Walking in the Shade (28 page)

And now I thought things out, carefully and soberly. I went to the Soviet Embassy and asked to see the cultural attaché—another one—and said why didn't they get some Soviet newspaper to pay for my airfare, treat me as a correspondent? Of course I knew this was an enormity and that I was inviting accusations of Moscow Gold, at the very least. What was outrageous was my casually turning up and inviting them to behave like a Western newspaper, just as if this was normal. Yes, I was finding it funny, enjoying it. But I was also very angry. What I
felt
was that I had given my own side the chance to employ me, they should have done, so it was their fault. And I knew I would give value for money. I was in an ambiguous relation with these Russians. True, I was a Party member—and they could hardly know how I was thinking seditious thoughts about the Party and that I intended to leave it. But I was not, like James Aldridge, ‘one of theirs', the Russian formula, still very much in use: So-and-so is ‘one of ours'—
nashe. Nashe
and therefore good.
The Grass Is Singing
had been slammed by their reviewers as ‘Freudian' and revealing a hundred non-communist faults, which I cannot now remember. The short stories were paternalistic and lacked a feeling for the proletariat. The mere fact that I had gone to them without even checking with the Party was proof of a serious lack of revolutionary understanding.

I went ahead with my preparations, trusting to luck. Something like a week before I left, when I was getting panicky, not least because all the comrades were telling me that this had never been done and wouldn't be done now, I got a cheque from the Narodny Bank for, I think (I've forgotten), a thousand pounds. Perhaps it was five hundred pounds. It was a lot of money. I could pay my airfare and a good bit over. On enquiry, by telephone, to the Soviet embassy, I was told the money was for royalties. (The Soviet Union was still pirating my books and never paid royalties—you had to go there and spend the money. Not a few writers did, holidaying on the Black Sea, living like rajahs—or like commissars. I never did this. My feeling was that the publishers should pay writers what was due and not go in for emotional blackmail: ‘You know our terrible difficulties; we feel sure you will be happy to help us by coming here, taking your money in Moscow, and spending it with us.') There was never any written confirmation that this money was for royalties. When I asked what newspaper I would be writing for, they said I should send the articles to the embassy and they would find a newspaper.

And now my real unforgiveable naivety: It never occurred to me that my articles would be ‘creatively' translated to make the situation in Central Africa worse than it was. This little tale illustrates why the people dealing with Soviet officialdom all had nervous breakdowns or had to leave the work. First, although the Embassy had been told my trip depended on them I didn't get the money until the last minute—people organising trips to the Soviet Union often got the visas the night before or even on the morning of departure, guaranteeing maximum anxiety for everyone. Then, I was not formally told for which of my books these royalties were being paid. Writers were never told when their books were published in the Soviet Union. Someone would return from a trip and say, ‘I saw your book for sale in Moscow'—but that was the first I had heard of it. To this day I don't know which of my books and stories were published there. Then, when I sent in the articles, after my trip (the same as were printed in
Tribune
here and in left-wing papers in Europe) I was not told what Soviet papers printed them.

Meanwhile something else had happened. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union held their Twentieth Congress. No young person now will react to ‘Twentieth Congress of 1956', but everyone, not only on the Left, interested in politics at all from those times will remember that this was when Khrushchev ‘came clean' about the crimes of Stalin. The effect of these ‘revelations' on the faithful was as if the Communist Parties of the world had been blown apart by a bomb. All over the world were people (and there are still a few left) who knew that everything bad said about the Soviet Union was a lie, an invention of the capitalist press, and that communism (of course, there had been ‘mistakes'), headed by the great and good successors of the great Stalin, was the future of the world. Comrades were indignantly refusing to believe the ‘revelations', saying that Khrushchev was a traitor, he had been bought by the CIA, or that he was exaggerating, or that if what Khrushchev said was true, then someone else, or a clique of conspirators, had been responsible for the crimes and Stalin had never known anything about them.

To write all this in the nineties is not easy. Gone—I hope for ever, but let's not be too sure—is the climate that made these events possible. I'm writing about mass social psychopathology. I was part of it. But things were not as clear-cut as this all sounds: the edges were blurred. As Arthur Koestler once remarked, every communist had a private agenda of personal beliefs. I was among those few who were disappointed by the Twentieth Congress for opposite reasons. These few knew by then that Stalin's crimes were a thousand times worse than Khrushchev said. Why was he not telling the whole truth? We—these few who discussed these things privately—believed that though everything the ‘capitalist press' and the émigrés from the Soviet Union and the by now many refugees from the communist countries of Eastern Europe said was true, there must remain inside the Soviet Union a hidden number of pure souls who would ‘at the right time' emerge and say, ‘Yes, everything that has been said about us is true, but now we shall put Soviet communism back on the true path.' If I use the word ‘believe' here, then it was a half belief, for with every new book about the Soviet Union, or every conversation with someone who had been living there, this belief had faded. Slowly. Losing faith in communism is exactly paralleled by people in love who cannot let their dream of love go. Now I knew that everything I had been clinging on to was nonsense. I cannot say it was a heart blow, for my psychological eggs were not all in that basket and never had been. But I knew people who had invested everything, heart and mind, had made sometimes bitter sacrifices, who had lived only for the golden communist future, and they were breaking down all around me, or suffering violent conversions into their own opposites. These were dramatic: soon there was a joke around the Left that having been a communist was the best possible education for becoming a very successful businessman.

Having shed all faith in the Soviet Union, and in communism, did not mean relinquishing revolution. Implicit was the idea that revolution was necessary to save us all. Hard now to put a term to it, but I would say revolution as a basic tenet of a creed was around for at least another twenty years. Perhaps more. It was implicit: no need to justify or spell it out. Revolution was good. The temporisings of socialism were bad and also despicable symptoms of cowardice, like a belief in God.

It was—is?—part of the structure of our minds and of our thinking. Take South Africa. When I became aware of South Africa politically, I was twenty or so, and it was taken for granted by us that there had to be a bloodbath, a ‘night of the long knives'. Again, this was so much part of how everybody concerned saw things that it needed no explanation. When, in 1992, Mandela and de Klerk agreed and the “inevitable bloodbath” was no longer on the agenda, decades of political belief simply evaporated.

In 1956 I was in a most familiar situation: I could not say what I thought, except to a very few people. I certainly could not say to comrades whose hearts were breaking, who were ill with shock, that what Khrushchev said at the Twentieth Congress was just cowardice: he should have told the whole truth.

Before leaving on my trip I was approached by the Party to ask if the artist Paul Hogarth could go with me. I did not particularly want this, but why not.

About this trip I wrote a short book, called
Going Home
, and it is there in print if anyone is interested.

I was in the Zelters'
*
house for a few days, discovering that in England there is always a hard tight little core somewhere near the solar plexus, on the alert to resist cold and damp, and it never really relaxes. The wonderful dry invigorating heat of Salisbury's altitude began with my bones, then took over the rest of me, and I did not really want to begin work. But I had arranged to stay with Bram Fischer,
*
in Johannesburg, who had arranged people for me to see and told Paul where he could go to find scenes most visitors never suspected were there. It was the time when South Africa was making a Prohibited Immigrant of any person critical of them, and we were joking that I might find myself put back on the plane that took me to Jan Smuts Airport. And that was what happened. I had told Paul that if I was stopped by the Special Branch, then he was not to know me; but while I was being led off by the policeman he was waving and shouting, Where are you going? I pretended not to know him. Their long experience of safety has made the British incapable of understanding how breeds without the law have to live. There was a joke in Party circles then that if a British communist photographer, journalist, or artist was travelling under the aegis of the Communist Party in any country with a repressive government—let's say Greece—his progress could be followed by a trail of people arrested and flung into prison: his contacts, the brave people prepared to help him. This trait is by no means dead. On the television you see being interviewed people who have demanded anonymity, for they fear arrest or reprisals. And there they are with an inch or two of geometrical dazzle in the very centre of their faces, ensuring that they will be arrested or even murdered the moment the programme is shown. But journalists and TV programme makers have the
right
to do as they like.

I was not really upset by being turned out of South Africa, for I had no emotional stake in the place. I was taken to the plane I had come on by two officials, and on the flight back sat by myself while people looked at me, imagining God knows what crimes.

Back in Salisbury I was postponing all the business of being a journalist, not really my favourite occupation, and sat around on verandahs, gossiping. Then there was a call from the Prime Minister's office, saying, Don't you want to interview Garfield Todd? It had not occurred to me. What for? I was after very different sources of information. But off I went to the Prime Minister's office, and there was Garfield Todd, a tall, handsome man striding about like Abraham Lincoln, for you could see walls and ceilings irked him and he would rather have been out-of-doors. And there I was for about three hours. As usual, I was in a thoroughly false position. Garfield Todd, a noble soul, was in love with the Federation of Central Africa, that noble idea that ignored every reality. He said, ‘I have let you in…' or, rather, ‘I have stretched my hand out over you, my child'—he was a missionary—and this was because he intended me to write nice things about Southern Rhodesia and the Federation. The foreign journalists always gave it a bad press, he said. He had told his publicity men to give me every facility, because he knew that when I saw ‘with my own eyes' what was being done, I must be impressed, and I would write nice articles. I said I had been brought up in the country, I knew it inside out and back to front, and there was no way I could write ‘nice articles' about it. What can be more extraordinary than what one doesn't hear, doesn't ‘take in'? Because it was
emotionally
impossible for me to be excluded from the landscape I had been brought up in, I couldn't hear what he was saying. The fact was that I had been made a Prohibited Immigrant by Lord Malvern (Dr. Huggins, the family doctor) when I left Southern Rhodesia eight years before: ‘I wasn't going to have you upsetting my natives.' But I had not been told I was Prohibited. They were embarrassed about it when, weeks later, I went with a lawyer to Rhodesia House in the Strand. They prevaricated, they wriggled, they lied, but in the end they admitted I was Prohibited, saying, ‘Drat it, you've forced our hand.'

Meanwhile, on being told by the Special Branch that my name was on the passenger list, Garfield Todd had intervened to allow me in. I told him he was putting me in an impossible position. He said he had confidence in my fairness of mind. I said it obviously had nothing to do with fairness of mind, since we both had fair minds but disagreed. We went on to debate about the bases of federation. I said that its inflammatory nature was surely shown by the fact that it had given birth to the two African National Congresses, of Northern Rhodesia and of Nyasaland. (It had also given birth to the still invisible National Congress in Southern Rhodesia: I had already met clandestinely two men who lived permanently on the run from the police of all three countries, smuggling into Southern Rhodesia leaflets and information from the two northern countries.) Garfield Todd said he loathed and despised the leaders of the National Congresses. He said they were loud-mouthed agitators. Of course they are, I said. Quite soon he was to become the good friend of all the black leaders.

I spent the rest of my time in Southern Rhodesia being courteously escorted around by his publicity people but at the same time pursued by the Special Branch, who had a rather more realistic view. They turned up in the most surprising places, such as in the middle of the bush near the Zambesi, where Paul was drawing a Coca-Cola stall; at the next table in the Karoi Hotel, trying to eavesdrop: he had the bad-tempered look characteristic of these people when forced into unwilling proximity to their seditious charges; in the next car at a drive-in cinema—but he went to sleep.

The painful part of the trip was going to see all my old comrades, the Reds. To hold views about the society you live in not shared by the people you live among, to preserve them coolly and sanely, to remain unparanoid and unbitter…well, it is not possible. In the old Southern Rhodesia, before the advent of Reds and kaffir-lovers, there were one or two such souls, one of them Arthur Shearly Cripps, the poet, who was supported by religion, but on the whole it was impossible. Eight years had passed. The Cold War still gripped, and because of the birth of the National Congresses up north, white attitudes had hardened. I found my old friends had become paranoid, had taken to drink, or had turned into their own opposites, defending White Civilisation in ways they would so recently have found pathetic. Or they were having breakdowns. All these people had been sustained by a vision of that beautiful and true Utopia over there in Russia, but they had just read in the
Observer
the full text of the Khrushchev speech, and they were angry, disbelieving, bitter. I met little groups or the isolated person in some mining town or in a house in Bulawayo or Salisbury, and they were in despair, and their hearts were broken. There was one thing I could not say: ‘Not only is the Khrushchev speech all true, but the real truth is a hundred times worse.' ‘Yes, it is true,' I said. ‘Yes, I am afraid it is true, Khrushchev's speech is true.'