for. Has anyone ever thought of suing a government that reneges on its promises? But perhaps a more important question is, What state of mind could we have been in, to trust the promises of governments? But that is easy: a romantic, Utopian, idealistic mood, where every good seemed possible.) The ‘Dole’ was gone, and so was the Means Test, which could mean, and often did, that help was refused to poor people down on their luck. I knew, when she was old, a woman who told me that when she had nothing to eat for days but stale bread begged from a baker’s, the Means Test officials refused her help, because she had not sold the rug on her floor. No one remembers now the bitter resentment even the words ‘Means Test’ could arouse.

  Mass observation, particularly during the war, was the first manifestation of an attitude towards ourselves now common. Sociology was being born, the ability to look at our society, our own behaviour, as an alien might see it. Now this seems to me the important thing, but it was the welfare state that filled our imaginations, as citizens.

  Harry Pollitt, the general secretary, or leader, of the British Communist Party, stands outside Pontings, an emporium in Kensington High Street. Compared with the riches of our shops now, it was a poor thing: compared with shops like Harrods or Selfridges then, it was a village shop. He raised his clenched fist and shook it, then lowered it to point an accusing finger: ‘When we take power, we’re going to pull all these places down.’ Meaning, this shocking luxury. So much for the Communist Party beating to the tune of the heart of the masses, who, clothes rationing having just ended, dreamed of nothing but a little fashion, a little glamour. There is a strand in British thinking exemplified by this anecdote. It is deeply puritan, pleasure-hating, with a need to control and suppress.

  When I told John Sommerfield this story, he said, ‘If you want to understand England, just remember that we are the nation that bulldozed down Nash’s Regent Street for the sake of a few pounds’ profit.’

  French food. Our food then was so bad, but just over the Channel there was France, real food. This was a decade before Elizabeth David. How we grumbled and despised what we had. The delicatessen shops were our consolation, the French and Italian food shops in Soho. Soft white bread was the symbol of everything bad about our food. (In the nineties, this hated bread is the choicest new thrill in Paris, where they cannot get enough of our white-bread sandwiches.) No, baguettes, croissants, brioches—and Gauloises and Gitanes: this was civilisation. Food is always much more than itself. To return from Soho with a decent bit of Brie or Camembert, or a French pastry, was a victory over barbarism. Now I wonder how much this passion for food—certainly fed by the deprivations of war, inflamed by our little trips to France, to Italy—contributed to our present obsession with food: whole pages of recipes, and talk about restaurants and chefs, reviews of cookbooks, which we read like novels. There is more space given in our newspapers or on TV to food than to books these days.

  Charity was gone for ever. The Welfare State had ended this bitter insult to the poor, for ever. Besides, soon there wouldn’t be any poor. ‘At least we’ll never again have to put our hands into our pockets for handouts.’

  Marghanita Laski wrote a play, The Offshore Island, whose theme was that Britain had become a dependency of the United States. U.S. military bases were positioned everywhere over Britain: the price we paid for the United States rescuing us when we ‘stood alone’ against Hitler. She was reviled as a communist, which she was very far from being. Anyone who criticised ‘the establishment’—a phrase only just coming into use, replacing ‘the ruling classes’—was a communist and by definition a traitor. Now this seems to me the worst of the consequences of the Cold War: so much legitimate and useful criticism was dismissed with, ‘It’s only communist propaganda’.

  Picasso came to London. He was openly, not to say disdainfully, a communist: take it or leave it. It was he who had drawn the Peace Dove that adorned communist peace campaigns all over the world. His welcome was far from wholehearted. Along with the encomiums went anger: ‘We don’t want this communist here.’ Riots were threatened. His reputation was not as unchallenged as now. Charlatan, trickster, mountebank, subversive—another Grand Old Man in the making.

  In cinemas and theatres, we stood up for the national anthem.

  As often as we could, we went to see French and Italian films at the two art cinemas in Oxford Street, Studio One and the Academy. The National Film Institute had not yet been born. Happy hours we spent there, and we often said, ‘I’m going off to get a dose of sunlight.’ In French and Italian films we could touch for an hour or two the grace and charm that we so lacked.

  Television: Our children’s minds would be rotted by this monstrous new invention. What could we all do to save ourselves?

  British was still best: everything British.

  People from abroad said how civilised our streets were, so gentle.

  In the CP Writers’ Group we were joking that the perennial difficulties of understanding between Britain and the Soviet Union would be easily resolved if we and the Russians remembered Britain was still like Dickens’s novels, and Russia like Dostoyevsky’s.

  So far this has mostly been a record of outward events: trips, meetings, the Writers’ Group, politics—and so it will go on. A scaffolding, a framework, into which fits the interior life. But suppose it was the other way around—the framework being the writing and the thoughts that go into it? Impossible to describe a writer’s life, for the real part of it cannot be written down. How did my day go in those early days in London, in Church Street? I woke at five, when the child did. He came into my bed, and I told or read stories or rhymes. We got dressed, he ate, and then I took him to the school up the street. But soon I put him on the bus, and he took himself the two stops to the school. I suppose now one couldn’t do this. I shopped a little, and then my real day began. The feverish need to get this or that done—what I call the housewife’s disease: ‘I must buy this, ring So-and-so, don’t forget this, make a note of that’—had to be subdued to the flat, dull state one needs to write in. Sometimes I achieved it by sleeping for a few minutes, praying that the telephone would be silent. Sleep has always been my friend, my restorer, my quick fix, but it was in those days that I learned the value of a few minutes’ submersion in…where? And you emerge untangled, quiet, dark, ready for work.

  Often when Peter went to the Eichners’ for a few days or the weekend, or my mother had taken him off somewhere, I simply went to bed, sliding into that restorative underwater state where you lie limp, rising towards the surface, just reaching it, sinking, rising…. You are not really conscious when you are reaching wakefulness, and the sleep itself is lightened by the half-knowledge you are asleep. An hour…a day even, if I had become too frenetic. As I grew older, and became cleverer at managing my emotional economy, I began to wonder if the condition of being awake accumulates some kind of substance, which jangles and vibrates, making you tense and sharp, and that this is exaggerated a hundred times if you are writing: but even a few minutes’ sleep, the me
rest dip into that other dimension, dissolves it, leaving you calm again, newborn.

  And now, on the little table that has been cleared of breakfast things, replaced by scattered sheets of paper, is the typewriter, waiting for me. Work begins. I do not sit down but wander about the room. I think on my feet, while I wash up a cup, tidy a drawer, drink a cup of tea, but my mind is not on these activities. I find myself in the chair by the machine. I write a sentence…will it stand? But never mind, look at it later, just get on with it, get the flow started. And so it goes on. I walk and I prowl, my hands busy with this and that. You’d think I was a paragon of concern for housekeeping if you judged by what you saw. I drop off into sleep for a few minutes, because I have wrought myself into a state of uncomfortable electric tension. I walk, I write. If the telephone rings I try to answer it without breaking the concentration. And so it goes on, all day, until it is time to fetch the child from school or until he arrives at the door.

  This business of the physical as a road into concentration: you see painters doing it. They wander about the studio, apparently at random. They clean a brush. They throw away another. They prepare a canvas, but you can see their minds are elsewhere. They stare out of the window. They make a cup of coffee. They stand for a long time in front of the canvas, the brush on the alert in their hands. At last, it begins: the work.

  There are no attempts to write when the child is there, for that only results in irritation on both sides. He is read to, we play board games. He listens to the radio, which he adores, grown-up plays as well as the children’s programmes. Supper. If Joan or Ernest are there he goes down to see them. He is put to bed at eight, but he has never been a sleeper, and he will lie awake until nine or so—later. Meanwhile Jack arrives. We eat. We talk. Jack works very hard at the Maudsley Hospital. This is the leading psychiatric hospital in Britain, and it is a time of ferment and discovery. Many psychiatric beliefs and practices we now take for granted were being established then. Jack was the kind of doctor probably now obsolete. He illustrated the Maudsley theories and practices, or incidents with patients, with comparisons from music—for he knew a good deal about music—or from composers’ lives, or incidents from literature. A poor man from London’s East End would be matched with a character from Dostoyevsky, a mad girl with a story from opera. He suffered over the sufferings of his patients. He was often dubious about the experiments that went on. He described, for instance, experiments in hypnosis. If you take someone—anyone—hypnotise them, and ask them to say what happened let’s say on the second of May in some far-off year, when this person was ten years old, or twenty, they will come up with a complete account of that day. ‘I woke in a bad mood, I quarrelled with my husband, I went to the shops, I cooked supper…,’ and so on. It is all stored in the mind somewhere. What we call memory is a tiny part of what is in our brains, and it is easy to think of it as a kind of overspill from the full, real record. ‘What right have we to intrude into another person’s mind like this?’ He told me how he stood in front of him a line of people chosen at random and went along the line, snapping his fingers, and—‘They’re out! Just like that! You can do what you like with them. No human being should be treated like that.’ He was always saying that human beings should not be treated like this, or like that. He may have been a communist, had been a Stalinist, was still, he said, a Marxist, but he was an old-fashioned humanist, and that was true of all communists with the literary tradition in their blood.

  And then we went to bed. The dark, and love.

  In the morning he was often off as the child woke. ‘I have to pick up a clean shirt from home,’ was the formula.

  ‘You could always keep your clean shirts here.’

  ‘Now, come on—why should you have the bother of my shirts?’

  This exchange, archetypical between man and mistress, went on, in one form or another, for the four years we were together.

  So that’s the outline of a day. But nowhere in it is there the truth of the process of writing. I fall back on that useful word ‘wool-gathering’. And this goes on when you are shopping, cooking, anything. You are reading but find the book has lowered itself: you are wool-gathering. The creative dark. Incommunicable. And what about the pages discarded and thrown away, the stories that were misbegotten—into the waste-paper basket, the ideas that lived in your mind for a day or two, or a week, but haven’t any life, so out with them. What life, what is it, why is one page alive and another not, what is this aliveness, which is born so very deep, out of sight, fed by love? But describing a day like this: I got up, the child went to school, I wrote, he came back, and the next day was the same—that is hardly the stuff that keeps the reader turning pages.

  I think a writer’s real life is understood only by another writer. And a few other people. These used to be publishers. The publishing scene has changed so much that it is hard to believe the heart of it was once the relationship between the publisher, as an individual, and the writer. In the fifties, every publishing firm had been started by one man—then it was men—in love with literature. They had often risked everything they had, were usually undercapitalised, and yes, they were sometimes bad businessmen. They were on the lookout for new writers, cherished them, kept books in print that might sell only a few hundred copies. The present dispensation, when everything is geared to a few weeks of intensive selling, was ushered in by a joke which—as so often happens—soon became no joke at all, but an accurate description, used by everyone in publishing: ‘This book’s shelf life is, or was six weeks…two months.’

  Here is an example of the opposite of what we are now used to. In 1949 a man called Frank Rudman took his demobilization pay of one hundred pounds and began to publish sixty titles a year from three attic rooms in Bloomsbury. This was Ace Books, the very beginning of the paperback revolution, and his list included all the fine writers of that time, from Europe, America, the Caribbean. I should imagine no one made much money. Frank Rudman liked to conduct his business when possible from the nearest pub.

  A first novel, or collection of short stories, was kept alive, not remaindered. The second novel, always a tricky moment, was similarly nursed. But a reputation was growing in the literary world. A third book, perhaps a fourth. None of these may have sold more than a few hundred copies. Then a book takes off, for some reason. It wins a prize—there were only a few then—or is mentioned on radio. More likely, I think, an invisible hoard of goodwill is growing, and there is a moment when the scale is tipped: the writer now has a steady readership, a constituency, who look out for a new book by her or by him. It can be a slow process, but it is organic, with a life in it: books recommended, books lent, a reputation growing mostly by word of mouth. And now the new book may at last sell ten thousand, twenty thousand. All this time the writer has been living frugally, or has an office job, or subsists on reviews, a radio play, an article sometimes.

  At the heart of this process was the close relationship between the writer and the publisher—the firms being small, it was usually the publisher himself. They didn’t move around then, they stayed. The writer relied on a steady, developing friendship, which I am sure has depths not yet acknowledged. It must be confessed that writers are all childish, at least in this department of their lives. On to the publisher—or editor—are projected a whirl of emotions: need, dependency, gratitude, resentment at being needy and dependent, a fighting, contradictory affection, which nourishes the work. The publisher’s passionate love of literature feeds into the writer’s work, and the discrimination that comes of reading so much helps in criticising the book, insisting on its being better. Yes, this is an exemplary relationship I am describing, perhaps the most famous being Thomas Wolfe’s (not the journalist, but the 1930s novelist) with Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. This was a fruitful and sustaining relationship, for the writer and for the publisher. There are few such publishers or editors left.

  I did not have this relationship with Michael Joseph, who never cared about literature in that pas
sionate way. His associate, Robert Lusty, took me out to lunch and confessed he never read books, only watched television. In the early days of television, it was rather despised. These two men hated each other and, unable to confer in the usual way, communicated by notes carried back and forth from one office to another (next to each other) by the secretaries. I do not know if this affected the efficient running of the firm. During this time I relied for support on Juliet O’Hea.

  What has happened to publishing exemplifies the rule that things often turn into their own opposites. The antipodes of the slow and reliable growth of a reputation, meaning that books are bought by people who have a personal stake in them, is this: Last year I was interviewed by a young woman from the New York Times, and a shallow and superficial article resulted. The publisher rang a couple of days later to say that this interview had sold one thousand five hundred copies of the book (Under My Skin) to a certain big chain, which does not mean that this number was read. A feature of our scene now is that books are bought but not necessarily read. The impulse to buy has come from outside—a prod from an interview or a TV appearance—but this kind of stimulus does not mean the reader will like a book. Impulse buying does not necessarily mean serious reading. The root of the trouble is that publishers are managed by accountants, who are interested not in the literary quality of a book but only in how much it sells, and writers are judged only on their sales. But some writers—and they can be the best—never sell more than a few hundred or a couple of thousand. Yet they have a strong, wide, deep influence. The real, the good books, those that in fact set a standard, or a tone, for the whole country or culture, have been, always will be, for a serious minority. No amount of ‘promotion’ can change such a book into a best-seller; it will result only in unsold books piling up in the warehouses, to be pulped.