Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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in one’s mind, fighting the sense of disgust and the staleness, as I tried to fight it that day sitting before Mother Sugar. But extraordinary how this old stuff issued so fresh and magisterial from the lips of psycho-analysis. Mother Sugar, who is nothing if not a cultivated woman, a European soaked in art, uttered commonplaces in her capacity as witch-doctor she would have been ashamed of if she were with friends and not in the consulting room. One level for life, another for the couch. I couldn’t stand it; that is, ultimately, what I couldn’t stand. Because it means one level of morality for life, and another for the sick. I know very well from what level in my self that novel, Frontiers of War, came from. I knew when I wrote it. I hated it then and I hate it now. Because that area in myself had become so powerful it threatened to swallow everything else, I went off to the witch-doctor, my soul in my hands. Yet the healer herself, when the word Art cropped up, smiled complacently; that sacred animal the artist justifies everything, everything he does is justified. The complacent smile, the tolerant nod, is not even confined to the cultivated healers, or the professors; it’s the property of the money-changers, the little jackals of the press, the enemy. When a film mogul wants to buy an artist—and the real reason why he seeks out the original talent and the spark of creativity is because he wants to destroy it, unconsciously that’s what he wants, to justify himself by destroying the real thing—he calls the victim an artist. You are an artist, of course…and the victim more often than not, smirks, and swallows his disgust.
The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word ‘artist’ used by the enemy.
I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this—why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game—that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?
I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company; yet I know that what made the film company so excited about the possibilities of that novel as a film was precisely what made it successful as a novel. The novel is ‘about’ a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn’t true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can’t read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. And I know that in order to write another, to write those fifty reports on society which I have the material to write, I would have to deliberately whip up in myself that same emotion. And it would be that emotion which would make those fifty books novels and not reportage.
When I think back to that time, those week-ends spent at the Mashopi hotel, with that group of people, I have to first switch something off in me; now, writing about it, I have to switch it off, or ‘a story’ would begin to emerge, a novel, and not the truth. It is like remembering a particularly intense love affair, or a sexual obsession. And it is extraordinary how, as the nostalgia deepens, the excitement, ‘stories’ begin to form, to breed like cells under a microscope. And yet it is so powerful, that nostalgia, that I can only write this a few sentences at a time. Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And the people who read Frontiers of War will have had fed in them this emotion, even though they were not conscious of it. That is why I am ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime.
The group was composed of people thrown together by chance, and who knew they would not meet again as soon as this particular phase of the war was over. They all knew and acknowledged with the utmost frankness that they had nothing in common.
Whatever fervours, beliefs and awful necessities the war created in other parts of the world, it was characterized in ours, right from the start, by double-feeling. It was immediately evident that for us war was going to be a very fine thing. This wasn’t a complicated thing that needed to be explained by experts. Material prosperity hit Central and South Africa tangibly; there was suddenly a great deal more money for everyone, and this was true even of the Africans, even in an economy designed to see that they had the minimum necessary to keep them alive and working. Nor were there any serious shortages of commodities to buy with the money. Not serious enough at least to interfere with the enjoyment of life. Local manufacturers began to make what had been imported before, thus proving in another way that war has two faces—it was such a torpid, slovenly economy, based as it was on the most inefficient and backward labour force, that it needed some sort of jolt from outside. The war was such a jolt.
There was another reason for cynicism—for people did begin to be cynical, when they were tired of being ashamed, as they were, to start with. This war was presented to us as a crusade against the evil doctrines of Hitler, against racialism, etc., yet the whole of that enormous land-mass, about half the total area of Africa, was conducted on precisely Hitler’s assumption—that some human beings are better than others because of their race. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil—those Africans with any education at all. They enjoyed the sight of the white baases so eager to go off and fight on any available battle-front against a creed they would all die to defend on their own soil. Right through the war, the correspondence columns of the papers were crammed with arguments about whether it was safe to put so much as a pop-gun into the hands of any African soldier since he was likely to turn it against his white masters, or to use this useful knowledge later. It was decided, quite rightly, that it was not safe.
Here were two good reasons why the war had for us, from the very beginnings, its enjoyable ironies.
(I am again falling into the wrong tone—and yet I hate that tone, and yet we all lived inside it for months and years, and it did us all, I am sure, a great deal of damage. It was self-punishing, a locking of feeling, an inability or a refusal to fit conflicting things together to make a whole; so that one can live inside it, no matter how terrible. The refusal means one can neither change nor destroy; the refusal means ultimately either death or impoverishment of the individual.)
I will try to put down the facts merely. For the general population the war had two phases. The first when things were going badly and defeat was possible; this phase ended, finally, at Stalingrad. The second phase was simply sticking it out until victory.
For us, and I mean by us the left and the liberals associated with the left, the war had three phases. The first was when Russia disowned the war. This locked the loyalties of us all—the half-hundred or hundred people whose emotional spring was a faith in the Soviet Union. This period ended when Hitler attacked Russia. Immediately there was a burst of energy.
People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own Communist Parties, to think about a subject that one day will be a subject for sociologists. Which is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of the existence of a Communist Party. People or groups of people who don’t even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the Communist Party, and this is true of all countries where there has been even a tiny Communist Party. In our own small town, a year after Russia entered the war, and the left had recovered because of it, there had come into existence (apart from the direct activities