The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  Jean works as a manager of a canteen. Long hours. Keeps her flat and her children and herself very well. Secretary of local Party branch. She is dissatisfied with herself. “I’m not doing enough, I mean the Party’s not enough, I get fed up, just paper work, like an office, doesn’t mean anything.” Laughs, nervously. “George—” (her husband) “says that’s the incorrect attitude, but I don’t see why I should always have to bow down. I mean, they’re wrong often enough, aren’t they?” Laughs. “I decided to do something worthwhile for a change.” Laughs. “I mean, something different. After all, even the leading comrades are talking about sectarianism aren’t they…well of course the leading comrades should be the first to say it…” Laughs. “Though that’s not what seems to happen…anyway, I decided to do something useful for a change.” Laughs. “I mean, something different. So now I have a class of backward children on Saturday afternoons. I used to be a teacher you know. I coach them. No, not Party children, just ordinary children.” Laughs. “Fifteen of them. It’s hard work. George says I’d be better occupied making Party members, but I wanted to do something really useful…” And so on. The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but who have a powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the Party is their family. The poet, Paul, who got drunk last week and said he was sick and disgusted with the Party, but he joined it in 1935, and if he left it, he’d be leaving “his whole life.”

  [The yellow notebook looked like the manuscript of a novel, for it was called The Shadow of the Third. It certainly began like a novel:]

  Julia’s voice came loud up the stairs: “Ella, aren’t you going to the party? Are you going to use the bath? If not, I will.” Ella did not answer. For one thing, she was sitting on her son’s bed, waiting for him to drop off to sleep. For another, she had decided not to go to the party, and did not want to argue with Julia. Soon she made a cautious movement off the bed, but at once Michael’s eyes opened, and he said: “What party? Are you going to it?” “No,” she said, “go to sleep.” His eyes sealed themselves, the lashes quivered and lay still. Even asleep he was formidable, a square-built, tough four-year-old. In the shaded light his sandy hair, his lashes, even a tiny down on his bare forearm gleamed gold. His skin was brown and faintly glistening from the summer. Ella quietly turned off the lights—waited; went to the door—waited; slipped out—waited. No sound. Julia came brisk up the stairs, enquiring in her jolly off-hand voice: “Well, are you going?” “Shhhh, Michael’s just off to sleep.” Julia lowered her voice and said: “Go and have your bath now. I want to wallow in peace when you’re gone.” “But I said I’m not going,” said Ella, slightly irritable.

  “Why not?” said Julia, going into the large room of the flat. There were two rooms and a kitchen, all rather small and low-ceilinged, being right under the roof. This was Julia’s house, and Ella lived in it, with her son Michael, in these three rooms. The larger room had a recessed bed, books, some prints. It was bright and light, rather ordinary, or anonymous. Ella had not attempted to impose her own taste on it. Some inhibition stopped her: this was Julia’s house, Julia’s furniture; somewhere in the future lay her own taste. It was something like this that she felt. But she enjoyed living here and had no plans for moving out. Ella went after Julia and said: “I don’t feel like it.” “You never feel like it,” said Julia. She was squatting in an armchair sizes too big for the room, smoking. Julia was plump, stocky, vital, energetic, Jewish. She was an actress. She had never made much of being an actress. She played small parts, competently. They were, as she complained, of two kinds: “Stock working-class comic, and stock working-class pathetic.” She was beginning to work for television. She was deeply dissatisfied with herself.

  When she said: “You never feel like it,” it was a complaint partly against Ella, and partly against herself. She always felt like going out, could never refuse an invitation. She would say that even when she despised some role she was playing, hated the play, and wished she had nothing to do with it, she nevertheless enjoyed what she called “flaunting her personality around.” She loved rehearsals, theatre shop and small talk and malice.

  Ella worked for a woman’s magazine. She had done articles on dress and cosmetics, and of the getting-and-keeping-a-man kind, for three years, hating the work. She was not good at it. She would have been sacked if she had not been a friend of the woman editor. Recently she had been doing work she liked much better. The magazine had introduced a medical column. It was written by a doctor. But every week several hundred letters came in and half of them had nothing to do with medicine, and were of such a personal nature that they had to be answered privately. Ella handled these letters. Also she had written half a dozen short stories which she herself described satirically as “sensitive and feminine,” and which both she and Julia said were the kind of stories they most disliked. And she had written part of a novel. In short, on the face of it there was no reason for Julia to envy Ella. But she did.

  The party tonight was at the house of the doctor under whom Ella worked. It was a long way out, in North London. Ella was lazy. It was always an effort for her to move herself. And if Julia had not come up, she would have gone to bed and read.

  “You say,” said Julia, “that you want to get married again, but how will you ever, if you never meet anybody?”

  “That’s what I can’t stand,” said Ella, with sudden energy. “I’m on the market again, so I have to go off to parties.”

  “It’s no good taking that attitude—that’s how everything is run, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Ella, wishing Julia would go, sat on the edge of the bed (at the moment a divan and covered with soft-green-woven stuff), and smoked with her. She imagined she was hiding what she felt, but in fact she was frowning and fidgety. “After all,” said Julia, “you never meet anyone but those awful phonies in your office.” She added, “Besides your decree was absolute last week.”

  Ella suddenly laughed, and after a moment Julia laughed with her, and they felt at once friendly to each other.

  Julia’s last remark had struck a familiar note. They both considered themselves very normal, not to say conventional women. Women, that is to say, with conventional emotional reactions. The fact that their lives never seemed to run on the usual tracks was because, so they felt, or might even say, they never met men who were capable of seeing what they really were. As things were, they were regarded by women with a mixture of envy and hostility, and by men with emotions which—so they complained—were depressingly banal. Their friends saw them as women who positively disdained ordinary morality. Julia was the only person who would have believed Ella if she had said that for the whole of the time while she was waiting for the divorce she had been careful to limit her own reactions to any man (or rather, they limited themselves) who showed an attraction for her. Ella was now free. Her husband had married the day after the divorce was final. Ella was indifferent to this. It had been a sad marriage; no worse than many, certainly; but then Ella would have felt a traitor to her own self had she remained in a compromise marriage. For outsiders, the story went that Ella’s husband George had left her for somebody else. She resented the pity she earned on this account, but did nothing to put things right, because of all sorts of complicated pride. And besides, what did it matter what people thought?

  She had the child, her self-respect, a future. She could not imagine this future without a man. Therefore, and of course she agreed that Julia was right to be so practical, she ought to be going to parties and accepting invitations. Instead she was sleeping too much and was depressed.

  “And besides, if I go, I’ll have to argue with Dr West, and it does no good.” Ella meant that she believed Dr West was limiting his usefulness, not from lack of conscientiousness, but from lack of imagination. Any query which he could not answer by advice as to the right hospitals, medicine, treatment, he handed over to Ella.

  “I know, they
are absolutely awful.” By they, Julia meant the world of officials, bureaucrats, people in any kind of office. They, for Julia, were by definition middle-class—Julia was a communist, though she had never joined the Party, and besides she had working-class parents.

  “Look at this,” said Ella excitedly, pulling a folded blue paper from her handbag. It was a letter, on cheap writing paper, and it read: “Dear Dr Allsop. I feel I must write to you in my desperation. I get my rheumatism in my neck and head. You advise other sufferers kindly in your column. Please advise me. My rheumatism began when my husband passed over on the 9th March, 1950, at 3 in the afternoon at the Hospital. Now I am getting frightened, because I am alone in my flat, and what might happen if my rheumatism attacked all over and then I could not move for help. Looking forward to your kind attention, yours faithfully. (Mrs) Dorothy Brown.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he had been engaged to write a medical column, not to run an out-patients for neurotics.”

  “I can hear him,” said Julia, who had met Dr West once and recognised him as the enemy at first glance.

  “There are hundreds and thousands of people, all over the country, simmering away in misery and no one cares.”

  “No one cares a damn,” said Julia. She stubbed out her cigarette and said, apparently giving up her struggle to get Ella to the party, “I’m going to have my bath.” And she went downstairs with a cheerful clatter, singing.

  Ella did not at once move. She was thinking: If I go, I’ll have to iron something to wear. She almost got up to examine her clothes, but frowned and thought: If I’m thinking of what to wear, that means that I really want to go? How odd. Perhaps I do want to go? After all, I’m always doing this, saying I won’t do something, then I change my mind. The point is, my mind is probably already made up. But which way? I don’t change my mind. I suddenly find myself doing something when I’ve said I wouldn’t. Yes. And now I’ve no idea at all what I’ve decided.

  A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for months. The point of the novel would be the contrast between the surface of his life, which was orderly and planned, yet without any long-term objective, and an underlying motif which had reference only to the suicide, which would lead up to the suicide. His plans for his future were all vague and impossible, in contrast with the sharp practicality of his present life. The undercurrent of despair or madness or illogicalness would lead on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future. So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide. The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of his life would be understood—a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality, commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood at the moment of death that the link between the dark need for death, and death, itself, had been the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity, but intimations of madness.

  The idea for this novel had come to Ella at a moment when she found herself getting dressed to go out to dine with people after she had told herself she did not want to go out. She said to herself, rather surprised at the thought: This is precisely how I would commit suicide. I would find myself just about to jump out of an open window or turning on the gas in a small closed-in room, and I would say to myself, without any emotion, but rather with the sense of suddenly understanding something I should have understood long before: Good Lord! So that’s what I’ve been meaning to do. That’s been it all the time! And I wonder how many people commit suicide in precisely this way? It is always imagined as some desperate mood, or a moment of crisis. Yet for many it must happen just like that—they find themselves putting their papers in order, writing farewell letters, even ringing up their friends, in a cheerful, friendly way, almost with a feeling of curiosity…they must find themselves packing newspapers under the door, against window-frames, quite calmly and efficiently, remarking to themselves, quite detached: Well, well! How very interesting. How extraordinary I didn’t understand what it was all about before!

  Ella found this novel difficult. Not for technical reasons. On the contrary, she could imagine the young man very clearly. She knew how he lived, what all his habits were. It was as if the story were already written somewhere inside herself, and she was transcribing it. The trouble was, she was ashamed of it. She had not told Julia about it. She knew her friend would say something like: “That’s a very negative subject, isn’t it?” Or: “That’s not going to point the way forward…” Or some other judgement from the current communist armoury. Ella used to laugh at Julia for these phrases, yet at the bottom of her heart it seemed that she agreed with her, for she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it. And besides being surprised and ashamed of its subject, she was sometimes frightened. She had even thought: Perhaps I’ve made a secret decision to commit suicide that I know nothing about? (But she did not believe this to be true.) And she continued to write the novel, making excuses such as: “Well, there’s no need to get it published, I’ll just write it for myself.” And in speaking of it to friends, she would joke: “But everyone I know is writing a novel.” Which was more or less true. In fact her attitude towards this work was the same as someone with a passion for sweet-eating, indulged in solitude, or some other private pastime, like acting out scenes with an invisible alter ego, or carrying on conversation with one’s image in the looking-glass.

  Ella had taken a dress out of the cupboard and set out the ironing-board, before she said: So, I’m going to the party after all, am I? I wonder at what point I decided that? While she ironed the dress, she continued to think about her novel, or rather to bring into the light a little more of what was already there, waiting, in the darkness. She had put the dress on and was looking at herself in the long glass before she finally left the young man to himself, and concentrated on what she was doing. She was dissatisfied with her appearance. She had never very much liked the dress. She had plenty of clothes in her cupboard, but did not much like any of them. And so it was with her face and hair. Her hair was not right, it never was. And yet she had everything to make her really attractive. She was small, and small-boned. Her features were good, in a small, pointed face. Julia kept saying: “If you did yourself up properly you’d be like one of those piquant French girls, ever so sexy, you’re that type.” Yet Ella always failed. Her dress tonight was a simple black wool which had looked as if it ought to be “ever so sexy” but it was not. At least, not on Ella. And she wore her hair tied back. She looked pale, almost severe.

  “But I don’t care about the people I’m going to meet,” she thought, turning away from the glass. “So it doesn’t matter. I’d try harder for a party I really wanted to go to.”

  Her son was asleep. She shouted to Julia outside the bathroom door: “I’m going after all.” To which Julia replied with a calm triumphant chuckle: “I thought you would.” Ella was slightly annoyed at the triumph, but said: “I’ll be back early.” To which Julia did not reply directly. She said: “I’ll keep my bedroom door open for Michael. Good night.”

  To reach Dr West’s house meant half an hour on the underground, changing once, and then a short trip by bus. One reason why Ella was always reluctant to drag herself out of Julia’s house was because the city frightened her. To move, mile after mile, through the weight of ugliness that is London in its faceless peripheral wastes made her angry; then the anger ebbed out, leaving fear. At the bus-stop, waiting for her bus, she changed her mind and decided to walk, to punish herself for her cowardice. She would walk the mile to the house, and face what she hated
. Ahead of her the street of grey mean little houses crawled endlessly. The grey light of a late summer’s evening lowered a damp sky. For miles in all directions, this ugliness, this meanness. This was London—endless streets of such houses. It was hard to bear, the sheer physical weight of the knowledge because—where was the force that could shift the ugliness? And in every street, she thought, people like the woman whose letter was in her handbag. These streets were ruled by fear and ignorance, and ignorance and meanness had built them. This was the city she lived in, and she was part of it, and responsible for it…Ella walked fast, alone in the street, hearing her heels ring behind her. She was watching the curtains at the windows. At this end, the street was working-class, one could tell by the curtains, of lace and flowered stuffs. These were the people who wrote in the terrible unanswerable letters she had to deal with. But now things suddenly changed, because the curtains at the windows changed—here was a sheen of peacock blue. It was a painter’s house. He had moved into the cheap house and made it beautiful. And other professional people had moved in after him. Here were a small knot of people different from the others in the area. They could not communicate with the people further down the street, who could not, and probably would not, enter these houses at all. Here was Dr West’s house—he knew the first-comer, the painter, and had bought the house almost opposite. He had said: “Just in time, the values are rising already.” The garden was untidy. He was a busy doctor with three children and his wife helped him with his practice. No time for gardens. (The gardens further down the street had been mostly well-tended.) From this world, thought Ella, came no letters to the oracles of the women’s magazines. The door opened in on the brisk, kindly face of Mrs West. She said: “So here you are at last,” and took Ella’s coat. The hall was pretty and clean and practical—Mrs West’s world. She said: “My husband tells me you’ve been having another brush with him over his lunatic fringe. It’s good of you to take so much trouble over these people.” “It’s my job,” said Ella. “I’m paid for it.” Mrs West smiled, with a kindly tolerance. She resented Ella. Not because she worked with her husband—no, this was too crude an emotion for Mrs West. Ella had not understood Mrs West’s resentment until one day she had used the phrase: You career girls. It was a phrase so discordant, like “lunatic fringe” and “these people” that Ella had been unable to reply to it. And now Mrs West had made a point of letting her know that her husband discussed his work with her, establishing wifely rights. In the past, Ella had said to herself: But she’s a nice woman, in spite of everything. Now, angry, she said: She’s not a nice woman. These people are all dead and damned, with their disinfecting phrases, lunatic fringe and career girls. I don’t like her and I’m not going to pretend I do…She followed Mrs West into the living-room, which held faces she knew. The woman for whom she worked at the magazine, for instance. She was also middle-aged, but smart and well-dressed, with bright curling grey hair. She was a professional woman, her appearance part of her job, unlike Mrs West, who was pleasant to look at, but not at all smart. Her name was Patricia Brent, and the name was also part of her profession—Mrs Patricia Brent, editress. Ella went to sit by Patricia, who said: “Dr West’s been telling us you’ve been quarrelling with him over his letters.” Ella looked swiftly around, and saw people smiling expectantly. The incident had been served up as party fare, and she was expected to play along with it a little, then allow the thing to be dropped. But there must not be any real discussion, or discordance. Ella said smiling: “Hardly quarrelling.” She added, on a carefully plaintive-humorous note, which was what they were waiting for: “But it’s very depressing, after all, these people you can’t do anything for.” She saw she had used the phrase, these people, and was angry and dispirited. I shouldn’t have come, she thought. These people (meaning, this time, the Wests and what they stood for) only tolerate you if you’re like them.