Doris Lessing - Walking in the Shade - Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

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.