Walking in the Shade (43 page)

And now I reached the main point: If his—Bertrand Russell's—statement accusing Canon Collins did come out in next Sunday's
Observer
, it would do great damage, it would disillusion hundreds of thousands of CND supporters, most of them very young. I had driven up to beg him to withdraw it, to make sure it would not be in the
Observer
. At once Russell became very rude and said I was misinformed, there was no statement, he knew nothing of any statement. Lady Russell also said there was no statement planned or drafted but she believed that at some point Collins should be exposed for what he was.

While this was going on we were being served sandwiches and coffee. Russell said he saw no point in continuing the discussion and that he was sure we must be tired. He would not be seeing us in the morning, but he would instruct the housekeeper to give us breakfast. Lady Russell and he escorted us to the bedroom, and the atmosphere was such that we would not have been surprised to find we were locked in. It was nine o'clock.

Poor Janet Hase did not deserve this unpleasantness, for after all, she had offered to drive me up out of kindness of heart. She was, I am sure, pretty depressed by it all, and if the nasty little trip contributed to her decision to leave Britain as soon as she could, then I didn't blame her.

Back we crawled to London next day, and I reported to Mervyn Jones that my attempt had been a failure. By then I was angry with myself for doing it all, for in fact it achieved nothing.

Next Sunday the
Observer
was due to come out with the two statements, Bertrand Russell accusing Canon Collins, Collins accusing Russell. That, at least, was how they would be read by the innocent masses. But this did not happen. The statements got lost, disappeared. And so the innocents never knew of all this dirty work and the competing of their leaders. Such is the nastiness left in my mind that even now I feel nervous for fear of arousing ancient sleeping dogs when I say I think Canon Collins was very much more sinned against than sinning and the faults on his side were not double-dealing and dirty tricks but—quite simply—not understanding how little interested were the rank and file in leaders and leadership. I was sorry for him.

The Committee of a Hundred flourished, attracted to itself people with a liking for ‘direct action' or, in other words, confrontations with the police, and the parent organisation, CND, was weakened. The Aldermaston Marches continued, grew, became unwieldy, and dwindled. But while it is easy to say that a great popular movement weakens and fades
because
of this and that, I don't think we really understand the dynamics or know why a mass movement grows, does well, then fades. If now you say to people who supported the Committee of a Hundred that you think its influences were bad, the reply often comes: ‘But it gave birth to the anti-Vietnam riots and marches in America.' It is true that one influenced the other, but to suggest that the Americans were not capable of giving birth to their own anti-war movements seems to me absurd.

Sometimes I meet people from the Direct Action days and ask how they saw Ralph Schoenman. Some say they admired him, others that he made them feel uneasy. The admirers on the whole were those for whom he was their first experience of politics. Yet surely the man was crazy; or if he was not, then his behaviour was. An important distinction, one that has to be made in politics, with such inspirational characters.
*
The thing is, people who are indeed frothing mad, if they are in political or religious contexts are not seen as mad. Yet if the same people were in a different context, it would be seen at once. But some people who are crazy drift towards political or religious movements where their craziness will not be seen, and whether they do this consciously or not surely doesn't matter. Some people know exactly what they do—Hitler, Stalin. Others, I think, find deep inclinations and tendencies they are hardly aware of blossoming in sympathetic atmospheres and are even terrified: I am pretty sure that many of the youngsters who went into the Committee of a Hundred for idealistic reasons were later appalled by what they found—in themselves as well as in others. We have forgotten the poisonous airs and atmospheres of then—just as we have forgotten the powerful idealism. This happens to be a mild, fairly nonpartisan, comparatively sane interregnum in the human story. To judge the fevers and accusations that then proliferated in and around the Committee of a Hundred means trying to revive that time: impossible.

How can one account for the fact that Bertrand Russell, a man who had been engaged in politics all his life, beginning with his brave stand against the militarism of the First World War, an experienced man, one who had known a hundred different types of politico, failed to see through a Ralph Schoenman? And refused to see the truth even when people were warning him, telling him exactly what was happening and how he was being used? Russell simply would not listen, not for a long time, and by then it was too late. People all this time were asking, was Ralph Schoenman in the pay of the CIA? The KGB? This was because of the damage he was doing. Now this seems pretty mad, but it wasn't then. Almost anyone could be accused of being in the pay of the CIA or the KGB, and of course some pretty unlikely people were.

There are all kinds of hazards and dangers associated with old age, but the one I think may be the worst of all is hardly noticed. It is what happens when an old person is confronted with a simulacrum of a youthful self, a mocking shadow, an echo of lost possibilities—and loses all moral independence.

Tolstoy lost his pride and his balance to Chertkov, a second-rate person who called himself the old man's disciple and told him what to think, whom to keep in his life, and whom to exclude.

Maxim Gorky allowed Pyotr Krychkov to run his life for him for years. He was paid by the KGB and was probably involved in Gorky's death. It seems that Gorky did in the end have his suspicions, but the question is, why surrender to such a man at all?

Jean-Paul Sartre gave himself up to Pierre Victor (or Benny Levy) at the end of his life, a young man who caricatured all his qualities so that even the good ones became monstrous. Meanwhile the French were saying, Our great Sartre is going the way of Bertrand Russell with Ralph Schoenman; it must be prevented. It wasn't.

There is an exception to this sad rule, but perhaps it is because here are not two men, an old one and a young man, but an old woman and a young man. The actress Louise Brooks, at the end of her life, was visited by young Kenneth Tynan, and there followed the most charming of friendships, tender, self-consciously whimsical, full of nostalgia for impossible loves.

Old friends, old comrades—old people generally—must beware that moment when appears a young person all shining eyes and ‘I've always so much admired you.' Almost certainly no good will come of it.

Bertrand Russell had a serious problem apart from Ralph Schoenman: he was canonized, seen as this dear sweet old man, full of years and wisdom. The appetite for saints of either sex, gurus, wise women and men, is unappeasable, and this means that the most unlikely material becomes sanctified. I myself have had to fight off attempts to turn me into a wise old woman. All that happens is that disillusioned fans and disciples attack unfairly where once they unwisely venerated. This is what happened to Russell.

 

I was four years in Langham Street and have lively memories of it, quite unlike Warwick Road, which I try not to think of at all. This was not only because my life had become easier, with more money, less worry, and the beginnings of emotional freedom, but because the general atmosphere had lightened. War-damaged and darkened Britain was in another age and could be recalled only with an effort. Ten years had done it, and already there was a generation who did not know what you meant when you said bomb sites, cracking facades, dreary unpainted buildings; when you talked of Utility clothes, the awful food, undrinkable coffee, and people going to bed by ten in the evening. The new coffee bars were full of young people remaking the world, there were the first good cheap restaurants, and the clothes were youthful and inventive. All kinds of small, pleasant things were happening, unthinkable ten years before. For instance, a band called the Happy Wanderers played traditional jazz up and down Oxford Street, which made it a pleasure to go shopping. Window boxes and hanging baskets and decorous little trees in tubs were appearing in new-painted streets. Now it is acknowledged that the recovery of shattered Europe after that war was an economic miracle, for it was not only Britain that had bounced back but all the countries in Europe, some of them laid flat by war. From ruins and hunger to affluence in fifteen years, less, but living through it, we took it for granted, hardly noticed it, and needed to have it pointed out to us. As by Eric Hobsbawn's
Age of Extremes
, which I read amazed, thinking, But why were we not more aware of how well we were doing?

Once again a new age was upon us, and its most dramatic sign was the Russian sputnik (in Russian, the word means ‘travelling companion, satellite, comrade'), for it was the first of the new technical apparitions in the sky, and a lot of people stayed up all night to catch a glimpse of it bowling past overhead. I was on the roof, hoping clouds would not obstruct. I didn't see it, but what elation, what pleasure, and feelings of achievement: we really did feel that this was a step forward for all humankind. The blackbirds sang. For some reason blackbirds loved that area, and their song at once brings back the dawns and evenings of Langham Street.

The roof was reached by a tricky little ladder. I sunbathed up there, using the shadow from chimneys to temper the heat. The short story ‘A Woman on a Roof' comes from that time. It was another world, because I was not the only one to use the roofs; there were plants and little gardens and deck chairs. Over near the BBC, building was going on, and the great yellow machines clambered and swung halfway up the sky, and the men operating the machines waved at us, shouting invitations and compliments.

The little market in the street was only a couple of stalls but people came from the BBC to get vegetables. The sounds from the market, cries where the meaning had eroded, so they were like shouts from the past, when the streets were full of hawkers and vendors, led to a story, a mere breath of a story, ‘A Room', that came from lying on my bed in the daytime behind the dark-blue curtains of thick soft cotton. Touching them reminded me that now we could buy such material, so recently not in existence. Lying there in the half dark, with the street cries in my ears, I fell into a dream and visited, or thought I did, that room as it had been in the dreadful threadbare cold poverty of the 1914-1918 war.

I went to the theatre a lot, meeting people there, often walking back alone afterwards from Shaftesbury Avenue, St. Martin's Lane, the Haymarket, even the Old Vic. There were people in the streets, enough to make a street companionship, though it wasn't as it is now, the streets of Central London filled with young people enjoying themselves and looking for adventure till long after midnight. It still did not occur to me to be nervous, walking at night, stopping to have a bit of a chat. ‘What are you doing out so late, dear?'

‘I've been to see Laurence Olivier in…'

‘Have you, now? That's nice, then. Enjoyed it, did you?'

That was the time when Joan Littlewood was making theatre in Stratford East. I saw there productions more original, more brilliant, than any I had seen till then: standards of production have risen, partly due to her. The theatre was always nearly empty, had a dozen or twenty people in it, all of us Lefties who had made the trip from Central London. Joan's idea had been to make a theatre for the working people of the area, but they did not come. Joan was in those days a vociferous communist, or rather made loud communist noises. I do not find it easy to see her actually in the Party. The Party did not do more than tolerate her.

For a couple of years, a handful of us knew we were seeing the most extraordinary theatre in Britain, and then Kenneth Tynan saw some productions, told the
Observer
readers, and thereafter the tube train to Stratford, in London's East End, a tedious journey, was crowded with smart Londoners, and it was hard to get a ticket.

Joan Littlewood has never been given the credit she deserves. This is partly because of her loathing for the middle classes, who were in fact her supporters. She could not stop insulting the bourgeoisie, the establishment, the BBC, and the West End theatre and West End theatre audiences. It was a necessity for her, her style, her trademark. When she was on television, she dropped a handkerchief over the back of her chair and turned to reach over and get it, so that her bum was offered as an insult to the camera. Childish. But she had to do this kind of thing. And she was a great director, a great force in the theatre. She and her team were really a continuation of the old tradition of strolling players, and she had made theatre in provincial towns with no money, no resources: political theatre, satirical political morality plays, improvised theatre.

I was visited by Nelson Algren. According to the newspapers and general report, he was bitter about having been put into
The Mandarins
, Simone de Beauvoir's novel about post-war Paris, as the evasive American lover—straight from life. Surely this could not have been true, because when he was brought to my flat by Clancy, who had the air of a successful marriage broker, Nelson's smile was all bashful sexual willingness, like a very young bridegroom. Yet I was a writer, female, and on the left—surely poison? But there is another ingredient in this puzzling brew. London was then glamorous for Americans in a way it has not been since the sixties ended. Sometimes when I was being presented by a male American to another as a good thing: ‘She's a real mensch, you know'—for a woman could be as much of a mensch as a man—I felt as if I was being seen as a kind of trophy, a valuable piece of Englishness. The fact is, he didn't really fancy me, nor I him, but we did like each other and spent several agreeable days together, he telling me about the experiences that made
The Man with the Golden Arm
and
A Walk on the Wild Side
. He made it all sound picaresque, and glamorous. In London he was in search of romantic poverty, intending to write about it. Where are your slums? he demanded. He went down to the East End with Clancy, but the old working-class communities had gone. Back he came, discontented, to me. He wanted to find the slums of Dickens's London, just as to this day people come hoping to encounter a real fog, a pea-souper, a London Particular, and are sad when they are told of the Clean Air Act. I explained to him that all along the streets of this area were extremely poor people, living in poor flats, even houses, but poverty in London was often concealed; a well-off house could be next door to one crammed with poor people. All he had to do was walk around a bit. He did, could not understand what he saw, so I went with him. ‘Look—see that house? See that little street there?' But gone were the days when people starved in Britain, or lived on tea, dripping, cheap jam, and bread, and children were without shoes. He was looking for the dramatic and evident squalor of certain slums in America. The goodwill we did feel for each other had to overcome a very basic difficulty. By now I had come to think that romanticising poverty as a style—for it is often that—was most irritating and puerile. It goes on all the time. The middle classes have always adored squalor—
La Bohème
, for instance. Nelson's novels were above all a celebration of the romanticism of poverty, the drug culture, prostitution. At that very time the slummy townships of South Africa, truly horrible poverty and destitution, were giving certain people a pleasant frisson: exciting to think that the inhabitants of a slum like Alexandra township were every one gold-hearted prostitutes, cheeky child thieves without a care in the world, gamin guttersnipes, singing and dancing vagabonds.