The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

Richard, his face red with anger over his too-yellow, too-tight shirt, held a glass of whisky between two hands, turning it round and round, looking down into it. “Thanks,” he said at last, “I will.” He spoke with such a stubborn confidence in the quality of what he was going to offer his son, that Anna and Molly again raised their eyebrows at each other, conveying that the whole conversation had been wasted, as usual. Richard intercepted this glance, and said: “You two are so extraordinarily naïve.” “About business?” said Molly, with her loud jolly laugh. “About big business,” said Anna quietly, amused, who had been surprised, during her conversations with Richard, to discover the extent of his power. This had not caused his image to enlarge, for her; rather he had seemed to shrink, against a background of international money. And she had loved Molly the more for her total lack of respect for this man who had been her husband, and who was in fact one of the financial powers of the country.

“Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is.

He looked like his father. That is to say he was a closely-welded, round youth, dark, like his father, with not a trace of Molly’s dash and vivacity. But unlike Richard, whose tenacious obstinacy was open, smouldering in his dark eyes and displayed in every impatient efficient movement, Tommy had a look of being buttoned in, a prisoner of his own nature.

Anna held herself quiet, with effort. What Molly had said was pure spite: she was saying, I’m glad that you are going to be subjected to the pressures the rest of us have to face. Anna thought, I wish I hadn’t become so conscious of everything, every little nuance. Once I wouldn’t have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mined field; and why can’t I accept that one’s closest friends at moments stick a knife in, deep, between the ribs?

“You must admit he radiates an atmosphere of the suburbs. Odd. But they all do—I mean those tycoons, they all did. One could positively see the labour-saving devices and the kiddies all in their slumber-wear, coming down to kiss daddy good night. Bloody complacent swine they all are.”

As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what’s-wrong-with-men session, then I won’t go home, I’ll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. 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…Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done with it all, finished with the men vs. women business, all the complaints and the reproaches and the betrayals. Besides, it’s dishonest. We’ve chosen to live a certain way, knowing the penalties, or if we didn’t we know now, so why whine and complain…and besides, if I’m not careful, Molly and I will descend into a kind of twin old-maidhood where we sit around saying to each other, Do you remember how that man, what-was-his-name said that insensitive thing, it must have been in 1947…

I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time

his look was both self-congratulatory and full of cynical cruelty. I came home, conscious of a feeling of disgust so much more powerful than usual that I sat down and made myself read the novel for the first time since it was published.

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it.

When I said that to Mother Sugar she replied with the small nod of satisfaction people use for these resounding truths, that the artist writes out of an incapacity to live. I remember the nausea I felt when she said it; I feel the reluctance of disgust now when I write it: it is because this business about art and the artist has become so debased, the property of every sloppy-minded amateur that any person with a real connection with the arts wants to run a hundred miles at the sight of the small satisfied nod, the complacent smile. And besides, when a truth has been explored so thoroughly—this one has been the subject matter of art for this century, when it has become such a monster of a cliché, one begins to wonder, is it so finally true? And one begins to think of the phrases “incapacity to live,” “the artist,” etc., letting them echo and thin in one’s mind, fighting the sense of disgust and the staleness, as I tried to fight it that day sitting before Mother Sugar. But extraordinary how this old stuff issued so fresh and magisterial from the lips of psychoanalysis.

Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue.

This war was presented to us as a crusade against the evil doctrines of Hitler, against racialism, etc., yet the whole of that enormous land-mass, about half the total area of Africa, was conducted on precisely Hitler’s assumption—that some human beings are better than others because of their race. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil—those Africans with any education at all.

“Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?” “Yes,” Ted had said. “Then I can’t help you,” Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him.

But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi’s, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.

Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytising. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn’t have it by temperament we had it on principle.

We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognise it as frustrated idealism—now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It’s the first time I’ve believed he was capable of it.)

Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody.

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears.

It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I’ve seen it over and over again.

“Yes,” said Willi, calmly. “You are an old nuisance. You can sit down if you like, but you must keep quiet and not talk nonsense.” Maryrose turned quite white with fright and with pain on behalf of her mother. But Mrs Fowler, after a moment’s silence, gave a short flustered laugh and sat down and kept perfectly quiet. And after that, if she came into the Gainsborough she always behaved with Willi like a well-brought-up small girl in the presence of a bullying father.

You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.”

Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this were a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh. But there was more to it, in Maryrose’s case. “Maryrose,” said Ted, bluffly, looking down at the gleaming little head at rest on his shoulder, “why don’t you love any of us, why don’t you let any of us love you?” Maryrose merely smiled, and even in this broken light, branch-and-leaf-stippled, her brown eyes showed enormous and shone softly. “Maryrose has a broken heart,” observed Willi above my head. “Broken hearts belong to old-fashioned novels,” said Paul. “They don’t go with the time we live in.” “On the contrary,” said Ted. “There are more broken hearts than there have ever been, just because of the times we live in. In fact I’m sure any heart we are ever likely to meet is so cracked and jarred and split it’s just a mass of scar tissue.” Maryrose smiled up at Ted, shyly, but gratefully, and said seriously: “Yes, of course that’s true.”

But Willi had withdrawn himself. For one thing, he did not approve of such bohemianism as collective bedroom breakfasts. “If we were married,” he had complained, “it might be all right.” I laughed at him, and he said: “Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.” He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. “What position?”—I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. “Yes, Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.” “Always have been?”—inviting him to remember his history. “For as long as it matters.” “Matters to you—not to me.” But we had had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use—the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us—the truth was that we shocked each other in our deepest feelings and instincts all the time.

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by “tolerantly amused eyes” was years away from me. I don’t think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires.