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

It was not only pressures from my own side that I had to resist. For instance, the editor of a popular newspaper, the Daily Graphic – it was not unlike the Sun – long since defunct, invited me to his office and offered me a lot of money to write articles supporting hanging, the flogging of delinquent children, harsher treatment for criminals, a woman’s place in the home, down with socialism, internment for communists. When I said I disagreed with all these, the editor, a nasty little man, said it didn’t matter what my personal opinions were. If I wanted, I could be a journalist – he would train me – and journalists should know how to write persuasively on any subject. I kept refusing large sums of money, which got larger as he became more exasperated. I fled to a telephone in the street, where I rang up Juliet O’Hea. I needed money badly. She said on no account should I ever write one word I did not believe in, never write a word that wasn’t the best I could do; if I started writing for money, the next thing would be I’d start believing it was good, and neither of us wanted that, did we? She did not believe in asking for advances before they were due, but if I was desperate she would. And she would tell the editor of the Daily Graphic to leave me alone.

There were other offers on the same lines, temptations of the Devil. Not that I was really tempted. But I did linger sometimes in an editor’s office out of curiosity: I could not believe that this was happening, that people could be so low, so unscrupulous. But surely they can’t really believe writers should write against their own beliefs, their consciences? Write less than their best, for money?

The most bizarre result of The Grass Is Singing, which was being execrated in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, was an invitation to be ‘one of the girls’ at an evening with visiting members of the still new Nationalist government. I was too intrigued to refuse, fascinated that Southern African customs could hold good here: ‘The English cricket team is coming – just round up some of the girls for them.’ There were ten or so Afrikaners, ministers or slightly lesser officials, living it up on a trip to London. I knew them all by name, and only too well as a type. Large, overfed, jovial, they joked their way through a restaurant dinner, about all the ways they used to keep the kaffirs down, for it was then a characteristic of these ruling circles to be proud of being ‘slim’ – full of cunning tricks. After dinner we repaired to a hotel bedroom, where I was in danger of being fondled by one or more. Another of ‘the girls’ told the men that I was an enemy and they should be careful of what they said. Why was I an enemy? was demanded, with the implicit suggestion that it was not possible to disagree with their evidently correct views. ‘She’s written a book,’ said this woman, or girl, a South African temporarily in London. ‘Then we’re going to ban it,’ was the jocular reply. One man, whose knee I was trying to refuse, said, ‘Ach, man, we don’t care what liberals read, what do they matter? The kaffirs aren’t going to read your little book. They can’t read, and that’s how we like it.’ The word ‘liberal’ in South Africa has always been interchangeable with ‘communist’.

All the places where I had lived with Gottfried, in Salisbury, people had dropped in and out, and the talk was not only of politics, and of changing the world, but of war; in Church Street it was the same, except that here war was not all rumour and propaganda but men who had returned from battlefronts, so that we could match what really had happened with what we had been told was happening. Similarly, I was in a familiar situation with Gottfried, who disapproved of me more with every meeting. He was having a very bad time. He had believed he would easily get a job in London. He knew himself to be clever and competent: had he not created a large and successful legal firm, virtually out of nothing, in Salisbury? There were relatives in London, to whom he applied for work. They turned him down. He was a communist, and they were – or felt themselves to be – on sufferance in Britain, as foreigners. Or perhaps they didn’t like him. He was applying for jobs on the level which he knew he deserved. No one would even give him an interview. The joke was, ten years later it would be chic to be German and a communist. Meanwhile he was working for the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. This organization owned a house in Kensington Square, where there were lectures on the happy state of the arts in the USSR. At every meeting the two back rows of chairs were filled with people who had actually lived under communism: they were trying to tell us how horrible communism was. We patronized them: they were middle-aged or old, they didn’t know the score, they were reactionary. A well-chosen epithet, flattering to the user, is the surest way of ending all serious thought. Gottfried earned very little money. He was being sheltered by Dorothy Schwartz, who had a large flat near Belsize Park Underground. The height – or depth – of the Cold War made him even more bitterly, angrily, coldly contemptuous of any opinion even slightly deviating from the Party Line. I was finding it almost impossible to be with him. I did not say to myself, But how did I stick him for so long? For we had had no alternative. About the child there were no disagreements. Peter spent most weekends with Gottfried and Dorothy. I would take him over there, sit down, have a cup of this or that, and listen to terrible, cold denunciations, then leave for two days of freedom. I went to the theatre a lot. In those days you queued in the mornings for a stool in the queue for the evening and saw the play from pit or gallery for the equivalent in today’s money of three or four pounds. I saw most of the plays on in London, in this way, sometimes standing. I continued madly in love with the theatre.

I also went off to Paris. There is no way now of telling how powerful a dream France was then. The British – that is, people who were not in the forces – had been locked into their island for the war and for some years afterwards. People would say how they had suffered from claustrophobia, dreamed of abroad – and particularly of Paris. France was a magnet because of de Gaulle, and the Free French, and the Resistance, by far the most glamorous of the partisan armies. Now that our cooking and our coffee and our clothes are good, it is hard to remember how people yearned for France as for civilization itself. And there was another emotion too, among women. French men loved women and showed it, but in Britain the most women could hope for was to be whistled at by workmen in the street, not always a friendly thing. Joan adored France. She had spent happy times there and spoke French well. Her father’s current girlfriend was French. Joan saw her as infinitely beautiful, while she was a mere nothing in comparison. This was far from the truth, but there was no arguing with her. (This was certainly not the only time in my life I have known a woman who wore rose-tinted spectacles for every woman in the world but herself.) Isn’t she gorgeous, she would moan over some woman less attractive than she was. She had had a very smart black suit made, with a tight skirt and a waistcoat like a man’s, which she wore with white shirts ruffled at throat and wrists. She actually went over to Paris to get it judged. There, men would compliment you on your toilette. She came back restored. Quite a few women I knew said that for the sake of one’s self-respect one had to visit Paris from time to time. This was not a situation without its little ironies. There was a newspaper cartoon then of a Frenchman, dressed in semi-battle gear, old jacket, beret, a Gauloise hanging from a lip, accompanying a Frenchwoman dressed like a model – a short stocky scruffy man, a tall slim elegant woman.