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

by Doris Lessing

  Again, writing this, I am brought up short with: But all this is outward, you’d think my life was all politics and personalities, though really most of the time I was alone in my flat, working. The capacious flat in Warwick Road was a very different affair from the compact, low-ceilinged, intimate little place in Church Street. Only in one way were they alike: noise. The buses roared up and down Church Street, and along Warwick Road lorries banged and ground all day and most of the night. Now I live high in a house where I might as well be in the country, all trees and even a field, although this is London, and it is quiet except for the birds and the wind in the trees and around the chimneys—and absolutely silent all night. How did I bear those eight years of din? I now wonder. I swear that as you get older your eardrums lose successive layers of soundproofing.

  This was almost a little house, with its upstairs and downstairs. Up, in one large room, was Peter, during his holidays; his things overflowed into the little room next to it. The other large room had in it Clancy, when he was there, and the little room had my clothes. Up and down those stairs I ran all day—not heavily, as I do now, holding on to banisters—and walked around my big room, or from the big room to the kitchen, back and forth, for, writing, I have to move. Just as, looking back at Church Street, I see Joan and me sitting at her little table in the kitchen, talking, gossiping, setting life, love, men, and politics to rights, the best part of my time there—one of my best times in London—so now I look back at Warwick Road and remember how Clancy, or some visitor or other, sat at the kitchen table with me and we talked. And talked. Politics and literature, but so much politics in that difficult time when ‘everything’ was falling apart; Now there have been a couple of generations who never talk anything but shopping or gossip, and when I am with them I wonder how they can bear it, this tiny, self-enclosed world they inhabit.

  It was the big room, though, where I was most of the time. It had three tall windows, the bed recessed in one corner, the desk with the typewriter, the small table painted glossy black, with the ashtrays, the cigarettes, the mess and smell of the smoker, for I smoked so much that now I can’t believe it. I walked up and down and around, and wrote a sentence, and walked some more, managed a paragraph, crossed it out, did it again, achieved a page that could stand, at least for a time. This process, this walking and thinking, while you pick up something from a chair and stare at it, hardly knowing what it is, and then let it drop, tidy something into a drawer, find yourself dusting a chair or straightening a pile of books against the wall, or standing at the window looking down while the lorries trundle past—this is the opposite of daydreaming, for it is all concentration, you are deep inside, and the outside world is merely material. And it is exhausting, for suddenly after an hour or two, with perhaps only a page or two done, you find yourself so heavy you tumble onto the bed and into sleep, for the necessary half hour, fifteen minutes, ten—and then up again, refreshed, the tension cut, and you resume the wandering about, the touching, the desultory tidying, the staring, while you approach the typewriter, and then you are seated, and your fingers fly for as long as they do—up again, movement again. How well I got to know that room, every fibre and thread of it, whose surfaces I had created: the plain white of the walls, the carpet I had dyed green, the floorboards I had painted glossy shiny black, the green-and-white curtains I had made on my Singer sewing machine, brought all the way from Africa.

  While I was pottering, hesitating, tumbling into sleep and back, walking to the kitchen and back, I might hear Clancy’s typewriter upstairs going like a machine gun, hour after hour, with never a moment’s pause. And then long silences, then bursts of clattering sound, then silences.

  In Warwick Road I wrote a lot of short stories, set in Africa, in France, in Germany. Some of them I think are good. Some are not up to much. If you are the kind of writer I am—that is, one who uses the process of writing to find out what you think, and even what you are—then it is surely dishonest to kick down the stepladder you came up by, but the fact is, I would be happy if some of the stories I wrote disappeared. Yet there are people who like the ones that I don’t think much of. Isn’t it a form of contempt to wish away what other people admire? I would be happy to be like those poets who at the end of their lives acknowledge a few survivors, rejecting everything but the best.

  I wrote A Ripple from the Storm, which helped to put that frenetic time when ‘everyone’ was a communist into perspective. When it came out it was described by many of the comrades as seditious, ‘fouling the nest’, and so forth, but it has had a contradictory career. I still get letters from people saying that when they read it they thought it a betrayal of the Cause but later found they liked it. This book, which details the vagaries and dynamics of group behaviour—not merely political—caused a couple of young Americans as late as the early nineties to go off and join an extreme left group. I could not believe this when I was told about it, but apparently they were attracted to the intrigue and excitement. I am sure that is why many people join political or religious groups. They need the excitement. Regularly, through the decades, people have said to me that they were in this or that movement or group, and A Ripple from the Storm described their experiences—which was why they left the group, disillusioned. Later this was said of The Good Terrorist. ‘It was just like life in…’ a feminist group, a black activist group, Greenpeace, animal rights. A group is a group is a group—just as a mob is a mob. The machineries that activate them are the same, whatever the cause. If you’ve been in one, you’ve been in them all. It is amazing to me that now, when so much is known about the mechanisms and dynamics of group behaviour, there is no attempt, when one is being set up, to make use of this information about what is bound to happen. If there was ever a block in the mind—a barrier, a division—it is this one: ‘We do not want to know’ about our behaviour. But wait, there is one example of when people beginning something looked back at predecessors and decided to do better. The Bolsheviks agreed together that they would not be like the revolutionaries of the French Revolution: their own revolution would not devour its children, they would not kill each other. This noble aspiration, as we know, came to nothing, and they all murdered each other with rhetorical enthusiasm. So perhaps more is needed than a simple aspiration to do better.

  How I felt about the reception of A Ripple from the Storm is in a letter I wrote to Edward Thompson. Here is part of it:

  My dear Edward,

  But Edward, I never said a word about policy, my attitude being entirely pragmatic, in other words, What About Me?

  Seriously—I wrote a book all about the kind of politics which the New Reasoner has been theoretical about for the last two years.

  As the reviews came out, I was more and more cross, though not surprised, at the way no one said what this book was about—either, that enigmatic girl, Martha Quest, at her antics again, or another jab at the colour bar. But no one could have deduced from the reviews that this book was about Stalinist attitudes of mind etc.

  Therefore, since the kind of people I wanted to reach were obviously the New Reasoner and The New Left Review readers, I naturally hoped that either or both magazines would at least put in a paragraph saying that this novel was about current topics.

  But not a word. Not a bloody word.

  Meanwhile, both magazines, and particularly the Reasoner, print long and analytical articles about The Contemporary Dilemma. And both magazines ask me to write articles and statements about the C.Dil. The fact that I’ve seen fit to write 140,000 words about it, as a novel, is apparently considered quite irrelevant.

  In a word, left magazines, like all other magazines, are not interested in what a writer says in his or her real work, but only interested to get ephemeral statements and articles, so that The Name will attract readers.

  I wrote another book in Warwick Road, which I later withdrew. It was called Retreat to Innocence. So little do authors’ wishes count that I often meet people who say triumphantly, ‘I have a copy of that
book you tried to suppress.’ Like children in a playground: Sucks to you!

  That novel was born out of being with Jack from Czechoslovakia, from Europe’s bloody and fought-over heartland, and how inexperienced, how innocent—and unpleasantly so—he made me feel. He did not try to make me feel this. If you have the kind of knowledge about human behaviour that he had, then most of what people say that does not come from that area of experience must sound like babes prattling. As I write, the war in Bosnia goes on, and those who are part of it will think all their lives, Don’t talk to us about civilisation. The two main characters in the novel are an older man, Jan, and a girl, Julia. It is a wonderful theme for a novel, but I didn’t succeed. I wasted it. It is a shallow novel. But some people did like it, and some still do, and when they say so I feel the pain of an opportunity lost. What I could have explored is how the human mind—our minds—continually try to soften and hide bad experience, by deliberately forgetting or distorting. The way not only individual minds, but collective minds—a country’s, a continent’s—will forget a horror. The most famous example is the Great Flu Epidemic of 1919-1920, when twenty-nine million people all over the world died, but it is left out of the history books, is not in the collective consciousness. Humanity’s mind is set to forget disaster. That was the contention of Velikovsky, whose story of our solar system’s possible history is dismissed by the professionals, though surely some of what he said has turned out to be true. There is certainly nothing in the human consciousness of the successive calamitous ice ages, and we—humanity—lived through more than one. There are glimpses in old tales of great floods, but that is about it. In the book which I failed to write would be implicit the question: Is it a good thing that every generation decides to forget the bad or cruel experience of the one before? That the Great War (for instance), such a calamity for Europe, became the ‘Great Unmentionable’—which made my father and other soldiers, of France and Germany, feel as if they were being nullified, discounted, were just so much human rubbish. That five or six years after that terrible civil war in Southern Rhodesia, the new young generation had forgotten and ‘didn’t want to know’. Well…it could have been a good book.

  What else? I begin thinking about the scheme for The Golden Notebook, and I wrote Play with a Tiger.

  For this play I used Warwick Road, as I experienced it, for a setting, the room with its typewriter, and the bed sheltering behind thin curtains, often seeming to lose its walls to the din and stink of the lorries thundering outside, the raucous groups of boys who late at night were forlornly drunk, mirroring Clancy’s tales of his street-corner adolescence in Chicago, on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’, the prostitutes’ house a diagonal glance away, where the girls sometimes emerged on to the pavement to attract customers or to quarrel.

  By now Oscar Lowenstein was well into his career as successful impresario.* He did nothing but good for the British theatre and films, and he has not been given the credit he deserves, but he could have done better for me, personally. He liked Play with a Tiger but insisted on Siobhan McKenna for the lead. She was tied up for four years, and so that was the time we had to wait to get it on. I kept saying that there were other good actresses. But impresarios often have a streak of power obstinacy, and it was Siobhan McKenna or nothing. Jumping ahead then, to 1962, Ted Kotcheff directed brilliantly, with a sense for the play’s flow and movement that meant, when watched from the dress circle, it looked like a slow dance. The male lead was another mistake. I said I wanted someone in style like Sam Wanamaker, but younger, but Oscar said, Over my dead body. He and Ted flew off to New York to audition and come back with a man’s idea of what is attractive to women, a stud, like a cowboy. He was a good actor, but he had no feeling for ambiguity. He and Siobhan hated each other on sight, and this showed.

  Siobhan was a kind of genius. She had that quality we agree to call charisma, but what is it? She flew over from Dublin, to be ballast during the auditions. It was a cold day, and the theatre was freezing. She was a bit drunk. She had a cold. She was inside layers of clothes. So as not to upstage the aspirant actors, she sat to one side of the stage with her back to us sitting in the auditorium: she was a generous actress and a kind woman. And yet we couldn’t take our eyes off her, off that lump of a back with her dark-red hair tousled over it. She was someone you had to look at; it was an effort to take one’s eyes off her to watch the actors auditioning.

  She was a fine actress but an undisciplined one, because somewhere early in her career she had been described as a wild Irish child, and so she lived up to it, all Irish impulse and whimsy, and she drank far too much. It was a tragedy that she had not learned discipline. On one evening she could be magnificent, unforgettable—and it was easy to see why Oscar wanted her—but on the next she was pathetic, forgetting her lines and moves, and evidently drunk.

  We had a great supporting cast. Maureen Prior was sent the play and loved it so much she staggered from her sickbed, where she was ill, and came out in a bitter wind to the cold theatre to audition. ‘I have to do this part,’ she said, ‘if I die for it.’ She was perfect. Godfrey Quigley was good. They all were. The play was put on at the Comedy Theatre, and it ran for two months, but just under its break-even point. Harold Hobson, the most influential critic then, liked it, calling it ‘the most troublingly poetic play in London’. T. C. Worsley said it ‘ought to be seen by anyone interested in the contemporary theatre and indeed in contemporary living’. Milton Shulman said it was sensitive, sympathetic, and touching. Robert Muller said it was ‘written with lacerating passion and truth’. But these remarks were culled from on the whole indifferent reviews—apart from Harold Hobson. Graham Greene liked it very much and generously wrote to tell me so. But he was not a critic.

  The fact that it was so brilliantly directed was hardly noticed. Still, I am not the only person who thinks that when Ted Kotcheff left us for Hollywood, the theatre lost the best director working then.

  What do I think about this play now? It is a good play but not a great one. It has a good shape and structure but needs the right director. It was of its time—why? That remark about ‘lacerating passion’ hints why. Lacerating passion is most unfashionable. The play for the times was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the sex war red in tooth and claw. Play with a Tiger has been put on here and there in various countries ever since, but mostly by feminist theatres, where it becomes an indictment of men, losing its balance and its humour. For it can, if done right, get not a few laughs.