The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

socialism. I had not formulated it so clearly before. Of course there is no Party member I could say this to, though it’s the sort of discussion I have with ex-Party people. Suppose that all the Party people I know have similarly incommunicable private myths, all different? I asked Molly. She snapped: ‘What are you reading that swine Koestler for?’ This remark is so far from her usual level of talk, political or otherwise, I was surprised, tried to discuss it with her. But she’s very busy. When she’s on an organizing job (she is doing a big exhibition of art from Eastern Europe) she’s too immersed in it to be interested. She’s in another role altogether. It occurred to me today, that when I talk to Molly about politics, I never know what person is going to reply—the dry, wise, ironical political woman, or the Party fanatic who sounds, literally, quite maniacal. And I have these two personalities myself. For instance, met Editor Rex in the street. That was last week. After the greetings were exchanged, I saw a spiteful, critical look coming on to his face, and I knew it was going to be a crack about the Party. And I knew if he made one, I’d defend it. I couldn’t bear to hear him, being spiteful, or myself, being stupid. So I made an excuse and left him. The trouble is, what you don’t realize when you join the Party, soon you meet no one but communists or people who have been communists who can talk without that awful dilettantish spite. One becomes isolated. That’s why I shall leave the Party, of course.

      I see that I wrote yesterday, I would leave the Party. I wonder when, and on what issue?

      Had dinner with John. We meet rarely—always on the verge of political disagreement. At the end of the dinner, he said: ‘The reason why we don’t leave the Party is that we can’t bear to say good-bye to our ideals for a better world.’ Trite enough. And interesting because it implies he believes, and that I must, only the Communist Party can better the world. Yet we neither of us believe any such thing. But above all, this remark struck me because it contradicted everything he had been saying previously. (I had been arguing that the Prague affair was obviously a frame-up and he was saying that while the Party made ‘mistakes’ it was incapable of being so deliberately cynical.) I came home thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind when I joined the Party was a need for wholeness, for an end to the split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all live. Yet joining the Party intensified the split—not the business of belonging to an organization whose every tenet, on paper, anyway, contradicts the ideas of the society we live in; but something much deeper than that. Or at any rate, more difficult to understand. I tried to think about it, my brain kept swimming into blankness, I got confused and exhausted. Michael came in, very late. I told him what I was trying to think out. After all he’s a witch-doctor, a soul-curer. He looked at me, very dry and ironic, and remarked: ‘My dear Anna, the human soul, sitting in a kitchen, or for that matter, in a double bed, is quite complicated enough, we don’t understand the first thing about it. Yet you’re sitting there worrying because you can’t make sense of the human soul in the middle of a world revolution?’ And so I left it, and I was glad to, but I was nevertheless feeling guilty because I was so happy not to think about it.

      I went to visit Berlin with Michael. He in search of old friends, dispersed in the war, might be anywhere. ‘Dead, I expect,’ he said in his new tone of voice, which is flat with a determination not to feel. Dates from the Prague trial, this voice. East Berlin terrifying place, bleak, grey, ruinous, but above all the atmosphere, the lack of freedom like an invisible poison continually spreading everywhere. The most significant incident this one: Michael ran into some people he knew from before the war. They greeted him with hostility—so that Michael, having run forward, to attract their attention, saw their hostile faces and shrank into himself. It was because they knew he had been friendly with the hanged men in Prague, or three of them. They were traitors, so that meant he was a traitor too. He tried, very quiet and courteous, to talk. They were like a group of dogs, or animals, facing outward, pressing against each other for support against fear. I’ve never experienced anything like that, the fear and hate on their faces. One of them, a woman with flaming angry eyes, said: ‘What are you doing, comrade, wearing that expensive suit?’ Michael’s clothes are always off the peg, he spends nothing on clothes. He said: ‘But Irene, it’s the cheapest suit I could buy in London.’ Her face snapped shut into suspicion, she glanced at her companions, then a sort of triumph. She said: ‘Why do you come here, spreading that capitalist poison? We know you are in rags and there are no consumer goods.’ Michael was at first stunned, then he said, still with irony, that even Lenin had understood the possibility that a newly-established communist society might suffer from a shortage of consumer goods. Whereas England which, ‘as I think you know, Irene,’ is a very solid capitalist society, is quite well-equipped with consumer goods. She gave a sort of grimace of fury, or hatred. Then she turned on her heel and went off, and her companions went with her. All Michael said was: ‘That used to be an intelligent woman.’ Later he made jokes about it, sounding tired and depressed. He said for instance: ‘Imagine, Anna, that all those heroic communists have died to create a society where Comrade Irene can spit at me for wearing a very slightly better suit than her husband has.’

      Stalin died today. Molly and I sat in the kitchen, upset. I kept saying, ‘We are being inconsistent, we ought to be pleased. We’ve been saying for months he ought to be dead.’ She said: ‘Oh, I don’t know, Anna, perhaps he never knew about all the terrible things that were happening.’ Then she laughed and said: ‘The real reason we’re upset is that we’re scared stiff. Better the evils we know.’ ‘Well, things can’t be worse.’ ‘Why not? We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better? Why should they? Sometimes I think we’re moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who’s to stop it—us?’ When Michael came in later, I told him what Molly had said—about Stalin’s not knowing; because I thought how odd it was we all have this need for the great man, and create him over and over again in the face of all the evidence. Michael looked tired and grim. To my surprise he said: ‘Well, it might be true, mightn’t it? That’s the point—anything might be true anywhere, there’s never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible—everything’s so crazy, anything at all’s possible.’

      His face looked disintegrated and flushed as he said this. His voice toneless, as it is these days. Later he said: ‘Well, we are pleased he is dead. But when I was young and politically active, he was a great man for me. He was a great man for all of us.’ Then he tried to laugh, and he said: ‘After all, there’s nothing wrong, in itself, in wanting there to be great men in the world.’ Then he put his hand over his eyes in a new gesture, shielding his eyes, as if the light hurt him. He said: ‘I’ve got a headache, let’s go to bed, shall we?’ In bed we didn’t make love, we lay quietly side by side, not talking. He was crying in his sleep, I had to wake him out of a bad dream.

      By-election. North London. Candidates—Conservative, Labour, Communist. A Labour seat, but with a reduced majority from the previous election. As usual, long discussions in CP circles about whether it is right to split the Labour vote. I’ve been in on several of them. These discussions have the same pattern. No, we don’t want to split the vote; it’s essential to have Labour in, rather than a Tory. But on the other hand, if we believe in CP policy, we must try to get our candidate in. Yet we know there’s no hope of getting a CP candidate in. This impasse remains until emissary from Centre comes in to say that it’s wrong to see the CP as a kind of ginger group, that’s just defeatism, we have to fight the election as if we were convinced we were going to win it. (But we know we aren’t going to win it.) So the fighting speech by the man from Centre, while it inspires everyone to work hard, does not resolve the basic dilemma. On the three occasions I watched this happen, the doubts and confusions were solved by—a joke. Oh yes, very important in politics, that joke. This joke made by the man from Centre himself: It’s all right, comrades, we are going to lose our deposit, we aren’t going to win enough votes to split the Labour vote. Much relieved laughter, and the meeting splits up. This joke, completely contradicting everything in official policy, in fact sums up how everyone feels. I went up to canvass, three afternoons. Campaign HO in the house of a comrade living in the area; campaign organized by the ubiquitous Bill, who lives in the constituency. A dozen or so housewives, free to canvass in the afternoons—the men come in at night. Everyone knew each other, the atmosphere I find so wonderful—of people working together for a common end. Bill, a brilliant organizer, everything