Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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rather as she might a tea ceremony in Japan, and afterwards enquired, ‘Are these people some kind of cannibal then?’ So much for what seems enduring.
There is a new kind of educated person, who may be at school and university for twenty, twenty-five years, who knows everything about a speciality, computers, the law, economics, politics, but knows about nothing else, no literature, art, history, and may be heard enquiring, ‘But what was the Renaissance then?’ ‘What was the French Revolution?’
Even 50 years ago this person would have been seen as a barbarian. To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humanist background – impossible. To call oneself educated without a background of reading – impossible.
Reading, books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries. Reading was and still is in what we call the Third World a kind of parallel education, which once everyone had, or aspired to. Nuns and monks in their convents and monasteries, aristocrats at their meals, women at their looms and their sewing, were read to, and the poor people, even if all they had was a Bible, respected those who read. In Britain until quite recently trade unions and workers’ movements fought for libraries, and perhaps the best example of the pervasiveness of the love for reading is that of the workers in the tobacco and cigar factories of Cuba whose trade unions demanded that the workers should be read to as they worked. The material was agreed to by the workers, and included politics and history, novels and poetry. A favourite of their books was the Count of Monte Cristo. A group of workers wrote to Dumas and asked if they might use the name of his hero for one of their cigars.
Perhaps there is no need to labour this point to anyone present here, but I do feel we have not yet grasped that we are living in a fast fragmenting culture. Pockets of the old excellences remain, in a university, a school, the classroom of an old-fashioned teacher in love with books, perhaps a newspaper or a journal. But a culture that once united Europe and its overseas offshoots has gone.
We may get some idea of the speed with which cultures may change by looking at how languages change. English as spoken in America or the West Indies is not the English of England. Spanish is not the same in Argentina and in Spain. The Portuguese of Brazil is not the Portuguese of Portugal. Italian, Spanish, French grew out of Latin not in thousands of years but in hundreds. It is a very short time since the Roman world disappeared, leaving behind its legacy of our languages.
One interesting little irony about the present situation is that a lot of the criticism of the old culture was in the name of Elitism, but what is happening is that everywhere are enclaves, pockets, of the old kind of reader and reading and it is easy to imagine one of the new barbarians walking by chance into a library of the old kind, in all its richness and variety, and understanding suddenly what has been lost, what he – or she – has been deprived of.
So what is going to happen next in this tumultuously changing world? I think we are all of us fastening our seat belts and holding on tight.
I drafted what I have just read before the events of 11 September. We are in for a war, it seems, a long one, which by its nature cannot have an easy end. We all know that enemies exchange more than gunfire and insults. In this country Spain you know this better perhaps than anyone. When feeling gloomy about the world I often think about that time here, in Spain, in the early Middle Ages, in Cordova, in Toledo, in Granada, in other southern cities, Christians, Muslims, Jews lived harmoniously together, poets, musicians, writers, sages, all together, admiring each other, helping each other. It went on for three centuries. This wonderful culture went on for three centuries. Has anything like it been seen in the world? What has been, can be again.
I think the educated person of the future will have a wider basis than anything we can imagine now.
Towards the end of the reign of the late unlamented Shah of Iran a certain lowly citizen named his beautiful cat Shah-in-Shah, King of Kings, a title claimed by this king who was the son of a common soldier. The culprit was arrested, and disappeared into Iran’s system of prisons, tortures and hangings. It is safe to assume that the Shah, while a petulant tyrant, could not have approved of the unfortunate being executed for calling a cat a king, but then he would not have known about it. Rulers more than anyone else may complain that they really cannot be expected to keep an eye on everything. Our age of terrors is often characterised by the grotesque, the inconsequent, the simply silly, and this incident is such a perfect example it must be cherished by connoisseurs of the politically surreal. But surely what must interest us is not the Shah, nor even the victim, whose fate is too familiar to merit much notice, but the state of mind of the man responsible. If, as is usual, the machinery of the secret police was simply transferred from shah to ayatollahs, then the same official was probably at it for years, but he must have retired by now, growing roses and generally cultivating his garden. How does he see himself? Is he secretly thinking, but what got into me? What got into me is the secret theme of the thinking of successive waves of people who were part of persecution’s machineries, but later became appalled at the past – at themselves. As for the many citizens who thought, ‘And quite right too, he shouldn’t have insulted our dear Shah’, then there isn’t much to be done about them, for the lovers of authority, no matter how cruel, will always be with us. And they will have forgotten about it by now, as the white supporters of apartheid may now murmur, ‘I was always a bit of a liberal you know.’
Direct and unambiguous censorship, as part of state control, is easier to combat than the indirect results of it. Books, works of art, and their authors, may be banned, reviled, made non-books and non-people, but what is hard to see is a prevailing wind of opinion, most particularly if it blows fitfully. Jack Cope, the writer, having been a communist, wanted a passport to leave South Africa, where he was under threat. At last he found himself sitting opposite the relevant official. ‘Ach, hell, Mr Cope, look at it from our point of view. How can we give you a passport? You are a commie and you are a liberal too.’ Impasse. Recently Jack had written a little tale about a bird caught in power lines. A linesman saw it, notified base, the machinery for power was shut down for the district, a man climbed up and rescued the bird, and with tears in his eyes watched it fly away. The official with life and death in his hands – passports were that then – confessed he hadn’t read Jack’s books, he didn’t read commie books, but he remembered a nice little story, and he told Jack the tale of the sparrow. ‘I wrote that story,’ Jack modestly confessed. ‘Ach, hell, man, but that is a nice story.’ And he gave Jack his passport. Never say that literature cannot have practical uses. Meanwhile South Africa’s prisons, some of the cruellest in the world, continued to flourish, and so did censorship, which was arbitrary, to say the least. For instance, Black Beauty was banned, for reasons obvious to the white censor. Many writers’ books were banned, mine among them, and then we authors might hear they were on sale somewhere, but then banned again, all this giving rise to much satirical laughter. If you are white – and privileged, or privileged anywhere, then it is easier to maintain a stoical attitude towards persecution, petty or otherwise, and easy to make jokes. The white progressive writers could fight with ridicule, but the appealing little scene of the white immigration official, white writer and released bird could never have happened with a black writer, and they fled from the country when they could. But I wonder about the books not written, and here I come to my concern. When certain winds blow they wither everything that is unprotected. Let us imagine a poor black man – these days it could be a woman – who has managed because of frightful sacrifices by his parents, and then himself, sometimes walking miles to school every day, to get himself some kind of certificate, and with that, a clerk’s job. He has read enough to know that his everyday experiences could make tales that would be printed and admired. He dreams of writing them. But he lives, let us say, in old Soweto, and his working conditions make it hard for him to sustain creative energy, and then he cannot help observing how the black writers still in South Africa are treated. Those who have fled, sometimes a few steps in front of the police, are in exile in London and New York and in universities which these days so often give shelter to victims of persecution. He heard some are drinking too much, dying young, often not writing much. In the evenings he sits at a table where his mother