The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

when I first told him I might join: ‘You’re mad. They hate and despise writers who join the Party. They only respect those who don’t.’ ‘They’ being the centre. It was a joke of course, but fairly typical. On the underground, read the evening newspaper. Attack on Soviet Union. What they said about it seemed to me true enough, but the tone—malicious, gloating, triumphant, sickened me, and I felt glad I had joined the Party. Came home to find Molly. She was out, and I spent some hours despondent, wondering why I had joined. She came in and I told her, and said: ‘The funny thing is I was going to say I wouldn’t join but I did.’ She gave her small sourish smile (and this smile is only for politics, never for anything else, there is nothing sour in her nature): ‘I joined in spite of myself too.’ She had never given any hint of this before, was always such a loyalist, that I must have looked surprised. She said: ‘Well now you’re in, I’ll tell you.’ Meaning that to an outsider the truth could not be told. ‘I’ve been around Party circles so long that…’ But even now she couldn’t say straight out ‘that I knew too much to want to join’. She smiled, or grimaced instead. ‘I began working in the Peace thing, because I believed in it. All the rest were members. One day that bitch Ellen asked me why I wasn’t a member. I was flippant about it—a mistake, she was angry. A couple of days later she told me there was a rumour I was an agent, because I wasn’t a member. I suppose she started the rumour. The funny thing is, obviously if I was an agent I’d have joined—but I was so upset, I went off and signed on the dotted line…’ She sat smoking and looking unhappy. Then said again: ‘All very odd, isn’t it?’ And went off to bed.

      5th Feb., 1950

      It’s as I foresaw, the only discussions I have about politics where I say what I think are with people who have been in the Party and have now left. Their attitude towards me frankly tolerant—a minor aberration, that I joined.

      19th August, 1951

      Had lunch with John, the first time since I joined the Party. Began talking as I do with my ex-Party friends, frank acknowledgement of what is going on in Soviet Union. John went into automatic defence of the Soviet Union, very irritating. Yet this evening had dinner with Joyce, New Statesman circles, and she started to attack Soviet Union. Instantly I found myself doing that automatic-defence-of-Soviet-Union act, which I can’t stand when other people do it. She went on; I went on. For her, she was in the presence of a communist so she started on certain clichés. I returned them. Twice tried to break the thing, start on a different level, failed—the atmosphere prickling with hostility. This evening Michael dropped in, I told him about this incident with Joyce. Remarked that although she was an old friend, we probably wouldn’t meet again. Although I had changed my mental attitudes about nothing, the fact I had become a Party member, made me, for her, an embodiment of something she had to have certain attitudes towards. And I responded in kind. At which Michael said: ‘Well, what did you expect?’ He was speaking in his role of East European exile, ex-revolutionary, toughened by real political experience, to me in my role as ‘political innocent’. And I replied in that role, producing all sorts of liberal inanities. Fascinating—the roles we play, the way we play parts.

      15th Sept., 1951

      The case of Jack Briggs. Journalist on The Times. Left it at outbreak of war. At that time, unpolitical. Worked during the war for British intelligence. During this time influenced by communists he met, moved steadily to the left. After the war refused several highly-paid jobs on the conservative newspapers, worked for low salary on left paper. Or-leftish; for when he wanted to write an article on China, that pillar of the left, Rex, put him in a position where he had to resign. No money. At this point, regarded as a communist in the newspaper world, and therefore unemployable, his name comes up in the Hungarian Trial, as British agent conspiring to overthrow communism. Met him by accident, he was desperately depressed—a whispering campaign around the Party and near-Party circles, that he was and had been ‘a capitalist spy’. Treated with suspicion by his friends. A meeting of the writers’ group. We discussed this, decided to approach Bill, to put an end to this revolting campaign. John and I saw Bill, said it was obviously untrue Jack Briggs could ever be an agent, demanded he should do something. Bill affable, pleasant. Said he would ‘make enquiries’, let us know. We let the ‘enquiries’ pass; knowing this meant a discussion higher up the Party. No word from Bill. Weeks passed. Usual technique of Party officials—let things slide, in moments of difficulty. We went to see Bill again. Extremely affable. Said he could do nothing. Why not? ‘Well in matters of this case when there might be doubt…’ John and I angry, demanded of Bill if he, personally, thought it was conceivable Jack could ever have been an agent. Bill hesitated, began on a long, manifestly insincere rationalization, about how it was possible that anyone could be an agent, ‘including me’. With a bright, friendly smile. John and I left, depressed, angry—and with ourselves. We made a point of seeing Jack Briggs personally, and insisting that others did, but the rumours and spiteful gossip continue. Jack Briggs in acute depression, and also completely isolated, from right and left. To add to the irony, three months after his row with Rex about the article on China, which Rex said was ‘communist in tone’, the respectable papers began publishing articles in the same tone, whereupon Rex, the brave man, found it the right time to publish an article on China. He invited Jack Briggs to write it. Jack in an inverted, bitter mood, would not.

      This story, with variations more or less melodramatic, is the story of the communist or near-communist intellectual in this particular time.

      

      3rd Jan., 1952

      

      I write very little in this notebook. Why? I see that everything I write is critical of the Party. Yet I am still in it. Molly too.

      Three of Michael’s friends hanged yesterday in Prague. He spent the evening talking to me—or rather to himself. He was explaining, first, why it was impossible that these men could be traitors to communism. Then he explained, with much political subtlety, why it was impossible that the Party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into ‘objectively’ anti-revolutionary positions. He talked on and on and on until finally I said we should go to bed. All night he cried in his sleep. I kept jerking awake to find him whimpering, the tears wetting the pillow. In the morning I told him that he had been crying. He was angry—with himself. He went off to work looking an old man, his face lined and grey, giving me an absent nod—he was so far away, locked in his miserable self-questioning. Meanwhile I help with a petition for the Rosenbergs. Impossible to get people to sign it, except Party and near-Party intellectuals. (Not like France. The atmosphere of this country has changed dramatically in the last two or three years, tight, suspicious, frightened. It would take very little to send it off balance into our version of McCarthyism.) I am asked, even by people in the Party, let alone the ‘respectable’ intellectuals, why do I petition on behalf of the Rosenbergs but not on behalf of the people framed in Prague? I find it impossible to reply rationally, except that someone has to organize an appeal for the Rosenbergs. I am disgusted—with myself, with the people who won’t sign for the Rosenbergs, I seem to live in an atmosphere of suspicious disgust. Molly began crying this evening, quite out of the blue—she was sitting on my bed, chatting about her day, then she began crying. In a still, helpless way. It reminded me of something, could not think of what, but of course it was Maryrose, suddenly letting the tears slide down her face sitting in the big room at Mashopi, saying: ‘We believed everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won’t.’ Molly cried like that. Newspapers all over my floor, about the Rosenbergs, about the things in Eastern Europe.

      The Rosenbergs electrocuted. Felt sick at night. This morning I woke asking myself: why should I feel like this about the Rosenbergs, and only feel helpless and depressed about the frame-ups in communist countries? The answer an ironical one. I feel responsible for what happens in the West, but not at all for what happens over there. And yet I am in the Party. I said something like this to Molly, and she replied, very brisk and efficient (she’s in the middle of a hard organizing job): ‘All right, I know, but I’m busy.’

      Koestler. Something he said sticks in my mind—that any communist in the West who stayed in the Party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth. Something like that. So I demand of myself, what