A Small Personal Voice. Doris Lessing
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propaganda.
Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad. That image of the pretty singer in the ivory tower has always seemed to me a dishonest one. Logically he should be content to sing to his image in the mirror. The act of getting a story or a novel published is an act of communication, an attempt to impose one’s personality and beliefs on other people. If a writer accepts this responsibility, he must see himself, to use the socialist phrase, as an architect of the soul, and it is a phrase which none of the old nineteenth-century novelists would have shied away from.
But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we live in.
We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us; and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman does not destroy us all, our children may be born deformed or mad. We are living at one of the great turning points of history. In the last two decades man has made an advance as revolutionary as when he first got off his belly and stood upright. Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe. And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares, and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.
What is the choice before us? It is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of a good which may defeat the evil.
Even before we liberated the power in the atom, so socialist economists claim, the products of our labour (that is, if freed from the artificial restrictions of a strangling economic system) were enough to feed and clothe all the people in the world; humanity could have been freed from want and drudgery if we had taken the brakes off the machines and if so much of the wealth we produced had not been spent on the engines of war. Even before we split the atom, the old dream of man liberated from the tyrannies of hunger and of cold had the solidity of something possible.
But to imagine free man, leisured man, is to step outside what we are. There is no one on this earth who is not twisted by fear and insecurity, and the compromise of thinking made inevitable by want and fear. Those people who see leisured man in terms of football matches and television-watching; those who say: ‘You can’t give man leisure, he won’t know how to use it,’ are as much victims of a temporary phase of economic development as the coupon-fillers and the screen-dreamers. Their imaginations are in bond to their own necessities. Slaves can envy the free; slaves can fight to free their children; but slaves suddenly set free are marked by the habits of submission; and slaves imagining freedom see it through the eyes of slaves.
I am convinced that we all stand at an open door, and that there is a new man about to be born, who has never been twisted by drudgery; a man whose pride as a man will not be measured by his capacity to shoulder work and responsibilities which he detests, which bore him, which are too small for what he could be; a man whose strength will not be gauged by the values of the mystique of suffering.
The imagination of the world already rejects hunger and poverty. We all believe they can be abolished. If humanity submits to living below the level of what is possible, it will be as shameful as when a human being chooses to live below the level of what he can be; or a nation falls below itself.
There are only two choices: that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being; or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business, or the socialist bureaucrats who have forgotten that socialism means a desire for goodness and compassion – and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.
It is because it is so hard to think ourselves into the possibilities of the ancient dream of free man that the nightmare is so strong. Everyone in the world now has moments when he throws down a newspaper, turns off the radio, shuts his ears to the man on the platform, and holds out his hand and looks at it, shaken with terror. The hand of a white man, held to the warmth of a northern indoor fire; the hand of a black man, held into the strong heat of the sun: we look at our working hands, brown and white, and then at the flat surface of a wall, the cold material of a city pavement, at breathing soil, trees, flowers, growing corn. We think: the tiny units of the matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, trees, flowers, soil … and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch, and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction. We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction. And the history of the last fifty years does not help us to disbelieve in the possibility of a madman in a position of power. We are haunted by the image of an idiot hand, pressing down a great black lever; or a thumb pressing a button, as the dance of fiery death begins in one country and spreads over the earth; and above the hand the concentrated fanatic stare of a mad sick face.
Even the vision of the madman it not so bad. We are all of us, at times, this madman. Most of us have said, at some time or another, exhausted with the pressure of living ‘Oh for God’s sake, press the button, turn down the switch, we’ve all had enough.’ Because we can understand the madman, since he is part of us, we can deal with him, he is not so frightening as that other image: of a young empty-faced technician in anonymous overalls, saying ‘Yes sir!’ and pressing the button. The anonymous technician, one of the growing army manning the departments of death, has no responsibility. He might turn the switch looking over his shoulder for confirmation at the Chairman of the Committee who ordered him to do it. And the Committee to another Committee. And the Chairman of that final superior Committee, one of those little half-men that we see on the newsreels, with their self-consciously democratic faces – that Chairman will say: ‘I represent the people.’ And the people is the brown man sitting under a tree, holding out the flesh of his forearm to the heat of the sun, thinking that the warmth of the great sun is the warmth also of that final blast of heat; the people is me.
Now, in March 1957, the British Government decides to continue the hydrogen bomb tests which threaten unborn children. Yet of the men who took the decision I am sure there is not one who says: Because of me thousands of children will be born crippled, blind, deaf, mad. They are members of a committee. They have no responsibility as individuals. They represent me. But I repudiate their act. I don’t know one person, have never known a person, who would agree, as an individual, to throw that particular switch which will make children be born monsters. We all know there is a terrible gap between the public and the private conscience, and that until we bridge it we will never be safe from the murderous madman or the anonymous technician. But what is the nature of that gap? Partly, I think, it is that we have been so preoccupied with death and fear that we have not tried to imagine what living might be without the pressure of suffering. And the artists have been so busy with the nightmare they have had no time to rewrite the old utopias. All our nobilities are those of the victories over suffering. We are soaked in the grandeur of suffering; and can imagine happiness only as the yawn of a suburban Sunday afternoon.
Yet there have been attempts enough to fill the gap. The literary products of the socialist third of the world can scarcely be said to lack optimism. Anyone who has studied them is familiar with that jolly, jaunty, curiously unemotional novel about the collective farm, the factory, the five-year plan, which is reminiscent of nothing so much as of a little boy whistling in the dark. The simple demand for simple statements of faith produces art so intolerably dull and false that one reads it yawning and returns to Tolstoy.
Meanwhile, the best and most vital works of Western literature have been despairing statements of emotional anarchy. If the typical product of communist literature during the last two decades is the cheerful little tract about economic advance, then the type of Western literature is the novel or play which one sees or reads with a shudder of horrified pity for all of humanity. If writers