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

independence, living in the same house. We got on pretty well. We sat often over her kitchen table, gossiping: people, men, the world, the comrades – this last increasingly critical. In fact, gossiping with Joan over the kitchen table is one of my pleasantest memories. We both cooked well; gentle competition went on over the meals we prepared. The talk was of the kind I later used in The Golden Notebook.

      A scene: Joan said she wanted me to see something. ‘I’m not going to tell you; just come.’ In a little house in a little street two minutes’ walk away, we found ourselves in a little room crammed with valuable furniture and pictures and, too, people. Four people filled it, and Joan stood at the doorway, me just behind, and waved to a languorous woman lying on a chaise longue, dressed in a frothy peignoir. A man bent over her, offering champagne: he was a former husband. Another, a current lover, fondled her feet. A very young man, flushed, excited, adoring, was waiting his chance. No room for us, so we said goodbye, and she called, ‘Do come again, darlings, any time. I get so down all by myself here.’ She was afflicted by a mysterious fatigue that kept her supine. It appeared that she was kept by two former husbands and the current lover. ‘Now, you tell me,’ says Joan, laughing, as we walk home. ‘What are we doing wrong? And she isn’t even all that pretty.’ We returned, worrying, to our overburdened lives.

      There we were, two or three times a week, discussing our own behaviour, and each other’s, with Mrs Sussman, but now all that rummaging about among the roots of our motives, then so painful and difficult, seems less important than, ‘I’ve just bought some croissants. Want to join me?’ Or, ‘Have you heard the news – it’s awful. Want a chat?’ What I liked best was hearing her talk about the artists and writers she knew because of her father and of working in the Party. I used to be impressed by her worldly wisdom. For instance, about David Bomberg, who had painted her father; he was then ignored by the artistic establishment: ‘Oh, don’t worry, they’re always like this, but they’ll see the error of their ways when he’s dead.’ Quite calm, she was, whereas I went in for indignation. And David Bomberg lived in poverty all his life, unrecognized, and then he died and it happened as she said. Or she would come from a party and say that Augustus John was there, and she’d told the young girls, ‘Better watch out, and don’t let him talk you into sitting for him,’ for by then Augustus John had become a figure of fun. Or she had been in the pub used by Louis MacNeice and George Barker, near the BBC, and she had been in the BBC persuading Reggie Smith, always generous to young writers, to take a look at this or that manuscript. She was one of the organizers of the Soho Square Fair in 1954, and they must have had a good time of it. I’d hear her loud jolly laugh and her voice up the stairs: ‘You’d never believe what’s happened. I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

      It was Joan who persuaded me to perform my ‘revolutionary duty’ in various ways. I organized a petition for the Rosenbergs, condemned to die in the electric chair for spying. As usual I was in a thoroughly false position. Everyone in the Communist Party believed, or said they did, that the Rosenbergs were innocent. I thought they were guilty, though I had no idea they were as important as spies as it turned out. Someone had told me this story: A woman living in New York, a communist, had got herself a job on Time magazine, then an object of vituperative hatred by communists everywhere because it ‘told lies’ about the Soviet Union. A Party official, met casually, said she should keep her ears and eyes open and report to the Party about the goings-on inside Time. She agreed, quite casually. Then, suddenly, there was spy fever. It occurred to her that she could be described as a spy. At first she told herself, Nonsense, surely it can’t be spying to tell a legal political party, in a democratic country, what is going on inside a newspaper. But the papers instructed her otherwise, and in a panic she left her job. In that paranoid atmosphere there could be no innocent communists. I thought the Rosenbergs had probably said, Oh yes, of course, we’ll tell you if there’s anything interesting going on.

      Not only did I think they were guilty, but that the letters they were writing out of prison were mawkish, and obviously written as propaganda to appear in newspapers. Yet the comrades thought they were deeply moving, and these were people who, in any other context but a political one, would have had the discrimination to know they were false and hypocritical.

      An important, not to say basic, point is illustrated here. Here we were, committed to every kind of murder and mayhem by definition: you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Yet at any suggestion that dirty work was going on, most communists reacted with indignation. Of course So-and-so wasn’t really a spy; of course the Party did not take gold from Moscow; of course this or that wasn’t a cover-up. The Party represented the purest of humankind’s hopes for the future – our hopes – and could not be anything other than pure.

      My attitude to the Rosenbergs was simple. They had small children and should not be executed, even if guilty. The letters I got back from writers and intellectuals mostly said that they did not see why they should sign a petition for the Rosenbergs when the Party refused to criticise the Soviet Union for its crimes.

      I did not see the relevance: it was morally wrong to execute Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I was again in the position of public and embattled communist; I was getting hate letters and anonymous telephone calls. In times of violent political emotion, issues like the Rosenbergs attract so much anger and hate that soon it is hard to remember that under all this noise and propaganda is a simple choice of right and wrong. And after all these years, there is still something inexplicable about this case. Soon there would be many spies exposed in Britain and America, some of them betraying their country for money, some sending dozens of fellow citizens to their deaths, yet not one of them was hanged or sent to the chair. The Rosenbergs’ crime was much less, and they were parents with young children. Some people think it was because they were Jewish. Others – I among them – wonder if their condemners got secret pleasure from the idea of a young, plump woman being ‘fried’. There are issues that are very much more than the sum of their parts, and this was one.

Another ‘duty’ I undertook at Joan’s behest was the Sheffield Peace Conference. My job was to go around to houses and hand out leaflets, extolling this festival. I was met at every door with a sullen, cold rejection. The newspapers were saying that the festival was Soviet inspired and financed – and of course it was, but we indignantly denied it and believed our denials. It was a truly nasty experience, perhaps the worst of my revolutionary duties. It was cold, it was grey, no one could describe Sheffield as beautiful, and I had not yet experienced the full blast of British citizens’ hostility to anything communist.^*

      With Jack I went on two trips to Paris. The little story ‘Wine’ sums up one. We sat in a cafe on the Boulevard St-Germain and watched mobs of students surge shouting past, overturning cars. What was their grievance? Overturning cars is a peculiarly French means of self-expression: Jack had seen the same thing before the war, and I saw it again on a much later visit.

      Another incident, the same trip, another cafe: We are sitting on the pavement, drinking coffee. Towards us comes, or sweeps, a wonderfully dressed woman, with her little dog. She is a poule, luxurious, perfect, and no, you don’t see prostitutes looking like that in Paris now. Jack is watching her, full of regret and admiration. He says to me in a low voice, ‘God, just look, only the French …’ Coming level with us, she pauses long enough to stare with contempt at Jack and say, ‘Vous êtes très mal élevé, monsieur.’ You are very ill-bred, sir. Or, You are a boor. And she sweeps past.

      ‘But why present yourself like that if you don’t want to be noticed?’ says Jack. (This is surely a question of much wider relevance.) ‘But if one did have the money for a woman like that, would one dare to touch her? I might upset her hairdo.’

      On the second visit, we were in a dark cellar-like room, where a reverent audience, all French, watched a pale woman in a long black dress with a high collar, unmade up except for tragic black-rimmed eyes, sing ‘Je ne regrette rien’ and other songs that now seem the essence of that time. (This style would shortly become the fashion.) What it sounded like was a defiant lament for the war, for the Occupation. On the streets of Paris then you kept coming on a pile of wreaths, or bunches of flowers on a pavement, under bullet holes, and a