Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney

It suddenly occurred to Jack, and for the first time, that he had repudiated his past. This so frightened him, leaving him, as it must, by himself out in the air somewhere, without comrades and allies — without a family — that he almost forgot Joseph's presence. He was thinking: For weeks now, ever since the old man's death — before even? — I've been thinking as if I have abandoned socialism.

Joseph was saying: 'I don't have to tell you what the conditions are like in that prison, how they are being treated.'

Jack saw that the 'I don't have to tell you' was in fact an admission that in spite of everything he said, Joseph saw him as an ally. 'You've come to me for money?' he asked, as if there could be another reason.

'Yeah. Yeah. That's about it, I suppose.'

'Why do you have to be American?' Jack asked in sudden real irritation. 'You're not American. Why do you all have to?'

Joseph said, with a conscious smile: It's a mannerism, that's all.'

Then he looked stern again, in command.

Jack said: 'I'm one of the old rich lefties you were publicly despising not long ago. You didn't want to have anything to do with us, you said.'

Joseph frowned and made irritable movements which said that he felt that the sort of polemic which abused people not standing exactly where he stood was rather like breathing, a tradition, and he genuinely felt his father was being unreasonable in taking such remarks personally. Then he said, as if nothing better could be expected: 'Then I take it it is no?'

'No,' said Jack. 'I am sorry'

Joseph got up; but he looked hesitant, and even now could sit down — if Jack said the right things. If he could push aside the rhetorical sentences that kept coming to his tongue: how should they not? — he had spent many hours of fantasy ensuring that they would!

Jack suddenly heard himself saving, in a low, shaking, emotional voice: 'I am so sick of it all. It all just goes on and on. Over and over again.'

'Well,' said Joseph, 'they say it is what always happens, so I suppose that ought to make us feel better.' His smile was his own, not forced or arranged.

Jack saw that Joseph had taken what he had said as an appeal for understanding between them personally: he had believed that his father was saying he was sick of their bad relations.

Had that been what he was saving? He had imagined he was talking about the political cycle. Jack now understood that if in fact he made enough effort, Joseph would respond and then... He heard himself saying:

'Like bloody automatons. Over and over again. Can't you see that it is going to take something like twenty years for you lot to become old rich lefties?'

'Or would if we aren't all dead first,' said Joseph, ending the thing as Jack would, and with a calm, almost jolly smile. He left, saying: 'The Robinson brothers are likely to get fifteen years if we don't do something.'

Jack, as if a button had been pushed, was filled with guilt about the Robinson brothers and almost got up to write a cheque there and then. But he did not: it had been an entirely automatic reaction.

He spent a few days apparently in the state he had been in for weeks; but he knew himself to have reached the end of some long inner process that had proved too much for him. This interview with his son had been its end, as, very likely, the scene in the attic had been its beginning? Who knew? Who could know! Not Jack. He was worn out, as at the end of a long vigil. He found himself one morning standing in the middle of his living-room saying over and over again: 'I can't stand any more of this. I can't. I won't

He found the pills and took them with the same miserable determination that he would have had to use to kill something that had to be killed. Almost at once he began to sleep and the tension eased. He no longer felt as if he was carrying around, embodied in himself, a question as urgent as a wound that needed dressing, but that he had no idea what the language was in which he might find an answer. He ceased to experience the cloying sweetness that caused a mental nausea, a hundred times worse than the physical. In a few days he had already stopped seeing his wife and daughters as great dolls who supplied warmth, charm, sympathy, when the buttons of duty or habit were pressed. Above all, he did not have to be on guard against his own abhorrence: his fingers did not explore masks on his face, nor was he always conscious of the statements made by his body and limbs.

He was thinking that he was probably already known throughout the Left as a renegade; yet, examining the furniture in his mind, he found it not much changed.

It occurred to him, and he went on to consider it in a brisk judicious way, that it was an extraordinary thing that whereas he could have sat for an examination at a moment’s notice on the history, the ideas and the contemporary situation of socialism, communism and associated movements, with confidence that he would know the answers even to questions on the details of some unimportant sect in some remote country, he was so ignorant of religious history and thought that he could not have answered any questions at all. His condition, in relation to religious questions, was like that of a person hearing of socialism for the first time and saying: 'Oh yes, I've often thought it wasn't fair that some people should have more than others. You agree, do you?'

He decided to go to the British Museum Reading Room. He had written many of his books there. His wife was delighted, knowing that this meant he was over the crisis.

He sent in his card for books on the history of the religions, on comparative religion, and on the relation of religion to anthropology.

For the first few days it seemed that he was still under the spell of his recent experience: he could not keep his attention from wandering from the page, and the men and women all around him bending over books seemed to him insane: this habit of solving all questions by imbibing information through the eyes off the printed page was a form of self-hypnotism. He was seeing them and himself as a species that could not function unless he took in information in this way.

But this soon passed and he was able to apply himself.

As he read, he conscientiously examined what he thought: was this changing at all? No, his distaste for the whole business could be summed up by an old idea of his, which was that if he had been bred, let us say, in Pakistan, that would have been enough for him to kill other people in the name of Mohammed, and if he had been born in India, to kill Moslems without a qualm. That had he been born in Italy, he would have been one brand of Christian, and if he had stuck with his family's faith, he would be bound to suspect Roman Catholicism. But above all what he felt was that this was an outdated situation. What was he doing sitting here surrounded by histories and concordances and expositions and exegetics? He would be better occupied doing almost anything else — a hundred years ago, yes, well, that had been different. The struggle for a Victorian inside the Church had meant something; for a man or a woman then to say, 'If I had been born an Arab I would be praying five times a day looking at Mecca, but had I been a Tibetan I would have believed in the Dalai lama' — that kind of statement had needed courage then, and the effort to make it had been worth while.

There were, of course, the mystics. But the word was associated for him with the tainted sweetness that had so recently afflicted him, with self-indulgence, and posturing and exaggerated behaviour. He read, however, Simone Weil and Teilhard de Chardin; these were the names he knew.

He sat, carefully checking his responses: he was more in sympathy with Simone Weil, because of her relations with the poor, less with Teilhard de Chardin who seemed to him not very different from any sort of intellectual: he could have been a useful sort of politician for instance? It occurred to him that he was in the process of choosing a degree or class of belief, like a pipe from a display of pipes, or a jacket in a shop, that would be on easy terms with the ideas he was already committed to, and above all, would not disturb his associates. He could imagine himself saying to Walter: Well, yes, it is true that I am religious in a way — I can see the point of Simone Weil, she took poverty into account. She was a socialist of a kind, really.'