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

There were other offers on the same lines, temptations of the Devil. Not that I was really tempted. But I did linger sometimes in an editor’s office out of curiosity: I could not believe that this was happening, that people could be so low, so unscrupulous. But surely they can’t really believe writers should write against their own beliefs, their consciences? Write less than their best, for money?

The most bizarre result of The Grass Is Singing, which was being execrated in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, was an invitation to be ‘one of the girls’ at an evening with visiting members of the still new Nationalist government. I was too intrigued to refuse, fascinated that Southern African customs could hold good here: ‘The English cricket team is coming – just round up some of the girls for them.’ There were ten or so Afrikaners, ministers or slightly lesser officials, living it up on a trip to London. I knew them all by name, and only too well as a type. Large, overfed, jovial, they joked their way through a restaurant dinner, about all the ways they used to keep the kaffirs down, for it was then a characteristic of these ruling circles to be proud of being ‘slim’ – full of cunning tricks. After dinner we repaired to a hotel bedroom, where I was in danger of being fondled by one or more. Another of ‘the girls’ told the men that I was an enemy and they should be careful of what they said. Why was I an enemy? was demanded, with the implicit suggestion that it was not possible to disagree with their evidently correct views. ‘She’s written a book,’ said this woman, or girl, a South African temporarily in London. ‘Then we’re going to ban it,’ was the jocular reply. One man, whose knee I was trying to refuse, said, ‘Ach, man, we don’t care what liberals read, what do they matter? The kaffirs aren’t going to read your little book. They can’t read, and that’s how we like it.’ The word ‘liberal’ in South Africa has always been interchangeable with ‘communist’.

All the places where I had lived with Gottfried, in Salisbury, people had dropped in and out, and the talk was not only of politics, and of changing the world, but of war; in Church Street it was the same, except that here war was not all rumour and propaganda but men who had returned from battlefronts, so that we could match what really had happened with what we had been told was happening. Similarly, I was in a familiar situation with Gottfried, who disapproved of me more with every meeting. He was having a very bad time. He had believed he would easily get a job in London. He knew himself to be clever and competent: had he not created a large and successful legal firm, virtually out of nothing, in Salisbury? There were relatives in London, to whom he applied for work. They turned him down. He was a communist, and they were – or felt themselves to be – on sufferance in Britain, as foreigners. Or perhaps they didn’t like him. He was applying for jobs on the level which he knew he deserved. No one would even give him an interview. The joke was, ten years later it would be chic to be German and a communist. Meanwhile he was working for the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. This organization owned a house in Kensington Square, where there were lectures on the happy state of the arts in the USSR. At every meeting the two back rows of chairs were filled with people who had actually lived under communism: they were trying to tell us how horrible communism was. We patronized them: they were middle-aged or old, they didn’t know the score, they were reactionary. A well-chosen epithet, flattering to the user, is the surest way of ending all serious thought. Gottfried earned very little money. He was being sheltered by Dorothy Schwartz, who had a large flat near Belsize Park Underground. The height – or depth – of the Cold War made him even more bitterly, angrily, coldly contemptuous of any opinion even slightly deviating from the Party Line. I was finding it almost impossible to be with him. I did not say to myself, But how did I stick him for so long? For we had had no alternative. About the child there were no disagreements. Peter spent most weekends with Gottfried and Dorothy. I would take him over there, sit down, have a cup of this or that, and listen to terrible, cold denunciations, then leave for two days of freedom. I went to the theatre a lot. In those days you queued in the mornings for a stool in the queue for the evening and saw the play from pit or gallery for the equivalent in today’s money of three or four pounds. I saw most of the plays on in London, in this way, sometimes standing. I continued madly in love with the theatre.

I also went off to Paris. There is no way now of telling how powerful a dream France was then. The British – that is, people who were not in the forces – had been locked into their island for the war and for some years afterwards. People would say how they had suffered from claustrophobia, dreamed of abroad – and particularly of Paris. France was a magnet because of de Gaulle, and the Free French, and the Resistance, by far the most glamorous of the partisan armies. Now that our cooking and our coffee and our clothes are good, it is hard to remember how people yearned for France as for civilization itself. And there was another emotion too, among women. French men loved women and showed it, but in Britain the most women could hope for was to be whistled at by workmen in the street, not always a friendly thing. Joan adored France. She had spent happy times there and spoke French well. Her father’s current girlfriend was French. Joan saw her as infinitely beautiful, while she was a mere nothing in comparison. This was far from the truth, but there was no arguing with her. (This was certainly not the only time in my life I have known a woman who wore rose-tinted spectacles for every woman in the world but herself.) Isn’t she gorgeous, she would moan over some woman less attractive than she was. She had had a very smart black suit made, with a tight skirt and a waistcoat like a man’s, which she wore with white shirts ruffled at throat and wrists. She actually went over to Paris to get it judged. There, men would compliment you on your toilette. She came back restored. Quite a few women I knew said that for the sake of one’s self-respect one had to visit Paris from time to time. This was not a situation without its little ironies. There was a newspaper cartoon then of a Frenchman, dressed in semi-battle gear, old jacket, beret, a Gauloise hanging from a lip, accompanying a Frenchwoman dressed like a model – a short stocky scruffy man, a tall slim elegant woman.

When I went to Paris my toilette was hardly of the level to attract French compliments, but it was true every man gave you a quick, expert once-over – hair, face, what you were wearing – allotting you marks. This was a dispassionate, disinterested summing-up, not necessarily leading to invitations.

A scene: I took myself to the opera, and in the foyer, at the interval, saw enter a very young woman, eighteen, perhaps, in what was perhaps her first evening dress, a column of white satin. She was exquisite, and so was the dress. She stood poised just in the entrance, while the crowd looked … assessed … judged. Not a word, but they might as well have been clapping. She was at first ready to shrink away with shyness but slowly filled with confidence, stood smiling, tears in her eyes, lifted on invisible waves of expert appreciation, approval, love. Adorable France, which loves its women, gives them confidence in their femininity – and that from the time when they are tiny girls.

On this first trip I was in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, so cheap I could hardly believe it. Gottfried had said I should look up his sister’s husband’s mother. I did and found an elderly lady in old-fashioned clothes living in a tiny room high up under the roof of one of those tall ancient cold houses. Through her I was admitted into a network of middle-aged and old women, without men, all poor, shabby, living from hand to mouth in maids’ rooms or in any comer that would let them fit themselves in. There they were, every one a victim of war, and some of them had lived in their little refuges through the war and, clearly, often did not know how they had managed it. They were witty and they were wise, and the best of company. As with the refugees in London then, it was hard to know what they lived on. I was served precious coffee in beautiful cups, by a stove that had to be fed with wood and coal – and whatever was burnable that could be picked up in the street, brought toiling up hundreds of cold stairs. Madame Gise had not heard from her son since the beginning of the war and said that he had chosen to despise her, because she was not a communist. She despised communists and communism. I said I was a kind of communist, and she said, Nonsense, you don’t know anything about it. These women, whose husbands or lovers or sons had been killed or had forgotten them: they were so brave, supporting each other in their poverty and when they were ill. Again, as in London, I was hearing tales of impossible survivals, endurances. Our talk in London of politics, all ideas and principles, of what went on in other countries, dissolved here into: ‘My cousin … Ravensbrook’; ‘My son was shot by the Germans for harbouring a member of the Resistance’; ‘I escaped from Germany … from Poland … from Russia … from Spain …’

In Paris I bought a hat. This needs explanation. I had to: it was a need of the times. A Paris hat proved you had captured elegance itself. Madame Gise stood by me. Saying, No, not that one, Yes, that one, she was representing Paris itself, that shabby woman with a carefully counted out store of francs in her handbag. I never wore the hat. But I owned a Paris hat. Joan said, But what are you going to do with it?

Another trip, and in another shabby hotel, I suddenly thought, But surely this was where Oscar Wilde died? Down I went to the desk, and the proprietress said. Yes, indeed that was so, he died here, and it was in the room you are in. People sometimes came to ask her about it, but she couldn’t say much; after all, she hadn’t been here. When I wanted to pay the bill, there was no one at the desk. I knocked at a door, and was told, Entrez. It was a dark, cluttered room, with mirrors gleaming from corners, shawls over chairs, a cat. There was Madame, in an armchair, flesh bulging over her pink corset, her fat feet in a basin of water. The maid, a young girl, was brushing her rusty old hair, while Madame tossed it back as if it were a treasure, in her imagination young tresses. This was a scene from Balzac? Zola? Certainly not a twentieth-century novel. Or Degas: The Concierge, perhaps? I lingered at the door, entranced. ‘Leave your money at the desk,’ she said. ‘The bill is there. And let us see you again, Madame.’ But I didn’t go back: one shouldn’t spoil perfection. And I didn’t see Madame Gise again either, and about that I feel bad.

On one of these trips there was one of the oddest encounters of my life. The plane back from Paris was delayed, by hours. At Orly we sat around, bored, tired, fractious. At last we were on. Next to me was a South African man, who, hearing from my voice that I was from Rhodesia, began talking. He was, I thought, drunk, then thought, No, that’s not drink. I hardly listened: We would land after midnight; I was years away from being able to afford taxis; Peter still woke at five. Slowly, what the man was saying began to penetrate. He was telling me that he had made a trip to Palestine to aid Irgun in its fight against the British occupying forces, and he had just helped to blow up the King David Hotel. Now, his duty as a Jew done, he was returning with a good conscience to South Africa. Women are used to hearing confessions, particularly if they are young – well, by then youngish – and reasonably attractive. Women don’t really count, as people, to a man who is drunk, or not himself for one reason or another – or to many men sober, if it comes to that. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was an enemy of my country and I should be thinking of how to alert the authorities. We landed. The airport was almost deserted. I was imagining what would happen if I said to the air hostess, I want to speak to the police. ‘What for?’ I could hear – and the voice would be tart, for she would be longing for bed, just like me. The police – a man, or two men – would arrive, after a delay, while I watched other people going off to find a bus. ‘I have been sitting on the plane from Paris next to a man who says he has been blowing up the King David Hotel. Among other things.’ The policeman hesitates. He glances at his partner. They examine me. My appearance, tired and cross, does not impress.

‘So this man told you he’d been blowing up this hotel?’

‘Yes.

‘Do you know him?’

‘No.’

‘So he was telling a perfect stranger that he had been committing murder and treason and God knows what in Jerusalem?’

‘Oh, forget it.’

But of course that would not be the end, and I’d have to hang around while sceptical officials questioned. If they didn’t decide I was simply daft.

‘There, there, just you run along home, dear, and forget all about it.’

The thing was – and is – I am sure he was telling the truth. Or – perhaps even more interesting – he had imagined it all so strongly, the blowing up of the hotel, the murder of policemen, that for him it was all true and had to be shared, even if only with a stranger in the next seat on an aeroplane.

I went to Dublin too, invited by writers, I am sure, for there was a convivial evening. But that is not what I remember most, what I cannot forget. I was just over a year out of all that sunlight, that dry heat, and I thought I had experienced everything in the way of dismalness and greyness in London, but suddenly I was in this city of old, unkempt buildings, and dignified, a city proud of itself, but everywhere ran about ragged children, with bare feet, legs red with cold, hungry faces. Never has there been such a poor place as Dublin then, and it was a sharp, biting poverty, which afflicted the writers too, for one of them pressed into my hands a book called Leaves for the Burning, unjustly forgotten, by Mervin Wall, the account of a drunken weekend, but this was the drinking of desperation. That city of rags and hunger had disappeared when I went again less than ten years later.

I reviewed Leaves for the Burning somewhere, probably John O’London’s Weekly. Now, that was an interesting periodical. It was the product of a now defunct culture, or sub-culture. All over Britain then, in towns, in villages, were groups of mostly young people, drawn together by love of literature. They read books, they discussed books, they met in pubs and in each other’s houses. Some of them aspired to write, but that was long before the time when anyone who had read a novel aspired to write one. John O’London was not highbrow, it was nowhere near the level of, let’s say, The London Review of Books now. But it had standards and was jealous of them, printed verses, had literary competitions – a pity there is nothing like it now. Another periodical served the short story: The Argosy. It was serious enough, within limits. It would not, for instance, print a story by Camus or a piece by Virginia Woolf, but I remember enjoyable tales. This, too, had a readership far beyond London; its real strength was provincial literary culture. Another lost and gone magazine was Lilliput, a lively compendium of tales, odd pieces, pictures. It was edited for a while by Patrick Campbell, who will be remembered now as the man who in spite of – you’d think – an incapacitating stammer was on television, in panel games. A story of mine went into Lilliput. On the strength of it we had several lunches in L’Escargot, long and alcoholic lunches, as were then a perk for both writer and editor. L’Escargot has gone through several transmutations, even an unfortunate one as nouvelle cuisine, but it was a mystery then that often we were the only people eating there at lunchtime. In the evenings it was crammed.

A visiting American said, did I read science fiction? I offered Olaf Stapledon, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and he said it was a good beginning. Then he gave me an armful of science fiction novels. What I felt then I have felt ever since. I was excited by their scope, the wideness of their horizons, the ideas, and the possibilities for social criticism – particularly in this time of McCarthy, when the atmosphere was so thick and hostile to new ideas in the United States – and disappointed by the level of characterization and the lack of subtlety. My mentor said, But of course you can’t have subtlety of character, which depends on a cultural matrix, if the hero is pioneering engineer Dick Tantrix No. 65092 on the artificial planet Andromeda, Sector 25,000. Very well, but I have always felt that a sci-fi novel is yet to be written using density of characterization, like Henry James. It would be great comedy, for a start. But if what we do get is so wonderfully inventive and astonishing and mind-boggling, then why repine? In science fiction are some of the best stories of our time. To open a sci-fi novel, or to be with science fiction writers, if you’ve just come from a sojourn in the conventional literary world, is like opening windows into a stuffy and old-fashioned little room.

My new tutor said he would take me to a pub where science fiction writers went. He did. It must have been the White Horse in Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street. There was a room full of bespectacled lean men who turned as one to look warily at me – a masculine atmosphere. No, the word suggests a sexual lordliness. ‘Blokeish’, then? No, too homespun and ordinary. This was a clan, a group, a family, but without women. I felt I should not be there, though chaperoned by my American, whom they knew and welcomed. What they were was defensive: this was because they had been so thoroughly rejected by the literary world. They had the facetiousness, the jokiness, of their defensiveness. I babbled absurdly about Nietzsche’s Superman, and the Revelations, and they were embarrassed. I like to think the great Arthur C. Clarke was there, but he had probably left for the States by then.

My disappointment with what I thought of as a dull group of people, suburban, provincial, was my fault. In that prosaic room, in that very ordinary pub, was going on the most advanced thinking in this country. (The Astronomer Royal had said it would be ridiculous to think that we could send people to the moon.) What these men were talking about, thinking about, were satellite communications, rocketry, spacecraft and space travel, the social uses of television. They were linked with people like themselves across the world: ‘The Earth is the cradle of Mankind, but you cannot live in a cradle for ever.’ – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. ‘We are living,’ said Arthur C. Clarke, ‘in a moment unique in all history – the last days of Man’s existence as a citizen of a single planet.’ My trouble was that I didn’t have mathematics, physics – couldn’t speak their language. Because of my ignorance, I know I have been cut off from the developments going on in science – and science is where our frontiers are, in this time. It is not to the latest literary novel that people now look for news about humanity, as they did in the nineteenth century.

When lists are made of the best British writers since the war, they do not include Arthur C. Clarke, nor Brian Aldiss, nor any of the good science fiction writers. It is conventional literature that has turned out to be provincial.

And so I had made a life for me and for Peter. That was an achievement, and I was proud of myself. The most important part was Peter, who was enjoying this life, particularly the nursery school, in Kensington, and then the family atmosphere with Joan and Ernest. Never has there been a child so ready to make friends. Our days still began at five. Again I was reading to him and telling him stories for a couple of hours after he woke, because Joan’s bedroom was immediately below, and the floors were thin, and she did not wake till later. Or he listened to the radio. We have forgotten the role radio played before television. Peter loved the radio. He listened to everything. He listened to two radio plays based on novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, each an hour long, standing by the machine, absolutely riveted. What was he hearing? Understanding? I have no idea. It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults. At three or four, Peter understood everything, and at eight or nine read only comics. And I’ve seen this again and again with small children. A child of three sits entranced through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but four years later can tolerate only Rupert Bear.

I was writing Martha Quest, a conventional novel, though the demand then was for experimental novels. I played in my mind with a hundred ways of doing Martha Quest, pulling shapes about, playing with time, but at the end of all this, the novel was straightforward. I was dealing with my painful adolescence, my mother, all that anguish, the struggle for survival.

And now there arrived a letter from my mother, saying she was coming to London, she was going to live with me and help me with Peter, and – here was the inevitable, surreal, heartbreaking ingredient – she had taught herself typing and would be my secretary.

I collapsed. I simply went to bed and pulled the covers over my head. When I had taken Peter to nursery school, I crept away into the dark of my bed and stayed there until I had to bring him home.

And now – again–there is the question of time, tricksy time, and until I came to write this and was forced to do my work with calendars and obdurate dates, I had thought, vaguely, that I was in Denbigh Road for … well, it was probably three years or so. But that was because, having been returned to child seeing, everything new and immediate, I had been returned – well, partly – to child time. No matter how I wriggled and protested. No, it can’t have been only a year, it was a year before I went to Joan’s, and I had been there only six months or so when the letter came from my mother. Yet those months seem now like years. Time is different at different times in one’s life. A year in your thirties is much shorter than a child’s year – which is almost endless – but long compared with a year in your forties; whereas a year in your seventies is a mere blink.

Of course she was bound to come after me. How could I have been so naive as to think she wouldn’t, as soon as she could? She had been in exile in Southern Rhodesia, dreaming of London, and now … She and her daughter did not ‘get on,’ or, to put it truthfully, had always fought? Oh, never mind, the girl was wrong-headed; she would learn to listen to her mother. She was a communist? She always had disreputable friends? That was all right; her mother would introduce her to really nice people. She had written The Grass Is Singing, which had caused her mother anguish and shame, because it was so hated by the whites? And those extremely unfair short stories about The District? Well, she – the girl’s mother – would explain to everyone that no one outside the country could really understand the whites’ problems and … But the author had been brought up in the country? Her views were wrong, and in time she would come to see that … She proposed to live with a daughter who had broken up her first marriage, leaving two children, had married a German refugee at the height of the war, who was a kaffir-lover and scornful of religion?

Well, how did she see it? Now I believe she did not think about it much. She could not afford to. She longed to live in London again, but it was the London she had left in 1919. She had no friends left, except for Daisy Lane, with whom she had been exchanging letters, but Daisy Lane was now an old lady, living in Richmond with her sister, an ex-missionary from Japan. There was her brother’s family, and she was coming home in time for the daughter’s wedding. Her brother’s sister-in-law had already said, ‘I hope Jane doesn’t imagine she is going to take first place at the wedding.’ (Jane: Plain Jane, the loving family nickname, making sure that Maude didn’t imagine she possessed any attractions.) And had written to my mother saying she must take a back seat.