Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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book, he takes up his biro, and then – he stops. What he would like to write about are his daily struggles, the miseries of poverty, the attentions of the police, the efforts of his women to feed him and the children, how it feels to watch and – this is the worst – how his talented children are going to waste. He knows that simply to describe his life could be seen as an act of sedition; these days everyone knows what the daily lives of people are in luckier countries. He sits on, staring at the bricks of his wall, which he may have built himself. Would he have to leave his home, his family? Who would look after them? His exercise book remains empty. His own talents, let alone his children’s, will remain unfulfilled.
How many of such people were there? How many now in various parts of the world? In Zimbabwe the police may sit in on writers’ meetings, nothing secret about it; or they harass writers, or influence reviewers and editors against them. They drop in to say to a writer they hear such and such a book is being planned, but it would be better to think again. At this very moment, everywhere from China to Indonesia to South America to parts of Africa, a woman or man is thinking, But I daren’t write it. Talent is not necessarily allied to a readiness for martyrdom, or even courage. Why should it be? Such is our time’s history that our paradigm has to be an Ernst Toller, Solzhenitsyn, the killed or persecuted writers of some Muslim countries. A good thing for writers to be talented, but to be noticed it is even better if they are in prison or fighting cancer or, like Rushdie, sentenced to death. Writers as victims, that’s our mental set, but we scarcely notice the wasted or disappointed ones.
There are times and places when we collude with tyranny, in ways more direct than simply not noticing what goes on. In the old Soviet Union writers might claim proudly that they were developing censors that stopped them writing anything critical about communism. A shocking thing: but we all have inner censors, and often don’t suspect it. It is hard to step outside a prevailing way of thinking, particularly when you are convinced you are living in a free society. If you travel outside your culture, let’s say to the Fat East, or to a Muslim country or even somewhere in the United States, you may catch a glimpse of how we seem to others – or are not seen at all. In Iowa or Dakota for many people a state boundary can be their horizon. Britain – what’s that? In China Europe seems simply to drop over the edge of the world. If Europe ceased to exist tomorrow millions of people would not even notice.
An interesting indication of how we think is books that do not get published, or, if they do, are scarcely noticed. One example, among many: Arthur Deikman’s book The Wrong Way Home, about cults and their characteristics. By now we are pretty well informed about cults, but Deikman went on to point out that many of our institutions, from big businesses to gentlemen’s clubs, share the characteristics of cults. Surely there could not be a more useful tool for examining our culture – but no. It was ignored. Perhaps it was too close to the bone.
The most powerful mental tyranny in what we call the free world is Political Correctness, which is both immediately evident, and to be seen everywhere, and as invisible as a kind of poison gas, for its influences are often far from the source, manifesting as a general intolerance. The history books will say something like this: ‘When the certitudes of communism began to dissolve then collapsed with them – but slowly in some countries – the dogmas of Socialist Realism; but at once stepped into the vacuum Political Correctness. This began as a sensitive, honest and laudable attempt to remove the racial and sexual biases encoded in language, but it was at once taken over by the political hysterics, who made of it another dogma. In no time, from one end of the world to the other, everyone was saying, “It is Politically Correct”, “I am afraid it isn’t Politically Correct”, as if ordered to do so. There could hardly be a conversation without it, and PC was used often as the Victorians used “It isn’t done”, meaning socially improper, or to bolster the orthodoxies of “received opinion”, or even to criticise the eccentric. The new tyranny soon took over whole universities, particularly in the United States, departments of universities, colleges, schools, dictating habits of criticism, suffocating thought in some areas of scientific research, dimming the natural ferments of intellectual life. The submission to the new creed could not have happened so fast and so thoroughly if communist rigidities had not permeated the educated classes everywhere, for it was not necessary to have been a communist to absorb an imperative to control and limit: minds had already been thoroughly subdued to the idea that free enquiry and the creative arts must be subject to the higher authority of politics.’
Truly, we cannot stand being free. Mankind – humankind – loves its chains, and hastens to forge new ones if the old ones fall away.
The trouble is that people who need the rigidities, dogmas, ideologies, are always the most stupid, so Political Correctness is a self-perpetuating machine for driving out the intelligent and the creative. It is forming a class of people – researchers, journalists, particularly educators – who are exiles in their own culture, sometimes kept in inferior work, or even unemployed, and yet they are often the best, the most innovative, the most flexible.
In a certain prestigious university in the United States two male faculty members told me they hated PC but did not dare say so, if they wanted to keep their jobs. They took me into the park to say it, where we could not be overheard, as used to happen in the communist countries. Militant feminists were in charge.
In a good school in California I was taken to task by pupils for Political Incorrectness, in The Good Terrorist, which they were being ‘taught’ in class. Being ‘taught’ meant going through it to find incorrect thinking. Again, a young teacher took me aside to say she hated what was going on, and she was leaving teaching altogether, because this was what teaching had become.
In Wales I heard of a teacher, much loved by the pupils, who taught literature as it should be, out of her own love and enthusiasm, but she had been eased out of the department. Her ideas were considered old-fashioned. She was the kind of teacher of whom you hear people say: I was so lucky, I had this teacher who taught me to love books.
The sad question has to be, with this pattern so firmly established in our minds, when we do succeed in driving out the nasty new tyranny – if we do – what will replace it? The intolerances of religion were succeeded by communism, their mirror image, which set the stage for Political Correctness. What next? What should we be looking out for, what should we be guarding against?
The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer
This book was put into my hands by a veteran of the campaign in Burma, a particularly nasty theatre of the Second World War. ‘You’ll never read a better book about being an ordinary soldier. Pity they were Nazis.’ I read it with awe at what human beings can stand, and rereadings have not dulled my reactions. Many books are written about war, few by the men who do the bloody work. We are far here from the balanced reports of war correspondents, from the plans of generals, let alone the demented schemes for world conquest of Stalin and Hitler.
Guy Sajer, not yet seventeen, with a French father and a German mother – a First World War alliance – fell in love with military excellence, as he puts it, and joined Hitler’s armies. He then had to become all German, and fought with the German armies into and across Russia, retreated, pursued by the Russians and, starving, the only one left alive of his comrades, was advised by a kindly French officer that since his mother was German, not his father – which would have meant him becoming a prisoner – he could join the French administration supervising the collapse of Germany. The German boy, twenty years old, had to reverse his efforts to suppress his French self, was fed and clothed and rehabilitated – his body, not his mind – but not surprisingly became very ill. Which reminds me of a friend who, having survived four years of horror in a Japanese prison camp, people dying all around him of starvation and disease, arrived skeletal but healthy in England, but nearly died of a mild flu.
Could there be an apter symbol of Europe, of Europe’s mingled and mangled fates, than this young man? Or a more painfully racked person than Guy Sajer at the Victory Celebrations in Paris, which celebrated the defeat of his Germany, reciting under his breath the names of his dead comrades whose heroism was certainly not being applauded that day, and who were