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

Conference, which divided the world for him into two camps, good and bad, he had been in a kind of ecstasy.

But something must be said about the World Congress of Intellectuals at Wroclaw^*. It was the first of the big ‘peace’ congresses, and they went on in one form or another until the collapse of the Soviet Union, which inspired and stage-managed them. They were all the same, because there had to be total disagreement between the communists and the rest. I include here two cuttings from the Times, and from these can be deduced what all the other congresses, conferences, and meetings were like.

* Freudian’ dreams are altogether more personal and petty.

* The Sheffield Conference, November 1950, never took place, because the incoming delegates were refused visas; it was transferred to Warsaw.

* August 25–29, 1948

      INTELLECTUALS AND PROPAGANDA ACRIMONIOUS CONGRESS

      WROCLAW, Aug. 27 – The aggressive opening day’s speech of the Soviet writer Alexander Fadieev, in which he delivered a bitter attack of a political nature on American imperialism and certain facets of western culture, continued to plague the World Congress of Intellectuals to-day.

      Mr Fadieev’s speech set the tone for the entire proceedings, which have developed to a large extent into the usual futile acrimonious exchanges of Soviet and western viewpoints. To-day, for example, there was only one speech among nearly two dozen that held to the intellectual rather than the political level established by Mr Fadieev. This was delivered by the French writer M. Julien Benda, who urged that educators and historians should cease to glorify warmongers, ‘whether they won or whether they lost.’ Literature should concentrate on glorifying civilization, justice, and those who oppose destruction.

      Otherwise the day was filled by protagonists of one side or the other, and was noteworthy for a strong answer to Mr Fadieev by an American delegate, who said things of the Russians that are ordinarily not said in public in present-day Poland. He is Mr Bryn J. Hovde, director of the New School for Social Research in New York. Mr Fadieev’s speech, he said, if made by a responsible member of a Government, was of a kind that would be made ‘to give propaganda justification to a premeditated military attack.’ Mr Hovde said that Americans thought that, since temptations to imperialism went historically with wealth and power, the Soviet Union was ‘no more immune than we ourselves,’ and when it came to demanding her own way in the world, Americans thought that the Soviet Union took a back seat to nobody.

      The British speaker to-day was Professor J.B.S. Haldane, who said he agreed that the main threat of war came from America and the dangers of American imperialism. He criticized the Russians for failing to make available ‘full information on the facts of life in the Soviet Union,’ which he said was necessary in order to influence British intellectuals.

      INTELLECTUALS’ CONFERENCE SOVIET WRITER’S OUTBURST

      The World Congress of Intellectuals dedicated by the French and Polish organizing committees to find a road to peace opened in anything but a peaceful manner to-day. After the Foreign Minister, Mr Medzelewski, had welcomed the delegates, the Soviet writer, Alexander Fadieev, launched the work of the Congress with the usual bitter diatribe against ‘American Imperialism’ and for this occasion extended it to include ‘reactionary aggressive’ elements of American culture as well.

      Mr Fadieev also attacked schools of writing which ‘bred aggressive propaganda,’ and. naming T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, John dos Passos, Jean Paul Sartre, and Andre Malraux, he said: ‘If hyenas could type and jackals could use a fountain pen they would write such things’ as were produced by these men. The Soviet writer’s outburst drew a temperate but firm reply from Mr Olaf Stapledon, the Bntish author, who, reminding Mr Fadieev of the purpose of the Congress, said that if they were to reach any agreement they must all make a special effort ‘to enter into the other point of view.’

      Mr Stapledon said that no side could lay claim to all the truth and that both sides, not just one, were guilty of using ‘instruments which pervert the truth.’ He answered Mr Fadieev specifically on Mr Eliot, saying that while they might not agree with his politics he certainly was an important figure in British poetry.

      Mr Stapledon arranged a private meeting to-night between the British and Russian delegates to enable them to get to know each other better.

      The delegates from Britain were Sir John Boyd Orr, the dean of Canterbury, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, Professor J. D. Bernal, Professor C. H. Waddington, Professor Hyman Levy, Richard Hughes, Olaf Stapledon, Louis Golding, Rudand Brougham, Bernard Stevens, Felix Topolski, Dr Julian Huxley, A. J. P. Taylor, Denis Saurat, Edward Crankshaw. A starry list. (The Times list.)

      As for our Authors World Peace Appeal: Very late at night, after those interminable, exhausting banquets, those speeches, trips here and there – collective farm, children’s holiday camp, museums – Alfred Coppard and I sat in my room and exchanged talk which must have had the ears of our invisible listeners curling with disbelief. No, I said, no, you must not go on the radio and say that Stalin is the greatest man who ever lived, no, nor claim that Britain is a tyranny worse than any communist country. Do you really want us all to quarrel publicly and make a field day for our newspapers? ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t quarrel publicly,’ he said, ‘if that’s how we feel.’ From time to time he tried to kiss me, or fondle me. My stern sense of duty forbade amorous dalliance. Besides, he was old.

      It was also my duty to visit Richard Mason in his room and tell him that he simply must not announce on every possible occasion that he had never read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. Our hosts had read all of British literature – the writers among them really had – and he was shaming us all. ‘Who is Turgenev?’ he might drawl, if the name came up. I thought he was putting it on, that this was his equivalent of Douglas Young’s kilt. But he really had not read anything much. He claimed that he had become a writer by accident. A very young lonely soldier, he had lain wounded in a hospital in – I think – Burma, had fallen in love with his beautiful brown nurse, had written the story, as much from boredom as for anything, and it had become a best-seller. He claimed he found great literature boring. Was this true? But his phlegmatic, philistine persona concealed all kinds of sensibilities. Like us all, he was upset by what he saw in Moscow: its dreary streets, its empty shops, the bad clothes, its atmosphere – this was just before Stalin died. We used to beg our minder, one Oksana, a beautiful Georgian girl, to be allowed to wander about the streets as we pleased, but she was evidently afraid. We did manage little guilty trips when she wasn’t looking, but were recalled by her anxious scoldings: ‘What are you doing? You are not allowed …’

      In those streets of almost empty shops there were two exceptions. One was the bread shops, wonderful, redeeming the ugliness, crammed full of different breads, brown, white, black, great fat crusty loaves that smelled so good we wanted to eat them then and there. The other surprise was corset shops. There were scarcely any clothes, the shoes were flimsy or clodhopping, there was nothing frivolous or nice, or piquant, or fashionable, or colourful. But there were corset shops and, in each, one or two enormous bright pink or purple corsets, with stays like girders, and shiny pink ribbons. Not a bra in sight, though.

      Scenes, little bright-coloured scenes, which I wrote down when I came home after the trip, and used to come on, among ageing papers and old notebooks. ‘Good God, all that happened, it did happen…’

      We are in the Tretyakov – an art gallery – surrounded by vast pictures of grazing cows, happy peasants, agreeable landscapes. Naomi, a collector of modern art, stands in front of a herd of cows. ‘That is a very fine cow,’ she drawls in her Oxford voice, which for some reason is emphasized in Russia. Our guides, the museum officials, gaze at the cow. ‘A fine cow,’ she drawls,