Walking in the Shade (24 page)

An incident not without its comedy was when the cultural attaché said he would like to meet me and discuss…what? Probably literature. I behaved as I would with anyone and asked him to lunch. When he arrived he found me alone, with the table laid for two—this was still in Joan's house. He had expected other guests, a real luncheon party. He surveyed the heaps of books and papers everywhere and said, ‘You are a real writer, I can see that.' He was nervous, and I pretended not to notice. I was thinking, I'm damned if I'm going to change my ways to fit in with their stupid ideas. ‘I cannot have lunch here with you alone,' he said. ‘It might be misunderstood.'

‘Oh, why?' said I, disingenuously. He was a nice sort of man, not at all like an official. I took him to the French Pub, which had a good restaurant upstairs, and told him the story of the Free French and this pub, and how on the Fourteenth of July people danced in the street. He liked all that. He didn't want to talk about literature at all and confessed that he was bored by culture; he hoped I didn't think the worse of him. What he liked was the circus. He went as often as he could. He was glad I was not shocked, for he knew that as a cultural attaché he should know about books. When we parted he said that he was sorry, but he had to inform me that I was not a communist at all, I was a Tolstoyan. No, this was not a compliment.

And now an occasion that gave up its full flavour only later. I was invited to the Soviet Embassy for lunch to meet Paul Robeson, the singer, a very public communist and having a bad time of it in the United States. As usual, I went thinking, Oh, Lord, I suppose I have to. There were as many Soviet officials as there were guests. About sixteen people sat down to lunch including Pamela Hansford Johnson and C. P. Snow, who, if not actually a Party member, was much trusted by the Russians.
*
James Aldridge was there with his wife, Dina. James Aldridge's novel
The Diplomat
was regarded in the Soviet Union as a great work of literature, but James was not much known in Britain.
The Diplomat
was full of what used to be known as ‘progressive ideas' and was not a good book. The sad thing was that he had written a beautiful little novel called
The Hunter
, about the wilds of Canada, where he had been brought up. But this novel, the real one, the good one, was mostly ignored in the Soviet Union, and ignored here because he was such a public communist.

I was sitting next to Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of
And Quiet Flows the Don
, and
The Don Flows Down to the Sea
. The first is an epic novel of the fighting in the civil war between the Reds and the Whites, a wonderful book. I had read it as a girl, when still on the farm. The only word for this man is
macho
, positively a comic-opera he-man. Vibrations of dislike instantly flowed between us. He asked me if I had read his books. Yes, I did. Did I like them? Yes, but I preferred
And Quiet Flows the Don
to the second novel. Why did I? Since he had paid me the compliment of asking for my opinion, I told him I thought the first was full of vigour and invention, and the love story was wonderful, but the second didn't come up to the first. Suddenly he was furious. He said that if he had me in his country he would get on his horse, tie me behind it, and make me run until I fell down, and he would drag me behind him until I cried for mercy, and then he would have me flogged. That was the treatment for women like me. I said that I didn't doubt he would do all that. We exchanged this kind of jest for a while. It was only later I discovered that he had stolen the first novel from some unfortunate young writer and, when it turned out to be such a success, read with admiration throughout the world, had tried to match it with
The Don Flows Down to the Sea
.
*

Over coffee I talked with Paul Robeson and his wife. I decided they were both stupid, because they were talking entirely in communist jargon: capitalist lies, fascist imperialists, running dogs, democratic socialism (the Soviet Union), peace-loving peoples. Not one word was said in normal speech. But I hadn't understood something, which was that this language was often employed either deliberately or instinctively, at moments of threat, even for days or weeks at a time. He was at the Soviet Embassy, officials were hovering about, and he was dependent on the goodwill of the Soviet Union because his own country was treating him so badly. When politics and public life become as polarised as they were then, then people may seem stupid. So I can say that I have met and talked with one of the great singers of our time and, with equal truth, that I didn't.

Talking to Robeson taught me how different the American Left was from the British Left. But as I've said, the Americans are a people of extremes. I do find it odd that this is never admitted, let alone discussed. Some kind of national ‘image', or sets of images, get in the way: the poor boy, or girl, who can become president…young people from indigent backgrounds working their way through college to become rich and famous…a chicken in every pot (now that is a cheapened symbol of plenty)…Jefferson, Lincoln, and all that. But it is a country that catches fevers and runs high temperatures. When we talk about the ‘shared language'—English—as a barrier, because of some differing (though not very many) word usages, that is surely itself another barrier, obscuring the truth, which is that the barrier is national temperaments, or dispositions. At the moment, a suggestion that there can be national temperaments or characteristics may hardly be said aloud in the United States, because of political correctness. And that proves my point.

The American communists were more communist, fanatical, party-line, and paranoid than anyone I ever knew in Britain. They produced more of what the Communist Party itself called the ‘one hundred and fifty percenters'—and certainly not with admiration, for they knew that the extreme communist flipped over easily into his or her opposite, the communist-hater. No British communist was ever treated with the harshness the American government used towards Paul Robeson and some other American communists.

 

And now enter Clancy Sigal. As if off a film set. He was in the style of young Americans then, jeans, sweatshirt, a low-slung belt where you could not help but see a ghostly gun. The lonely outlaw. The lone sheriff battling against the bad men.

Someone had telephoned to say that this American was in town, he needed a place to stay, could I let him a room. I said my career as a landlady had not encouraged me to try again. Comrade Whoever-it-was said wasn't I ashamed not to help a comrade out, when I had an empty room?

He was unlike the Americans I had met to date, most of them publishers or film people. They were then formal, correct, hair short-back-and-sides, and as if inside invisible armour. They watched their words. They spoke slowly. The phrase
stiff upper lip
might have been invented to describe Americans then, particularly the men, for it seemed a spell had been put on their mouths: they could hardly move them. You would see an American a hundred yards away, and from the set of his lips you would know him. Was this because of McCarthy? Had he frightened them into a tight-lipped and general conformity, even if they had nothing to do with left-wing politics? But soon this type of American disappeared, and they all became loose and laid back—as a style.

Clancy was a heroic figure, made one not only by a thousand film epics and the heroes and heroines of the Left, who inhabited his imagination like close friends, but, too, because of the great figures of American history. He had recently made that journey which was obligatory for young Americans, traversing the United States by car, by himself, crazy as a loon, conversing with Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Sacco and Vanzetti, Jefferson, Mother Bloor, John Brown, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, Speransky, Bukharin, Trotsky, and anyone else who turned up.

Clancy was a mirror of everything I was beginning to be uneasy about in myself. Only beginning—and that is the difficulty. Coming events cast their shadows before. But looking back from the perspective of those events, it is easy to be dishonest. Some tiny passing shade of feeling, a mere cloud shadow, may ten years later become a storm of revelation: about yourself, about others, about a time. Or may have dissolved and gone.

What I was beginning to be unhappy about was left-wing romanticism, not to say sentimentality, by no means confined to communists, and in fact it permeates the left wing. It is the sentimentality that so often accompanies the extremes of brutality, or can lead to it. Attitudinising. The Red Flag carried to fire-storming heights by dying heroes. The Storming of the Bastille, the Storming of the Winter Palace…both these last mythologized out of any resemblance to the truth. I could fill a page or two here—what am I saying?—a volume, several volumes.

What was, is, important to this layer of the Left was always the dramatic, indeed, the melodramatic, never some small sober unremarkable work or effort. There are in the Left (and elsewhere) people labouring for a lifetime to improve some small aspect of life for everybody, but never in the Left I had been part of. Clancy's history of the United States was all heroic battles, and often bloody confrontations with government. Miners against callous mine owners—no, I'm not saying there were not callous mine owners, and people have forgotten just how brutal they often were. John Brown's mouldering body. The courtrooms where Clarence Darrow fought for liberalism and the truth. The soup kitchens of the Great Depression. Clancy's vision put them in the centre of the stage, excluded anything else.

There is a history of Britain that is all heroism and big events. Clancy knew it as well as he did the American saga, and in neither was the story of some woman or man working for years to change some small law or other.

My ‘doubts'—and these were separate from the ‘revelations' from the Soviet Union—have to be recorded here, though they were then so uneasy and so unsure of themselves.

Sometimes I survey my current thoughts and wonder which of them—some of them new, with the overemphasis of outline that befits an untried idea, still not worn into shape by events, some astounded at their own effrontery—will turn out to have been the ones I should have been listening to, developing. Which of them will seem absurd, and even pathetic, in a decade or so?

Clancy was pretty ill when he arrived, just about holding himself together. He had come from Paris, where a close friend, an American woman living in Paris, told him he was crazy. People had been telling him he was for years. ‘Clancy, you have got to face up to it.' He had just decided that there might be something in what they said. He made no secret about finding in me a good substitute for a psychotherapist. He was younger than I was.

By the same cold but useful gauge I used for Jack, Gottfried, and others, Clancy and I were ill suited emotionally—that above all—and sexually, but that was because the cool, cut-off distancing of so many Americans then from emotion was inhibiting; but intellectually it was a match, all right, for a time. First of all, he had read everything. His mother, a Russian immigrant to the States, a very poor woman, saw herself—as did his father—as heir of the world's great revolutionary movements, and by definition that included literature. Both father and mother were labour agitators and trade union organisers, often losing their jobs and having to move on. Bringing up their child had always taken second place to the Revolution. In short, Clancy was a survivor, one of the extremest I've known. ‘No wonder you're screwed up,' I'd say to him, and he'd say to me, ‘Lady, I'm not screwed up; everybody else is.'

He was a Trotskyist. This had made him doubly an outlaw. First, as a revolutionary in paranoid America. Second, as a traitor to communism—and to the Communist Party. That meant he was a minority in a minority. It was his mother who had decided that if the Soviet Union was Stalinist, then she was a Trotskyist. At university, he had been execrated and reviled for years by the Stalinists. Now he was coming into his own. Very soon all the revolutionary youth of Britain, and anywhere in Europe, would call themselves Trotskyists.

A word about these ancient schisms, for they are rapidly being forgotten. The communist parties everywhere were Stalinist, and Trotsky was a traitor and heretic. But the new youth believed that if Trotsky and not Stalin had won the battle for power in the Soviet Union, then communism would have become that Utopia it was meant to be. Isaac Deutscher, historian of the Soviet Revolution, wrote two books about Trotsky,
The Prophet Armed
and
The Prophet Disarmed
. I recommend them. Here is an account of the political battles of the time, seen in the light of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. But it is hard not to see that the two often changed positions, one taking his stand where not long before he had accused his rival of treacherously or misguidedly being. It is like watching a dance of puppets. And these little straw men are being swept down a great waterfall. The Bolsheviks, having studied the history of the French Revolution, had agreed that they would not turn on each other, accuse each other, kill each other, as the French revolutionaries had done. But that is exactly what they did.

Isaac Deutscher thought Lenin, one of history's most ruthless murderers, was the Perfect Man. Interesting, that: it is a concept from spiritual traditions.

One of Lenin's contributions to the happiness of humankind was the concept of Revolutionary Vigilance—which in practice meant that Communist Party members must be regularly and steadily murdered, tortured, imprisoned, and sent to camps, so as to keep them on their toes. This policy was most faithfully carried on by Stalin.

I had a glimpse of what it had been like as a Trotskyist in America when I introduced Clancy Sigal to Reuben Ship, Ted Allan, and the rest of the group. They all had been Stalinists. They met with ironical, or sarcastic, understanding and at once began bitter debates. But after all, they were talking to each other, and quite recently no Stalinist would have considered a Trot worthy of a hello—more suitable, rather, as recipient for an ice pick in the brain.