Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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it as applying to me. But I suppose it does. Willi, however, was not weak. On the contrary he was the most ruthless person I have ever known.
Having written that, I am astounded. What do I mean? He was capable of great kindness. And now I remember that all those years ago, I discovered that no matter what adjective I applied to Willi, I could always use the opposite. Yes. I have looked in my old papers. I find a list, headed Willi:
Ruthless Kind
Cold Warm
Sentimental Realistic
And so on, down the page; and underneath I wrote: ‘From the process of writing these words about Willi I have discovered I know nothing about him. About someone one understands, one doesn’t have to make lists of words.’
But really what I discovered, though I didn’t know it then, was that in describing any personality all these words are meaningless. To describe a person one says: ‘Willi, sitting stiffly at the head of the table, allowed his round spectacles to glitter at the people watching him and said, formally, but with a gruff clumsy humour:’ Something like that. But the point is, and it is the point that obsesses me (and how odd this obsession should be showing itself, so long ago, in helpless lists of opposing words, not knowing what it would develop into), once I say that words like good/bad, strong/weak, are irrelevant, I am accepting amorality, and I do accept it the moment I start to write ‘a story’, ‘a novel’, because I simply don’t care. All I care about is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their reality. And after twenty years of living in and around the Left, which means twenty years’ preoccupation with this question of morality in art, that is all I am left with. So what I am saying is, in fact, that the human personality, that unique flame, is so sacred to me, that everything else becomes unimportant. Is that what I am saying? And if so, what does it mean?
But to return to Willi. He was the emotional centre of our sub-group, and had been, before the split, the centre of the big sub-group, and had been, before the split, the centre of the big group—another strong man, similar to Willi, was now leading the other sub-group. Willi was centre because of his absolute certainty that he was right. He was a master of dialectic; could be very subtle and intelligent in diagnosing a social problem, could be, even in the next sentence, stupidly dogmatic. As time went on, he became steadily more heavy-minded. Yet the odd thing was that people continued to revolve around him, people much subtler than he, even when they knew he was talking nonsense. Even when we had reached the stage when we could laugh, in front of him and at him, and at some monstrous bit of logic-chopping, we continued to revolve around and depend on him. It is terrifying that this can be true.
For instance, when he first imposed himself and we accepted him, he told us that he had been a member of the underground working against Hitler. There was even some fantastic story about his having killed three SS men and secretly buried them and then escaped to the frontier and away to England. We believed it, of course. Why not? But even after Sam Kettner came up from Johannesburg, who had known him for years, and told us that Willi had never been anything more in Germany than a liberal, had never joined any anti-Hitler group, and had only left Germany when his age-group became eligible for the army, it was as if we believed it. Because we thought him capable of it? Well, I’m sure he was. Because, in short, a man is as good as his fantasies?
But I don’t want to write Willi’s history—it was common enough for that time. He was a refugee from sophisticated Europe stuck for the duration of the war in a backwater. It is his character I want to describe—if I can. Well, the most remarkable thing about him was how he would sit down to work out everything that might conceivably happen to him in the next ten years, and then make plans in advance. There is nothing that most people find harder to understand than that a man can continuously scheme to meet all the contingencies that might occur five years ahead. The word used for this is opportunism. But very few people are genuinely opportunists. It takes not only clarity of mind about oneself, which is fairly common; but a stubborn and driving energy, which is rare. For instance, for the five years of the war Willi drank beer (which he hated) every Saturday morning with a CID man (whom he despised) because he had worked out that this particular man was likely to have become a senior official by the time Willi needed him. And he was right, because when the war ended, it was this man who pulled strings for Willi to get his naturalization through long before any of the other refugees got theirs. And therefore Willi was free to leave the Colony a couple of years before they were. As it turned out he decided not to live in England, but to return to Berlin; but had he chosen England, then he would have needed British nationality—and so on. Everything he did had this quality of careful calculated planning. Yet it was so blatant that nobody believed it about him. We thought, for example, that he really liked the CID man as a person, but was ashamed of admitting he liked a ‘class enemy’. And when Willi used to say: ‘But he will be useful to me,’ we would laugh affectionately as at a weakness that made him more human.
For, of course, we thought him inhuman. He played the role of commissar, the communist intellectual leader. Yet he was the most middle-class person I have known. I mean by this that in every instinct he was for order, correctness and conservation of what existed. I remember Jimmy laughing at him and saying that if he headed a successful revolution on Wednesday, by Thursday he would have appointed a Ministry of Conventional Morality. At which Willi said he was a socialist and not an anarchist.
He had no sympathy for the emotionally weak or deprived or for the misfits. He despised people who allowed their lives to be disturbed by personal emotion. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of spending whole nights giving good advice to someone in trouble; but the advice tended to leave the sufferer feeling he was inadequate and unworthy.
Willi had had the most conventional upper-middle-class upbringing imaginable. Berlin in the late ’twenties and ’thirties; an atmosphere which he called decadent, but of which he had been very much a part; a little conventional homosexuality at the age of thirteen; being seduced by the maid when he was fourteen; then parties, fast cars, cabaret singers; a sentimental attempt to reform a prostitute about which he was now sentimentally cynical; an aristocratic contempt for Hitler, and always plenty of money.
He was—even in this Colony and when he was earning a few pounds a week, perfectly dressed; elegant in a suit made for ten shillings by an Indian tailor. He was of middle-height, lean, stooped a little; wore a cap of absolutely smooth gleaming black hair which was rapidly receding; had a high pale forehead, extremely cold greenish eyes usually invisible behind steadily focused spectacles, and a prominent and authoritarian nose. He would listen patiently while people spoke, his lenses flashing, and then take off the glasses, exposing his eyes, which were at first weak and blinking from the adjustment, then suddenly narrowed and critical, and speak with a simplicity of arrogance that took everyone’s breath away. That was Wilhelm Rodde, the professional revolutionary who later (after failing to get the good well-paid job in a London firm he had counted on) went to East Germany (remarking with his usual brutal frankness: I’m told they are living very well there, with cars and chauffeurs) and became an official with a good deal of power. And I am sure he is an extremely efficient official. I am sure he is humane, when it is possible. But I remember him at Mashopi; I remember us all at Mashopi—for now all those years of nights of talk and activity, when we were political beings, seem to me far less revealing of what we were than at Mashopi. Though of course, as I’ve said, that is true only because we were politically in a vacuum, without a chance of expressing ourselves in political responsibility.
The three men from the camp were united by nothing but the uniform, although they had been friends at Oxford. They acknowledged that the end of the war would be the end of their intimacy. They would sometimes even acknowledge their lack of real liking for each other, in the light, hard, self-mocking voice which was common to us all during that particular phase—to all, that is, save Willi, whose concession to the tone, or style of that time was to allow freedom to others. It was his way of participating in anarchy. At Oxford these three had been homosexuals. When I write the word down and look at it, I realize its power to disturb. When I remember the three, how they were, their characters, there is no shock, or moment of disturbance. But at the word homosexual, written—well, I have to combat dislike and disquiet. Extraordinary. I qualify the word by saying that already,