The Golden Notebook (27 page)

the affair. It is that which would give the thing its shape. Otherwise it would be chaos, because these two days, separated by many months in time, would have no shadow over them, but would be records of a simple unthinking happiness with perhaps a couple of jarring moments (which in fact would be reflections of the approaching end but would not be felt like that at the time) but moments swallowed in the happiness. Literature is analysis after the event. The form of that other piece, about what happened in Mashopi, is nostalgia. There is no nostalgia in this piece, about Paul and Ella, but the form is a kind of pain. To show a woman loving a man one should show her cooking a meal for him or opening a bottle of wine for the meal, while she waits for his ring at the door. Or waking in the morning before he does to see his face change from the calm of sleep into a smile of welcome. Yes. To be repeated a thousand times. But that isn't literature. Probably better as a film. Yes, the physical quality of life, that's living, and not the analysis afterwards, or the moments of discord or premonition. A shot in a film: Ella slowly peeling an orange, handing Paul yellow segments of the fruit, which he takes, one after another, thoughtfully, frowning: he is thinking of something else. [The blue notebook began with a sentence:] 'Tommy appeared to be accusing his mother.' [Then Anna had written:] I came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to turn it into a short story. It struck me that my doing this-turning everything into fiction-must be an evasion. Why not write down, simply, what happened between Molly and her son today? Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? Why don't I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself. Today it was so clear: sitting listening to Molly and Tommy at war, very disturbed by it; then coming straight upstairs and beginning to write a story without even planning to do it. I shall keep a diary.

Jan .7th, 1950

Tommy was seventeen this week. Molly has never put pressure on him to make up his mind about his future. In fact, recently she told him to stop worrying and to go off to France for a few weeks to 'broaden his mind.' (This phrase irritated him when she used it.) Today he came into the kitchen on purpose to quarrel-both Molly and I knew it as soon as he walked in. He has been in a mood of hostility to Molly for some time. This started after his first visit to his father's house. (At the time we didn't realise how deeply the visit affected him.) It was then he began to criticise his mother for being a communist and 'bohemian.' Molly laughed it off, and said that country houses full of landed gentry and money were fun to visit but he was damned lucky not to have to live that life. He paid a second visit a few weeks later, and returned to his mother over-polite, full of hostility. At which point I intervened: told him, which Molly was too proud to do, about the history of Molly and his father-the way he bullied her financially to make her go back to him, then the threats to tell her employers she was a communist, etc., so that she might lose her job-the whole long ugly story. Tommy at first didn't believe me; no one could be more charming than Richard over a long week-end, I should imagine. Then he believed me, but it didn't help. Molly suggested he should go down to his father's for the summer in order (as she put it to me) that the glamour should have time to wear off. He went. For six weeks. Country house. Charming conventional wife. Three delightful little girls. Richard at home for week-ends, bringing business guests, etc. The local gentry. Molly's prescription worked like a charm. Tommy announced that 'week-ends were long enough.' She was delighted. But too soon. Today's quarrel like a scene from a play. He came in, ostensibly on the grounds that he had to decide about his National Service: he was clearly expecting Molly to say he should be a conscientious objector. Molly would, of course, like him to be; but said it was his decision. He began by arguing that he should do his National Service. This became an attack on her way of life, her politics, her friends-everything she is. There they sat, on either side of the kitchen table, Tommy's dark obstinate muzzled face pointed at her, she sitting all loose and at ease, half her attention on the food cooking for lunch, continually rushing off to the telephone on Party business- he patiently, angrily, waiting through each telephone call until she came back. And at the end of the long fight, he had talked himself into a decision that he should be a conscientious objector; and now his attack on her was linked with this position-the militarism of the Soviet Union, etc. When he went upstairs, announcing, as if this came naturally from what went before, that he intended to marry very young and have a large family, Molly let herself go limp into exhaustion and then began to cry. I came upstairs to give Janet her lunch. Disturbed. Because Molly and Richard make me think of Janet's father. As far as I am concerned this was a highly neurotic stupid involvement of no importance. No amount of repeating phrases like: the father of my child, can make me feel different about it. One day Janet is going to say: 'My mother was married to my father for a year, then they divorced.' And when she is older and I've told her the truth: 'My mother lived with my father for three years; then they decided to have a baby and married so I should not be illegitimate, then divorced.' But these words will have no connection with anything that I feel to be true. Whenever I think about Max, I am overcome with helplessness. I remember the feeling of helplessness made me write about him before. (Willi in the black notebook.) But the moment the baby was born, the silly empty marriage seemed to be cancelled out. I remember thinking, when I first saw Janet: Well, what does it matter, love, marriage, happiness, etc. Here's this marvellous baby. But Janet won't understand that. Tommy doesn't. If Tommy could feel that, he'd stop resenting Molly for leaving his father. I seem to remember starting a diary once before, before Janet was born. I'll look for it. Yes, here is the entry I vaguely remembered.

9th October, 1946

I came in last night from work into that horrible hotel room. Max lying on the bed, silent. I sat on the divan. He came over, put his head in my lap and his arms around my waist. I could feel his despair. He said: 'Anna, we have nothing to say to each other, why not?' 'Because we aren't the same kind of person.' 'What does that mean, the same kind of person?' he asked, injecting the automatic irony into his voice-a sort of willed, protective, ironic drawl. I felt chilled, thinking, perhaps it doesn't mean anything, but I held tight on to the future, and said: 'But surely it means something, being the same kind of person?' Then he said: 'Come to bed.' In bed, he put his hand on my breast and I felt sexual revulsion and said: 'What's the use, we aren't any good for each other and never have been?' So we went to sleep. Towards morning, the young married couple in the next room made love. The walls were so thin in that hotel we could hear everything. Listening to them made me unhappy; I've never been so unhappy. Max woke and said: 'What's the matter?' I said: 'You see, it's possible to be happy, and we should both hold on to that.' It was very hot. The sun was rising, and the couple next door were laughing. There was a faint warm stain of pink light on the wall from the sun. Max lay beside me, and his body was hot and unhappy. The birds were singing, very loud, then the sun got too hot and quenched them. Suddenly. One minute they were making a shrill lively discordant noise, then silence. The couple were talking and laughing and then their baby woke and began to cry. Max said: 'Perhaps we should have a baby?' I said: 'You mean, having a baby would bring us together?' I said it irritably, and hated myself for saying it; but his sentimentality grated on me. He looked obstinate, and repeated: 'We should have a baby.' Then I suddenly thought: Why not? We can't leave the Colony for months yet. We haven't the money. Let's have a baby-I'm always living as if something wonderful is going to crystalise some time in the future. Let's make something happen now... and so I turned to him and we made love. That was the morning Janet was conceived. We married the following week in the registry office. A year later, we separated. But this man never touched me at all, never got close to me. But there's Janet... I think I shall go to a psycho-analyst.

January 10th, 1950

Saw Mrs. Marks today. After the preliminaries, she said: 'Why are you here?' I said: 'Because I've had experiences that should have touched me and they haven't.' She was waiting for more, so I said: 'For instance, the son of my friend Molly-last week he decided to become a conscientious objector, but he might just as well have decided not to be. That's something I recognise in myself.' 'What?' 'I watch people-they decide to be this thing or that. But it's as if it's a sort of dance-they might just as well do the opposite with equal conviction.' She hesitated, then asked: 'You have written a novel?' 'Yes.' 'Are you writing another?' 'No, I shall never write another.' She nodded. I already knew that nod, and I said: 'I'm not here because I'm suffering from a writer's block.' She nodded again and I said: 'You'll have to believe that if...' This hesitation was awkward and full of aggression and I said with a smile I knew to be aggressive: '... if we're going to get on.' She smiled, drily. Then: 'Why don't you want to write another book?' 'Because I no longer believe in art.' 'So you don't believe in art?'-isolating the words, and holding them up for me to examine. 'No.' 'So.'

Jan .14th, 1950

I dream a great deal. The dream: I am in a concert hall. A doll-like audience in evening dress. A grand-piano. Myself, dressed absurdly in Edwardian satin, and a choker of pearls, like Queen Mary, seated at the piano. I am unable to play a note. The audience waits. The dream is stylised, like a scene in a play or an old illustration. I tell Mrs. Marks this dream, and she asks: 'What is it about?' I reply: 'About lack of feeling.' And she gives her small wise smile which conducts our sessions like a conductor's baton. Dream: Wartime in Central Africa. A cheap dance-hall. Everyone drunk, and dancing close for sex. I wait at the side of the dance-floor. A smooth doll-like man approaches me. I recognise Max. (But he has a literary quality from what I wrote in the notebook about Willi.) I walk into his arms, doll-like, freeze, can't move. Once again the dream has a grotesque quality. It's like a caricature. Mrs. Marks asks: 'What is that dream about?' The same thing, lack of feeling. I was frigid with Max.' 'So you are frightened about being frigid?' 'No, because he was the only man I have been frigid with.' She nods. Suddenly I start to worry: Shall I be frigid again?

Jan .19th, 1950

This morning I was in my room under the roof. Through the wall a baby was crying, I was reminded of that hotel room in Africa, where the baby would wake us crying in the morning, then he would be fed and start gurgling and making happy noises while his parents made love. Janet was playing on the floor with her bricks. Last night Michael asked me to drive with him and I said I couldn't because Molly was going out, so I couldn't leave Janet. He said, ironically: 'Well, the cares of motherhood must ever come before lovers.' Because of the cold irony, I reacted against him. And this morning I felt enclosed by the repetitive quality-the baby crying next door, and my hostility to Michael. (Remembering my hostility towards Max.) Then a feeling of unreality-couldn't remember where I was-here, in London, or there, in Africa, in that other building, where the baby cried through the wall. Janet looked up from the floor and said: 'Come and play, mummy.' I couldn't move. I forced myself up out of the chair after a while and sat on the floor beside the little girl. I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: 'Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a 'young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph. I told Mrs. Marks about this and she said: 'So?' I said: 'It's the same as the dreams, only suddenly in real life.' She waited, and I said: 'It was because I felt hostility towards Michael- and that froze everything.' 'You are sleeping with him?' 'Yes.' She waited and I said, smiling: 'No, I'm not frigid.' She nodded. A waiting nod. I didn't know what she was expecting me to say. She prompted: 'Your little girl asked you to come and play?' I didn't understand. She said: 'To play. To come and play. You couldn't play.' Then I was angry, understanding. For the last few days I've been brought again and again, and so skilfully, to the same point; and every time I've been angry; and always my anger is made to seem a defence against the truth. I said: 'No, that dream was not about art. It was not.' And trying to joke: 'Who dreamed that dream, you or I?' But she wouldn't laugh at the joke: 'My dear, you wrote that book, you are an artist.' She said the word artist with a gentle, understanding, reverent smile. 'Mrs. Marks, you must believe me, I don't care if I never write another word.' 'You don't care,' she said, meaning me to hear behind the don't care my words: Lack of feeling. 'Yes,' I insisted, 'I don't care.' 'My dear, I became a psychotherapist because I once believed myself to be an artist. I treat a great many artists. How many people have sat where you are sitting, because they are blocked, deep in themselves, unable to create any longer.' 'But I am not one of them.' 'Describe yourself.' 'How?' 'Describe yourself as if you were describing someone else.' 'Anna Wulf is a small dark thin spiky woman, over-critical and on the defensive. She is thirty-three years old. She was married for a year to a man she didn't care for and has a small daughter. She is a communist.' She smiled. I said: 'No good?' 'Try again: for one thing, Anna Wulf wrote a novel which was praised by the critics and did so well she is still in fact living on the money it earned.' I was full of hostility. 'Very well: Anna Wulf is sitting in a chair in front of a soul-doctor. She is there because she cannot deeply feel about anything. She is frozen. She has a great many friends and acquaintances. People are pleased to see her. But she only cares about one person in the world, her daughter, Janet.' 'Why is she frozen?' 'She is afraid.' 'What of?' 'Of death.' She nodded, and I broke in across the game and said: 'No, not of my death. It seems to me that ever since I can remember anything the real thing that has been happening in the world was death and destruction. It seems to me it is stronger than life.' 'Why are you a communist?' 'At least they believe in something.' 'Why do you say they, when you are a member of the Communist Party?' 'If I could say we, really meaning it, I wouldn't be here, would I?' 'So you don't care, really, about your comrades?' 'I get on easily with everyone, if that's what you mean?' 'No, that's not what I mean.' 'I told you, the only person I really care about, really, is my daughter. And that's egotism.' 'You don't care about your friend, Molly?' 'I'm fond of her.' 'And you don't care about your man, Michael?' 'Supposing he dropped me tomorrow, how long would I remember that-I like sleeping with him?' 'You've known him how long-three weeks? Why should he drop you?' I couldn't think of a reply, in fact I was surprised I had said it at all. Our time was up. I said good-bye and as I went out she said: 'My dear, you must remember the artist has a sacred trust.' I could not help laughing. 'Why do you laugh?' 'Doesn't it strike you as funny-art is sacred, a majestic chord in C Major?' 'I will see you the day after tomorrow as usual, my dear.'