DORIS LESSING
553
We knew that anyone connected with business, of any kind, was
morally inferior. "Businessman" was a term of contempt. The portrait of
the Wilcox family in E. M. Forster's
Howards End
as crude and philistine
barbarians says it all. So does my picture of Richard in
The Colden
Notebook.
I think this attitude was reinforced by the English aristocratic
contempt for "trade," which had percolated down to levels far from its
beginnings. Yet "business," trade, capitalism in short, was, in our canon,
at times necessary and good. I do not remember that we made any at–
tempt to reconcile, or even discuss , these "contradictions."
The most powerful ideas are the ones which are taken for granted.
When people say now, But how
could
you have gone along with
Communism, with the Soviet Union, knowing the situation there? -
what is forgotten is that in our minds there was no alternative to
Communism or socialism. Capitalism was dead, it was
only
a matter of
time. The future was socialist, was Communist. Any "errors" committed
by the Soviet Union - the great exemplar - would be put right, they
were only bumps along the socialist road.
We enter dubious and foggy regions with "You knew what was go–
ing on." In this country, Rhodesia, our contempt for the Press was total.
Its attitudes towards the key question, treatment of the black population,
were simply absurd. Five minutes with the
Rhodesia Herald
was enough to
restore our faith in our ideas. When we used the phrase "the lies of the
capitalist press" we had good reason. When the people from Britain
talked about the "capitalist press" they meant newspapers that had sup–
ported the betrayal of the legitimate Spanish government, inertia as Hitler
took power, equivocations or lies about Hitler's treatment of the Jews.
When people talked about the Purges or the Collectivization, and the
resulting millions of deaths, we did not believe the figures. The capitalist
press was concerned to blacken the nascent Communist paradise, and that
was all there was to it.
Now I think all this is off the point. I have known now a good many
people who have gone through the process, first devout Communist, then
adjustments to various degrees of doubt, described by Arthur Koestler as
"coins dropping one by one out of your pocket" (interesting, that, coins
equated with ideas), then sadness or depression, then loss of faith. This
can take a long time. But why does it? - That's the point. There are
people - but that goes with a certain kind of personality - who have a
sudden reverse conversion, shedding Communist ideas (perhaps the right
word is emotions) overnight. They are few. Most dawdled and drifted out
of Communism, out of "The Party." For some people this was not
painful. It was not for me. What [ suffered from mostly was fear of epi–
thets like "turncoat" and "renegade" - a powerful weapon indeed. But I
