The Golden Notebook (69 page)

room is dark, and on the ceiling two gently-flickering patterns of gold-red light from the heaters, and the gas fire is a red glow whose fierceness has no power to penetrate the cold further than a few inches from the bars of the fire. I have been sitting looking at the new pretty notebook, handling it and admiring it. Saul has scribbled in the front of it in pencil without my seeing the old schoolboy's curse: Whoever he be who looks in this He shall be cursed, That is my wish. Saul Green, his book. (!!!) It made me laugh, so that I nearly went upstairs and gave it to him. But I will not, I will not, I will not. I'll pack away the blue notebook with the others. I'll pack away the four notebooks. I'll start a new notebook, all of myself in one book. [Here the blue notebook ended with a heavy double black line.]

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

Whoever he be who looks in this

He shall be cursed,

That is my wish. Saul Green, his book. (!!!) It is so dark in this flat, so dark, it is as if darkness were the shape of cold. I went through the flat turning on light everywhere, the dark retreated to outside the windows, a cold shape trying to press its way in. But when I turned on the light in my big room, I knew this was wrong, light was foreign to it, so I let the dark come back, controlled by the two paraffin heaters and the glow from the gas fire. I lay down, and thought of the little earth, half of it in cold dark, swinging in immense spaces of darkness. Soon after I lay down Saul came and lay beside me. 'This is an extraordinary room,' he said, 'it's like a world.' His arm under my neck was warm and strong, and we made love. He slept, and when he woke he was warm, not full of the deathly cold which frightens me. Then he remarked: 'Well now perhaps I can work.' The egoism was so direct, like mine when I need something, that I began to laugh. He laughed, and we couldn't stop. We rolled on the bed laughing and then on the floor. Then he jumped up off the floor, saying in a prissy English voice: 'This won't do, it won't do at all,' and went out, still laughing. The devils had gone out of the flat. That is how I thought, sitting on my bed naked, warmed by the heat from the three fires. The devils. As if the fear, the terror, the anxiety were not inside me, inside Saul, but some force from outside which chose its moments to come and go. I thought like that, lying to myself; because I needed that moment of pure happiness- me, Anna, sitting naked on the bed, my breasts pressing between my naked arms, and the smell of sex and sweat. It seemed to me that the warm strength of my body's happiness was enough to drive away all the fear in the world. Then the feet began again upstairs, moving, driven, from place to place above my head, like armies moving. My stomach clenched. I watched my happiness leak away. I was all at once in a new state of being, one foreign to me. I realised my body was distasteful to me. This has never happened to me before; and I even said to myself: Hullo, this is new, this is something I have read about. I remembered Nelson telling me how sometimes he looked at his wife's body and hated it for its femaleness; he hated it because of the hair in the armpits and around the crotch. Sometimes, he said, he saw his wife as a sort of spider, all clutching arms and legs around a hairy central devouring mouth. I sat on my bed and I looked at my thin white legs and my thin white arms, and at my breasts. My wet sticky centre seemed disgusting, and when I saw my breasts all I could think of was how they were when they were full of milk, and instead of this being pleasurable, it was revolting. This feeling of being alien to my own body caused my head to swim, until I anchored myself, clutching out for something, to the thought that what I was experiencing was not my thought at all. I was experiencing, imaginatively, for the first time, the emotions of a homosexual. For the first time the homosexual literature of disgust made sense to me. I realised how much homosexual feeling there is floating loose everywhere, and in people who would never recognise the word as theirs. The sound of feet had stopped upstairs. I could not move, I was gripped by my disgust. Then I knew that Saul would come downstairs and say something that echoed what I was thinking; this knowledge was so clear that I simply sat and waited, in a fug of stale self-disgust, waiting to hear how this disgust would sound when said aloud in his voice, my voice. He came down and stood in the doorway, and he said: 'Jesus, Anna, what are you doing there, sitting naked?' And I said, my voice detached and clinical: 'Saul do you realise we've got to the point where we influence each other's moods even when we are in different rooms?' It was too dark in my room to see his face, but the shape of his body, standing alert by the door, expressed a need to fly, to run from Anna sitting naked and repulsive on the bed. He said in the scandalised voice of a boy: 'Put some clothes on.' I said: 'Did you hear what I said?' For he had not. He said: 'Anna, I told you, don't sit there like that.' I said: 'What do you think this thing is that makes people like us have to experience everything? We're driven by something to be as many different things or people as possible.' He heard this, and said: 'I don't know. I don't have to try, it's what I am.' I said: 'I'm not trying. I'm being driven. Do you suppose that people who lived earlier were tormented by what they had not experienced? Or is it only us?' He said, sullen: 'Lady, I don't know, and I don't care, I just wish I were delivered from it.' Then he said, friendly, not out of disgust: 'Anna, do you realise how damned cold it is? You'll be ill if you don't put on clothes. I'm going out.' He went. As his feet went down the stairs, my mood of self-disgust went with him. I sat and luxuriated in my body. Even a small dry wrinkling of skin on the inside of my thigh, the beginning of being old, gave me pleasure. I was thinking: Yes, that's as it should be, I've been so happy in my life, I shan't care about being old. But even as I said it, the security leaked away again. I was back in disgust. I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from the three points of heat, and I knew, and it was an illumination-one of those things one has always known, but never really understood before-that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. The texture of the carpet was abhorrent to me, a dead processed thing; my body was a thin, meagre, spiky sort of vegetable, like an unsunned plant; and when I touched the hair on my head it was dead. I felt the floor bulge up under me. The walls were losing their density. I knew I was moving down into a new dimension, further away from sanity than I had ever been. I knew I had to get to the bed fast. I could not walk, so I let myself down on my hands and knees and crawled to the bed and lay on it, covering myself. But I was defenceless. Lying there I remembered the Anna who can dream at will, control time, move easily and is at home in the underworld of sleep. But I was not that Anna. The areas of light on the ceiling had become great watchful eyes, the eyes of an animal watching me. It was a tiger, lying sprawled over the ceiling, and I was a child knowing that there was a tiger in the room, even while my brain told me there was not. Beyond the triple-windowed wall a cold wind blew, striking the panes and making them shudder, and the winter's light thinned the curtains. They were not curtains they were shreds of stinking sour flesh left by the animal. I realised I was inside a cage into which the animal could leap when it wished. I was ill with the smell of dead flesh, the reek of the tiger and with fear. And, while my stomach swayed, I fell asleep. It was the kind of sleep I have known only when ill: very light, as if lying just under water, with real sleep in bottomless layers beneath me. And so all the time I was conscious of lying on the bed, and conscious of sleeping, and thinking extraordinarily clearly. Yet it was not the same as when I stood, in a dream, to one side and saw Anna sleeping, watching other personalities bend over to invade her. I was myself, yet knowing what I thought and dreamed, so there was a personality apart from the Anna who lay asleep; yet who that person is I do not know. It was a person concerned to prevent the disintegration of Anna. As I lay on the surface of the dream-water, and began very slowly to submerge, this person said: 'Anna, you are betraying everything you believe in; you are sunk in subjectivity, yourself, your own needs.' But the Anna who wanted to slip under the dark water would not answer. The disinterested person said: 'You've always thought of yourself as a strong person. Yet that man is a thousand times more courageous than you are-he has had to fight this for years, but after a few weeks of it, you are ready to give in altogether.' But the sleeping Anna was already just under the surface of the water, rocking on it, wanting to go down into the black depths under her. The admonishing person said: 'Fight. Fight. Fight.' I lay rocking under the water, and the voice was silent, and then I knew the depths of water under me had become dangerous, full of monsters and crocodiles and things I could scarcely imagine, they were so old and so tyrannous. Yet their danger was what pulled me down, I wanted the danger. Then, through the deafening water, I heard the voice say: 'Fight. Fight.' I saw that the water was not deep at all, but only a thin sour layer of water at the bottom of a filthy cage. Above me, over the top of the cage, sprawled the tiger. The voice said: 'Anna, you know how to fly. Fly.' So I slowly crawled, like a drunk woman, to my knees in the filthy thin water, then stood up and tried to fly, treading down the stale air with my feet. It was so difficult that I almost fainted, the air was too thin, it wouldn't hold me. But I remembered how I had flown before, and so with a very great effort, fighting with every down-pushing step, I rose and clutched the top bars of the cage, over which the tiger lay sprawled. The smell of fetid breath suffocated me. But I pulled myself up through the bars and stood by the tiger. It lay still, blinking greenish eyes at me. Above me was still the roof of the building and I had to push down the air with my feet and tread up through it. Again I fought and struggled, and slowly I rose up and the roof vanished. The tiger lay sprawled at ease on a small ineffective cage, blinking its eyes, one paw stretched out and touching my foot. I knew I had nothing to fear from the tiger. It was a beautiful glossy animal lying stretched out in a warm moonlight. I said to the tiger: 'That's your cage.' It did not move, but yawned, showing white rows of teeth. Then there was a noise of men coming for the tiger. It was going to be caught and caged. I said: 'Run, quickly.' The tiger got up, stood lashing its tail, moving its head this way and that. It stank of fear now. Hearing the clamour of the men's voices and their running feet, it slashed with its paw at my forearm in a blind terror. I saw the blood running down my arm. The tiger leaped right down from the roof, alighting on the pavement, and it ran off into the shadows along the railings of the houses. I began to cry, filled with sorrow, because I knew the men would catch and cage the tiger. Then I saw my arm was not hurt at all, it had already healed. I wept with pity, saying: The tiger is Saul, I don't want him to be caught, I want him to be running wild through the world. Then the dream, or the sleep, became quite thin, close to waking, yet not quite waking. I said to myself: I must write a play about Anna and Saul and the tiger. The part of my mind concerned with this play went on working, thinking about it, like a child moving bricks about a floor-a child, moreover, who has been forbidden to play, because she knew it was an evasion, making patterns of Anna and Saul and the tiger was an excuse not to think; the patterns of what Anna and Saul would do and say were shapes of pain, the 'story' of the play would be shaped by pain, and that was an evasion. Meanwhile, with the part of my mind which, I knew, was the disinterested personality who had saved me from disintegration, I began to control my sleep. This controlling person insisted that I must put aside the play about the tiger, must stop playing with the bricks. He said that instead of doing what I always do, making up stories about life, so as not to look at it straight, I should go back and look at scenes from my life. This looking back had a remarkable quality about it, like a shepherd counting sheep, or the rehearsal for a play, a quality of checking up, touching for reassurance. It was the same act as when I was a child and had bad nightmares every night: before I slept each night I lay awake, remembering everything in the day that had a quality of fear hidden in it; which might become part of a nightmare. I had to 'name' the frightening things, over and over, in a terrible litany; like a sort of disinfection by the conscious mind before I slept. But now, asleep, it was not making past events harmless, by naming them, but making sure they were still there. Yet I know that having made sure they were still there, I would have to 'name' them in a different way, and that was why the controlling personality was forcing me back. I revisited, first, the group under the eucalyptus trees at the Mashopi station in a wine-smelling moonlight, the patterns of leaves dark on white sand. But the terrible falsity of nostalgia had gone out of it; it was emotionless, and like a speeded-up film. Yet I had to watch George Hounslow come stooping his broad shoulders up from the black lorry standing by the glinting railway lines under the stars, to look with his fearful hunger at Maryrose and at me; and to hear Willi hum tunelessly in my ear the bars from Brecht's opera; and to see Paul bend slightly towards us with his mocking courtesy, before he smiled and went off up to the block of bedrooms near the tumbling granite boulders. And then, following him, we were walking along the sandy track. He was standing waiting for us, facing us, smiling with a cool triumph, looking not at us, the group sauntering towards him in hot sunlight, but past us, towards the Mashopi Hotel. One after another we, too, stopped and turned to look. The hotel building seemed to have exploded in a dancing whirling cloud of white petals or wings, millions of white butterflies had chosen the building to alight on. It looked like a white flower opening slowly, under the deep steamy blue sky. Then a feeling of menace came into us, and we knew we had suffered a trick of sight, had been deluded. We were looking at the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, and a white flower unfolded under the blue sky in such a perfection of puffs, folds and eddying shapes that we could not move, although we knew we were menaced by it. It was unbelievably beautiful, the shape of death; and we stood watching in silence, until the silence was slowly invaded by a rustling, crawling, grating sound, and looking down we saw the grasshoppers, their gross tumbling fecundity inches deep, all around us. The invisible projectionist who was running this film now snapped the scene off, as if saying: 'That's enough, you know it's still there.' And immediately he began running a new part of the film. It was running slowly, because there was a technical hitch of some kind and several times he (the invisible
projectionist) turned back the film so as to go through it again. The trouble was that the film was not clear, it had been shot badly. Two men, who were the same, yet separate, seemed to be fighting, in a silent duel of wills to be in the film. One was Paul Tanner, the man from the working-class, who had become a doctor, and whose quality of dry critical irony was what had sustained him in his struggle, the quality, however, which had fought with, and slowly defeated the idealism in him. The other was Michael, the refugee from Europe. When these two figures finally merged, a new person was created. I could see the moment, it was as if the shape of a human being, a mould already created to contain the personality of Michael, or Paul Tanner, swelled out and altered, as if a sculptor working from inside his material was changing the shape of his statue by pressing his own shoulders, his own thighs, against the substance that had been Paul, been Michael. This new person was larger in build, with the heroic quality of a statue, but above all, I could feel his strength. Then he spoke, and I could hear the thin sound of the real voice before it was swallowed or absorbed by the new strong voice: 'But my dear Anna, we are not the failures we think we are. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly less stupid than we are to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have always known, they have known for ten thousand years, that to lock a human being into solitary confinement can make a madman of him or an animal. They have always known that a poor man frightened of the police and his landlord is a slave. They have always known that frightened people are cruel. They have always known that violence breeds violence. And we know it. But do the great masses of the world know it? No. It is our job to tell them. Because the great men can't be bothered. Their imaginations are already occupied with how to colonise Venus; they are already creating in their minds visions of a society full of free and noble human beings. Meanwhile, human beings are ten thousand years behind them, imprisoned in fear. The great men can't be bothered. And they are right. Because they know we are here, the boulder-pushers. They know we will go on pushing the boulder up the lower slopes of an immensely high mountain, while they stand on the top of the mountain, already free. All our lives, you and I, we will use all our energies, all our talents, into pushing that boulder another inch up the mountain. And they rely on us and they are right; and that is why we are not useless after all.' This voice faded; but already the film had changed. Now it was perfunctory. Scene after scene, flicked on, then off; I knew this brief 'visiting' of the past was so that I should be reminded I had still to work on it. Paul Tanner and Ella, Michael and Anna, Julia and Ella, Molly and Anna, Mother Sugar, Tommy, Richard, Dr West-these people appeared briefly, distorted with speed, and vanished again, and then the film broke off, or rather ran down, with a jarring dislocation. And the projectionist, in the silence that followed, remarked (and it was in a voice that struck me, because it was a new voice, rather jaunty, practical, jeering, a commonsensical voice): 'And what makes you think that the emphasis you have put on it is the correct emphasis?' The word correct had an echoing parodic twang. It was a jeer at the Marxist jargon-word correct. It also had a primness, like that of a schoolteacher. No sooner did I hear the word, correct, than I was attacked by a feeling of nausea, and I knew that feeling well-it was the nausea of being under strain, of trying to expand one's limits beyond what has been possible. Feeling sick, I listened to the voice saying: 'And what makes you think that the emphasis you have put on it is correct?' while he, the projectionist, began running the film through again, or rather, the films, for there were several, and I was able, as they flicked past me on the screen, to isolate and 'name' them. The Mashopi film; the film about Paul and Ella; the film about Michael and Anna; the film about Ella and Julia; the film about Anna and Molly. They were all, so I saw now, conventionally, well-made films, as if they had been done in a studio; then I saw the titles: these films, which were everything I hated most, had been directed by me. The projectionist kept running these films very fast, and then pausing on the credits, and I could hear his jeering laugh at Directed by Anna Wulf. Then he would run another few scenes, every scene glossy with untruth, false and stupid. I shouted at the projectionist: 'But they aren't mine, I didn't make them.' At which the projectionist, almost bored with confidence, let the scenes vanish, and he waited for me to prove him wrong. And now it was terrible, because I was faced with the burden of re-creating order out of the chaos that my life had become. Time had gone, and my memory did not exist, and I was unable to distinguish between what I had invented and what I had known, and I knew that what I had invented was all false. It was a whirl, an orderless dance, like the dance of the white butterflies in a shimmer of heat over the damp sandy vlei. The projectionist was still waiting, sardonic. What he was thinking got into my mind. He was thinking that the material had been ordered by me to fit what I knew, and that was why it was all false. Suddenly he said aloud: 'How would June Boothby see that time? I bet you can't do June Boothby.' At which my mind slipped into a gear foreign to me, and I began writing a story about June Boothby. I was unable to stop the flow of words, and I was in tears of frustration as I wrote in the style of the most insipid coy woman's magazine; but what was frightening was that the insipidity was due to a very slight alteration of my own style, a word here and there only: 'June, a just-sixteen-year-old, lay on the chaise lounge of the verandah, looking past the luxuriant foliage of the golden shower to the road. She knew something was going to happen. When her mother came into the room behind her and said: June, come and help me with the hotel dinner-June did not move. And her mother, after a pause, went out of the room without speaking. June was convinced that her mother knew, too. She thought: Dear Mum, you know how I feel. Then it happened. A lorry drew up in front of the hotel beside the petrol pumps, and he got out. June, without hurrying, sighed and stood up. Then, as if impelled by an outer power, she left the house and walked, on the path which her mother had used a few moments before, towards the hotel. The young man standing beside the petrol pumps seemed to be conscious of her approach. He turned. Their eyes met...' I heard the projectionist laughing. He was delighted because I could not prevent these words emerging, he was sadistically delighted. 'I told you,' he said, his hand already lifted to start the film again. 'I told you you couldn't do it.' I woke into the stuffy dark of the room, illuminated in three places by glowing fire. I was exhausted by the dreaming. Instantly I knew I had woken because Saul was in the flat. I could hear no movement but I could feel his presence. I even knew just where he was, standing a little beyond the door on the landing. I could see him, in a tense indecisive pose, plucking at his lips, wondering whether to come in. I called: 'Saul, I'm awake.' He came in, and said in a jaunty false voice: 'Hi, I thought you were asleep.' I knew who had been the projectionist in my dream. I said: 'Do you know, you've become a sort of inner conscience or critic. I've just dreamed of you like that.' He gave me a long, cool, shrewd look, then said: 'If I've become your conscience, then it's a joke, you're certainly mine.' I said: 'Saul, we're very bad for each other.' He was on the point of saying: 'I may be bad for you, but you're good for me-' because on to his face came the consciously whimsical but arrogant look that was the mask that went with those words. I stopped him by saying: 'You're going to have to break it. I ought to, but I'm not strong enough. I realise you're much stronger than I am. I thought it was the other way around.' I watched anger, dislike, suspicion, move over his face. He was watching me sideways, eyes narrowed. I knew that now he was going to fight, out of the personality that would hate me for taking something away from him. I also knew that when he was 'himself,' he would think about what I had said, and being responsible, he would, in fact, do what I asked. Meanwhile he said, sullen: 'So you're kicking me out.' I said: 'That's not what I said'-speaking to the responsible man. He said: 'I don't toe your particular line so you're going to kick me out.' Without knowing I was going to do it, I sat up and shrieked at him: 'For Christ's sake, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it.' He ducked back, instinctively. I knew that for him a woman shrieking in hysteria meant that he would be hit. I thought how odd it was we two should be together at all, so close we should have become each other, for I had never hit anyone in my life. He even moved to the end of the bed, and sat ready to run off from a woman shrieking and hitting. I said, not shrieking, but crying: 'Can't you see that this is a cycle, we go around and around?' His face was dark with hostility, I knew he was going to fight against going. I turned away from him, wrestled down the sickness in my stomach, and said: 'Anyway, you'll go by yourself when Janet comes back.' I hadn't known I was going to say it, or that I thought it. I lay thinking about it. Of course it was true. 'What do you mean?' he asked, interested, not hostile. 'If I had had a son, you'd have stayed. You'd have identified with him. At least for a time, till you worked yourself through that. But since I've got a girl you'll go because you'll see us as two women, two enemies.' He slowly nodded. I said: 'How odd, I'm always afflicted by feelings of doom, fate, inevitability. But it was chance I had a girl and not a boy. Just pure chance. So it's chance you'll leave. My life will be changed, completely, because of it.' I felt easier, less caged, holding on to chance. I said: 'How strange, having a baby is where women feel they are entering into some sort of inevitable destiny. But right in the heart of where we feel most bound is something that's just chance.' He was watching me, sideways, unhostile, with affection. I said: 'After all, no one in the world could make my having had a girl and not a boy into anything but chance. Imagine Saul, if I'd had a boy, we'd have had what you Yanks call a relationship. A long relationship. It might have turned into anything, who knows?' He said quietly: 'Anna, do I really give you such a bad time?' I said, with precisely his brand of sullenness-borrowed from him at a moment when he was not using it, so to speak, for now he was gentle and humorous: 'I haven't done time with the witch-doctors not to know that no one does anything to me, I do it to myself.' 'Leaving the witch-doctors out,' he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. He was smiling, concerned for me. For that moment he was all there, the good person. Yet already I could see behind his face the black power; it was coming back into his eyes. He was fighting with himself. I recognised that fight as the fight I had had while sleeping, to refuse entrance to alien personalities wanting to invade me. His fight got so bad he sat, eyes shut, sweat on his forehead. I took his hand, and he clutched at it, and he said: 'O. K. Anna, O. K. O. K. Don't worry. Trust me.' We sat on the bed, clutching at each other's hands. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, then kissed me, and said: 'Put on some jazz.' I put on some early Armstrong. I sat on the floor. The great room was a world, with its glow of caged fire, and its shadows. Saul was lying on the bed, listening to the jazz, a look of pure contentment on his face. Just then I couldn't 'remember' sick Anna. I knew she was there in the wings, waiting to walk on, when some button was touched-but that was all. We were silent a long time. I wondered, when we began to talk, which two people would be talking. I was thinking that if there were a tape recorder of the hours and hours of talk in that room, the talk and the fighting and the arguing and the sickness, it would be a record of a hundred different people living now, in various parts of the world, talking and crying out and questioning. I sat and wondered what person would start crying out when I began talking, and I said: 'I've been thinking.' This is already a joke when one of us says, 'I've been thinking.' He laughed and said: 'So you've been thinking.' 'If a person can be invaded by a personality who isn't theirs, why can't people-I mean people in the mass-be invaded by alien personalities.' He lay, popping his lips to the jazz, plucking at an imaginary guitar. He didn't reply, merely grimaced, saying: I am listening. 'The joint is, comrade...' I stopped, hearing how I used the word, as we all do now, with an ironical nostalgia. I was thinking that it was first cousin to the jeering voice of the projectionist-it was an aspect of disbelief and destruction. Saul said, laying aside his imaginary guitar: 'Well comrade, if you're saying that the masses are infected with emotions from outside, then I'm delighted, comrade, that you're holding fast to your socialist principles in spite of everything.' He had used the words comrade and masses ironically, but now his voice switched to bitterness: 'So all we have to do, comrade, is to arrange that the masses are filled, like so many empty containers, with good useful pure kindly peaceful emotions, just the way we are.' He spoke well beyond irony, not quite in the voice of the projectionist, but not far off it either. I remarked: 'That's the sort of thing I say, that kind of mocking, but you hardly ever do.' 'As I crack up out of that 100 per cent revolutionary, I notice I crack up into aspects of everything I hate. That's because I've never lived with my eye on becoming what is known as mature. I've spent all my life, until recently, preparing myself for the moment when someone says: "Pick up that rifle"; or, "run that collective farm"; or, "organise that picket line." I always believed I'd be dead by the time I was thirty.' 'All young men believe they are going to be dead by the time they're thirty. They can't stand the compromise of ageing. And who am I to say they're not right?' 'I'm not all men. I'm Saul Green. No wonder I had to leave America. There's no one left who speaks my kind of language. What happened to them all-I used to know plenty once. We were all world-changers. Now I drive across my country, looking up my old friends, and they're all married or successful and having drunken private conversations with themselves because American values stink.' I laughed