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

by Doris Lessing

  No one knew how to behave, neither men nor women. And this is why there was so much unhappiness, so much incomprehension. Do I exaggerate? Yes, I do, because I am leaving out of this account the enjoyable and happy encounters.

  We are all now well equipped with handbooks explaining the basic differences between men and women, but the sixties coincided with a stage in the feminist movement which denied all differences between men and women. Or, as D. H. Lawrence put it, women were just as good as men, only better.

  No ideological rages are likely to be aroused now at the news that men and women are biologically programmed to want different things—at the root of their natures, never mind how civilisation or culture or current morality decides to tame us. There is no man who has not dreamed of that brief encounter where emotion does not enter for even one moment, that quick fuck without any strings or obligations, and not with a prostitute either. A fantasy of some golden age hovers here, I think. And there is no woman whose first emotion is not ‘Is this the man I’m looking for?’ and this even when she has resolved to set this aside, having decided to be more like men, enjoying the fun of it all, for a night or two. I am prepared to bet that there is no woman who has not been left after the most enjoyable night imaginable, and even if neither knows the other’s name, or wants to, without, as he leaves—full of love, admiration, and gratitude for her aplomb—a suddenly dull and empty feeling, for she has gone against her real deep nature and she must pay for it, even if only for half an hour.

  How often have women who have with the most honest, open-hearted intentions spent a night with a man not found themselves swearing, raging: ‘You bloody heel. Surely you could at least ring up? Can’t you even send some flowers?’ For the flowers would be ample, would be enough, a psychological balance would be redressed. And meanwhile the man, full of affection and pleasure, is thinking, Now, at last, a woman who understands how to enjoy life and who doesn’t say, ‘Do you really love me?’

  The Victorians knew what they were about, with their prescribed tributes of flowers from man to woman. I am tempted to say they knew what they were doing in laying down so many rules and restrictions. Romance is the child of prohibition. But let’s leave romance out, for there are some parts of the world where it seems to have become obsolete, And already in the fifties there was the beginning of the feeling that sex was on an agenda, something that ought to be done, and blame would accrue if it was not performed.

  I am walking down Church Street, Kensington, with Donald Ogden Stewart, and we are going to have dinner, his suggestion. He must be sixty or so, a lean, balding, freckly, sandy man, and I am thirty-something. He says to me, ‘I ought to tell you that these days I am more interested in food than in sex.’ I was absolutely, coldly furious. That it was so graceless—well, what did one expect? meaning, specifically, from Americans; but there had never been, not for one second, any suggestion of a physical attraction, and anyway he was old. Now I see this as a quite sensible (if graceless) way of dealing with the situation. After all, he had come from Hollywood, and from the Left in America, and probably had had affairs by the dozen. To his contemporaries he must have seemed an attractive man. None of us find it easy to know that we are not as attractive as we once were. He had thought, I’m not going to sit through the whole dinner while she is wondering if I’m going to make a pass.

  Again I have been out to dinner with a high executive in Granada Television, for I am going to write for them. He drinks heavily all evening. But everyone drank a lot then; these days if you invite people to dinner or a party, the amount of alcohol drunk is a tenth of what it was then. He drives me home and says, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make it, I’m too drunk.’ Yet there had not been a flicker of sexual interest between us. I am furious. The oaf. The idiot. The conceited fool. The story ‘One Off the Short List’ is apropos.

  I look back and see myself, a forthright, frank young woman, often tactless out of a genuine outrage at what I still saw as dishonesty. I despised all female ruses, as insults to real friendship, to humanity, and to humanism itself. I would have scorned to play hard to get, to coquette, play hot and cold. I would say this is generally true of the Western female, but I was also a colonial and even more liberated from the hypocritical shackles of the past—as I saw it. A comradely equality, that was my style, easy friendliness, even intimacy.

  To see the difference between liberated Western girls and, let’s say, Indians, one only has to spend an hour in a mixed group and watch the languishing eyes, deep glances, sighs, little fluttering withdrawals, coquettish veils and scarves always at their work. It is not that such operators do not exist in the West, and when she appears then the liberated ones have to stand back helpless and watch men fall before her, for the traditional dishonesties are based on the soundest knowledge of male and female nature. A woman playing hot and cold is at the oldest and most successful game in the world—the rules are admirably set forth in Stendhal’s Love. But how can one enjoy that ideal, perfect, honest, loving friendship with a man on whom you are playing such tricks? And yet for some women these aren’t tricks, they’re doing what comes naturally…and so we go around and around.

  With Western women, particularly the English, men don’t know where they are: except those men with an instinctive understanding of women, with whom one immediately sets up a current of happy complicity.

  To put an end to this flounder in marshy waters: the comradely and helpful equality meant that (means that) a man may think a woman is in love with him—simply because he has been admitted into an easy intimacy—and may rejoice or run a mile. But equally, since she is still a woman and full of a certain residual shyness underneath all that friendliness, she may be madly in love with him and he never suspects it.

  I look back on tangles of misunderstanding. Men whom I liked, with whom I intended friendship, imagined I was in love and were confused when refused, became huffy, were hurt: Why did she lead me on? Men who I hoped would see I fancied them did not know it, since the signs were so well camouflaged by general mateyness. The free-and-easy, anything goes of the fifties, and then the sixties, obscured genuine emotions, attractions, repulsions. If there is a convention that easy sex is a sign of general liberation, civilisation, and equality, then what happens to all the subtle to-and-fro, the natural affinities and antipathies—real sex, in short?

  To add to the confusion, I enjoyed flirting, but then I don’t see that as any more than a pleasant game, an agreeable convention. Well, it is in some parts of the world. Recently I met a couple of young Mexican women who had gone to Canada and the United States for a holiday. Used to the flattering attention of men and to the pleasures of flirting, they soon wondered what was wrong with them: had they lost all their looks and their charm? Enquiring of a sympathetic male friend, they were told, ‘You don’t understand: men can’t show they find women attractive any longer; they may find themselves in prison.’

  My most bizarre sexual encounter was with Ken Tynan. I had gone with him to the theatre and then to some party of actors winding down after a performance. Ken was the star, shedding witticisms and benevolent advice and criticism. Then it was very late, and he suggested I stay the night in Mount Street. The young of every generation have to imagine they have invented casual ways, but the innocent sharing of beds did not begin in the sixties. Not once, nor twice, have I spent a friendly night with some man because we haven’t finished our conversation or because he missed the last train. Never, not for the slice of a second, had there been sexual attraction between Ken and me. I cannot imagine two human beings less likely to make each other’s pulses flutter. I had often been in the Tynan bedroom, because it was where we left coats during parties. I came back from the bathroom to get into bed beside companionable Ken, and suddenly the bedroom walls had been grotesquely transformed, for on them were arranged every sort of whip, as if in a whip museum. Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that Ken would say, ‘Are you wondering what all those whips are doing there?’ Or I would say, ‘
Now, about those whips, Ken?’ Not at all; there we lay, side by side, conversing agreeably about a hundred things, but certainly politics, because that was our favourite subject. I used to tell him he was romantic, not to say sentimental, and ignorant, and he complained I was cynical and lacking faith in humanity. I remember an occasion when he summoned me to a meeting to discuss how to protest about something, I forget what, with several prominent people. I said I found this business of celebrities ‘sitting down’ in public to fast as a protest absurd and laughable, because everyone knew that the moment the ‘fast’ was over we would all be off to a five-star restaurant. Ken thought I was lacking in any instinct for publicity, and he was afraid I often showed reactionary tendencies.

  And so we fell asleep and were woken by a female menial bringing breakfast on two trays. (Ken refused to cook, and so did Elaine Dundy. Neither knew how to boil an egg, they proudly claimed, and they always ate in restaurants. Even breakfast was brought in.) Then she tidied away the whips.

  The same sort of thing happened to me with other well-known men—whose names I am withholding—but Ken not only made no secret of his tastes but flaunted them. He took to extremes the didact’s need to believe that everyone must be the same as himself, describing his somewhat perverse musical Oh, Calcutta as ‘after-dinner entertainment for civilised people’.

  A scene: A party in Mount Street. Ken is confronting a young actress, newly arrived in London. He is trying to persuade her that her refusal to accept whips and associated delights was because she had been taught prejudice.

  ‘You have been conditioned,’ says Ken, his stammer reinforcing his pedagogical self. He towers over her while she smiles delightfully up at him.

  ‘But, Ken,’ she murmurs, ‘I don’t enjoy it.’

  He is checked, but the force of his need to instruct carries him on. ‘You have been taught to think that there is only one way of having sex.’

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly say only one….’ She smiles, earning applause from the listening party-goers.

  ‘Only one kind,’ says Ken, and is probably on the point of launching into informational anecdotes from Greece and Rome and the Lord knows where else, but she again says firmly, ‘Ken, I don’t enjoy it.’

  And now one may observe the switch in him from the teacher to the wit. ‘I must protest that you have unfairly silenced me,’ says Ken. ‘I have no more to say. How, logically, could I have? How could you not have my blessing? Enjoy, then, my darling.’

  It is a disconcerting thing for a more or less normal woman, after having enjoyed dinner and chat about literature, the theatre, politics, to find one’s host suggesting a little diversion with whips, as if saying, ‘A drop of port, perhaps? Or I have some nice dessert wine.’ Or even producing the whips—once it was a sjambok, always irresistible to sadomasochists—and reacting to a refusal as if it were you, not he, who was a little strange.

  The following little tale is here because of the talk about black men’s superiority in bed. White women lusting after black penises is one of the myths furnishing the colonial mind, and I was listening to variations on the myth as I grew up. And then this particular incident happened at a time when the prowess of black studs was much vaunted, because for some reason the superiority of black people’s sexuality (men and women both) had become part of ‘progressive’ thinking.

  A certain exiled black writer was putting in his time in London. He pursued me for months, full of ardour; he loved me, he could not sleep for thinking of me. Sighs and suffering, the language of romantic despair—the lot. Now, I had never been to bed with a black man. This was because I did not really fancy them. You could say it was my early conditioning, if it were not that the same conditioning has produced people, but I think mostly men, who yearn for black flesh. It was because of pity for his state that I eventually gave in, expecting to assuage a painful passion. The actual sexual contact lasted perhaps three minutes, and then he fell asleep. His snores were such as I had never heard before nor have since. I removed myself to another bed and slept peacefully till morning. When I took him in a cup of tea he was uxorious and complacent. Then he saw I had not slept beside him and demanded to know why. The inhibitions of a proper upbringing—‘You must never hurt people’s feelings’—intervened, and I murmured, ‘You were snoring.’ He seemed surprised. Having drunk his tea, he dressed and said that he was so happy. He then resumed his romantic pursuit—telephone calls, passionate letters, encounters in the street, where he had been lying in wait. I cannot help feeling that all this romantic passion of his had derived from literature. I have sometimes caught a certain ironical look on the faces of black women friends when told of the amorous fame of their partners. But perhaps I was unlucky.

  Another occasion I remember with shame. This was a black man too, and he was from Jamaica. Madly in love, he was, and his pursuit was lengthy and exhaustive. Remembering my previous experience, I kept saying no, and then at last I thought, as women may do, Oh, for God’s sake, what am I making such a fuss about, if it means so much to him? I took off all my clothes—and then I put them on again, for by now I was thinking, Why the hell should I, when I don’t want to? This was a terrible thing to do. Cruel. As my mother might have said, though in a somewhat different context, There are things a decent woman doesn’t do.

  There was a theatre director who was as queer as they come, and famously so, with whom I shared the easy friendship women do with some homosexuals. A rumbunctious sexual romp of a play was running, Lock Up Your Daughters, and in it was the line, ‘When is the ravishing going to start?’ I am descending a staircase, glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and this suitor stops me by gripping both my arms while he stands in front of me, demanding, ‘And when is the ravishing going to start?’ A joke, you’d think, but no, for a time whenever we met he’d accost me, by now full of accusation, saying, ‘It is your duty to initiate me into the joys of this heterosexual sex we hear so much about.’

  And now an embattled subject, American men. Things may very well have changed, for they always do, but in those days a lot of comparisons were being made, invidious or not. A woman cannot have as bed partners first a man from the centre of Europe and then one from America, both womanisers on principle, without brooding about differences. I say ‘womanisers’ and not ‘lovers of women’ here, because no one could accuse—then—Americans of that willing if sometimes whimsical subjection to the magics and manias of love that we call romance. All the Americans I knew had a certain attitude to sex—let’s not call it love—and they all played a role. Mensch. Tough guys. Where did it come from? I think, like jazz and a lot else in American culture, from black culture. A real man loves them and leaves them—no, fucks them and leaves them. There was something willed about it and something joyless. A practical lot, they are, down to earth. Or were. Now, the essence—surely—of this masculine woman-haver-and-subduer is something active, dominant, is one who sets the pace and draws the boundaries. But as we all know, extremes meet, and extremes turn into their opposites.

  Imagine a room and in it several women, all European, and it is the mid-sixties. We are talking about American men. We have all had American lovers—no, bedfellows—and two of us have actually had, or been had by, the same man. It is not common, this kind of conversation between women—or it wasn’t then—and it all happened by chance. There we were, ten or so of us…the talk led from one thing to another. The conclusions I am offering are too comprehensive to be the result of only one woman’s researches.

  Would we all agree that American men loved with their heads and not their hearts? Absolutely; their hearts were not involved. Would we agree that in those heads was a blueprint for behaviour with women, in bed and out of it, and they performed—or fucked—not from some deep instinct or (perish the thought) the need to express love, but from a need to affirm to themselves that they were indeed mensches? Here D. H. Lawrence was quoted: ‘warm-hearted fucking’, for instance. It is interesting how often this writer is quoted in con
versations of this sort. For if he knew very little about sex, he did know a lot about love. But in parenthesis, perhaps we should remember that the expertise in sex we all pride ourselves on is after all recent: nothing unusual then about Lawrence’s ignorance; it was general.

  It was as if—we agreed—in the solar plexus of this performer was a cold place, an icy promontory, an extension from some continent all tundra. There was the intelligent head, there were the hot prick and balls, but in between, a cold defensive place.

  The talk strayed off to the legacy of the troubadours and trouvères in France, in lovely France, for could we perhaps make a case that loving of a certain poetic and even fanciful kind had never reached Germany, whose culture had so extensively influenced America, and particularly its universities…? Well, that was the kind of talk, and its culminating moment was when one television woman offered a little tale of a certain American film-maker, an exemplar of cock-and-balls, poised over her like an arched bow, but motionless, scolding her, ‘Use it, use it, damn you.’ Was not that the extreme of passivity, male as fucking machine, for the pleasure of the female, to be used by her (but was the word ‘pleasure’, with its frivolous associations, permissible here?)? Here was the absolute embodiment of a mensch but, at the moment of truth, passivity and instructions how to make use of him. Was this not a case of an extreme turning into an opposite? Well, yes, that was about it—at least for that time, for if you read novels and other witnesses of American culture, it was not always thus. No, a certain time produced the fucking machine, which, as everything has to do, disappeared. Or has it? Has feminism restored the warm heart, the male solar plexus radiating hot need like a little sun?