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

by Doris Lessing

  While waiting for the publication of Declaration, Tom became friends with us all. Some of us gave him advice. Since he wanted to be a publisher, then it would be a good thing if he read some books. Interesting that we all came up with roughly the same list of twenty books. He should also try to read a newspaper a day, for while he might not be interested in politics, he should know what was going on. Well, all right, then: if he didn’t want to read newspapers he must get someone to tell him the news.*

  Tom is one of those people who attract comment, much of it unfavourable. Some of this is of course envy, for he has been so phenomenally successful.

  Once, I told him it would be difficult to write about him because some of the things he did were so appalling.

  ‘For instance?’ asks Tom.

  ‘For instance this,’ I say. My Italian publisher, Feltrinelli, rang me from the Ritz to ask would I have breakfast with him. How chic, then, was a business breakfast: I had never heard of them. There we sat in the Ritz, surrounded by the plenitudes of the Ritz breakfast, drinking black coffee, since neither of us ate breakfast. He was an agreeable man, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and a brave publisher. He was a communist, Feltrinelli was a left-wing house, and he published books like Doctor Zhivago and other novels damned by the Soviet authorities. For this, of course, he was reviled by the comrades. That morning Tom happened to telephone, and I said I had had breakfast with Feltrinelli. Tom said, ‘I’m coming over.’ He then got me to telephone Feltrinelli at his hotel to say that my friend Tom Maschler was with me and would very much like to talk to him. I did this. I am not saying what I felt about it. I listened while Tom chatted up Feltrinelli, who could not have been blamed for assuming that Tom was living with me. The conversation finished, Tom put down the receiver and turned to say triumphantly, ‘I’m seeing him tonight.’ Next day he rang and announced that he was invited to stay with them in their country house. And Tom became a close friend of the Feltrinellis.†

  ‘Well, what was wrong with that?’ says Tom. ‘That was just being enterprising.’ Chutzpah, that was Tom’s middle name. He had been at McGibbon and Kee for six months when Howard Samuels, the proprietor, summoned him for an interview, and said to this ebullient and engaging infant, whom he had after all chosen from so many hopeful applicants, ‘You know Tom, I don’t really mind you allowing everyone to think you run this firm, but I am afraid I do rather object to your behaving as if you owned it.’

  But really it was only necessary to remember Balzac’s Rastignac, the provincial determined to conquer Paris. London was full of young men, most, but not all, from the north of England, many working class, from the grammar schools, without the connections that are so important in this country, but with plenty of cheek and cleverness. Women have ever been useful to ambitious young men. Why not? It is part of the social mechanisms. But until we worked it out—some of us by remembering Rastignac—women then in the news were always being puzzled by how we were being embraced in theatre foyers and public places by young men we scarcely knew, whose attentiveness impressed the onlookers, if not us; or summoned by public address systems, at the same time as youths we scarcely knew, to hotel or airport desks.

  And now a more general comment. It seems to be generally agreed that unpleasant facts about people are more revealing of their real selves than pleasant ones, but why? Nothing is easier than malice, and to find something discreditable about someone needs no more than a good look at him; besides, everyone alive has a root down into the mud: it is the human condition. We are skilled critics of our fellows, clever sniffers-out of moral weakness. Once, to be malicious was considered a fault; now it is applauded. Our current happy phrase ‘dishing the dirt’ says more about us than we ought to like: it is diagnostic of our nasty time. And now, if I write: Tom was for years an enterprising, a brilliant publisher; he brought Jonathan Cape from a moribund condition to being the liveliest publishing house in Britain; he found new young authors and cherished and supported them; he fought for books at first patronised or rubbished by reviewers, like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Catch-22; he has kept his friends loyal to him through thick and thin…but I am sure the reader’s eye has slid over these encomiums, waiting to get to the dirt. The truth.*

  My complaint now is more general: What happens to these glorious buccaneers when they get old? These youths who entertained us with their exploits? They get respectable: you meet some balding oldster whom you remember for his reckless adventures, and he is lisping away about imaginary youthful conformities, which in fact he would have despised from the bottom of his brave heart.

  When Declaration came out, Tom Maschler at once became famous, as its originator, and it was described by every newspaper as a manifesto by the Angry Young Men, as if they were a movement or a group. In fact, as I soon found out, they divided into two main groups, with nothing at all in common. The real left wing was Ken Tynan—who had left his dandyish young self behind—and Lindsay Anderson. John Osborne was called a socialist by other people, but I don’t think he ever said he was. John Wain might have written Hurry on Down, similar to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and to my mind as good, but he was a Young Tory if there ever was one.

  I suppose they could all justly have been called angry, because of the state of the nation, but there were also three I thought of as the Metaphysicals, and they were not only not angry but had not even met their left-wing fellows, and in fact rather despised them for their shallow view of life. To call this odd lot of people a group, or a movement, was simply absurd. I asked the Metaphysicals to tea, separately. They were charming. One was Stuart Holroyd, a very young man, whose book Emergence from Chaos was in the news. Later he wrote: ‘at twenty-five I had the temerity to publish an account of my own inner life and experience. This was in the late 1950s, when the British press made much of “the angry young men”, and that was probably one reason why I ventured to write autobiographically: all the publicity we had received made us feel that what we had to say was important.’ Bill Hopkins had written a first novel, The Divine and the Decay, also acclaimed. He died very young. Both these young men were unlike the rest of the contributors, who tended to be combative, and concerned with social mechanisms: they were shy, sensitive, interested in inner experience, and well read in mystical and religious literature.

  Colin Wilson had written The Outsider, which was acclaimed as a work of great significance, if not genius, by the literary establishment. If there ever was a rising star on the literary horizon, it was Colin Wilson, but then there was a reaction, as if the people who had lionised him were thinking, You aren’t going to get away with that again. On the whole it is not a good thing for a first book to be wildly praised: there is nearly always an irrational reaction. If that first (good) book of Wilson’s was overpraised, then his succeeding books have been unjustly ignored or dismissed. At least two—I haven’t read them all—should have been commended. One was Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs, which rescued Rasputin from his reputation as a sort of hysterical charlatan and put him into the context of a tradition of Russian shamans and healers. The other was The Great Beast, about Aleister Crowley, equally balanced and sensible.

  So there we all were. The Left-Wing Politicals, very fashionable. The Metaphysicals, unfashionable, but they would be the last word in chic only ten years later. And me, a female and ten years older than any of them.

  Briefly and in passing: it is a sad thing that what is written has permanence, whereas what is said is often unnoticed. Something written is reprinted, becomes part of theses. Decades later it is quoted back at you. It is a millstone around your neck, and there is nothing you can do. ‘But you said, on page 123…’ I like most of my piece, ‘A Small Personal Voice’ in Declaration, but emphatically dislike some of it. What is that nonsense I was writing about Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Genet? I am shocked at myself. I wrote nonsense about China and the Soviet Union. I am appalled at my sentimentality when I said that I had never met anyone who would throw the switch that would unleash
what we then thought of as The Bomb. It seems to me now that anyone would, given the right programming. Still, it was a piece for its time, all right.

  One thing I wrote about in Declaration is still true—and more so. I complained about the xenophobia and little-mindedness of Britain. Sometimes, when one has returned from a trip abroad, a session with the newspapers and magazines is like opening a door on to a room full of very clever argumentative schoolchildren. News about one another is considered important. Wars and famines can be raging, governments tottering, but what they are writing about is that one of the children is trying a new hairstyle, or pettishly refusing to have lunch with another. My father used to complain about the parish-pump mentality of Britain, which was why he was eager to leave it in 1919 and in 1924.

  The Angry Young Men was a phenomenon entirely invented by the newspapers, the media. It went rolling on, year after year, gathering momentum, and all the time I was amazed no one seemed to notice that in fact they had very little in common. The media are the equivalent of yesterday’s scientists, for today’s scientists have seen that when they conduct an experiment they are part of it and influence results by their very being; the media can create a story, a scandal, an event, but behave as if they have nothing to do with it, as if the event or the reputation were a spontaneous happening and they haven’t influenced the result, or invented it all in the first place. ‘The general interest in…continues and is growing.’ Of course it is, since the journalists are fanning the flames, permitting themselves fits of moral indignation, excitement, concern. Meanwhile the public marvel at them.

  I repeat: The Angry Young Men was a creation of the media, invented by the newspapers, and never had any basis in fact. But it is no good saying so; a thousand theses have been written and a thousand reputations made, and now people have a vested interest in the thing and it probably will never be allowed to die. When I was in Japan, some professor asked me about the Angry Young Men and their manifesto, and I said they had never existed and it was a newspaper bubble. His face…but I saw on it that he was an expert on this revolutionary movement and the last thing he could bear to hear was that it was all a mirage.

  The Angry Young Men (and I) were associated with the Royal Court because of John Osborne and because of the Court’s glamour then.

  There is a famous photograph of the Royal Court people on some jaunt, on the top of a bus, lovely Mary Ure in front—she was every bit as fascinating as Marilyn Monroe, with the same fragility. The young lions and lionesses are laughing, and every young lion, and most particularly John Osborne (who would shortly marry her) and Tony Richardson, is watching Mary, who has her head back, laughing, but seems a bit panicky, from all the attention. It is a picture of wonderful gaiety, like children on a picnic, when they are overexcited.

  A party to celebrate the publication of Declaration was planned at the Royal Court, but the management refused to host it, on the grounds that John Osborne had insulted the Royal Family in his piece. “My objection to the Royalty symbol is that it is dead, it is a gold filling in a mouthful of decay.” The venue was switched to the Pheasantry, Chelsea, a great basement room, crammed with directors, politicians, actors, and of course, the contributors, everyone in the news at that time. Aneurin Bevan was there, with his entourage, just back from some conference, where he had allowed his famous fire to be flattened by a prevailing wind, and some of us tackled him and said that now communism had collapsed, he represented much more than the left wing of the Labour Party. He seemed surprised at what was expected of him. He was a politician, and revolution was certainly not on his agenda, whereas I would say that revolution, an abstract, inspirational, and uncompromised revolution, was part of how most people in that room thought. Not if you said to them, Do you think it should be this or that kind of revolution? No, nothing pedantically defined.

  The din was incredible, but it was silenced by a loud voice from the top of the stairs that led down into the throng. There stood a young woman, dowdy, with floppy blond hair, a flowery dress—then the height of unchic—and disapproving pale eyes. ‘And who,’ she was demanding of her escort, in the ringing tones of her class, ‘and who are all those furry little people?’ For a good deal of slumming was going on, and the classes were getting a good stir round.

  The people I was seeing about then came from very different worlds. The bliss of big cities is knowing people who may not care to know each other, and only those who have had to live in the provinces—like Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia—can appreciate the freedom of it.

  For a time I saw a good bit of Miles Malleson. He had been in the theatre for forty years, and I loved hearing him talk about it. I went with him to the theatre, and to theatre restaurants, like the Ivy, and to the zoo, for he was a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. Miles was fond of Peter, and Peter liked the zoo, where he could meet Miles’s special animal, but I’ve forgotten what it was. I have known so many people who have supported tarantulas, sloths, scorpions, apes, and chameleons and they have blurred into a generic Zoo Pet.

  We also talked about love, I with reluctance. Miles fancied me, but this was not a sentiment that needed much compassion from me, because Miles was in love with love. A product of the Twenties, he said he was: Free Love had been his emotional education, and he still thought this was the only way to conduct one’s life and loves. Miles said he had never felt jealousy, or a need to own a woman, but women were sadly lacking in his largeness of approach. He thought one should be able to tell one’s chief loved one about the fleeting fancy that had occupied a charming weekend, but his whole life, said he, had been a repetition of when he had gone ebulliently in to tell his first wife—I think; at any rate, a wife—about such an adventure and she had said, ‘Now that’s enough. Out!’ Why did women have to be like that? he demanded, really expecting an answer. He said he believed that love between a man and a woman—that is to say, real love—could exist only on a basis of absolute frankness. But frankness caused unhappiness. Well, yes, I said, I had heard similar complaints in my past, but surely this was the basic and intrinsic and terrible dilemma at the heart of love. Why did he think he was going to solve it all, just like that? But he did think so, he still hoped so. He would speak about it in a voice full of the hot grievance of a lifetime. I put him in a story called ‘The Habit of Loving’.

  I saw Tom Maschler quite often too. He was rushing about London, seeing everyone, for he operated on a high-octane energy. You don’t often meet people like this, who make you realise just how slowly your own wheels revolve in comparison.

  The journalist Murray Sayle was in and out of my life. He lived up the road, in Notting Hill Gate, with his wife Tessa Sayle. They had met in Paris, both poor, as everyone was, and had been the right age for that city. She was Austrian, aristocratic, a pretty, sprightly woman, whose chief characteristic then was a love of order. She was the tidiest woman I have ever known, and nothing in their flat was even half an inch out of place. Later, when she could afford expensive clothes, she would take them to pieces and put them together according to her exacting standards. Murray was Australian, affable, easy-going, and carelessly generous with his time. Here was another of those improbable marriages, and it didn’t last. Murray lived inside an always evolving epic, populated with outsize characters, one of them Shoulders Moresby. Later I learned that this character actually existed—and exists—and I was disappointed. Sometimes you may hear about a friend’s friend for years, until he or she has all the familiar charm of a character in a folk tale, and the last thing you want to hear is that they live in the ordinary light of day. One of the incidents in the saga was when Murray and his mates decided to renovate a boat on the Thames in order to sail around the world; they spent a year of weekends and holidays doing it, needless to say much to the disapproval of their women. At last they set off, accompanied by champagne and speeches. But it was rough in the Channel. They were all seasick, a hazard they had not once thought of. They left the boat in Cherbourg, where it might very wel
l be to this day, and travelled home, not by sea. Surreal adventures of this kind entertained Murray’s friends for years. Murray worked for a popular newspaper, like the Sun or the Daily Mail. One day, having pursued some scandal to its limits, he was sitting on a bench in the park, and as with St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from his eyes. These are people I’m doing these terrible things to, he thought. What am I doing? I am supposed to be a lover of humanity. He resigned from the newspaper and came to tell his friends, with all the penitence of a criminal determined to reform.

  The journalists on those scandal sheets were not exactly admired, but I don’t think we loathed and despised them, as decent people do now, for their lies and dishonesty and their cruelty to their victims. They certainly hadn’t evolved anything like their present levels of hypocrisy. We have indeed gone from bad to worse. It would be nice to report that Murray at once became the world-famous journalist he is now, but in fact he had a hard time at first, and virtue had to be its own reward. A novel he wrote got into trouble with the libel law and had to be withdrawn. His life loitered in the doldrums. For a while he was earning his living as a salmon putcher on the Severn Estuary. This is the person who takes salmon out of the traps when the tide falls. He was in a minute house and eating far too much salmon, as he complained, serving delicious salmony meals to his friends when we visited. The saga of adventures continued, with Shoulders Moresby an attendant knight. True or false, who cares? The storytellers of this world should not be held to account for tedious exactitudes.

  A scene: Facing me across a low table scattered with ashtrays, cigarettes, and teacups sits Betty, a plain young woman frowning with earnest endeavour, her eyes all anxiety. Yet there is a certain little complacency there too, for she has on her string in the role of agony aunts, Tessa Sayle, Joan Rodker, and others. She holds on her lap a neat white handbag that looks as if it was bought at a church bazaar. She is a bishop’s daughter: the daughters of bishops do seem far more often than most of us to flounder in mires of moral adventure.