The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  “Be still and sleep now Noni, the moon is four-horned with menace and I am making my fate and yours, the fate of our people.”

  “John, John,” says my girl, and her voice is sighing with longing like the sigh of the incandescent leaves, wooing the moon.

  “Sleep now my Noni.”

  “But my heart is ebony with uneasiness and the guiltiness of my fate.”

  “Sleep, sleep, I do not hate you my Noni, I have often been seeing the white man pointing his eyes like arrows at the swing and the sway of your hips my Noni. I have seen it. I have seen it as I see the banana leaves answering the moon and the white spears of the rain murdering the cannibal-raped soil of our land. Sleep.”

  “But John, my John, I am sickening with the knowing of my betraying you, my man, my lover, and yet was I being taken by force, not in having of my true self, by the white man from the store.”

  Frrrrr, frrr, say the banana leaves and the night-jars cry black murder to the sick-grey moon.

  “But John, my John, it was only one little lipstick, one little red lipstick that I bought, for the making of my thirsty lips more beautiful for you, my love, and when I was buying of it I saw his cold blue eyes hot on my maiden thighs, and I ran, I was running my love, back from the store to you, to my love, my lips red for you, for you my John my man.”

  “Sleep now, Noni. Sit no longer cross-legged in the grinning moon-shadows. Sit no longer, crying from your pain which is my pain and the pain of our people crying for my pity, which you are having now and for always my Noni my girl.”

  “But your love, my John, where is your love for me?”

  Ah, dark coils of the red snake of hate, sliding at the roots of the banana tree, swelling in the latticed windows of my soul.

  “My love, Noni, is yours and for our people and for the red hooded snake of hate.”

  “Aie, Aie, Aie,” screams my love, my love Noni, speared to her mysterious giving womb by the lust of the white man, by his lust for having, by his trader’s lust.

  And “Aie, Aie, Aie,” wail the old women in their huts hearing my purposefulness in the wind and in the sign of the raped banana leaves. Voices of the wind, call my pain to the free world, the snake in the echoing dust, bite the heel of the heartless world for me!

  “Aie, Aie, my John, and what of the child I am having, it is being heavy on my heart, the child I am giving to you, my love, my man, and not to the hated white man from the store who tripped my frantic fleeing heels as I sped from him, and was being flung into the sightless dust at the hour of setting sun, the hour when all the world is being betrayed by the ageless night?”

  “Sleep, sleep, my girl, my Noni, the child is for the world, heavy with fate, and crossed with the mystery of mingling bloods, it is a child of vengeful shadows, the child of the gathering snake of my hate.”

  “Aie, Aie,” screams my Noni, writhing deep and mystical in the shadows of the eaves of the hut.

  “Aie, Aie,” scream the old women, hearing my purposefulness, the old women, auditors of life’s stream, their wombs dry for living, hearing the silent screams of living from their huts.

  “Sleep now, my Noni. I will return after many years. But now I have a man’s purpose. Do not stop me.”

  Dark blue and green the ghosts in the moonlight, the ghosts subdivided by my hate. And dark red the snake in the purple dust under the banana tree. Within a myriad answers, the answer. Behind a million purposes, the purpose. Frrrrr, frrr, say the banana leaves, and my love sings: John and where will you go from me, who wait for you always with my womb filled with longing.

  I go to the city now to the gun-metal-writhing-grey streets of the white man and I find my brothers and into their hands I will place the red snake of my hate and together we will seek out the white man’s lust and kill it, so that no longer will the banana trees bear alien fruit, and the soil of our raped country cry, and the dust of souls weep for rain.

  “Aie, Aie,” scream the old women.

  In the moon-menaced night a scream, the scream of anonymous murder.

  My Noni creeps, double, into the hut and the purple-green shadows of the moon are empty and empty my heart save for its snake-purpose.

  Ebony lighting hates the leaves. Jacaranda thunder kills the trees. Sweet globes of paw paws receive indigo vengeance. Frrr, frr, say the banana leaves, ghosting the time-tired moon. I am going, I am saying to the banana leaves. Multitudes of perverted shudders rip the crisscrossing dreams of the thwarted forest.

  I go on fated feet and the dust-echoes are swamp-dark in the loom of time. I go past the banana tree and red snakes of loving hatred are singing after me: Go, man, go, for vengeance to the city. And the moon on the banana leaves is crimson, singing frrrr, frr, scream, cry and croon, oh red is my pain, crimson my twining pain, oh red and crimson are dripping the moon-echoing leaves of my hate.

  [Here was pinned to the page a review of Frontiers of War cut from Soviet Writing, and dated August, 1952.]

  Terrible indeed is the exploitation in British colonies revealed in this courageous first novel, written and published under the very eye of the oppressor to reveal to the world the real truth behind British Imperialism! Yet admiration for the courage of the young writer, daring all for her social conscience, must not blind us to the incorrect emphasis she gives to the class struggle in Africa. This is the story of a young airman, a true patriot, so soon to die for his country in the Great Anti-Fascist War who falls in with a group of so-called socialists, decadent white settlers who play at politics. Sickened by his experience with this gang of rich cosmopolitan socialites, he turns to the people, to a simple black girl who teaches him the realities of true working-class life. Yet this is precisely the weak point of this well-intentioned but misguided novel. For what contact can a young upper-class Englishman have with the daughter of a cook? What a writer must search for in her calvary towards true artistic verity is the typical. Such a situation is not, cannot be, typical. Suppose the young writer, daring the Himalayas of truth itself, had made her hero a young white working man and her heroine an African organised worker from a factory? In such a situation she might have found a solution, political, social, spiritual, that could have shed light on the future struggle for Freedom in Africa. Where are the working masses in this book? Where the class conscious fighters? They do not appear. But let not this talented young writer lose heart! The artistic heights are for the great in spirit! Forward! for the sake of the world!

  [Review of Frontiers of War, Soviet Gazette, dated August, 1954.]

  Majestic and untamed is Africa! What a burst of splendour is revealed before us in the pages of this novel which has just reached us from Great Britain depicting a wartime incident in the very heart of the plains and jungles of the African land.

  It goes without saying that typical characters in art differ from scientific concepts of types in content, and accordingly, in form. Hence, when this author quotes at the beginning of her book a saying which, redolent as it is of Western sociological mumbo-jumbo, nevertheless contains a profound verity: “It is said, it was because Adam ate the apple that he was lost, or fell. I say it was because of his claiming something for his own, and because of his I, Mine, Me, and the like”—we look at her work with an eager expectation which is not justified. Yet let us welcome what she has given, looking forward with hope to what she might, indeed will, give us, when she comes to understand that a true artistic work must have a revolutionary life—asserting content, ideological profundity, humaneness, as well as artistic quality. The feeling grows, as page follows page: How noble, how truly profound must be the human types evolved by this still undeveloped continent; the feeling remains with you and repeatedly evokes a response in your heart. For the young English flier, and the trusting black girl, never-to-be-forgotten as they are, thanks to the author’s entrancing power, are not yet typical of the deep moral potentialities of the future. Our readers say to you, dear author, with one voice: “Work on! Remember that art must ever be bathed in the clear
light of truth! Remember that the process of creating new concrete forms of realism in the literature of Africa and in general those of underdeveloped countries with a strong national-liberation movement is a very difficult and intricate process!”

  [Review of Frontiers of War in Soviet Journal for Literature for Colonial Freedom, dated Dec. 1956.]

  The struggle against Imperialist Oppression in Africa has its Homers and its Jack Londons. It also has its petty psychologisers, not without a certain minor merit. With the black masses on the march, with every day a new heroic stand by the nationalist movements, what can we say of this novel which chronicles the story of a love affair between a young Oxford-educated Britisher and a black girl? She is the only representative of the people in this book, and yet her character remains shadowy, undeveloped, unsatisfying. No, this author must learn from our literature, the literature of health and progress, that no one is benefited by despair. This is a negative novel. We detect Freudian influences. There is an element of mysticism. As for the group of “socialists” portrayed here, the author has essayed satire and failed. There is something unhealthy, even ambiguous in her writing. Let her learn from Mark Twain, whose wholesome humour is so dear to progressive readers, how to make mankind laugh at what is already dead, backward, outmoded by history.

  13th November, 1955

  Ever since Stalin’s death in 1953 there has been a state of affairs in the C.P. that the old hands say would have been impossible at any time before. Groups of people, ex-communists and communists together, have been meeting to discuss what is going on in the Party, in Russia and in Britain. The first meeting I was asked to attend (and I’ve been out of the Party for over a year now) consisted of nine members and five ex-members. And none of us, the ex-members, had the usual “You are traitors” inflicted on us. We met as socialists, with full trust. The discussions have slowly developed and there is now a sort of vague plan—to remove the “dead bureaucracy” at the centre of the Party, so that the C.P. should be completely changed, a genuinely British Party, without the deadly loyalty to Moscow and the obligation to tell lies, etc., a genuinely democratic Party. I again find myself among people filled with excitement and purpose—among them people who left the Party years ago. The plan can be summarised thus: (a) The Party, shorn of its “old hands” who are incapable of thinking straight after so many years of lying and double-cross, should make a statement repudiating its past. This, first. (b) to break all ties with foreign communist parties, in the expectation that other communist parties will also be rejuvenating themselves and breaking with the past. (c) to call together the thousands and thousands of people who have been communist and who have left the Party in disgust, inviting them to join the revitalised party. (d) to…

  [At this point the red notebook was stuffed full of newspaper cuttings to do with the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, letters from all kinds of people about politics, agendas for political meetings, etc. This mass of paper had been fastened together by rubber bands and clipped to the page. Then Anna’s handwriting began again:]

  11th August, 1956

  Not for the first time in my life I realise I have spent weeks and months in frenzied political activity and have achieved absolutely nothing. More, that I might have foreseen it would achieve nothing. The Twentieth Congress has doubled and trebled the numbers of people, both in and out of the Party, who want a “new” communist party. Last night I was at a meeting which went on till nearly morning. Towards the end a man who had not spoken before, a socialist from Austria, made a short humorous speech, something like this: “My dear Comrades. I have been listening to you, amazed at the wells of faith in human beings! What you are saying amounts to this: that you know the leadership of the British C.P. consists of men and women totally corrupted by years of work in the Stalinist atmosphere. You know they will do anything to maintain their position. You know, because you have given a hundred examples of it here this evening, that they suppress resolutions, rig ballots, pack meetings, and twist. There is no way of getting them out of office by democratic means partly because they are unscrupulous, and partly because half of the Party members are too innocent to believe their leaders are capable of such trickery. But every time you reach this point in your deliberations you stop, and instead of drawing the obvious conclusions from what you have said, you go off into some day-dream and talk as if all you have to do is to appeal to the leading comrades to resign all at once because it would be in the best interests of the Party if they did. It is as if you proposed to appeal to a professional burglar to retire because his efficiency was giving his profession a bad name.”

  We all laughed, but continued with the discussion. The humorous note he used absolved him, as it were, from the necessity of a serious answer.

  Afterwards I thought about it. Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter—yet it’s the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense.

  I’ve just read what I wrote on the 13th November last year. I am amazed at our naivety. Yet I was really inspired by a belief in the possibility of a new honest C.P. I really did believe it was possible.

  20th September, 1956

  Have been to no more meetings. The idea in the air, so I’m told, is to start a new “really British C.P.” as an example and an alternative to the existing C.P. People are contemplating, apparently without misgivings, the existence of two rival C.P.’s. Yet it’s obvious what would happen. The energies of both would be occupied by throwing insults at each other and denying each other’s right to be communist at all. A recipe for farce. But it’s no more stupid than the idea of “throwing out” the old guard by democratic means and reforming the Party “from within.” Stupid. Yet I was wrapped up in it for months, like hundreds of other normally intelligent people who have been involved in politics for years. Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

  People are reeling off from the C.P. in dozens, broken-hearted. The irony is that they are broken-hearted and cynical to the degree that they were loyal and innocent before. People like myself who had few illusions (we all had some illusions—mine was that anti-Semitism was “impossible”) remain calm and ready to start again, accepting the fact that the British C.P. will probably slowly degenerate into a tiny little sect. The new phrase in the air is “re-think the socialist position.”

  Today Molly rang me. Tommy is involved with the new group of young socialists Molly said she had sat in a corner listening while they talked. She felt as if “she had gone back a hundred years to her own youth” when she was first in the C.P. “Anna, it was extraordinary! It was really so odd. Here they are, with no time for the C.P., and quite right too, and no time for the Labour Party, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t right about that, there are a few hundred of them, scattered up and down Britain, yet they all talk as if Britain will be socialist in about ten years at the latest, and through their efforts of course. You know, as if they will be running the new beautiful socialist Britain that will be born on Tuesday week. I felt as if they were mad, or as if I were mad…but the point is, Anna, it’s just like us, isn’t it? Well? And even using that awful jargon we’ve been making fun of for years and years, just as if they’d just thought it all up for themselves.” I said: “But surely, Molly, you’re pleased he’s become a socialist and not some sort of career-type?” “But, of course. Naturally. The point is, oughtn’t they to be more intelligent than we were, Anna?”

  THE SHADOW OF THE THIRD

  From this point of the novel “the third,” previously Paul’s wife; then Ella’s younger alter ego formed from fantasies about Paul’s wife; then the memory of Paul; becomes Ella herself. As Ella cracks and disintegrates, she holds fast to the idea of Ella whole, healthy, and happy. The link between the various “third
s” must be made very clear: the link is normality, but more than that—conventionality, attitudes or emotions proper to the “respectable” life which in fact Ella refuses to have anything to do with.

  Ella moves into a new flat. Julia resentful. An area of their relationship obscured before is now exposed by Julia’s attitude. Julia had dominated Ella. Ella had been prepared to be dominated, or at least been prepared to look as if she was. Julia’s nature was essentially generous—kind, warm, giving. Yet now she even goes to the length of complaining to mutual friends that Ella had taken advantage of her, had made use of her. Ella, alone with her son in the big ugly dirty flat which she now has to clean and paint, thinks that in a sense what Julia complains of was true. She had been rather like a willing captive, with the captive’s hidden core of independence. Leaving Julia’s house was like a daughter leaving a mother. Or, she thinks wryly, remembering Paul’s unfriendly jokes that she was “married to Julia”—like the break-up of a marriage.

  Ella is for a while more alone than she has ever been. She thinks a great deal about her ruptured friendship with Julia. For she is closer to Julia than anyone, if being “close” means mutual confidence and shared experience. Yet at the moment this friendship is all hatred and resentment. And she cannot stop herself thinking about Paul who left her months ago. Over a year now.

  Ella understands that, living with Julia, she has been protected from a certain kind of attention. She is now definitely “a woman living alone”; and that, although she has not realised it before, is very different from “two women sharing a house.”

  For instance. Three weeks after she has moved into the new flat, Dr West telephones her. He informs her that his wife is on holiday and asks her to dinner. Ella goes, unable to believe, in spite of the too-carefully dropped information about his wife’s being away, that this is not to be a dinner about some aspect of office-work. During the dinner Ella slowly understands that Dr West is offering her an affair. She remembers the unkind remarks that he so carefully passed on to her at the time that Paul left her, and thinks that he has probably pigeon-holed her in his mind for an occasion like this. She also understands, that if she, Ella, turns him down this evening he will work through a short list of three or four women, for he remarks spitefully: “There are others, you know. You aren’t condemning me to solitude.”