The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  Meanwhile he stood, weary with disgust: this money-grubbing woman, well what can one expect?

  But he must have taken the money out of the bank or borrowed it that morning, which meant that he had expected her to stay firm, in spite of the flowers. He must have said: There’s a chance I’ll get round her with flowers, I’ll try it, it’s worth risking five shillings on it.

  THE NOTEBOOKS

  [The black notebook now abandoned its original intention to be divided into two parts, The Source, and Money. Its pages were covered with newspaper cuttings pasted in and dated, covering the years 1955, 56, 57. Every one of these news items referred to violence, death, rioting, hatred, in some part of Africa. There was only one entry in Anna’s handwriting, dated September 1956:]

  Last night I dreamed that a television film was to be made about the group of people at the Mashopi Hotel. There was a script ready, written by someone else. The director kept assuring me: “You’ll be pleased when you see the script, it’s exactly what you would have written yourself.” But for one reason or another I never saw the script. I went to the rehearsals for the television film. The “set” was under the gum-trees beside the railway lines outside the Mashopi Hotel. I was pleased that the director had got the atmosphere so well. Then I saw that the “set” was in fact the real thing: he had somehow transported the whole cast to Central Africa, and was filming the story under the gum-trees with even such details as the smell of wine rising off white dust, the smell of eucalyptus in hot sunlight. Then I saw the cameras come wheeling in to make the film. They reminded me of guns, in the way they pointed and swung over the group waiting to start their play. The play started. I began to feel uneasy. Then I understood that the director’s choice of shots or of timing was changing the “story.” What would emerge on the completed film would be something quite different from what I remembered. I was powerless to stop the director and the cameramen. So I stood to one side and watched the group (among whom was Anna, myself, but not as I remembered her). They were speaking lines of dialogue I did not remember, their relationships were altogether different. I was filled with anxiety. When it was all over, and the cast began drifting off, to drink in the Mashopi Hotel bar, and the cameramen (who I now saw were all black, all the technicians were black) were wheeling off their cameras and dismantling them (for they were also machine guns). I said to the director: “Why did you change my story?” I saw he did not understand what I meant. I had imagined he had done it on purpose, had decided my story was no good. He looked rather hurt, certainly surprised. He said: “But Anna, you saw those people there, didn’t you? You saw what I saw? They spoke those words, didn’t they? I only filmed what was there.” I did not know what to say, for I realised that he was right, that what I “remembered” was probably untrue. He said, upset because I was: “Come and have a drink, Anna. Don’t you see, it doesn’t matter what we film, provided we film something.”

  I shall close this notebook. If I were asked by Mother Sugar to “name” this dream, I would say it was about total sterility. And besides, since I dreamed it, I have been unable to remember how Maryrose moved her eyes, or how Paul laughed. It’s all gone.

  [There was a double black line across the page, marking the end of the notebook.]

  [The red notebook, like the black notebook, had been taken over by newspaper cuttings, for the years 1956 and 1957. These referred to events in Europe, the Soviet Union, China, the United States. Like the cuttings on Africa in the same period, they were about, for the most part, violence. Anna had underlined the word “freedom” whenever it occurred, in red pencil. Where the cuttings ceased, she had added up the red lines, making a total of 679 references to the word freedom. The only entry in her own handwriting for this period was the following:]

  Yesterday Jimmy came to see me. He has just come back from a visit to the Soviet Union with a teachers’ delegation. Told me this story. Harry Mathews, a teacher, dropped his job to fight in Spain. Was wounded, ten months in hospital with a fractured leg. During this time thought over Spain—communist dirty work, etc., read a lot, became suspicious of Stalin. Usual in-fight—C.P. then expulsion, joined the Trotskyists. Quarrelled with them, left them. Unable to fight in the war, because of his crippled leg, he trained to teach backward children. “It goes without saying that for Harry there is no such thing as a stupid child, only unfortunate children.” Harry lived through the war in a small spartan room near King’s Cross, performing more than one act of heroism, rescuing people from bombed and burning buildings, etc. “He was quite a legend in the area, but of course at the moment when people started looking for the limping hero who had saved the child or poor old woman Harry was nowhere to be found, because it goes without saying he would despise himself if he took credit for heroic deeds.” At the end of the war Jimmy, back from Burma, went to see his old friend Harry, but they quarrelled. “I was a hundred per cent Party member, and there was Harry, a dirty Trot, so there were high words and we parted forever. But I was fond of the silly sod, so I used to make a point of finding out what happened to him.” Harry had two lives. His outward life was all self-sacrifice and devotion. He not only worked in a school for backward children, and with great success, but he used to invite children of the area (a poor one) into his flat for classes every evening. He taught them literature, made them read, coached them for examinations. He was teaching, one way or another, for eighteen hours a day. “It goes without saying that he regards sleep as a waste of time, he trained himself to sleep four hours a night.” He lived in this one room until the widow of an airforce pilot fell in love with him and transferred him to her flat, where he had two rooms. She had three children. He treated her with kindness, but if her life was now dedicated to him, his was to his children, in the school and off the street. That was his outer life. Meanwhile he learned Russian. Meanwhile he collected books, pamphlets, newspaper cuttings, about the Soviet Union. Meanwhile he built up for himself a picture of the real history of the Soviet Union, or rather of the Russian Communist Party, from 1900 onwards.

  A friend of Jimmy’s visited Harry, about 1950, and told Jimmy about him. “He used to dress in a sort of bush shirt, or tunic, and sandals, with a military hair-cut. He never smiled. A portrait of Lenin on the wall—well that certainly goes without saying. A smaller one of Trotsky. The widow hovering respectfully in the background. Kids rushing in and out from the street. And Harry, talking about the Soviet Union. He spoke Russian fluently by then, and knew the inside history of every minor squabble or intrigue, let alone the big blood-baths, from the year dot. And what was all this in aid of? Anna, you’d never guess.” “Of course I can,” I said. “He was preparing himself for the day.” “Of course. Right first time. The poor lunatic had it all worked out—the day would come when the comrades in Russia would all suddenly and at the same moment see the light. They’d say: ‘We’ve lost our road, we’ve missed the right path, our horizons are unclear. But over there in St Pancras, London, England, is Comrade Harry, who knows it all. We’ll invite him over and ask his advice.”’ Time passed. Things got worse and worse, but from Harry’s point of view, better and better. With every new scandal from the Soviet Union, it seems that Harry’s morale rose. The piles of newspapers rose to the ceiling in Harry’s rooms and overflowed into the widow’s rooms. He was speaking Russian like a native. Stalin died—Harry nodded and thought: It won’t be long now. And then the Twentieth Congress: Good, but not good enough. And then Harry meets Jimmy on the street. Ancient political enemies, they frown and stiffen. Then they nod, and smile. Then Harry takes Jimmy back to the widow’s flat. They have tea. Jimmy says: “There’s a delegation to the Soviet Union, I’m organising it, like to come?” Harry is suddenly illuminated. “Imagine it, Anna, there I sat, like a clot, thinking: Well, the poor Trot’s got his heart in the right place after all, he’s still got a soft spot for our Alma Mater. But all the time he was thinking: My day has come. He kept asking me who had suggested his name, and it was obviously important to him and so
I didn’t say the idea had only just that moment crossed my mind. Little did I realise that he believed that ‘the Party itself,’ and all the way from Moscow at that, was summoning him to help them out. So anyway, to cut a long story short, off we all go to Moscow, thirty happy British teachers. And the happiest, poor Harry, who had documents and papers stuffed into every pocket of his military tunic. We arrive in Moscow, and he has a dedicated and expectant air. He is kind to the rest of us, but we charitably put it down to the fact that he despises us for our comparatively frivolous lives but is determined not to show it. Besides, most of us are ex-Stalinists, and there is no denying that more than one ex-Stalinist has a twinge or two, meeting the Trots these days. However. The delegation proceeds on its flowery way of visits to factories, schools, Palaces of Culture, and the University, not to mention speeches and banquets. And there is Harry, in his tunic, with his gammy leg, and his revolutionary sternness, the living incarnation of Lenin, only those foolish Russians never recognised him. They adored him of course for his high seriousness, but more than once they enquired why Harry wore such bizarre clothes, and even, as I recall, if he had a secret sorrow. Meanwhile, our old friendship had been restored and we used to chat about this and that in our rooms at night. I noticed he was looking at me increasingly bewildered. I noticed he was getting agitated. And still I had no idea what was going through his mind. Well, on the last night of our visit, we were supposed to go off and banquet with some teachers’ organisation but Harry wouldn’t come. He said he didn’t feel well. I went to see him, when I got back, and there he was, sitting in a chair by the window, his gammy leg stuck out in front of him. He rose to meet me, positively radiant, then he saw it was only me, and it was a blow, I could see that. Then he cross-examined me and found out that he had been invited on to the delegation only because I had thought of it when I saw him in the street. I could have kicked myself for telling him. I swear, Anna, at the moment when it began to dawn on me, I wished I had made up some story about ‘Khrushchey himself,’ etc. He kept saying: ‘Jimmy, you must tell me the truth, you invited me, it was just your idea?’ over and over again. It was really terrible. Well, suddenly the interpreter came in to see if we had everything for the night and to say good-bye, because we wouldn’t see her in the morning. She was a girl of about twenty or twenty-two, an absolute honeypot, with long yellow plaits and grey eyes. I swear that every man on the delegation was in love with her. She was dropping with exhaustion, because it’s no joke, nannying thirty British teachers for two weeks all round those palaces and schools. But suddenly Harry saw his chance. He pulled out a chair, and said: ‘Comrade Olga, sit down please.’ Brooking no argument. I knew what was going to happen, because he was unloading theses and documents from all over his person and arranging them on the table. I tried to stop him but he simply nodded at the door. When Harry nods at the door, one goes out. Well, I went to my room and sat and smoked, waiting. That was about one in the morning. We were due to get up at six so as to be driven to the airport at seven. At six Olga came in, white with exhaustion, and definitely at a loss. Yes, that’s the phrase, at a loss. She said to me: ‘I have come to tell you that I think you must look after your friend Harry, I think he is not well, he is over-excited.’ Well, I told Olga all about his Spanish war record, and his acts of heroism, and I invented two or three extra ones, and she said: ‘Yes, it is easy to see he is a very fine man.’ Then she nearly split her face yawning and she went off to bed, because she had to start work on another delegation of peace-loving churchmen from Scotland next day. And then Harry came in. He was gaunt as a ghost and dead with emotion. The whole basis of his life had collapsed. He told me what had happened, while I kept trying to hurry him up, because we had to be leaving for the airport and neither of us had even changed since the night before…”

  Harry had apparently unloaded papers and cuttings on to the table and then began a lecture on the history of the Russian Communist Party, starting from the days of Iskra. Olga sat opposite, suppressing her yawns, smiling and full of charm and preserving the civic politeness that is owed to progressive guests from abroad. At one point she asked if he were a historian, but he replied: “No, I am a socialist, like yourself comrade.” He took her through years of intrigues, and heroism and intellectual battles, missing nothing. At about three in the morning she had said: “Will you excuse me a moment, comrade?” She went out, and he had sat thinking that she had gone for the police, and now he would be arrested and “sent to Siberia.” When Jimmy asked him how he felt about vanishing into Siberia, possibly for good, Harry had replied that: “For such a moment as this, no price is too high.” Because of course he’d forgotten by now that he was addressing Olga the interpreter, the pretty twenty-year-old blonde whose father had been killed in the war, who looked after a widowed mother, and intended to marry a journalist from Pravda next spring. By that time he was addressing History itself. He waited for the police, quite limp with ecstatic acceptance, but when Olga came back it was with two glasses of tea she had ordered from the restaurant. “The service is beyond words appalling Anna, so I can imagine that he was sitting there waiting for the handcuffs for some time.” Olga sat down, pushing his glass of tea across to him, and said: “Please go on, I am sorry I interrupted you.” Soon after she went to sleep. Harry had just reached the point where Stalin had arranged for the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico. Apparently Harry sat there, cut off in the middle of a sentence, looking at Olga, her gleaming plaits slipping forward over her slumped shoulders, her head fallen sideways. Then he pushed his papers together, and put them away. Then he very gently woke her, apologising for boring her. She was overcome with shame at her bad manners, but explained that while she enjoyed her work, as interpreter for one delegation after another, it was hard work, “And besides, my mother is an invalid and I have to do the housework when I get home at nights.” She clasped his hand, and said: “I will make you a promise. I promise you that when our Party Historians have re-written the history of our Communist Party in accordance with the revisions made necessary by the distortions imposed during the era of Comrade Stalin, I promise you that I will read it.” Apparently Harry had been overcome by her embarrassment because of her lack of manners. They spent some minutes reassuring each other. Then Olga went off to see Jimmy to say that his friend was over-excited.

  I asked Jimmy what happened next. “I don’t know. We had to get dressed and packed in a hurry, then we flew back. Harry was silent and rather ill-looking but that’s all. He made a point of thanking me for getting him on to the delegation: a very valuable experience, he said it was. I went over to see him last week. He’s married the widow at last and she’s pregnant, I don’t know what that proves, if anything.”

  [Here a double black line marked the end of the red notebook.]

  *1 A SHORT STORY

  A woman, starved for love, meets a man rather younger than herself, younger perhaps in emotional experience than in years; or perhaps in the depth of his emotional experience. She deludes herself about the nature of the man; for him, another love affair merely.

  *2 A SHORT STORY

  A man uses grown-up language, the language of emotionally grown people, to gain a woman. She slowly understands that this language comes from an idea in his head, it has nothing to do with his emotions; in fact he is an adolescent boy emotionally. Yet, knowing this, she cannot prevent herself being moved and won by the language.

  *3 A SHORT STORY

  Saw in the review of a book recently: “One of those unfortunate affairs—women, even the nicest of them, tend to fall in love with men quite unworthy of them.” This review, of course, written by a man. The truth is that when “nice women” fall in love with “unworthy men” it is always either because these men have “named” them, or because they have an ambiguous uncreated quality impossible to the “good” or “nice” men. The normal, the good men, are finished and completed and without potentialities. The story to be about my friend Annie in Central Africa, a “nice woman�
� married to a “nice man.” He was a civil servant, solid, responsible, and he wrote bad poetry in secret. She fell in love with a hard-drinking womanising miner. Not an organised miner, the manager, or clerk, or owner. He moved from small mine to small mine that were always precarious, on the point of making a fortune or of failing. He left a mine when it failed or was sold to a big combine. I was with the two of them one evening. He was just in from some mine in the bush three hundred miles off. There she was, rather fat, flushed, a pretty girl buried in a matron. He looked over at her and said: “Annie, you were born to be the wife of a pirate.” I remember how we laughed, because it was ludicrous, pirates in that suburban little room in the city; pirates and the nice kind husband and Annie, the good wife, so guilty because of this affair, more of the imagination than the flesh, with the roving miner. Yet I remember when he said it, how gratefully she looked at him. He drank himself to death, years later. I got a letter from her, after years of silence: “You remember X? He died. You’ll understand me—the meaning of my life has gone.” This story, translated into English terms, should be the nice suburban wife in love with a hopeless coffee-bar bum, who says he is going to write, and perhaps does, one day, but that isn’t the point. This story to be written from the point of view of the entirely responsible and decent husband, unable to understand the attraction of this bum.

  *4 A SHORT STORY

  A healthy woman, in love with a man. She finds herself becoming ill, with symptoms she has never had in her life. She slowly understands that this illness is not hers, she understands the man is ill. She understands the nature of the illness, not from him, how he acts or what he says, but from how his illness is reflected in herself.

  *5 A SHORT STORY