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,
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
