Walking in the Shade (38 page)

‘…a resurrection of that destructiveness familiar to all of us who have been in the C.P.—if by any chance the left does produce some real creative talent then the first impulse is to squash it.'

I omit the really bad bits, but I told Edward he was a shit. He was equally uncomplimentary. This frank, brotherly-sisterly rough-and-tumble was very much the style of the comrades then. We remained good friends, when the storm, or stormlet, had blown over.

Weekend in Dinlock
is still arousing irrational hostility among exactly those people you'd think would value it. ‘Written by an American,' you hear. ‘What does he know about our working class?' ‘Written after a short visit.' ‘He made use of the miners.' And so it all goes on, year in, year out, decade in and decade out. Once, I thought of making a list of the good and original work which has had to survive the onslaughts of the comrades, for it might be instructive. But then I thought this would be a major effort, take up a lot of time, and not change things, because the people who feel the need to attack new and good work do not know what their real motives are. Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
*

Clancy returned to ‘Dinlock' several times and befriended Len Doherty, who was going through difficulties. A young man, in his twenties, with a wife and, I think, three small children, but the marriage was in trouble. Clancy brought him up to London, and he stayed in my flat, and Clancy and Alex took him around their London, which of course included the New Left and its precincts, and to Soho and similar enlightenments. Len came again and brought a friend, a miner, and came again and brought two or three friends. I thought their attitude to Len was paternal, they were concerned for him. He was a dark, much too thin, tense young man, who had found himself in the limelight. He emanated that moral exhaustion, like stale air, which is often a sign of physical illness. I remember an evening when he was in bed upstairs, for he had not been able to get up that day, having drunk himself silly the night before, and he was running a fever, and I and one of the miners were trying to keep him calm, for he was tossing his limbs about and throwing his head from side to side. ‘It's too late,' he kept croaking, ‘it's too late.'

He became a journalist on a local paper but later died, too young.

This little tale does illustrate the dilemmas of journalism, of ‘the media'—what happens when a community has been made self-conscious, has been forced to look at itself through others' eyes. I do not think Len's fate would have been much different without
Weekend in Dinlock
, though perhaps he was made unhappier by being shown what must have seemed to him the glamours of literary London—for he had aspirations to write.

 

I took Clancy up to Carradale. Naomi asked me to: ‘I hear you have a
fascinating
American.' The coach journey to Scotland remains as one of my nastiest memories. Clancy was ill then, a bit crazy. I felt sick, from the coach, but what he must have felt…He was pale, sweaty, sat with closed eyes, teeth clenched. I have known now not a few people who cope with periodic attacks of disequilibrium, and they are the bravest souls in the world.

I had told Naomi that Clancy should be inside the house, for he did not do well where he felt isolated, but she put him into a room right away from the house in an annexe. Interesting, too, that we were so thoroughly put apart. The whole clan hated him on sight, and he them. There was something about him, this maverick, this outsider, this deadly observer, that they could not stand. For the three days of our stay he sat quietly watching from the edges of rooms, while they patronised him or were rude. Oh, I do loathe groups, clans, families, the human ‘we'. How I do dread them, fear them—try to keep well away. Prides of lions or packs of wild dogs are kindly enemies in comparison. Back we went to London on another coach, the cold rain streaming down the windows, and Clancy went straight upstairs to his typewriter, where he stayed for a day and then came down with some fifty or so sheets, which he handed to me. He sat at the kitchen table, watching my face as I read. I have never read anything in my life as clever, as acute, as minutely seen—or so terrible. For his hate had written that piece, and it was pure poison. Compare it with his writing on the miners' village: that was written from love and respect, but this, from loathing. For Clancy the word ‘middle class' was already enough of a goad, but there was something about the Mitchisons…it was their safety, their security, their smugness because of their invulnerability—so this outsider was bound to see them—the way the clan was so tightly woven into society, that this outsider could not bear. I certainly learned a lesson from that. It is that nothing in the world is easier than malice. No, there was nothing easy about the brilliance of that observation, but one may switch oneself into the mode Hatred in the space of a thought. I don't know why we admire malice so much. It is often called ‘wit'. One time when this flourished was the twenties—probably an emanation from that famous table at the Algonquin—and the influence percolated down through the decades, until some ancient lady erupts into cackling laughter and says, ‘She's got a face like a potato'…and directs confident glances around to make sure this shaft is earning the admiration it deserves. ‘He looks like a constipated frog'—oh, wot wit, as we used to say at school.

 

It's 1957, 1958…I am deep in
The Golden Notebook
, and groaning secretly that every time the telephone rings there is something like this: ‘Have you heard about poor Bob? He's taking it hard.' ‘Mary's left the Party. She's training as a social worker.'

Are these ancient political passions of interest now? What I do think is important is the learning from them. We are still left with that (now) incredible and unforgivable fact that some of the most socially concerned, hopeful-for-the-future, dedicated souls connived at the crimes in the communist world, by refusing to recognise them and, then, by refusing to acknowledge them openly. Not ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, but many thousands, millions, all over the world. And this attitude—reluctance to criticise the Soviet Union, the great alma mater—goes on now and is shown by the way Hitler is put in the position of chief criminal of our times, whereas Stalin, a thousand times worse—and Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar—is still handled gently in the imaginations of people on the left.

What is interesting, surely, is why. After all, this situation, a similar one, is bound to roll around again, in a different context, a different history. Everything does. And the next time, will we (humankind) recognise it and do better?

Like everybody in my generation, the one when ‘everyone' was a communist, I have brooded, thought, wondered, allowed the pander memory to pretty things up, but have been left for years, for decades, with an unanswered question. Evidently it was a variety of mass lunacy, mass psychosis. Late, very late—quite recently, in fact—I began to see what I believe might be the reason for it all. Might be—that is all I claim.

Again, back we go to World War I, which is where the mass horrors of our time were brewed.

It is interesting to watch people with a vested interest in the national reputation soften and justify that terrible war. ‘But we only lost…' so-and-so many hundreds of thousands of men ‘in the trenches'.
We—
Britain. But this was a European war, and it was not only British soldiers who were left with a hatred and contempt for their government, or, if these words are too strong, at least disquiet, sorrow, and at any rate a loss of faith in the men who ruled them, because of their incompetence. My parents were not the only victims of World War I in the district of Banket, Southern Rhodesia. The woman we called Lady Murray because of her sad dignity had lost four sons and a husband to the trenches. Captain Livingstone, like my father, had only one leg. McAuley from the Ayreshire Mine had been badly wounded. There were others. All were lovers of the British Empire and their country, and all full of sorrow and anger because of the conduct of the war by Haig and by the British government. A German small mine worker with whom my father often reminisced had the same feelings about the German trenches and his government. The slaughter in the trenches destroyed something vital in Europe—respect for government. And from that stemmed communism, fascism, national socialism, and later terrorism, anarchy, and that attitude of mind which is now prevalent everywhere, the deadly ‘Well, what can you expect?' Nihilism, cynicism, disbelief—for one's own side—and meanwhile all idealism, love, hope, dreams for a good world, put elsewhere, into Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and, later, those other criminals, Mao, Pol Pot…there seems no end to them.

But there is a deeper emotion here, which I think is the point. The children of the soldiers of the First World War were brought up not only on bitter disillusion, and loss of respect for their own governments, but a feeling of being participants in an understanding denied to an unheeding, ignorant majority. It is the feeling expressed in that World War I song which my father remembered all his life:

Tell them—that is, the civilians—the truth about what was going on in the trenches. For in Britain, in Germany, in France, and the other combatant countries, the war cabinets whipped up the crudest national feelings—how glorious to die for your country—and suppressed the truth about the horrors of the trenches. So the soldiers felt misunderstood and unappreciated by their own people. The novels that came out of World War I testify to this bitterness the soldiers felt.
All Quiet on the Western Front
, Remarque, German, was perhaps the bitterest and the best. There was a Bairnsfather cartoon. A romantic girl in her nightdress, her hair down, loons out of her window at the full moon. ‘That same dear old moon is looking down on him.' But the soldier she dreams of is, with a mate, standing up to his waist in water in a shell hole in No-man's-land, cursing the moon, which makes them visible to the enemy. A little encapsulation.

Them:
the stupid majority;
we:
the initiates into the truth—and the truth is hard, painful, bloody, and the reality is pain and suffering, and the best people know this truth, and the worst are complacent idiots who refuse to acknowledge reality.

Truth was the preserve of a knowledgeable and experienced minority. Initiates.

Identification with pain, with suffering. This easily translated into ‘You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.' When I was on that trip to the Soviet Union, very strong was that emotion: Here is where the engine of events is, the painful heart of the truth.

I think it is likely that when young people became communists in the late thirties, flinging themselves into the war in Spain, it was because a pattern was being repeated. They were joining soldiers who were being betrayed. For the democratic governments, France and Britain, refused to come to the aid of the beleaguered Spanish democratic government, allowing Hitler and Mussolini to do as they liked in Spain, so that the fascist Franco won, and Hitler and Stalin were encouraged. The International Brigade were repeating their fathers' experience. And then the Second World War, where the Soviet Union took the brunt of the fighting. The Soviet Union lost eight million in the war. (Not twenty million—that figure is swollen to include Stalin's murders of his own people, cooking the books.)
*
Swathes, multitudes of mowed-down people, and to identify with the Soviet Union meant to be part of the by then well-established emotion that in suffering is to be found the truth. Which after all was only a continuation of the religious love of suffering, a pattern in the European mind long before World War I.

And that is why I believe people so easily became communists and why they stuck with it. Communism was being born in storms of blood and fire and bullets and explosions, and illuminated by the star shells of Hope.

‘
Knowing the score
' meant being an initiate into the truth, knowing how things
really
work. And what could truth be but that unspeakable suffering is the price exacted by ‘life itself' in its tortuous progress upwards—always upwards, it goes without saying. Life itself—the facts, reality, actual events, which are bound to be full of the nasty reality that disperses bullshit and the illusions that feed the innocent. The stupid.

A later generation used ‘where it's at'. The truth, hard facts, the
real experience—
which, in the absence of war or revolution, was soon to be found in drugs, hallucinogens, illusion.

When people accepted the real situation in the Soviet Union, something deeply out of sight was confirmed, a knowledge of horror, of betrayal. A high price has to be paid: and with that knowledge goes a dark and greedy need for pain. The root of communism—a love of revolution—is, I believe, masochism, pleasure in pain, satisfaction in suffering, identification with the redeeming blood. The Cross, in fact. To leave ‘the Party' was to give up the greater truth, give up being an initiate into understanding the real processes of life.

And here I think is an analogy with the reluctance of people who are in love to give up their ridiculous hopes. If you step out of that country of dreams, you are giving up the real experience, the knowledge of good and evil, you are tearing up your ticket to ride, you are relinquishing fructifying pain.

That was the poet Edwin Muir, who, like so many others of his time, was a Red of some sort, and I put that quotation before one of the sections of
Martha Quest
, which is the first of the ‘Children of Violence' sequence of novels. And right at the beginning of
A Ripple from the Storm
, the third, comes this quotation: