Walking in the Shade
Page 20
He was a Trotskyist. This had made him doubly an outlaw. First, as a revolutionary in paranoid America. Second, as a traitor to communism—and to the Communist Party. That meant he was a minority in a minority. It was his mother who had decided that if the Soviet Union was Stalinist, then she was a Trotskyist. At university, he had been execrated and reviled for years by the Stalinists. Now he was coming into his own. Very soon all the revolutionary youth of Britain, and anywhere in Europe, would call themselves Trotskyists.
A word about these ancient schisms, for they are rapidly being forgotten. The communist parties everywhere were Stalinist, and Trotsky was a traitor and heretic. But the new youth believed that if Trotsky and not Stalin had won the battle for power in the Soviet Union, then communism would have become that Utopia it was meant to be. Isaac Deutscher, historian of the Soviet Revolution, wrote two books about Trotsky, The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Disarmed. I recommend them. Here is an account of the political battles of the time, seen in the light of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. But it is hard not to see that the two often changed positions, one taking his stand where not long before he had accused his rival of treacherously or misguidedly being. It is like watching a dance of puppets. And these little straw men are being swept down a great waterfall. The Bolsheviks, having studied the history of the French Revolution, had agreed that they would not turn on each other, accuse each other, kill each other, as the French revolutionaries had done. But that is exactly what they did.
Isaac Deutscher thought Lenin, one of history’s most ruthless murderers, was the Perfect Man. Interesting, that: it is a concept from spiritual traditions.
One of Lenin’s contributions to the happiness of humankind was the concept of Revolutionary Vigilance—which in practice meant that Communist Party members must be regularly and steadily murdered, tortured, imprisoned, and sent to camps, so as to keep them on their toes. This policy was most faithfully carried on by Stalin.
I had a glimpse of what it had been like as a Trotskyist in America when I introduced Clancy Sigal to Reuben Ship, Ted Allan, and the rest of the group. They all had been Stalinists. They met with ironical, or sarcastic, understanding and at once began bitter debates. But after all, they were talking to each other, and quite recently no Stalinist would have considered a Trot worthy of a hello—more suitable, rather, as recipient for an ice pick in the brain.
I was thinking back to the Trotskyist group in Salisbury. I had secretly thought them a more lively and interesting lot than we were. There was such a thing as a Trot by temperament: anarchic, spiky, fiercely aggressive, funny.
In the Party, in the fifties, there was a joke that Stalinists and Freudians were of the same stuff, conforming and conservative, and Jungians and Trotskyists were similar: all rebels. Things have changed, so that it is hard now to explain how Freudians seemed then: they were a church, a priesthood, the possessors of a revealed truth; they persecuted opponents or people who strayed from their path. They were humourless. They were paranoid. I cannot say that I find Freud the most lovable of human beings, any more than I find Marx, but surely he—they—both—would have hated their inheritors? Surely people who have original ideas, start movements, must be haunted by what they know must happen: they will give birth to a generation who snarl and snap over their remains, turn them into icons, become fanatics and bigots.
I found I agreed with the Trotskyist Clancy about politics, and that was when I was a member of the Party, though thinking of ways to leave it without a fuss. Surely that was remarkable, for the official party line about Trotsky was unchanged. On the Left, everyone always spent a lot of time defining exact intellectual positions. A private individual ‘line’ need not be the party line—seldom was. Clancy and I spent hours: What do you think about this…and this? Do you think this is true or that is true? There would have to be a revolution—well, of course—but certainly the present communist parties, in Britain and in Europe, could not lead it; they were too compromised.
Clancy had an immediate, intelligent understanding of women, not as females, but of our situation, our difficulties. This was because of his mother’s long ordeal, bringing him up, very poor, without help from his father—who went off and started another family. Women easily responded to him. In The Golden Notebook I call it ‘naming’. He ‘named’ us. Every woman he ever met he got into bed, or tried, and as a matter of principle. The style of the Lone Ranger. He told me about his journeyings around America, north-south, east-west, and he seldom spent a night alone. I do not think these women lost out, even when he was ill, for when he left the next morning they would feel themselves supported, simply because he had understood them.
I remember with shame at my stupidity that when he came into my bed—I think on the first night he was in the flat—what I felt was that the loneliness I had been living in since Jack took off was over. There is no fool like a woman in need of a man. A man, that is, to have and to hold.
No, I was not stupid for long. Here was another man who made no secret at all of the fact that he was merely passing through. Both Jack and Clancy are in The Golden Notebook. Not necessarily facts, but emotional truth is all there. Play with a Tiger too. Later Clancy wrote a novel and put me in it, but I didn’t read it. Usually I don’t read books about myself, unless it is a supposedly factual book and I have to check facts. I don’t read them because the temptation to burst into protest and altercation might prove irresistible: one could spend one’s life at it.
‘But I didn’t say that.’ ‘Oh yes, you did!’
‘I didn’t, I tell you.’ ‘But I tell you you did.’
‘Didn’t.’ ‘Did.’ ‘Didn’t.’ ‘Did.’
‘That never happened.’ ‘I know it did.’
‘I know it didn’t.’ ‘It did.’ ‘Didn’t.’ ‘Did.’ ‘Didn’t.’ ‘Did.’
Most disagreements of this kind are usually not on a much higher level. What’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me.
Clancy is now living in California, with a new young wife and a baby. He has had a first wife and a lot of women on the way. When I knew him, domestic life, intimacy, everything that comes so easily to me, was to him not merely a trap, as young men so easily see it—and particularly then; it was the mode—but a betrayal of the pure, the good, the decent, a submission to a bourgeois morality—than which, of course, there could be nothing worse. He would relate how he had walked out of a friend’s house in the States because the man had got married—the ultimate submission—and there were contraceptive gels in the bathroom cabinet. This was evidence of the most disgusting moral backsliding from the standards of the young knights they had decided to be. Travelling around the States on his farewell trip, he had found half the friends of his youth married and with incriminating bathroom cabinets. ‘That’s when I knew that was it, I had to leave.’ Domestic squalor—he could scent it on walking into a house.
We were together, if that is the word for it, for three years or so.
I really don’t have much to say about Clancy’s accounts of London, except that he claims that in London he was forced to eat in cheap hamburger joints. The fact is, he was cooked for by some of the best amateur cooks in London. If he did find himself in a hamburger joint, then it was on some nostalgic trip to the brave hardships of his poverty-struck youth. London was very good to Clancy.
He was a romantic man, Clancy. The Left was then romantic, heroic, monitored by the ghosts of heroes and heroines. Of the darker side of this, more later.
Now, I met Clancy just as the romantic—the sentimental—attitudinisings of the Left were beginning to shock me. I had fed on them, for years. They had been my fuel, my impulse towards better things. It is a strange business, how one may go along comfortably but with unease, at first which is at best slight, then more and more, and then a rush of dislike of what you are, have been, as the scales fall from your eyes. And then you dislike what you have been much more than it deserves, but you have to, for it is still a threat.
Clancy caused as severe a dislocation of my picture of myself as ever in my life. I had always been seen as a maverick—tactless, intransigent, ‘difficult’—and now, all at once, I was accused of being an English lady. It was no good saying that any real English lady would at once repudiate me as a bogus sister. This English lady was ignorant of the harsh realities of life, which meant, for him, the struggles of the poor. Clancy was never one to spare unfavourable comment, and I was tongue-lashed, but I gave back as good as I got. I had only just learned the art of not saying what I thought when I thought it and I found I was defending hard-won social graces against this savagely angry social critic.
‘Jesus, but the English kill me. Why don’t you ever say what you think?’
At once he undertook my education into the realities of life, and he began with jazz. For which I shall always be grateful to him. To me until then jazz had meant the ‘kids’ of the Sports Club in Salisbury apeing Satchmo when they were drunk at the climax of some dance, or the smooth melodies of Cole Porter.
He went with me to buy a record player and twenty or so records, each one in some way special, a landmark in jazz, or the best of some artist. It took me years to appreciate just what a perfect little collection this was. No one may be immersed in real jazz, and the blues, without a change in sensibility. As Clancy knew. He was nothing if not an educator. He saw it as his task to re-form and re-shape every inadequate soul in his path. He instructed me in the history of jazz, of the blues, how to listen to different instruments, how to tell false from true, how to appreciate the way a group plays together, the instruments as a family. He insisted that I, like him, should own only the purest tastes. Later, his tutelage removed, I allowed myself less rigorous standards, a guilty Duke Ellington perhaps, an Eartha Kitt.
I listened to jazz, particularly the blues, for four years or so. What did it do for me? If the yearning, longing, wanting, you-are-out-of-reach music of the war years—‘I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’—predisposed me, and all of us, to romantic love, whose essence is to be out of reach, then I think jazz, and particularly the blues, inclines us to suffering, the enjoyment of the pain of loss. I am oversimplifying, but in my case, listening to the blues, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, or the heartbroken fragmented cries of Bird’s saxophone, went together with a time of pain, and the one reinforced the other. The richly enjoyable melancholies of adolescence can deepen into something dangerous, a poison.
Clancy taught me the code of honour of the working-class American, but surely it was influenced by the working people of Russia and East Europe and the shtetl too? Clancy always knew exactly what was right and what was wrong. This was as inflexible a code of behaviour as I’ve ever heard of.
First of all, if a friend, even an acquaintance, even someone you had only heard of, lost a job, then your first duty was to get her or him another. A priority, put before any of your own interests. This was a legacy from the unemployment in the thirties.
Secondly, you hated the police as a matter of course, always and everywhere. You always defended your friends or mates against the police, and any lie about the police was good, for they lied about the workers, or the poor. Clancy, walking in the southern states of America, from town to town, or hitchhiking, had been run out of town as a vagrant, taken beyond the city limits and dumped, or put in prison, suspected of all kinds of crimes. To say one word in defence of the police was to prove that you were middle class and an enemy.
Third, if any friend or comrade, or the wife or girlfriend of a friend, was down on his or her luck, then you rallied around with money and food.
Fourth, if anyone was on the run, or in hiding, for any reason at all (except of course if he was a political opponent), you sheltered him, hid him, without asking questions. I think this last surely was a legacy from slavery—hiding runaway slaves.
Clancy’s education of me included his explorations into London, the squalid parts, for his instinct led him to them as if it is only in the lower depths that the truth can be found. For instance, I had not known that on a certain street corner in Soho a poker game went on every day under the noses of the police. Clancy used to go there, chancing his luck, when short of money. He talked a great deal to prostitutes. I was exasperated by his attitude to them—more romanticising, more glamorising of crime and poverty. Americans then were all fascinated by prostitutes, just as if they had none of their own. Any American who came to see me in those days would at once ask where he could find the girls. I directed them to Soho, where the girls would line the streets every evening, or Bayswater. But shortly that was illegal, and then I directed them to the newsagents’ boards.
Soon Clancy became friends with Alex Jacobs, a large, friendly, instantly likeable young man, one of the people who would coalesce into the New Left, then in the process of being born. Alex was not the only person I’ve heard say that being forced to lie in bed with nothing to do for months was the best thing that ever happened to him. In his case, it was TB. He read all the time he was in the sanatorium, and came out looking back with pity on the ignorant youth he had been. He was a journalist and intended to write. The two young men took themselves around and about Earls Court, Notting Hill Gate, Soho, anywhere something was happening—crimes, scandals, protests, ‘demos’—and sat about in pubs, cafés, bus shelters, cheap restaurants, the coffee bars just opening everywhere, and they watched people, talked endlessly, listened, reported minor injustices to the authorities. They were both outsiders, both outside by that unwritten law that says that the two great divisions of British society should be impenetrable to each other. Clancy’s American accent and Alex’s working-class voice, which he exaggerated when on these adventures, made them acceptable to what are known as ordinary people. They could go where people like me could not. It was all right for me when I still had my Rhodesian accent, which put me outside the system, but that had gone, and now, as is the way in these islands, I was judged by how I spoke. I discovered quite by accident that I had lost my early freedom here when, in Devon, I was walking towards an ironmonger’s shop and saw the shopkeeper watching me. He stood in the doorway, hands on his hips, and he was doubtless thinking, She looks like them, the clothes…but there is something not quite…He waited for me to speak: Do you stock…whatever it was, and his posture subtly changed, he dropped his arms, and then, ‘Yes, madam, if you’ll come inside.’
Clancy and Alex used to breeze in, elated, after some excursion and tell me all about it, over coffee or a meal. They were accepted as honorary members by some groups of boys, young men, really, since they had left school. Fifteen was the age you left school then. Both men identified with these ‘kids’ who had little or no education, had nothing to do with themselves now except hang about the streets. This passion of protectiveness for the deprived: I knew what I was looking at, all right—what I was being invited to share. One evening they brought a youth who sat for a couple of hours talking about his life, while Alex and Clancy encouraged him. Their understanding of his situation gave him much more coherence and clarity than normally he would have bothered with. He was not against his parents but did not want to be like them. He had been educated by films—there was not yet much television—into wider horizons, and he did not want to settle for (a phrase much used by Clancy, meaning a compromise with the second-best) the life of his parents. But he knew his education had not fitted him for anything better. He said he didn’t have a job because he wanted more than what he’d have to accept. But soon he would get something, because he didn’t want to live on his parents, and then he would marry, someone like his sister, and as soon as he married he would be trapped. This would be the only time in his life he’d have a bit of freedom, and he was enjoying it whil
e he could. Once married, then that was it, that was the end. In other words, how he was thinking was the precise opposite of his sister, for she was waiting for the wedding, and then life would begin—as he pointed out. The visit was about a week before the Notting Hill Gate race riots, when white youths beat up blacks. The youth who had spoken so intelligently about his life was arrested and shortly tried at the Old Bailey; I attended with Clancy and Alex. They knew exactly what had happened that night, because they had been there, dodging about, watching. I knew what had happened because they had told me. We sat there in the crammed court, while the police lied, the witnesses lied, the defence lawyer lied, and of course the accused lied, to save themselves, but it was no use: they were sentenced to prison. I sat there watching the jury, thankful I wasn’t among them, for if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have been able to say who was lying and who wasn’t.
Clancy and Alex pursued their researches, even after the New Left had become a social entity, a tribe, and met mostly only each other. One day they said they had found a young girl being kept prisoner by a Greek restaurant proprietor and they were going to rescue her and bring her to my flat. She was a plump fair frail beauty, with hazy blue eyes. She was eighteen years old: the Greek’s mistress. Her parents, she said, didn’t like her. The Greek had a wife and children. He would not allow her out of the room he kept her in during the day. She was bored, she said. She was afraid of him, she said.
It seemed Clancy and Alex believed that all I had to do was to say, ‘Now come on, my girl, pull yourself together, this won’t do.’ For whatever I said, no matter how I put it, this is how it would sound to her. She wasn’t very clever, unlike the young man doing time in prison somewhere, but she did know she wasn’t going to marry a boring man like her dad and then slave away for him. What was she doing now if not being a slave to her Greek? I did enquire, but she only smiled—her lazy, knowing little smile. It was perfectly clear to me that she had agreed to escape with the two young heroes because what she had heard was that they were promising her a future. Glamour. Posh people. Exciting times with this famous writer—so they had told her I was. She hinted she would like to be a model, a film star. I was a disappointment to her. She fingered books with my name on them, asked, had I written this? When I said yes, then she gazed at me, all baffled enquiry: then why are you living like this, why aren’t you in a place like the ones we see on the telly? What had Clancy and Alex promised her, exactly? A general betterment, it seemed, improvement, enlightenment. They would breeze in, to see how this process was going, and find us gossiping in the kitchen over cups of tea. And stronger—she liked a bit of gin, or sweet liqueurs; she was used to going out with her Greek to drink with him and his friends in the evenings.