What is truth? Few writers ask the question, let alone stay for an answer; and when they get into the subject they get into trouble. Plato condemned artists who did not tell the truth because this was immoral, but commanded rulers to tell "noble lies" because this would raise morale. A couple of millennia later, writers are often accused of putting too much fiction into their non-fiction (or too much non-fiction into their fiction); the accusation is often true. They defend themselves by claiming that untruth is justified because it is art or literature, or makes a better story or sells more copies, or that fiction is truer than fact. But even if comment is free, aren't facts sacred?
A case: Doris Lessing. She was a token woman among the so-called Angry Young Men; like some of them she has risked her reputation by writing miserable memoirs. Among her miseries are complaints about what other people say about her. What about what she says about other people? Her fiction includes many portraits of recognisable people-portraits both frank and false. Her autobiography has a whole chapter on the problem of truth. It claims to tell it as far as possible, and concludes: "Facts are easy." Is that a fact?
It is hard to test her claim against the first volume, Under my Skin (1995), because few readers know much about life in Southern Rhodesia from the 1920s to the 1940s. But the second volume, Walking in the Shade (1997), is a different matter. Many readers know a lot about life in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. As one of them, who lived near Doris Lessing in London and moved near her on the left, let me try.
On a trivial level, she says strange things about Britain in those days. "No caf?s. No good restaurants"; "You could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the British Isles"; "These days, everyone goes to a therapist, or is a therapist, but then no one did"; Ace Books in 1949 was "the very beginning of the paperback revolution"; "In 1958 I calculated that I earned on average ?20 a week, the working man's wage"; at about the same time, "I applied for a secretary's job in Mayfair" at "?7 a week." (I don't believe it.)
On a more serious level, she says strange things about the Communist party, which she joined, despite her quasi-religious doubts, in "what was probably the most neurotic act of my life," in "I think, 1951." She repeatedly attacks the Party, yet repeatedly insists that "it was the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people who became communists," that "there were so many colourful, extraordinary people in it," "good people, generous, kind, clever." Just as she has the false impression that no one ever mentions the influenza epidemic after the first world war, she has the false impression that "Stalin's deliberate mass murders are never condemned as Hitler's are."
She misspells Sam Aaronovitch and Hewlett Johnson and Ralph Samuel. She mistakes Hyman Levy, calling him "a poor Jew from the East End" who broke with the Party and died "soon afterwards"; in fact he came from Edinburgh and died 17 years after his expulsion. She says that Victor Gollancz "actually apologised publicly for publishing Animal Farm"; he actually refused to publish it, and it went to Fredric Warburg. She describes a conversation with Janet Hase, the secretary of New Left Review, who complained about the way she was treated by the men there: "She had wanted to review The Golden Notebook for them, but they wouldn't let her"; the conversation occurred in 1960, The Golden Notebook appeared in 1962. People who know a lot more about the Communist party and the New Left than I do have told me about many other things she gets wrong.
I know a lot more about the peace movement, about which she says more strange things. Her account of the Committee of 100 is sheer fantasy, especially the paranoid assertion that it was deliberately designed to destroy the CND. In a detailed account of the biggest sit-down demonstration in Trafalgar Square, she gives a precise date for once-"18th September 1960"; it was 17th September 1961. She describes some of the people sitting there, including "Bertrand Russell, like a little terrier with his acolytes"; Russell was sitting that day not in Trafalgar Square but in Brixton Prison. She describes another demonstration in Downing Street "shortly after that"; it was on 17th February 1958. She claims that during a later Committee of 100 demonstration "there was a real battle outside the American embassy"; there was no such event.
Old men (and women) forget. But famous writers who will be widely read should surely take the trouble to refresh their memories or verify their references, or else get researchers or editors to do the job for them. Doris Lessing and HarperCollins have between them perpetrated something of a fraud on the public, because few readers are likely to notice her many false suggestions and wrong statements, which will now act as a virus in the historical record. No, facts are not easy; and untruth is not truth.
