Читать книгу Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962 - Doris Lessing - Страница 10

The World Congress of Intellectuals dedicated by the French and Polish organizing committees to find a road to peace opened in anything but a peaceful manner to-day. After the Foreign Minister, Mr Medzelewski, had welcomed the delegates, the Soviet writer, Alexander Fadieev, launched the work of the Congress with the usual bitter diatribe against ‘American Imperialism’ and for this occasion extended it to include ‘reactionary aggressive’ elements of American culture as well.

Mr Fadieev also attacked schools of writing which ‘bred aggressive propaganda,’ and. naming T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, John dos Passos, Jean Paul Sartre, and Andre Malraux, he said: ‘If hyenas could type and jackals could use a fountain pen they would write such things’ as were produced by these men. The Soviet writer’s outburst drew a temperate but firm reply from Mr Olaf Stapledon, the Bntish author, who, reminding Mr Fadieev of the purpose of the Congress, said that if they were to reach any agreement they must all make a special effort ‘to enter into the other point of view.’

Mr Stapledon said that no side could lay claim to all the truth and that both sides, not just one, were guilty of using ‘instruments which pervert the truth.’ He answered Mr Fadieev specifically on Mr Eliot, saying that while they might not agree with his politics he certainly was an important figure in British poetry.

Mr Stapledon arranged a private meeting to-night between the British and Russian delegates to enable them to get to know each other better.

The delegates from Britain were Sir John Boyd Orr, the dean of Canterbury, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, Professor J. D. Bernal, Professor C. H. Waddington, Professor Hyman Levy, Richard Hughes, Olaf Stapledon, Louis Golding, Rudand Brougham, Bernard Stevens, Felix Topolski, Dr Julian Huxley, A. J. P. Taylor, Denis Saurat, Edward Crankshaw. A starry list. (The Times list.)

As for our Authors World Peace Appeal: Very late at night, after those interminable, exhausting banquets, those speeches, trips here and there – collective farm, children’s holiday camp, museums – Alfred Coppard and I sat in my room and exchanged talk which must have had the ears of our invisible listeners curling with disbelief. No, I said, no, you must not go on the radio and say that Stalin is the greatest man who ever lived, no, nor claim that Britain is a tyranny worse than any communist country. Do you really want us all to quarrel publicly and make a field day for our newspapers? ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t quarrel publicly,’ he said, ‘if that’s how we feel.’ From time to time he tried to kiss me, or fondle me. My stern sense of duty forbade amorous dalliance. Besides, he was old.

It was also my duty to visit Richard Mason in his room and tell him that he simply must not announce on every possible occasion that he had never read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. Our hosts had read all of British literature – the writers among them really had – and he was shaming us all. ‘Who is Turgenev?’ he might drawl, if the name came up. I thought he was putting it on, that this was his equivalent of Douglas Young’s kilt. But he really had not read anything much. He claimed that he had become a writer by accident. A very young lonely soldier, he had lain wounded in a hospital in – I think – Burma, had fallen in love with his beautiful brown nurse, had written the story, as much from boredom as for anything, and it had become a best-seller. He claimed he found great literature boring. Was this true? But his phlegmatic, philistine persona concealed all kinds of sensibilities. Like us all, he was upset by what he saw in Moscow: its dreary streets, its empty shops, the bad clothes, its atmosphere – this was just before Stalin died. We used to beg our minder, one Oksana, a beautiful Georgian girl, to be allowed to wander about the streets as we pleased, but she was evidently afraid. We did manage little guilty trips when she wasn’t looking, but were recalled by her anxious scoldings: ‘What are you doing? You are not allowed …’

In those streets of almost empty shops there were two exceptions. One was the bread shops, wonderful, redeeming the ugliness, crammed full of different breads, brown, white, black, great fat crusty loaves that smelled so good we wanted to eat them then and there. The other surprise was corset shops. There were scarcely any clothes, the shoes were flimsy or clodhopping, there was nothing frivolous or nice, or piquant, or fashionable, or colourful. But there were corset shops and, in each, one or two enormous bright pink or purple corsets, with stays like girders, and shiny pink ribbons. Not a bra in sight, though.

Scenes, little bright-coloured scenes, which I wrote down when I came home after the trip, and used to come on, among ageing papers and old notebooks. ‘Good God, all that happened, it did happen…’

We are in the Tretyakov – an art gallery – surrounded by vast pictures of grazing cows, happy peasants, agreeable landscapes. Naomi, a collector of modern art, stands in front of a herd of cows. ‘That is a very fine cow,’ she drawls in her Oxford voice, which for some reason is emphasized in Russia. Our guides, the museum officials, gaze at the cow. ‘A fine cow,’ she drawls, ‘but surely she needs milking?’ The official meets her innocent gaze, but it is more than his life is worth – literally – to laugh. ‘Soviet cows are well treated,’ he says severely. Naomi says, ‘I’ve got a cow in my herd just like that brown one.’ We, coming on behind, are smiling, and even risking a laugh, but the look on the man’s face stops us.

It seems that the Soviet artists, who were allowed to paint only ‘healthy’ pictures, softened their situation, at least a little, by this ruse: A picture having been completed, they deliberately painted in a dog or an obviously out-of-place figure. When this picture was set in front of the officials who would say yea or nay, they were bound to criticise it, to cover themselves in case of criticism from high up. At which point the artist would come in. ‘Comrades, I’ve just seen – it’s that dog. I was wrong to put in that dog.’ ‘Very well, then, comrade, take out the dog.’ And the picture was passed. This sort of stratagem has turned out to be quite amazingly useful to me, in all kinds of contexts: suitably modified, of course.

While on a trip to a collective farm, the official cars having turned off onto the farm road, Naomi asks if we may stop. Our cars, four or five of them, stop. We all get out, about twenty people, and stand on the track, looking across fields. It is August, very hot, the grain already harvested. ‘That’s a very nasty bit of erosion,’ says Naomi, pointing. And indeed, it is. ‘But our grain harvest for last year was very good on this farm.’ ‘Well, you won’t be getting good harvests for long, if you allow that kind of erosion,’ she says. In this way did her frustrated need to criticise much worse show itself.

It was at this collective farm that I witnessed the bravest thing I have ever seen in my life.

We, the six of us, and our hosts, headed by Alexei Surkov, stood facing a crowd of collective farmers. We were being introduced. An old man, dressed in a white peasant smock, like Tolstoy, stepped out and said he wanted to speak. At once the others attempted to hustle and scold him back into the group. He stood his ground, said he had to speak to us. A silence. Oksana was clearly frightened. The old man spoke. Oksana interpreted, and Douglas Young, our Russian speaker, stopped her. ‘No, you are not interpreting properly,’ he said, blandly, like a professor. The old man addressed him, and Douglas interpreted, while Oksana squeezed her hands together, as if she were praying. ‘You must not believe what you are told. Visitors from abroad are told lies. You must not believe what you are shown. Our lives are terrible. The Russian people – I am speaking for the Russian people. You must go back to Britain and tell everybody what I am saying. Communism is terrible –’ And he was pulled back by the others and surrounded, but he stood among them with his burning eyes fixed on us, while the others scolded him. That was remarkable – they scolded and fussed at him; they didn’t shrink away from a pariah. And throughout the long, toast-filled meal that followed, he sat silent, his eyes on us, while they scolded – affectionately, there was no doubt about that. Yet at that time people vanished into the Gulag for much less than what he had done. No crime could be worse than to say such things to foreigners. He would be arrested and disposed of, and he knew that this would happen.

During this meal Coppard was enjoying himself flirting delightfully with the collective farm’s teacher and nurse. He loved charming young women, and these two were pretty and warm, and flirted with him.

I try and imagine this as a scene in a film, but it is truly too terrible. There is a long, loaded table, flowers, wine, a banquet. There, the special people chosen from the farm to represent the Soviet farmers. There, we happy delegates, elated and pleased with ourselves, the way you get on such trips. There, the party officials, all affability. There, the old man in his smock, never taking his eyes off us. Albert Coppard is flirting. We make speeches. Douglas Young reminds us all of the sufferings of the Scottish farmers. Naomi talks about British farming practices, contrasting them severely with what we saw while driving through the fields.

In the lavatory there is a framed copy of Kipling’s ‘If’. We are told that this is everyone’s favourite piece of poetry and they all know it by heart.

The next time I saw ‘If’ on the back of a lavatory door was on a large rich farm in Kenya, where there were photographs of the Queen everywhere.

We were taken to a building filled with presents to Stalin from his grateful subjects. It was sad, because they were mostly hideous, derivations or fallings-off from some genuine peasant or folk tradition, like carpets with his face occupying all the middle of them, or carved boxes or metalwork – all with his face. I left the others at it and went to sit outside. It was there I decided to try and write a story according to the communist formula, because I was becoming uncomfortably aware of our smugness and superiority. It would have very good and very bad characters in it, like Dickens. I wrote it. It was called ‘Hunger.’ It was about a youth from a village in Africa, risking his fortunes and his life going to the big city, this being a basic plot of our time, not only in Africa. The background came from Africans I knew, who would describe, when I asked, exactly how this or that was done in a village, how things were in the locations and shebeens of Salisbury. This story has been much translated and reprinted, and yet I am ashamed of it. Quite a few of my early stories I would like to see vanish away. What is wrong with that tale is sentimentality, which is often the sign of an impure origin: in this case, to write a tale with a moral.

Naomi and I and Oksana are standing in St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, and Naomi is lecturing Oksana about the Russian lack of taste. Naomi suffered aesthetically throughout that trip. Everything was ugly and second-rate. If Arnold and I murmured something about the war, she would say, Nonsense, they are producing new materials and furniture, and they are hideous. She showed Oksana the patterns on the walls and ceilings and said. Why, when you’ve got this, do you put such hideous patterns on your dress materials? Oksana was confused. She did not know the patterns on the new cottons and silks were hideous. When Naomi showed her the Liberty skirt she had on, Oksana did not see why it was any better than the bales of cotton she had showed us that morning. She thought the patterns on the cathedral walls were old and old-fashioned. She asked me afterwards why, if Mrs Mitchison was a rich lady, she wore cotton and not silk. For of course, if you could afford it, you wore silk all the time. Oksana’s best dress was silk. ‘And very nice too,’ said Richard Mason gallantly. Arnold and I discussed how Naomi patronized our hosts and apparently did not know it, and how we could stop her. We actually took her to task. ‘Naomi, you’ve got to stop hurting their feelings like this. We won’t have it.’

‘But I simply cannot understand it,’ Naomi said, that voluminous voice booming.’ Why can’t they take good models for their furniture instead of that rubbish?’

‘But, Naomi,’ said intellectual Arnold, ‘that’s what happens when a peasant tradition is smashed: they model themselves on something modern. They had taste in the old ways, but they have to develop taste in the new.’

‘Well,’ drawled Naomi, ‘but I’m going to have my say. This delegation is supposed to be bridging gaps: I’m jolly well going to tell them about their atrocious taste.’

‘Then when we get home we’re going to tell the press that you spent your time patronizing the Russians about their aesthetic sense.’

‘But, Arnold, my dear boy, you surely can’t be serious.’

‘You’re hurting their feelings, Naomi,’ said Arnold, his eyes full of tears.

In Leningrad they asked Naomi and me if we minded sharing a room. We thought this odd; it took me a long time to see that probably they wanted to overhear our conversations. It being August, the nights were not completely white, but almost; there were only a couple of hours of real dark. Exhausted, I flopped into bed, a double bed, and there was Naomi, prodding me, because she wanted me to tell her about my love life, so she could tell me about her lovers in the twenties. I thought this was like being back at school, naughty conversations in the dorm. She said young women these days had become real stick-in-the-muds. I went to sleep.

Leningrad was a sad city, grey and elegant, full of watery perspectives, its walls pocked with bullet holes or cracked because of the attritions of the siege, in which ten years before one and a half million people died. We moved from palace to palace, all built in the style I know some people adore, all gilt curlicues and cupids, rosy flesh, pink and blue ribbons, medallions, a very festival of pouring and dimpling architecture. This was because Russian royalty had adored France and imported the style for palaces, and so even when we went to the Children’s House, it was a former palace, and the thought of sandpits or swings seemed in rather poor taste.

We had a formal encounter with the Leningrad branch of the Soviet Writers, and there we were, in another of these frivolous rooms, for an occasion as sombre as any I remember. Naomi had said she was going to insist that the Leningrad writers produce the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko for our inspection. There were rumours in the West that he was dead – murdered. Arnold and I were horrified. First, why should any writer anywhere be produced like evidence in a law court? And then we did know that writers were, as it is now put, keeping a low profile – trying not to be noticed – and perhaps it would be the last thing he would welcome, being made a test case by the West. But Naomi insisted.

I cannot remember the names of our hosts. The opening speeches were all sound and fury. Already we were weary of them, to the point where we were saying. Thank God we are going home soon; one more speech and –

‘Or one more toast.’

‘Or one more banquet.’

After a while you literally cannot listen to these speeches. It is as if the rhetoric numbs your brain: the words – the sound – a narcotic. Speeches of this sort went on for the hours of the meeting but were interrupted by a young poet who, like a Quaker, from time to time feeling an impulse he could not disobey, had to jump to his feet and recite an ode to Stalin. Obviously, no one could object, at the risk of being accused of lèse-majesté, so that every time this happened, all the officials smiled benignly at the inspired infant and even clapped. Against this background Mikhail Zoshchenko was brought in and sat in the middle of the room, the Russians on one side, we on the other. He was a little thin man, yellow-skinned, and he looked ill, and was being brave, and dignified. Just as with the defiant old man at the collective farm, it was as if the atmosphere itself put protective arms around him. These officials, no matter how much they were vassals, lackeys, arse-lickers, were all under threat themselves, had seen many writers, friends or not, disappear into exile or the camps. Zoshchenko had been under official criticism – and that meant from themselves too – for a long time now. He had written small, very funny, very popular stories about the mishaps and anomalies of the lives of citizens living under communism, and a wonderful novella called, simply, People – and for a while had been officially applauded, but that did not last.

While sitting before us, he agreed, when prodded by the chairman, that he certainly did still exist, was well and well-treated, and had seen the error of his ways; he had repented of his negative and critical early work, but he was now engaged on a three-volume novel about the Great Patriotic War, which he hoped would atone for his former crimes.

Mikhail Zoshchenko died quite soon, of illness, not in a camp; so he was more fortunate than many Soviet writers. Arnold and I, discussing the death, tried to hope that what we had thought was a grotesque and silly intervention in his life perhaps in the end had protected him. But I do not think Stalin, who decided these matters, cared about the opinions of “useful idiots.” (Lenin’s description of Westerners like us.)

By now there was no pretence that we were a unit. Naomi and Douglas spent their free time, such as there was, together.

Coppard wanted to be with me, to be reassured. He was disturbed by the grimness of Moscow, while delighted by the multitudes of visitors – delegations – from everywhere in the communist world.

But I was mostly with Arnold. We talked, and we talked. How ridiculous it does seem now – that we took ourselves so seriously. Don’t forget that on the shoulders of communists rested the future of the entire world. Communists and ‘progressive forces’. It occurs to me now that all adolescents believe this: everything lies in their hands, because adults are such a disaster. Is it possible that this so fundamental belief of the communists was no more than delayed or displaced collective adolescence?

The stress, the pressures, our disagreements, the lack of sleep, the strenuous pace of our engagements, were reducing us to our worst selves, or at least to the extremes of our natures. Richard Mason became more solitary, silent, and exaggerated his philistine pose: ‘I’m sorry, I never go near a theatre or a concert.’ Coppard always found in any gathering that sympathetically pretty woman, or untrammelled soul, with whom he talked about how in his youth he had walked by himself all over England – this was often Samuel Marshak, who had walked over Russia as a young man. Coppard told everyone that he loathed politicians, hated the ruling class of his country, loved communism. Douglas Young’s enormous height and kilt called forth storms of applause as he talked, whenever he could, about the ground-down Scots. Naomi’s upper-class drawl become more intolerable with every day. ‘But the poor things, they simply must learn better.’ Arnold became more emotional and was often in tears. There was every opportunity for tears. They took us to a dance hall, to see how the people enjoyed themselves. This was Moscow’s main amusement hall. It was an ugly, poor place. A band played 1930s dance music. And not a man in sight, not one, only women and girls, dancing together. ‘Why no men?’ we asked, stupidly. And Oksana said, ‘But the men were all killed in the war.’ For she had no man, nor expected to marry: just like my mother’s generation, whose men were dead.

Arnold wept, and I became bossy-boots, more so with every hour.

Arnold and I, sitting in my plushy suite, every word we said monitored, decided it wasn’t good enough, we could not stand any more of the official rhetoric; the trouble with the Russians was they hadn’t had enough contact with the outside world, they did not know how to talk simply, in a human way. What we had to do – we decided after long discussion – was to frame a question which would force Alexei Surkov to answer truthfully, bypassing the jargon. And this was the question we came up with: ‘Always, in every society, even in the most rigid, new ideas appear, are usually regarded as reprehensible or even seditious, but then become accepted, only to be swept aside in their turn by ideas at first considered heretical. How does the Soviet Union allow for this inevitable process, which prevents cultures going rotten, or stultified?’ If these were not the exact words – I believe they were – this was the sense of the question. Arnold and I found a moment when Surkov was not surrounded by henchmen. We said we wanted to put a question that was of the greatest importance to us. He listened carefully, nodded (with the sternness demanded by the Soviet style), and said, ‘Yes, that’s a very good question,’ and he would give us our reply tomorrow, when we went to Yasnaya Polyana. This was Tolstoy’s estate, a place of pilgrimage. We did actually expect a real answer.

We drove, several cars, out into the country, and on the roads were local people selling wild strawberries. The officials all bought them, and particularly Boris Polevoi, who though not an official was with us in Moscow. He was an applauded writer of novels about the Great Patriotic War. Konstantin Simonov was also there. He had just produced a volume of love poems, officially accepted, though love poems were considered daring and Stalin himself had said he thought that such effusions should surely be confined to the bedroom. This remark was being quoted often, as a sign of the great man’s paternal interest in the arts. Boris was an attractive man, boyish, enthusiastic, and he went everywhere on a motorcycle, which fact was rubbed in at every opportunity: here is this important and honoured writer, but he is not too good to go about on a motorcycle. At Tolstoy’s place we saw his house, which, if you think that this man was an aristocrat and a member of Russia’s top society, was astonishing, because it is not large and yet it had in it so many relations, children, servants, visitors. Above all, it is poorly furnished, and the sofa on which the countess gave birth so often stands in an ordinary public room and might have been designed for maximum discomfort.

The woods and fields are wonderful. The table for lunch was long, for about thirty people, and set out under the trees. Surkov’s daughter was there, a merry, pretty girl, her father’s pet: he could not take his eyes off her and showed her off to us. She remarked she was going on a trip to polar regions, and the romanticism of the communist imagination at once seized Arnold, who asked if she was going on an expedition to the North Pole, for no less could be expected of a Soviet maiden. She laughed prettily and said no, she was going with school friends to visit some picturesque place. It is only when I recall moments like this that I can put myself back into that atmosphere of heroic expectation which was the air of communism.

Arnold and I were waiting for Surkov’s reply, and when nothing had happened and it was time to leave, we invited him to come aside with us. But he stood his ground. Not moving even a step away from his officials, he raised his voice, so that everybody in sight had to turn and look, and, lifting his clenched right fist, orated, ‘The Soviet Union under the guidance of the great leader Comrade Joseph Stalin will always make the correct decisions, based on Marxist principles.’ He did not meet our eyes. This, obviously, was what he had been told to say, after the KGB, having listened to our earnest prattle, had worked out a formula of no danger to Surkov or to themselves. He was also saying something about his own position, but that I am afraid only too obvious fact I did not see for some time – years.

Arnold and I discussed this reply and decided we had expected too much. We were part of an official delegation, and he was the main representative of the Party during this visit.

We discussed, too, whenever we could, Stalin and their attitudes to him. This was a time when a version of the following appeared constantly, in short stories, novels, reminiscences: ‘My tractor/motorbike/harvester/car had broken down. I was standing by the road, wondering what to do, when suddenly I saw standing in front of me a simple-looking kindly man, with honest eyes. “Is something wrong, comrade?” I pointed at the machine. He indicated the carburetor/engine/brakes/tyres. “I think you’ll find the cause lies there.” He smiled, with stern kindness, nodded, and walked on. I realized this was Comrade Stalin, the man who had sacrificed his life to be of service to the Russian people.’

My attitude towards Comrade Stalin by that time was less than reverential. But Arnold could not bear to hear a word against him: he was one of those who believed the truth was being concealed from Stalin by his colleagues. Arnold was suffering because of the many ‘mistakes’ the Party was making. He was a man who needed to respect authority, just as I needed to oppose it. He was a homosexual, he confided – hardly a surprise – and said that before this trip he had gone to Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party boss, and told him he was worried, visiting the Soviet Union as a homosexual. Harry Pollitt had consulted with his mates. Their decision was that it was all right, the Party would stand by him, but any approach by spies, pretty boys, and so forth should be at once reported to them. Arnold was emotional about this. It was then illegal in Britain to be a homosexual: people could and did go to prison. Many years ahead was the tolerant attitude we take for granted. That ‘the Party itself’ should stand by him was, I believe, why Arnold remained a Communist when other people left in droves. I admired Harry Pollitt and his colleagues too: it could not have been easy for these conventional, respectable working-class men to accept Arnold.

Almost the last place we were taken to was a summer holiday camp for children. We knew it was a show place. Oksana and the others insisted that every child in the Soviet Union went for six weeks of the summer to a camp just as good as this one. It was a pretty well-run place, full of charming girls, in pinafores and braids, and well-mannered boys. What struck us was the library, stocked with Russian, English, and French classics. Everywhere on the little beds, and in the public rooms, lay Tolstoy, Chekhov, and translated English books too. ‘Our children read only the best.’ And this was true all over the country? Yes, we were assured. Of course we discussed this. It was true that everyone we met knew as much about English literature as we did and that people could be seen reading their classics on the underground. The ‘contradiction’ was this: these people lived in a country where every moment of their lives was governed by a senseless brutal rhetoric. Yet they were being brought up on the humanist tradition. A single volume of Tolstoy would contradict everything they were officially being taught.

I think that literature – a novel, a story, even a line of poetry – has the power to destroy empires. ‘And their packs infest the age.’

Once upon a time, there was the Russian intelligentsia, cultivated in music, art, and literature: we know about it from a thousand novels and plays. Viciously and consistently attacked through the communist era, these people survived, carefully conserving their heritage. But, it seems, this is no longer true, for when communism collapsed, in flooded the worst of western products, pornography and violence, and what remained of the heritage collapsed too. A unique culture has gone, one that truly inspired the world.

We were invited to go to Samarkand, but Naomi said she had to be back at a council meeting in Argyll. This had the deliberate frivolity, cocking the snook, of Douglas Young’s kilt, or Richard Mason’s ‘I think on the whole I preferred Lourdes.’

There was a touch of the surreal about that invitation, but what could match, for improbability, the great sky-high propaganda banners decorating Red Square: Drink More Champagne! For as always, the government was trying to combat the demon drink, and champagne was considered a step up towards health from vodka. Or the overheard chat among the officials, during those interminable banquets, about the superior charms of holidays on the Black Sea. ‘My wife just adores the way they do the sturgeon.’

It was not all collective farms and People’s Palaces and speeches. There was The Red Poppy, a ballet of political exhortation, but hardly boring, for its hypocrisies included a scene of a decadent capitalist nightclub, enabling the audience to enjoy what it was ordered to despise: those faces, avid, envious, condemning, as they watched the writhing nudity. But the audiences for the opera Ivan Susasin were a different matter: here was the other Russia, preserving itself. What singing, what music! But for us the production already had the charms of the past, for it was realistic to the point where you could count the leaves on the trees. In this opera, the hero, a peasant, a man of the people, defies the invaders of Mother Russia and dies to save his Czar. Some of the audience wept quietly throughout, and of all the impressions of that fevered fortnight, it was this one that spoke direct to the heart about the Great Patriotic War and what it had meant to these people.

There was an evening at the flat of Frank Johnson, a British newspaper man in Moscow. All foreigners visited that flat. He made no secret of his Soviet sympathies, and it seems he was KGB all the time. He was an affable public man. His wife was a Russian beauty. It was there I heard from the Russians, including her, remarks like ‘I hate black people’ and, like any white madam in Southern Africa, ‘I wouldn’t drink out of a cup a black had used. I’d disinfect it.’ Also Russian talk about their non-Russian republics – Georgia, Uzbekistan, the Baltic States, and so forth – just like Southern African whites: ‘They’d be nothing without us.’ ‘We support them.’ ‘They’re very backward.’ ‘I don’t think we ought to let them into Russia.’

When we were being driven back to the airport, at night, this happened. In the back of our car were Oksana, Arnold, and I, while Douglas Young sat by the chauffeur. A man staggered out into the headlights on a half-dark road. The car swerved but hit him. We all jumped out. A peasant lay bleeding, spread-eagled. He was very drunk. Oksana, transformed into an angel of vengeance, said we should leave him on the road, to punish him. We insisted on bringing him into the car, where he lay in Arnold’s arms, dazed, incoherent, bleeding. Arnold wept, while cradling him with a passionate protectiveness. It was all of the Soviet Union he held there, the millions of the dead, the women without men, the pathetic war-wracked streets. I knew this was what he felt, because I did too. Oksana kept up a high, vindictive scolding all the way to the airport: ‘How dare you do this, these are distinguished foreign guests, how dare you insult our great country, you will be punished for this, you should be ashamed.’ Douglas Young translated, in a satiric voice. This was the most bizarre of all the scenes on that trip, a summing-up and a caricature – the drunk, bleeding man, the Soviet nanny-shrew, Arnold’s weeping, Douglas’s Scottish voice, deliberately exaggerated, full of bitterness, full of anger, an indictment, and I interrupting Oksana: ‘But you will take him to the hospital when we get to the airport, promise? You will, won’t you?’

At the airport, there was Boris Polevoi, who had come on his motorcycle to say goodbye to us, all smiles and good comradeship. A friendly fellow, he was, and he promised to see that the drunk was taken to the hospital. ‘A likely story,’ we agreed. ‘Lucky not to be shot,’ said Douglas, and Arnold did not protest.

We were delighted we were leaving, we all concurred.

We stopped off at Prague for two days on the way back, to go to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and to visit a picture gallery. I remember very little about Czechoslovakia, probably because I was exhausted by then, but there is one incident: The six of us were trailing through the gallery, when I was left behind in a room by myself, looking at a picture I liked. The attendant came up to me and whispered, ‘I love you. I must marry you. Take me to England.’ He was desperate, pleading; he clutched my arm and said, ‘Please, please, tell them you love me, take me with you.’ And then in came the interpreter to retrieve her charge from this dangerous straying from the flock, and the little attendant – he was old, or so I thought then, thin, sad, all anguished dark eyes – quickly pointed to a picture as if explaining it to me. His eyes followed me as I went out; there went his chance of escape from his life, intolerable for some reason I would never know. When I told Jack about this later, he said, with that mix of bitterness, pain, anger, that was his characteristic, ‘Poor bastard, poor little bastard.’ And then, ‘Well, why not marry him. But don’t imagine you’ll get rid of him so quickly.’ Jack had married a girl in Czechoslovakia to rescue her from the Nazis, in a scheme organized by the Party, but afterwards she was difficult about divorcing him. At last she agreed to meet him, and he reproached her: ‘I was doing you a good turn, and you’ve given me so much trouble.’ She said to him, with bitterness, ‘But you didn’t even take me out to lunch after the wedding. I’ll never forgive you.’

‘Just think,’ said Jack. ‘If I had the foresight I’d have given her a rose, or some flowers, and saved myself all this trouble.’ This was a reference to an early very famous Soviet story. Sentiment at weddings had been banned, and a pair of young lovers, like all Soviet couples then, went through the minimalist registry office ceremony. Despite their allegiance to Soviet principles, they felt sad, bleak, deprived. Someone gave them flowers: a defiant gesture. Everyone felt better.

As soon as we reached London, the six of us became a unit again. This was because of the press conference. It is truly impossible to re-create the snarling, hating atmosphere of the Cold War. We were confronted by journalists who hated us so much they could scarcely be polite. They demanded to be told ‘the truth’. The inevitable reaction was that we defended, where we could; Naomi and Douglas too. If they hated us, we hated them. This was by no means the only time in my life I have reflected that journalists can be their own worst enemy.

After that I refused invitations to go on Peace or Cultural Delegations – it was the beginning of the era of delegations to all the communist countries. I remember invitations to China, Chile, Cuba, others. Writers considered sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to communism were always being invited. The trouble is not that you fall for the official Party Line but that you like the people you meet, become one with them in sympathetic imagination, identify with their sufferings. This must be a version of what happens when terrorists capture hostages, who soon become one with their hosts, by osmosis. The communist governments always used the prestige of their visitors to impress their captive populations, but the said populations were in fact too wise to be impressed. Debates about whether one should or should not go to oppressive countries as official visitors went on then, go on now. When I went to China for the British Council in 1993, with Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd, Western journalists who operated in the East approached me to say I was wrong to go. But some Chinese, in London including one who had been in Tiananmen Square, did not understand when asked if I should go. ‘Why should you not go?’

‘Because the people will think we admire the Chinese government.’

‘No one will think that. But it is important for the writers and intellectuals to see writers from the West. They feel isolated.’

No sooner had I got back to London than I was sent my Party card and approached by John Sommerfield to join the Communist Party Writers’ Group. By now I was regretting my impulse to join the Party. I did know it was a neurotic decision, for it was characterized by that dragging helpless feeling, as if I had been drugged or hypnotized – like getting married the first time because the war drums were beating, or having babies when I had decided not to – pulled by the nose like a fish on a line. Going to the Soviet Union had stirred up emotions much deeper than the political. My thoughts and my emotions were at odds. I was a long way off seeing, as I do now, that ‘supporting the Soviet Union was only a continuation of early childhood feelings – war, the understanding of suffering, identification with pain: the knowledge of good and evil. I only knew that here was a deeply buried thing which was riding me like a nightmare.

What I was thinking – attempts at cool objectivity – was something else. I told an ex-Party friend of mine this experience: On parting with Oksana, so poor, so hardworking, with so few clothes or trinkets, I wanted to give her a little gilt-mesh bracelet, from Egypt. It was nothing much. She went pale with … could that be terror? Surely not. She stammered out frantic fearful refusals. What was that all about? I asked my expert friend, who said with the furious impatience we use for people who are still in positions we have just outgrown – he had only very recently left the Party – ‘Don’t be so naive. If she was seen with that bracelet, she would be accused by the KGB – who were of course instructing her every day – of taking bribes from the decadent evil Western capitalist world. It could get her sent to a labour camp.’

And why was it so many of the writers we met insisted on talking about the royal family? They went on and on: how interested they were in our Queen, such a good institution – for Britain, of course, not for them – and how much they admired us. Why on earth should writers in the Soviet Union care about the British royal family? ‘Obviously,’ was the reply, ‘they could not say openly how much they hate communism. They said it indirectly, hoping you would have the gumption to understand.’

The Writers’ Group was about to fall apart under the weight of its contradictions. Ah, with what nostalgia I use that old jargon … but how useful were those contradictions, always on our lips, while we tried to keep hold of the roller coaster of those days.

Remarkable people, they were. First, John Sommerfield. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War and written a book, Volunteer in Spain, describing various actions he had taken part in. It was dedicated to John Comford, his friend, who had died there. He had also written good short stories, Survivors. He was a tall, lean man, pipe-smoking, who would allow to fall from unsmiling lips surreal diagnoses of the world he lived in, while his eyes insisted he was deeply serious. A comic. He knew everything about English pubs, had written a book about them. It was he who took me to the Soho clubs, saying that their great days were over, the war had been their heyday. He was married to Molly Moss, the painter. Like everyone else then, they had no money. They bought for a couple of hundred pounds a little Victorian house in Mansfield Road, NW3, and filled it full of her paintings, and Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac which could be bought for a few shillings because everything Victorian was unfashionable. This cherished little treasure house, a jewel box of a house, was pulled down with hundreds of others in those great days for architecture, the sixties, and replaced with some of the ugliest blocks of flats in London. During one hard winter, when the Sommerfields were broke, their big tomcat caught pigeons for them, which they stewed, giving him half of what he caught.

The meetings were held in my room because, since I had a child, it was hard for me to go out. Also because I had informed John Sommerfield that I loathed meetings and had had enough of them to last my life. He said. In that case we’ll come to you and you can’t get out of it. John had said that when you joined the CP it was a good principle to say that there was something you couldn’t do, like taking buses or being out at night. Why? To let them know they couldn’t put anything over on you. ‘But no, you cannot say you won’t go to the meetings.’ Them? The Party, King Street.

All the writers shared this attitude to King Street, not much different in spirit from David Low’s cartoon trade-union horse, a great lump of obstinate stupidity. The loyalty that they could not feel for ‘the Party’ was deflected to the Soviet Union, which of course could not be anything like as stupid as King Street.

Montagu Slater was a smallish, quick, lively, clever man, and many-sided. He had done the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. He was under pressure, because he had written a book about the Kenyan war, then at its height, exposing the machinations and dirty tricks of the British government against Jomo Kenyatta, and was being reviled by the newspapers: ‘What can you expect from a communist?’ Everything he said was true, but soon it didn’t matter, because Kenyatta won the war in Kenya and in no time at all had become a Grand Old Man, revered by everyone, not least the whites in Kenya.

Jack Beeching was a poet, with a wife and new baby. I visited them in Bristol, with Peter. They had no money and were in an old, run-down flat in a terrace now beyond the means of anyone not rich. Enormous, beautiful, freezing rooms. I haven’t said much about the cold in those days, when houses were often heated with a bar or two of tiny electric fires, sometimes no heat at all. The five of us – Jack, his wife, the new baby, Peter, and I – huddled like refugees under sweaters and blankets in the centre of the great room, where the draughts blew about like cold winds. Jack is still alive in Spain, writing poetry and history.

Jack Lindsay, the Australian, was perhaps the purest example I know of a good writer done in by the Party. He was a polymath, knowledgeable on a variety of subjects, and wrote two kinds of novel. One was party-line orthodox, factories and workers and the proletariat, the other fanciful, whimsical novels, like Iris Murdoch, but nothing like as good. They might have been written by two different writers. He also wrote biographies.

Asked by some researcher about Randall Swingler, I said he was not a member of the Writers’ Group but later found he was. I simply did not remember him. Perhaps he was never there: I was told as I wrote this that he had said the Writers’ Group was nothing but a sink of lost talent. What did impress me about him was that he and his wife bought a cottage in Essex for five pounds, without running water, light, telephone, heat, or toilet. A paradise in summer, but in winter? There they lived, solving the problems of poverty, for years. Then Essex cottages became fashionable …

Soon after our return from the Soviet Union, there was the last of the great fogs. Truly you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. Naomi was having a reunion for the people on the trip, in the Mitchison flat on the Embankment. I was standing on the Embankment, unable to move, having lost my way. I was submerged in fog as in dirty water. Suddenly a man bumped into me. It was a Soviet official – Surkov,^* I think – in a state of ecstasy because of the fog, because all foreigners adore Dickens’s fogs and to this day will say, ‘Your terrible London fogs …’ ‘But we don’t have them any longer; we have the Clean Air Act.’ It is a disappointment. You can’t sweep away potent symbols so easily.

When I was a member of the Communist Party I did not go to the ordinary meetings. Much later, many years, when I was no longer a communist, I was invited to address a Communist Party group, a real one, of the rank and file. It was a house in a poor street in South London. I was appalled. Here was a room full of failures and misfits, huddled together because the Party for them was a club, or a home, a family. But – and this was the heartbreak – there, too, were the village Hampdens, inglorious Miltons, often self-taught, with original and questioning minds on every subject in the world but communism.

A visit to a Communist Party meeting in Paris was a very different affair. I told King Street I was going to Paris, would like to see what the French CP was like. I was told to contact Tristan Tzara. He was a Party member. A likeable man. King Street had had to get permission from the top brass in the French CP, who instructed Tristan Tzara. The local branch on the Left Bank were ordered to receive me, but they said only on condition that I left when they began discussing policy. We had lunch. Only politics were discussed. This was the communist Tzara, not a sign of the anarchic surrealist Tzara. I said to him. What did the Left Bank local branch of the French Communist Party expect? That I might blow them all up? He did not find this amusing. I said that in Britain someone thinking of joining the Party might drop in to a meeting to see how he liked it, but Tristan’s silence confirmed that this was no more than what could be expected of British comrades. I insisted: what was wrong with that? He asked: how did you guard against infiltration from hostile elements? I said that there is no way to prevent spies or hostile elements from gaining entry anywhere they like, if they set their minds to it. He said, with an efficient air, that I was wrong: vigilance is essential. The exchange, classic for this kind of situation – and how often so many of us had it! – did not prevent good feeling, but he was truly disappointed in me. He made it clear that the French CP despised the British CP.

Tristan took me to a building somewhere near the boulevard St-Germain, on the Left Bank, just beginning to be touristland. Guards at the door inspected us, and then we were checked again inside – I had been given a temporary pass. We entered a large, drab room, with a small table at one end for the officials. A hundred or so communists, and they all looked like recruits for an army, for everyone wore at least one item of war dress, probably army surplus. Certainly they all saw themselves as soldiers in a war, men and women, for that is how they carried themselves, how they spoke, cold, clipped, and responsible. No one smiled. Perhaps they were in imagination still in the great days of the Partisans, the Occupation, the Free French. They might look as it they expected war to begin tomorrow, but what they were talking about was a fund-raising event in the quartier. After an hour or so, I was requested to leave. Tristan asked how I found it, and I said I thought it unsurprising that the French and English have such a hard time getting on. Did they really need such a military atmosphere? After all, the German Occupation had ended getting on for ten years ago. He said gently, forgiving me, that I underestimated the strength of the enemy. When I reported this visit to the Writers’ Group, they said that one must expect this kind of thing from the French. They have to dramatize everything.

I think there couldn’t have been more than ten or so of these Writers’ Group meetings. Discussions about literature did not defer at all to the party line and were critical of ‘socialist realism’. As for me, I was told by the comrades, as a summing-up of my contributions to Party thinking, that I raised questions none of them had thought of before or which had such obvious solutions no one would dream of wasting time on them. My trouble was that I couldn’t see the difference.

And now the Communist Party Writers’ Group put me into a truly ridiculous situation. Montagu Slater and John Sommerfield told me that they had gone to the Annual General Meeting of the Society of Authors.^* This, they said, was an authoritarian, undemocratic organization, run by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. No member ever went to an AGM. They had put my name forward to be on the management committee. I was furious, said I had meant it when I told them I hated meetings. I would not go. Too late, they said airily, and after all, I did have to do something as a Party member. I could regard it as my revolutionary duty. They did speak with the sardonic relish for incongruity which I understood so well. I therefore found myself in that charming Chelsea house, at a meeting, to help run the affairs of the Society. They, of course, knew that I was a communist, having been proposed by two well-known communists, and they saw me as a beachhead for an invading force. They expected from me the dishonesty and double-dealing characteristic of the comrades. After all, they could hardly be innocent of the ways of the Party, since some of them were bound to have been in it, or near it. I cannot remember who they were. A young woman announced that she was a Conservative. She was there as a counterbalance to this subversive person, and scarcely took her satiric and knowledgeable eye off me. How I wish I could remember who she was. As for me, I was depressed and discouraged. I knew nothing about the policies of British literature, and did not care much, being so absorbed in the difficulties of trying to write when so beset with the problems of money, my child, my mother, my psychotherapist, my lover, and – not least – wishing I could slip unnoticed from the Party. For this was a time when, if any public person left the Party, it was to the accompaniment of press furore: ‘So-and-so has left the Communist Hell.’ ‘Communist Party Secrets Revealed.’ You were always meeting ex-comrades apologizing: ‘I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t say that. They made it all up.’ (Then, as now.)

I was a year on that committee, hating every minute.^* Accustomed as I am to being in a false position – sometimes I think it was a curse laid on me in my cradle – this was the falsest. A false position is when people around you believe you think as they do; or that you stand for something quite different, and they assume this difference is what they have decided it is. Or when you have found this position or that oversimplified, a mere set of precepts, and this means that in any gathering your mind is supplying a running commentary, amplifying what is being said or assumed. I have always done this, even as a child. When I was young, this opposing commentary was irritable and intemperate, but the older I get, the more weary: ‘Oh God, I suppose it has to be like this?’

There was another problem, which I do not have to explain to any ex-colonial (which includes here Canada, Australia, South Africa, and all the other indisputable ex-dominions) and to most foreigners. All your life you have been used to seeing the Brits working in difficult places, often isolated, coping with all kinds of deprivations and savageries. You know that the British are never happier than when on the top of some dangerous mountain, or crossing the Atlantic in a cockleshell, or alone in a desert, or deep in a jungle. Indomitable is the word. Self-sufficing. Solitude-loving. And yet a group of these same people, in England, seems cosy, seems insular, and, confronted by an alien, they huddle together, presenting the faces of alarmed children. There is an innocence, something unlived, often summarized by: ‘You see, Britain hasn’t been invaded for hundreds of years.’

There is a dinkiness, a smallness, a tameness, a deep, instinctive, perennial refusal to admit danger, or even the unfamiliar: a reluctance to understand extreme experience. Somewhere – so the foreigner suspects, and for the purposes of comparison, while writing this I am one too – somewhere deep in the psyche of Britain is an Edwardian nursery, fenced all around with sharp repelling thorns, and deep inside it is a Sleeping Beauty with a notice pinned to her: Do Not Touch. One Christmas, when I had a child visitor to entertain -and this was the seventies – the following were on offer in London: Peter Pan. Let’s Make an Opera. The Water Babies – child chimney sweeps. Alice in Wonderland. Toad of Toad Hall. Pooh Bear. To sit through a matinee of Pooh Bear, while the young mothers, not the children, weep bitterly, makes you think a bit.

Two episodes stand out among memories of that unlucky year as a committee member. One, a discussion of My Fair Lady, derived from Shaw’s Pygmalion. Shaw actually wrote a future for Eliza. She accepts her rich, effete suitor, to save herself from her background and from her tormentor, Higgins, but then takes charge of her life. The makers of the musical insisted she should settle for Higgins. And so there is yet another masochistic woman in literature happy to bring a man’s slippers and lick his hands. The Society of Authors acts as agent to Shaw’s estate – 10 percent. I was shocked at this then and am shocked now. I could not believe then and find it hard now that when Shaw made his intentions so clear, they should be overridden for the sake of the money. It was this incident which told me how out of place I was among those people, who could see nothing wrong with what they were doing. The other bad moment was when Dylan Thomas was off to New York and wanted to use the Society’s contacts there. He was by then very drunk and destructive, and it was agreed that people in New York should be warned. I was shocked then – an artist’s sacred right to anarchic behaviour: that kind of thing – but think differently now, having seen not a few poets and writers allowing themselves every kind of licence and expecting other people to clear up after them.

Another experience which I suppose could be called communist was when I took Peter down to Hastings during one of his holidays, to a hotel run by Dorothy Schwartz for communists. Oakhurst provided lectures, courses, and the usual amenities. I found the place dispiriting. It was the atmosphere of us and them, of the faithful against the ignorant world. For someone used to sun and large skies, Hastings is not easy to love. I keep meeting people now who you would never think could have been communist, such pinnacles of respectability they are, but they were there, listening to or giving lectures, and in one case actually working as a waiter. What I did find intriguing was that Aleister Crowley had lived just down the road in the sister house, Netherwood. In the twenties and thirties, flamboyant occult groups flourished in Britain, and not all of the participants were negligible: Yeats, for instance, and the New Dawn. Crowley had a reputation, even in the fifties, of dazzling arcane accomplishments, but at the end of his life he was a pitiful figure. He had died in 1947, but they were still saying of him in Hastings, ‘Supposed to be a magician, was he? Then why was he living like an old tramp?’ The hotel, Dorothy’s place, was reputed to have been the house that Robert Tressell used as a setting for The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The living room had a beautiful ceiling, and all guests were shown it as a possible work of Tressell’s hands.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a classic of working-class life, had been published several times, first in 1914, but only in a truncated form. Fred Ball, who had been researching Tressell’s life for many years, managed to locate the original manuscript and bought it, with the help of friends, for seventy pounds. Some people doubted its authenticity, but it was genuine. It was difficult to get the full version published, because the abridged version was still in print and several publishers felt that the full text was too much of a socialist tract. Eventually Maurice Cornforth at Lawrence and Wishart, the communist publishers, were persuaded to publish. It was very successful. Jonathan Clowes, who was to become a well-known literary agent, was working as a painter and decorator then. He was a friend of Fred Ball, helped him with advice, and was able to place his biography of Tressell with Weidenfeld – a mainstream publisher, not a socialist one. Lawrence and Wishart did not want to publish the biography, because Fred Ball discovered that Tressell, probably the son of a well-off Irish RM, was not working class. This was about the same time as Joan Littlewood had a big success with a ‘working-class’ play about building workers called You Won’t Always Be on Top, by Henry Chapman, also Jonathan’s friend – described by the press as the Hastings bricklayer. Much to the disgust of the Communist Party cultural commissars, Henry also turned out to have impeccable middle-class origins.^*

During this time, when almost all the people I met saw themselves as the vanguard of the working class, the only person I knew who was a genuine representative, unredeemed and unpolitical, was – classically – the woman who came to clean my flat once a week. What interested me most about her was that she was just like the Scottish farmers’ wives I had grown up with. She was Mrs Dougall, about sixty, thin, pale, unwell, never without a cigarette, but if Fate had taken her winging across the seas to Southern Rhodesia? Instead she was as downtrodden as anyone I’ve known, but a willing accomplice in her exploitation. She was on the books of a firm employing cleaning women, which charged us the maximum per hour, paid her half. It was no use telling her that if she set up for herself she would earn twice as much. ‘They’ve been good to me,’ she would sigh. She had an unsatisfactory husband, whom she often had to keep. She loved him. My little splinter of a story ‘He’ was suggested by her. When not talking lovingly of her husband and kindly of her employers, she brooded about 10 Rillington Place, just up the road, the scene of horrific murders.