The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being on the theme of “She is unfeminine,” “She is a man-hater.” This particular reflex seems indestructible. Men—and many women—said that the suffragettes were defeminised, masculine, brutalised. There is no record I have read of any society anywhere when women demanded more than nature offers them that does not also describe this reaction from men—and some women.

You don’t see that you are the victim of a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as your subject, and if you do have to write a thesis—and believe me I am very grateful that what I’ve written is being found useful by you—then why don’t you read what I have written and make up your own mind

They remind me of the white people in Central Africa—they used to say: ‘Well of course, the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years’ time.’ They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, ‘We know that what we are doing is wrong.’ But it’s turned out to be a good deal shorter than fifty years.”

And when we part, there’ll be a sudden resentment, a rancour—because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women…

A slightly malicious tone, a cynical edge to a voice, can have developed inside ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality. I’ve seen it often, and in many other places than political or communist organisations.

So she tried again: “I can’t understand how anyone can see what’s happening to this country and not hate it. On the surface everything’s fine—all quiet and tame and suburban. But underneath it’s poisonous. It’s full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.”

“You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon.

How odd!—the phrase is, to give a child life; but a child gives life to its parent when the parent decides to live simply because to commit suicide would hurt the child. I wonder how many parents decide to go on living because they have decided not to hurt their children, although they don’t care for living themselves?

And I prefer it, because it divides me. The two personalities—Janet’s mother, Michael’s mistress, are happier separated. It is a strain having to be both at once.

Then the words I use surprise and displease me: the word “crime” is from the communist arsenal, and is meaningless. There’s some kind of social process involved which makes words like “crime” stupid. And

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.

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.

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.