DORIS LESSING
559
aunt, lover, friend, and is intoxicated with power: writers he or she has
spent long years in university learning to admire may now be slashed to
the ground, demolished. Probably, later, this little critic will be ashamed,
or embarrassed. The point is, there is always, in any culture where there
are praised writers and artists, a sump or a well of hatred for them, and
always people ready to do them down. Then, in Salisbury, Southern
Rhodesia, the stage of demolishing the great was short, was mild indeed,
compared to Britain, or the great exemplars like the Soviet Union.
Certainly Gottfried and others exhorted us to admire only Mayakovsky
and Gorky, only writers with a proletarian background, but the trouble
was, they were talking to people who had been formed by literature, and
not prepared to anathematize their spiritual parents.
A scene: we have been discussing proletarian literature. As we rise
from our chairs drugged with rhetoric and cigarette smoke, it can be seen
that Dorothy is smiling, and is about to address Gottfried in a way we
all
wait for. "As for me, I am going to get an early night, and I might just
possibly
take
War and Peace
to
bed with me. " Then, with a gentle but tri–
umphant roll of her eyes, she departs.
I now rather admire the sleights of hand we used to admit writers to
favour that we were instructed to despise. Lawrence? Well, he was a
miner's son wasn't he? Eliot? He was describing the decadence of the
bourgeoisie. Yeats? He was Irish, an oppressed people. Virginia Woolt?
She was a woman. Orwell? At that time he was being insulted by the
Party, because he had told the truth about Spain. The trouble was some
of us admired him. How did we get around this? I forget. But don't
bother, Political Correctness, the offspring of Marxist dialectics, illustrates
the ways of thought.
A scene: half a dozen of us are sitting around a table writing letters
asking for money on behalf of the various organizations we run. We are
all elated, laughing, inflated by our sneers at the people we are begging
from, our "respectable sponsors." Because it is a small town, and there
were never enough philanthropists to go around, we are swapping our
sponsors like playing cards. "You can have Councillor Smith for Medical
Aid, if I can have MP Jones for Friends of." "Then I shall have Cabinet
Minister Z." "Then I shall have Lawyer X." Most of them appeared on
the letterheads of
all
the organizations. "We got a fiver out of him last
time." "Then he can cough up another fiver. They are only doing it
anyway to get their names on the letterheads." What had our "respectable
sponsors" done to earn such contempt? They were successful, by defini–
tion. They were not young. Worst of all, they were not revolutionaries.
People who believed in achieving socialism or even a just society by
peaceful means were cowardly lackeys of the ruling class, at the very least.
