Walking in the Shade (31 page)

58 Warwick Road

London SW5

19 October

The reaction to the Twentieth Congress has been expressed in party circles throughout the world in the phrase ‘the cult of the individual'. That these words should have been chosen as the banner under which we should fight what is wrong with the party seems to me a sign of the corruption in our thinking. For they suggest that what caused the breakdown of inner-party democracy was an excess of individualism. But the opposite is the truth. What was bad is not that one man was a tyrant, but that hundreds and thousands of party members, inside and outside the Soviet Union, let go their individual consciences and allowed him to become a tyrant.

Now we are discussing what sort of rules we should have in the party to prevent the emergence of bureaucracy and dictatorship. A lot of worried and uneasy people are pinning their faith in some kind of constitution which will ensure against tyranny. But rules and constitutions are what people make them. The publication of the Constitution of the Soviet Union, an admirable document, coincided with the worst period of the terror. The party rules in the various communist parties are (I believe) more or less the same; but the development of the different communist parties have been very dissimilar.

I think that this talk about changing the rules is a symptom of the desire in all of us to let go individual responsibility on to something outside ourselves, something on to which we can put the blame if things go wrong. It is pleasant to have implicit trust in a beloved leader. It is pleasant and comfortable to believe that the communist party must be right simply because ‘it is the vanguard of the working class'. It is pleasant to pass resolutions at a conference and think that now everything will be all right.

But there is no simple decision we can make, once and for all, that will ensure that we are doing right. There is no set of rules that can set us free from the necessity of making fresh decisions, every day, of just how much of our individual responsibility we are prepared to delegate to a central body—whether it is the communist party, or the government of the country we live in, be it a communist or a capitalist government.

It seems to me that what the last thirty years have shown us is that unless a communist party is a body of individuals each jealously guarding his or her independence of judgement, it must degenerate into a body of yes-men.

The safeguard against tyranny, now, as it always has been, is to sharpen individuality, to strengthen individual responsibility, and not to delegate it.

Doris Lessing

58 Warwick Rd

London SW 5

21 Feb. 1957

My dear Edward,

First, some practical points.

(a) Excuse me while I'm sick. Don't feel bad that I may feel bad because you don't like it. I've rather lost interest anyway. I think, were I to finish it, it would be a quite interesting small novel, which would appeal to a certain number of people; but quite obviously its mood is right out of key with what a very large number of people are feeling who would be its natural readers. Such a book, a sort of intellectual jape, is of value set against a background of accepted moral values. In the absence of any such background, perhaps it is better left. I think in one way it is a pity this book is not going to be finished. But a piece of polemical writing, even if on the surface a frivolous one, is half the magazine it is published in, and clearly the New Reasoner is not the magazine.

But of course our different attitudes over this are a reflection of a much deeper difference, which is why I am finding this letter so hard to write…

But first, about the suggestions in your, I think, second letter. I like the suggested article by Alex Werth. I would be interested in a piece by Hervé. I would very much like to read a bit of Not by Bread Alone, but you must be sure first that it hasn't been translated and published as a whole first—I shall be surprised if it doesn't appear here very soon. They always do publish this sort of thing fast. Like The Thaw, for instance. And they did the Visitors on the radio very quickly.

I think autobiography is a good idea. A really truthful bit of writing about experience in the C.P. at some stormy point would be invaluable, but I shall be very surprised if people are ready to be truthful writers or readers. The instinctive defence against being truthful is so very strong.

I think it would be interesting to have a serious description by someone like Kingsley Amis of his experience with the C.P.
*
It would be typical of the experience of hundreds of thousands of people vis à vis the C.P. But these angry young men have nothing philosophically to utter. Why should they have? They are all artists, not philosophers.

But now my dear Edward—there are a lot of points in particularly your middle letter.

That poem ‘Plea for the Hated Dead Woman'
*
was written ten years ago, and has nothing whatsoever to do with any recent political situation. It was written in a mood when I was hating my mother.

As for my recent novel,
Retreat to Innocence
,
^†
I think it was a bad book, because I wasn't facing up to any essential issue—I wasn't being truthful with myself, although I imagined I was, and so it's softcentred and sentimental. I don't hold with it. Though it's got some good bits in it.

But what I am trying to say is more complicated than all this:

Look, when I read your letters I feel as if you were reaching out for some kind of final word or statement from me; as if you wanted something of me, and I ask myself, why? And what is it?

But above all, our moods are very different.

I know full well that all my reactions now are because (if I may use this word I hate so much) I am an artist, and I've exhausted all the experience and emotions that are useful to me as an artist in the old way of being a communist. Someone said flippantly that people left the C.P. because they got bored. You know—Frank Pitcairn, always forget his real name. But he said it because he is an artist.

I shall wither and die and never write another word if I can't get out of this straitjacket of what we've all been thinking and feeling for so long.

But this is not a political attitude, and this is why I don't think you ought to ask me for clarification.

And I suspect you of being an artist, in which case you ought to be finding out what you think by writing it.

It seemed to me the other afternoon that you and Randall shared the same attitude, which was that unless you could present yourselves and justify yourselves as you have been during the last fifteen or whatever years it is, you would have let yourselves down? But all of us have been involved in this thing that has been so corrupting, and there is nothing to justify that which interests people who have not been involved in it. You, Edward Thompson and Randall Swingler don't stand or fall by your explanations now…. If you think this is a very emotional way to take your demand for philosophical clarity, then I retort that your attitude is at bottom not at all a demand for a philosophy, but a terrible need to explain yourselves.

You have been a pure and high-minded communist, and until recently wouldn't accept the evil in it, and your idealism is hurt and your picture of yourself is damaged.

Get thee to thy typewriter, dear Edward. You can communicate your experience in art, and as such it can be communicated. But what has your lost feeling got to do with philosophies?

We are living in a time, I am convinced, when there aren't likely to be any philosophies one can pay allegiance to. Marxism is no longer a philosophy, but a system of government, differing from country to country.

Which is a good thing. Any philosophy which lasts longer than fifty years must be a bad one, because everything changes so fast.

I know I am a socialist, and I believe in the necessity for revolution when the moment is opportune. But whether the economists like Ken and John, or the historians are right as Marxists, I don't know. How should one know? It seems to me that a great many of the concepts we have called Marxist and which are shared by people who aren't Marxists are simply the reflection of the pressures of the time we live in.

I don't want to make any more concepts. For myself, I mean.

I want to let myself simmer into some sort of knowledge, but I don't know what it is.

Do you think there is something to be said for the point of view that being a communist has never been (except for a very few people) a question of intellectual standpoint, but rather a sort of sharing of moral fervours?

I haven't got any moral fervour left. No one who feels responsible for the bloodbaths and cynicism of the last thirty years can feel morally indignant about the bloodymindedness of capitalism? I can't, anyway.

What I feel is an immense joy and satisfaction that the world is going so fast, that the peasant in China no longer starves, that people all over the world care enough for their fellow human beings to fight for what they feel, at the time, to be justice. I feel a sort of complicated gigantic flow of movement of which I am a part, and it gives me profound satisfaction to be in it. But what has this got to do with political attitudes?

I want to write a lot of books.

And the stale aroma of thirty years of dead political words makes me feel sick.

I know quite well, since you are looking for something from me, this letter will make you feel let down. But I can't help it. You shouldn't go asking people like me for certainties.

I feel as I've been let out of a prison.

But above all I am convinced you should get yourself in front of a typewriter and ask yourself what you think.

Love,
Doris