A Small Personal Voice. Doris Lessing
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it is not evident from their work.
I believe that the pleasurable luxury of despair, the acceptance of disgust, is as much a betrayal of what a writer should be as the acceptance of the simple economic view of man; both are aspects of cowardice, both fallings-away from a central vision, the two easy escapes of our time into false innocence. They are the opposite sides of the same coin. One sees man as the isolated individual unable to communicate, helpless and solitary; the other as collective man with a collective conscience. Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. It is a balance which must be continuously tested and reaffirmed. Living in the midst of this whirlwind of change, it is impossible to make final judgements or absolute statements of value. The point of rest should be the writer’s recognition of man, the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgements before every act of submission.
I think that a writer who has for many years been emotionally involved in the basic ethical conflict of communism – what is due to the collective and what to the individual conscience – is peculiarly equipped to write of the dangers inherent in being ‘committed.’ The writer who can be bludgeoned into silence by fear or economic pressure is not worth considering; these problems are simple and the dangers easily recognizable. What is dangerous is the inner loyalty to something felt as something much greater than one’s self. I remember, in Moscow, when this question was discussed, a writer replied to an accusation of being bludgeoned by the Party into false writing by saying: ‘No one bludgeons us. Our conscience is at the service of the people. We develop an inner censor.’ It is the inner censor which is the enemy.
This same attitude was expressed at a higher level during another conversation I had with one of the well-known Soviet writers some months before the Twentieth Congress. He had been telling me about his experiences during the thirties. Because he had refused to inform on some of his colleagues he had suffered two years of what amounted to social ostracism. He was not a communist but he had a deep emotional loyalty to the communist ideals. I asked him if he had written about his experiences, saying that, since Sholokov, there had been many interesting small books produced in Soviet literature, but none describing the great conflict between good and evil which was still being played out in his country. I said I could understand that such books could not be published now, but there would come a time when they would be published. He replied: ‘How could I write of that? It was too painful, too difficult to know what was wrong and what was right.’ I said that if the people like himself remained silent about this struggle, the literature of his country would be impoverished. He said: ‘To write of such suffering, to write of such pain, would need an objectivity proper only to a second-rate writer. A great writer has a warmth of heart which commits him to the deepest pain and suffering of his people. But to step back from that experience far enough to write about it would mean a coldness of heart.’ I said that what he was saying amounted to a new theory of art. To which he replied: ‘Art can look after itself. Art will always recreate itself in different forms. But there are times when humanity is so pitiful and so exposed that art should be willing to stand aside and wait. Art is arrogant unless it is prepared to stand aside.’
This sums up for me, and where I feel it most deeply and personally, the point where ‘committedness’ can sell out to expediency. Once you admit that ‘art should be willing to stand aside for life,’ then the little tracts about progress, the false optimism, the dreadful lifeless products of socialist realism, become inevitable.
People who have been influenced by, or who have lived inside, the communist ethos, will understand the complicated emotions, the difficult loyalties, behind what that Soviet writer said. For me it is depressing that the younger people now have no understanding of it. This is the real gap between people of my age and, to choose a point at random, people under thirty. Rejecting ‘propaganda,’ for this is what they believe they are doing, they reject an imaginative understanding of what I am convinced is the basic conflict of our time. The mental climate created by the cold war has produced a generation of young intellectuals who totally reject everything communism stands for; they cut themselves off imaginatively from a third of mankind, and impoverish themselves by doing so.
It is this conflict which I am trying to explore in my series of novels, ‘Children of Violence,’ two volumes of which have appeared. Not one critic has understood what I should have thought would be obvious from the first chapter, where I was at pains to state the theme very clearly: that this is a study of the individual conscience in its relations with the collective. The fact that no critic has seen this does not, of course, surprise me. As long as critics are as ‘sensitive,’ subjective, and uncommitted to anything but their own private sensibilities, there will be no body of criticism worth taking seriously in this country. At the moment our critics remind me of a lot of Victorian ladies making out their library lists: this is a ‘nice’ book; or it is not a ‘nice’ book; the characters are ‘nice’; or they are not ‘nice.’
What we need more than anything else, I am convinced, is some serious criticism. The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
We are not living in an exciting literary period but in a dull one. We are not producing masterpieces, but large numbers of small, quite lively, intelligent novels. Above all, current British literature is provincial. This in spite of the emergence of the Angry Young Men. I use the phrase not because I think it is in any way an adequate description but because it is immediately recognizable.
When as a socialist I look forward to the working class being emancipated into readers and writers of serious literature, it is not because I believe books ‘about’ workers are better than books by or about middle-class people. I make a point of saying this because it is assumed that this is what socialists believe. It is because when a hitherto inarticulate class is released into speech, it brings a fresh rush of vitality into literature. This is why the work of the Angry Young Men was like an injection of vitality into the withered arm of British literature. It expresses something new; a section of the intelligentsia who are scornful of middle-class values; reject The Establishment; are refreshingly derisive and are not prepared to be bullied by phrases like ‘good taste.’ Yet they are extremely provincial and I do not mean by provincial that they come from or write about the provinces. I mean that their horizons are bounded by their immediate experience of British life and standards.
As an example there is John Braine’s book Room at the Top, which was compared with Stendhal’s work. This comparison exactly pinpoints what I mean. Stendhal’s bitterly opportunist heroes sought their various destinies in the painful twilight of the reaction that followed the French Revolution. The grandeur of Stendhal’s vision comes precisely from his bitter knowledge of the pettiness of life after a great vision had failed. But the hero of Room at the Top, whose values are similar to Stendhal’s heroes, who understand, as clearly as Julien Sorel when he is allowing himself to be corrupted, does not see himself in relation to any larger vision. Therefore he remains petty.
It seems to me that the work of all the new younger writers is essentially a protest against the pettiness and narrowness of what is offered them. From Jimmy Porter to Lucky Jim they are saying: ‘I am too good for what I am offered.’ And so they are.
British life is at the moment petty and frustrating. The people in these islands are kindly, pleasant, tolerant; apparently content to sink into ever-greater depths of genteel poverty because of the insistence of our rulers on spending so much of the wealth we produce on preparations for a war against communism; a war which will take place if and when the United States decides. They are a people who have lost the habit of fighting back; they will emigrate, but they won’t rebel, or at least, not about fundamentals. If there is industrial strife, even socialist newspapers behave like anxious maiden aunts, exhorting both sides to play the game and not to step outside the rules of fair play. For the workers are striking because their standard of living is fluctuating, not because a fifth of the products of their work is being spent on armaments which almost at once become obsolete; not because this is a rich country being artificially kept poor. If there is a disciplinary war against a dissident colony, the young men obediently march off, because they have been educated not to think, or because war experience is