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McCarthyism, when she insisted that no one was safe from the
witch hunt and that all intellectual and academic freedom in
the United States was shut down. She made America sound like
Russia under Stalin. I tried vainly-and angrily-to make her
understand that however bad McCarthyism was, it was slipshod
and scattershot, and that most liberals, indeed most of the
country, were only indirectly affected by McCarthy's and the
House Un-American Activities Committee's campaign against
real and imaginary communists. I finally gave up, convinced
it was hopeless. Having never been to the United States, she
had absorbed the ideological picture of this country propagated
by those who were not content to observe our real shortcomings
but for obvious political reasons had to blow them up to mon–
strous proportions. However, she has long since moved away
from her earlier left politics. The turning point was the Russian
invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Her politics sometimes took a more amusing and almost
refreshing form when it was personalized and transformed into
an assertion of individual purity. For example, I took her one
day to a reception by the American embassy for Mary McCarthy.
Alan Sillitoe, a confirmed leftist at the time, and his wife also
came with us. From the beginning, Doris could not contain her
political hostility and contempt for the affair, which, I must
admit, was a bit silly and pompous. There was a receiving line to
meet Mary and the American Ambassador, David Bruce, and
the lavish setting, with its almost imperial splendor, was scarcely
in keeping with what Mary McCarthy stood for. But she gra–
ciously accepted the formalities of the situation while Doris
Lessing, I thought, overreacted by fuming against capitalism in
general and American imperialism in particular. While all this
invective of the class struggle was being delivered by the repre–
sentative of the exploited masses, Mary McCarthy, the showpiece
of the embassy, was greeting her guests, mostly liberal to leftish
English writers, with a frozen smile, indicating her belief that on
certain social occasions gracious manners were more important
than having the correct politics.
But underneath Lessing's politics and personal style was a
powerful literary drive or, perhaps I should say, an enormous
ambition, for that is what seemed to come out in a very significant
way. Once I asked, a bit foolishly I realized afterward, what she
