The Golden Notebook (59 page)

she emotionally gives herself to him, his emotions cut off, he loses desire for her. She, hurt and miserable. Turns to another man. But at this point, the first man finds her desirable again. But whereas he is excited by the knowledge she has been sleeping with someone else, she is frozen up because he is excited, not by her, but the fact she has been with someone else. But slowly, she succumbs to him emotionally. And just at the moment when it is at its best for her, he freezes up again, takes another woman, she another man, and so on. *18 A SHORT STORY Same theme as Chekhov's The Darling. But this time the woman doesn't change to suit different men, one after another; she changes in response to one man who is a psychological chameleon, so that in the course of a day she can be half a dozen different personalities, either in opposition to or in harmony with him. *19 THE ROMANTIC TOUGH SCHOOL OF WRITING The fellows were out Saturday-nighting true-hearted, the wild-hearted Saturday-night gang of true friends, Buddy, Dave and Mike. Snowing. Snow-cold. The cold of cities in the daddy of cities, New York. But true to us. Buddy, the ape-shouldered, stood apart and stared. He scratched his crotch. Buddy the dreamer, pitch-black-eyed, sombrely staring, he would often masturbate in front of us, unconscious, pure, a curious purity. And now he stood with the snow crumb white on his sad bent shoulders. Dave tackled him low, Dave and Buddy sprawled together in the innocent snow, Buddy winded. Dave drove his fist into Buddy's belly, oh true love of true friends, mensch playing together under the cold cliffs of Manhattan on a true Saturday night. Buddy passed out cold. 'I love this son-of-a-bitch,' Dave said, while Buddy sprawled, lost to us and to the sadness of the city. I, Mike, Mike-the-lone-walker, stood apart, the burden of knowing on me, eighteen-years-old and lonely, watching my true buddies, Dave and Buddy. Buddy came to. Saliva flecked his near-dead lips and flew off into the saliva-white snowbank. He sat up, gasping, saw Dave there, arms around his kneecaps, staring at him, love in his Bronx-sad eyes. Left side of hairy fist to chin, he hit and Dave now fell flat out, out in the death-cold snow. Laughing Buddy, Buddy sat laughing, waiting in his turn. Man, what a maniac. 'Whatta you going to do, Buddy?' I said, Mike-the-lone-walker but loving his true friends. 'Ha ha ha, d'you see the expression on his face?' he said and rolled breathless, holding his crotch. 'Didja see that?' Dave gasped, life coming to him, rolled, groaned, sat up. Dave and Buddy fought then, true-fought, laughing with joy, till, laughing, fell apart in the snow. I, Mike, winged-with-words Mike, stood sorrowing with joy. 'Hey I love this bastard,' gasped Dave, throwing a punch to Buddy's midriff and Buddy, fore-arm stopping it said: 'Jeez, I love him.' But I heard the sweet music of heels on the frost-cold pavement, and I said: 'Hey, fellas.' We stood waiting. She came, Rosie, from her dark tenement bedroom, on her sweet-tapping heels. 'Hey, fellas,' says Rosie, sweet-smiling. We stood watching. Sad now, watching the proud-fleshed Rosie, swivelling on her true sex down the pavement, twitching her round-ball butt, which jerked a message of hope to our hearts. Then Buddy, our buddy Buddy, moved apart, hesitant, sad-eyed, to our sad eyes: 'I love her, fellas.' Two friends were left then. Two-fisted Dave and winged-with-words Mike. We stood then, watching our friend Buddy, fated with life, nod and move on after Rosie, his pure heart beating to the tune of her sweet heels. The wings of mystic time beat down on us then, white with snowflakes, time that would whirl us all after our Rosies to death and the frame-house funeral. Tragic and beautiful to see our Buddy, move on out into the immemorial dance of fated snow-flakes, the dry rime rhyming on his collar. And the love that went out from us to him then was fantastic, true-volumed, sad-faced and innocent of the purposes of time, but true and in fact serious. We loved him as we turned, two friends left, our adolescent top coats flapping around our pure legs. On then, Dave and I, I-Mike, sad, because the intimation-bird of tragedy had touched our pearly souls, he-Dave and I-Mike, on then, goofy with life. Dave scratched his crotch, slow, owl-scratching pure Dave. 'Jeez, Mike,' he said, 'you'll write it someday, for us all.' He stammered, inarticulate, not-winged-with-words, 'You'll write it, hey feller? And how our souls were ruined here on the snow-white Manhattan pavement, the capitalist-money-mammon hound-of-hell hot on our heels?' 'Gee, Dave, I love you,' I said then, my boy's soul twisted with love. I hit him then, square to the jaw-bone, stammering with love-for-the-world, love-for-my-friends, for the Daves and the Mikes and the Buddies. Down he went and I then, Mike, then cradled him, baby, I-love-you, friendship in the jungle city, friendship of young youth. Pure. And the winds of time were blowing, snow-fated, on our loving pure shoulders. If I've gone back to pastiche, then it's time to stop. [The yellow notebook ended here with a double black line.] [The blue notebook continued, but without dates:] People have heard the room upstairs is empty, they ring me up about it. I've been saying I don't want to let it; but I am short of money. Two business girls came round, they heard from Ivor I had a room. But then I realised I didn't want girls. Janet and myself, and then two girls, a flat full of women, I didn't want it. Then some men. Two of them instantly set up the atmosphere: you and me in this flat alone, so I sent them off. Three were in need of mothering, wrecks and waifs, I knew I'd be put in the position of looking after them before a week was out. So then I decided not to let rooms any more. I'll take a job, move to a smaller flat, anything. Meanwhile Janet's been asking questions: It's a pity Ivor had to leave, I hope we'll get someone as nice as him again, and so on. Then out of the blue she said she wanted to go to boarding-school. Her friend from the day school is going. I asked why and she said she wanted other girls to play with. Instantly I felt sad and rejected, then angry with myself that I did. Told her I'd think it over-money, the practical side. But what I really wanted to think over was Janet's character, what would suit her. I've often thought that if she hadn't been my daughter (I don't mean genetically, but my daughter because she's been brought up by me) she would have been the most conventional child imaginable. And that is what she is, despite a surface of originality. Despite the influence of Molly's house, despite my long affair with Michael, and his disappearance, despite the fact that she's the product of what is known as a 'broken marriage,' when I look at her I see no more than a charming, conventionally intelligent little girl, destined by nature for an un-problematical life. I nearly wrote: 'I hope so.' Why? I have no time for people who haven't experimented with themselves, deliberately tried the frontiers, yet when it's a question of one's own child, one can't bear the thought of all that for them. When she said: 'I want to go to boarding-school' with the petulant charm she is using now, trying her wings as a woman, what she was really saying to me was: 'I want to be ordinary and normal.' She was saying: 'I want to get out of the complicated atmosphere.' I think it is because she must be aware of my increasing depression. It is true that with her I banish the Anna who is listless and frightened. But she must feel that Anna is there. And of course, the reason why I don't want her to go is that she is my normality. I have to be, with her, simple, responsible, affectionate, and so she anchors me in what is normal in myself. When she goes to school... Today she asked again: 'When am I going to boarding-school, I want to go with Mary.' (Her friend.) I told her we would have to leave this big flat, get a smaller one, and that I must get a job. Not immediately however. For the third time a film company has bought the rights of Frontiers of War, but it won't come to anything. Well I hope not, anyway. I wouldn't have sold the rights if I'd believed the film would be made. The money will keep us, living simply, even with Janet at boarding-school. I've been investigating progressive schools. Told Janet about them, she said: 'I want to go to an ordinary boarding-school.' I said, 'There is nothing ordinary about a conventional English girls' boarding-school, they are unique in the world.' She said: 'You know quite well what I mean. And besides, Mary is going.' Janet will be leaving in a few days. Today Molly rang up and said there was an American in town looking for a room. I said I didn't want to let rooms. She said: 'But you're in that enormous flat all by yourself, you don't have to see him.' I persisted, and then she said, 'Well I think it's just anti-social. What's happened to you Anna?' The what's happened to you hit me. Because of course it's anti-social, and I don't care. She said: 'Have a heart, he's an American lefty, he's got no money, he's been black-listed, and there you are in a flat with all those empty rooms.' I said: 'If he's an American on the loose in Europe, he'll be writing the American epic novel and he'll be in psychoanalysis and he'll have one of those awful American marriages and I'll have to listen to his troubles -I mean problems.' But Molly didn't laugh, she said: 'If you don't look out you'll be like the other people who've left the Party. I met Tom yesterday, he left the Party over Hungary. He used to be a sort of unofficial soul-daddy for dozens of people. He's changed into something else. I heard he'd suddenly doubled the rent of the rooms he lets in his house, and he's stopped being a teacher, he's taken a job in an advertising agency. I rang him up to ask what the hell he thought he was doing, and he said: "I've been taken for a sucker long enough." So you'd better be careful Anna.' So I said the American could come, provided I didn't have to see him, and then Molly said: 'He's not bad, I've met him, awfully brash and opinionated, but then they all are.' I said: 'I don't think they're brash, that's a stereotype from the past, the Americans these days are cool and shut off, they've got glass or ice between themselves and the rest of the world.' 'Oh if you say so,' Molly said, 'but I'm busy.' Afterwards I thought of what I'd said, it was interesting because I hadn't known I'd thought it until I said it. But it's true. Yes. They can be brash and noisy, but more often full of good humour, yes that's their characteristic, good humour. And underneath the hysteria, the fear of involvement. I've been sitting and thinking about the Americans I've known. A lot of them now. I remember the week-end I spent with F., a friend of Nelson's. At first, I was relieved, I thought: A normal man at last, thank God. Then I understood, everything was from his head. He was 'good in bed.' Consciously, positively dutifully 'a man.' But no warmth. Everything measured out. The wife 'back home' whom he patronised with every word he said (but really he was afraid of her-he was afraid not of her but of the obligations to society she represented). And the careful non-committal affairs. Exactly the right amount of warmth measured out-everything worked out, for such and such a relationship, so much emotion. Yes, that's their quality, something measured, shrewd and cool. Of course, emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that's why people are measuring it out. I put myself back into the state of mind I was in when I went to Mother Sugar. I can't feel, I said. I don't care about anyone in the world except Janet. Seven years ago now?- something like that. When I left her I said: You've taught me to cry, thank you for nothing, you've given me back feeling, and it's too painful. 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. In a world as terrible as this, limit emotion. How odd I didn't see it before. And against this instinctive retreat into no-feeling, as a protection against pain, Mother Sugar-I remember saying to her in exasperation: 'If I said to you that the H bomb has fallen and obliterated half of Europe, you'd click with your tongue, tck, tck, and then, if I was weeping and wailing, you'd invite me, with an admonitory frown or a gesture, to remember, or take into account some emotion I was wilfully excluding. What emotion? Why, joy, of course. Consider, my child, you'd say, or imply, the creative aspects of destruction! Consider the creative implications of the power locked in the atom! Allow your mind to rest on those first blades of tentative green grass that will poke into the light out of the lava in a million years time!' She smiled, of course. Then the smile changed and became dry, there was one of the moments, outside the analyst-patient relationship that I waited for. She said: 'My dear Anna, it is possible after all that in order to keep ourselves sane we will have to learn to rely on those blades of grass springing in a million years?' But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves. It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences.... I can hear Janet coming up the stairs. Janet went to school today. Uniform is optional, and she chose to wear it. Extraordinary that my child should want a uniform. I can't remember a time in my life when I wouldn't have felt uncomfortable in one. Paradox: when I was a communist, it was not in the service of uniformed man, but the opposite. The uniform is an ugly sage-green tunic with a yellowish-brown blouse. It is cut to make a girl of Janet's age, twelve, as ugly as possible. Also there is an ugly round hard dark green hat. The greens of the hat and the tunic are ugly together. Yet she is