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

by Doris Lessing

  For a while I was with theatre people a good deal, and not only because of having a play on. A wildly idealistic plan was being hatched, to take the starch, as we saw it, out of the London theatre. There were bright—very bright—spots: the Royal Court, Bernard Miles at the Mermaid Theatre in the city, the Arts Theatre, Oscar Lowenstein. But most theatres were being run by very conventional commercial managements. The scene was different from today’s, with so many small innovative and adventurous theatres, plays being put on in pubs, and above all the National Theatre and the South Bank. Now we take it for granted that a theatre can be a social centre, with all kinds of activities going on—lectures, study groups, seminars, music, restaurants, bookshops. But there was nothing like that then.

  The idea was to get hold of a warehouse in Covent Garden and create a structure which would accommodate every kind of experimental theatre, new playwrights, workshops, and plays from other countries. For then few foreign plays reached Britain.

  Who were we, these hopeful dreamers? The idea was Gareth Wigan’s. He was then an agent (he is now helping to run Warner Brothers in Hollywood), and it was in his Belgravia house that we met. Ted Kotcheff, Ted Allan, Sean Connery, Mordecai Richler, Shelagh Delaney, the theatre designer Sean Kenny, who died too young, Clive Exton. Over a period of some weeks in 1960 we met a dozen or so times, and our plans became as solid as an architect’s blueprint. There was a lot of experience in that room, of theatre, film, television, radio. We had no doubt we could raise money. Conversations with monied people showed how much support there would be. I still think that money would have been the least of our problems. As for us, we would all work for nothing, or for nominal pay, for we intended to be a living reproach to commercial theatre. We found a warehouse. It was in poor condition, but that did not matter, for it would be easier to adapt for our purposes. We called a meeting in the warehouse one Sunday morning. Word of mouth and a small advertisement attracted a couple of hundred people—actors, playwrights, designers, directors. Many of them were in work; it was not just a question of people who were feeling rejected. The atmosphere was as encouraging as we had hoped. It was a political atmosphere in that the enemy was the West End theatre managements, despised thoroughly and instinctively by us, like Joan Littlewood anathematising them as rotten, if not evil. This was partly the set of mind which took it for granted that anything commercially successful had to be bad, and is still with us: I think it is a displacement of the aristocratic contempt for trade, come to rest improbably as a part of left-wing thinking. Partly it was a hangover from communism. Most of the people in the arts then had been communists of some kind, and this new theatre was being seen as a stand not only against the West End but against all tyranny in the theatre, the Communist Party Line in particular. It is now forgotten that many, perhaps most, of the actors of that time had worked in Unity Theatre—the communist theatre—at some time or other, and everyone had seen a theatre famous for its lively iconoclasm destroyed by the heavy hand of King Street. And then the theatre union, Equity, was run by communists, using all the tricks of the trade, and most actors thoroughly disliked them. That morning in Covent Garden there was much excitement, optimism, agreement: everything was in place, we were set to go. At the meeting after that Sunday we all knew we had reached the point of having to decide who was to run it. None of us wanted to; we had our work to do. We would contribute in every way we could, but we could not run it. So whom would we ask? No one seemed exactly right. If this were happening now it would be easy, for there are many lively, flexible people of the kind we needed, in a wonderfully gifted generation.

  Well, then, all right, who? A good many readers will recognise this situation. It is the same as when writers decide they can do better than publishers, get together to make a publishing house, may actually set one up—and then go back to their real work, writing, having hired someone to do the job. But in what way is this new creation different from any publishing house? I’ve seen this more than once, and it doesn’t work. At the heart of such an enterprise must be, not a hireling, but that passionate, inspired, dedicated lunatic who knows how to move mountains.

  So there we were, with our grandiose and romantic schemes in place, being besieged by letters and telephone calls from people wanting to be part of it all, but there was a vacuum at the heart of the thing.

  And now enter Arnold Wesker. I ran into him somewhere, said I was involved with a scheme that might interest him—he was himself engaged in similar enterprises, all of them in the early stages. He came in late to a meeting when we were all mellow and relaxed, full of confidence, because our scheme had gone so well, with everything organised but the one essential. Arnold sat unsmiling and then announced, ‘There is only one person who can run this thing, and I am the person.’ Ted Allan joked that Stalin had spoken. And that was the end—the end, that is, of the scheme as we envisaged it. Off went Arnold to start Centre 42, expecting opposition from us. But every one of us had had more than enough of confrontational politics, and we simply left Arnold to get on with it. What we felt was something like, ‘Oh well, he’ll grow out of it.’ I am sure we did not see how absurd this parental stance was when we had so recently grown out of it ourselves. It is only fair to record that he saw us all as a lot of clapped-out old Marxists.

  So that was how Centre 42 really started. Like Joan Littlewood before him, Arnold found the working class less than enthusiastic about his efforts. But always, when this point is reached in a debate which after all recurs, and recurs, I remember the miners in Armsthorpe, with tears in their eyes, talking about Sybil Thorndike and others going to the mining village to play Shakespeare for them. And only a couple of years later I was to see a couple of idealistic young teachers giving some working-class fifteen-year-olds a holiday before they began work and their adult lives, and this consisted not only of all kinds of trips into the Oxford countryside but of three visits to the theatre at Stratford. And these children, whose parents had never been near a theatre, loved the theatre, loved Shakespeare. Probably the organised trade-union movement was the wrong mechanism to use: the name Centre 42 derived from a resolution passed at the 1960 TUC that there should be an enquiry into the state of the arts.

  And now, as I look back, what seems so extraordinary is how important we thought it all was, our plans for creating a ‘new’ style of theatre, which in the end evolved quite happily without us.

  There is a sad joke. The Round House,* where Arnold centred his efforts but then had to give up, became rather what our original scheme had hoped for. A great many people were involved with it, and there were workshops and lectures and a bookshop and restaurants, and many productions from other countries. The Round House was a most agreeable place to spend an evening. It would be flourishing to this day, but the dead hand of ideology struck again. The Camden Town Council decided this was the place for a black artistic centre. Why, when the black communities were mostly in another part of London, were nowhere near the Round House? But one cannot argue with ideologies. They never got their black centre going, but they had destroyed what there was, and the Round House stood empty, for years, and is still empty. Sometimes when I drive past I wonder what those brave left-wing councillors feel about what they did: probably a small secret feeling of satisfaction, for I am sure that in their hearts is a fear of art. They probably hated the anarchic lively flourishing youthful atmosphere of the Round House.

  The Committee of a Hundred organised a big ‘demo’ in Trafalgar Square for Sunday, 18 September 1960. At once the police banned it. This was not an intelligent thing to do. For one thing, it was to behave exactly as their worst enemies said they did. For another, Trafalgar Square had seen big popular demonstrations for a century or more, and to ban one was deliberately to insult all that history. Then there was the practical aspect. So many streets run into Trafalgar Square that to keep people out must need hundreds of police. And there was one little thing that the police overlooked: the National Gallery is in Trafalgar Square, but probably
this wasn’t on their mental map of the place.

  I am told by those people who know the top levels of the police that they are the most intelligent, charming, admirable people in the world, but most of us meet the police on somewhat lower levels, and my experience has been that on the whole they aren’t very bright. I am white, middle class, and after about ten years in London became middle-aged, and so am not the kind of person to attract the famous police brutality, though I have friends of various colours, ages, and kinds who have. But I have a whole repertoire of incidents involving the police where they figure not as callous but as inept.

  There is one small happening that is as revealing as any. I was witness to a traffic accident; a policeman came to interview me and remarked that he was leaving the force, not long after joining, because he didn’t like what he had to do. ‘For instance?’

  ‘Having to tell so many lies,’ said he.

  But the police have been reformed more than once since then.

  ‘How could the police possibly be so stupid?’ enjoyably scandalised voices resounded up and down the ranks during the week or so before the confrontation. For a confrontation everybody knew it was going to be. A lot of people looked forward to it. A clash. A fight. So many people enjoy this kind of thing.

  Before that Sunday I had two visits. One was from Shelagh Delaney, who said she hated demos and riots and even large numbers of people massed together, but she supposed we had to do it? My sentiments, exactly. The other was from Vanessa Redgrave, in a high fever of excitement, like a beautiful young Joan of Arc, or Boadicea, going on about the brutality of the police. It was getting late, and I indicated that I wanted to go to bed. She got herself to her elegant height and demanded, ‘How can you even think of going to sleep on a night like this?’ It is a cliché that the stage you have just grown out of is intolerable when you see it in someone else; and I was thinking, Oh my God, that was me not so long ago, and how did people put up with me?

  On Sunday at midday, before they closed the square, hundreds of us made our way to the National Gallery, and there I met with John Osborne and we whiled away the time pleasurably enough. At the right time, we all grouped ourselves, and I took John’s arm, to support him, for he hated doing this: he was miserable. We walked down the steps of the National Gallery, a large crowd of us, and went into the square and sat down. The police massed themselves around the perimeters. Many of the sitters-down steadily insulted and taunted the police, as usual, and some of us, as usual, found this childish and useless. It all went on and on. Everyone knew that the moment the press and television left, the police would pile into the square and start arresting us. I was sitting near John. Oscar Beuselink, his lawyer, with whom he later quarrelled, was there. Oscar said to me, ‘Why is it that there are all these hundreds of people, but John is being treated as if he is an invalid or a rookie going into battle for the first time?’ True, but people get treated in the way they demand or need to be. The fact is, John was feeling ill. Most people thoroughly enjoyed themselves. There sat Bertrand Russell, like a little terrier with his acolytes. There was Lindsay Anderson, stern, martial, disapproving of everyone as usual. Nearly everybody I knew seemed to be there. I was unhappy for various reasons, one being that Peter was hovering about just beyond the ranks of police, very anxious, though I had promised him I would not permit myself to be beaten up. And he was not the only child there, afraid for parents or older siblings. And then I was beginning to question the value of ‘demos’, of ‘sitting-downs’, of clashes with the police, simply because some people did enjoy it all so much. Was it in fact that their first impulse was the enjoyment, the excitement, the thrills, or the socialising, and secondly came the politics? Now I believe this to be so. The cameras were rolling away, the journalists moved up on their bottoms to be close to their interviewees, the taunts at the police grew louder and louder, you could see how the police eyed certain people they were targeting, and then off went the press, the cameras—the witnesses—and in swooped the police. They lifted up the people sitting down who would not get up, took them to the vans, but ignored people like myself, who stood up and walked. I heard the mayor of one of the London boroughs shouting at the police, who in fact had not touched her, ‘Filthy beasts,’ just like Miss Ball. I was with Oscar Beuselink, who was observing in his professional capacity how the vans went off with their loads. The police were careful not to handle famous people roughly, but they were knocking about those who had been taunting them. In one of the vans, a youth nearly died: he had been flung in with his jacket pulled up over his head in such a way he could not breathe. Others in the van, realising he had not moved or spoken, got the jacket off him and found him blue and unconscious. They told the police, ‘You nearly killed him,’ but they replied, ‘Lucky you were there, then, wasn’t it?’

  I had difficulty then and have difficulty now about what I think about these ‘demos’. Did that one change government policy? Change anybody’s mind when they saw it on national television? Was I saying, am I saying, that the fact there are people who adore fighting with the police means their efforts have no value? I know one thing, though: during subsequent Committee of a Hundred demonstrations, shortly to begin, when there was a real battle outside the American Embassy and confrontations outside nuclear installations, a hard core of people was there because of the thrill of it all.

  As for that sit-down, it at once took its place on the roll call of great fights between citizens and authority in Trafalgar Square.

  Shortly after that I was an observer of another political confrontation. It was decided to ‘sit down’ outside No. 10 Downing Street to protest about the Bomb. I was standing on the pavement, watching. Ernest Rodker was sitting down, among a mass of people. He had been until then unpolitical, probably in reaction to his political mother. When the police came in to rout the sitters, Ernest performed his first political act. He tipped forward a policeman’s helmet, not the cleverest thing to do. At once he was set on by six policemen, who kicked and punched him as he lay between their legs, trying to cover his head. Next morning I was in Bow Street when the judge sentencing him said, ‘You are obviously a young man with an inveterate propensity for violence.’ So started Ernest’s career as a political activist. He was a prominent member of the Committee of a Hundred for years.

  Somewhere in this area belong thoughts of ‘the Bomb’. That is how the nuclear threat was perceived: as a single final conclusive dead-end explosion which would at a stroke kill everyone in the world and lay it waste probably for centuries. There were two initiatory exemplars, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two bombs. Yet it was ‘the Bomb’ that dominated our minds, our songs, the speeches, the manifestos. The idiot thumb presses down, the Bomb falls, and that is the end of everything. In the very distant future a few mutated survivors will creep about on poisoned soil, and life will begin again.

  But where did that pattern come from—the pattern in our minds—because it had to be that, a pattern common to everyone marching, demonstrating, writing. The Apocalypse, Armageddon, the fire next time.

  I got a letter from some young scientists—but that was in the seventies—asking why I was helping to perpetuate a false way of looking at the threat, which was not a single final doom, or apocalypse, but rather a multiplicity of dangers, such as, for instance, the fact that large areas of the Soviet Union had been devastated, poisoned, made uninhabitable by explosions and accidents which had never been reported officially. This kind of thing was much more of a danger than a single Bomb. (Still ahead, of course, was Chernobyl.) If I wanted to be useful, was the suggestion, I should not be adding to the talk about the Bomb but rather pointing out that there were many different dangers.

  When I wrote Shikasta, the first volume of ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’, and I had the Bomb falling, it was the Northern Hemisphere that was devastated and uninhabitable—but this was not what people ‘took in’ when they read, because readers talked as if I had described the ruination of the whole world. It is not the story,
the plot, that interests me now, but the fact that it was taken absolutely for granted that if a Bomb fell, then it had to be totally destructive. The Bomb—and the end.

  Is this pattern still in the collective mind, and if so, where is it operating? What did it—does it—contribute to what actually has happened? It certainly set me thinking about South Africa: for decades everyone thought there was going to be the ‘night of the long knives’, the ‘bloodbath’—no two ways about it.

  Hushabye baby on the treetop,

  When the wind blows the cradle will rock,

  When the wind blows the cradle will fall,

  And down will fall baby and cradle and all.

  Somewhere towards the end of the sixties, I found that I was laughing, unexpectedly, helplessly: first, a disbelieving and incredulous yelp, and then a real laugh, ha ha, oh my God, but it’s so funny…

  What was? Sex, that’s what. This laugh is out of its proper place only chronologically, because it was not merely the sixties I was looking at but the fifties too: as I have already hinted, sex did not begin in the sixties.

  What distinguished the fifties, and then the sixties, was that there were no rules. Surely this must have been the first time in history—in any history that we remember—that there were no commonly accepted conventions and at the same time there was access to birth control. Anything went. And there were to be no rules until the advent of AIDS, which restored morality at a stroke.

  I would say that in the fifties, in the way of love, or sex, the most obvious thing—obvious later—is that people were going to bed because it was expected of them. (The Zeitgeist demanded.) Some people were coupling like hypnotised fish bumping into each other. Curiosity? Perhaps, a little. Sexual fever, not at all. These embraces had nothing to do with love, and not much to do with sex either. I mean, real sexual attraction. There was a passivity about it all.