The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  I’ve been investigating progressive schools.

  Told Janet about them, she said: “I want to go to an ordinary boarding-school.” I said, “There is nothing ordinary about a conventional English girls’ boarding-school, they are unique in the world.” She said: “You know quite well what I mean. And besides, Mary is going.”

  Janet will be leaving in a few days. Today Molly rang up and said there was an American in town looking for a room. I said I didn’t want to let rooms. She said: “But you’re in that enormous flat all by yourself, you don’t have to see him.” I persisted, and then she said, “Well I think it’s just anti-social. What’s happened to you Anna?” The what’s happened to you hit me. Because of course it’s anti-social, and I don’t care. She said: “Have a heart, he’s an American lefty, he’s got no money, he’s been black-listed, and there you are in a flat with all those empty rooms.” I said: “If he’s an American on the loose in Europe, he’ll be writing the American epic novel and he’ll be in psychoanalysis and he’ll have one of those awful American marriages and I’ll have to listen to his troubles—I mean problems.” But Molly didn’t laugh, she said: “If you don’t look out you’ll be like the other people who’ve left the Party. I met Tom yesterday, he left the Party over Hungary. He used to be a sort of unofficial soul-daddy for dozens of people. He’s changed into something else. I heard he’d suddenly doubled the rent of the rooms he lets in his house, and he’s stopped being a teacher, he’s taken a job in an advertising agency. I rang him up to ask what the hell he thought he was doing, and he said: ‘I’ve been taken for a sucker long enough.’ So you’d better be careful Anna.”

  So I said the American could come, provided I didn’t have to see him, and then Molly said: “He’s not bad, I’ve met him, awfully brash and opinionated, but then they all are.” I said: “I don’t think they’re brash, that’s a stereotype from the past, the Americans these days are cool and shut off, they’ve got glass or ice between themselves and the rest of the world.” “Oh if you say so,” Molly said, “but I’m busy.”

  Afterwards I thought of what I’d said, it was interesting because I hadn’t known I’d thought it until I said it. But it’s true. Yes. They can be brash and noisy, but more often full of good humour, yes that’s their characteristic, good humour. And underneath the hysteria, the fear of involvement. I’ve been sitting and thinking about the Americans I’ve known. A lot of them now. I remember the weekend I spent with F., a friend of Nelson’s. At first, I was relieved, I thought: A normal man at last, thank God. Then I understood, everything was from his head. He was “good in bed.” Consciously, positively dutifully “a man.” But no warmth. Everything measured out. The wife “back home” whom he patronised with every word he said (but really he was afraid of her—he was afraid not of her but of the obligations to society she represented). And the careful noncommittal affairs. Exactly the right amount of warmth measured out—everything worked out, for such and such a relationship, so much emotion. Yes, that’s their quality, something measured, shrewd and cool. Of course, emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that’s why people are measuring it out.

  I put myself back into the state of mind I was in when I went to Mother Sugar. I can’t feel, I said. I don’t care about anyone in the world except Janet. Seven years ago now?—something like that. When I left her I said: You’ve taught me to cry, thank you for nothing, you’ve given me back feeling, and it’s too painful.

  How old-fashioned of me to seek a witch-doctor to be taught to feel. Because now I think of it, I see that people everywhere are trying not to feel. Cool, cool, cool, that’s the word. That’s the banner. From America first, but now us. I think of the groups of young people, political and social around London, Tommy’s friends, the new socialists—that’s what they have in common, a quality of measured emotion, coolness.

  In a world as terrible as this, limit emotion. How odd I didn’t see it before.

  And against this instinctive retreat into no-feeling, as a protection against pain, Mother Sugar—I remember saying to her in exasperation: “If I said to you that the H bomb has fallen and obliterated half of Europe, you’d click with your tongue, tck, tck, and then, if I was weeping and wailing, you’d invite me, with an admonitory frown or a gesture, to remember, or take into account some emotion I was wilfully excluding. What emotion? Why, joy, of course. Consider, my child, you’d say, or imply, the creative aspects of destruction! Consider the creative implications of the power locked in the atom! Allow your mind to rest on those first blades of tentative green grass that will poke into the light out of the lava in a million years time!” She smiled, of course. Then the smile changed and became dry, there was one of the moments, outside the analyst-patient relationship that I waited for. She said: “My dear Anna, it is possible after all that in order to keep ourselves sane we will have to learn to rely on those blades of grass springing in a million years?”

  But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

  It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only…or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences…. I can hear Janet coming up the stairs.

  Janet went to school today. Uniform is optional, and she chose to wear it. Extraordinary that my child should want a uniform. I can’t remember a time in my life when I wouldn’t have felt uncomfortable in one. Paradox: when I was a communist, it was not in the service of uniformed man, but the opposite. The uniform is an ugly sage-green tunic with a yellowish-brown blouse. It is cut to make a girl of Janet’s age, twelve, as ugly as possible. Also there is an ugly round hard dark green hat. The greens of the hat and the tunic are ugly together. Yet she is delighted. The uniform was chosen by the head-mistress, whom I interviewed—an admirable old Englishwoman, scholarly, dry, intelligent. I should imagine that the woman in her died before she was twenty, she probably killed her off. It occurs to me that in sending Janet to her, I am providing Janet with a father-figure? But oddly enough, I was certainly trusting Janet to oppose her, by refusing, for instance, to wear the ugly uniform. But Janet doesn’t want to oppose anything.

  The young girl’s quality, the petulant, indulged-child’s charm, which she put on like a pretty dress about a year ago, vanished the moment she put the uniform on. On the station platform she was a nice, bright little girl in a hideous uniform, among a herd of such young girls, her young breasts hidden, all charm vanquished, her manner practical. And, seeing her, I mourned for a dark, lively, dark-eyed, slight young girl, alive with new sexuality, alert with the instinctive knowledge of her power. And at the same time I noticed I had a truly cruel thought: my poor child, if you are going to grow up in a society full of Ivors and Ronnies, full of frightened men who measure out emotions like weighed groceries, then you’ll do well to model yourself on Miss Street, the head-mistress. I was feeling, because that charming young girl had been put out of sight, as if something infinitely precious and vulnerable had been saved from hurt. And there was a triumphant malice in it, directed against men: All right, so you don’t value us?—then we’ll save ourselves against the time when you do again. I ought to have been ashamed of the spite, of the malice, but I was not, there was too much pleasure in it.

  The American, Mr Green, was coming today, so I got his room ready. He telephoned to say he was invited to spend a day in the country, could he come tomorrow. Many ca
reful apologies. Was annoyed, had made arrangements that I had to change. Later Molly telephoned to say that her friend Jane told her that she, Jane, had spent the day with Mr Green “showing him Soho.” I was angry. Then Molly said: “Tommy met Mr Green and didn’t like him, he said he was unorganised, that’s a mark in Mr Green’s favour, don’t you think? Tommy never approves of anyone who isn’t just so. Don’t you think that’s odd? Ever such a socialist he is, and all his friends, and they’re all as respectable and petit-bourgeois as—they’ve only got to meet someone with a bit of life in them, and they start drawing their moral skirts aside. And of course that ghastly wife of Tommy’s is worse than anybody. She complained that Mr Green was nothing but a bum, because he doesn’t have a regular job. Can you beat it? That girl’d do beautifully as the wife of a provincial businessman with slightly liberal leanings that he uses to shock his Tory friends. And she’s my daughter-in-law. She’s writing a great tome about the Chartists and she puts aside two pounds a week as a nest-egg against her old age. Anyway, if Tommy and that little bitch don’t like Mr Green, it means you probably will, so virtue won’t have to be its own reward.” Well, I laughed at all this, and then I thought that if I could laugh I couldn’t be in such a bad state as I thought. Mother Sugar once told me it had taken her six months to get a depressed patient to laugh. Yet there’s no doubt that Janet’s going, leaving me alone in this big flat, has made me worse. I am listless and idle. I keep thinking of Mother Sugar, but in a new way, as if the idea of her can save me. From what? I don’t want to be saved. Because Janet’s going has reminded me of something else—time, how time can be, when one hasn’t got pressure on one. I haven’t moved, at ease, in time, since Janet was born. Having a child means being conscious of the clock, never being free of something that has to be done at a certain moment ahead. An Anna is coming to life that died when Janet was born. I was sitting on the floor this afternoon, watching the sky darken, an inhabitant of a world where one can say, the quality of light means it must be evening, instead of: in exactly an hour I must put on the vegetables, and I suddenly went back into a state of mind I’d forgotten, something from my child hood. I used at night to sit up in bed and play what I called “the game.” First I created the room I sat in, object by object, “naming” everything, bed, chair, curtains, till it was whole in my mind, then move out of the room, creating the house, then out of the house, slowly creating the street, then rise into the air, looking down on London, at the enormous sprawling wastes of London, but holding at the same time the room and the house and the street in my mind, and then England, the shape of England in Britain, then the little group of islands lying against the continent, then slowly, slowly, I would create the world, continent by continent, ocean by ocean (but the point of “the game” was to create this vastness while holding the bedroom, the house, the street in their littleness in my mind at the same time), until the point was reached where I moved out into space, and watched the world, a sunlit ball in the sky, turning and rolling beneath me. Then, having reached that point, with the stars around me, and the little earth turning underneath me, I’d try to imagine at the same time, a drop of water, swarming with life, or a green leaf. Sometimes I could reach what I wanted, a simultaneous knowledge of vastness and of smallness. Or I would concentrate on a single creature, a small coloured fish in a pool, or a single flower, or a moth, and try to create, to “name” the being of the flower, the moth, the fish, slowly creating around it the forest, or the sea-pool, or the space of blowing night air that tilted my wings. And then, out, suddenly, from the smallness into space.

  It was easy when I was a child. It seems to me now that I must have lived for years in a state of exhilaration, because of “the game.” But now it is very hard. This afternoon I was exhausted after a few moments. Yet I did succeed, just for a few seconds, to watch the earth turn beneath me, while the sunlight deepened on the belly of Asia and Europe fell into darkness.

  Saul Green came to see the room and to leave his things. I took him straight up to the room, he gave one glance at it and said: “Fine, fine.” This was so offhand I asked if he expected to leave again soon. He gave me a quick wary look, which I already knew to be characteristic, and began long, careful explanations, in the same tone he had used for his apologies about the day in the country. Reminded, I said: “I believe you spent the day exploring Soho with Jane Bond.” He looked startled, then offended—but quite extraordinarily offended, as if he’d been caught out in some crime, then his face changed, it became wary and careful, and he started off on a long explanation about changed plans, etc., and the explanation was even more extraordinary, since it was clearly all untrue. Suddenly I got bored, and said that I had only asked about the room because I intended to move to another flat, so if he planned a long stay, he should look for somewhere else. He said it was Fine, it was Fine. It seemed as if he wasn’t listening, and that he hadn’t seen the room at all. But he came out after me, leaving his bags. Then I said my land-lady’s piece, about there being “no restrictions,” making it a joke, but he didn’t understand, so I had to spell it out, that if he wanted girls in his room I didn’t mind. Was surprised by his laugh—loud, abrupt, offended. He said he was glad I assumed he was a normal young man; this was so American, the automatic reaction one is used to when virility is in question, so I didn’t make the joke I had been going to, about the previous occupant of the room. Altogether I felt everything to be jarring, discordant, so I went down to the kitchen, leaving him to follow if he wanted. I had made coffee, and he came into the kitchen on his way out so I offered him a cup. He hesitated. He was examining me. I have never in my life been subjected to as brutal a sexual inspection as that one. There was no humour in it, no warmth, just the stockman’s comparison-making. It was so frank that I said: “I hope I pass,” but he gave his abrupt offended laugh again and said: “Fine, fine”—in other words, he was either unconscious he had been making a list of my vital statistics, or he was too prudish to acknowledge it. So I left it, and we had coffee. I was uncomfortable with him, I didn’t know why, something in his manner. And there is something upsetting about his appearance, as if one instinctively expects to find something when one looks at him that one doesn’t find. He is fair, his hair is close-cut, like a fair glistening brush. He is not tall, though I kept thinking of him as tall, and then checking again and seeing he was not. It’s because his clothes are all too big for him, they hang around him. One would expect him to be that fair, rather stocky, broad-shouldered American type, with the greenish-grey eyes, the square face. I kept looking, I realise now, expecting to see this man, and seeing a slight, uncoordinated man with clothes hanging loose from broad shoulders, and then being caught and held by his eyes. His eyes are cool grey-green, and never off guard. That is the most striking thing about him, he is never for one second off guard. I asked one or two questions out of the fellow-feeling of “A socialist from America” but I gave it up, because he turned aside my questions. For something to say, I asked why he wore his clothes so big, and he looked startled, as if he were surprised I had noticed it, and then evasive, and said he had lost a lot of weight, he was normally a couple of stones heavier. I asked if he’d been ill, and again he was offended, suggesting by his manner that pressure was being put on him or that he was being spied on. For a while we sat in silence, while I wished he would go, since it seemed impossible to say anything at all that he wouldn’t resent. Then I said something about Molly, whom he hadn’t mentioned. I was surprised how he seemed to change. Some kind of intelligence switched on suddenly, I don’t know how else to put it: his attention focused, and I was struck by how he spoke of her, extraordinarily acute about her character and situation. I realised there was no other man I had met, with the exception of Michael, capable of such quick insight into a woman. It struck me that he was “naming” her on a level that would please her if she heard it…

  [From this point on in the diary, or chronicle, Anna had marked certain points in it with asterisks, and numbere
d the asterisks.]

  …and this made me curious, envious rather, so I said something (*1) about myself and so he spoke of me. Rather, he lectured me. It was like being lectured by a fair-minded pedant, on the dangers and pitfalls and rewards of a woman living alone, etc. It occurred to me, giving me the most curious feeling of dislocation, of disbelief, that this was the same man, who ten minutes before had given me such a cold and almost hostile sexual inspection; yet in what he was saying now there was nothing of that quality, and nothing, either, of the half-veiled curiosity, the sudden moment of lip-licking expectation one is used to. On the contrary, I could not remember any other man talking with this simplicity, frankness and comradeship about the sort of life I, and women like me, live. I laughed at one point, because I was being “named” on such a high level (*2), yet lectured as if I were a small girl, instead of being several years older than he. It struck me as odd that he did not hear my laugh, it wasn’t a question of being offended by it, or waiting until I stopped laughing, or asking why I was laughing, he simply went on talking, as if he had forgotten I was there. I had the most uncomfortable feeling that I literally didn’t exist for Saul any longer, and I was glad to bring the thing to an end, which I had to do because I was expecting a man from the company who wants to buy Frontiers of War. When he came I decided not to sell the rights of the novel. They do want to make the film, I think, so what is the use of standing out all these years simply to give in now, just because for the first time I’m running short of money. So I told him I wouldn’t sell. He assumed I had sold it to someone else, was unable to believe that a writer existed who wouldn’t sell, at a high enough price. He kept raising the price, absurdly, I kept refusing, it was all farcical, I began to laugh—it reminded me of the moment I laughed and Saul didn’t hear: he didn’t know why I was laughing and kept looking at me as if I, the real Anna who was laughing, didn’t exist for him. And when he went off, it was with dislike on both sides. Anyway, to go back to Saul, when I told him I was expecting someone to come, I was struck by how he scrambled up, as if he were being thrown out, yes, really, as if I’d thrown him out, instead of just saying I was expecting a man on business. Then he controlled the scrambling defensive movement, and nodded, very cool and withdrawn, and went straight downstairs. When he had gone I felt bad, the whole encounter full of jarrings and discordancies, and I decided I had made a mistake about letting him come to my flat. But later I told Saul about my not wanting to sell the novel for a film, and rather defensively, because I am used to being treated as if I were foolish, and he took it for granted I was right. He said the reason he finally left his job in Hollywood was because there wasn’t anybody left in it who was capable of believing that a writer would refuse money rather than have a bad film made. He talks like all these people who have worked in Hollywood—with a sort of grim, incredulous despair that anything so corrupt can actually exist. Then he said something that struck me: “We’ve got to make stands all the time. Yeah, O.K., we make stands on false positions sometimes, but the point is to make the stand at all. I’ve the advantage over you on one point…” (I was struck, this time uncomfortably, by the sullenness of I’ve the advantage over you on one point, as if we were in some sort of a contest or battle) “…and that is, the pressures that have been put on me to give in have been much more direct and obvious than the pressures in this country.” I said, knowing what he meant, but wanting to hear him define it: “Give in to what?” “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.” “Oh, but I do know.” “I think you do. I hope you do.” And then, with the touch of sullenness: “Believe me, that’s one thing I learned in that hell-hole—the people who aren’t prepared to take a stand somewhere, and sometimes on bad issues, won’t make a stand, they sell out. And don’t say: Sell out to what? If it were easy to say exactly what, we wouldn’t all have to make stands on bad issues sometimes. We shouldn’t be afraid to be naïve and foolish, that’s the one thing we should none of us be afraid of…” He began lecturing me again. I liked being lectured. I liked what he said. And yet as he talked, again unaware of me—I swear he had forgotten I was there—I was looking at him, from the safety of his having forgotten me, and I saw his pose, standing with his back to the window in a way that was like a caricature of that young American we see in the films—sexy he-man, all balls and strenuous erection. He stood lounging, his thumbs hitched through his belt, fingers loose, but pointing as it were to his genitals—the pose that always amuses me when I see it on the films, because it goes with the young, unused, boyish American face—the boyish, disarming face, and the he-man’s pose. And Saul stood lecturing me about the pressures of society to conform, while he used the sexy pose. It was unconscious but it was directed at me, and it was so crude I began to be annoyed. There were two different languages being spoken to me at the same time. Then I noticed he looked different. Earlier I had kept looking at him, uneasy, because of how I was expecting to see something different from what he was, and seeing the thin bony man in loose hanging clothes. He was wearing clothes that fitted him. They looked new. I realised he must have gone out and bought new clothes. He wore new neat blue jeans, tight-fitting, and a close dark blue sweater. He looked slight, with the fitting new clothes, and yet he still looked wrong, the shoulders being too broad, and the jutting bones of his hips. I broke into the monologue, and asked if he had bought new clothes simply because I had said what I had that morning. He frowned, and replied stiffly, after a pause, that he didn’t want to look a hick—“Any more than I have to.” I felt uncomfortable again, and said: “Hadn’t anyone told you before that your clothes were hanging on you?” He said nothing, it was as if I hadn’t spoken, his eyes were abstracted. I said: “If no one told you, well, your mirror must have.” He laughed gruffly, and said: “Lady, I don’t enjoy looking into mirrors these days, I used to think of myself as a good-looking boy.” He intensified the sexy, lounging pose as he said these words. I could see him as he was when his flesh fitted his bone-structure: broad, solid, a strong fair-coloured man glistening with health, with cool greyish eyes, shrewdly measuring. But the new neat clothes intensified the discordancy in his appearance; he looked all wrong. I realised he looked ill, there was an unhealthy whiteness in his face. And yet still he lounged, not looking at me, Anna; but directing sexual challenge at me. I thought how odd that this was the same man who was capable of such real perception about women, such a simple warmth in the form of the words he used. I nearly challenged him in his turn, saying something like: What the hell do you mean by using that grown-up language to me, and then standing there like a heroic cowboy with invisible revolvers stuck all over your hips? But there was a great space between him and me, he started talking again, lecturing. Anyway I said I was tired and went off to bed.