Дорис Лессинг – Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962 (страница 2)

But by the end of the decade, there were coffee bars and good ice cream, by courtesy of the Italians, and good cheap Indian restaurants. Clothes were bright and cheap and irreverent. London was painted again and was cheerful. Most of the bomb damage was gone. Above all, there was a new generation who had not been made tired by the war. They did not talk about the war, or think about it.

The first place where I lived was in Bayswater, which was then rather seedy and hard to associate with the grandeur of its earlier days. Prostitutes lined the streets every evening. I was supposed to be sharing a flat with a South African woman and her child: I wrote about this somewhat unsatisfactory experience in In Pursuit of the English. The flat we were in was large and well furnished. Two rooms were let to prostitutes. When I discovered this – I did not realize at once who these smartly dressed girls were who tripped up and down the stairs with men – and tackled the South African woman, because I did not think this was good for the two small children, she burst into tears and said I was unkind.

I spent six weeks looking for a place that would take a small child. There was a heat wave, and I couldn’t understand why people complained about the English weather. My feet gave in on the hot pavements, and my morale almost did, but then a household of Italians welcomed the child and me, and my main problem was solved. This was Denbigh Road. Peter had been accepted by a council nursery. Circumstances had taught him from his very first days to be sociable, and he loved going there. When he came back from the nursery he disappeared at once into the basement, where there was a little girl his age. The house, dispiriting to me, because it was so grim and dirty and war-damaged, was a happy place for him.

We were at the beginning – but literally – in a garret, which was too small for me even to unpack a typewriter. I sent some short stories to the agent Curtis Brown, chosen at random from the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, and Juliet O’Hea wrote back what I later knew was a form letter: Yes, but did I have a novel or was I thinking of writing one? I said there was a novel, but it had been bought by a Johannesburg publisher. She asked to see the contract, was shocked and angry when she saw it – they were going to take fifty percent of everything I earned, as a reward for risking themselves over this dangerous book. She sent them a telegram saying that if they didn’t at once release me from the contract she would expose them as crooks. She then sold the book over the weekend to Michael Joseph.

Pamela Hansford Johnson was Michael Joseph’s reader. She wrote an enthusiastic report but said that these and those changes should be made. Since I had spent years writing and rewriting the book, I did not feel inclined to make changes, particularly as I had broken my shoulder. How? It cannot be regarded as anything less than a psychologically significant event. I was in Leicester Square, seeing Les Enfants du Paradis with a young man. We had been most romantically in love when he was in the RAF in Rhodesia. Our lives had already taken dramatically different routes: he was about to join the Federation of British Industry, and I was still, if uneasily, a Red – though not a member of the Party. I came out of the cinema and walked straight into slippery tar painted on the street by workmen who said I should have looked where I was going. Gottfried had arrived in London, where he proposed to live, and was staying with Dorothy Schwartz from Salisbury in a large flat near the Belsize Park underground station. He took Peter for six weeks, while my shoulder mended.

Hindsight has given a jaunty tone to my memories of that time, for if it was difficult, I was coping with it all. This little scene paints a different picture: I am standing on the platform at Queensway underground station. My left arm is in a sling, and my yellow wool jacket is buttoned over it. A button flies off, a draught lifts the jacket off my left shoulder, I stand revealed in my bra. In London you could walk down Oxford Street nude and earn hardly a glance, and my embarrassment is unnecessary. I try futilely to get myself covered. A woman emerges from the crowd, turns me to her, takes a large safety pin from her pocket, pins my jacket onto the sling. She stands examining my face. ‘Broken it, ’ave you? Well, a break takes forty-two days or six weeks, whichever is the shortest.’ I can’t speak. ‘Cheer up. The worst may never happen.’

‘This is the worst,’ I manage. She laughs, that anarchic, gruff, well-what-can-you-expect laugh still heard from people who lived through the Blitz.

‘Is that so? If that’s the worst you can manage, then …’ She gives me encouraging little pats, then shoves me gently towards the train and helps me onto it. ‘You just go and get yourself a nice cup of tea and cheer up,’ I hear, as the doors grind shut.

I sent The Grass Is Singing back to Michael Joseph in the same parcel it arrived in. I got a letter from them, congratulating me on the valuable changes I had made. I never enlightened them.

Soon Alfred Knopf in New York said they would take the book, if I would change it so that there was an explicit rape, ‘in accordance with the mores of the country’. This was Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, and the Knopfs were the stars of the publishing firmament then. I was furious. What did she know about the ‘mores’ of Southern Africa? Besides, it was crass. The whole point of The Grass Is Singing was the unspoken, devious codes of behaviour of the whites, nothing ever said, everything understood, and the relationship between Mary Turner, the white woman, and Moses, the black man, was described so that nothing was explicit. This was only partly out of literary instinct. The fact is, I have never decided whether Mary had sex with Moses or not. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. While it was a commonplace that white men had sex with black women, and the continually enlarging Coloured community was there to prove it, I had only once heard of a white woman having sex with her black servant. The penalty – for the man – was hanging. Besides, the taboos were so strong. If Mary Turner had had sex with Moses, this poor woman so precariously holding on to her idea of herself as a white madam would have cracked into pieces. Yes, but she was cracked, she was crazy – yes, but she would have been crazy in a different way: as soon as I say it, the phrases and words appear that would describe that different lunacy. No, on the whole I think she didn’t. When I wrote the book I was sure she didn’t. The episode from which the story grew was this: I overheard contemptuous and uneasy talk on the verandahs about a farmer’s wife on a near farm who ‘allowed her cook to button up her dress at the back and brush her hair’. This was – correctly, I think – described by my father as the ultimate in contempt for the man: like aristocrats permitting themselves every kind of intimate and filthy behaviour in front of servants, because they weren’t really human beings.

I decided that the Knopf demand was hypocrisy: an explicit rape would have the shock of novelty – this was true then. I said I would not change the book. I was supported all the way by Juliet O’Hea, who said of course I should never change a word I didn’t want to, but it was always worthwhile thinking about what they said. ‘After all, my dear, they are sometimes right.’ She thought that this time they were wrong. ‘Don’t worry. If they don’t take it I’ll get you another publisher.’ They took it anyway.^*

I had very little money left. The £150 advance from Michael Joseph was at once swallowed up by rent and fees for the nursery school. I took a secretary’s job for a few weeks, where I did practically no work at all, for it was a new engineering firm, with young, inexperienced partners. I had taken the child out of the council nursery and put him in a rather expensive private nursery. How was I going to pay for this? But my attitude always was: decide to do something and then find out the way to pay for it. Soon I knew I was being stupid. I was supposed to be a writer: publishers enquired tenderly about what I was writing. But I had no energy for writing. I woke at five, with the child, as always – he went on waking at five for years, and I with him. I read to him, told him stories, gave him breakfast, took him by bus down to the nursery school, went to work. There I sat about, doing nothing much, or perhaps covertly writing a short story. At lunchtime I shopped. At five I fetched the child from the nursery, went back by bus, and then the usual rumbustious rowdy evening for him, downstairs, while I cleaned the place up. He did not sleep until ten or so. But then I was too tired to work.

I gave up the job. Meanwhile the publishers rang – twice – to say they were reprinting, and that was before publication. I said, ‘Oh good.’ I thought this happened to every writer. My ignorance was absolute. They thought I was taking my success for granted.