Walking in the Shade (5 page)

When lists are made of the best British writers since the war, they do not include Arthur C. Clarke, nor Brian Aldiss, nor any of the good science fiction writers. It is conventional literature that has turned out to be provincial.

 

And so I had made a life for me and for Peter. That was an achievement, and I was proud of myself. The most important part was Peter, who was enjoying this life, particularly the nursery school, in Kensington, and then the family atmosphere with Joan and Ernest. Never has there been a child so ready to make friends. Our days still began at five. Again I was reading to him and telling him stories for a couple of hours after he woke, because Joan's bedroom was immediately below, and the floors were thin, and she did not wake till later. Or he listened to the radio. We have forgotten the role radio played before television. Peter loved the radio. He listened to everything. He listened to two radio plays based on novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, each an hour long, standing by the machine, absolutely riveted. What was he hearing? Understanding? I have no idea. It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults. At three or four, Peter understood everything, and at eight or nine read only comics. And I've seen this again and again with small children. A child of three sits entranced through the film
2001: A Space Odyssey
, but four years later can tolerate only Rupert Bear.

I was writing
Martha Quest
, a conventional novel, though the demand then was for experimental novels. I played in my mind with a hundred ways of doing
Martha Quest
, pulling shapes about, playing with time, but at the end of all this, the novel was straightforward. I was dealing with my painful adolescence, my mother, all that anguish, the struggle for survival.

 

And now there arrived a letter from my mother, saying she was coming to London, she was going to live with me and help me with Peter, and—here was the inevitable, surreal, heartbreaking ingredient—she had taught herself typing and would be my secretary.

I collapsed. I simply went to bed and pulled the covers over my head. When I had taken Peter to nursery school, I crept away into the dark of my bed and stayed there until I had to bring him home.

And now—again—there is the question of time, tricksy time, and until I came to write this and was forced to do my work with calendars and obdurate dates, I had thought, vaguely, that I was in Denbigh Road for…well, it was probably three years or so. But that was because, having been returned to child seeing, everything new and immediate, I had been returned—well, partly—to child time. No matter how I wriggled and protested, No, it
can't
have been only a year, it
was
a year before I went to Joan's, and I had been there only six months or so when the letter came from my mother. Yet those months seem now like years. Time is different at different times in one's life. A year in your thirties is much shorter than a child's year—which is almost endless—but long compared with a year in your forties; whereas a year in your seventies is a mere blink.

Of course she was bound to come after me. How could I have been so naive as to think she wouldn't, as soon as she could? She had been in exile in Southern Rhodesia, dreaming of London, and now…She and her daughter did not ‘get on,' or, to put it truthfully, had always fought? Oh, never mind, the girl was wrongheaded; she would learn to listen to her mother. She was a communist? She always had disreputable friends? That was all right; her mother would introduce her to really nice people. She had written
The Grass Is Singing
, which had caused her mother anguish and shame, because it was so hated by the whites? And those extremely unfair short stories about The District? Well, she—the girl's mother—would explain to everyone that no one outside the country could really understand the whites' problems and…But the author had been brought up in the country? Her views were
wrong
, and in time she would come to see that…. She proposed to live with a daughter who had broken up her first marriage, leaving two children, had married a German refugee at the height of the war, who was a kaffir-lover and scornful of religion?

Well, how
did
she see it? Now I believe she did not think about it much. She could not afford to. She longed to live in London again, but it was the London she had left in 1919. She had no friends left, except for Daisy Lane, with whom she had been exchanging letters, but Daisy Lane was now an old lady, living in Richmond with her sister, an ex-missionary from Japan. There was her brother's family, and she was coming home in time for the daughter's wedding. Her brother's sister-in-law had already said, ‘I hope Jane doesn't imagine she is going to take first place at the wedding.' (Jane: Plain Jane, the loving family nickname, making sure that Maude didn't imagine she possessed any attractions.) And had written to my mother saying she must take a back seat.

Over twenty-five years: 1924 to 1950. That was then the term of my mother's exile in Africa. Now I have reached the age to understand that twenty-five years—or thirty—can seem nothing much, I know that for her time had contracted and that unfortunate experience, Africa, had become an irrelevance. But for me, just over thirty, it was the length of my conscious life, and my mother lived in, belonged to, Africa. Her yearnings after London pea-soupers and jolly tennis parties were mere whimsies.

How could she come after me like this? Yet of course she had been bound to. How could she imagine that…But she did. Soon she would toil up those impossible narrow stairs, smiling bravely, walk into my room, move the furniture about, look through my clothes and pronounce their unsuitability, look at the little safe on the wall—no fridge—and say the child was not getting enough to eat.

It was at this point Moidi Jokl entered into my life, an intervention so providential that even now I marvel at it.

Moidi was one of the first refugees from communism in London, then still full of refugees from the war, all surviving as they could. She had been Viennese, a communist, a friend of the men who after the war came back from the Soviet Union or wherever else they had been existing, biding their time, to become the government of East Germany. She went to East Germany because she had been their close friend. Then she had been thrown out, because she was Jewish, a victim of Stalin's rage against the Jews, referred to then as the ‘Black Years'. I have never understood why those victims have never been honoured and remembered by Jews. Everything has been swallowed up by the Holocaust—but all over the Soviet Union, and in all the communist countries of East Europe, Jews were murdered, tortured, persecuted, imprisoned; it was a deliberate genocide. But for some reason Stalin's deliberate mass murders are never condemned as Hitler's are, although Stalin's crimes are much more, both in number and in variety. Bad luck about those poor Jews of the years 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952. No one thinks of them—many thousands, perhaps millions?

Moidi was escorted to that East German frontier by a young policeman in tears: he did not like what he was doing.

Gottfried had by this time visited East Berlin, had found his sister and her husband (the eternal student) working in the Kulturbund, and decided to go back to Germany. He had formally applied to the Party for permission to return home but could get no reply to his letters. Moidi Jokl told him he did not understand the first thing about communism. It all worked on whom you knew—this was later called
blat
. He should get himself over there, pull strings, and he had a chance of being allowed to stay. Not more than a chance. Anyone from the West was considered a criminal and an enemy, and might easily disappear for ever. Never have I heard such vituperation: Gottfried loathed Moidi. But he did take her advice, went back, pulled strings, and survived.

And then there was Peter. Moidi took a good look at my situation with Peter, shut up with me far too often, for long hours in that tiny flat. She had friends, the Eichners, also Austrians, refugees, who lived near East Grinstead. They had several children and were very poor. They lived in an old house on a couple of acres of rough rocky land and took in children at holiday times, up to twenty sometimes, and they all had a very good time. So Peter began to spend days, or a weekend, or—later—a couple of weeks, with the Eichners. I would put him on a coach at Victoria, and at the other end he became one of a gang of country children. This arrangement could not have been better for him, or for me.

And then, Moidi saw the state I was in because of my mother's imminent arrival and told me I should go to a friend of hers, Mrs. Sussman (Mother Sugar in
The Golden Notebook
), because if I didn't get some help, I would not survive. She was right. These days, everyone goes to a therapist, or is a therapist, but then no one did. Not in England, only in America, and even there the phenomenon was in its infancy. And particularly communists did not go ‘into analysis', for it was ‘reactionary' by definition, or rather without the need for definition. I was so desperate I went. I went two or three times a week, for about three years. I think it saved me. The process was full of the wildest anomalies or ironies—the communist word ‘contradictions' seems too mild. First, Mrs. Sussman was a Roman Catholic, and Jungian, and while I liked Jung, as all artists do, I had no reason to love Roman Catholics. She was Jewish, and her husband, a dear old man, like a Rembrandt portrait, was a Jewish scholar. But she had converted to Roman Catholicism. This fascinated me, the improbability of it, but she said my wanting to discuss it was merely a sign of my evading real issues. Enough, she said, that Roman Catholicism had deeper and higher levels of understanding, infinitely removed from the crudities of the convent. (And Judaism did not have such higher reaches or peaks? ‘We were talking about your father, I think, my dear. Shall we go on?') Mrs. Sussman specialised in unblocking artists who were blocked, could not write or paint or compose. This is what she saw as her mission in life. But I did not suffer from a ‘block'. She wanted to discuss my work. I did not want to. I did not see the need for it. So she was perpetually frustrated, bringing up the subject, while I deflected her. Mrs. Sussman was a cultivated, civilised, wise old woman, who gave me what I needed, which was support. Mostly support against my mother. When the pressures came on, all of them intolerable, because my mother was so pathetic, so lonely, so full of emotional blackmail—quite unconscious, for it was her situation that undermined me—Mrs. Sussman simply said, ‘If you don't stand firm now, it will be the end of you. And the end of Peter too.'

My mother was…but I have forgotten which archetype my mother was. She was one, I know. Mrs. Sussman would often bring some exchange to a close: She, he, is such and such an archetype…or is one at this time. I, for example, at various times was Electra, Antigone, Medea. The trouble was, while I was instinctively happy with the idea of archetypes, those majestic eternal figures, rising from literature and myth like stone shapes created by Nature out of rock and mountain, I hated the labels. Unhappy with communism, I was unhappiest with its language, with the labelling of everything, and the vindictive or automatic stereotypes, and here were more of them, whether described romantically as ‘archetypes' or not. I did not see why she minded my criticisms, for she liked the dreams I ‘brought' her. Psychotherapists are like doctors and nurses who treat patients like children: ‘Just a little spoonful
for me
.' ‘Put out your tongue
for me
.' When we have a dream, it is ‘for' the therapist. Often it is: I swear I dreamed dreams to please her, after we had been going along for a while. But at my very first session she had asked for dreams, preferably serial dreams, and she was pleased with my ancient-lizard dream and the dreams I was having about my father, who, too shallowly buried in a forest, would emerge from his grave, or attract wolves who came down from the hills to dig him up. ‘These are typically Jungian dreams,' she would say gently, flushed with pleasure. ‘Sometimes it can take years to get someone to dream a dream on that level.' Whereas ‘Jungian' dreams had been my night landscape for as long as I could remember, I had not had ‘Freudian' dreams. She said she used Freud when it was appropriate, and that was, I gathered, when the patient was still at a very low level of individuation. She made it clear that she thought I was.
*

‘Jungian dreams'—wonderful, those layers of ancient common experience, but what was the use of that if I had to go to bed with the covers over my head at the news my mother was about to arrive? Here I was. Here I am, Mrs. Sussman. Do what you will with me, but for God's sake, cure me.

I needed support for other reasons.

One of them was my lover. Moidi Jokl suggested that I should go with her one evening to a party, and there I met a man I was destined—so I felt then—to live with, and to have and to hold and be happy with.

Yes, he had a name. But as always, there is the question of chil dren and grandchildren. Since
Under My Skin
came out, I have met not a few grandchildren, children, of my old mates from those far-off times and learned that the views of contemporaries about each other need not share much with the views of their children. Whole areas of a parent's, let alone a grandparent's, life can be unknown to them. And why not? Children do not own their parents' lives, though they—and I too—jealously pore over them as if they hold the key to their own.

I say to a charming young man who has come to lunch to discuss his father, ‘When James was working on the mines on the Rand—'

‘Oh, I'm sure he never did that,' comes the confident reply.

To another: ‘You didn't know your father was a great lover of women?' A faintly derisive smile, meaning: What, that old stick? So then of course you shut up; after all, it has nothing to do with him.