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[...] It is called: 'For Peace and Happiness,' and is written by a young worker. At least, that is how he is described by Comrade Butte. In fact, he is nearly forty, has been a Communist Party official these twenty years, was once a bricklayer. The writing is bad, the story lifeless, but what is frightening about this book is that it is totally inside the current myth. If that useful imaginary man from Mars (or for that matter, a man from Russia) should read this book he would get the impression that (a) the cities of Britain were locked in deep poverty, unemployment, brutality, a Dickensian squalor; and that (b) the workers of Britain were all communist or at least recognised the Communist Party as their natural leader. This novel touches reality at no point at all. (Jack described it as: 'communist cloud-cuckoo spit.') It is, however, a very accurate re-creation of the self-deceptive myths of the Communist Party at this particular time; and I have read it in about fifty different shapes or guises during the last year. I say: 'You know quite well this is a very bad book.' A look of dry stubbornness comes over Comrade Butte's long, bony face. I remember that novel he wrote himself, twenty years ago, which was so fresh and good and marvel that this can be the same man. He now remarks: 'It's no masterpiece, I didn't say it was, but it's a good book, I think.' This is the overture, so to speak, to what is expected to follow. I will challenge him, and he will argue. The end will be the same, because the decision has already been taken. The book will be published. People in the Party with any discrimination will be even more ashamed because of the steadily debasing values of the Party; the Daily Worker will praise it: 'In spite of its faults, an honest novel of Party life'; the 'bourgeois' critics who notice it will be contemptuous. [...]
It occurred to me that the reason I came to work for Jack, without knowing, was that I wanted to have my deep private preoccupations about art, about literature (and therefore about life), about my refusal to write again, put into a sharp focus, where I must look at it, day after day.
[...] I am too egotistical, Jack is right, I should simply be concerned with some sort of work, and not bothered about my conscience- nonsense, I don't believe that. I shouldn't dislike Rose so much-well only a saint wouldn't, she's a terrible woman. I am living on unearned money, because it's only luck that book was a best-seller, and other people with more talent have to sweat and suffer-nonsense, it's not my fault. The fight with my various forms of dissatisfaction tires me; but I know this is not a personal fight. When I talk about this with other women, they tell me they have to fight all kinds of guilt they recognise as irrational, usually to do with working, or wanting time for themselves; and the guilt is a habit of the nerves from the past, just as my happiness a few moments ago was a habit of the nerves from a situation that is finished. [...]
'What do you have in mind, Richard? Are you going to pension off Marion? Is that it? Are you planning that Marion and Molly should live out their old age together somewhere while you...' Anna saw that this flight of fancy was in fact stumbling on the truth. 'Oh Richard,' she said. 'You can't abandon Marion now. Particularly when she's just begun to cope with her drinking.'
Richard said hotly: 'She doesn't care for me. She has no time for me. I might just as well not be there at all.' Wounded vanity rang in his voice. And Anna was amazed. For he was genuinely wounded. Marion's escape from her position as prisoner, or fellow-victim, had left him alone and hurt.
'I might just as well not be married at all. Marion's got her own room now. And she's never at home. Why should I be cheated out of a normal life?'
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'And I thought-Anna I wish I could explain it. It was really a revelation. I thought: I've been married to him for years and years, and all that time I've been-wrapped up in him. Well women are, aren't they? I've thought of nothing else. I've cried myself to sleep night after night for years. And I've made scenes, and been a fool and been unhappy and... The point is, what for? I'm serious Anna.' Anna smiled, and Marion went on: 'Because the point is, he's not anything, is he? He's not even very good-looking. He's not even very intelligent-I don't care if he is ever so important and a captain of industry. Do you see what I mean?' 'Well, and then?' 'I thought, My God, for that creature I've ruined my life. I remember the moment exactly. I was sitting at the breakfast-table, wearing a sort of negligee thing I'd bought because he likes me in that sort of thing-you know, frills and flowers, or well, he used to like me in them. I've always hated them. And I thought, for years and years I've even been wearing clothes I hated, just to please this creature.'
Anna laughed. Marion was laughing, her handsome face alive with self-critical irony, and her eyes sad and truthful. 'It's humiliating, isn't it Anna?'
'Yes, it is.'
[Here was pinned to the page a review of Frontiers of War cut from Soviet Writing, and dated August, 1952.] Terrible indeed is the exploitation in British colonies revealed in this courageous first novel, written and published under the very eye of the oppressor to reveal to the world the real truth behind British Imperialism! Yet admiration for the courage of the young writer, daring all for her social conscience, must not blind us to the incorrect emphasis she gives to the class struggle in Africa. This is the story of a young airman, a true patriot, so soon to die for his country in the Great Anti-Fascist War who falls in with a group of so-called socialists, decadent white settlers who play at politics. Sickened by his experience with this gang of rich cosmopolitan socialites, he turns to the people, to a simple black girl who teaches him the realities of true working-class life. Yet this is precisely the weak point of this well-intentioned but misguided novel. For what contact can a young upper-class Englishman have with the daughter of a cook? What a writer must search for in her calvary towards true artistic verity is the typical. Such a situation is not, cannot be, typical. Suppose the young writer, daring the Himalayas of truth itself, had made her hero a young white working man and her heroine an African organised worker from a factory? In such a situation she might have found a solution, political, social, spiritual, that could have shed light on the future struggle for Freedom in Africa. Where are the working masses in this book? Where the class conscious fighters? They do not appear. But let not this talented young writer lose heart! The artistic heights are for the great in spirit! Forward! for the sake of the world!
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'I've learned,' he drawls, sharp with wounded vanity, 'that it's not necessary to have a beautiful woman in the sack. It's enough to concentrate on one part of her-anything. There's always something beautiful in even an ugly woman. An ear for instance. Or a hand.'
Ella suddenly laughs and tries to catch his eye thinking that surely he will laugh. Because for the couple of hours before they had got into bed, their relationship had been good-humoured and humorous. What he has just said is positively the parody of a worldly-wise philanderer's remark. Surely he will smile at it? But no, it had been intended to hurt, and he would not withdraw it, even by a smile.
'Lucky I have nice hands, if nothing else,' says Ella at last, very dry.
He comes to her, picks up her hands, kisses them, wearily, rake-like: 'Beautiful, doll, beautiful.'
He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticises her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being 'a career woman.' This woman who, throughout the five years of then-affair, in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticised her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties, and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does-sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that's what you wanted, that's what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she 'really' is. He has rejected her 'real' self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected.
Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.
She looks inside herself again and finds: A man and a woman. She, after years of freedom, is over-ready for a serious love. He is playing at the role of a serious lover because of some need for asylum or refuge. (Ella gets the idea of this character from the Canadian script-writer-from his cool and mask-like attitude as a lover: he was watching himself in a role, the role of a married man with a mistress. It is this aspect of the Canadian that Ella uses-a man watching himself play a role.) The woman, over-hungry, over-intense, freezes the man even more than he is; although he only half-knows he is frozen. The woman, having been unpossessive, unjealous, undemanding, turns into a jailor. It is as if she is possessed by a personality not hers. And she watches her own deterioration into this possessive termagant with surprise, as if this other self has nothing to do with her. And she is convinced it has not. For when the man accuses her of being a jealous spy, she replied and with sincerity: 'I'm not jealous, I've never been jealous.' Ella looked at this story with amazement; because there was nothing in her own experience that could suggest it. Where, then, had it come from? Ella thinks of Paul's wife-but no; she had been too humble and accepting to suggest such a character. Or perhaps her own husband, self-abasing, jealous, abject, making feminine hysterical scenes because of his incapacity as a man? Presumably, thinks Ella, this figure, her husband, with whom she was linked so briefly and apparently without any real involvement, is the masculine equivalent of the virago in her story? Which, however, she decides not to write. It is written, within her, but she does not recognise it as hers. Perhaps I read it somewhere?-she wonders; or someone told it to me and I've forgotten hearing about it?