The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  “All young men believe they are going to be dead by the time they’re thirty. They can’t stand the compromise of ageing. And who am I to say they’re not right?”

  “I’m not all men. I’m Saul Green. No wonder I had to leave America. There’s no one left who speaks my kind of language. What happened to them all—I used to know plenty once. We were all world-changers. Now I drive across my country, looking up my old friends, and they’re all married or successful and having drunken private conversations with themselves because American values stink.”

  I laughed because of the sullen way he said married. He looked up to see why I laughed, and he said: “Oh yes, yes, I mean it. I’d walk into the fine new flat of an old friend, and I’d say: ‘Hey, what the hell do you mean by doing this job, you know it stinks, you know you’re destroying yourself?’ And he’d say: ‘But what about my wife and kids?’ I’d say: ‘Is it true what I heard—that you’d turned informer on your old friends?’ And he’d swallow another quick drink and say: ‘But Saul, there’s my wife and the kids.’ Jesus, yes. And so I hate the wife and the kiddies, and I’m right to hate them. Yes, all right, laugh, what could be funnier than my kind of idealism—it’s so old hat, it’s so naïve! There’s one thing you can’t say to anyone any more, so it seems: You know in your heart of hearts you shouldn’t be living like this. So, why do you? No, you can’t say it, you’re a prig…what’s the use of saying it, some kind of guts have gone out of people. I should have gone to Cuba earlier this year and joined Castro, and been killed.”

  “Obviously not, since you didn’t go.”

  “Determination enters again, in spite of the chance you were saluting a moment ago.”

  “If you really want to be killed, there are a dozen revolutions around you can get killed in.”

  “I’m not fitted to live life as she is organised for us. Do you know what Anna? I’d give anything to go back to when I was in the gang of idealist kids on the street corner, believing we could change everything. That’s the only time in my life I’ve been happy. Yes, all right, I know what you’re going to say.”

  So I said nothing. He lifted his head to look at me, and said: “But obviously I want you to say it.”

  So I said: “All American men look back and hanker after when they were in the group of young men before they had pressure on them to be successful or get married. Whenever I meet an American man, I wait for the moment when his face really lights up—it’s when he’s talking about the group of buddies.”

  “Thanks,” he said, sullen. “That buttons up the strongest emotion I’ve ever felt and disposes of it.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with us all. All our strongest emotions are buttoned up, one after another. For some reason, they’re irrelevant to the time we live in. What’s my strongest need—being with one man, love, all that. I’ve a real talent for it.” I heard my voice sullen, as his was, a moment before. I got up and went to the telephone.

  “What are you doing?”

  I rang Molly’s number, and I said: “I’m ringing Molly. She’ll say: How’s your American? I’ll say: I’m having an affair with him. An affair—that’s the word. I always did love that word, so sophisticated and debonair! Well, and she’ll say: That’s not the most sensible thing you ever did in your life? I’ll say no. That’ll button this one up. I want to hear her say it.” I stood listening to the telephone ringing in Molly’s flat. “I say now about five years of my life—that was when I loved a man who loved me. But of course I was very naïve in those days. Period. That’s buttoned up. I say: Then I went through a time when I was looking for men who would hurt me. I needed it. Period. That’s buttoned up.” The telephone went on ringing. “I was a communist for a time. On the whole, a mistake. A useful experience though, and one can never have too many of those. Period. That’s buttoned up.” There was no reply from Molly’s house, so I put my receiver down. “So she’ll have to say it another time,” I said.

  “But it won’t be true,” he said.

  “Possibly not. But I’d like to hear it, all the same.”

  A pause. “What’s going to happen to me, Anna?”

  I said, listening to hear what I would say, to find out what I thought: “You’re going to fight your way through what you are in now. You’ll become a very gentle, wise, kind man who people will come to when they need to be told that—they’re crazy in a good cause.”

  “Jesus, Anna!”

  “You sound as if I’d insulted you!”

  “Our old friend maturity again! Well, I’m not going to be bullied by that one.”

  “Oh, but ripeness is all, surely?”

  “No, it is not!”

  “But my poor Saul, there’s no help for you, you’re heading straight for it. What about all those marvellous people we know, aged about fifty or sixty? Well, there are a few of them…marvellous, mature, wise people. Real people, the phrase is, radiating serenity. And how did they get to be that way? Well, we know, don’t we? Every bloody one of them’s got a history of emotional crime, oh the sad bleeding corpses that litter the road to maturity of the wise, serene man or woman of fifty-odd! You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.”

  “I’m going right on being a cannibal.” He was laughing, but sullen.

  “Oh no you’re not. I can recognise a candidate for middle-aged serenity and ripeness a mile off. At thirty they are fighting mad, spitting fire and defiance and cutting sexual swathes in all directions. And I can see you now, Saul Green, living all strong and isolated from hand to mouth in some cold-water flat somewhere, sipping judiciously from time to time at some fine old Scotch. Yes, I can see you, you’ll have filled yourself out to your proper shape again. You’ll be one of those tough, square, solid middle-aged men, like a shabbying brown bear, your golden crew-cut greying judiciously at the temples. And you’ll probably have taken to spectacles, too. And you’ll have taken up silence, it might even come naturally by then. I can even see a neat blond temperately-greying beard. They’ll say: Know Saul Green? Now there’s a man! What strength! What calm! What serenity! Mind you, from time to time one of the corpses will let out a small self-pitying bleat—remember me?”

  “The corpses, I would have you know, are one and all on my side, and if you don’t understand that, you understand nothing.”

  “Oh I understand it, but it doesn’t make it less depressing, the way the victims are always so willing to contribute their flesh and blood.”

  “Depressing! I’m good for people, Anna. I wake them up and shake them and push them on their proper way.”

  “Nonsense. The people who are oh so willing to be victims are those who’ve given up being cannibals themselves, they’re not tough or ruthless enough for the golden road to maturity and the ever-so-wise shrug. They know they’ve given up. What they are really saying is: I’ve given up, but I’ll be happy to contribute my flesh and blood to you.”

  “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” he said, his face clenched up so that his blond eyebrows met in a hard line across his brow, and his teeth showed, grinning angrily.

  “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” I said.

  “You, I take it, not being a cannibal?”

  “Oh yes indeed. But I’ve dished out aid and comfort too, from time to time. No, I’m not for sainthood, I’m going to be a boulder-pusher.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a great black mountain. It’s human stupidity. There are a group of people who push a boulder up the mountain. When they’ve got a few feet up, there’s a war, or the wrong sort of revolution, and the boulder rolls down—not to the bottom, it always manages to end a few inches higher than when it started. So the group of people put their shoulders to the boulder and start pushing again. Meanwhile, at the top of the mountain stand a few great men. Sometimes they look down and nod and say: Good, the boulder-pushers are still on duty. But meanwhile we are meditating about the nature of space, or what it will be like when th
e world is full of people who don’t hate and fear and murder.”

  “Hmm. Well I want to be one of the great men on top of the mountain.”

  “Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.”

  And suddenly he leaped up and off the bed, like a black steel spring snapping, and stood, the hatred behind his eyes, as sudden as if switched on, and said: “Oh no, you don’t, oh no, I’m not going to…I’m not…I, I, I.” I thought, Well, so he’s back, is he. I went to the kitchen, got a bottle of Scotch, came back, lay on the floor, and drank the Scotch, while he talked. I lay on the floor, looking at the patterns of gold light on the ceiling, hearing the irregular pattering of big rain outside, and felt the tension lay hands on my stomach. Sick Anna was back. I, I, I, I, like a machine-gun ejaculating regularly. I was listening and not listening, as if to a speech I had written someone else was delivering. Yes, that was me, that was everyone, the I. I. I. I am. I am. I am going to. I won’t be. I shall. I want. I. He was walking around the room like an animal, a talking animal, his movements violent and charged with energy a hard force that spat out I, Saul, Saul, I, I want. His green eyes were fixed, not seeing, his mouth, like a spoon or a spade or a machine-gun, shot out, spewed out, hot aggressive language, words like bullets. “I’m not going to be destroyed by you. By anyone. I’m not going to be shut up, caged, tamed, told be quiet keep your place do as you’re told I’m not…I’m saying what I think, I don’t buy your world.” I could feel the violence of his black power attack every nerve in me. I felt my stomach muscles churning, my back muscles tense as wires. I lay with the bottle of Scotch in my hand, sipping it steadily, feeling the drunkenness take hold, listening, listening…I realised I had been lying there a long time, hours perhaps, while Saul stalked and shouted. Once or twice I said something, threw words against his stream of talk, and it was if a machine, tuned or set by a mechanic to stop briefly at a sound from outside, stopped, checked itself mechanically, mouth, or metal opening already in position to ejaculate the next stream of I I I I I I I. I once got up, not really seen by him, for he was not seeing me, except as an enemy he had to shout down, and I put on Armstrong, partly for myself, clutching close as a comforter the pure genial music, and I said: “Listen Saul, listen.” He frowned slightly, his brows twitching, and said mechanically: “Yeah? What?” Then I I I I I I, I’m going to show you all with your morality and your love and your laws, I I I I. So I took off the Armstrong, and put on his music, cool and cerebral, the detached music for men who refuse the madness and the passion, and for a moment he stopped, then sat, as if the muscles of his thighs had been cut, he sat, his head on his breast, eyes shut, listening to the soft machine-gun drumming of Hamilton, the drumming that filled the room as his words had, then he said, in his own voice: “My God, what we’ve lost, what we’ve lost, what we’ve lost, how can we ever get back to it, how can we get back to it again? And then, as if this had not happened, I could see how the muscles of his thighs tensed and jerked him up and I switched off the machine, since he was not listening, except to his own words, I I I, and lay down again and listened to the words spattering against the walls and ricochetting everywhere, I I I, the naked ego. I was so sick, I was clenched up into a ball of painful muscles, while the bullets flew and spattered, and for a moment I blacked out and revisited my nightmare where I knew, but really knew, how war waited, me running down the emptied street of white dirtied buildings in a silent city but filled with human beings silent with waiting, while somewhere close the small, ugly container of death exploded, soft, soft, it exploded into the waiting silence, spread death, crumbling the buildings, breaking the substance of life, disintegrating the structure of flesh, while I screamed, soundless, no one hearing, just as all the other human beings in the silent buildings screamed, no one hearing. When I came out of the blackout, Saul was standing against the wall, pressing against it with his back, the muscles of his thighs and back gripping the wall, looking at me. He had seen me. He was back again, for the first time in hours. His face was white, blood-drained, his eyes grey and strained and full of horror because I was lying there screwed up with pain. He said, in his own voice: “Anna, for God’s sake, don’t look like that,” but then a hesitation, and back came the madman, for now it was not only I I I I, but I against women. Women the jailors, the consciences, the voice of society, and he was directing a pure stream of hatred against me, for being a woman. And now the whisky had weakened me and soddened me, and I felt in myself the weak soft sodden emotion, the woman betrayed. Oh boohoo, you don’t love me, you don’t love, men don’t love women any more. Oh boohoo, and my dainty pink-tipped forefinger pointed at my white, pink-tipped betrayed bosom, and I began to weep weak, sodden whisky-diluted tears on behalf of womankind. As I wept I saw his prick stand up under his jeans, and I got wet, and I thought, derisive, oh so now he’s going to love me, he’s going to love poor betrayed Anna and her wounded white bosom. Then he said in the scandalised little voice of a schoolboy, a prig, “Anna, you’re drunk, get off the floor.” And I said, “I won’t,” weeping, luxuriating in the weakness. So he dragged me up, scandalised and lustful, and came into me, very big but like a schoolboy, making love to his first woman, too quick, full of shame and heat. And then I said, being unsatisfied: “Now be your age,” using his language, and he said, scandalised: “Anna you’re drunk, now sleep it off.” So he covered me and kissed me, went tiptoeing out, like a guilty schoolboy proud of his first lay, and I saw him, I saw Saul Green, the good American boy, sentimental and ashamed, having laid his first woman. And I lay and I laughed, and I laughed. Then I slept and woke laughing. I don’t know what I had been dreaming, but I woke out of pure light-heartedness, and then I saw he was beside me.

  He was cold, so I held him in my arms, full of happiness. I knew, because of the quality of my happiness, that I must have been flying easily and joyfully in my sleep, and that meant I would not always be sick Anna. But when he woke he was exhausted from the hours of I I I I, and his face was yellow and agonised, and when we got out of bed we were both exhausted, and we drank coffee and read the newspapers silent, unable to say anything, in the big, brightly coloured kitchen. He said: “I ought to work.” But we knew we would not; and we went back to bed, too tired to move, and I even wished the Saul back from the night before, full of black murderous energy, it was so frightening to be so exhausted. Then he said: “I can’t lie here.” And I said: “No.” But we didn’t move. Then he got, or crawled, out of bed. And I thought: How is he going to get himself out of here, he’s got to get steam up to do it. And though the tension in my stomach told me, I was even interested to see. He said, challenging: “I’m going for a walk.” I said: “All right.” He gave me a furtive look and went out to dress and then came back. He said: “Why don’t you stop me?” And I said: “Because I don’t want to.” And he said: “If you knew where I was going, you’d stop me.” And I said, hearing my voice harden: “Oh, I know you’re going to a woman.” And he said: “Well, you’ll never know, will you?”

  “No, and it doesn’t matter.”

  He had been standing at the door, but now came into the room, hesitating. He had an air of being interested.

  I remembered De Silva’s: “I wanted to see what would happen.”

  Saul wanted to see what would happen. And so did I. I could feel in myself, stronger than anything else, a spiteful, positively joyous interest—as if he, Saul and I were two unknown quantities, two forces anonymous, without personality. It was as if the room held two totally malignant beings who, if the other suddenly fell dead or began screaming with pain, would say: “Well, so that’s it, is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, now sullen, but in a kind of tentative sullenness, a rehearsal for sullenness, or a repetition of it too old for conviction. “It doesn’t matter, you say, but you watch every movement I make like a spy.”

  I said, in a jaunty jolly voice, accompanying it with a laugh, like a weak ebbing gasp (a laugh I’ve heard from women under acute stres
s and which I was copying): “I’m a spy because you make me one.” He stood silent, but looked as if he were listening, as if the words he must say next would be fed to him from a play-back: “I’m not going to be corralled by any dame in the world. I’ve never been yet and I never shall.”

  The “I’ve never been yet and I never shall” came out in a hastening rush, as if a record had been speeded up.

  And I said, in the same murderously jolly malicious voice: “If you mean by being corralled, that your woman should know every move you make, then you’re corralled now.”

  And I heard myself letting out the expiring, weak, yet triumphant laugh.

  “That’s what you think,” he said, malignant.

  “That’s what I know.”

  The dialogue had run itself out, and now we looked at each other, interested, and I said: “Well we’ll never have to say that again.” And he said, interested: “I should hope not.” With which he went out, in a rush, driven by the energy from this exchange.

  I stood and thought: I can find out the truth by going upstairs and looking at his diary. But I knew I would not, and that I never would again. All that was finished. But I was very ill. I went to the kitchen for coffee, but measured myself a small measure of Scotch. I looked at the kitchen, very bright, very clean. Then vertigo attacked me. The colours were too bright, as if they were hot. And I became conscious of all the faults of the kitchen which usually gives me pleasure—a crack in glistening white enamel, dust on a rail, the paint beginning to discolour. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of cheapness and nastiness. The kitchen should all be painted again, but nothing would change the flat’s being so old and the walls decaying in a decaying house. I switched off the lights in the kitchen and came back into this room. But soon it seemed as bad as the kitchen. The red curtains had an ominous yet tawdry gleam, and the white of the walls was tarnished. I found I was walking around and around the room, staring at the walls, curtains, the door, repelled by the physical substance of which the room was made, while colours attacked me by their hot unreality. I was looking at the room as I might look at the face of someone I know very well, for the marks of strain or tension. At my own, or Saul’s for instance, knowing what is behind my neat, composed little face, what is behind Saul’s broad, open, blond face, that looks ill, admittedly, but who would guess, who had not experienced it, the explosion of possibilities that deploy through his mind? Or at the face of a woman on a train, when I can see from a tense brow or a knot of pain that a world of disorder lies hidden there and marvel at the power of human beings to hold themselves together under pressure. My big room, like the kitchen, had become, not the comfortable shell which held me, but an insistent attack on my attention from a hundred different points, as if a hundred enemies were waiting for my attention to be deflected so that they might creep up behind me and attack me. A door-knob that needed polishing, a trace of dust across white paint, a yellowish streak where the red of the curtains had faded, the table where my old notebooks lie concealed—these assaulted me, claimed me, with hot waves of rocking nausea. I knew I had to get to the bed, and again I had to crawl across the floor to reach it. I lay on the bed and I knew before I fell asleep that the projectionist was in wait for me.