[Each day had its entry, consisting of short factual statements: “Got up early. Read so-and-so. Saw so-and-so. Janet is sick. Janet is well. Molly is offered a part she likes/doesn’t like, etc.” After a date in March 1956, a line in heavy black was drawn across the page, marking the end of the neat small entries. And the last eighteen months had been ruled out, every page, with a thick black cross. And now Anna continued in a different writing, not the clear small script of the daily entries, but fluent, rapid, in parts almost unintelligible with the speed it had been written:]
So all that is a failure too. The blue notebook, which I had expected to be the most truthful of the notebooks, is worse than any of them. I expected a terse record of facts to present some sort of a pattern when I read it over, but this sort of record is as false as the account of what happened on 15th September, 1954, which I read now embarrassed because of its emotionalism and because of its assumption that if I wrote “at nine-thirty I went to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated,” this would be more real than if I simply wrote what I thought. And yet I still don’t understand why. Because although in life things like going to the lavatory or changing a tampon when one has one’s period are dealt with on an almost unconscious level, I can recall every detail of a day two years ago because I remember that Molly had blood on her skirt and I had to warn her to go upstairs and change before her son came in.
And of course this is not a literary problem at all; it is the same as the “experience” with Mother Sugar. I remember saying to her that for the larger part of our time together her task was to make me conscious of, to become preoccupied by, physical facts which we spend our childhood learning to ignore so as to live at all. And then she made the obvious reply: that the “learning” in childhood was of the wrong kind, or otherwise I would not need to be sitting opposite her in a chair asking for her help three times a week. To which I replied, knowing I would get no answer to it, or at least, not on the level I wanted, since I knew that what I was saying was the “intellectualising” to which she attributed my emotional troubles: “It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism and then rescued from it by crystallising what one learns into a sort of intellectual primitivism—one is forced back into myth, and folk lore and everything that belongs to the savage or undeveloped stages of society. For if I say to you: I recognise in that dream, such and such a myth; or in that emotion about my father, that folk-tale; or the atmosphere of that memory is the same as an English ballad—then you smile, you are satisfied. As far as you are concerned; I’ve gone beyond the childish, I’ve transmuted it and saved it, by embodying it in myth. But in fact all I do, or you do, is to fish among the childish memories of an individual, and merge them with the art or ideas that belong to the childhood of a people. At which, of course, she smiled. And I said: “I’m now using your own weapons against you. I’m talking not of what you say, but how you react. Because the moments when you’re really pleased and excited; the moments when your face comes alive are those when I say the dream I had last night was of the same stuff of Hans Andersen’s story about the Little Mermaid. But when I try to use an experience, a memory, a dream, in modern terms, try to speak of it critically or drily or with complexity, you almost seem bored or impatient. So I deduce from this that what really pleases you, what really moves you, is the world of the primitive. Do you realise that I’ve never once, not once, spoken of an experience I’ve had, or a dream, in the way one would speak of it to a friend, or the way you would speak of it, outside this room, to a friend, without earning a frown from you—and I swear the frown or the impatience is something you aren’t conscious of. Or are you going to say that the frown is deliberate, because you think I’m not really ready to move forward out of the world of myth?”
“And so?” she said, smiling.
I said: “That’s better—you’d smile like that if I were talking to you in a drawing-room—yes, I know you’re going to say that this isn’t a drawing-room, and I’m here because I’m in trouble.”
“And so?”—smiling.
“I’m going to make the obvious point that perhaps the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say—he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.”
“Would you say you were better or worse for your experience with me?”
“But now you’re back in the consulting room. Of course I’m better. But that’s a clinical term. I’m afraid of being better at the cost of living inside myth and dreams. Psychoanalysis stands or falls on whether it makes better human beings, morally better, not clinically more healthy. What you are really asking me now is: Am I able to live more easily now than I did? Am I less in conflict, less in doubt, less neurotic in short? Well, you know that I am.”
I remember how she sat opposite me, the alert, vigorous old woman, with her efficient blouse and skirt, her white hair dragged back into a hasty knot, frowning at me. I was pleased because of the frown—we were outside, for a moment, the analyst-patient relationship.
“Look,” I said. “If I were sitting here, describing a dream I’d had last night, the wolf-dream, let’s say, more highly developed, there’d be a certain look on your face. And I know what the look means because I feel it myself—recognition. The pleasure of recognition, of a bit of rescue-work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form. Another bit of chaos rescued and ‘named.’ Do you know how you smile when I ‘name’ something? It’s as if you’d just saved someone from drowning. And I know the feeling. It’s joy. But there’s something terrible in it—because I’ve never known joy, awake, as I do, asleep, during a certain kind of dream—when the wolves come down out of the forest, or when the castle gates open, or when I’m standing before the ruined white temple on the white sands with the blue sea and sky behind it, or when I’m flying like Icarus—during these dreams, no matter what frightening material they incorporate, I could cry with happiness. And I know why—it’s because all the pain, and the killing and the violence is safely held in the story and it can’t hurt me.”
She was silent, looking at me intently.
I said: “Are you saying perhaps that I’m not ready to go on further? Well, I think that if I’m capable of being impatient, of wanting it, I must be ready for the next stage?”
“And what is the next stage?”
“The next stage is, surely, that I leave the safety of myth and Anna Wulf walks forward alone.”
“Alone?” she said, and added drily, “You’re a communist, or so you say, but you want to go alone. Isn’t that what you’d call a contradiction?”
And so we laughed, and it might have ended there, but I went on: “You talk about individuation. So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognises one part after another of his earlier life as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I felt then, is only the reflection of that great archetypal dream, or epic story, or stage in history, then he is free, because he has separated himself from the experience, or fitted it like a piece of mosaic into a very old pattern, and by the act of setting it into place, is free of the individual pain of it.”
“Pain?” she queried softly.
“Well, my dear, people don’t come to you because they are suffering from an excess of happiness.”
“No, they usually come, like you, because they say they can’t feel.”
“But now I can feel. I’m open to everything. But no sooner do you accomplish that, than you say quickly—put it away, put the pain away where it can’t hurt, turn it into a story or into history. But I don’t want to put it away. Yes, I know what you want me to say—that because I’ve rescued so much private pain
-material—because I’m damned if I’ll call it anything else, and ‘worked through it’ and accepted it and made it general, because of that I’m free and strong. Well all right, I’ll accept it and say it. And what now? I’m tired of the wolves and the castles and the forests and the priests. I can cope with them in any form they choose to present themselves. But I’ve told you, I want to walk off, by myself, Anna Freeman.”
“By yourself?” she said again.
“Because I’m convinced that there are whole areas of me made by the kind of experience women haven’t had before…”
The small smile was already beginning on her face—it was the “conducting smile” of our sessions together, we were back as analyst and patient.
I said: “No, don’t smile yet. I believe I’m living the kind of life women never lived before.”
“Never?” she said, and behind her voice I could hear the sounds she always evoked at such moments—seas lapping on old beaches, voices of people centuries dead. She had the capacity to evoke a feeling of vast areas of time by a smile or a tone of voice that could delight me, rest me, fill me with joy—but I didn’t want it just then.
“Never,” I said.
“The details change, but the form is the same,” she said.
“No,” I insisted.
“In what way are you different? Are you saying there haven’t been artist-women before? There haven’t been women who were independent? There haven’t been women who insisted on sexual freedom! I tell you, there are a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.”
“They didn’t look at themselves as I do. They didn’t feel as I do. How could they? I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world. And I don’t want to hear, when I’ve had encounter with some Mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men’s minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it’s hard enough to come by) of a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date…”
“Isn’t it?” she said, smiling.
“No, because the dream of the golden age is a million times more powerful because it’s possible, just as total destruction is possible. Probably because both are possible.”
“What do you want me to say then?”
“I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be new…” I saw the look on her face, and said: “You are saying that nothing I feel or think is new?”
“I have never said…” she began, and then switched to the royal we…“we have never said or suggested that further development of the human race isn’t possible. You aren’t accusing me of that, are you? Because it’s the opposite of what we say.”
“I’m accusing you of behaving as if you didn’t believe it. Look, if I’d said to you when I came in this afternoon: Yesterday I met a man at a party and I recognised in him the wolf, or the knight, or the monk, you’d nod and you’d smile. And we’d both feel the joy of recognition. But if I’d said: Yesterday I met a man at a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought: Yes, there’s a hint of something—there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvellous, but something new—if I said that, you’d frown.”
“Did you meet such a man?” she demanded, practically.
“No. I didn’t. But sometimes I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across, they’re split, means they are keeping themselves open for something.”
She said, after a long, thoughtful silence: “Anna, you shouldn’t be saying this to me at all.”
I was surprised. I said: “You’re not deliberately inviting me to be dishonest with you?”
“No. I’m saying that you should be writing again.”
I was angry, of course, and of course she knew I was going to be.
“You’re suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.”
“And so?”
“It would be a record of how I saw myself at a certain point. Because the record of an hour in the first week, let’s say, of my seeing you, and an hour now, would be so different that…”
“And so?”
“And besides, there are literary problems, problems of taste you never seem to think of. What you and I have done together is essentially to break down shame. In the first week of knowing you I wouldn’t have been able to say: I remember the feeling of violent repulsion and shame and curiosity I felt when I saw my father naked. It took me months to break down barriers in myself so I could say something like that. But now I can say something like:…because I wanted my father to die and—but the person reading it, without the subjective experience, the breaking down, would be shocked, as by the sight of blood or a word that has associations of shame, and the shock would swallow everything else.”
She said drily: “My dear Anna, you are using our experience together to re-enforce your rationalisations for not writing.”
“Oh, my God no, that is not all I’m saying.”
“Or are you saying that some books are for a minority of people?”
“My dear Mrs Marks, you know quite well it would be against my principles to admit any such idea, even if I had it.”
“Very well then, if you had it, tell me why some books are for the minority.”
I thought, and then said: “It’s a question of form.”
“Form? What about the content of yours? I understood that you people insisted on separating form and content?”
“My people may separate them, I don’t. At least, not till this moment. But now I’ll say it’s a question of form. People don’t mind immoral messages. They don’t mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex’s sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love. What they can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t stand formlessness.”
“So it is formless works of art, if such a thing were possible, that are for the minority?”
“But I don’t hold the belief that some books are for the minority. You know I don’t. I don’t hold the aristocratic view of art.”
“My dear Anna, your attitude to art is so aristocratic that you write, when you do, for yourself only.”
“And so do all the others,” I heard myself muttering.
“What others?”
“The others, all over the world, who are writing away in secret books, because they are afraid of what they are thinking.”
“So you are afraid of what you are thinking?” And she reached out for her appointment book, marking the end of our hour.
[At this point, another thick black line across the page.]
When I came to this new flat and arranged my big room the first thing I did was to buy the trestle table and lay my notebooks on it. And yet in the other flat in Molly’s house, the notebooks were stuffed into a suitcase under the bed. I didn’t buy them on a plan. I don’t think I ever, until I came here, actually said to myself: I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary. In Molly’s house the notebooks were something I n
ever thought about; and certainly not as work, or a responsibility.
The things that are important in life creep up on one unawares, one doesn’t expect them, one hasn’t given them shape in one’s mind. One recognises them, when they’ve appeared, that’s all.
When I came to this flat it was to give room, not only to a man (Michael or his successor) but to the notebooks. And in fact I now see moving to this flat as giving room to the notebooks. For I hadn’t been here a week before I had bought the trestle table and laid out the books on it. And then I read them. I hadn’t read them through since I first began to keep them. I was disturbed by reading them. First, because I had not realised before how the experience of being rejected by Michael had affected me; how it had changed, or apparently had changed, my whole personality. But above all, because I didn’t recognise myself. Matching what I had written with what I remembered it all seemed false. And this—the untruthfulness of what I had written was because of something I had not thought of before—my sterility. The deepening note of criticism, of defensiveness, of dislike.
It was then I decided to use the blue notebook, this one, as nothing but a record of facts. Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc. etc., and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film. When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like “I walked down the street,” or take a phrase from a newspaper “economic measures which lead to the full use of…” and immediately the words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can’t write any longer. Or only when I write fast, without looking back at what I have written. For if I look back, then the words swim and have no sense and I am conscious only of me, Anna, as a pulse in a great darkness, and the words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.
The Golden Notebook Page 55