Walking in the Shade Read Online Free PDF

not to share them. I could not discuss any ‘doubts’ I might have with Joan or anyone who came to that house—not yet, but, if I found the Party Line hard to swallow, there was something else, much stronger. Colonials, the children or grandchildren of the far-flung Empire, arrived in England with expectations created by literature. ‘We will find the England of Shelley and Keats and Hopkins, of Dickens and Hardy and the Brontës and Jane Austen, we will breathe the generous airs of literature. We have been sustained in exile by the magnificence of the Word, and soon we will walk into our promised land.’ All the communists I met had been fed and sustained by literature, and very few of the other people I met had. In short, my experience in Southern Rhodesia continued, if modified, not least because again I was having to defend my right to write, to spend my time writing, and not to run around distributing pamphlets or the Daily Worker . But a woman who had stood up to Gottfried Lessing—‘Why are you wasting your time? Writing is just bourgeois self-indulgence’—was more than equipped to deal with the English comrades. The pressure on writers—and artists—to do something other than write, paint, make music, because those are nothing but bourgeois indulgences, continued strong, and continues now, though the ideologies are different, and will continue, because it has roots in envy, and the envious ones do not know they suffer from a disease, know only that they are in the right.
    It did help that I was now one of the recognised new writers. The Grass Is Singing had got very good reviews, and was selling well, and was bought in other countries. The short stories, This Was the Old Chief’s Country , did well. Needless to say, I was attacked by the comrades for all kinds of ideological shortcomings. For instance, The Grass Is Singing was poisoned by Freud. At that stage I had not read much Freud. The short stories did not put the point of view of the organised black working class. True. For one thing, there wasn’t one. There is no way one can exaggerate the stupidity of communist literary criticism; any quote immediately seems like mockery or caricature—like so much of Political Correctness now.
    It was not only pressures from my own side that I had to resist.
    For instance, the editor of a popular newspaper, the Daily Graphic —it was not unlike the Sun —long since defunct, invited me to his office and offered me a lot of money to write articles supporting hanging, the flogging of delinquent children, harsher treatment for criminals, a woman’s place in the home, down with socialism, internment for communists. When I said I disagreed with all these, the editor, a nasty little man, said it didn’t matter what my personal opinions were. If I wanted, I could be a journalist—he would train me—and journalists should know how to write persuasively on any subject. I kept refusing large sums of money, which got larger as he became more exasperated. I fled to a telephone in the street, where I rang up Juliet O’Hea. I needed money badly. She said on no account should I ever write one word I did not believe in, never write a word that wasn’t the best I could do; if I started writing for money, the next thing would be I’d start believing it was good, and neither of us wanted that, did we? She did not believe in asking for advances before they were due, but if I was desperate she would. And she would tell the editor of the Daily Graphic to leave me alone.
    There were other offers on the same lines, temptations of the Devil. Not that I was really tempted. But I did linger sometimes in an editor’s office out of curiosity: I could not believe that this was happening, that people could be so low, so unscrupulous. But surely they can’t really believe writers should write against their own beliefs, their consciences? Write less than