Walking in the Shade

Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962 (Text Only)

Doris Lessing

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780007396498
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The second volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

LANGHAM STREET
W1

FOUR YEARS AFTER I had been assured it was impossible the law could change, it was changed, and I was no longer a protected tenant. When I asked the lawyer how this could be, he said, Well, these things happen. At once a developer arrived to look at my flat. One very large room, two medium-sized rooms, two small ones, and a kitchen the right size to sit in, drinking coffee and talking, were to become twelve rooms: my big room alone would make four. Quite soon I would be gone and thinking of young Australians in their vagabond phase shut into these little boxes of rooms, for this whole area – Earls Court – would become Little Australia.

And so where was I to live? In 1958, nine years after I came to London, I found that if my earnings were evened out, they were the same as the average worker’s wage – twenty pounds a week, I think it was. My unconcerned, it-will-all-come-right-in-the-end attitude towards money has always suited my way of life but proved a handicap at times when I needed to find a place to live. As everyone knows, writers’ earnings are chancy and you never know what you will have coming in next year. I remember an income tax official coming to see me at Joan’s house, to say, Why haven’t you paid your tax? I told him that last year I had earned enough to pay tax, but not this year, with three hundred pounds. He was nice about it, found ways of seeing me through, but as with all regularizers and invigilators, my precarious life made him uneasy, and he thought I should be aiming at a steady income, perhaps as a secretary.

By now I was having opportunities to earn money in ways other than writing novels and stories: radio and television were beckoning. On the whole I resisted their blandishments. In those days we believed that to write for money was to sell your soul, dilute the precious honey, offend your Muse, who would punish you by making you incapable of seeing the difference between good and bad writing, so that you would end up as a hack. We were right, but such is the climate now that it is hard even to mention these dear old-fashioned ideas. And we still believed that a writer should be private, quiet, resist publicity.

My mother had left me a thousand pounds. She had also left a house in a suburb of Salisbury, which she had been renting out. I told my brother I didn’t want my share of the house, he could have it. I knew that dividing up the house and furniture would lead to unpleasantness and difficulties. I also said I didn’t want any of the photographs, the canteens of silver cutlery, the silver presentation trays. Now, that was a bad mistake, not least because my brother valued them so little that when I asked many years later where they were, he did not know, had forgotten how the big silver tray had stood on the writing desk (made of petrol boxes) in the old farmhouse, insisting on its Englishness, or how the photographs in their silver frames had stood about near the fluted silver vases for sweet peas, next to plough parts and bits of rock that might turn out to have gold in them.

I would be able to afford a modest rent or mortgage. I began one of those intensive day-after-day periods of home-hunting which have taken me to so many parts of London that I can hardly go down a street anywhere without thinking, Look, there’s that house; I could have been living there all this while.

Two places stand out from that time. One was a house in Flood Street, Chelsea, where there were two floors of faded crumbling dingy dusty rooms. It was cheap, but although so many famous people had lived in Flood Street, the place depressed me. I would need yet again to spend weeks painting and mending and dyeing, and besides, there was that name, Flood – and the Thames was running at the bottom of the street. The other house was in Royal Crescent in Holland Park, very far from the fashionable place it is now. For one thing, it had been bombed, or looked as if it had. The house was clean, had been painted. But why was it so cheap? I was tempted, said I would go back, but as I reached the gate the woman from the next house beckoned me over and told me in a low voice – one eye on the estate agent, who was standing sulkily by – that if I bought the house it would be down about my ears in a year: the dry rot and wet rot had been festooning the walls and ceilings like rotten mushrooms, and the builders had simply scraped it off and painted everything white.

I was saved by my publisher. I already had two publishers, then not as common as it soon would be. Needing money, I had asked for an advance for a collection of short stories, The Habit of Loving, but Michael Joseph would not give it to me. This was stupid of them, for my previous collection. This Was the Old Chief’s Country, had done well and was still selling. Tom Maschler, still at McGibbon and Kee, was waiting for just such an opportunity and gave me the money, though I expect Howard Samuels – the owner – was consulted. Howard Samuels was a millionaire, but no ordinary millionaire: for he was a socialist, a close friend of Aneurin Bevan, and he helped Tribune, the organ of the left wing of the Labour Party. He was self-made, and publishing was his real love, after politics. He owned Holbein Mansions in Langham Street, near the BBC. He offered me a flat in it, for five pounds a week. This was a very low rent, not only for that area – within walking distance of theatreland, Soho, Oxford Street, Mayfair, the river – but for anywhere in London then. The flat was tiny, six small rooms, and the building was hideous, with a grey bare cement staircase. On the fourth floor you opened the door to a narrow corridor, which bisected the flat. Opposite the door was a minute kitchen, then the bathroom, with its hissing and clattering gas geyser, and two other little rooms on that side. On the street side was my tiny bedroom, and a larger room, the living room. There was no way that flat could be made more than tolerable. Both Clancy and Tom Maschler helped me to move. There was far too much furniture from the Warwick Road flat, so I gave it away to anyone hard up enough to want it, and took with me a couple of beds, a table, and some chairs. And the bookcases. My bedroom was a box. Three walls were bright pink, with panels of whimsical birds on the fireplace wall. I painted the room white, a task for a morning, since it was small, but the fireplace was so hideous I could not stop looking at it, and I painted the fireplace wall dark plum colour, to try and make it disappear. To this day people say, Do you remember when you painted your bedroom black? I think the analogy must be when a painter puts a little patch of red on his canvas and, if you haven’t looked too closely, you think: the picture with all that red in it. The only nice thing in the room was a big window, with beautiful dark-blue cotton curtains, and they made a good restful light. I ran up all the curtains on the ancient Singer sewing machine.

I thought the low rent and living in that area justified any ugliness, but Peter hated the place. He had hated Warwick Road, but at least there had been space. From the moment we got into this new flat, he was begging me to buy a house. He wanted security. A house meant security. The bank also was putting pressure on me to buy a house or a flat. Astonishing, for this doesn’t happen in other parts of Europe. In Britain, if you have a mortgage, then you are a good citizen, and the banks smile. I was afraid of the regular commitment, and besides, I had to find money for school fees. Peter was now at boarding school. He was twelve when he went. I did not like doing it, remembering what I felt going to boarding school, but twelve years old is not seven. And in fact it was a good decision. Many children who are miserably unhappy sent to boarding school at six or seven like it when they are older.

There were two prostitutes living in that building, but I didn’t notice until Clancy told me. Both conformed to pattern, but they were different patterns. One was, or had been, a little fluffy blonde, and her rooms were full of rosy corners, pink curtains, pink pouffes, pink eiderdowns, flirtatious dolls and fluffy toys. She used to wait for me in her doorway, so that she could waylay me and complain about Helen. Otherwise I did not see her, for it seemed she worked not in this area but in Soho. I put her into a story called ‘Mrs Fortescue’. Helen was dark-skinned, with black Gauguin hair and dark eyes full of the knowledgeable ‘scepticism’ so prized by Clancy and other Americans I knew. This ‘scepticism’ in a woman signalled that she knew the score, knew how to look after herself, and this meant damage limitation for both partners. I had only to mention to American visitors that two of the ‘girls’ were in the building for them to feel they were near the source of real experience. I liked Helen, and we would exchange friendly words. She had been, I was told, a good friend to Howard Samuels when he was a lonely and lost young man, and that was why she had the best flat in the building and why he would always look after her. Sometimes, down in the street outside the building, you would see a fluffy old whore, like a terrier with a bow around its neck, and a languid elegant dark worldly whore pass each other with cool disliking looks.

The streets around Langham Street invited curiosity and casual strolling. Here was the centre of the rag trade. You did see, looking down through railings, semi-underground rooms full of badly paid girls running up dresses and blouses on their machines, but most of this work had moved elsewhere. The shops were wholesale, designed to attract not shoppers but buyers, and if you glanced in, there were scenes of intense competitive bargaining. This business was mostly Jewish, and there was a restaurant to feed the trade. In Warwick Road the cheap good food was Indian, but here it was Jewish. In four years, when I would move again, the good cheap restaurants would be Greek. This restaurant was always full. I took a lot of people there, but the one I remember best is Mordecai Richler, who tried to persuade me to like stuffed chicken necks, but I said it must be that he was eating nostalgic memories of childhood. Clancy was there often. American visitors loved the place, because in those days people in show business and in publishing were often Jewish and had come from the Bronx, to the extent that when you heard ‘I was brought up in the Bronx,’ it was like the refrain of a song, or like one of those novels that have a large poor family struggling to live, but the clever children, all stuffed with literature and literary ambitions, are destined to escape and astonish the world. And the American visitors who were not Jewish said this homely restaurant with its family atmosphere, once common in New York was now disappearing, and so they felt they were visiting their own history.

The area was noisy and alive in the day but deserted at night, except for a couple of pubs and a restaurant that took advantage of the law which said that nudity was immoral if the naked ones were in movement, but moral if motionless. Patrons were supplied with pencils and paper and invited to exercise their artistic talents. A naked girl was wheeled in and held a pose for twenty minutes, and then she was removed while the eaters applauded and showed each other their sketches, and another girl arrived, as often as not goose-pimpled from cold. The eaters were encouraged to keep sketching, because if a policeman dropped in to check that a girl was not moving a muscle, then all those flying or dawdling pencils proved artistic intent. The police dropped in often. This restaurant was a great success with all Americans. It is a surprising thing that all the fifties and sixties Americans visiting London headed straight for Soho, prostitutes, and nude clubs. When you said, For heaven’s sake, you have plenty of prostitutes in every one of your big cities, they said it was not the same. The Russians too. Each visiting delegation of Russians – this was the era of Delegations, each one chaperoned by a guide who was really the KGB – was at once taken to Soho to see capitalist degeneracy in action, in the same spirit as, in Moscow, The Red Poppy ballet included a long and sexy scene in a capitalist nightclub, to show how disgusting the West was. Communist Russia was forbidden these delights; prostitutes and sex shows were possible only under capitalism, so the flocks of the Russians to Soho were understandable.

Soho sex clubs had more attractions than one. The licensing law closed drinking places for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but in the clubs, alcohol was legal. Drinking men joined one of these clubs if unable to bear the deprivation. Reuben Ship took me to one, and I was the only woman in the audience. I sat and watched the show, but Reuben was at the bar, with his back to the platform. One girl remains in my mind: she was Irish, large and beautiful, and new to the work. She was supposed to writhe around and then shake her breasts so that the tassels on her nipples swung, but she was finding it all so funny that she could not resist making a joke of it, and ended by offering her large betasseled tits to the audience like puddings resting on her two hands, and they shook with her laughter at herself, and the men, and at the whole business. The men were not pleased: deadly dark concentration, full of latent hostility, was their mode, and she was breaking the atmosphere and making them ridiculous. The patron hauled her off and scolded her while she giggled. She lost the job, but then she became a barmaid in the local, where her sense of fun was an asset.

Another near restaurant was one I couldn’t possibly have afforded then, but Howard Samuels took his authors there. It was the Spanish Club, and it was all dark-brown shiny panelling and red leather, very masculine, very heavy in style. There Howard Samuels and Aneurin Bevan, Howard Samuels and Jenny Lee,^* Howard Samuels and the Labour Party Left – but not the New Left – sat for hours over the solid Spanish food and then drank peach brandy. Howard liked being a host. He was a handsome, emotional, mercurial man, and such a man must have his Sancho Panza, and there he was, Reginald Davis-Poynter, who was his right-hand man in McGibbon and Kee. Reggie was calm, sensible, large, and kind, and he looked after Howard. And looked after me too, as his author, as long as I was, when Tom Maschler left.

And now I became for a short time that disgraceful thing a middle-aged woman buying half-bottles of whisky from the off-licence.

When I moved to Langham Street it was not at all like the move to Warwick Road, where I so foolishly believed I would be living with Jack. Clancy and I were breaking up – had been for months or, you could say, from the moment we began. For one thing, we had so little in common. And then he had never made any secret of his wanting to live by himself and have girls. But what my mind knew went on intelligently, on a level far from those depths where my emotions – no, this was deeper than emotions, or feelings – were. Again I was being dragged along like a fish on a line. With Clancy I hit the extremes in myself and had from the start, and this had nothing very much to do with Clancy the person. Partly it was because he was in ‘breakdown’ – that useful word which I am not going to define here. For one thing it is described (not defined) in The Golden Notebook. You cannot live with someone in breakdown, even if in a casual and undemanding way, without becoming involved, though it might be only in imagination. It was that old business of being dragged along, will-less. This was like the feeling I had when I got married for the first time, when the war drums were beating in 1939. I seemed to have no will; my intelligence watched what I did but was helpless. My surface behaviour accorded with: ‘Oh no, Clancy and I are good friends; that’s all it is now.’ And we were good friends. But underneath I was all the betrayed woman, the abandoned one, I suffered and mourned and dragged myself about, with no more will than I needed to keep myself going and the fact that I despised myself made it all worse.

And there was Peter, who instead of dropping in and out, as he had when at school in London, or being there for long stretches, was now at boarding school, and there would be defined half-terms and holidays. But I felt as if this was the beginning of an end. Peter had been the one constant in my life, my ballast, what I held on to through thick and thin – which is of course why he had had to go away from me, because it was not good for him – but now he wasn’t there.

I was working hard – it was The Golden Notebook – because there never has been a time when I wasn’t, and I saw friends and acquaintances. But all the time I was being pulled along by something dark and out of sight.

And there was something else. Clancy had decided to trust a doctor who prescribed large doses of LSD. He did not treat his patients in hospital, but they arrived at his rooms in the mornings, were given a dose – and were thrown out again in the evening, about six. That is, when they were still high, crazy, out of control. I thought then it was criminal, and I think so now. This happened a couple of times a week, and I was in a frenzy of anxiety. Joan was worried too. We would ring each other up:

‘Has Clancy arrived at your place?’

‘No, I thought he was with you.’

He might turn up to say to either of us, ‘I need to lie down.’ Or we didn’t know where he was. Well, he survived all that, so I suppose that doctor could say, ‘What are you making such a fuss about? He was all right, wasn’t he?’ But he could easily have not been all right. I knew that this panic I felt, the anxiety, was because I was reliving my father, drifting away into death but kept alive towards the end on injections of insulin and God knows what drugs. But what is the good of knowing something if that doesn’t affect how you behave? I seem to have lived through far too many times when I was watching my behaviour, or feelings, with my intelligence – satirically, disapprovingly, anxiously – but was not able to stop.

I went to see Mrs Sussman again, after three or four years’ interval. She sat listening to me, her cheek resting on her palm. The connection between us had been cut, all right. She seemed a long way off. She said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to teach you any better sense.’ Then she said, ‘I am a very old woman. I am going to die soon. I am preparing myself for my death. Good morning.’ It was salutary, learning that one would reach a stage when all these emotions became, simply, irrelevant.

This time my drinking was serious. I never counted the drinking that went on in my first marriage as serious. It was stupid, ill considered, and you’d think designed to do the maximum amount of damage – drinking for hours sometimes and not eating. But that was drinking because I was with people who drank, in a culture that not only permitted but admired hard drinking. And when I left that marriage I stopped. I had been in London for two years or more when it occurred to me, I’ve scarcely had a drink since I came. I had n...