Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

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 men 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 Hider’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 specialized 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, civilized, 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 children 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 faindy derisive smile, meaning: What, that old stick? So then of course you shut up; after all, it has nothing to do with him.

I will call this man Jack. He was a Czech. He had worked as a doctor with our armies throughout the war. He was – what else? – a communist.

He fell in love with me, jealously, hungrily, even angrily – with that particular degree of anger that means a man is in conflict. I did not at once fall in love with him. At the start, what I loved was his loving me so much: a nice change after Gottfried. The way I saw this – felt this – was that now I was ready for the right man: my ‘mistakes’ were over, and I was settled in London, where I intended to stay. All my experiences had programmed me for domesticity. I might now tell myself – and quite rightly – that I had never been ‘really’ married to Frank Wisdom, but for four years we had a conventional marriage. Gottfried and I had hardly been well matched, but we had lived conventionally enough. The law and society saw me as a woman who had had two marriages and two divorces. I felt that these marriages did not count. I had been too young, too immature. The fact that the bouncy, affectionate, almost casual relationship I had had with Frank was hardly unusual – particularly in those war years, when people married far too easily – did not mean I did not aspire to better. With Gottfried it had been a political marriage. I would not have married Gottfried if the internment camp was not still a threat. Then, people were always marrying to give someone a name, a passport, a place; in London there were organizations for precisely this – to rescue threatened people from Europe. But now, in these luckier times, people have forgotten that such marriages were hardly uncommon. No, my real emotional life was all before me. And I had all the talents needed for intimacy. I was born to live companionably – and passionately – with the right man, and here he was.

Jack had been one of thirteen children, the youngest, of a very poor family in Czechoslovakia. He had had to walk miles to school and back – just like Africans now in many parts of Africa. They scarcely had enough to eat or to cover themselves with. This was a common enough story, then, in Europe – and in some parts of Britain too: people don’t want to remember the frightful poverty in Britain in the twenties and thirties. Jack had become a communist in his early teens, like all his schoolfellows. He was a real communist, for whom the Party was a home, a family, the future, his deepest and sanest self. He wasn’t at all like me – who had had choices. When I met him, his closest friends in Czechoslovakia, the friends of his youth, the top leadership of the Czech Communist Party, had just been made to stand in the eyes of the world as traitors to communism, and then eleven of them were hanged, Stalin the invisible stage manager. For Jack it had been as if the foundations of the world had collapsed. It was impossible for these old friends to have been traitors, and he did not believe it. On the other hand, it was impossible for the Party to have made a mistake. He had nightmares, he wept in his sleep. Like Gottfried Lessing. Again I shared a bed with a man who woke from nightmares.

That was the second cataclysmic event of his life. His entire family – mother, father, and all his siblings, except one sister who had escaped to America – had died in the gas chambers.

This story is a terrible one. It was terrible then, but taken in the context of that time, not worse than many others. In 1950 in London, everybody I met had come out of the army from battlefields in Burma, Europe, Italy, Yugoslavia, had been present when the concentration camps were opened, had fought in the Spanish war or was a refugee and had survived horrors. With my background, the Trenches and the nastiness of the First World War dinned into me day and night through my childhood. Jack’s story was felt by me as a continuation: Well, what can you expect?

We understood each other well. We had everything in common. Now I assess the situation in a way I would then have found ‘cold’. I look at a couple and I think. Are they suited emotionally … physically … mentally? Jack and I were suited in all three ways, but perhaps most emotionally, sharing a natural disposition towards the grimmest understanding of life and events that in its less severe manifestations is called irony. It was our situations, not our natures, that were incompatible. I was ready to settle down for ever with this man. He had just come back from the war, to find his wife, whom he had married long years before, a stranger, and children whom he hardly knew.

It is a commonplace among psychiatrists that a young woman who has been close to death, has cut her wrists too often, or has been threatened by parents, must buy clothes, be obsessed with clothes and with the ordering of her appearance, puzzling observers with what seems like a senseless profligacy. It is life she is keeping in order.

And a man who has been running a step ahead of death for years – if Jack had stayed in Czechoslovakia it is likely he would have been hanged as a traitor, together with his good friends, if he hadn’t already perished in the gas chambers – such a man will be forced by a hundred powerful needs to sleep with women, have women, assert life, make life, move on.

In no way can I – or could I then – accuse Jack of letting me down, for he never promised anything. On the contrary, short of actually saying, ‘I am sleeping with other women; I have no intention of marrying you,’ he said it all. Often joking. But I wasn’t listening. What I felt was: When we get on so wonderfully in every possible way, then it isn’t sensible for him to go away from me. I wasn’t able to think at all; the emotional realities were too powerful. I think this is quite common with women. ‘Really, this man is talking nonsense, he doesn’t know what is right for him. And besides, he says himself his marriage is no marriage at all. And obviously it can’t be, when he is here most nights.’ How easy to be intelligent now, how impossible then.

If I needed support against my mother, soon I needed it because of Jack too. He was a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. He had wanted to be a neurologist, but when he started being a doctor in Britain, neurology was fashionable and ‘a member of a distant country of which we know nothing’ could not compete with so many British doctors, crowding to get in. So he went into psychiatry, then unfashionable. But soon it became chic, even more so than neurology. He was a far from uncritical practitioner. He was no fan of Freud, and this was not only because as a communist – or even an ex-communist – he was bound to despise Freud. He said Freud was unscientific, and this at a time when to attack Freud was like attacking Stalin – or God. One of my liveliest memories is of how he took me to Oxford to listen to Hans Eysenck lecture to an audience composed almost entirely of doctors from the Maudsley, all of them Freudians, about the unscientific nature of psychoanalysis. There he was, this large, bouncing young man, with his thick German accent, telling a roomful of the angriest people I remember that their idol had faults. (He has not lost his capacity to annoy: when I told a couple of young psychiatrists this tale, thinking it might amuse them – in 1994 – their cold response was: ‘He always was unsound.’) Jack admired him. He knew psychoanalysis had feet of clay. This scepticism included Mrs Sussman: And if Freud was unscientific, what could be said of Jung? But I didn’t go to Mrs Sussman for ideology, I said. And anyway, she used a pragmatic mix of Freud, Jung, Klein, and anything else that might come in appropriately. He did not find this persuasive; he said that all artists like Jung, but this had nothing to do with science: why not just go off and listen to lectures on Greek mythology? It would do just as well. He was unimpressed by my ‘Jungian’ dreams. And even less when I began dreaming ‘Freudian’ dreams. And I was uneasy myself. I was dreaming dreams to order. No one need persuade me of the influence a therapist has on a confused, frightened suppliant for enlightenment. One needs to please that mentor, half mother, half father, the possessor of all knowledge, sitting so powerfully there in that chair. ‘And now, my dear, what do you have to tell me today?’

Some things I wouldn’t dare tell Jack. For instance, about that day when she remarked, after nothing had been said for a few minutes, ‘I am sure you do know that we are communicating even when we are not saying anything.’ This remark, at that time, was simply preposterous. As far as she was concerned, I was a communist and therefore bound to dismiss any thoughts of that kind as ‘mystical nonsense’. She was not talking about body language (that phrase, and the skills of interpreting people’s postures, gestures, and so forth, came much later). She was talking about an interchange between minds. As soon as she said it, I thought, Well, yes… accepting this heretical idea as if it was my birthright. But to say this to Jack … For though he might have been, now, painfully – and for him it had to be painful – critical of communism, he was a Marxist, and ‘mystical’ ideas were simply inadmissible.

Jack attacked me for going to Mrs Sussman at all. He said I was a big girl now and I should simply tell my mother to go off and live her own life. She was healthy, wasn’t she? She was strong? She had enough money to live on?

My mother’s situation was causing me anguish. She was living pitifully in a nasty little suburb with George Laws, a distant cousin of my father’s. He was old, he was an invalid, and they could have nothing in common. She kept up a steady pressure to live with me. There was nowhere else for her. She found her brother’s family – he had died – as unlikeable as she always had. She actually had very little money. Common sense, as she kept saying, would have us sharing a flat and expenses, and besides, I needed help with Peter. Her sole reason for existence, she said, was to help me with Peter. And she took Peter for weekends, sometimes, and on trips. From one, to the Isle of Wight, he returned baptized. She informed me that this had been her duty. I did not even argue. There was never any point. And of course it was very good, for me, when I could go off with Jack for three days. At these times she moved into the Church Street flat, where the stairs were almost beyond her. Joan did not mind my mother; she simply said. But she’s a typical middle-class matron, that’s all. Just as I didn’t mind her mother, with whom she found it difficult to get on. I could listen to her self-pitying, wailing tales of her life dispassionately – this was social history, hard times brought off the page into a tale of a beautiful Jewish girl from the poor East End of London surviving among artists and writers.

Jack said I should simply put my foot down with my mother, once and for all.

Joan was also involved – a good noncommittal word – with psychotherapy. Various unsuccessful attempts had ended in her returning from a session to say that no man who had such appalling taste in art and whose house smelled of overcooked cabbage could possibly know anything about the human soul. That was good for a laugh or two, as so many painful things are.

Joan saw her main problem as the inability to focus her talents. She had many. She drew well – like Kathe Kollwitz, as people told her: this was before Kollwitz had been accepted by the artistic establishment. She danced well. She had acted professionally. She wrote well. Perhaps she had too many talents. But whatever the reason, she could not narrow herself into any one channel of accomplishment. And here I was, in her house, getting good reviews, with three books out. She was critical of Jack, and of me because of how I brought up Peter. I was too lax and laissez-faire, and treated him like a grown-up. It was not enough to read to him and tell him stories; he needed … well, what? I thought she criticised me because of dissatisfaction over her son, for no woman can bring up a son without a full-time father around and not feel at a disadvantage. And then I was such a colonial, and graceless, and perhaps she found that hardest of all. Small things are the most abrasive. An incident: I have invited people to Sunday lunch, and among the foods I prepare are Scotch eggs, this being a staple of buffet food in Southern Africa. Joan stands looking at them, dismayed. ‘But why,’ she demands, ‘when there’s a perfectly good delicatessen down the street?’ She criticised me – or so it felt – for everything. Yet this criticism of others was the obverse of her wonderful kindness and charity, the two things in harness. And it was nothing beside her criticism of herself, for she continued to denigrate herself in everything.

To withstand the pressure of this continual disapproval, I got more defensive and more cool. Yes, this was a repetition of my situation with my mother, and of course it came up in talk with Mrs Sussman, who was hearing accounts of the same incidents from both of us, Box and Cox, and supported us both. Not an easy thing. One afternoon Joan came rushing up the stairs to accuse me of having pushed her over the cliff.

‘What?’

‘I was dreaming you pushed me over the cliff.’

When I told Mrs Sussman, she said, ‘Then you did push her over the cliff.’

Joan was unable to see that I found her overpowering because I admired her. She was everything in the way of chic, self-confidence, and general worldly experience that I was not. And years later, when I told her that this was how I had seen her, she was incredulous.

Jack saw her as a rival – or so it seemed to me – for if she criticised him, then he criticised her. ‘Why don’t you get your own place? Why do you need a mother figure?’ He did not see that being in Joan’s house protected me from my mother, or that it was perfect for Peter.

Jack thought I was too protective of Peter. He found it difficult to get on with his son and said frankly that he was not going to be a father to Peter.

This was perhaps the worst thing about this time. I knew how Peter yearned for a father, and I watched this little boy, so open and affectionate with everyone, run to Jack and put up his arms – but he was rebuffed, his arms gently replaced by his sides, while Jack asked him grown-up questions, so that he had to return sober, careful replies, while he searched Jack’s face with wide, strained, anxious eyes. He had never experienced anything like this, from anyone.

The difficulties between Joan and me were no more than were inevitable, with two females, both used to their independence, living in the same house. We got on pretty well. We sat often over her kitchen table, gossiping: people, men, the world, the comrades – this last increasingly critical. In fact, gossiping with Joan over the kitchen table is one of my pleasantest memories. We both cooked well; gentle competition went on over the meals we prepared. The talk was of the kind I later used in The Golden Notebook.

A scene: Joan said she wanted me to see something. ‘I’m not going to tell you; just come.’ In a little house in a little street two minutes’ walk away, we found ourselves in a little room crammed with valuable furniture and pictures and, too, people. Four people filled it, and Joan stood at the doorway, me just behind, and waved to a languorous woman lying on a chaise longue, dressed in a frothy peignoir. A man bent over her, offering champagne: he was a former husband. Another, a current lover, fondled her feet. A very young man, flushed, excited, adoring, was waiting his chance. No room for us, so we said goodbye, and she called, ‘Do come again, darlings, any time. I get so down all by myself here.’ She was afflicted by a mysterious fatigue that kept her supine. It appeared that she was kept by two former husbands and the current lover. ‘Now, you tell me,’ says Joan, laughing, as we walk home. ‘What are we doing wrong? And she isn’t even all that pretty.’ We returned, worrying, to our overburdened lives.