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

by Doris Lessing

  And that is why I believe people so easily became communists and why they stuck with it. Communism was being born in storms of blood and fire and bullets and explosions, and illuminated by the star shells of Hope.

  ‘Knowing the score’ meant being an initiate into the truth, knowing how things really work. And what could truth be but that unspeakable suffering is the price exacted by ‘life itself’ in its tortuous progress upwards—always upwards, it goes without saying. Life itself—the facts, reality, actual events, which are bound to be full of the nasty reality that disperses bullshit and the illusions that feed the innocent. The stupid.

  A later generation used ‘where it’s at’. The truth, hard facts, the real experience—which, in the absence of war or revolution, was soon to be found in drugs, hallucinogens, illusion.

  When people accepted the real situation in the Soviet Union, something deeply out of sight was confirmed, a knowledge of horror, of betrayal. A high price has to be paid: and with that knowledge goes a dark and greedy need for pain. The root of communism—a love of revolution—is, I believe, masochism, pleasure in pain, satisfaction in suffering, identification with the redeeming blood. The Cross, in fact. To leave ‘the Party’ was to give up the greater truth, give up being an initiate into understanding the real processes of life.

  And here I think is an analogy with the reluctance of people who are in love to give up their ridiculous hopes. If you step out of that country of dreams, you are giving up the real experience, the knowledge of good and evil, you are tearing up your ticket to ride, you are relinquishing fructifying pain.

  But far within him something cried

  For the great tragedy to start.

  The pang in lingering mercy fall

  And sorrow break upon his heart.

  That was the poet Edwin Muir, who, like so many others of his time, was a Red of some sort, and I put that quotation before one of the sections of Martha Quest, which is the first of the ‘Children of Violence’ sequence of novels. And right at the beginning of A Ripple from the Storm, the third, comes this quotation:

  There is no passion for the absolute without the accompanying frenzy of the absolute. It is always accompanied by a certain exaltation, by which it may be first recognised and which is always working on the growing point, the focal point of destruction, at the risk of making it appear, to such as have not been warned, that the passion for the absolute is the same as a passion for unhappiness.

  That is by Louis Aragon, a French communist, who remained unrepentantly one and was that common mix, talking nonsense about communism and the Soviet Union, while the ferment of faith brought out in him original ideas on other subjects.

  Now I look at those quotations and marvel at my younger self—and shudder, for I cannot yet laugh at it. To choose the Edwin Muir quotation meant that I did see I wanted sorrow to break upon my heart—but surely I should have been more disquieted than I was? And I did not see at all that to make the growing point an equivalent of the focal point of destruction was a pretty sick state of mind. I literally did not see it. Of course, if you are communist—and for many people not communist too—a growing point had to be a destruction, because you don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and a revolution is—it goes without saying—a necessary preliminary to paradise.

  The trouble is, you may see something clearly enough to use revelatory quotes to highlight parts of a story, but not clearly enough to be frightened at what you see. You can’t see something in depth until you have lived your way into seeing it in depth.

  This set of mind, this predisposition towards suffering, the unconscious belief that to understand life—or to know the score—means immersion in painful experience, shows itself in other areas than the political. It took much too long to see what I did about people becoming communists, but soon after came the thought, Wait a minute: take another look at what you’ve written—and then at what others write—for often enough a novel or story chronicles a willed descent into extreme experience. Take, for instance, my novel The Summer Before the Dark. In it, the protagonist, Kate Brown, a middle-aged woman, is shown at a point of crisis, children flown, indifferent husband, life needing a new direction or at least understanding—and she allows herself a fall away from her own high standards into a sluttish and premature (and temporary) old age, permits herself a kind of breakdown…though is this word, which we use so easily, really an appropriate one when Kate is so capably following her own inner line of growth, even if apparently in outward disarray? In allowing the forms of social life to disintegrate, Kate approaches self-understanding. Fair enough: a novel, to be interesting, has to have some sort of focus, and most novels report a concentration of experience of some kind. Around about the time that novel was written, in 1971 and 72 there lingered from the sixties the belief that to go mad is to receive the ultimate in revelation. Well, I have never believed that, though I might have added to it with The Golden Notebook, whose structure, at least, says that an over-aridity can be cured by ‘breakdown’. As I had been observing so comprehensively during that period when communism cracked from top to bottom. It was the most rigid and dogmatic people who ‘broke down’ and were amazingly improved by the experience, emerging into the light of common day where live ordinary mortals like you and me. And Kate’s self-immolation was analogous to a real experience of mine, not a literary one, when I deliberately drove myself crazy by not eating and not sleeping, out of curiosity. I did learn quite a bit, though I would not recommend it, for it is a dangerous little experiment. Its relevance here is that it was a willed submission to an extreme. I have not had the same experience I gave Kate Brown, but this raises an interesting question, for it feels as if I did. Again and again I have written about people mad, half mad, and in breakdown. I have never personally been mad or broken down, but I feel as if I have. The reason for my not having been personally mad or in breakdown is, I think—partly—that any inclination towards it has been staved off by writing about it. And, partly, because my life has always had in it people very ill—like my father; people who have had appalling childhoods; people in breakdown; or people who are—as we say—inadequate. But I do not believe that ultimate truths come from being crazy. I’ve seen too much of craziness. Schizophrenics have flashes of truth which in less knowledgeable times were described as divine inspiration, and they are certainly startling insights. The last-ditch depressives have to suffer a vision of life so bleak, so ugly, so terrible, that no wonder they sometimes kill themselves. Yet there are those among them who say that this vision is the real one, and we who do not share it are merely ignorant or frivolous. Just like the men who returned from the trenches, initiated into the extremes of suffering, to find civilians who understood nothing of what they had gone through.

  It is not the flat grey plains of ‘pessimism’ or the equable perspectives of mild depression—for most writers work best in a low, cool, gently depressed condition—that are relevant to my thesis here. Lynda Coldstream, in The Four-Gated City, mad all her life—schizophrenic; Professor Watkins, in A Briefing for a Descent into Hell, who loses his memory for a while, has the opportunity to know himself better, but refuses it; The Fifth Child; The Good Terrorist, with its load of destructive people—these are what interest me here.

  Into this gallery goes Kate Rawlings (another Kate), who is successfully married, with four children, a wonderful husband, and a comfortable life, but the substance of her belief in life leaks away and she ends up turning on the gas in a rented room in Paddington. ‘To Room Nineteen’ is a quite terrible story, not least because I don’t understand it, or rather the region of myself it comes from. And quite recently I have written about a man, Stephen, in Love, Again, who feels as if life is slipping away between his fingers. When this kind of theme emerges again and again, one has to acknowledge—I have to acknowledge—that just under the surface there lies in wait for me, if I am not careful, something like those ant lions, the tiny insects that lie just hidden in the bottom of a little
pit in the sand, waiting to drag a struggling ant into quicksand. Do I believe this will happen to me? No, because I write myself out of those potentials for disaster.

  There is a pattern in my mind, there must be, where order breaks into disorder and extremity. It came from World War I and my parents’ destruction by it. This pattern has to be in other people’s minds, must be, for we are not sufficient to ourselves.

  Long after the time I am writing about, the fifties, I had this experience: Sometimes it is useful to visualise a tale, a story, an incident, one that speaks to you. In this particular story, an old man, a woodcutter, has to walk away from his house, in the very early morning, following a Voice, which is calling to him. I had visualised the mountain, its wooded slopes and, low on these slopes, the little hut of the woodcutter. I could see the moonlight on the trees and on the ground, which was already fading because morning was nearly here. The old man walked across the rough ground into the trees, but then…he could not go on, because there was a chasm across his path. I flung a bridge across this chasm, and the old man walked over on it, but before he reached the other side the earth was sliding away, so I extended the bridge, and he scrambled to safety and was on the rounded slope of a foothill, which he knew every foot of, since he had lived here all his life, but now as he walked it crumbled away under him. To get that old man from the back door of his house to where he finally sat down, exhausted, a couple of miles away, waiting for the Voice, needed a patient construction and reconstruction of the whole route, making bridges and culverts, and all the time the earth was giving way in landslips and subsidence.

  This must be a pattern in the stuff of my mind, for what else can it be? Sometimes a little thing—it could seem like a little thing—like an inability to perform the simple task of making an old man walk an imaginary path across the foothills of a mountain, can tell you so much about your ways of seeing life that your whole past is put in question.

  If it were just one person, me, one small individual set for tears, then who could care?

  For some months before I left Warwick Road, an old woman came to clean and tidy up and, most of all, put me in my place, for she was part of the aristocracy of Britain. She was Miss Ball, over seventy and still working, because she had worked all her life and did not approve of idleness. When she first came, to find out if I would suit her, I asked her to sit down. ‘Thank you, but I know how things should be done,’ said she, standing in the middle of the kitchen with its sky-blue floor, red wallpaper, white wood and ceiling, and on the table the blue-ringed white mugs that everyone had then. Miss Ball was tall, she was gaunt, she had big red bony hands, and she wore a grey Utility coat, a stained felt hat with a grey net cage around it, and on her feet once-elegant grey suede shoes, with a big hole in both to accommodate bunions. She said she had come from the West Country, aged seventeen, to work in a house in London. A good house, she said, examining my kitchen with contempt. She had worked for a duke in her time. She had worked in houses that had thirty staff. Once, she would not have looked at the work she had to do now. She told me this with a gentle good-servant’s smile and coldly, malevolently observing eyes. How much she did hate me, how much she did hate all her employers now.

  She came in two mornings a week, and I gave her top wages for the work, badly paid then as now, and she took the coins carefully and put them into a leather purse once solid black but now limp and silvery with age.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ she would greet me, smiling her poisonous smile, but the moment I was in a different room, or had even turned away, she began on a muttered litany: ‘Filthy pigs, and I have to clean up after them, pigs too good for them, pigs don’t leave dirty plates in the sink, slave, slave, slave all my life for pigs, I never thought when I was a girl…’ And so forth. This low muttering went on all the time she swept and wiped and washed, but if I happened to go into a room where she was, up would come her head, and ‘Oh, there you are, dear.’ Miss Ball had acquired a genteel voice and vowels from her years in good service. And it was in this voice that the angry mutter continued. ‘On their backs with their legs in the air, these fine ladies, I don’t think, as bad as each other, every one of them, duchess and parlourmaid, cook and skivvy.’ She had worked mostly in the kitchens, but she had also taken hot water in the mornings into cold bedrooms, made up the fires, tidied rooms before the families came down to breakfast. But the kitchen was best, she said, for she liked a bit of life. Good times, she said there were, down in the kitchens, and the best was the meals, with all the staff around a long table, with the cook and the butler at the top. Such good times, such good food and plenty of it, everyone knew their place then, not like now, all kinds of upstarts thinking themselves as good as their betters.

  How, I asked Miss Ball, had she acquired that foot of hers? For she limped about, holding on to the back of a chair, or a table if she thought I was watching. She owed that foot to the death of King Edward Seventh, she said. She was cleaning out the grate in the kitchen, and the cook was scraping the vegetables, and the parlourmaid came running down the stairs, in a real state she was, all ready to burst with tears, and she screamed, ‘Cookie, Cookie, the old cock’s dead,’ and Miss Ball was so shocked she dropped the grate on her foot and broke it.

  And why had Miss Ball never married? I dared to ask at last. Men were filthy, she said, they’re only good for one thing, if that’s what you’re interested in, but she had learned what’s what at a dance in Tiverton, when she was sixteen. She had new shoes her cousin Betty lent her, they were white calf shoes and you had to clean them with milk. There was this young man who wouldn’t let her alone, and he took her outside into the dark—a lovely evening it was—and he pulled her about and messed her up and then he ruined her shoes. And how did he do that? ‘Can’t you guess? Filthy pigs…The mess, all over my shoes…I had to pay for them, and it took me a year of saving my pocket money, and that was it, I didn’t want anything to do with any man after that.’

  Miss Ball’s employers would ring each other up, at moments when we were brought low by that obscene muttering, and ask each other if we were doomed for ever to listen to it, but how could we possibly dismiss her; no, only her death would release us…but then I moved.

  THE ZEITGEIST: HOW WE WERE THINKING

  Women can’t be comics; there never has been a female comic. The reason is that they have no sense of humour.

  The capitalist press is always against the Labour Party and never reports any Labour Party rally, march, or issue fairly.

  Full employment is taken for granted, and Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano (published in Britain, 1953), where work is so scarce it is given as a reward to favoured or particularly good workers, seems merely eccentric.

  There is a great deal of agitation for and against repealing the law that makes homosexuality a crime.

  Colin Wilson is being portrayed by the press as some kind of latter-day Byron, moody and dangerous, an enemy of law and order. He has just announced that Shakespeare had no talent. One evening he appears in the Arts Club holding aloft a skull in one hand. He stands in the doorway with a charming, shy, and engaging smile, waiting for us to laugh.

  An astonishing number of upper-class fathers are rushing about the country waving whips and bellowing that they are going to thrash young men who have slept with their daughters—just like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

  You cannot pick up a newspaper without reading about an Angry Young Man.

  To acquire a mortgage and start owning property was a capitulation to capitalism and meant you were in serious danger of losing your soul.

  A strong anti-American feeling: the United States was the world’s chief enemy, a fascist imperialist power, much worse than the Soviet Union. All Americans were rich. Clancy and other Americans used to insist that there was the most terrible poverty in the States, and I watched them being patronised and even laughed at by their British hosts: of course these communists had to say something like this.

  Everything Brit
ish was still best. Except for the food and coffee, for this excellence was permitted to other countries.

  Sociology, that study of humankind by itself, not yet two decades old, if Mass Observation is taken as its start, is dismissed by—mostly—the Left, as ‘discredited’.

  Why don’t we have a national theatre, like every other country in Europe? Why does our government consistently disparage and underfund the arts?

  Vivien Leigh was acting Blanche Dubois in Streetcar Named Desire. It was the first time the play had been done in Britain, and we were not used to rawly emotional American plays. A very big theatre—too large. It was half full. A matinee. There were some gangs of louts there because they had heard this was a dirty play. They were throwing rubbish on to the stage and shouting insults at Vivien and commenting loudly. There was so much noise in the audience it was hard to hear the play. Vivien Leigh’s marriage with Laurence Olivier had just broken up, and she was ill, and her performance had a dimension of verisimilitude most painful for her sympathisers, but she was an unforgettable Blanche. I suppose this was like theatre-going in more unruly days here, when the audience jeered disapproval, and threw things at the actors.

  In Tiananmen Square a million people are listening to Mao Tse-tung. Ted Allan is there. Mao says the United States is planning to drop nuclear bombs on China to destroy the glorious new Communist Dawn, but ‘we have plenty of people in China,’ and even if America kills one-half the population and lays waste half of China, it doesn’t matter: Communist China will fight back with the other half. Tumultuous applause, lasting for many minutes.