The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  “My dear Julia, you didn’t sit down to count them?”

  “Not until I started thinking about it, no.”

  Ella finds herself in a new mood or phase. She becomes completely sexless. She puts it down to the incident with the Canadian script-writer, but does not care particularly. She is now cool, detached, self-sufficient. Not only can she not remember what it was like, being afflicted with sexual desire, but she cannot believe she will ever feel desire again. She knows, however, that this condition, being self-sufficient and sexless, is only the other side of being possessed by sex.

  She rings up Julia to announce that she has given up sex, given up men, because “she can’t be bothered.” Julia’s good-humoured scepticism positively crackles in Ella’s ear, and she says: “But I mean it.” “Good for you,” says Julia.

  Ella decides to write again, searches herself for the book which is already written inside her, and waiting to be written down. She spends a great deal of time alone, waiting to discern the outlines of this book inside her.

  I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else. I don’t understand what happens at the moment Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella. No one does. It’s enough to call her Ella, instead of Anna. Why did I choose the name Ella? Once I met a girl at a party called Ella. She reviewed books for some newspaper and read manuscripts for a publisher. She was small, thin, dark—the same physical type as myself. She wore her hair tied back with a black bow. I was struck by her eyes, extraordinarily watchful and defensive. They were windows in a fortress. People were drinking heavily. The host came over to fill our glasses. She put out her hand—a thin, white delicate hand, at just that moment when he had put an inch of liquor in her glass, to cover it. She gave a cool nod: “That’s enough.” Then a cool shake, as he pressed to fill the glass. He went off; she saw I had been looking. She picked up the glass with just an inch of red wine in it, and said: “That’s the exact amount I need for the right degree of intoxication.” I laughed. But no, she was serious. She drank the inch of red wine, and then remarked: “Yes, that’s right.” Assessing how the alcohol was affecting her—she gave another small, cool nod. “Yes, that was just right.”

  Well, I would never do that. That’s not Anna at all.

  I see Ella, isolated, walking about her big room, tying back her straight black hair with a wide black ribbon. Or sitting hour after hour in a chair, her white delicate hands loose in her lap. She sits frowning at them, thinking.

  Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticises her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being “a career woman.” This woman who, throughout the five years of their affair, in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticised her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties, and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does—sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she “really” is. He has rejected her “real” self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected.

  Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.

  She looks inside herself again and finds:

  A man and a woman. She, after years of freedom, is over-ready for a serious love. He is playing at the role of a serious lover because of some need for asylum or refuge. (Ella gets the idea of this character from the Canadian script-writer—from his cool and mask-like attitude as a lover: he was watching himself in a role, the role of a married man with a mistress. It is this aspect of the Canadian that Ella uses—a man watching himself play a role.) The woman, over-hungry, over-intense, freezes the man even more than he is; although he only half-knows he is frozen. The woman, having been unpossessive, unjealous, undemanding, turns into a jailor. It is as if she is possessed by a personality not hers. And she watches her own deterioration into this possessive termagant with surprise, as if this other self has nothing to do with her. And she is convinced it has not. For when the man accuses her of being a jealous spy, she replied and with sincerity: “I’m not jealous, I’ve never been jealous.” Ella looked at this story with amazement; because there was nothing in her own experience that could suggest it. Where, then, had it come from? Ella thinks of Paul’s wife—but no; she had been too humble and accepting to suggest such a character. Or perhaps her own husband, self-abasing, jealous, abject, making feminine hysterical scenes because of his incapacity as a man? Presumably, thinks Ella, this figure, her husband, with whom she was linked so briefly and apparently without any real involvement, is the masculine equivalent of the virago in her story? Which, however, she decides not to write. It is written, within her, but she does not recognise it as hers. Perhaps I read it somewhere?—she wonders; or someone told it to me and I’ve forgotten hearing about it?

  About this time Ella pays a visit to her father. It is some time since she has seen him. Nothing has changed in his life. He is still quiet, absorbed in his garden, his books, a military man turned some sort of mystic. Or had always been a mystic? Ella, and for the first time, wonders: What must it have been like, married to such a man? She seldom thinks of her mother, so long dead, but now tries to revive memories of her. She sees a practical, cheerful bustling woman. One evening, sitting across the fireplace from her father, in a white-ceilinged black-beamed room full of books, she watches him read and sip whisky and at last brings herself to talk of her mother.

  Her father’s face takes on the most comical look of alarm; clearly he, too, has not thought of the dead woman for years. Ella persists. He says at last, abruptly: “Your mother was altogether too good for me.” He laughs, uncomfortably; and his remote blue eyes suddenly have the startled rolling look of a surprised animal. The laugh offends Ella; but she recognises why: she is annoyed on behalf of the wife, her mother. She thinks: What’s wrong with Julia and me is quite simple: we’re being mistress figures long past the age for it. She says aloud: “Why too good?” although her father has picked up his book again as a shield. He says, over the top of the book, an elderly burned-leather man, suddenly agitated with emotions thirty years old: “Your mother was a good woman. She was a good wife. But she had no idea, absolutely no idea at all, all that sort of thing was left completely out of her.” “You mean sex?” asks Ella, forcing herself to speak in spite of her distaste for associating these ideas with her parents. He laughs, offended; his eyes rolling again: “Of course all you people don’t mind talking about that sort of thing. I never talk about it. Yes, sex, if that’s what you call it. Was left clean out of her makeup, that sort of thing.” The book, a memoir of some British General, is raised against Ella. Ella insists: “Well, what did you do about it?” The edges of the book seem to tremble. A pause. She has meant: Didn’t you teach her? But her father’s voice says from behind the book—the clipped yet hesitant voice, clipped from training, hesitant because of the vagueness of his private world: “When I couldn’t stick it, I went out and bought myself a woman. What did you expect?” The what did you expect is addressed, not to Ella, but to her mother. “And j
ealous! She didn’t give a damn about me, but she was jealous as a sick cat.”

  Ella says: “I meant, perhaps she was shy. Perhaps you should have taught her?” For she is remembering Paul’s saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

  The book slowly lowers to her father’s lean and stick-like thighs. The yellowish, dry, lean face has flushed, and the blue eyes were protuberant, like an insect’s: “Look here. Marriage as far as I’m concerned—well! Well, you’re sitting there, so I suppose that’s a justification of it.”

  Ella says: “I suppose I ought to say I’m sorry—but I want to know about her. She was my mother after all.”

  “I don’t think of her. Not for years. I think of her sometimes when you do me the honour of a visit.”

  “Is that why I feel you don’t like seeing me much?” says Ella, but smiling and forcing him to look at her.

  “I never said that, did I? I don’t feel it. But all these family ties—family stuff, marriage, that sort of thing, it seems pretty unreal to me. You’re my daughter, so I believe. Must be, knowing your mother. I don’t feel it. Blood ties—do you feel it? I don’t.”

  “Yes,” says Ella. “When I’m here with you, I feel some sort of a bond. I don’t know what.”

  “No, I don’t either.” The old man has recovered himself, and is again in a remote place, safe from the hurt of personal emotions. “We’re human beings—whatever that may mean. I don’t know. I’m pleased to see you, when you do me the honour. Don’t think you’re not welcome. But I’m getting old. You don’t know what that means yet. All that stuff, family, children, that sort of thing, seems unreal. It’s not what matters. To me at least.”

  “What does matter then?”

  “God, I suppose. Whatever that may mean. Oh, of course, I know it means nothing to you. Why should it? Used to get a glimpse sometimes. In the desert—the army, you know. Or in danger. Sometimes now, at night. I think being alone—it’s important. People, human beings, that kind of thing, it’s just a mess. People should leave each other alone.” He takes a sip of whisky, stares at her, with a look of being astonished at what he sees. “You’re my daughter. So I believe. I know nothing about you. Help you any way I can of course. You’ll get what money I have when I go—but you know that. Not that it’s much. But I don’t want to know about your life—shouldn’t approve of it anyway, I suppose.”

  “No, I don’t think you would.”

  “That husband of yours, a stick, couldn’t understand it.”

  “It was a long time ago. Suppose I told you that I’d loved a married man for five years and that was the most important thing in my life?”

  “Your business. Not mine. And men since, I suppose. You’re not like your mother, that’s something. More like a woman I had after she died.”

  “Why didn’t you marry her?”

  “She was married. Stuck to her husband. Well, she was right, I suppose. In that line it was the best thing in my life, but that line—it never was the most important to me.”

  “You don’t ever wonder about me? What I’m doing? You don’t think about your grandson?”

  And now he was clearly in full retreat, he didn’t like this pressure at all.

  “No. Oh, he’s a jolly little chap. Always pleased to see him. But he’ll turn into a cannibal like everyone else.”

  “A cannibal?”

  “Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone. As for you—what do I know about you? You’re a modern woman, don’t know anything about them.”

  “A modern woman,” says Ella drily, smiling.

  “Yes. Your book, I suppose. I suppose you’re after something of your own the way we all are. And good luck to you. We can’t help each other. People don’t help each other, they are better apart.”

  With which he lifts his book, having given her a final warning that the conversation is over by means of a short abrupt stare.

  Ella, alone in her room, looks into her private pool, waiting for the shadows to form, for the story to shape itself. She sees a young professional officer, shy, proud and inarticulate. She sees a shy and cheerful young wife. And now a memory, not an image, rises to the surface: she sees this scene: late at night, in her bedroom, she is pretending to be asleep. Her father and mother are standing in the middle of the room. He puts his arms about her, she is bashful and coy like a girl. He kisses her, then she runs fast out of the bedroom in tears. He stands alone, angry, pulling at his moustache.

  He remains alone, withdrawing from his wife into books and the dry, spare dreams of a man who might have been a poet or a mystic. And in fact, when he dies, journals, poems, fragments of prose are found in locked drawers.

  Ella is surprised by this conclusion. She had never thought of her father as a man who might write poetry, or write at all. She visits her father again, as soon as she can.

  Late at night, in the silent room where the fire burns slowly in the wall, she asks: “Father, have you ever written poetry?” The book descends to his lean thighs with a bump and he stares at her. “How the hell did you know?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought perhaps you did.”

  “I’ve never told a soul.”

  “Can I see them?”

  He sits a while, pulling at his fierce old moustache that is now white. Then he gets up and unlocks a drawer. He hands her a sheaf of poems. They are all poems about solitude, loss, fortitude, the adventures of isolation. They are usually about soldiers. T. E. Lawrence: “A lean and austere man among lean men.” Rommel: “And at evening lovers pause outside the town, where an acre or so of crosses lean in the sand.” Cromwell: “Faiths, mountains, monuments and rocks…” T. E. Lawrence again: “…yet travels wild escarpments of the soul.” And T. E. Lawrence again who renounced: “The clarity, the action and the clean rewards, and owned himself beat, like all who come to words.”

  Ella hands them back. The wild old man takes the poems and locks them up again.

  “You’ve never thought of having them published.”

  “Certainly not. What for?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Of course you’re different. You write to get published. Well, I suppose people do.”

  “You never said, did you like my novel? Did you read it?”

  “Like it? It was written well, that sort of thing. But that poor stick, what did he want to kill himself for?”

  “People do.”

  “What? Everyone wants to at some time or another. But why write about it?”

  “You may be right.”

  “I’m not saying I’m right. That’s what I feel. It’s the difference between my lot and yours.”

  “What, killing ourselves?”

  “No. You ask such a lot. Happiness. That sort of thing. Happiness! I don’t remember thinking about it. Your lot—you seem to think something’s owed to you. It’s because of the communists.”

  “What?” says Ella, startled and amused.

  “Yes, your lot, you’re all reds.”

  “But I’m not a communist. You’re mixing me up with my friend Julia. And even she’s stopped being one.”

  “It’s all the same thing. They’ve got at you. You all think you can do anything.”

  “Well, I think that’s true—somewhere at the back of the minds of ‘our lot’ is the belief that anything is possible. You seemed to be content with so little.”

  “Content? Content! What sort of word is that.”

  “I mean that for better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.”

  The old man sits, fierce and resentful. “That young sap in your book, he thought of nothing but killing himself.”

  “Perhaps because something was owed to him, it’s owed to everyone, and he didn’t get it.”

  “Perhaps, you say? Perhaps? You wrote it, so you ought to know.”

  “Perhaps next time I’l
l try to write about that—people who deliberately try to be something else, try to break their own form as it were.”

  “You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can’t be anything else. You can’t change that.”

  “Well then, I think that’s the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.”

  “Then I don’t follow you. And I don’t want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.”

  This conversation with her father starts a new train of thought for Ella.

  Now, looking for the outlines of a story and finding, again and again, nothing but patterns of defeat, death, irony, she deliberately refuses them. She tries to force patterns of happiness or simple life. But she fails.

  Then she finds herself thinking: I’ve got to accept the patterns of self-knowledge which mean unhappiness or at least a dryness. But I can twist it into victory. A man and a woman—yes. Both at the end of their tether. Both cracking up because of a deliberate attempt to transcend their own limits. And out of the chaos, a new kind of strength.

  Ella looks inwards, as into a pool, to find this story imaged; but it remains a series of dry sentences in her mind. She waits, she waits patiently, for the images to form, to take on life.

  [For something like eighteen months the blue notebook consisted of short entries different in style not only from previous entries in the blue notebook but from anything else in the notebooks. This section began:]

  17th October, 1954: Anna Freeman, born 10th November, 1922, a daughter of Colonel Frank Freeman and May Fortescue; lived 23 Baker Street; educated Girls’ High School, Hampstead; spent six years Central Africa—1939 to 1945; married Max Wulf 1945; one daughter, born 1946; divorced Max Wulf 1947; joined Communist Party 1950, left it 1954.