The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  Well, and of course that softened me, stopped my anger. We talked about politics. For on this subject we don’t disagree. It’s like being back in the Party, but when a communist meant holding high standards, fighting for something. He was kicked out of the Party for being “prematurely anti-Stalinist.” Then he was black-listed in Hollywood for being a red. It’s one of the classic, already archetypal stories of our time, but the difference between him and the others is that he isn’t bitter or soured.

  I was able for the first time to joke with him, so that his laugh wasn’t defensive. He wears his new blue jeans, new blue sweater, sneakers. I told him he should be ashamed to wear the uniform of American non-conformism; he said he wasn’t adult enough yet to join the tiny minority of human beings who didn’t need a uniform.

  I am hopelessly in love with this man.

  I wrote the last sentence three days ago, but I didn’t realise it was three days until I worked it out. I’m in love and so time has gone. Two nights ago we talked late, while the tensions built up. I wanted to laugh, because it’s always funny, two people manoeuvring, so to speak, before sex; at the same time I felt a reluctance, precisely because I was in love; and I swear that either one of us might have broken the current, and said good night. At last he came and put his arms around me and said: “We’re both lonely people, let’s be good to each other.” I noted there was a touch of sullenness as he said it, but chose not to hear it (*5). I’d forgotten what making love with a real man is like. And I’d forgotten what it was like to lie in the arms of a man one loves. I’d forgotten what it was like to be in love like this, so that a step on the stair makes one’s heart beat, and the warmth of his shoulder against my palm is all the joy there is in life.

  That was a week ago. I can say nothing about it except that I was happy. (*6) I am so happy, so happy. I find myself sitting in my room, watching the sunlight on the floor, and I’m in the state that I reach after hours and hours of concentration with “the game”—a calm and delightful ecstasy, a oneness with everything, so that a flower in a vase is oneself, and the slow stretch of a muscle is the confident energy that drives the universe. (*7) And Saul is relaxed, a different person from the man who walked into my flat, tense and suspicious, and my state of apprehension is gone, the sick person who inhabited my body for (*8) a while has vanished.

  I read the last paragraph as if it were written about someone else. The night after I wrote it, Saul did not come down into my room to sleep. There was no explanation, he simply did not come. He nodded, cool and stiff, and went upstairs. I lay awake and thought of how, when a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her, of emotional and sexual responses, that grows in its own laws, its own logic. That creature in me was snubbed by Saul’s quietly going up to bed, so that I could see it quiver, and then fold itself up and begin to shrink. Next morning, we had coffee, and I looked across the table at him (he was extraordinary white and tense-looking) and I realised that if I said to him, Why didn’t you come to my room last night, why didn’t you make some kind of explanation for not coming, he would frown and go hostile.

  Later that day he came into my room and made love to me. It wasn’t real love-making. He had decided he would make love. The creature inside me who is the woman in love was not implicated, refused to be lied to.

  Last evening he said: “I have to go and see…” a long complicated story followed. I said: “Of course.” But he went on with the story, and I got annoyed. I knew what it was all about, of course, but I didn’t want to know and that in spite of the fact that I had written the truth in the yellow diary. Then he said, sullen and hostile: “You are very permissive, aren’t you?” He had said it yesterday, and I wrote in the yellow notebook. I said aloud, suddenly: “No.” A blind look came over his face. And I remembered that I knew the blind look, I’d seen it before and not wanted to. The word permissive is so alien to me, it’s got nothing to do with me. He came into my bed late, and I knew he had just come from sleeping with another woman. I said: “You’ve slept with another woman, haven’t you?” He stiffened and said, sullen: “No.” But I didn’t say anything and he said: “But it doesn’t mean anything, does it?” What was strange was, that the man who had said No, defending his freedom, and the man who said, pleading, It doesn’t mean anything, were two men. I couldn’t connect them. I was silent, in the grip of apprehension again, and then a third man said, brotherly and affectionate: “Go to sleep now.”

  I went to sleep, in obedience to this third friendly man, conscious of two other Annas, separate from the obedient child—Anna, the snubbed woman in love, cold and miserable in some corner of myself, and a curious detached sardonic Anna, looking on and saying: “Well, well!”

  I slept lightly, with terrible dreams. The dream that kept recurring was myself with the old dwarfed malicious man. In my dream I even nodded a sort of recognition—so there you are, I knew you’d turn up some time. He had a great protruding penis sticking out through his clothes, it menaced me, was dangerous, because I knew the old man hated me and wanted to hurt me. I woke myself up, tried to calm myself. Saul lay against me, a weight of inert dense cold flesh. He was lying on his back, but even asleep his pose was defensive. In the dim early morning light I could see his face, defensive. I was aware of a sharp sour smell. I thought: It can’t be Saul, he is too fastidious; then I could smell the sourness coming off the flesh of his neck, and I knew it was the smell of fear. He was afraid. In his sleep he was locked in fear, and he began to whimper, like a child afraid. I knew he was ill (though during the week of being happy I had refused to know it) and I felt full of love and compassion and I began rubbing his shoulders and neck into warmth. Towards morning he gets very cold, the cold was coming out of him, with the smell of his being afraid. When he was warmed, I put myself back to sleep, and instantly I was the old man, the old man had become me, but I was also the old woman, so that I was sexless. I was also spiteful and destructive. When I woke, Saul was again cold in my arms, a weight of cold. I had to warm myself out of the terror of the dream before I could warm him. I was saying to myself: I’ve been the malicious old man, and the spiteful old woman, or both together, so now what next? Meanwhile the light had come into the room, a greyish light, and I could see Saul. His flesh which, had he been well, would have been the warm dun-coloured flesh of his type of man—the broad strong fair man, strongly fleshed, was yellowish, loose on the big bones of his face. Suddenly he woke, afraid, out of a dream, and sat up, defensive, looking for enemies. Then he saw me and smiled: I could see how his smile would be on the broad, brown face of Saul Green, healthy. But his smile was yellow and terrified. He made love to me, out of fear. Fear of being alone. It was not the counterfeit love the woman-in-love, that instinctive creature, repudiated, but it was love from fear, and the Anna who was afraid responded; we were two frightened creatures, loving through terror. And my brain was on guard, fearful.

  For a week he didn’t come near me, again, no explanations, nothing, he was a stranger who came in, nodded, went upstairs. For a week I watched the female creature shrink, then grow angry, grow jealous. It was a terrible, spiteful jealousy I didn’t recognise in myself. I went upstairs to Saul and said: “What sort of man is it who makes love to a woman with every appearance of enjoying the process for days on end, and then switches off without so much as a polite lie?” The loud aggressive laugh. Then he said: “What sort of a man, you ask? You may very well ask.” I said: “I suppose you are writing that great American novel, young hero in search of an identity.” “Right,” he said. “But I’m not prepared to take that tone of voice from inhabitants of the old world who for some reason I don’t understand never have a moment’s doubt about their identity.” He was hard, laughing, hostile; I was also hard, and laughing. I said, enjoying the cold moment of pure hostility: “Well good luck, but don’t use me in your experiments.” And went downstairs. A few minutes later he came down, no longer a kind of spiritual tomahawk, but kindly and responsible. He said:
“Anna, you are looking for a man in your life, and you’re right, you deserve one, but.” “But?” “You’re looking for happiness. It’s a word that never meant anything to me until I watched you manufacturing it like molasses out of this situation. God knows how anyone, even a woman, could make happiness out of this set-up, but.” “But?” “This is me, Saul Green, and I’m not happy, and I never have been.” “So I’m making use of you.” “That’s right.” “Fair exchange, for your making use of me.” His face changed, he looked startled. “Forgive me for mentioning it,” I said, “but surely it must have crossed your mind that you are?”

  He laughed, a real laugh, not the hostile laugh.

  Then we went to drink coffee, and we talked about politics or rather about America. His America is cold and cruel. He talked of Hollywood, of the writers who were “red,” who fell into a conformity of being “red” under pressure from McCarthy, of the writers who became respectable and fell into a conformity of anti-communism. Of the men who informed on their friends to the inquisitorial committees. (*9) He speaks of this with a sort of detached amused anger. Told a story about his boss, who had called him into the office to ask if he was a member of the Communist Party. Saul wasn’t a member then, had in fact been expelled from the Party some time before, but he refused to answer. The boss, full of regrets, then said that Saul must resign. Saul resigned. Met this man at a party a few weeks later, and he began to weep and accuse himself. “You’re my friend, Saul, I like to think of you as my friend.” This note I’ve heard in a dozen stories from Saul, from Nelson, from others. While he talked I felt in myself an emotion which disquiets me, the sharp angry pressure of contempt for Saul’s boss, for the “red” writers who took refuge in conforming communism, for the informers. I said to Saul: “It’s all very well, but what we are saying, our attitude, stems from an assumption that people can be expected to be courageous enough to stand up for their individual thinking.” He raised his head, sharp and challenging. Usually, when he talks, he talks blind, his eyes blank, he is talking to himself. Only when his whole personality swung into line behind his cool grey eyes did I realise how used I have got to this way of his—talking to himself, hardly conscious of me. He said: “What do you mean?” I realised it was the first time I had thought all this so clearly, having him here makes me think clearly, because so much of our experience is similar, and yet we’re so different as people. I said: “Look, take us, there isn’t one of us who hasn’t done this thing, saying one thing publicly and another privately, one thing to one’s friends, another to the enemy. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t succumbed to the pressure, fear of being thought a traitor. I remember at least a dozen times when I thought: The reason why I’m terrified to say that, or even think that, is because I’m frightened of being thought a traitor to the Party.” He was staring at me, his eyes hard, with a sort of sneer. I know that sneer, it’s “the revolutionary sneer,” and everyone of us has used it some time, and that’s why I didn’t challenge it but went on: “So what I’m saying is that precisely the kind of person in our time who by definition might have been expected to be fearless, outspoken, truthful, has turned out to be sycophantic, lying, cynical, either from fear of torture, or of prison, or fear of being thought a traitor.” He barked out, an automatic bark: “Middle-class talk, that’s what that is. Well your origins are showing at the moment, aren’t they?” I was stopped short for a moment. Because nothing he had ever said to me, no tone he had ever used, could have prepared me for that remark: it was a weapon from the armoury, jeering and sneering, and it took me by surprise. I said: “That isn’t the point.” He said, in the same tone: “The fanciest bit of red-baiting I’ve heard in a long time.” “But your criticisms of your old Party friends I suppose are just dispassionate comment?” He did not reply, he was frowning. I said: “We know, from looking at America, that an entire intelligentsia can be bullied into routine anti-communist attitudes.” Suddenly he remarked: “That’s why I love this country, it couldn’t happen here.” Again the feeling of jar, of shock. Because what he said was sentimental, stock from the liberal cupboard, just as the other remarks were stock from the red cupboard. I said: “During the cold war, when the communist hue and cry was at its height, the intellectuals here were the same. Yes, I know everyone’s forgotten about it, now everyone’s shocked at McCarthy, but at the same time, our intellectuals were playing it all down, saying things were not as bad as they seemed. Just as their opposite numbers were doing in the States. Our liberals were mostly defending, either openly or by implication, the anti-American activity committees. A leading editor could write a hysterical letter to the gutter press saying if only he’d known that X and Y, who were old friends of his, were spies, he’d have gone straight to M.I.5 with information about them. No one thought the worse of him. And all the literary societies and organisations were engaged in the most primitive sort of anti-communism—what they said, or a great deal of it, was quite true, of course, but the point is, they were simply saying what might have been found any day in the gutter press, no attempt to really understand anything, they were in full cry, a pack of barking dogs. And so I know quite well that if the heat had been turned on even a little harder, we’d have had our intellectuals packing anti-British activity committees, and meanwhile, we, the reds, were lying black is white.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, judging from what we’ve seen happening in the last thirty years, in the democracies, let alone the dictatorships, the number of people in a society really prepared to stand against a current, really ready to fight for the truth at all costs is so small that…”

  He suddenly said: “Excuse me,” and walked out with his stiff blind walk.

  I sat in the kitchen and thought over what I’d just said. I and all the people I knew well, some of them fine people, had been sunk inside the communist conformity and lied to themselves or to others. And the “liberal” or “free” intellectuals could be and had been swung into witch-hunts of one kind or another very easily. Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

  I sat there, discouraged and depressed. Because in all of us brought up in a Western democracy there is this built-in belief that freedom and liberty will strengthen, will survive pressures, and the belief seems to survive any evidence against it. This belief is probably in itself a danger. Sitting there I had a vision of the world with nations, systems, economic blocks, hardening and consolidating; a world where it would become increasingly ludicrous even to talk about freedom, or the individual conscience. I know that this sort of vision has been written about, it’s something one has read, but for a moment it wasn’t words, ideas, but something I felt, in the substance of my flesh and nerves, as true.

  Saul came back down the stairs, dressed. He was now what I call “himself,” and he said simply, with a kind of whimsical humour: “I’m sorry I walked out, but I couldn’t take what you were saying.”

  I said: “Every line of thought I pursue these days turns out to be bleak and depressing. Perhaps I can’t take it either.”

  He came over to me and put his arms around me. He said: “We are comforting each other. What for, I wonder?” Then, with his arms around me still: “We’ve got to remember that people with our kind of experience are bound to be depressed and unhopeful.”

  “Or perhaps it’s precisely people with our kind of experience who are most likely to know the truth, because we know what we’ve been capable of ourselves?”

  I offered him lunch, and now we talked about his childhood. A classically bad childhood, broken home, etc. After lunch he went upstairs saying he wanted to work. Almost immediately he came down, and leaned against the door frame, remarking: “I used to be able to work for hours at a stretch, now I can’t work for more than an hour without a break.”

  I felt the jar again. Now,
having thought it all out, it is quite clear, but then I was confused. For he was talking as if he had worked for an hour instead of perhaps five minutes. He stood there, lounging, restless. Then he said: “I’ve a friend back home whose parents separated when he was a kid. Do you think it might have affected him?”

  For a moment I couldn’t answer, because “the friend” was so obviously himself. But he’d been talking about his parents not ten minutes before.

  I said: “Yes, I’m sure your parents’ splitting up has affected you.”

  He jerked himself up, his face closed into suspicion, and he said: “How did you know?”

  (*10) I said: “You’ve got a bad memory, you told me about your parents a few minutes ago.”

  He stood, alert, watchful, thinking. His face was sharp with suspicious thought. Then he said in a scramble of words: “Oh, I was thinking about my friend, that’s all…” He turned and went upstairs.

  I sat, confused, fitting things together. He had genuinely forgotten he had told me. And I remembered half a dozen occasions in the last few days—he had told me something, and then mentioned it a few minutes later again as if it were a new subject. Yesterday, for instance, he said: “Do you remember when I first came here?” speaking as if he had been here many months. And another time he said: “That time we went to the Indian restaurant,” when we’d been there that day for lunch.

  I went into the big room and shut my door. We have an understanding that when my door is shut, I’m not to be disturbed. Sometimes, with my door shut, I hear him walking up and down overhead, or coming halfway down the stairs, and it’s as if a pressure is on me to open the door, and I do. But today I shut the door fast, and sat on my bed and tried to think. I was sweating lightly, and my hands were cold, and I couldn’t breathe properly. I was clenched with anxiety, and saying over and over again: This isn’t my anxiety state, it isn’t mine—didn’t help at all. (*11) I lay on the floor on my back with a cushion under my head, relaxed my limbs and played “the game.” Or tried to. No use, for I could hear Saul upstairs, prowling around. Every movement he made went through me. I thought I should get out of the house, see someone. Who? I knew I couldn’t discuss Saul with Molly. I telephoned her nevertheless, and she asked casually: “How’s Saul?” and I said: “Fine.” She remarked she had seen Jane Bond, who is “in a real state over him.” I hadn’t thought of Jane Bond for some days, so I talked quickly of something, and lay down on the floor again. Last night Saul had said: “I must take a little walk or I won’t be able to sleep.” He had been gone about three hours. Jane Bond lives about half an hour away walking, ten minutes by bus. Yes, he had telephoned someone before he left. That meant, he had arranged with Jane, from my home, to meet her to make love, gone over, made love, come back, got into my bed, slept. No, we didn’t make love last night. Because, unconsciously, I was defending myself against the pain of knowledge. (Yet with my intelligence I don’t care, it’s the creature inside me who cares, who is jealous, who sulks and wants to hurt back.)