Shikasta. Doris Lessing
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and he saw the conditions of his upbringing everywhere. The war taught him to think in terms of Shikasta as a whole, and of interacting forces, at least to an extent: he was not able to encompass the dark-skinned in his compassion, not able to withstand the influences of his upbringing which had taught him to think of himself as superior. But he was also being affected, like everybody in or out of the army, by the general brutalizing, coarsening. He accepted things as ‘human nature’ which as a child he would have rejected. But he was full of purpose, dreaming of returning home to uplift others, rescuing, supporting, shielding them from realities which he felt himself able to withstand, though they could not.
When he got home from the army, he set himself actively to ‘speak for the working class’, as the phrase then went, and he very soon stood out among others.
The period immediately following World War II was bitter, impoverished, grey, colourless. The nations of the Northwest fringes had shattered themselves, physically and morally. [See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. SUMMARY CHAPTER.] The Isolated Northern Continent had strengthened itself and was supporting the nations of the Northwest fringes on condition they become subservient and obedient allies in the military bloc this continent dominated. Wealth flowed from the military bloc into the Northwest fringes, and about fifteen years after the end of World War II there was a sudden brief prosperity all over the area. That was a paradoxical thing, in a paradoxical time, and deeply demoralizing to populations already demoralized and lacking in purpose.
The system of economic production depended on consumption of every conceivable kind of goods by everyone – consumption of entirely unnecessary objects, food, drink, clothes, gadgets, devices. Every person in the Northwest fringes – as in the Isolated Northern Continent – was subjected, every moment of every day, through propaganda methods more powerful than any ever known before, to the need to buy, consume, waste, destroy, throw away – and this at a time when the globe as a whole was already short of goods of every kind and the majority of Shikasta’s people starved and went without.
The individual under consideration here was at the age of forty an influential person in a workers’ organization.
His role was to prevent the people he represented from being paid less than they could live on decently – this was a minimum goal; otherwise to get them ‘as large a slice of the cake as possible’; otherwise – but this aim had long since been secondary to the others – to overturn the economic system and substitute a workers’ rule. He often contrasted how he saw things now with how he had seen them when he was a child and streets, areas of streets, no, whole cities, hungered and dwindled. This spurt of quite spurious and baseless affluence so soon to end, was intoxicating. Suddenly everything seemed possible. Within reach were experiences, ways of living he had never dreamed of as available to people of his kind. Not ‘a decent living wage’, which slogan now seemed to him mean-spirited and cowardly, but as much as could be got. And this attitude was reinforced all the time, by everything around him. It was not that the working classes got anything like what the rich still got, but that millions were getting more than had seemed possible without some shocking overturn of society, or a revolution … in this atmosphere where there seemed no limit to what could be expected, there seemed no reason either why the workers of the nation should not exact retribution for the poverty of their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, for the humiliations of their own childhoods. Revenge was a motive, clear to everyone to see.
But it was not in the nature of things that the Age of Affluence could continue: and the reasons were not to be sought in local conditions but globally – so far our friend did understand. He was still one who examined events less narrowly than most. He remained solitary. He was referred to as ‘an odd man out’. Where groups of people are close, kept together by forces they combat by being defensive, the characteristics of individuals become affectionately regarded, are prized, made much of.
He was admired for standing for minority points of view. For being quiet, observant, reflective, often critical.
This was his role.
He had integrity.
He was proud of this, was still proud, but now saw that such words can acquire a double edge. He noted that people were very ready to congratulate him on this integrity of his. He had seen that people are willing to compliment others in the way these want to be complimented: an exacted flattery.
‘Integrity’ was his perquisite.
Not the only one. Many good things came his way because of this position of his, as representative of the workers. But why not? Nothing compared to what came the way of ‘his betters’ – as he had been expected as a child to call them, and had so stubbornly rebelled. And everyone did it. Did what? Nothing very much! Little crumbs and bits of this and that off the cake. What was the harm? For one thing, it could be said that these ‘perks’ were not for him, personally, at all, but were an honour paid to his position and therefore to the workers. He would brood, secretly, about bribery, where it began and where it ended. About flattery as a food that sustained – and bought? He seemed to be spending hours of his time in definitions, self-assessments, doubts.
Nearly fifty, his life two-thirds gone, his children grown up. His children dismayed him. They cared for nothing but their own good, their pleasure, their possessions, their comfort. Criticizing them, he told himself that this was no more than how parents always were with their children. (Rightly, he might utter obstinately to himself, but not to his wife, who thought him prickly and difficult.) He was also proud of them, because by an inevitable process that he understood perfectly, they were a step up on the class ladder from him in this infinitely class-divided society; just as their children, his grandchildren, could expect to be a step higher still – but he was proud with a part of himself that he despised. He was self-divided, delighted they made demands on life that he was not able to believe even now were his due, while it was at the cost of rising in a society which he despised as much as ever he did.
But, criticizing his children, he was criticizing, too, the younger members of his own union – an entire generation. This was dangerous because treachery and disloyalty threatened. But he could not banish his thoughts. The incredulity that had been the strongest emotion of his childhood returned, transformed. How was it possible that people could forget as they did, taking everything that came their way as their due – thieves, snatching what they could whenever they could (and everybody knew it, including themselves), but they were even proud of it, regarding this pilfering and skiving as a sort of cleverness on their part, a way of outdoing the world – they were all careless, heedless, thoughtless, unable to see that this time of ease and even wealth was due to some transitory shift in the international economic juggling. Yet these were the sons and daughters of people so bitterly afflicted that they had gone to bed hungry more often than not, and were so stunted in growth that in looking at a crowd of working people it was a simple thing to pick out grandparents, even parents, who were often dwarves compared to their progeny. The history of the lower classes in this country had always been one of dire poverty and deprivation. Had they forgotten it? How was it possible? How could all this be happening?
Meanwhile, he was busy, in a hundred ways, sitting on committees, arguing with employers, travelling and making speeches, attending conferences.
What exactly was it that he was doing?
Where did he stand now compared with his dreams for himself at the end of World War II?
He would find himself at a meeting, or a conference, with men and women, whom he had known sometimes since he was a child. He would observe, hoping he was unobserved, feeling himself increasingly a stranger to them.
All his life he had polished and perfected a certain practice: that of keeping bright and close certain memories of his childhood as a conscience, or gauge, to measure present events against. After the war, beginning his work on the committees, there was a memory that was strong and alive, and kept so by what he could see around him. A cousin had sold vegetables from a barrow on a pavement. His fight to survive had been dreadful, and had worn him out early. He stood by the barrow all hours of the day and evening, and in all weathers, coughing, shivering, just holding himself together. But it was that stance of his which stuck in the mind –