Walking in the Shade
Page 47
But usually, when I hear someone talking nostalgically about the sixties—‘If you remember it, you weren’t there’—what comes into my mind is a line from a poem I wrote when I was very young, not more than a girl: ‘When I look back I seem to remember singing.’ Well, yes, that seems to be about it.
Acknowledgments
My especial thanks to Jonathan Clowes for his good advice and his support, and, with this book, helping out my memories with his, for though we did not know each other then, we shared an experience of certain public events.
And to Stuart Proffitt, my editor at HarperCollins, for his excellent and sensitive editing.
My gratitude, too, to Dorothy Thompson, who generously wrote asking me if I would like to have copies of my letters to Edward Thompson. I had forgotten I had written them.
And to Joan Rodker, Tom Maschler, Mervyn Jones, and Clive Exton, for useful corrections and suggestions.
About the Author
Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. Her most recent works include Love, Again and Under My Skin, the first volume of her autobiography. Doris Lessing lives in London.
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ALSO BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass Is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers:
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
If the Old Could…
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Love, Again
“Canopus in Argos: Archives” series
Re: Colonized Planet 5-Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
“Children of Violence” series
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
SHORT STORIES
African Stories
Volume I This Was the Old Chief’s Country
Volume II The Sun Between Their Feet
Stories
Volume I To Room Nineteen
Volume II The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (U.S.), London Observed (U.K.)
OPERA
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (Music by Philip Glass)
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Particularly Cats…and Rufus
African Laughter
Under My Skin
The Doris Lessing Reader
Copyright
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WALKING IN THE SHADE. Copyright © 1997 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061856440
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*I was soon to have a sharp little lesson in the realities of publishing. The first paperback edition of The Grass Is Singing had on its front a lurid picture of a blonde cowering terrified while a big buck nigger (the only way to describe him) stood over her, threatening her with a panga. My protests, on the lines of ‘But Moses the black man was not a great stupid murderous thug,’ were ignored with: ‘You don’t understand anything about selling books.’
*‘Freudian’ dreams are altogether more personal and petty.
*The Sheffield Conference, November 1950, never-took place, because the incoming delegates were refused visas; it was transferred to Warsaw.
*Wroclaw: Wrotslav, or Breslau.
*On a Peace Delegation, probably.
*The Society of Authors is something like a writers’ trade union.
*I left 1953.
*Jonathan was actually acting as an agent for talented but impecunious friends, some of whom later became world best-sellers, before realising that that was what he was.
*Instalment buying.
*Basil Davidson later became known as an expert in African affairs and African history.
*‘I have seen the future and it works.’—Lincoln Steffens, an American journalist in love with the Soviet Union in the thirties.
*In the United States, Cohn and Schine were serious and admired politicians. Cohn had been one of those who sent the Rosenbergs to their death. In Europe, they seemed only ludicrous, because of their pompous hysterical oratory, and they were a gift to the comedians.
*He was trusted by the Americans, too. I don’t know any other writer in this position. It was because of his evident honesty.
*This business of the theft of the young writer’s book: sometimes it is claimed as true, other times denied. I don’t know what the position is now.
*Mervyn Jones is a novelist and journalist.
*See Under My Skin.
*Bram Fischer was perhaps the best-known, bravest of the South African communists. He was a lawyer. He spent years in prison.
*Babu died in 1996.
*I wrote a passionate letter protesting about it to the Union of Soviet Writers and got a conciliatory letter back. Of course I had not expected to actually change anything.
*Kingsley Amis was not a Communist Party member.
*Printed in the New Statesman.
†I suppressed this book.
*Which Revolution? Against whom or what? Why? When? But we are talking about a mass social psychosis.
*This was David Piper, known to his friends as Peter.
*John Dexter was later a famous director of theatre and opera.
*Because the era when it was fashionable for the youth not to care about politics was only just ending, there were
quite a few hopeful young men who had to be advised by their mentors that they could not expect to be movers and shakers of the nation if totally ignorant about what was going on in the world.
†Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was later murdered—a political murder; no one seems to know why.
*Later, when Tom Maschler ran Jonathan Cape, he was my publisher—most felicitously—for many years. In the States I was published by Knopf—Robert Gottlieb. I have been fortunate: two of the finest publishers of the time have been my publishers and my good friends.
*A radio show that has been running for years.
*See Under My Skin.
*Oscar Lowenstein died in 1997.
*Three writers in particular should be remembered for their treatment at the hands of comrades. One is George Orwell, who wrote in Homage to Catalonia about what he had observed during the Spanish Civil War, the dirty dealings of the communists and, by extension, of the Soviet Union. As late as 1996 he was being accused, and had to be defended, when it became known he was working with British security forces against the Soviet Union—surely logical that he should, when he had learned the hard way about the real nature of Soviet communism and the blind support of the Left for everything it did. The influence of the comrades extended far beyond the Party: Victor Gollancz actually apologised publicly for publishing Animal Farm. George Orwell was systematically denigrated by the comrades until he died. Solzhenitsyn could not be dismissed by saying that he did not know firsthand what he was writing about, so instead they said he couldn’t write—no talent. The third, Proust, has only recently been released from ‘Oh, but he was such a snob.’ No one has written more wittily about snobbishness, social climbing, machinations in pursuit of honours, how people’s minds change under pressure of social opinion. But his scene was the aristocracy and its hangers-on, and so, ‘He was such a snob’—that most vulgar of the critics’ defences: identification of the writer with the material.
*These figures are contested, but now the Soviet archives are open, the truth must soon be known.
*The Minister for Arts, and Aneurin Bevan’s wife.
*Ralph Samuel died in 1996.
*The first Aldermaston March was in 1958.
*There were hundreds of thousands—millions?—of these saints of politics in the world then, stern, ruthless, military in style, each accompanied by the ghost of Lenin, that Perfect Man—each acting leading roles of heroic martyrdom in dramas written by Revolution Itself and running in their heads day and night like tapes that could not be turned off. Sometimes I wonder how these characters see it all now. Are they saying, ‘I don’t know what got into me’?
*Wayland Young was then a well-known journalist.
*This film was one of the new wave of British films of the time: Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz.
*He died on 23 November 1996.
*Edward died in 1993.
*The Round House in north London, an enormous building, has had many incarnations and was the place where Customs and Excise kept liquors and wines, before it became a theatre.