Walking in the Shade (11 page)

The delegates from Britain were Sir John Boyd Orr, the dean of Canterbury, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, Professor J. D. Bernal, Professor C. H. Waddington, Professor Hyman Levy, Richard Hughes, Olaf Stapledon, Louis Golding, Rutland Brougham, Bernard Stevens, Felix Topolski, Dr. Julian Huxley, A. J. P. Taylor, Denis Saurat, Edward Crankshaw. A starry list. (The
Times
list.)

As for our Authors World Peace Appeal: Very late at night, after those interminable, exhausting banquets, those speeches, trips here and there—collective farm, children's holiday camp, museums—Albert Coppard and I sat in my room and exchanged talk which must have had the ears of our invisible listeners curling with disbelief. No, I said, no, you must not go on the radio and say that Stalin is the greatest man who ever lived, no, nor claim that Britain is a tyranny worse than any communist country. Do you really want us all to quarrel publicly and make a field day for our newspapers? ‘I don't see why we shouldn't quarrel publicly,' he said, ‘if that's how we feel.' From time to time he tried to kiss me, or fondle me. My stern sense of duty forbade amorous dalliance. Besides, he was
old
.

It was also my duty to visit Richard Mason in his room and tell him that he simply must not announce on every possible occasion that he had never read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. Our hosts had read all of British literature—the writers among them really had—and he was shaming us all. ‘Who is Turgenev?' he might drawl, if the name came up. I thought he was putting it on, that this was his equivalent of Douglas Young's kilt. But he really had not read anything much. He claimed that he had become a writer by accident. A very young lonely soldier, he had lain wounded in a hospital in—I think—Burma, had fallen in love with his beautiful brown nurse, had written the story, as much from boredom as for anything, and it had become a best-seller. He claimed he found great literature boring. Was this true? But his phlegmatic, philistine persona concealed all kinds of sensibilities. Like us all, he was upset by what he saw in Moscow: its dreary streets, its empty shops, the bad clothes, its atmosphere—this was just before Stalin died. We used to beg our minder, one Oksana, a beautiful Georgian girl, to be allowed to wander about the streets as we pleased, but she was evidently afraid. We did manage little guilty trips when she wasn't looking, but were recalled by her anxious scoldings: ‘What are you doing? You are not allowed…'

In those streets of almost empty shops there were two exceptions. One was the bread shops, wonderful, redeeming the ugliness, crammed full of different breads, brown, white, black, great fat crusty loaves that smelled so good we wanted to eat them then and there. The other surprise was corset shops. There were scarcely any clothes, the shoes were flimsy or clodhopping, there was nothing frivolous or nice, or piquant, or fashionable, or colourful. But there were corset shops and, in each, one or two enormous bright pink or purple corsets, with stays like girders, and shiny pink ribbons. Not a bra in sight, though.

Scenes, little bright-coloured scenes, which I wrote down when I came home after the trip, and used to come on, among ageing papers and old notebooks. ‘Good God, all that happened, it
did
happen….'

We are in the Tretyakov—an art gallery—surrounded by vast pictures of grazing cows, happy peasants, agreeable landscapes. Naomi, a collector of modern art, stands in front of a herd of cows. ‘That is a very fine cow,' she drawls in her Oxford voice, which for some reason is emphasized in Russia. Our guides, the museum officials, gaze at the cow. ‘A fine cow,' she drawls, ‘but surely she needs milking?' The official meets her innocent gaze, but it is more than his life is worth—literally—to laugh. ‘Soviet cows are well treated,' he says severely. Naomi says, ‘I've got a cow in my herd just like that brown one.' We, coming on behind, are smiling, and even risking a laugh, but the look on the man's face stops us.

It seems that the Soviet artists, who were allowed to paint only ‘healthy' pictures, softened their situation, at least a little, by this ruse: A picture having been completed, they deliberately painted in a dog or an obviously out-of-place figure. When this picture was set in front of the officials who would say yea or nay, they were bound to criticise it, to cover themselves in case of criticism from high up. At which point the artist would come in. ‘Comrades, I've just seen—it's that dog. I was wrong to put in that dog.' ‘Very well, then, comrade, take out the dog.' And the picture was passed. This sort of stratagem has turned out to be quite amazingly useful to me, in all kinds of contexts: suitably modified, of course.

While on a trip to a collective farm, the official cars having turned off onto the farm road, Naomi asks if we may stop. Our cars, four or five of them, stop. We all get out, about twenty people, and stand on the track, looking across fields. It is August, very hot, the grain already harvested. ‘That's a very nasty bit of erosion,' says Naomi, pointing. And indeed, it is. ‘But our grain harvest for last year was very good on this farm.' ‘Well, you won't be getting good harvests for long, if you allow that kind of erosion,' she says. In this way did her frustrated need to criticise much worse show itself.

It was at this collective farm that I witnessed the bravest thing I have ever seen in my life.

We, the six of us, and our hosts, headed by Alexei Surkov, stood facing a crowd of collective farmers. We were being introduced. An old man, dressed in a white peasant smock, like Tolstoy, stepped out and said he wanted to speak. At once the others attempted to hustle and scold him back into the group. He stood his ground, said he had to speak to us. A silence. Oksana was clearly frightened. The old man spoke. Oksana interpreted, and Douglas Young, our Russian speaker, stopped her. ‘No, you are not interpreting properly,' he said, blandly, like a professor. The old man addressed him, and Douglas interpreted, while Oksana squeezed her hands together, as if she were praying. ‘You must not believe what you are told. Visitors from abroad are told lies. You must not believe what you are shown. Our lives are terrible. The Russian people—I am speaking for the Russian people. You must go back to Britain and tell everybody what I am saying. Communism is terrible—' And he was pulled back by the others and surrounded, but he stood among them with his burning eyes fixed on us, while the others scolded him. That was remarkable—they scolded and fussed at him; they didn't shrink away from a pariah. And throughout the long, toast-filled meal that followed, he sat silent, his eyes on us, while they scolded—affectionately, there was no doubt about that. Yet at that time people vanished into the Gulag for much less than what he had done. No crime could be worse than to say such things to foreigners. He would be arrested and disposed of, and he knew that this would happen.

During this meal Coppard was enjoying himself flirting delightfully with the collective farm's teacher and nurse. He loved charming young women, and these two were pretty and warm, and flirted with him.

I try and imagine this as a scene in a film, but it is truly too terrible. There is a long, loaded table, flowers, wine, a banquet. There, the special people chosen from the farm to represent the Soviet farmers. There, we happy delegates, elated and pleased with ourselves, the way you get on such trips. There, the party officials, all affability. There, the old man in his smock, never taking his eyes off us. Albert Coppard is flirting. We make speeches. Douglas Young reminds us all of the sufferings of the Scottish farmers. Naomi talks about British farming practices, contrasting them severely with what we saw while driving through the fields.

In the lavatory there is a framed copy of Kipling's ‘If'. We are told that this is everyone's favourite piece of poetry and they all know it by heart.

The next time I saw ‘If' on the back of a lavatory door was on a large rich farm in Kenya, where there were photographs of the Queen everywhere.

We were taken to a building filled with presents to Stalin from his grateful subjects. It was sad, because they were mostly hideous, derivations or fallings-off from some genuine peasant or folk tradition, like carpets with his face occupying all the middle of them, or carved boxes or metalwork—all with his face. I left the others at it and went to sit outside. It was there I decided to try and write a story according to the communist formula, because I was becoming uncomfortably aware of our smugness and superiority. It would have very good and very bad characters in it, like Dickens. I wrote it. It was called ‘Hunger.' It was about a youth from a village in Africa, risking his fortunes and his life going to the big city, this being a basic plot of our time, not only in Africa. The background came from Africans I knew, who would describe, when I asked, exactly how this or that was done in a village, how things were in the locations and shebeens of Salisbury. This story has been much translated and reprinted, and yet I am ashamed of it. Quite a few of my early stories I would like to see vanish away. What is wrong with that tale is sentimentality, which is often the sign of an impure origin: in this case, to write a tale with a moral.

Naomi and I and Oksana are standing in St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, and Naomi is lecturing Oksana about the Russian lack of taste. Naomi suffered aesthetically throughout that trip. Everything was ugly and second-rate. If Arnold and I murmured something about the war, she would say, Nonsense, they are producing new materials and furniture, and they are hideous. She showed Oksana the patterns on the walls and ceilings and said, Why, when you've got this, do you put such
hideous
patterns on your dress materials? Oksana was confused. She did not know the patterns on the new cottons and silks were hideous. When Naomi showed her the Liberty skirt she had on, Oksana did not see why it was any better than the bales of cotton she had showed us that morning. She thought the patterns on the cathedral walls were old and old-fashioned. She asked me afterwards why, if Mrs. Mitchison was a rich lady, she wore cotton and not silk. For of course, if you could afford it, you wore silk all the time. Oksana's best dress was silk. ‘And very nice too,' said Richard Mason gallantly. Arnold and I discussed how Naomi patronised our hosts and apparently did not know it, and how we could stop her. We actually took her to task. ‘Naomi, you've got to stop hurting their feelings like this. We won't have it.'

‘But I simply cannot understand it,' Naomi said, that voluminous voice booming. ‘
Why
can't they take good models for their furniture instead of that rubbish?'

‘But, Naomi,' said intellectual Arnold, ‘that's what happens when a peasant tradition is smashed: they model themselves on something modern. They had taste in the old ways, but they have to develop taste in the new.'

‘Well,' drawled Naomi, ‘but I'm going to have my say. This delegation is supposed to be bridging gaps: I'm jolly well going to tell them about their atrocious taste.'

‘Then when we get home we're going to tell the press that you spent your time patronising the Russians about their aesthetic sense.'

‘But, Arnold, my dear boy, you surely can't be serious.'

‘
You're hurting their feelings
, Naomi,' said Arnold, his eyes full of tears.

In Leningrad they asked Naomi and me if we minded sharing a room. We thought this odd; it took me a long time to see that probably they wanted to overhear our conversations. It being August, the nights were not completely white, but almost; there were only a couple of hours of real dark. Exhausted, I flopped into bed, a double bed, and there was Naomi, prodding me, because she wanted me to tell her about my love life, so she could tell me about her lovers in the twenties. I thought this was like being back at school, naughty conversations in the dorm. She said young women these days had become real stick-in-the-muds. I went to sleep.

Leningrad was a sad city, grey and elegant, full of watery perspectives, its walls pocked with bullet holes or cracked because of the attritions of the siege, in which ten years before one and a half million people died. We moved from palace to palace, all built in the style I know some people adore, all gilt curlicues and cupids, rosy flesh, pink and blue ribbons, medallions, a very festival of pouting and dimpling architecture. This was because Russian royalty had adored France and imported the style for palaces, and so even when we went to the Children's House, it was a former palace, and the thought of sandpits or swings seemed in rather poor taste.

We had a formal encounter with the Leningrad branch of the Soviet Writers, and there we were, in another of these frivolous rooms, for an occasion as sombre as any I remember. Naomi had said she was going to insist that the Leningrad writers produce the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko for our inspection. There were rumours in the West that he was dead—murdered. Arnold and I were horrified. First, why should any writer anywhere be produced like evidence in a law court? And then we did know that writers were, as it is now put, keeping a low profile—trying not to be noticed—and perhaps it would be the last thing he would welcome, being made a test case by the West. But Naomi insisted.

I cannot remember the names of our hosts. The opening speeches were all sound and fury. Already we were weary of them, to the point where we were saying, Thank God we are going home soon; one more speech and—

‘Or one more toast.'

‘Or one more banquet.'

After a while you literally cannot listen to these speeches. It is as if the rhetoric numbs your brain: the words—the sound—a narcotic. Speeches of this sort went on for the hours of the meeting but were interrupted by a young poet who, like a Quaker, from time to time feeling an impulse he could not disobey, had to jump to his feet and recite an ode to Stalin. Obviously, no one could object, at the risk of being accused of
lèse-majesté
, so that every time this happened, all the officials smiled benignly at the inspired infant and even clapped. Against this background Mikhail Zoshchenko was brought in and sat in the middle of the room, the Russians on one side, we on the other. He was a little thin man, yellow-skinned, and he looked ill, and was being brave, and dignified. Just as with the defiant old man at the collective farm, it was as if the atmosphere itself put protective arms around him. These officials, no matter how much they were vassals, lackeys, arse-lickers, were all under threat themselves, had seen many writers, friends or not, disappear into exile or the camps. Zoshchenko had been under official criticism—and that meant from themselves too—for a long time now. He had written small, very funny, very popular stories about the mishaps and anomalies of the lives of citizens living under communism, and a wonderful novella called, simply,
People—
and for a while had been officially applauded, but that did not last.