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

by Doris Lessing

  I was hurt by its reception. I thought it deserved better. There was a sour and disagreeable note in the comment that I was to get full blast when The Golden Notebook came out. I believed it was due to anti-female bias, which can take many forms and may be far from straightforward. People known to me or not kept coming up and saying, But you put your own life into the play. Just as if John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger were not direct from life, and as if Arnold Wesker’s plays were not from life. No one had said to John or Arnold anything like the unpleasant things that were said to me. And I was probably oversensitive, for many more than were critical liked the play and wrote to say so. People still say now that they remember the play and how they liked it.

  But there was no doubt that on the whole the play was a failure, and I was beginning to have thoughts about my career as a playwright that can only be described as unscientific.

  At the Salisbury Playhouse, The Truth About Billy Newton filled the seats but did not transfer; to London and it had suffered improbable setbacks and fatalities. Then look what happened to Each His Own Wilderness. Then Play with a Tiger. To wait four years for an actress who was only intermittently satisfactory, and to be landed with the wrong leading man, and then all the fever and fret and the wounded pride—was it worth it? Later I wrote two more plays. One of them I read recently and thought—as I did then—that it would have done well at the Court, being a farce about the clash of the classes, but they turned it down. Joan Littlewood liked it, or said she did and came to lunch to say so, but Raffles, her manager, didn’t agree. Then I wrote a modern version of the Medea, which for a couple of years kept getting itself cast on the highest level, but every time a star was secured, something terrible happened, until finally one of them died just as the contracts were being signed. By then I had decided that I was unlucky in the theatre, and I should see this and simply give up. But the end was when the National Theatre asked me to do a version of Ostrovsky’s The Storm. I was asked because I was a woman and the play was seen by John Dexter as about the sufferings of womanhood. I should have said no, but my vanity was involved. A hundred plays would have interested me more than The Storm. It was played wonderfully by Jill Bennett and Anthony Hopkins, all grand passion and suffering, but in fact the play is about teenagers, as young as twelve and thirteen, being married off by cruel and greedy parents to secure their money and their estates. It is about the insufferable ignorance and stupidity of provincial Russia then. The understudies’ production got the play right, heartbreaking it was, poor children enjoying a little flare of life before the lid slammed down on them. But no one saw this production.

  I could go on about what was wrong with John Dexter’s production—yet he was usually brilliant—and at the time I did go on about it, and just before the first night I was for an evening with Laurence Olivier and said what I thought about it all, much too forcibly, for I was drunk with despair. He was kind. I remember him all vitality, energy, sympathy—above all the vital energy (the same quality possessed by Charlie Chaplin, whom I met for ten minutes on a pavement with Miles Malleson in Leicester Square: he has left behind in my mind for ever an impression of quick forceful movements, quick intelligent dark eyes, humour, charm).

  And that was when I sat myself down to do some serious thinking. Not one of my attempts at the theatre had gone as I wanted. I had put so much time and effort into plays. At least, when I wrote a novel, it was printed as I wanted it. The anguish, the tension, the sleepless nights, so many disproportionate emotions: and what for? I did not again write for the theatre but did for television, successfully and without disasters or misfortunes.

  And so my passion for the theatre, my ambition to write for it, has been sublimated into the great pleasure of theatre-going, in that cornucopia of great theatre, London, and if sometimes I think, Oh, if only…, then I do not allow the moment of weakness to last.

  My experiences in the theatre and later in opera went into Love, Again, my novel that describes a theatre group at work.

  And now an encounter with the ex-comrades, which did not differ at all from confrontations with the comrades. Clancy Sigal had gone to a mining village, in the same spirit as I had five years before, but he, being a man, was at once part of the hard-drinking, pub and club culture of miners at leisure. He became friends with a young miner, Len Doherty, and spent a couple of weekends there. He wrote Weekend in Dinlock in three days, over my head, in Warwick Road, while I listened to his chattering typewriter. It is a brilliant little book. I have known no one in my life with Clancy’s capacity for minute acute social observation. And then it was published and at once exploded that farcical shameful reaction that, alas, people on the left have seen a thousand times. Those people who you would think must welcome this book were those who did most to harm it.

  Why is that? This book is no place for a little essay on literary criticism and its history on the left, but these push-button enmities have a long history, going back at least to the methods of the Inquisition, later adapted to the uses of communism. Every new writer, every new book, must if successful somehow survive the arrows of envy, but communism gave envy and jealousy a robe of respectability to wear over the nasty truth. Under names such as ‘socialist realism’, communist attitudes towards art and literature have been and in some places still are art and literature’s deadly enemy. Again and again and in country after country, we have seen ‘socialist realism’ surfacing to rubbish respected writers, and this long after it was hated and despised by every working artist and writer in socialist realism’s mother country as well as by readers. What happened in the countries of Scandinavia in the seventies is instructive: ‘socialist realism’ was used to discredit the well-known writers. And now, in country after country of the Third World, these primitive emotions are used against the successful.

  Clancy’s little book was greeted with a storm of accusations. One was that he had taken advantage of the good nature of the miners of the village in question. But he had shown the book to Len Doherty, who had cleared it for publication.

  Then The New Reasoner asked Len Doherty to review it.

  There followed an exchange of very heated letters between me and The New Reasoner, me and Edward Thompson. I certainly had a nasty little talent for invective. But then we all had, having learned in a nasty school. I shall quote only two little bits, relevant to my chief points:

  ‘I’m sick to death of socialists knifing each other in the back,’ I exclaim.

  ‘…a resurrection of that destructiveness familiar to all of us who have been in the C.P.—if by any chance the left does produce some real creative talent then the first impulse is to squash it.’

  I omit the really bad bits, but I told Edward he was a shit. He was equally uncomplimentary. This frank, brotherly-sisterly rough-and-tumble was very much the style of the comrades then. We remained good friends, when the storm, or stormlet, had blown over.

  Weekend in Dinlock is still arousing irrational hostility among exactly those people you’d think would value it. ‘Written by an American,’ you hear. ‘What does he know about our working class?’ ‘Written after a short visit.’ ‘He made use of the miners.’ And so it all goes on, year in, year out, decade in and decade out. Once, I thought of making a list of the good and original work which has had to survive the onslaughts of the comrades, for it might be instructive. But then I thought this would be a major effort, take up a lot of time, and not change things, because the people who feel the need to attack new and good work do not know what their real motives are. Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.*

  Clancy returned to ‘Dinlock’ several times and befriended Len Doherty, who was going through difficulties. A young man, in his twenties, with a wife and, I think, three small children, but the marriage was in trouble. Clancy brought him up to London, and he stayed in my flat, and Clancy and Alex took him around their London, which of course included the New Left and its precincts, and to Soho and similar enlightenments. Len came again and brought
a friend, a miner, and came again and brought two or three friends. I thought their attitude to Len was paternal, they were concerned for him. He was a dark, much too thin, tense young man, who had found himself in the limelight. He emanated that moral exhaustion, like stale air, which is often a sign of physical illness. I remember an evening when he was in bed upstairs, for he had not been able to get up that day, having drunk himself silly the night before, and he was running a fever, and I and one of the miners were trying to keep him calm, for he was tossing his limbs about and throwing his head from side to side. ‘It’s too late,’ he kept croaking, ‘it’s too late.’

  He became a journalist on a local paper but later died, too young.

  This little tale does illustrate the dilemmas of journalism, of ‘the media’—what happens when a community has been made self-conscious, has been forced to look at itself through others’ eyes. I do not think Len’s fate would have been much different without Weekend in Dinlock, though perhaps he was made unhappier by being shown what must have seemed to him the glamours of literary London—for he had aspirations to write.

  I took Clancy up to Carradale. Naomi asked me to: ‘I hear you have a fascinating American.’ The coach journey to Scotland remains as one of my nastiest memories. Clancy was ill then, a bit crazy. I felt sick, from the coach, but what he must have felt…He was pale, sweaty, sat with closed eyes, teeth clenched. I have known now not a few people who cope with periodic attacks of disequilibrium, and they are the bravest souls in the world.

  I had told Naomi that Clancy should be inside the house, for he did not do well where he felt isolated, but she put him into a room right away from the house in an annexe. Interesting, too, that we were so thoroughly put apart. The whole clan hated him on sight, and he them. There was something about him, this maverick, this outsider, this deadly observer, that they could not stand. For the three days of our stay he sat quietly watching from the edges of rooms, while they patronised him or were rude. Oh, I do loathe groups, clans, families, the human ‘we’. How I do dread them, fear them—try to keep well away. Prides of lions or packs of wild dogs are kindly enemies in comparison. Back we went to London on another coach, the cold rain streaming down the windows, and Clancy went straight upstairs to his typewriter, where he stayed for a day and then came down with some fifty or so sheets, which he handed to me. He sat at the kitchen table, watching my face as I read. I have never read anything in my life as clever, as acute, as minutely seen—or so terrible. For his hate had written that piece, and it was pure poison. Compare it with his writing on the miners’ village: that was written from love and respect, but this, from loathing. For Clancy the word ‘middle class’ was already enough of a goad, but there was something about the Mitchisons…it was their safety, their security, their smugness because of their invulnerability—so this outsider was bound to see them—the way the clan was so tightly woven into society, that this outsider could not bear. I certainly learned a lesson from that. It is that nothing in the world is easier than malice. No, there was nothing easy about the brilliance of that observation, but one may switch oneself into the mode Hatred in the space of a thought. I don’t know why we admire malice so much. It is often called ‘wit’. One time when this flourished was the twenties—probably an emanation from that famous table at the Algonquin—and the influence percolated down through the decades, until some ancient lady erupts into cackling laughter and says, ‘She’s got a face like a potato’…and directs confident glances around to make sure this shaft is earning the admiration it deserves. ‘He looks like a constipated frog’—oh, wot wit, as we used to say at school.

  It’s 1957, 1958…I am deep in The Golden Notebook, and groaning secretly that every time the telephone rings there is something like this: ‘Have you heard about poor Bob? He’s taking it hard.’ ‘Mary’s left the Party. She’s training as a social worker.’

  Are these ancient political passions of interest now? What I do think is important is the learning from them. We are still left with that (now) incredible and unforgivable fact that some of the most socially concerned, hopeful-for-the-future, dedicated souls connived at the crimes in the communist world, by refusing to recognise them and, then, by refusing to acknowledge them openly. Not ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, but many thousands, millions, all over the world. And this attitude—reluctance to criticise the Soviet Union, the great alma mater—goes on now and is shown by the way Hitler is put in the position of chief criminal of our times, whereas Stalin, a thousand times worse—and Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar—is still handled gently in the imaginations of people on the left.

  What is interesting, surely, is why. After all, this situation, a similar one, is bound to roll around again, in a different context, a different history. Everything does. And the next time, will we (humankind) recognise it and do better?

  Like everybody in my generation, the one when ‘everyone’ was a communist, I have brooded, thought, wondered, allowed the pander memory to pretty things up, but have been left for years, for decades, with an unanswered question. Evidently it was a variety of mass lunacy, mass psychosis. Late, very late—quite recently, in fact—I began to see what I believe might be the reason for it all. Might be—that is all I claim.

  Again, back we go to World War I, which is where the mass horrors of our time were brewed.

  It is interesting to watch people with a vested interest in the national reputation soften and justify that terrible war. ‘But we only lost…’ so-and-so many hundreds of thousands of men ‘in the trenches’. We—Britain. But this was a European war, and it was not only British soldiers who were left with a hatred and contempt for their government, or, if these words are too strong, at least disquiet, sorrow, and at any rate a loss of faith in the men who ruled them, because of their incompetence. My parents were not the only victims of World War I in the district of Banket, Southern Rhodesia. The woman we called Lady Murray because of her sad dignity had lost four sons and a husband to the trenches. Captain Livingstone, like my father, had only one leg. McAuley from the Ayreshire Mine had been badly wounded. There were others. All were lovers of the British Empire and their country, and all full of sorrow and anger because of the conduct of the war by Haig and by the British government. A German small mine worker with whom my father often reminisced had the same feelings about the German trenches and his government. The slaughter in the trenches destroyed something vital in Europe—respect for government. And from that stemmed communism, fascism, national socialism, and later terrorism, anarchy, and that attitude of mind which is now prevalent everywhere, the deadly ‘Well, what can you expect?’ Nihilism, cynicism, disbelief—for one’s own side—and meanwhile all idealism, love, hope, dreams for a good world, put elsewhere, into Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and, later, those other criminals, Mao, Pol Pot…there seems no end to them.

  But there is a deeper emotion here, which I think is the point. The children of the soldiers of the First World War were brought up not only on bitter disillusion, and loss of respect for their own governments, but a feeling of being participants in an understanding denied to an unheeding, ignorant majority. It is the feeling expressed in that World War I song which my father remembered all his life:

  And when they ask us,

  We’re going to tell them,

  And they’re certainly going to ask us…

  Tell them—that is, the civilians—the truth about what was going on in the trenches. For in Britain, in Germany, in France, and the other combatant countries, the war cabinets whipped up the crudest national feelings—how glorious to die for your country—and suppressed the truth about the horrors of the trenches. So the soldiers felt misunderstood and unappreciated by their own people. The novels that came out of World War I testify to this bitterness the soldiers felt. All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque, German, was perhaps the bitterest and the best. There was a Bairnsfather cartoon. A romantic girl in
her nightdress, her hair down, loons out of her window at the full moon. ‘That same dear old moon is looking down on him.’ But the soldier she dreams of is, with a mate, standing up to his waist in water in a shell hole in No-man’s-land, cursing the moon, which makes them visible to the enemy. A little encapsulation.

  Them: the stupid majority; we: the initiates into the truth—and the truth is hard, painful, bloody, and the reality is pain and suffering, and the best people know this truth, and the worst are complacent idiots who refuse to acknowledge reality.

  Truth was the preserve of a knowledgeable and experienced minority. Initiates.

  Identification with pain, with suffering. This easily translated into ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ When I was on that trip to the Soviet Union, very strong was that emotion: Here is where the engine of events is, the painful heart of the truth.

  I think it is likely that when young people became communists in the late thirties, flinging themselves into the war in Spain, it was because a pattern was being repeated. They were joining soldiers who were being betrayed. For the democratic governments, France and Britain, refused to come to the aid of the beleaguered Spanish democratic government, allowing Hitler and Mussolini to do as they liked in Spain, so that the fascist Franco won, and Hitler and Stalin were encouraged. The International Brigade were repeating their fathers’ experience. And then the Second World War, where the Soviet Union took the brunt of the fighting. The Soviet Union lost eight million in the war. (Not twenty million—that figure is swollen to include Stalin’s murders of his own people, cooking the books.)* Swathes, multitudes of mowed-down people, and to identify with the Soviet Union meant to be part of the by then well-established emotion that in suffering is to be found the truth. Which after all was only a continuation of the religious love of suffering, a pattern in the European mind long before World War I.