The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

“People like Anna or Molly and that lot, they’re not just one thing, but several things. And you know they could change and be something different. I don’t mean their characters would change, but they haven’t set into a mould. You know if something happened in the world, or there was a change of some kind, a revolution or something…” He waited, a moment, patiently, for Richard’s sharply irritated indrawn breath over the word revolution, to be expelled, and went on: “they’d be something different if they had to be. But you’ll never be different, father. You’ll always have to live the way you do now. Well I don’t want that for myself,” he concluded, allowing his lips to set, pouting, over his finished explanation.

“Well, things can’t be worse.” “Why not? We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we’re moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who’s to stop it—us?”

The conversations between the two women are sophisticated, full of critical insight, implicitly critical of men. Yet Ella does not feel this is disloyalty to Paul, because these conversations come from a different world; the world of sophisticated insight has nothing to do with her feeling for Paul.

It is almost like an art gallery. It is a dedicated room. It gives me pleasure, like an art gallery. The point is, that nothing in my life corresponds with anything in this room—my life has always been crude, unfinished, raw, tentative; and so have the lives of the people I have known well. It occurred to me, looking at this room, that the raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was valuable in it and I should hold fast to it.

“It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing—I mean, it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning, to do without something one wants. It’s not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I’m capable of doing something bigger. Or I’m a person who needs love, and I’m doing without it. What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.

During the last year, reading these stories, these novels, in which there might be an occasional paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, of truth, I’ve been forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguisable private emotion. Even in translation there is no mistaking these lightning flashes of genuine personal feeling. And I read this dead stuff praying that just once there may be a short story, a novel, even an article, written wholly from genuine personal feeling.

Ella holds on fast to this knowledge, and thinks: every time in life I go through a dry time, a period of deadness, I always do this: hold on to a set of words, the phrases of a kind of knowledge, even while they are dead and meaningless, but knowing that life will come back and make them live too. But how strange that one should hold on to a set of sentences, and have faith in them.

“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.

But I went towards him, in sleep. It was a night of dreams. I was playing roles, one after another, against Saul, who was playing roles. It was like being in a play, whose words kept changing, as if a playwright had written the same play again and again, but slightly different each time. We played against each other every man-woman role imaginable. As each cycle of the dream came to an end, I said: “Well, I’ve experienced that, have I, well it was time that I did.” It was like living a hundred lives. I was astonished at how many of the female roles I have not played in life, have refused to play, or were not offered to me. Even in my sleep I knew I was being condemned to play them now because I had refused them in life.

watching in myself a need to give spouting like water from a whale.

It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.