Walking in the Shade by Doris Lessing

enemy, and might easily disappear for ever. Never have I heard such vituperation: Gottfried loathed Moidi. But he did take her advice, went back, pulled strings, and survived.
    And then there was Peter. Moidi took a good look at my situation with Peter, shut up with me far too often, for long hours in that tiny flat. She had friends, the Eichners, also Austrians, refugees, who lived near East Grinstead. They had several children and were very poor. They lived in an old house on a couple of acres of rough rocky land and took in children at holiday times, up to twenty sometimes, and they all had a very good time. So Peter began to spend days, or a weekend, or—later—a couple of weeks, with the Eichners. I would put him on a coach at Victoria, and at the other end he became one of a gang of country children. This arrangement could not have been better for him, or for me.
    And then, Moidi saw the state I was in because of my mother’s imminent arrival and told me I should go to a friend of hers, Mrs. Sussman (Mother Sugar in The Golden Notebook ), because if I didn’t get some help, I would not survive. She was right. These days, everyone goes to a therapist, or is a therapist, but then no one did. Not in England, only in America, and even there the phenomenon was in its infancy. And particularly communists did not go ‘into analysis’, for it was ‘reactionary’ by definition, or rather without the need for definition. I was so desperate I went. I went two or three times a week, for about three years. I think it saved me. The process was full of the wildest anomalies or ironies—the communist word ‘contradictions’ seems too mild. First, Mrs. Sussman was a Roman Catholic, and Jungian, and while I liked Jung, as all artists do, I had no reason to love Roman Catholics. She was Jewish, and her husband, a dear old man, like a Rembrandt portrait, was a Jewish scholar. But she had converted to Roman Catholicism. This fascinated me, the improbability of it, but she said my wanting to discuss it was merely a sign of my evading real issues. Enough, she said, that Roman Catholicism had deeper and higher levels of understanding, infinitely removed from the crudities of the convent. (And Judaism did not have such higher reaches or peaks? ‘We were talking about your father, I think, my dear. Shall we go on?’) Mrs. Sussman specialised in unblocking artists who were blocked, could not write or paint or compose. This is what she saw as her mission in life. But I did not suffer from a ‘block’. She wanted to discuss my work. I did not want to. I did not see the need for it. So she was perpetually frustrated, bringing up the subject, while I deflected her. Mrs. Sussman was a cultivated, civilised, wise old woman, who gave me what I needed, which was support. Mostly support against my mother. When the pressures came on, all of them intolerable, because my mother was so pathetic, so lonely, so full of emotional blackmail—quite unconscious, for it was her situation that undermined me—Mrs. Sussman simply said, ‘If you don’t stand firm now, it will be the end of you. And the end of Peter too.’
    My mother was…but I have forgotten which archetype my mother was. She was one, I know. Mrs. Sussman would often bring some exchange to a close: She, he, is such and such an archetype…or is one at this time. I, for example, at various times was Electra, Antigone, Medea. The trouble was, while I was instinctively happy with the idea of archetypes, those majestic eternal figures, rising from literature and myth like stone shapes created by Nature out of rock and mountain, I hated the labels. Unhappy with communism, I was unhappiest with its language, with the labelling of everything, and the vindictive or automatic stereotypes, and here were more of them, whether described romantically as ‘archetypes’ or not. I did not see why she minded my criticisms, for