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

by Doris Lessing

  Probably the most interesting thing about this long-ago scene is its tone, so far from vindictiveness of the Cruel Sisters. For years—decades—perhaps centuries—women have been complaining about men’s lack of sensitivity, their unkindness, but no sooner have women acquired power than they permit, even sanctify, some of the nastiest manifestations of human nature.

  A television programme: In front of several million viewers, a liberated woman says, ‘My husband is a bit of a wimp really.’

  Turn it around: ‘My wife is a very frightened soul, I am afraid, no courage.’ Oh, the callous swine.

  A dinner party: The wife, casually: ‘My two husbands—’ The husband: ‘But surely you’ve had three, darling?’ ‘Oh, I wasn’t counting you; I haven’t had a child by you.’

  ‘My wife’s a disappointment to me. She’s barren.’ The pig.

  Another party: ‘My husband often can’t get it up. He’s semi-impotent.’ This, loudly laughing.

  Monsieur Sorel in The Red and the Black, the archetype of the thick insensitive boorish husband, with a sneer: ‘Woman’s delicate machinery…’

  Only last week I got a letter from an American woman: ‘Do you ever think about the female monsters you unleashed with The Golden Notebook? They hate men and hate women who love men.’

  A scene: A famous American feminist is visiting London, and I go to see her with a man who has consistently taken a feminist position, and long before it was fashionable. As we walk through the hotel she deliberately slams one door after another in his face.

  A scene: A building in London that houses a feminist publishing house has in it other offices, one of which is regularly visited by a friend of mine from the Middle East, as it happens an exemplary husband and father. It took him a long time, he said, to understand why it was that every time he passed the door of the publishing house, one of the females came out and deliberately stamped on his feet, as hard as she could. He was a Muslim and by definition enslaved women.

  Not least depressing is that this kind of thing was thought of by the Cruel Sisters as political action.

  The other day a group of women on one television channel were complaining about men’s rudeness to them, and on another a woman was saying that all men are slimebags.

  Could we have foreseen this efflorescence of crude stupidity? Yes, because every mass political movement unleashes the worst in human behaviour and admires it. For a time at least.

  It certainly hasn’t been easy to be a feminist these last thirty years.

  Now Englishmen, if possible an even more embattled subject than American men: Englishwomen perennially sit around complaining about Englishmen. They don’t really like women, they don’t really like sex. Englishwomen go searching for true love among their compatriots but then often find it with men not English. It is not unknown for Englishwomen to take themselves abroad to find lovers, ‘just to remind myself that I am still a woman.’ Which hints at the real trouble, which is really a lack not of the thump thump of sex but the approaches to it. But surely these unromantic Englishmen are only the counterpart of the sisterly, comradely, straightforward women who, if they knew how to use female wiles, would despise them?

  They are homosexuals, comes the plaint; it is because of those all-male schools they go to. But I think Englishmen are the most romantic men in the world, and this is precisely because of their incarceration in boys’ schools, aged seven, to sob their hearts out for mummy night after night, with their heads beneath the bedclothes. There is nothing like early-childhood deprivation for creating people (men and women) who fall drastically and repeatedly for out-of-reach loves. Some spend their lives with their romantic imaginations inhabited by unobtainable loves. Yet when they are at last matched, they are the best lovers, the most intelligent, and—most important—the funniest. What is wrong with Englishmen is not that they hate women, or even do not like them, but that their impressionable years were spent entirely with males. Life in a male public school is harsh. ‘If you have been in English public school, then prison life, or being a hostage, is a mere bagatelle’—we have heard this again recently. And if public schools are less brutal and bullying than they were, these places are still, above all, hierarchies and structured like armies. After years of growing up in a narrow slot of humanity, at first desperately homesick and then learning emotional coldness; of finding some kind of warmth in sex with other boys or in intense emotional friendships…they escape to romantic love with women, powered by memories of the destitutions of their childhood and adolescence. And they grow older, marry or not, and there is always something missing, and it is the companionship of men. Women married to Englishmen don’t have to fear losing them to another woman nearly so much as to the club or the companionableness of the office or any place where men are in groups. This is because no romantic or sentimental or domestic love can ever come up to the intensity of those years at school, like the companionship of soldiers. By now we all know that painful and unpleasant experience impresses itself; that we are taught masochism in a thousand ways. It is a horrid fact that soldiers may adore cruel commanding officers: ‘I’d follow the brute to hell and back.’ What they are adoring is the intensity of the experience. ‘The best years of my life,’ old soldiers will say, looking back at the horrors of war, but they were fiercely alive and, above all, in the close and undangerous companionship of men.

  But you are talking about public school boys, surely a minority, readers may complain. True. But it is not only the upper classes; far from it. The most revealing clue to the dark depths of the English male psyche, a little fragment of evidence, is that perennial British comedy situation: an impervious, or unnoticing, or—and here is the essence of it—serious male is being pursued by a woman or a girl, and she is in love with him or fancies him. This can be good-humoured, or it can be cruel, but she is a figure of fun, she is ridiculous. It is a ritual humiliation, and it recurs again and again, and again and again; you can scarcely have a British comedy without it. Or there is this upright Englishman, and he finds himself in a harem or a group of sexy women, but he is sturdily indifferent to their absurd wiles. And surely it is not an accident that ‘Not tonight, Josephine,’ is a favourite and perennial joke. Only in Britain—or perhaps I should say England…And yet, now, I must say that there were two men I could have married or lived with happily ever after, and they were English.

  There is a complaint by women, I think a new one, a concomitant of the sexual equality, and it goes like this: Here I am, an attractive woman, I cook like an angel, I am good in bed, I am self-sufficient—surely I am a pretty good bet for any man. But while they fall for me in droves, they go off and shack up with some green girl.

  When that hopeless and helpless laughter overtook me, the best of it was because of this; and it was a long-overdue seeing of an absurdity. As one of our most famous poets puts it, with a wondering awe at the plentitudes of Nature, ‘Every year they come tumbling out of their schools, these lovely girls, as certain as flowers in spring, and I always wonder, what have we done to deserve them?’

  A sad little tale apropos: A certain friend, in her late forties, attractive, clever, competent, well-read, knowledgeable about politics, and financially independent, thought it unfair that a woman like herself was not valued above some nymphet. After too many unhappy experiences, she announced to her friends that she had seen the light. What she wanted was a middle-aged man, intelligent, well-read, interested in politics, not to live with or marry, but to share walks, meals, theatre, and bed ‘when it comes over us. And I don’t want ever again to wake with a man in my bed and then have to make breakfast for him. And I promise you this: I’ve been a port in the storm to my very last hopeful novelist or musician or poet.’

  At the same time, a handsome, well-read, covetable man of middle age was saying he was sick to death with these girls he kept marrying and then having to divorce, and he wanted a mature, self-sufficient, well-read woman, who didn’t want him to move in. What he valued now was his inde
pendence.

  And now a group of us went to work, and with what tact, care, and deviousness. Neither of the protagonists was allowed even a hint of what was going on. We planned a party, a casual affair, of enough people for nothing to be obvious. This is what happened: Betty—we will call her—came in at the same time as—we will call him—Jeffrey. They at once noticed each other and began to exchange sharp witticisms. We, the observers, were pleased, since antagonism so often leads to happy endings. But alas…rather later there arrived an uninvited daughter of one of the conspirators, an apologetic girl of twenty or so, who was drawn to her fate like a little boat going over a waterfall, and she and Jeffrey left together to embark on yet another misfortune, while Betty went off with a neophyte actor from the Midlands, just arrived in London. He was hungry, he said loudly: ‘For God’s sake, won’t some good woman take me home and feed me?’

  There were two men then in London who had both removed themselves long before from the dangers of being chosen as a husband or a ‘partner’, who were unlike each other in every way, and yet on each passport, under ‘Occupation’ could have been written Sex.

  One was South African, and behind him was a classically bad childhood, brutal father, beatings, coldness, and an early escape into the underworld of a big city. He had created for himself a house like a temple, not to love—certainly not—but to sex. How had this poor boy done it?—for it was a fine house. Much better not ask. It was a violent and sentimental house: here again the link between sentimentality—the tears in the eyes, as if an invisible observer were counting the tears, each one evidence of superior sensibility—and pain, but not necessarily physical, for this was as much psychological domination. The girls—of all ages—were adored, were worshipped, and subjugated. This kind of sex is not every woman’s cup of tea.

  The other man was from South America, part Japanese, part Spanish. He had a vast flat, and every item in it could have starred in a museum. He was very rich. He had been studying—and still was—sexual practices of the subtle and esoteric sort from many cultures. Unlike the man on the other side of London, he did not collect women, for he aimed to find at last that woman who would be his sole companion in the ways of love, because, he claimed, for real achievement in love, two bodies and hearts and—he would insist—souls, as well, should be perfectly in tune with each other, and this could take months, even years. He despised, could not take seriously, people with several or many sex partners, or even more than one. Mere amateurs: they understood nothing. His wife had been his colleague, his ideal, but she had insisted on having children, and so with regret they parted. She lived in a flat nearby, and he was a good father to the children, but as he said, children do not go well with the erotic life. With her he had sex of a utilitarian sort. I am of course tempted here to invent a chronicle of amorous adventure, a diary of arcane delights, but I had to earn my living, and there was a child to consider. My interesting friend understood the problem well: the pursuit of real love needed a reliable private income and childlessness, he said often. We met occasionally, before he left London for Spain, for a meal and a chat, and I heard all about his present researches, and occasionally did sigh a little, for surely there are few more delightful ways of passing the time—but even to use that phrase explains why I could never have been a suitable candidate. Besides, I must confess, perhaps slightly ashamed, like someone who has failed a high examination, that long-term I would get bored. Truly he was right when he said that one had to put one’s whole heart into the thing, like searching for a Holy Grail or for a key to a mysterious hidden realm—the growing point, in fact—or otherwise expect the ravages of futility, a soured desert.

  Four years after I arrived in Langham Street, Howard Samuels died. I was summoned to the office of Basil Samuels, Howard’s brother, and found your classic hard-headed businessman and proud of it. ‘I don’t see why artists should be subsidised. I never agreed with my brother; he was always giving handouts to you people. Do you realise I could get ten times the rent for your flat that you are paying?’ Clearly, what I was seeing was just another episode in a long-running disagreement or even antagonism between the brothers, and it was easy to understand it, looking at this tight-mouthed angry tycoon and thinking of easy-going, charming, witty—and left-wing—Howard Samuels. I asked if I could have three months’ notice, because I had had every reason to think I could stay there indefinitely and I needed time to find a place. At last he agreed. It was not gracious, but I was grateful to him.

  And now I had to find a house: partly because Peter wanted one so badly, needed that famous roof over his head, his roof, our roof, secure and for ever; and partly because, as always in Britain, the pressure was so strong for me to own something. When I needed an overdraft, it was always, Why don’t you get a house? And everyone said, Why throw away your money paying rent? Put it into a mortgage. For in this country using your money to pay rent to keep yourself housed is not good enough: if you lack the ambition to actually own your roof, it betrays unserious, even bohemian, tendencies.

  This time I was looking for houses in only one area, Camden Town. I found a place in a street shortly to house many famous people in the theatre and the arts, but the estate agent said, ‘I wouldn’t let my mother or my sister live in such a street.’ Camden Town had yet to become fashionable, but meanwhile it was seeming to a lot of canny people a convenient place to live. Tom Maschler had difficulty getting money to buy a cheap house in Chalcot Square, shortly to be the last word in chic. A friend could not find a bank to lend her money for a vast house in Regent’s Park Road, but borrowed, bought it for £6,000, and sold it twenty-five years later for over a million. Again and again the experts get it wrong. Who gets it right? Impractical and airy-fairy artists who do not care about being fashionable, care only about finding somewhere cheap and convenient.

  Not only the estate agent but my bank would not hear of my buying a house in seedy Camden Town, and I was frantic with worry. Then appeared a certain gentleman I will call Len. Ten years earlier he would have been an evident fixer, or spiv, a crook, always on the lookout for a good thing—you can’t put anything past me—but this was 1962, the beginning of the matey classless sixties, and looking back, I can pick out from a pretty variegated cast of characters quite a few who were not crooks but merely in tune with the times, and if this had been the eighties, then they would have been the darlings of the nation. Len was uneasy middle class, he wore a duffel coat, he had a smart haircut, and he dropped the names of actors and TV personalities. He took me to Charrington Street, in Somers Town, now famous for riots and crime, but once it took in refugees from France, the Huguenots.

  Mary Wollstonecraft lived in Somers Town, with William Godwin, and their names are on the tombstones in the little graveyard round the corner. Shelley must have visited. It is a short street, and on one side the houses have been pulled down to make room for a big new school. The whole street was shabby and unpainted. No. 60, which was being sold because the old woman who owned it could no longer look after herself, was £4,000 cheaper than anything I had seen. It cost £4,500. Cheap with reason. It had not been painted for decades, probably not since it had been built, and its facade was cracked like the bed of a river in drought, and covered with dark-brown flakes, like stale chocolate. Nothing had been done inside since it was built, in 1890.

  My bank said no, absolutely not, not that area, had they not said so already? But Len said he could get me fixed up with a mortgage, no trouble at all, and I could take his word for it the place was structurally sound, for in those days they built to last. No, don’t bother with a survey; he had already had it surveyed. And so I became a customer of the National Westminster Bank. My father had worked in his youth for the Westminster Bank. So much had things changed that when I told the manager that my father’s great nightmare was always that he might be in debt, or rather fall into worse debt than he was in, the man was quite shocked and said that the whole point of banking was to lend money. And so I had a mortgage and
a loan to do the place up. This was far from doubtful and dubious finance; on the contrary; but what was dubious was Len’s vagueness about the status of No. 60. There was a possibility, said he, that it could be scheduled for redevelopment, but I had to realise the Greater London Council often had houses scheduled for years. Besides, they would have to compensate me. I have always taken chances, and that is what I did now. I never regretted it, for I could not otherwise have afforded a house in an area where I wanted to live, and I did take that step away from freebooting freewheeling unloanworthy bohemianism, which is what suited me, to being a property owner and deserving of respect and of overdrafts, even if every penny was borrowed. But I could not begin to live in that house until it had been done up, and Len knew a builder, let us call him Doug, another like himself, free and easy, you can trust me, and he would see the house done up as it deserved.

  I took Peter and one of his friends to stand outside the house. ‘There’s the house. I’ve bought it.’ The two boys were silent, looking at the dark-brown flaking exterior in the shabby street. ‘Look,’ I pleaded, ‘it will be very nice, you’ll see.’

  That house could have been kept as a museum, a time capsule. The first thing that had to strike the outsider was its extreme discomfort. It was on three floors, two rooms to a floor, over a vast basement. There was no proper heating, only tiny fireplaces. In such a house, I kept reminding myself, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin lived, wrote their high-minded thoughts, and they must have been cold all the time. Over every ill-fitting window hung dirty rags of cretonne. The four rooms on the two top floors had been bedrooms and recently let out to lodgers, for in each were coin meters for electricity. On the two landings were gas jets, the flame four inches away from the wallpaper, and they were still in use. The electricity was dangerous; wires trailed, the holders were cracked. There was one ceiling light in each room. One lavatory for the whole house, a cement bowl in the basement, with a cracked porcelain cistern and a chain pull. The basement was once the kitchen, with the coal-burning kitchen range still functioning, and the old copper for boiling clothes, a great cone-shaped copper basin sunk in cement, with a place for the fire under it. The mangle was there, and the ironing table, and its steam irons. There was a bath—unused—vast, stained brown, and cracked. The great enamel jugs that had once been carried up the rickety stairs with hot water still stood, stained and chipped, on the range. Up those stairs had been carried meals to the little dining room, which overlooked a neglected back garden, with a view on to the roof of Unity Theatre. I never went to Unity Theatre in all the time I lived in that house, because it had fallen into its dogmatic, strictly party-line time.