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PARTISAN REVIEW
DORIS LESSING
In the late fifties and well into the sixties visitors came from everywhere
to London because of what was being seen as a renaissance of democ–
ratic socialism. The collapse of communism in Europe, given impetus by
the Twentieth Congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, not to men–
tion the foul odors that increasingly came from behind the Iron Curtain,
meant that generally the Left was in trouble. But westward-Iook!-the
land was bright: over there in Britain was a new dawn, partly because
of the Aldermaston Marches, which attracted people with horizons and
ideas much wider than the simple "Ban the Bomb!" and partly because
of the New Left-which already had its periodical,
New Left Review–
was young, noisy, energetic, irreverent about the schisms of the past.
William Phillips came partly from curiosity and, I think too, from a
hope that at last there would be a genuinely democratic socialist party.
People were asking if the New Left could develop into a political party
of a sane, wholesome, non-dogmatic kind. I met William at Wayland
Young's house in Bayswater, invited there so he could meet a representa–
tive of the new thinking: me. Wayland at that stage in his life was a
romantic socialist, a generous soul far from the viperish or peevish
intrigues of the Left. To see me as a representative showed how innocent
he was. But more than once I was summoned to Bayswater or recom–
mended to some visitor hungry for political enlightenment whom I was
bound to disappoint, because I had been so relieved to throw off the
whole murky bundle of tricks which was communism that I had perhaps
gone to an extreme reaction: a plague on all your houses, leave me alone.
That Wayland had become this focus was ironical enough. He was so
visible because the newspapers liked to photograph him marching from
Aldermaston with his lovely wife and at least some of his children.
It
is
not only Brits who dearly love a Lord : Wayland would be Lord Kennet.
Foreigners have always been intrigued by the way aristocrats in England
so easily espouse the extreme left wing. There used to be a joke on the
Left that the Communist Party could never get one of its own into the
House of Commons, but there were always c.P. members in the House
of Lords .
On that first evening, sauntering back into central London along
Bayswater, I was struck by the detailed and well-informed cross–
questioning I was getting, by a man who knew the history of socialist
Britain as well as he did the story of the labor movement in America.
Doris Lessing'S most recent book is
The Sweetest Dream.
