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In high, windy Avila there were acres of wonderful brown jars and pots, standing on dry reeds. I bought the most beautiful jar I have ever owned, for a few pence.
What struck me most then, and surprises me even now, is the contrast between the wild, savage, empty beauty of Spain and the stuffy stolidity of even the cheap hotels we could afford, between the poverty we saw everywhere and the churches loaded with gold and jewels, as if all the wealth of the peninsula had come to rest in them.
We visited Germany, three times. The first was when I wanted to find Gottfried. Peter had gone the year before for a summer to visit his father. I had told Gottfried he must not have him do this unless he was sure he could keep it up. As usual he was contemptuous of my political acumen: of course he would be able to invite Peter whenever he liked. I said I wasn’t so sure; besides, Moidi Jokl said he was wrong. I turned out to be right. Germans who had spent the war abroad were suspect, and many vanished into Stalin’s camps. I was angry, partly for the ignoble reason that I had been insulted and patronized by Gottfried for years about politics but in fact had been more often right, and he wrong. I was angry because of Peter, who had had a wonderfully kind father who had apparently dropped him.
Now I understand what happened. It was indeed a question of life and death. What I blame him for is for not smuggling out a little letter saying, I cannot afford to keep contact with the West; I might be killed for it. It would have been easy: there was a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing. Instead people would come back from some official trip to East Germany and say, I saw your handsome husband. He is a very important man. He sends you his love. ‘He is not my husband,’ I would say, ‘and it is Peter who needs his love.’ I hated East Berlin. For me it was like a distillation of everything bad about communism, but some comrades admired it. For years, right up to the time of the collapse of communism, they were saying, ‘East Germany has got it right. It is economically in advance of any other communist country. What a pity the revolution didn’t start in Germany.’
Another trip was to Hamburg. Jack wanted to find a friend who had disappeared in the war. He failed. Hamburg had been badly bombed and was still full of ruins. It was February, dark, very cold, with a bitter wind coming off the North Sea. Jack said there was a trade-union festival, a traditional one; we should join in. In the gaps between buildings, among ruins, burned great bonfires, and around them leaped and staggered or swayed very drunk people, with bottles in their hands, singing or rather howling songs from the war and traditional workers’ songs. It was like Walpurgis Night. It was like Bosch. It was horrible. For years these scenes stayed in my mind, and then I returned to Hamburg after thirty years and told my publisher what I remembered, and he said, Impossible; nothing like that has ever happened here. You must be thinking of Berlin, or Munich.
And indeed I saw the ruins in Berlin, miles of them, and I stood where the Brandenburg Gate had been. Much later, thirty years later, I went back and there was not a sign of ruins; you’d think the war had never happened. I met people who had been children just after the war in Berlin, and apart from being permanently hungry, what they remembered was playing in the bombed houses. They thought that was what a city was – streets sometimes whole, sometimes in ruins. Later they went to undamaged cities. One of these, who as a child had been half starved, had survived because his mother was working for the Americans; he saw a film with Orson Welles in it and said, ‘One day I’m going to eat as much as I like, and I’m going to be as fat as Orson Welles.’ And that indeed came to pass, and then he was in trouble with his doctor and had to go on a diet.
I went on a trip with Jack to southern Germany. It is recorded in ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’. The mood in Germany was so bad then, so low, so angry. The experience depressed me, and so did writing the story. Some Germans have reproached me for writing it, but the point of the story is not Germany but Europe: it was all of us I was thinking of, Europe building itself up, knocking itself down, building, destroying, building…
The nastiest of my recollections of Germany was of a woman coming up to me on a railway platform to complain that Germany had been divided. Her fatherland was cut in half. Did I know of this injustice? Was it fair? What had Germany done to be punished in this way? Other people came to join her, all assaulting me with voices full of the insincerity that goes with a consciously false position.
Jack went to Germany partly out of political conviction. As a Marxist he refused to believe in national characteristics, national guilt, but this was the country that had murdered nearly all his family.
I was full of conflict. I had been brought up on the First World War, and a good part of that was my father’s passionate identification with the ordinary German soldiers, who were victims of their stupid government, just like the Tommies. I had been married to a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. I had been brought up to believe that Hitler and the Nazis were a direct result of the Versailles Treaty and that if Germany had been treated with an intelligent generosity, there would have been no World War II. I believed – and still do – that the Second World War would have been prevented if we, Britain and France, had had the guts to stand up to Hitler early and had supported the anti-Nazi Germans, whom we consistently snubbed. Being in Germany then was so painful: I was divided, sorry for the Germans, and yet hearing German or seeing a sign in German still reminded me of the fear I felt in the war, though I believed this reaction to be stupid and irrational. There was a day, or rather a night, when, standing on a railway platform in Berlin and realizing that every person on it was a cripple from the War – legless men, armless men, eyeless men, and all drunk, in that particular way of being drunk in war or bad times, a bitter drunkenness – I said to myself, Enough, stop tormenting yourself: this is like voluntarily rubbing one’s nose in one’s own vomit. What am I doing this for? What good does it do to me – or the Germans? And I did not go back to Germany for decades. And then Germany was whole again, and that landscape of misery and destruction had vanished. Please God, for ever.
And now I have to record what was probably the most neurotic act of my life. I decided to join the Communist Party. And this at a time when my ‘doubts’ had become something like a steady, private torment. Separate manifestations of the horror that the Soviet Union had become were discussed, briefly, in lowered voices – the equivalent of looking over one’s shoulder to see if anyone could hear. I do not remember one serious, sit-down, in-depth discussion about the implications of what we were hearing. Rather, sudden burstings into tears: ‘Oh, it’s so horrible.’ Sudden storms of accusation: ‘It’s just anti-Soviet propaganda anyway.’ Marital quarrels, even divorces.
People complain that old Reds ‘try to justify themselves’. These are nearly all young people, for older ones understand exactly why it was natural to be a communist. To explain, to ‘bear witness’, is not to justify.
To spell out the paradox: All over Europe, and to a much lesser extent the United States, it was the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people who became communists. (Among these were a very different kind of people, the power-lovers.) These decent, kind people supported the worst, the most brutal tyranny of our time – with the exception of communist China. Hitler’s Germany, which lasted thirteen years, was an infant in terror compared to Stalin’s regime – and yes, I am taking into account the Holocaust.
The first and main fact, the ‘mind-set’ of those times, was that it was taken for granted capitalism was doomed, was on its way out. Capitalism was responsible for every social ill, war included. Communism was the future for all mankind. I used to hear earnest proselytizers say, ‘Let me have anyone for a couple of hours, and I can persuade him that communism is the only answer. Because it is obvious that it is.’ Communism’s hands were not exactly clean? Or, to put it as the comrades did, ‘There have been mistakes’? That was because the first communist country had been backward Russia; but if the first country had been Germany, that would have been a very different matter! (The fact that the Soviet Union had inherited the oldest and most successful empire in the world was decades away from being noticed.) Soon, when the industrially developed countries became communist, we would all see a very different type of communism.
I have been tempted to write a chapter headed ‘Politics’, so that it could be skipped by people who find the whole subject boring, but politics permeated everything then; the Cold War was a poisonous miasma. And yet it is hard from present perspectives to make sense of a way of thinking I now think was lunatic. Does it matter if one woman succumbed to lunacy? No. But I am talking of a generation, and we were part of some kind of social psychosis or mass self-hypnosis. I am not trying to justify it when I say that I now believe all mass movements – religious, political – are a kind of mass hysteria and, a generation or so later, people must say, But how could you believe … whatever it was?
Belief – that’s the word. This was a religious set of mind, identical with that of passionate religious True Believers. Arthur Koesder and others wrote a book called The God That Failed, and now it is a commonplace to say that communism is a religion. But to use that phrase is not necessarily to understand it. What communism inherited was not merely the fervours but a landscape of goodies and baddies, the saved and the unredeemed. We inherited the mental framework of Christianity. Hell: capitalism; all bad. A Redeemer, all good – Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Purgatory: you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs (lagers; concentration camps, and the rest). Then paradise … then heaven … then Utopia.
Yet I was far from a true believer. For one thing, Jack, the most serious love of my life, embodied the conflicts or, if you like, the ‘contradictions’ of communism: eleven of his closest friends, his comrades, his real family, had been hanged as traitors. When I said to Jack I was thinking of joining the Party, he said I was making a mistake – and it must have hurt him most horribly to say it. Yet he knew, having been through all those mills himself, it was a waste of time saying it. ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ was what I could have heard.
Arthur Koestler said that every communist who stayed in the Communist Party in the face of all the evidence had a secret explanation for what was happening, and this could not be discussed with friends and comrades. Some of the communists I knew had decided that yes, the reported crimes were true – though of course not as bad as the capitalist press said – but that Comrade Stalin could not possibly know about what was going on. The truth was being kept from Uncle Joe. My rationalization, my ‘secret belief – and it certainly could not be discussed with anyone but Jack – was that the leadership of the Soviet Union had become corrupt but that waiting everywhere in the communist world were the good communists, keeping their counsel, and they would at the right time take power, and then communism would resume its march to the just society, the perfect society. There was just one little thing: I didn’t realize Uncle Joe had murdered them all.
And then there was this business of Britain’s class system. It shocked me – as it does all colonials. Britain is two nations, all right … though it is a bit better now – not much. When I first arrived, my Rhodesian accent enabled me to talk to the natives – that is, the working class – for I was seen as someone outside their taboos, but this became impossible as soon as I began talking middle-class standard English: this was not a choice; I cannot help absorbing accents wherever I am. A curtain came down – slam. I am talking about being treated as an equal, not of the matey, rather paternal ‘niceness’ of the upper classes. And then I found that people who had suffered out the thirties on tea and bread and margarine and jam, who had been for years unemployed, who lived in filthy slums, voted Tory.
An incident: One of my RAF friends from Rhodesia took me to lunch and said, ‘You could learn to pass. Women are good at it.’ This was meant kindly: he had taken me out to lunch to say this. He did not understand when I said that I had no intention of learning to ‘pass’. People did not necessarily admire his kind. Only six or seven years later, with the advent of the (so-called) angry young men, that generation, it would become unnecessary to justify this stand, but then it was necessary. Uncomfortable, embarrassing for both sides.
An incident: With another man, also ex-RAF, I went into a pub in Bayswater. It was the public bar. We stood at the counter, ordered drinks. All around the walls, men sat watching us. They were communing without words. One got up, slowly, deliberately, came to us, and said, ‘You don’t want to be here [rather, ’ere]. That’s your place.’ Pointing at the private bar. We meekly took ourselves there, joining our peers, the middle class. This kind of thing goes on now. Foreigners, returning natives, complain about the class system, but the British say – both classes – You don’t understand us, and continue as before. The working classes, the lower classes, have ‘internalized’ their station in life.
When in this mood, a bitter criticism of Britain, my set of mind was identical – but I saw this only later – with that of the people who became communists in the thirties: because of that grim and grimy poverty. And, too, with the people who went off to the Spanish Civil War, because of anger when the French and British governments refused to supply arms to the legitimate government, while Hitler and Mussolini armed Franco. A deep shame persisted in many people I met then. (Does this kind of shame, over the behaviour of one’s government, still exist? I think not – an innocence has gone.) This shame caused some people to become traitors, and spies. The Spanish Civil War had left a painful legacy. People have forgotten how badly the refugees from Spain were treated, kept in camps near the border for years, as if they were criminals, to be punished. Well into the sixties, there were a couple of pubs in Soho where intensely poor Spaniards met to talk about how the world had forgotten them, and yet they had been the first to stand up to the Nazis, to the fascists. There are cynics who say that that was their crime.
And so I joined ‘the Party’, which is how it was generally referred to. I hated having a Party card. I hated joining anything. I hated and hate meetings. I merely record this … a tangle of contradictory, lunatic emotions and behaviour. Later, so very much later, quite recently, in fact, an explanation of why so many people stuck with the Communist Party, long after they should have left, came to me. But for now, enough.
There was another thing: I had seen too many of the kind who run around saying, ‘I am a communist,’ but wouldn’t dream of joining the Party. I despised them. Quite soon, in London, there would be a new generation of young people saying, ‘I am a communist,’ to shock the bourgeoisie, to annoy mummy and daddy, to give themselves and others an enjoyable frisson.
I was interviewed by Sam Aaronivitch, cultural commissar. He was a very young man, lean, stern, military in style, with the grim, sardonic humour of the times. He had been a very poor boy, from the East End. The Young Communist League had been his education but not his nursery, because he was a Jew and one of a people of a Book. I have several times been told by children of the Jewish East End how they listened to fathers, uncles, elder brothers, even mothers, argue politics, philosophy, religion, around meal tables on which there might be hardly enough to eat. Why had ‘the Party’ chosen a young man who had read nothing of modern literature, and was not interested in the arts, to represent culture? The interview was in the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. (‘King Street says…’ ‘Those idiots in King Street…’ ‘I was summoned to King Street, but I told them that…’) He heard me out, like an officer interviewing a rookie, and said he was intrigued to meet an intellectual who wanted to join the Party, when most of them were leaving it, and he looked forward to reading my denunciations of the Party when I left. Then he took me on a tour of the East End, where he had grown up. Sam does not remember doing this, but it is one of the vividest of my memories of those early days in London. He was showing me a culture already dead, which he regretted, because of its guts and its cohesiveness. Sam has had a various life, or perhaps one should say lives: one of them as ‘the Balliol Marxist’. Sometimes we meet, when he is sprinting and I am ambling across Hampstead Heath. We reminisce: I remember this, he remembers that – for instance, that Peter used to spend weekends and play with his daughter Sabrina. He is now helping the Bangladeshi community who live in the streets where he grew up. The Bangladeshis in East London are people of a Book, but for some reason theirs does not do for them what the Jews’ Book did for them, producing the passionately polemical, intellectual, clever people who were able to rise above their poverty to invigorate the worlds of learning, business, and the arts. The children do not grow up hearing fathers, mothers, uncles, elder brothers, argue about religion, politics, literature; they do not hear poetry and bits from great novels quoted in support of arguments. When they go to school they do not do brilliantly, as did the poor Jews who lived before them in those streets.
One of the reasons some found it hard to leave the Party was precisely because there were so many colourful, extraordinary people in it. Good people, generous, kind, clever.
I shall mention two out of many. Once, when I was so short of money I didn’t know what to do, thought I would have to give up trying to live on my earnings and get a job, I got a letter quite out of the blue from people I did not know, communists, who wrote to say they had heard I was hard up, they liked my books, and enclosed one hundred pounds. That was a lot of money then. They did not want me to return it, but when I had enough, they would like me to send it on to someone who needed it, with the same request: to hand it on to someone in need. I shall be forever grateful to these people, whom I never met.
A bit later, when feeling imprisoned by the stratifications of the class system, I asked the Communist Party to arrange a visit for me to a mining community. I found this village, Armsthorpe, near Doncaster, grim, depressing; and yet it had been recently built and the people in it felt themselves lucky compared with families living in some of the old villages. A miner, his wife, three adolescent children. He had been a communist for years, and so had she. The house was full of books: I saw no other books in the houses of the village. They listened to music on the radio, and plays. They talked about how Sybil Thorndike had brought a company to play Shakespeare to the miners in the middle of the war. Everyone in the community remembered this. These two had travelled to the Soviet Union and to other communist countries. That was before mass tourism; they were the only travelled people in the village. He was a father figure, or unofficial representative; people dropped in all the time to ask his advice. Everything he said about the mining community, about Britain, about his life – the usual story of bitter poverty in the twenties and thirties – was full of information and good sense. Everything he said about the Soviet Union and the communist world was nonsense. To have said to this man, What you admire so much is an illusion, and Stalin is a monster – that would have killed something in him: hope, a belief in humankind. This kind of dichotomy, on one side everything that was sound and sensible and honest, and on the other a mirage of lies, was common.
I used to lie awake, for the two weeks of my visit, in the living room on a sofa immediately under their bedroom and hear him coughing just above my head. He had lung disease from the pit, and he knew he would die soon. He wouldn’t allow his children to go near the mines; it was a life for a dog.
Walking with him through the street, I saw a group of young miners, just up from the pit, wearing cheap best suits and red scarves, having showered in the pithead baths. They were off to Doncaster for the evening. They greeted my host, nodded to me. The old miner was full of an angry tenderness for them: what were they eating, they didn’t look well, those scarves weren’t enough to keep them warm. You could see their affection for him.
I used this experience in a short story, ‘England Versus England.’
My Party card was in fact delayed. I had been invited to go to the Soviet Union for the Authors World Peace Appeal: that kind of inspirational organization flourished then. It had been started by Naomi Mitchison and Alex Comfort. Few people could be found who would go. The atmosphere was such that I got letters and telephone calls saying that I would disappear into a concentration camp. When I said that it was hardly likely that the Union of Soviet Writers would allow eminent guests to disappear – surely bad publicity for them? – I was told (like Moidi Jokl with Gottfried), ‘You don’t understand anything about communism. It would serve you right if you were bumped off.’
There were six of us: Naomi Mitchison herself. Her cousin Douglas Young, because he understood Russian. Arnold Kettle, a well-known Marxist literary critic from Leeds University. A. E. Coppard, the short-story writer. Richard Mason, the author of The Wind Cannot Read, a best-selling novel from the war, about a young English soldier in love with a half-caste nurse. And myself, a very new writer. This, we knew, was hardly the level of literary repute the Russians must have been hoping to attract for the first visit of writers from the West since the war – this was 1952.
There was a preliminary meeting, passionate and polemical, violent. Alex Comfort hated that there would be a communist on the delegation, Arnold Kettle, who would try to pull the wool over our eyes and feed us lies. Naomi refuted this. She knew Arnold, who was a sweet young man. A. E. Coppard, as innocent as a babe about politics, had gone to the Wrotslav Peace Conference and fallen in love with communism, as if he had been given a potion. The meeting developed into a plan with detailed instructions, from Alex Comfort, on how to outwit Arnold. I think Richard Mason was present.
Meanwhile the Party had decided it was not a good thing to have two communists on the trip; one was enough. They told me not to join, formally, until after I returned. This made me uncomfortable, put me at once in a false position. Deception w-as not, really, in my nature. An immediate, direct openness, often criticised as tactlessness, was more my line.
Discussing it later with the knowledgeable, I was told that this was typical communist tactics. I was from the very start put in a position where I was involved in a dishonest act and could be exposed for it. I believed that, but not for long, because I began to see something much deeper. Why was it that anywhere near the Party, facts became twisted, people said things which you knew – and they must have known – were untrue? The devil is described as the Father of Lies, a resonant phrase, suggesting other, older phrases, like ‘Realm of Lies’. I have come to think that there is something in the nature of communism that breeds lies, makes people lie and twist facts, imposes deception. What is this thing? This force? One cannot believe one word that emanates from a communist source. Communism is indeed a realm of lies. Stalin, the great deceiver, was only partly responsible, because it was Lenin, the exemplar, who provided the blueprints. ‘Disinformation’ was – is? – only a crystallization, a formalization, of communism’s deepest nature. But these are deeper waters than I know how to plumb: I am sure, though, that there is something here that lives well beyond the daylight world of common sense and simple causes.
We were an improbable assortment of people. First, Naomi Mitchison. She was one of the writers who had broken new ground for women in the thirties, particularly with the novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen. She was a town councillor in Scotland, a farmer, and, with her husband, Dick Mitchison, who was a member of Parliament, an energetic member of the Labour Party. A. E. Coppard wrote some of the best of English short stories, gentle, wry, humorous – and sharp-eyed, like himself. But unfortunately, falling in love with communism had not done much for his clarity of vision. Richard Mason claimed he was going to the Soviet Union because the year before he had gone to Lourdes and thought this would be a nice contrast, and as piquant an experience. But he was deceptive, played the role of philistine, a pipe-smoking tweedy Englishman, phlegmatic and silent. In fact, he was a romantic soul. Arnold Kettle was on this delegation because Naomi had invited him and because the Party had agreed to it. I had written a well-reviewed novel and short stories.
When we met at the airport, five of us looked with suspicion, or with wariness, at Arnold Kettle, but almost at once his calm and good sense made him the mentor of the group. This often happened: communists, seen as demons, seemed disproportionately sane when actually met.
Our opinions about the Soviet Union could hardly have been more diverse, but we were made one partly because of the hysterical attentions of the newspapers, which caused us to close ranks, and partly because of Arnold’s insistence that we should present a united front, regardless of our differences. This had to be the party line, from King Street and – presumably – the Soviet Union. It surprised the ‘right wing’ – Naomi and Douglas – and upset A. E. Coppard, because he wanted only to embrace communism publicly and for ever on behalf of the whole British nation. The point was, he was quite unpolitical, had not been, as it were, inoculated against politics, and his first introduction to it had overthrown him. Richard Mason was unpolitical by nature and intention. So Arnold and I found ourselves holding the centre ground, which certainly suited my temperament and, of course, my sense of importance. I think now that if we had quarrelled publicly, in front of the Russians, we would at least have presented a fairer picture of British attitudes towards communism, but with every hour together we found ourselves feeling more and more British, and patriots. This united front was matched as soon as we met the Russians, for they were all old-fashioned nationalists. This sounds a simple statement, to be met now by: Well, of course! But nationalism of this sort had nothing to do with the purities of Utopian Communism, which planned the mutual love of all mankind. To listen to our hosts talking like Colonel Blimp made me remember, most uncomfortably, the hours we had spent in the group in Southern Rhodesia, trying to make sense of the twists and turns in the ‘Party Line’. Masterpieces of dialectic, they were, and particularly from Gottfried, manipulating Marxist verities. If the Russians had known how local communists, all over the world, wove their airy structures of explanation of why the Russian comrades were doing this and that improbable thing, they would have laughed their heads off. How right I had been to say – and Gottfried too – that no real Communist party anywhere would recognize our idealistic vapourings. But to encounter this crude, simplistic nationalism here was not what I had expected, and yet why not? The Russians, or rather Stalin, had never made any secret of it. These mental discomforts I discussed with Arnold, for the others would not have understood us. We concluded that the war had been so terrible for the Russians that of course they had to retreat to nationalism. Russians had to be forgiven everything because of that war. They had lost more people in the siege of Leningrad than the British and Americans combined had lost in the whole war. This was why Czech Jack kept saying to me, ‘You people here simply don’t understand.’ [‘The Soviet Union’ and ‘Russia’ were interchangeable in those days, improbable though that sounds now.]
I have to say that these memories of that trip are not shared – for instance, with Naomi, as I discovered when twenty-five years or so later I found we were not remembering the same things: it was not a question of remembering the same things differently but as if we had been on two different trips. This experience, which was shocking to me, began my attempts to understand the extraordinary slipperiness of memory: before that, I had taken it for granted that people with the same experiences would remember the same things. Particularly when they were as vivid as those during our trip to Russia. I did better with Arnold; our memories did match, more or less.
I have seldom been so torn, astonished, disappointed, alert … alive, as during that trip, and my memories of it are among the most vivid I have. There is a basic question about memory: why do we remember this and not that, particularly when this is not necessarily important, is on the contrary mere trivia. We remember what we do, I think, because for one reason or another we were particularly alert, paying attention, present in the occasion – because most often we are not present but thinking about what we had for breakfast, or what we will do tomorrow, or recalling what we said to So-and-so. Why we are more alive and awake at some times than others is a separate question, leading to very deep waters. Well, I was certainly present, every minute, during that trip, and that is the reason for my memories of it. I had often decided to write about it but then decided not. What was the point? Anything said or written about the Soviet Union was bound to be greeted by emotions so violent, so enraged, or so partisan that no calm judgement could be expected. Besides, what I remembered was not necessarily flattering to my fellow delegates. Of course, this was bound to be true of what they thought about me.
But now all there is left is the music of the distant drum …
Our official host was the Union of Soviet Writers, headed by one Alexei Surkov, whose name was soon to become synonymous with the oppression of decent writers by Soviet ideology. He was an ordinary-looking man, in the style Soviet officials used then to convince: bluff, open, take-me-or-leave-me, honest-John Surkov, the friend of friends of the Soviet Union. Behind him was the KGB, monitoring and directing every word and action. Did we know this? Yes, but our view of the KGB was naive, to say the least. Also coloured by arrogance. We joked, in our hotel rooms, that the KGB would be tapping our telephones and the concierges examining our belongings, but it was of no concern to us; we were from the West and did not go in for that sort of thing. We did not see ourselves as useful tools for the KGB. Correctly, as it turned out, though they would have been pleased if we had become their tools – after all, so many did. From their point of view we were the first delegation of ‘intellectuals’ from the West since the war, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ – a phrase which caused us discomfort and highlighted our differences from them – and were to be humoured and pampered. Behind them were the horrors of the Great Famine, deliberately engineered by Stalin, the Purges, the Gulag, the crushing devastations of the war, the killing of the Jews during the Black Years – not over yet – unspeakable injustices, torments, murders, tortures. While writing this, I read that the mass graves recently discovered and acknowledged were because Stalin, continually imprisoning hundreds of thousands of his people, was told the prisons were overcrowded, did not feel inclined to waste money on building more, and solved the problem by having the prisoners shot and then beginning again. Behind the Russians we were meeting was this history. And Stalin was still alive, watching like a spider from his Kremlin. We did not know then, but Stalin read everything published in the Soviet Union – novels, short stories, poems, and all play and film scripts. He had caused songs to be written, with prescribed words, suitable for different stages of the war and even for battles. He certainly believed that the artist is the engineer of the human soul – as he was always being quoted as saying. The opening of the Soviet Archives has fleshed out the character of dear Uncle Joe.
Their visitors must have seemed to them like not very bright children. I have oftened wondered if this visit contributed to remarks – by ex KGB, GRU, and other intelligence agents – like: ‘The Western communists and fellow travellers are like naive children, and when the Soviet tanks roll over them they will be crying, Welcome, Welcome.’ No, the still innocent would be crying, ‘But, comrades, stop your tanks; you are making a terrible mistake, and you are sullying the glorious name of communism.’ As late as the 1960s, a Jew from Israel, not a communist but left labour, was arrested and imprisoned in Prague and charged with being a fascist-Zionist agent of international imperialism – decoded, this meant a Jew – and when in prison pleaded with his torturers and jailors, ‘Comrades, how can you soil the hands of the working class in this way, how can you hurt yourselves and all the decent people in the world by such behaviour?’
Our first official engagement was around a long table in a formal room, and there were twenty or so of us. Surkov opened with a florid official speech, which set the tone for all their succeeding speeches.
The gulf between the Soviet writers – or rather the official party line – and the British contingent was unbridgeable. This was evident from that first speech, and the distance between us widened rather than narrowed throughout the visit.
Naomi opened for our side. A middle-aged woman, in appearance not unlike a friendly terrier, she said she had been in Moscow during the twenties, she had had the most wonderful love affair, and why had the Soviet Union become hostile to Free Love? She remembered bathing nude in the Moskva River with her lover, and all kinds of good times. Once, the Soviet Union had been a beacon of progress in matters amorous, but ‘you have all become so reactionary’. Needless to say, Arnold and I were burning with shame and embarrassment. The seriousness of the occasion! Our responsibilities as representatives of our country! Now I wonder if this wasn’t a pretty good way of dealing with all the rhetoric and bombast, with an impossible situation.
Then Douglas Young demanded to put the case for the exploited colonies, speaking for Scotland, England’s vassal. He wore a kilt at times during the trip, for dramatic emphasis. (He was very tall and very thin, and a kilt was even more dramatic on him than on an ordinary man.) On every possible occasion he stood up to speak for downtrodden and oppressed Scotland. I have no doubt he was a sincere Scottish nationalist, but he had his tongue in his cheek. The communists were obliged to rise to their feet and cheer him whenever he spoke of oppressed nations, so waves of noisy insincerity were continually disrupting whatever meeting we were having.
The details of what both sides said have gone, but not my emotions. I was feeling a direct continuation of the emotions fed into me by my parents, particularly my father: You don’t understand the awfulness of… in this case, the Second World War as experienced by the Russians, by the Soviet Union – their feeling of isolation, which nobody could understand who had not been part of it. This was shared by Arnold, for very personal reasons. Emotionally, then, we were both identified with the Russians. Certain arguments – discussions they were not, rather the stating and restating of our so different positions – were repeated. They attacked with their creed: literature must further the progress of communism, the Communist Party’s right to decide what should be written and published, the Party’s responsibility for the glorious future of all humankind. We defended ours: the integrity of the individual conscience, individual responsibility, the duty of artists to tell the truth as they saw it. (No, this debate is far from over: the Communist position is represented now by the defenders of political correctness.) The Russians – most of them were Russians – put themselves beyond the possibility of serious debate when they said there was really no need for official censorship. ‘Communist writers develop an inner censor, which tells them what they may write.’ This inner censor seemed to us a terrifying thing: that they should defend it – no, boast of it – shocked us.
Another problem was their attitude to Stalin. Stalin’s name could not be used without a string of honorifics – the Great, the Glorious, and so on. This was because the slightest whisper of criticism of Stalin would put them in a concentration camp. No, we did not understand this. We said that when we read in the reports of their assemblies that Comrade Stalin had spoken for five hours and the applause lasted for half an hour, we were incredulous. In our culture – we boasted – there could not be this kind of reverence for a leader. In fact, the very word ‘leader’ was an embarrassment. Decades later, with what chagrin did I read, during the reign of Thatcher, ‘wild applause for fifteen minutes’. Thus does Time punish our arrogances.
A couple of coordinating meetings were attempted, by Arnold, between the members of the delegation: the ‘right wing’ – Naomi and Douglas – and the left wing, Coppard. Arnold and I would confer – hastily, for we were worn out by the intensity of the experience – in my room, late at night. Naomi wanted to issue a statement, on behalf of all of us, condemning the camps and extolling democracy. If she did this, A. E. Coppard threatened, he would demand his right to say – on behalf of all of us – that the Soviet Union was the hope for all the world, and the British people had been told lies by their government about the real nature of communism. Arnold undertook to take on Naomi and say that if she did what she wanted, we would all resign and go home. At the same time he would tell Douglas Young, who would be in Naomi’s room, that he must stop playing the jackass in his kilt. I must explain to Coppard that if he did what he wanted, we would all resign and Naomi would issue her statement. I did and he was terribly distressed. Our conversations went on in my room, or rather suite, which looked like a blown-up version of a Victorian parlour, all heavy plush tablecloths, heavy velvet curtains, ornate mirrors, thick carpets. He sat on one side of a vast table, I on the other. Alfred Coppard had been a poor boy, had always hated ‘the ruling class’, or ‘that lot up there’. He saw Britain as being run entirely for the benefit of the few; the formulations of communism seemed to him the merest common sense. He had become a Utopian Communist, as I had, ten years before. I felt for him. More, I loved him. He was a pure soul, incapable of understanding evil – if I may use that word at all. I have known few people as lovable as he was. Ever since the Wrotslav Peace 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
(#ulink_d9ed03da-34e5-5e74-b2cc-584163aa5ac6). 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.
* (#ulink_f440cba5-efcd-5992-af4e-ff765f171be6) Freudian’ dreams are altogether more personal and petty.
* (#ulink_564b0342-2242-5688-a223-66b4946d89ed) The Sheffield Conference, November 1950, never took place, because the incoming delegates were refused visas; it was transferred to Warsaw.
* (#ulink_1a197138-6d74-5951-99a7-a95befe75827) 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, ‘but surely she needs milking?’ The official meets her innocent gaze, but it is more than his life is worth – literally – to laugh. ‘Soviet cows are well treated,’ he says severely. Naomi says, ‘I’ve got a cow in my herd just like that brown one.’ We, coming on behind, are smiling, and even risking a laugh, but the look on the man’s face stops us.
It seems that the Soviet artists, who were allowed to paint only ‘healthy’ pictures, softened their situation, at least a little, by this ruse: A picture having been completed, they deliberately painted in a dog or an obviously out-of-place figure. When this picture was set in front of the officials who would say yea or nay, they were bound to criticise it, to cover themselves in case of criticism from high up. At which point the artist would come in. ‘Comrades, I’ve just seen – it’s that dog. I was wrong to put in that dog.’ ‘Very well, then, comrade, take out the dog.’ And the picture was passed. This sort of stratagem has turned out to be quite amazingly useful to me, in all kinds of contexts: suitably modified, of course.
While on a trip to a collective farm, the official cars having turned off onto the farm road, Naomi asks if we may stop. Our cars, four or five of them, stop. We all get out, about twenty people, and stand on the track, looking across fields. It is August, very hot, the grain already harvested. ‘That’s a very nasty bit of erosion,’ says Naomi, pointing. And indeed, it is. ‘But our grain harvest for last year was very good on this farm.’ ‘Well, you won’t be getting good harvests for long, if you allow that kind of erosion,’ she says. In this way did her frustrated need to criticise much worse show itself.
It was at this collective farm that I witnessed the bravest thing I have ever seen in my life.
We, the six of us, and our hosts, headed by Alexei Surkov, stood facing a crowd of collective farmers. We were being introduced. An old man, dressed in a white peasant smock, like Tolstoy, stepped out and said he wanted to speak. At once the others attempted to hustle and scold him back into the group. He stood his ground, said he had to speak to us. A silence. Oksana was clearly frightened. The old man spoke. Oksana interpreted, and Douglas Young, our Russian speaker, stopped her. ‘No, you are not interpreting properly,’ he said, blandly, like a professor. The old man addressed him, and Douglas interpreted, while Oksana squeezed her hands together, as if she were praying. ‘You must not believe what you are told. Visitors from abroad are told lies. You must not believe what you are shown. Our lives are terrible. The Russian people – I am speaking for the Russian people. You must go back to Britain and tell everybody what I am saying. Communism is terrible –’ And he was pulled back by the others and surrounded, but he stood among them with his burning eyes fixed on us, while the others scolded him. That was remarkable – they scolded and fussed at him; they didn’t shrink away from a pariah. And throughout the long, toast-filled meal that followed, he sat silent, his eyes on us, while they scolded – affectionately, there was no doubt about that. Yet at that time people vanished into the Gulag for much less than what he had done. No crime could be worse than to say such things to foreigners. He would be arrested and disposed of, and he knew that this would happen.
During this meal Coppard was enjoying himself flirting delightfully with the collective farm’s teacher and nurse. He loved charming young women, and these two were pretty and warm, and flirted with him.
I try and imagine this as a scene in a film, but it is truly too terrible. There is a long, loaded table, flowers, wine, a banquet. There, the special people chosen from the farm to represent the Soviet farmers. There, we happy delegates, elated and pleased with ourselves, the way you get on such trips. There, the party officials, all affability. There, the old man in his smock, never taking his eyes off us. Albert Coppard is flirting. We make speeches. Douglas Young reminds us all of the sufferings of the Scottish farmers. Naomi talks about British farming practices, contrasting them severely with what we saw while driving through the fields.
In the lavatory there is a framed copy of Kipling’s ‘If’. We are told that this is everyone’s favourite piece of poetry and they all know it by heart.
The next time I saw ‘If’ on the back of a lavatory door was on a large rich farm in Kenya, where there were photographs of the Queen everywhere.
We were taken to a building filled with presents to Stalin from his grateful subjects. It was sad, because they were mostly hideous, derivations or fallings-off from some genuine peasant or folk tradition, like carpets with his face occupying all the middle of them, or carved boxes or metalwork – all with his face. I left the others at it and went to sit outside. It was there I decided to try and write a story according to the communist formula, because I was becoming uncomfortably aware of our smugness and superiority. It would have very good and very bad characters in it, like Dickens. I wrote it. It was called ‘Hunger.’ It was about a youth from a village in Africa, risking his fortunes and his life going to the big city, this being a basic plot of our time, not only in Africa. The background came from Africans I knew, who would describe, when I asked, exactly how this or that was done in a village, how things were in the locations and shebeens of Salisbury. This story has been much translated and reprinted, and yet I am ashamed of it. Quite a few of my early stories I would like to see vanish away. What is wrong with that tale is sentimentality, which is often the sign of an impure origin: in this case, to write a tale with a moral.
Naomi and I and Oksana are standing in St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, and Naomi is lecturing Oksana about the Russian lack of taste. Naomi suffered aesthetically throughout that trip. Everything was ugly and second-rate. If Arnold and I murmured something about the war, she would say, Nonsense, they are producing new materials and furniture, and they are hideous. She showed Oksana the patterns on the walls and ceilings and said. Why, when you’ve got this, do you put such hideous patterns on your dress materials? Oksana was confused. She did not know the patterns on the new cottons and silks were hideous. When Naomi showed her the Liberty skirt she had on, Oksana did not see why it was any better than the bales of cotton she had showed us that morning. She thought the patterns on the cathedral walls were old and old-fashioned. She asked me afterwards why, if Mrs Mitchison was a rich lady, she wore cotton and not silk. For of course, if you could afford it, you wore silk all the time. Oksana’s best dress was silk. ‘And very nice too,’ said Richard Mason gallantly. Arnold and I discussed how Naomi patronized our hosts and apparently did not know it, and how we could stop her. We actually took her to task. ‘Naomi, you’ve got to stop hurting their feelings like this. We won’t have it.’
‘But I simply cannot understand it,’ Naomi said, that voluminous voice booming.’ Why can’t they take good models for their furniture instead of that rubbish?’
‘But, Naomi,’ said intellectual Arnold, ‘that’s what happens when a peasant tradition is smashed: they model themselves on something modern. They had taste in the old ways, but they have to develop taste in the new.’
‘Well,’ drawled Naomi, ‘but I’m going to have my say. This delegation is supposed to be bridging gaps: I’m jolly well going to tell them about their atrocious taste.’
‘Then when we get home we’re going to tell the press that you spent your time patronizing the Russians about their aesthetic sense.’
‘But, Arnold, my dear boy, you surely can’t be serious.’
‘You’re hurting their feelings, Naomi,’ said Arnold, his eyes full of tears.
In Leningrad they asked Naomi and me if we minded sharing a room. We thought this odd; it took me a long time to see that probably they wanted to overhear our conversations. It being August, the nights were not completely white, but almost; there were only a couple of hours of real dark. Exhausted, I flopped into bed, a double bed, and there was Naomi, prodding me, because she wanted me to tell her about my love life, so she could tell me about her lovers in the twenties. I thought this was like being back at school, naughty conversations in the dorm. She said young women these days had become real stick-in-the-muds. I went to sleep.
Leningrad was a sad city, grey and elegant, full of watery perspectives, its walls pocked with bullet holes or cracked because of the attritions of the siege, in which ten years before one and a half million people died. We moved from palace to palace, all built in the style I know some people adore, all gilt curlicues and cupids, rosy flesh, pink and blue ribbons, medallions, a very festival of pouring and dimpling architecture. This was because Russian royalty had adored France and imported the style for palaces, and so even when we went to the Children’s House, it was a former palace, and the thought of sandpits or swings seemed in rather poor taste.
We had a formal encounter with the Leningrad branch of the Soviet Writers, and there we were, in another of these frivolous rooms, for an occasion as sombre as any I remember. Naomi had said she was going to insist that the Leningrad writers produce the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko for our inspection. There were rumours in the West that he was dead – murdered. Arnold and I were horrified. First, why should any writer anywhere be produced like evidence in a law court? And then we did know that writers were, as it is now put, keeping a low profile – trying not to be noticed – and perhaps it would be the last thing he would welcome, being made a test case by the West. But Naomi insisted.
I cannot remember the names of our hosts. The opening speeches were all sound and fury. Already we were weary of them, to the point where we were saying. Thank God we are going home soon; one more speech and –
‘Or one more toast.’
‘Or one more banquet.’
After a while you literally cannot listen to these speeches. It is as if the rhetoric numbs your brain: the words – the sound – a narcotic. Speeches of this sort went on for the hours of the meeting but were interrupted by a young poet who, like a Quaker, from time to time feeling an impulse he could not disobey, had to jump to his feet and recite an ode to Stalin. Obviously, no one could object, at the risk of being accused of lèse-majesté, so that every time this happened, all the officials smiled benignly at the inspired infant and even clapped. Against this background Mikhail Zoshchenko was brought in and sat in the middle of the room, the Russians on one side, we on the other. He was a little thin man, yellow-skinned, and he looked ill, and was being brave, and dignified. Just as with the defiant old man at the collective farm, it was as if the atmosphere itself put protective arms around him. These officials, no matter how much they were vassals, lackeys, arse-lickers, were all under threat themselves, had seen many writers, friends or not, disappear into exile or the camps. Zoshchenko had been under official criticism – and that meant from themselves too – for a long time now. He had written small, very funny, very popular stories about the mishaps and anomalies of the lives of citizens living under communism, and a wonderful novella called, simply, People – and for a while had been officially applauded, but that did not last.
While sitting before us, he agreed, when prodded by the chairman, that he certainly did still exist, was well and well-treated, and had seen the error of his ways; he had repented of his negative and critical early work, but he was now engaged on a three-volume novel about the Great Patriotic War, which he hoped would atone for his former crimes.
Mikhail Zoshchenko died quite soon, of illness, not in a camp; so he was more fortunate than many Soviet writers. Arnold and I, discussing the death, tried to hope that what we had thought was a grotesque and silly intervention in his life perhaps in the end had protected him. But I do not think Stalin, who decided these matters, cared about the opinions of “useful idiots.” (Lenin’s description of Westerners like us.)
By now there was no pretence that we were a unit. Naomi and Douglas spent their free time, such as there was, together.
Coppard wanted to be with me, to be reassured. He was disturbed by the grimness of Moscow, while delighted by the multitudes of visitors – delegations – from everywhere in the communist world.
But I was mostly with Arnold. We talked, and we talked. How ridiculous it does seem now – that we took ourselves so seriously. Don’t forget that on the shoulders of communists rested the future of the entire world. Communists and ‘progressive forces’. It occurs to me now that all adolescents believe this: everything lies in their hands, because adults are such a disaster. Is it possible that this so fundamental belief of the communists was no more than delayed or displaced collective adolescence?
