But Martha, having reached this point in her silent address to those sympathetic figures, the beautiful, solid girl who bent her dark head over her chairman’s notes, the pleasant, bespectacled young man who was softening his criticism with a fraternal smile, understood that the orator, sensing the three visitors were absorbed in thoughts unconnected with what he was actually saying, interrupted a sentence in which the word millions had already occurred four times, to demand with hostile politeness: ‘Was he boring them, perhaps?’
‘Good Lord, no, far from it!’ Marjorie exclaimed, with all the energy of her frank charm. She was transformed with new enthusiasm. Martha shook her head, smiling: she knew better than to risk speech. He looked at Jasmine, who said: ‘I’m sorry I was late. But I want to know, what is this group?’
At once eyes met, communed, separated. A discreet silence.
‘Oh, well, if it’s like that,’ said Jasmine companionably, and lit a cigarette.
‘No one said it was like anything,’ said a pretty student of about eighteen. She looked with dislike at the three old women—as she clearly felt them to be.
A silence.
‘Well,’ said Marjorie warmly, her eyes shining, ‘it’s awfully nice of you people to ask us old reactionaries around anyway.’
At once eyes met again, lingered. Grimaces, silence, hostility.
Martha was remembering an incident from those dead days of eight years ago.
Jasmine had come hot-foot into the office—which? there had been so many dingy, bench-furnished, dust-smelling little offices. She had just met Mr Forrester in the street, and had stopped for a talk: ‘I was on my guard of course, he might be a spy for all we know!’ He had said, humorously: ‘Well, thanks at least for acknowledging the existence of an old reactionary like myself.’ ‘Imagine,’ Jasmine had said, in prim, shocked tones that nevertheless managed to suggest a sneer, ‘he wasn’t even ashamed of saying it aloud. He actually said it in so many words.’
Lord, Lord, thought Martha, were we really so awful, so stupid? Thank goodness she was leaving soon and would not have to forgive these young idiots for the sake of her own past.
She said, smiling with what she hoped was a benevolently neutral expression: ‘It’s particularly nice of you to invite me, because I am leaving the country soon.’
‘If people aren’t ashamed to turn their backs on the problems of this country for a soft life in England,’ said the pretty girl, bitterly.
At this, the fair, solid young man took a pipe from his pocket and begin to fill it, watching his hands at work, while he calmly smiled. Their attention attracted by this deliberate gesture, everyone waited for him to say something. Martha again felt Marjorie’s elbow against hers: ‘Remember, Andrew?’ she whispered.
‘Some people are much more interested in private conversation than in the meeting, forgive me if I’m wrong,’ said the young Indian teacher.
The pipe-filler said: ‘I’d like to remind everyone that a vote was taken as to whether members of the old groups should be invited.’ He spoke ‘humorously’ and the chairwoman said, ‘humorously’: ‘I was just about to say the same thing. I hereby bring this meeting to order. Our guests don’t even know what it is all about.’
‘Oh, yes we do!’ muttered Marjorie, smiling; but the people who had heard her, frowned.
‘This meeting,’ said the orator, ‘humorously’ but with passion, reclaiming everyone by leaning forward and sweeping them with a fire of hot, demanding, accusing glances, ‘is to establish socialism in this country—now!’
Small flattered laughs all around.
The pipe-filler said: ‘We are a group of socialists—enough said, in present conditions.’
More flattered laughter.
‘Who are we?—if I may ask?’ Jasmine persisted.
The chairwoman said: ‘You are quite right to ask, but at the present moment all that can be said is: we are socialists, we are feeling our way, and we are very loosely organized. You must understand that we can’t say more than that.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Marjorie, with a sort of friendly gruffness. But this remark, for some reason, caused general ill-feeling. Eyes met again, and even the chairwoman seemed upset. It was clear that afterwards people would ask each other: ‘Who told her our affairs—there must be a traitor in our midst.’
‘I suggest someone sums up—the world situation I mean,’ said the Indian teacher.
‘That is just what I was doing,’ said the impassioned orator huffily. ‘Or rather, what I was working up to,’ he went on, recovering good humour as people affectionately laughed at him. He drew notes towards him and began to speak. It was ‘an analysis of the situation’. Not a patch on Anton in his hey-day, Martha found herself thinking.
The problem for discussion tonight was: what effect would the newly created Communist China make on the world scene?
It turned out, after some hours, that there was complete unanimity about this.
Who would have foreseen it? Everyone spoke, including ‘the old guard’ they disagreed, they raised their voices, were riven with dissension, agreed to differ, might have gone on till morning, if the chairman, or chairwoman, had not said: ‘I’m going to put it to you: in fact, everyone’s saying the same thing.’ They all looked at each other again: not really friendly, this look, for they didn’t want to be like each other, to be similar, although the violence of their discussion had, in fact, caused an underlying good feeling. But they saw it: they had, in fact, been saying, though of course in very different ways, the same thing. They laughed, all together. The laugh made them one.
It was the laugh heard always when a group of people are in agreement but—and this is the point, when they are in agreement against an outside majority. It is the laugh of a minority in the right, the intelligent, forward-looking, informed minority, holding difficult or even dangerous opinions against great odds. It is the self-flattering, comforting, warming laugh heard—but how many times, in how many different settings had Martha heard it! And how many times and in what circumstances would she hear it again?
The good humour was now so great that it was easy for the Turgenev girl to suggest that Jasmine should sum up. Besides, she was a visitor from the Communist Party in the South (though of course it was no longer in existence, it had dissolved itself) and while the people in this room could on no account be considered communists, there was a sense in which she might, perhaps, be considered a fraternal delegate.
Laughter, and even the impassioned orator nodded.
Jasmine summed up:
‘It was unlucky for the world that the first socialist country had chanced to be Russia, because that country’s backwardness had branded socialism itself with a barbarousness that had nothing to do with socialism. China, being an ancient country of deep and imperturbable civilization—much more civilized than we are!—’ cries of hear, hear, all round the room—‘would restore to communism moderation, calm, sense, humanity, humour, tolerance, etc.
‘The Soviet Union, realizing in the true spirit of communist self-criticism that she was not as fitted for the task of world leadership as this new, unspotted exemplar with her ancient civilization, would stand aside and allow China to lead the world towards full communism.
‘America, having sunk so many billions into trying to prevent the Chinese communists from coming to power, would probably continue fomenting civil war, there would be another epoch of civil wars, famines, etc., etc., but after all, this year, 1949, would be remembered in the world’s calendar as the first of the new epoch of benevolent socialism.’ And so on, of course, but this was the gist of it.
For a moment, when Jasmine had finished, there was confidence, elation, general good feeling. If the three guests had not been familiar with such situations, they might have believed the meeting was over, it now being after midnight. But they recognized the atmosphere of ‘closed meeting’ and they got up, one after another, to say goodnight.
Marjorie was obviously longing t
o be asked to stay; but while the three were no longer considered enemies, or perhaps even spies, they certainly weren’t accepted either. Marjorie would have to wait until Jasmine and Martha left, and she the only member of the ‘old guard’ in the town. She would finally be asked to join on the basis that she was quite a good soul, and useful for running around and doing donkey work, even if theoretically she was quite hopeless, poor thing. ‘But of course, she’ll have to work her passage.’
Formal thanks for being invited at all were offered and accepted, and the three went down the dark stairs.
They stood together on the pavement. They realized that while they had sat arguing in the stuffy, bright, little room, the skies had been swept by storms and by rain: it must be raining somewhere outside the city, for gusts of soft, damp air came to their faces with a smell of freshly wetted leaves.
Jasmine said: ‘Well, they’re a nice lot, really. If only they weren’t so unbalanced about everything. But they’ll settle down.’
Marjorie said: ‘Oh, I’m so pleased they are starting. It doesn’t make one feel so bad about our failing. And if only they’ll learn some lessons from our mistakes…’ she gave a little laugh which was half a sob. ‘I’ve really got to stop being so emotional about everything. Colin says it is driving him mad, and I don’t blame him. But of course, he’s never emotional about anything. Shall I see you before you go to England, Matty?’
‘I suppose I should have a party—but who to invite?’
‘Yes, who’s left? Oh, isn’t it awful, when you think…’
‘Never mind, the young are on the march,’ said Jasmine. Martha laughed, but Marjorie said: ‘Oh, don’t, don’t joke—it’s all right for you, but I’ve got to stay here.’
She ran off to find her car: Colin was waiting for her to come home; he was sitting up—one of the children was feverish.
Martha and Jasmine walked up the empty street under the deep glitter of the stars.
Jasmine said: ‘Poor Marjorie, what a fate. We’re lucky, we’re getting out.’
‘Are you really going to stay in Johannesburg?’
‘I like the nasty hole. And besides, with the Nats in, one feels as if one really can do something—I mean, it’s so terrible, it can’t last. I reckon we’ll have socialism in five years at the latest…well, so long, Matty. Be seeing you somewhere, sometime.’
She went off by herself down the street. At the corner she turned to wave: ‘Barricades!’ she said, almost formally, as she might have said, good night, or how are you? Then she vanished from sight.
About the Author
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris’s mother adapted to the rough life of the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a “civilized” Edwardian life among “savages,” but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where the nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen, and it was the end of her formal education.
But like other women writers from southern Africa who did not graduate from high school, such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. “Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn’t apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn’t thinking in terms of being a writer then—I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time.” The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing’s early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, and Kipling; later she discovered D. H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth; her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris’s formative years were also spent absorbing her father’s bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of “poison.” “We are all of us made by war,” Lessing has written, “twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.”
In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, “in a fever of erotic longing.” Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.
Lessing’s life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. “There is a whole generation of women,” she has said, speaking of her mother’s era, “and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic—because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.” Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of “setting at a distance,” taking the “raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.”
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists “who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read.” Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.
Lessing’s fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual’s own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing’s courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
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