The Golden Notebook (28 page)

January 31st, 1950

I took dozens of dreams to Mrs. Marks today-all dreamed over the last three days. They all had the same quality of false art, caricature, illustration, parody. All the dreams were in marvellous fresh vivid colour, that gave me great pleasure. She said: 'You are dreaming a great deal.' I said: 'As soon as I close my eyes.' She: 'And what are all these dreams about?' I smile, before she can; at which she looks at me sternly, ready to take a strong line. But I say: 'I want to ask you something. Half those dreams were nightmares, I was in real terror, sweating when I woke up. And yet I enjoyed every minute of them. I enjoy dreaming. I look forward to sleep because I am going to dream. I wake myself up in the night, again and again, to enjoy the knowledge of my dreaming. In the morning I feel as happy as if I've built cities in my sleep. Well? But yesterday I met a woman who has been in psychoanalysis for ten years-an American naturally.' Here Mrs. Marks smiled. 'This woman told me with a sort of bright sterilised smile that her dreams were more important to her than her life, more real to her than anything that happened in the day-time with her child and her husband.' Mrs. Marks smiled. 'Yes, I know what you are going to say. And it's true-she told me she once believed herself to be a writer. But then I've never met anyone anywhere or any class, colour or creed, who hasn't at some time believed themselves to be writers, painters, dancers or something. And that is probably a more interesting fact than anything else we've discussed in this room-after all a hundred years ago it would never have crossed most people's minds to be artists. They recognised the station in life it had pleased God to call them to. But-isn't there something wrong with the fact that my sleep is more satisfying, exciting, enjoyable than anything that happens to me awake? I don't want to become like that American woman.' A silence, her conducting smile. 'Yes, I know you want me to say that all my creativity is going into my dreams.' 'Well, isn't it true?' 'Mrs. Marks, I'm going to ask if we can ignore my dreams for a time.' She says drily: 'You come to me, a psychotherapist, and ask if we can ignore your dreams?' 'Isn't it possible at least that my dreaming so enjoy-ably is an escape away from feeling.' She sits quiet thinking. Oh, she is a most intelligent wise old woman. She makes a small gesture, asking me to be quiet while she thinks whether this is sensible or not. And in the meantime I look at the room we are sitting in. It is tall, long, darkened, quietened. It has flowers everywhere. The walls are covered with reproductions of masterpieces and there are statues. 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. She came out of her brief meditation and said: 'Very well, my dear. We'll leave your dreams for a while, and you will bring me your waking fantasies.' On that day, the last entry, I stopped dreaming as if a magic wand had been waved. 'Any dreams?' she asks casually, to find out if I'm ready to forget my absurd evasion of her. We discuss the nuances of my feeling for Michael. We are happy together most of the time, then suddenly I have feelings of hatred and resentment for him. But always for the same reasons: when he makes some crack about the fact I have written a book-he resents it, makes fun of my being 'an authoress'; when he is ironical about Janet, that I put being a mother before loving him; and when he warns me he does not intend to marry me. He always makes this warning after he has said he loves me and I am the most important thing in his life. I get hurt and angry. I said to him, angrily: 'Surely that's a warning one need only make once,' then he teased me out of my bad temper. But that night I was frigid with him for the first time. When I told Mrs. Marks, she said: 'Once I treated a woman for three years for frigidity. She was living with a man she loved. But she never in all those three years had an orgasm. On the day they married she had an orgasm for the first time.' Having told me this she nodded, emphatically, as if to say: There you are, you see! I laughed, and said: 'Mrs. Marks, do you realise what a pillar of reaction you are?' She said, smiling: 'And what does that word mean, my dear?' 'It means a great deal to me,' I said. 'And yet on the night after your man says he won't marry you, you are frigid?' 'But he has said it or implied it other times and I haven't been frigid.' I was conscious of dishonesty, so I admitted: 'It's true my response in bed is in relation to how he accepts me.' 'Of course, you are a real woman.' She uses this word, a woman, a real woman, exactly as he does artist, a true artist. An absolute. When she said, 'you are a real woman,' I began to laugh, helplessly, and after a while she laughed too. Then she said, why are you laughing and I told her. She was on the point of using the occasion to bring in the word 'art'-which neither of us has mentioned since I stopped dreaming. But instead she said: 'Why do you never mention your politics to me?' I thought it out, and said: 'About the C. P.-I swing from fear and hatred of it to a desperate clinging to it. Out of a need to protect it and look after it-do you understand that?' She nodded, so I went on: 'And Janet-I can resent her existence violently because she prevents me doing so many things I want to do, and love her at the same time. And Molly. I can hate her one hour for her bossiness and protectiveness and love her the next. And Michael-it's the same thing. So we can obviously confine ourselves to one of my relationships and be dealing with my whole personality?' Here she smiled, drily. 'Very well,' she said, 'let's confine ourselves to Michael.'

15th March, 1950

I went to Mrs. Marks and said that while I was happier with Michael than I have ever been in my life, something was happening that I did not understand. I would go to sleep in his arms, dissolved and happy, and wake in the morning hating and resenting him. At which she said: 'Well, my dear, so perhaps it is time you started dreaming again?' I laughed, and she waited for me to stop laughing, so I said, 'You always win.' Last night I began to dream again as if I had been ordered to dream.

27th March, 1950

I am crying in my sleep. All I can remember when I wake is that I have been crying. When I told Mrs. Marks, she said: 'The tears we shed in our sleep are the only genuine tears we shed in our lives. The waking tears are self-pity.' I said: 'That's very poetic, but I can't believe you mean it.' 'And why not?' 'Because when I go to sleep knowing I am going to cry, there's pleasure in it.' She smiles; I wait for it-but by now she is not going to help me. 'You aren't going to suggest,' I say, ironical, 'that I am a masochist?' She nods: of course. 'There's pleasure in pain,' I say, sounding the trumpet for her. She nods. I say: 'Mrs. Marks, that sad nostalgic pain that makes me cry is the same emotion I wrote that damned book out of.' She sits up, straight, shocked. Because I could describe a book, art, that noble activity, as damned. I say: 'All you've done is to bring me, step by step, to the subjective knowledge of what I knew before anyway, that the root of that book was poisoned.' She says: 'All self-knowledge is knowing, on deeper and deeper levels, what one knew before.' I say: 'But that isn't good enough.' She nods and sits thinking. I know something is coming but I don't know what. Then she says: 'Do you keep a diary?' 'Off and on.' 'Do you write in it what happens here?' 'Sometimes.' She nods. And I know what is in her mind. It is that the process, writing a diary, is the beginning of what she thinks of as unfreezing, the releasing of the 'block' that stops me writing. I felt so angry, so resentful, that I couldn't say anything. I felt as if, in mentioning the diary, in making it part of her process, so to speak, she was robbing me of it. [At this point the diary stopped, as a personal document. It continued in the form of newspaper cuttings, carefully pasted in and dated.]

March, 50

The modeller calls this the 'H-Bomb Style,' explaining that the 'H' is for peroxide of hydrogen, used for colouring. The hair is dressed to rise in waves as from a bomb-burst, at the nape of the neck. Daily Telegraph July 13th, 50 There were cheers in Congress today when Mr. Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat, urged that President Truman should tell the North Koreans to withdraw within a week or their towns would be atom-bombed. Express July 29th, 50 Britain's decision to spend £100 millions more on Defence means, as Mr. Attlee has made clear, that hoped-for improvements in living standards and social services must be postponed. New Statesman Aug .3, 50 America is to go right ahead with the H Bomb, expected to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atom bombs. Express Aug .5th, 50 Basing its conclusions on the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as to the range of blast, heat-flash, radiation, etc., it assumes that one atom bomb might kill 50,000 people in a British built-up area. But, leaving out the Hydrogen Bomb, it is surely unsafe to assume that... New Statesman 24th Nov., 50 MAC ARTHUR PUTS IN 100,000 TROOPS IN AN OFFENSIVE TO END THE WAR IN KOREA. Express 9th Dec, 50 KOREA PEACE TALKS OFFERED BUT ALLIES WOULD NOT APPEASE. Express 16th Dec, 50 U. S. 'IN GRAVE DANGER. ' Emergency call today. President Truman tonight told Americans that the U. S. is in 'grave danger' created by the rulers of the Soviet Union.

13th Jan., 51

Truman yesterday set vast targets for the U. S. Defence effort involving sacrifices for all Americans. Express 12th March, 51 A-BOMBS BY EISENHOWER. I would use them at once if I thought it would bring sufficient destruction to the enemy. Express April 6th, 51 WOMAN ATOM SPY TO DIE. Husband too sent to Electric Chair. Judge: You Caused Korea.

May 2nd

KOREA: 371 KILLED, WOUNDED OR MISSING.

9th June, 51

The U.S. Supreme Court has sustained the conviction of the eleven leaders of the American Communist Party for conspiracy to teach the violent overthrow of the Government. The sentences of five years in prison and individual fines of $10,000 will now be enforced. Statesman 16th June, 51 Sir: The Los Angeles Times of June 2, states: 'In Korea it is estimated that some 2 million civilians, the greater part of them children, have been killed or have died of exposure since the start of the war. More than ten million are homeless and destitute.' Dong Sung Kim, special envoy of the Republic of Korea, reported June 1st here: 'In just one night, there were 156 villages burned. The villages were in the path of an enemy advance. So, of course, the U.N. planes had to destroy them. And all the old people and children who were still there because they were unable to heed the evacuation orders were killed.' New Statesman 13th July, 51 Truce Talks Held Up-because the Reds refuse to allow 20 Allied reporters and photographers into Kaesong. Express July 16th 10,000 in oil-land riots. Troops use tear-gas. Express July 28th Rearmament has up till now brought no sacrifice to the American people. On the contrary, consumption is still rising. New Statesman 1st Sept., 51 The technique of quick-freezing germ-cells and keeping them indefinitely can mean a complete change in the significance of time. At present it applies to the male sperm, but it might also be adapted to the female ovum. A man alive in 1951 and a woman alive in 2,051 might be 'mated' in 2,251 to produce a child by a pre-natal foster-mother. Statesman Oct .17, 51 MOSLEM WORLD FLARES. More troops for Suez. Express Oct .20 ARMY SEALS OFF EGYPT. Express 16th Nov., 51 12,790 Allied war prisoners and 250,000 South Korean civilians have been murdered by Reds in Korea. Express 24th Nov., 51 Within the lifetime of some of our children the world's population may be expected to reach 4,000 millions. How shall we work the miracle of feeding the 4,000 millions? Statesman 24th Nov., 51 No one knows how many people were executed, imprisoned, sent to labour camps or died during months of interrogation in the great Soviet purge of 1937-39, nor whether a million or twenty million people are engaged in forced labour in Russia today. Statesman RUSSIA BUILDS A-BOMBER. Fastest in the World. Express 1st Dec, 51 The U. S. is riding the greatest boom in history. Though its spending on armaments and on overseas economic aid alone is now larger than the entire pre-war Federal Budget. Statesman 29th Dec, 51 This was the first peace-time year in British history when we had eleven divisions overseas and consumed ten per cent of our national income in armaments. Statesman 29th Dec, 51 There are signs that Mc Carthy and his friends may at last have gone too far in the United States. Statesman 12th Jan, 1952 When President Truman told the world, early in 1950, that the U.S. would accelerate efforts to produce the H-bomb- which would have, according to the scientists, an explosive effect 1,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, or equal to twenty million tons of T.N.T.-Albert Einstein pointed out quietly that there 'emerges, more and more distinctly, the spectre of general annihilation.' Statesman 1st March, 1952 Just as hundreds of thousands of innocent people were condemned as witches in the Middle Ages, so multitudes of Communists and Russian patriots were purged for mythical counter-revolutionary activities. Indeed, it was precisely because there was nothing to uncover that the arrests reached such fantastic proportions (by a most ingenious method, Mr. Weissberg calculates that eight million innocent people probably passed through the prisons between 1936 and 1939). Statesman 22nd March, 1952 The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane. Statesman April 15th, 52 Roumanian Communist Government has ordered mass deportation of 'unproductive people' from Bucharest. They number 200,000 or one-fifth of the city. Express 28th June, 52 It is impossible to establish the number of Americans who have had their passports restricted or denied, but known cases reveal that a wide range of individuals of different backgrounds, beliefs and political persuasions have been affected. The list includes... Statesman 5th July, 52 Most important of all, the effect of the American witchhunt is to produce a general level of conformity, a new orthodoxy from which a man dissents at his economic peril. Statesman 2nd Sept., 52 The Home Secretary said that although grave damage must be caused by an accurately delivered atom bomb, it is sometimes wildly exaggerated. Express I am well aware that you cannot carry out a revolution with rosewater; my query was whether, in order to defeat the danger of war from Formosa, it was necessary to execute a million and a half, or whether to disarm them might not have been adequate. Statesman Dec .13th, 1952 JAPANESE DEMAND ARMS. Express Dec .13th Title II of the Mc Carran Act specifically provides for the establishment of so-called detention centres. Far from directing the creation of such centres, the law authorises the Attorney-General of the U. S. to apprehend and detain 'in such places of detention as may be prescribed by him... all persons as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe that such persons probably will engage in or probably will conspire with others to engage in acts of espionage and sabotage.'