The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  I also knew what I was going to be told. Knowing was an “illumination.” During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I’ve had these moments of “knowing” one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die. Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it’s not my world. The fact is, the real experience can’t be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and the others won’t. But once having been there, there’s a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it’s not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It’s a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don’t we? And perhaps the condition of your existing at all is precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns—have you thought of that?

  So all I can say is that before going to sleep I “understood” why I had to sleep, and what the projectionist would say, and what I would have to learn. Though I knew it already; so that the dreaming itself already had the quality of words spoken after the event, or a summing-up, for emphasis’ sake, of something learned.

  As soon as the dream came on, the projectionist said, in Saul’s voice, very practical: “And now we’ll just run through them again.” I was embarrassed, because I was afraid I’d see the same set of films I had seen before—glossy and unreal. But this time, while they were the same films, they had another quality, which in the dream I named “realistic”; they had a rough, crude, rather jerky quality of an early Russian or German film. Patches of the film slowed down for long, long stretches while I watched, absorbed, details I had not had time to notice in life. The projectionist kept saying, when I had got some point he wanted me to get: “That’s it lady, that’s it.” And because of his directing me, I watched even more emphasis, or to which the pattern of my life had given emphasis, were now slipping past, fast and unimportant. The group under the gum-trees, for instance, or Ella lying in the grass with Paul, or Ella writing novels, or Ella wanting death in the aeroplane, or the pigeons falling to Paul’s rifle—all these had gone, been absorbed, had given place to what was really important. So that I watched, for an immense time, noting every movement, how Mrs Boothby stood in the kitchen of the hotel at Mashopi, her stout buttocks projecting like a shelf under the pressure of her corsets, patches of sweat dark under her armpits, her face flushed with distress, while she cut cold meat off various joints of animal and fowl, and listened to the young cruel voices and crueller laughter through a thin wall. Or I heard Willi’s humming, just behind my ear, the tuneless, desperately lonely humming; or watched him in slow motion, over and over again, so that I could never forget it, look long and hurt at me when I flirted with Paul. Or I saw Mr Boothby, the portly man behind the bar, look at his daughter with her young man. I saw his envious, but un-bitter gaze at this youth, before he turned away his eyes, and stretched out his hand to take an empty glass and fill it. And I saw Mr Lattimer, drinking in the bar, carefully not-looking at Mr Boothby, while he listened to his beautiful red-haired wife’s laughter. I saw him, again and again, bend down, shaky with drunkenness, to stroke the feathery red dog, stroking it, stroking it. “Get it?” said the projectionist, and ran another scene. I saw Paul Tanner coming home in the early morning, brisk and efficient with guilt, saw him meet his wife’s eyes, as she stood in front of him in a flowered apron, rather embarrassed and pleading, while the children ate their breakfast before going off to school. Then he turned, frowning, and went upstairs to lift a clean shirt down from a shelf. “Get it?” said the projectionist. Then the film went very fast, it flicked fast, like a dream, on faces I’ve seen once in the street, and have forgotten, on the slow movement of an arm, on the movement of a pair of eyes, all saying the same thing—the film was now beyond my experience, beyond Ella’s, beyond the notebooks, because there was a fusion; and instead of seeing separate scenes, people, faces, movements, glances, they were all together. The film became immensely slow again, it became a series of moments where a peasant’s hand bent to drop seed into earth, or a rock stood glistening while water slowly wore it down, or a man stood on a dry hillside in the moonlight, stood eternally, his rifle ready on his arm. Or a woman lay awake in darkness, saying No, I won’t kill myself, I won’t, I won’t.

  The projectionist now being silent, I called to him, It’s enough, and he didn’t answer, so I leaned out my own hand to switch off the machine. Still asleep, I read the words off a page I had written: That was about courage, but not the sort of courage I have ever understood. It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

  I looked at these words which I had written, and of which I felt critical; and then I took them to Mother Sugar. I said to her: “We’re back at the blade of grass again, that will press up through the bits of rusted steel a thousand years after the bombs have exploded and the world’s crust has melted. Because the force of will in the blade of grass is the same as the small painful endurance. Is that it?” (I was smiling sardonically in my dream, wary of a trap.)

  “And so?” she said.

  “But the point is, I don’t think I’m prepared to give all that much reverence to that damned blade of grass, even now.”

  At which she smiled, sitting in her chair four-square and upright, rather bad-tempered because of my slowness, because I so invariably missed the point. Yes, she looked like an impatient housewife who has mislaid something or who is going to be out with her time-table.

  Then I woke into a late afternoon, the room cold and dark. I was depressed; I was entirely the white female bosom shot full of cruel male arrows. I was aching with the need for Saul, and I wanted to abuse him and rail at him and call him names. Then of course he would say: Oh poor Anna, I’m sorry, then we would make love.

  A short story: or a short novel: comic and ironic: A woman, appalled by her capacity for surrendering herself to a man, determines to free herself. She determinedly takes two lovers, sleeping with them on alternate nights—the moment of freedom being when she would be able to say to herself that she has enjoyed them both equally. The two men become instinctively aware of each other’s existence; one, jealous, falls in love with her seriously; the other becomes cool and guarded. In spite of all her determination, she cannot prevent herself loving the man who has fallen in love with her; freezing up with the man who is guarded. Nevertheless, although she is in despair that she is as “unfree” as ever, she announces to both men that she has now become thoroughly emancipated, she has at last achieved the ideal of full sexual and emotional pleasure with two men at once. The cool and guarded man is interested to hear it, makes detached and intelligent remarks about female emancipation. The man she is in fact in love with, hurt and appalled, leaves her. She is left with the man she does not love and who does not love her, exchanging intelligent psychological conversation.

  The idea for this story intrigued me, and I began thinking how it should be written. How, for instance, would it change if I used Ella instead of myself? I had not thought about Ella for some time, and I realised that of course she had changed in the interval; she would have become more defensive, for instance. I saw her
with her hair altered—she would be tying it back again, looking severe; she would be wearing different clothes. I was watching Ella moving about my room; and then I began imagining how she would be with Saul—much more intelligent, I think, than I, cooler, for instance. After a while I realised I was doing what I had done before, creating “the third”—the woman altogether better than I was. For I could positively mark the point where Ella left reality, left how she would, in fact, behave because of her nature; and move into a large generosity of personality impossible to her. But I didn’t dislike this new person I was creating; I was thinking that quite possibly these marvellous, generous things we walk side by side with in our imaginations could come in existence, simply because we need them, because we imagine them. Then I began to laugh because of the distance between what I was imagining and what in fact I was, let alone what Ella was.

  I heard Saul’s feet coming up the stairs, and I was interested to know who would come in. As soon as I saw him, although he looked ill and tired, I knew the devils would not be in my room that day; and perhaps never again, because I also knew what he planned to say.

  He sat on the edge of my bed and said: “It’s funny that you should have been laughing. I was thinking about you while I was walking around.”

  I saw how he had been walking through the streets, walking through the chaos of his imagination, clutching at ideas or sets of words to save him. I said: “Well, what were you thinking?”—waiting for the pedagogue to speak.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Because you’ve been rushing about a crazy city, making sets of moral axioms to save us both with, like mottoes out of Christmas crackers.”

  He said drily: “It’s a pity you know me so well. I thought I was going to astonish you with my self-control and brilliance. Yes, I suppose mottoes out of Christmas crackers is just.”

  “Well, let’s have them.”

  “In the first place, you don’t laugh enough Anna. I’ve been thinking. Girls laugh. Old women laugh. Women of your age don’t laugh, you’re all too damned occupied with the serious business of living.”

  “But I was in fact laughing my head off—I was laughing about free women.” I told him the plot of my short story, he sat listening, smiling wryly. Then he said: “That’s not what I meant, I meant really laughing.”

  “I’ll put it on my agenda.”

  “No, don’t say it like that. Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’s no hope for us. We’re going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.”

  “We’ve got to believe in our blueprints?”

  “We’ve got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.”

  “Right. What next?”

  “Secondly, you can’t go on like this, you’ve got to start writing again.”

  “Obviously if I could, I would.”

  “No, Anna, that’s not good enough. Why don’t you write that short story you’ve just told me about? No, I don’t want all that hokum you usually give me—tell me, in one simple sentence, why not. You can call it Christmas cracker mottoes if you like, but while I was walking about I was thinking that if you could simplify it in your mind, boil it all down to something, then you could take a good long look at it and beat it.”

  I began to laugh, but he said: “No, Anna, you’re going to really crack up unless you do.”

  “Very well then. I can’t write that short story or any other, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me.”

  “Who? Do you know?”

  “Of course I know. It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F.L.N. Or Mr Mathlong. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?”

  “You know very well that’s not what any of them would say.”

  “No. But you know quite well what I mean. I know you do. It’s the curse of all of us.”

  “Yes, I do know. But Anna, I’m going to force you into writing. Take up a piece of paper and a pencil.”

  I laid a sheet of clean paper on the table, picked up a pencil and waited.

  “It doesn’t matter if you fail. Why are you so arrogant? Just begin.”

  My mind went blank in a sort of panic. I laid down the pencil. I saw him staring at me, willing me, forcing me—I picked up the pencil again.

  “I’m going to give you the first sentence then. There are the two women you are, Anna. Write down: The two women were alone in the London flat.”

  “You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?”

  “Why say it like that? Write it, Anna.”

  I wrote it.

  “You’re going to write that book, you’re going to write it, you’re going to finish it.”

  I said: “Why is it so important to you that I should?”

  “Ah,” he said, in self-mocking despair. “A good question. Well, because if you can do it, then I can.”

  “You want me to give you the first sentence of your novel?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “On a dry hillside in Algeria, the soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle.”

  He smiled. “I could write that, you couldn’t.”

  “Then write it.”

  “On condition you give me your new notebook.”

  “”

  “I need it. That’s all.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m going to have to leave, Anna, you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then cook for me. I never thought I’d say to a woman, cook for me. I regard the fact that I can say it at all as a small step towards what they refer to as being mature.”

  I cooked and we slept. This morning I woke first and his face, sleeping, was ill and thin. I thought it was impossible he should go, I couldn’t let him, he was in no state to go.

  He woke, and I was fighting the desire to say: You can’t go. I must look after you. I’ll do anything if only you’ll say you’ll stay with me.

  I knew he was fighting his own weakness. I was wondering what would have happened if, all those weeks ago, he had not put up his arms around my neck unconsciously, in his sleep. I wanted, then, for him to put his arms up around my neck. I lay, fighting not to touch him, as he was fighting not to appeal to me, and I was thinking how extraordinary that an act of kindness, of pity, could be such a betrayal. My brain blacked out with exhaustion, and while it did, the pain of pity took me over and I cradled him in my arms, knowing it was a betrayal. He clung to me, immediately, for a second of genuine closeness. Then, at once, my falseness created his, for he murmured, in a child’s voice: “Ise a good boy,” not as he had ever whispered to his own mother, for those words could never have been his, they were out of literature. And he murmured them mawkishly, in parody. But not quite. Yet as I looked down at him, I saw his sharp ill face show first the sentimental falseness that went with the words; then a grimace of pain; then, seeing me look down, in horror, his grey eyes narrowed into a pure hating challenge, and we looked at each other helpless with our mutual shame and humiliation. Then his face relaxed. For a few seconds he slept, blacked out, as I had blacked out the moment before, just before I had bent to put my arms around him. Then he jerked himself out of sleep, all tenseness and fight, jerked himself out of my arms, glancing alert and efficient around the room for enemies, then stood up; all in one movement, so fast did these reactions follow each other.

  He said: “We can’t either of us ever go lower than that.”

  I said: “No.”

  “Well that’s played out,” he said.

  “Buttoned up and finished,” I said.

  He went up to pack his few things into his bag and cases.

  He came down again soon and leaned against the door of my big room. He was Saul Green. I saw Saul Green, the man
who had walked into my flat some weeks before. He was wearing the new close-fitting clothes that he had bought to clothe his thinness. He was a neat, smallish man with over-big shoulders and the bones of a too-thin face standing out, insisting that this was a stocky, strong-fleshed body, that this would again be a strong, broad-shouldered man when he had worked through his illness into health. I could see standing beside the small, thin, fair man, with his soft brush of blond hair, his sick yellow face, a strong sturdy brown-fleshed man, like a shadow that would absorb the body that cast it. Meanwhile he looked stripped for action, pared down, light on his feet, wary. He stood, thumbs hooked in his belt, fingers arrowing down (but now it was like a gallant parody of a rake’s stance) and he was sardonically challenging, his cool grey eyes on guard, but friendly enough. I felt towards him as if he were my brother, as if, like a brother, it wouldn’t matter how we strayed from each other, how far apart we were, we would always be flesh of one flesh, and think each other’s thoughts.