well treated,’ he says severely. Naomi says, ‘I’ve got a cow in my herd just like that brown one.’ We, coming on behind, are smiling, and even risking a laugh, but the look on the man’s face stops us.
It seems that the Soviet artists, who were allowed to paint only ‘healthy’ pictures, softened their situation, at least a little, by this ruse: A picture having been completed, they deliberately painted in a dog or an obviously out-of-place figure. When this picture was set in front of the officials who would say yea or nay, they were bound to criticise it, to cover themselves in case of criticism from high up. At which point the artist would come in. ‘Comrades, I’ve just seen – it’s that dog. I was wrong to put in that dog.’ ‘Very well, then, comrade, take out the dog.’ And the picture was passed. This sort of stratagem has turned out to be quite amazingly useful to me, in all kinds of contexts: suitably modified, of course.
While on a trip to a collective farm, the official cars having turned off onto the farm road, Naomi asks if we may stop. Our cars, four or five of them, stop. We all get out, about twenty people, and stand on the track, looking across fields. It is August, very hot, the grain already harvested. ‘That’s a very nasty bit of erosion,’ says Naomi, pointing. And indeed, it is. ‘But our grain harvest for last year was very good on this farm.’ ‘Well, you won’t be getting good harvests for long, if you allow that kind of erosion,’ she says. In this way did her frustrated need to criticise much worse show itself.
It was at this collective farm that I witnessed the bravest thing I have ever seen in my life.
We, the six of us, and our hosts, headed by Alexei Surkov, stood facing a crowd of collective farmers. We were being introduced. An old man, dressed in a white peasant smock, like Tolstoy, stepped out and said he wanted to speak. At once the others attempted to hustle and scold him back into the group. He stood his ground, said he had to speak to us. A silence. Oksana was clearly frightened. The old man spoke. Oksana interpreted, and Douglas Young, our Russian speaker, stopped her. ‘No, you are not interpreting properly,’ he said, blandly, like a professor. The old man addressed him, and Douglas interpreted, while Oksana squeezed her hands together, as if she were praying. ‘You must not believe what you are told. Visitors from abroad are told lies. You must not believe what you are shown. Our lives are terrible. The Russian people – I am speaking for the Russian people. You must go back to Britain and tell everybody what I am saying. Communism is terrible –’ And he was pulled back by the others and surrounded, but he stood among them with his burning eyes fixed on us, while the others scolded him. That was remarkable – they scolded and fussed at him; they didn’t shrink away from a pariah. And throughout the long, toast-filled meal that followed, he sat silent, his eyes on us, while they scolded – affectionately, there was no doubt about that. Yet at that time people vanished into the Gulag for much less than what he had done. No crime could be worse than to say such things to foreigners. He would be arrested and disposed of, and he knew that this would happen.
During this meal Coppard was enjoying himself flirting delightfully with the collective farm’s teacher and nurse. He loved charming young women, and these two were pretty and warm, and flirted with him.
I try and imagine this as a scene in a film, but it is truly too terrible. There is a long, loaded table, flowers, wine, a banquet. There, the special people chosen from the farm to represent the Soviet farmers. There, we happy delegates, elated and pleased with ourselves, the way you get on such trips. There, the party officials, all affability. There, the old man in his smock, never taking his eyes off us. Albert Coppard is flirting. We make speeches. Douglas Young reminds us all of the sufferings of the Scottish farmers. Naomi talks about British farming practices, contrasting them severely with what we saw while driving through the fields.
In the lavatory there is a framed copy of Kipling’s ‘If’. We are told that this is everyone’s favourite piece of poetry and they all know it by heart.
The next time I saw ‘If’ on the back of a lavatory door was on a large rich farm in Kenya, where there were photographs of the Queen everywhere.
We were taken to a building filled with presents to Stalin from his grateful subjects. It was sad, because they were mostly hideous, derivations or fallings-off from some genuine peasant or folk tradition, like carpets with his face occupying all the middle of them, or carved boxes or metalwork – all with his face. I left the others at it and went to sit outside. It was there I decided to try and write a story according to the communist formula, because I was becoming uncomfortably aware of our smugness and superiority. It would have very good and very bad characters in it, like Dickens. I wrote it. It was called ‘Hunger.’ It was about a youth from a village in Africa, risking his fortunes and his life going to the big city, this being a basic plot of our time, not only in Africa. The background came from Africans I knew, who would describe, when I asked, exactly how this or that was done in a village, how things were in the locations and shebeens of Salisbury. This story has been much translated and reprinted, and yet I am ashamed of it. Quite a few of my early stories I would like to see vanish away. What is wrong with that tale is sentimentality, which is often the sign of an impure origin: in this case, to write a tale with a moral.
Naomi and I and Oksana are standing in St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, and Naomi is lecturing Oksana about the Russian lack of taste. Naomi suffered aesthetically throughout that trip. Everything was ugly and second-rate. If Arnold and I murmured something about the war, she would say, Nonsense, they are producing new materials and furniture, and they are hideous. She showed Oksana the patterns on the walls and ceilings and said. Why, when you’ve got this, do you put such hideous patterns on your dress materials? Oksana was confused. She did not know the patterns on the new cottons and silks were hideous. When Naomi showed her the Liberty skirt she had on, Oksana did not see why it was any better than the bales of cotton she had showed us that morning. She thought the patterns on the cathedral walls were old and old-fashioned. She asked me afterwards why, if Mrs Mitchison was a rich lady, she wore cotton and not silk. For of course, if you could afford it, you wore silk all the time. Oksana’s best dress was silk. ‘And very nice too,’ said Richard Mason gallantly. Arnold and I discussed how Naomi patronized our hosts and apparently did not know it, and how we could stop her. We actually took her to task. ‘Naomi, you’ve got to stop hurting their feelings like this. We won’t have it.’
‘But I simply cannot understand it,’ Naomi said, that voluminous voice booming.’ Why can’t they take good models for their furniture instead of that rubbish?’
‘But, Naomi,’ said intellectual Arnold, ‘that’s what happens when a peasant tradition is smashed: they model themselves on something modern. They had taste in the old ways, but they have to develop taste in the new.’
‘Well,’ drawled Naomi, ‘but I’m going to have my say. This delegation is supposed to be bridging gaps: I’m jolly well going to tell them about their atrocious taste.’
‘Then when we get home we’re going to tell the press that you spent your time patronizing the Russians about their aesthetic sense.’
‘But, Arnold, my dear boy, you surely can’t be serious.’
‘You’re hurting their feelings, Naomi,’ said Arnold, his eyes full of tears.
In Leningrad they asked Naomi and me if we minded sharing a room. We thought this odd; it took me a long time to see that probably they wanted to overhear our conversations. It being August, the nights were not completely white, but almost; there were only a couple of hours of real dark. Exhausted, I flopped into bed, a double bed, and there was Naomi, prodding me, because she wanted me to tell her about my love life, so she could tell me about her lovers in the twenties. I thought this was like being back at school, naughty conversations in the dorm. She said young women these days had become real stick-in-the-muds. I went to sleep.
Leningrad was a sad city, grey and elegant, full of watery perspectives, its walls pocked with bullet holes or cracked because of the attritions of the siege, in which ten years before one and a half million people died. We moved from palace to palace, all built in the style I know some people adore, all gilt curlicues and cupids, rosy flesh, pink and blue ribbons, medallions, a very festival