The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  Death again. Death come out of her novel and into her life. And yet death in the form of energy, for this man works like a madman, out of a furious angry compassion, this man who says he wishes he were dead never rests from work for the helpless.

  It is as if this novel were already written and I were reading it. And now I see it whole I see another theme, of which I was not conscious when I began it. The theme is, naivety. From the moment Ella meets Paul and loves him, from the moment she uses the word love, there is the birth of naivety.

  And so now, looking back at my relationship with Michael (I used the name of my real lover for Ella’s fictitious son with the small overeager smile with which a patient offers an analyst evidence he has been waiting for but which the patient is convinced is irrelevant), I see above all my naivety. Any intelligent person could have foreseen the end of this affair from its beginning. And yet I, Anna, like Ella with Paul, refused to see it. Paul gave birth to Ella, the naïve Ella. He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

  Now, when I am drawn to a man, I can assess the depth of a possible relationship with him by the degree to which the naïve Anna is recreated in me.

  Sometimes when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship.

  What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety.

  The end of the affair. Though that was not the word that Ella used then. She used it afterwards, and with bitterness.

  Ella first understands that Paul is withdrawing from her at the moment when she realises he is not helping her with the letters. He says: “What’s the use? I deal with widow Brown all day at the hospital. I can’t do any good, not really. I help one here and there. Ultimately the boulder-pushers don’t really help anything. We imagine we do. Psychiatry and welfare work, it’s putting poultices on unnecessary misery.”

  “But Paul, you know you help them.”

  “All the time I’m thinking, we are all obsolete. What sort of a doctor is it who sees his patients as symptoms of a world sickness?”

  “If it were true you really feel like that, you wouldn’t work so hard.”

  He hesitated, then delivered this blow: “But Ella, you’re my mistress, not my wife. Why do you want me to share all the serious business of life with you?”

  Ella was angry. “Every night you lie in my bed and tell me everything. I am your wife.” As she said it, she knew she was signing the warrant for the end. It seemed a terrible cowardice that she had not said it before. He reacted with a small offended laugh, a gesture of withdrawal.

  Ella finishes her novel and it is accepted for publication. She knows it is a quite good novel, nothing very startling. If she were to read it she would report that it was a small, honest novel. But Paul reads it and reacts with elaborate sarcasm.

  He says: “Well, we men might just as well resign from life.”

  She is frightened, and says: “What do you mean?” Yet she laughs, because of the dramatic way he says it, parodying himself.

  Now he drops his self-parody and says with great seriousness: “My dear Ella, don’t you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution—they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.”

  “But Paul, that doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “I saw a film last week, I went by myself, I didn’t take you, that was a film for a man by himself.”

  “What film?”

  “Did you know that a woman can now have children without a man?”

  “But what on earth for?”

  “You can apply ice to a woman’s ovaries, for instance. She can have a child. Men are no longer necessary to humanity.”

  At once Ella laughs, and with confidence. “But what woman in her senses would want ice applied to her ovaries instead of a man?”

  Paul laughs too. “For all that Ella, and joking apart, it’s a sign of the times.”

  At which Ella cries out: “My God, Paul, if at any time during the last five years you’d asked me to have a baby, I’d have been so happy.”

  The instinctive, startled movement of withdrawal from her. Then the deliberate careful answer, laughing: “But, Ella, it’s the principle of the thing. Men are no longer necessary.”

  “Oh, principles,” says Ella, laughing. “You’re mad. I always said you were.”

  At which he says, soberly: “Well, maybe you’re right. You are very sane, Ella. You always were. You say I’m mad. I know it. I get madder and madder. Sometimes I wonder why they don’t lock me up instead of my patients. And you get saner and saner. It’s your strength. You’ll have ice applied to your ovaries yet.”

  At which she cries out, so hurt that she doesn’t care any longer how she sounds to him: “You are mad. Let me tell you I’d rather die than have a child like that. Don’t you know that ever since I’ve known you I’ve wanted to have your child? Ever since I’ve known you everything has been so joyful that…” She sees his face, which instinctively rejects what she has just said. “Well, all right then. But supposing that is why you’ll ultimately turn out to be unnecessary—because you haven’t got any faith in what you are…” His face is now startled and sad, but she is in full flood and doesn’t care. “You’ve never understood one simple thing—it’s so simple and ordinary that I don’t know why you don’t understand. Everything with you has been happy and easy and joyful, and you talk about women putting ice on their ovaries. Ice. Ovaries. What does it mean? Well, if you want to sign yourselves off the face of the earth then do it, I don’t care.” At which he says, opening his arms, “Ella. Ella! Come here.” She goes to him, he holds her, but in a moment he teases her: “But you see, I was right—when it comes to the point you openly admit it, you’d push us all off the edge of the earth and laugh.”

  Sex. The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. Women deliberately choose not to think about technical sex. They get irritable when men talk technically, it’s out of self-preservation: they want to preserve the spontaneous emotion that is essential for their satisfaction.

  Sex is essentially emotional for women. How many times has that been written? And yet there’s always a point even with the most perceptive and intelligent man, when a woman looks at him across a gulf: he hasn’t understood; she suddenly feels alone; hastens to forget the moment, because if she doesn’t she would have to think. Julia, myself and Bob sitting in her kitchen gossiping. Bob telling a story about the break-up of a marriage. He says: “The trouble was sex. Poor bastard, he’s got a prick the size of a needle.” Julia: “I always thought she didn’t love him.” Bob, thinking she hadn’t heard: “No, it’s always worried him stiff, he’s just got a small one.” Julia: “But she never did love him, anyone could see that just by looking at them together.” Bob, a bit impatient now: “It’s not their fault, poor idiots, nature was against the whole thing from the start.” Julia: “Of course it’s her fault. She should never have married him if she didn’t love him.” Bob, irritated because of her stupidity, begins a long technical explanation, while she looks at me, sighs, smiles, and shrugs. A few minutes later, as he persists, she cuts him off short with a bad-tempered joke, won’t let him go on.

  As for me, Anna, it was a remarkable fact that until I sat down to write about it, I had never analysed how sex was between myself and Michael. Yet there was a perfectly clear devel
opment during the five years, which shows in my memory like a curving line on a graph.

  When Ella first made love with Paul, during the first few months, what set the seal on the fact she loved him, and made it possible for her to use the word, was that she immediately experienced orgasm. Vaginal orgasm that is. And she could not have experienced it if she had not loved him. It is the orgasm that is created by the man’s need for a woman, and his confidence in that need.

  As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical—a man wouldn’t use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalised sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake, and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively. Ella had never experienced clitoral orgasm before Paul, and she told him so, and he was delighted. “Well, you are a virgin in something, Ella, at least.” But when she told him she had never experienced what she insisted on calling “a real orgasm” to anything like the same depth before him, he involuntarily frowned, and remarked: “Do you know that there are eminent physiologists who say women have no physical basis for vaginal orgasm?” “Then they don’t know much, do they?” And so, as time went on, the emphasis shifted in their love-making from the real orgasm to the clitoral orgasm, and there came a point when Ella realised (and quickly refused to think about it) that she was no longer having real orgasms. That was just before the end, when Paul left her. In short, she knew emotionally what the truth was when her mind would not admit it.

  It was just before the end, too, that Paul told her something which (since in bed he preferred her having clitoral orgasm) she simply shrugged away as another symptom of this man’s divided personality—since the tone of the story, his way of telling it, contradicted what she in fact was experiencing with him.

  “Something happened at the hospital today that would have amused you,” he said. They were sitting in the dark parked car outside Julia’s. She slid across to be near him, and he put his arm around her. She could feel his body shaking with laughter. “As you know, our august hospital gives lectures every fortnight for the benefit of the staff. Yesterday it was announced that Professor Bloodrot would lecture us on the orgasm in the female swan.” Ella instinctively moved away, and he pulled her back, and said: “I knew you were going to do that. Sit still and listen. The hall was full—I don’t have to tell you. The professor stood up, all six foot three of him, like a buckled foot-rule, with his little white beard wagging, and said he had conclusively proved that female swans do not have an orgasm. He would use this useful scientific discovery as a basis for a short discussion on the nature of the female orgasm in general.” Ella laughed. “Yes, and I knew you would laugh at just that point. But I haven’t finished. It was noticeable that at this point there was a disturbance in the hall. People were getting up to leave. The venerable professor, looking annoyed, said that he trusted that this subject would not be found offensive to anyone. After all, research into sexuality, as distinct from superstition about sex, was being conducted in all hospitals of this type throughout the world. But still, people were leaving. Who was leaving? All the women. There were about fifty men, and about fifteen women. And every one of those lady doctors had got up and were going out as if they had been given an order. Our professor was very put out. He stuck out his little beard in front of him, and said that he was surprised his lady colleagues, for whom he had such a respect, were capable of such prudery. But it was no use, there wasn’t a woman in sight. At which our professor cleared his throat and announced he would continue his lecture, despite the deplorable attitude of the female doctors. It was his opinion, he said, based on his researches into the nature of the female swan, that there was no physiological basis for a vaginal orgasm in women…no, don’t move away, Ella, really women are most extraordinarily predictable. I was sitting next to Dr Penworthy, father of five, and he whispered to me that it was very strange—usually the professor’s wife, being a lady of great public-mindedness, was present at her husband’s little talks, but she had not come that day. At this point I committed an act of disloyalty to my sex. I followed the women out of the hall. They had all vanished. Very strange, not a woman in sight. But at last I found my old friend Stephanie, drinking coffee in the canteen. I sat down beside her. She was definitely very withdrawn from me. I said: ‘Stephanie, why have you all left our great professor’s definitive lecture on sex?’ She smiled at me very hostile and with great sweetness and said: ‘But my dear Paul, women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex.’ It took me half an hour’s hard work and three cups of coffee to make my friend Stephanie like me again.” He was laughing again, holding her inside his arm. He turned to look at her face, and said: “Yes. Well don’t be angry with me too, just because I am the same sex as the professor—that’s what I said to Stephanie too.” Ella’s anger dissolved and she laughed with him. She was thinking: Tonight he’ll come up with me. Whereas until recently he had spent nearly every night with her, now he went home two or three nights a week. He said, apparently at random: “Ella, you’re the least jealous woman I’ve ever known.” Ella felt a sudden chill, then panic, then the protective mechanism worked fast: She simply did not hear what he had said, and asked: “Are you coming up with me?” He said: “I’d decided not to. But if I had really decided I wouldn’t be sitting here, would I?” They went upstairs, holding hands. He remarked: “I wonder how you and Stephanie would get on?” She thought that his look at her was strange, “as if he’s testing something.” Again the small panic, while she thought, he talks a great deal about Stephanie these days, I wonder if…Then her mind went dim, and she said: “I’ve got some supper ready if you’d like it.”

  They ate, and he looked over at her and said: “And you’re such a good cook too. What am I going to do with you, Ella?”

  “What you are doing now,” she said.

  He was watching her, with a look of desperate, despairing humour that she saw very often now. “And I’ve not succeeded in changing you in the slightest. Not even your clothes or the way you do your hair.”

  This was a recurrent battle between them. He would move her hair this way and that about her head, pull the stuff of her dress into a different line, and say: “Ella, why do you insist on looking like a rather severe school-mistress? God knows, you’re not remotely like that.” He would bring her a blouse cut low, or show her a dress in a shop window, and say: “Why don’t you buy a dress like that?”

  But Ella continued to wear her black hair tied back, and refused the startling clothes he liked. At the back of her mind was the thought: He complains now that I’m not satisfied with him and I want another man. What would he think if I started to wear sexy clothes? If I made myself very glamorous he’d not be able to bear it. It’s bad enough as it is.

  She once said, laughing at him: “But Paul, you bought me that red blouse. It’s cut to show the top of my breasts. But when I put it on, you came into the room, and came right over and buttoned it up—you did it instinctively.”

  Tonight he came over to her and untied her hair and let it fall loose. Gazing close into her face, frowning, he teased out fronds of hair over he
r forehead, and arranged it around her neck. She allowed him to do as he liked, remaining quiet under the warmth of his hands, smiling at him. Suddenly she thought: He’s comparing me with someone, he’s not seeing me at all. She moved away from him, quickly, and he said: “Ella, you could be a really beautiful woman if you would let yourself be.”

  She said: “So you don’t think I’m beautiful then?”

  He half-groaned, half-laughed, and pulled her down on to the bed. “Obviously not,” he said. “Well then,” she said, smiling and confident.

  It was that night that he remarked, almost casually, that he had been offered a job in Nigeria, and was thinking of going. Ella heard him, but almost absentmindedly; accepting the off-hand tone he imposed on the situation. Then she realised a pit of dismay had opened in her stomach and that something final was happening. Yet she insisted on thinking, Well it will solve everything. I can go with him. There’s nothing to keep me here. Michael could go to some kind of school there. And what have I here to keep me?

  It was true. Lying in the darkness, inside Paul’s arms, she thought that those arms had slowly, over the years, shut out everyone else. She went out very little, because she did not enjoy going out by herself, and because she had accepted, very early on, that to go out together into company meant more trouble than it was worth. Either Paul was jealous, or he said he was odd-man-out among her literary friends. At which Ella would say: “They aren’t friends, they are acquaintances.” She had no vital connection with anyone but her son, Paul, and Julia. Julia would keep, it was a friendship for life. So now she said: “I can come with you, can’t I?” He hesitated, and said, laughing; “But you don’t want to give up all your exciting literary goings-on in London?” She told him he was quite crazy, and began making plans to go.