The Golden Notebook (72 page)

understood, in bad sexual trouble; she conspired with him, out of chivalry, in pretending there was nothing seriously wrong. They parted in the morning with friendship. Then she found herself weeping, in a low helpless depression. She told herself that the cure for this was not to sit alone, but to ring up one of her men friends. She did nothing of the sort, she was unable to face seeing anyone, let alone another 'affair.' Anna found that she was spending her time in a curious way. She had always read newspapers, journals, magazines in large quantities; she suffered from the vice of her kind, that she had to know what was going on everywhere. But now, having woken late, and drunk coffee, she would sit on the floor of the big room, surrounded by half a dozen daily newspapers, a dozen weekly journals, reading them, slowly, over and over again. She was trying to fit things together. Whereas, before, her reading had been to form a picture of what was taking place all over the world, now a form of order familiar to her had disappeared. It seemed as if her mind had become an area of differing balances, she was balancing facts, events, against each other. It was not a question of a sequence of events, with their probable consequences. It was as if she, Anna, were a central point of awareness, being attacked by a million uncoordinated facts, and the central point would disappear if she proved unable to weigh and balance the facts, take them all into account. Thus, she would find herself staring at the statement: "The ignition hazard from the thermal radiation of 10 M.T. surface burst will extend over a circle of about 25 miles in radius. A fire circle of 25 miles radius encompasses an area of 1,900 square miles and if the weapon detonates near the intended aiming point, will include the most densely populated sections of the target complex which means that under certain clear atmospheric conditions everyone and everything within this tremendous area would probably be subject to a grave thermal hazard and many consumed in the holocaust,'- and now it was not the words that were terrible but that she could not make what they said match imaginatively with: 'I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.' So that she would stare at these two sets of words, until the words themselves seemed to detach themselves from the page and slide away, as if they had detached themselves from their own meaning. Yet the meaning remained, unconfirmed by the words, and probably more terrible (though she did not know why) because the words had failed to confine it. And so, having been defeated by these two sets of words, she would put them aside and turn her attention to another set: 'It is too little realised in Europe that there is no status quo in Africa as it is at present ordered.' 'Formality, I think (not, as Mr. Smith suggests, a neo-neo-romanticism), may be the coming mode.' So that she was spending hours sitting on the floor, all her attention focused on selected fragments of print. Soon a new activity began. She carefully cut out the patches of print from newspapers and journals and stuck them on the walls with drawing-pins. The white walls of the big room were covered all over with large and small cuttings from papers. She walked carefully around the walls, looking at the statements pinned there. When she ran out of drawing-pins, she told herself it was stupid to go on with a meaningless occupation; yet she put on a coat, went down to the street, and bought two boxes of drawing-pins and methodically attached the still unanchored fragments of print to the walls. But the newspapers piled up, landing on her door-mat every morning in a great thick pack of print, and every morning she sat, fighting to order this new supply of material-and going out to buy more drawing-pins. It occurred to her that she was going mad. This was 'the breakdown' she had foreseen; the 'cracking-up.' Yet it did not seem to her that she was even slightly mad; but rather that people who were not as obsessed as she was with the inchoate world mirrored in the newspapers were all out of touch with an awful necessity. Yet she knew she was mad. And while she could not prevent herself from the careful obsessed business of reading masses of print, and cutting out pieces, and pinning them all over her walls, she knew that on the day Janet came home from school, she would become Anna, Anna the responsible, and the obsession would go away. She knew that Janet's mother being sane and responsible was far more important than the necessity of understanding the world; and one thing depended on the other. The world would never get itself understood, be ordered by words, be 'named,' unless Janet's mother remained a woman who was able to be responsible. The knowledge that Janet would be home in a month nagged at Anna inside her obsession with newspaper facts. It turned her towards the four notebooks which she had neglected ever since Tommy's accident. She turned the pages of these books over and over, but had no connection with them. She knew that some sort of guilt, which she did not understand, cut her off from them. The guilt was of course connected with Tommy. She did not know, would never know, if Tommy's attempt at suicide was triggered off by reading her notebooks; or, if this were true, whether there was something in particular which had upset him; or whether she was in fact arrogant. 'It's arrogant, Anna; it's irresponsible.' Yes, he had said that; but beyond knowing she had let him down, that she had not been able to give him something he needed, she did not understand what had happened. One afternoon she went to sleep and dreamed. She knew it was a dream she had often had before, in one form or another. She had two children. One was Janet, plump and glossy with health. The other was Tommy, a small baby, and she was starving him. Her breasts were empty, because Janet had had all the milk in them; and so Tommy was thin and puny, dwindling before her eyes from starvation. He vanished altogether, in a tiny coil of pale bony staring flesh, before she woke, which she did in a fever of anxiety, self-division and guilt. Yet, awake, she could see no reason why she should have dreamed of Tommy being starved by her. And besides, she knew that in other dreams of this cycle, the 'starved' figure might be anyone, perhaps someone she had passed in the street whose face had haunted her. Yet there was no doubt she felt responsible for this half-glimpsed person, for why otherwise should she dream of having failed him-or her? After this dream, she went feverishly back to work, cutting out news items, fastening them to the wall. That evening, sitting on the floor, playing jazz, desperate because of her inability to 'make sense' out of the bits of print, she felt a new sensation, like a hallucination, a new and hitherto not understood picture of the world. This understanding was altogether terrible; a reality different from anything she had known before as reality, and it came from a country of feeling she had never visited. It was not being 'depressed'; or being 'unhappy'; of feeling 'discouraged'; the essence of the experience was that such words, like joy or happiness, were meaningless. Coming around from this illumination-which was timeless; so that Anna did not know how long it had lasted, she knew she had had an experience for which there were no words-it was beyond the region where words could be made to have sense. Yet she again stood before the notebooks, letting her hand with the style in it (which looked, with its fragile entrails showing, like a sea-animal, a sea-horse) wait above first one, then another, to let the nature of the 'illumination' decide for itself where it should be written; but the four notebooks, with their various sub-divisions and categories, remained as they were, and Anna laid down her pen. She tried various passages of music, some jazz, some bits of Bach, some Stravinsky, thinking that perhaps music might say what words could not; but this was one of the times, increasingly frequent, when music seemed to irritate her, seemed to attack the membranes of her inner ear, which repulsed sounds as if they were enemies. She said to herself: I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature inaccurate. If I thought they were capable of expressing the truth I wouldn't keep journals which I refuse to let anyone see-except, of course, Tommy. That night she hardly slept; she lay awake re-thinking thoughts already so familiar to her she was bored even by their approach-political thoughts, the patterns of action in our time. It was a descent into banality; because as usual she concluded that any act she might make would be without faith, that is, without faith in 'good' and 'bad,' but simply a sort of provisional act, hoping it might turn out well, but with no more than that hope. Yet from this attitude of mind she might very well find herself making decisions that would cost her her life, or her freedom. She woke very early, and soon found herself standing in the middle of the kitchen, her hands full of bits of newspaper and drawing-pins, the walls of her big room being entirely covered as far as she could reach, with clippings. She was shocked into laying aside the new clippings, and the bundles of journals and papers. She was thinking: but there's no sensible reason why I should be shocked by starting on a second room, when I wasn't shocked by covering the whole of the first room-or at least, not shocked enough to stop. Nevertheless, she was encouraged because she would stick up no more fragments of print, offering unassimilable information. She stood in the middle of the big room, telling herself to strip the walls. But she was unable to. She was again moving from point to point, around the room, matching statement with statement, one set of words with another. While she was doing this, the telephone rang. It was a friend of Molly's. An American left-winger needed a room for a few days. Anna joked that if he was an American he would be writing an epic novel, be in psychoanalysis, and in the process of divorcing his second wife; but said he could have a room. He telephoned later to say he would be over that afternoon at five. Anna dressed to receive him, realising that she had not dressed, except to go out and buy odd bits of food and drawing-pins, for several weeks. Just before five he telephoned again to say he couldn't come, he had to see his agent. Anna was struck by the careful detail he put into his account of the appointment with the agent. A few minutes later Molly's friend rang again to say that Milt (the American) was coming over to a party at her place, and would Anna like to come too? Anna was annoyed, shrugged off the annoyance; refused the invitation, put on her dressing-gown again, and returned to the floor, surrounded by newspapers. Late that night the bell rang. Anna opened the door, saw the American. He apologised for not telephoning; she apologised for not being dressed. He was young, about thirty, she judged; with close young brown hair, like healthy fur, a lean intelligent face, bespectacled. He was the shrewd, competent, intelligent American. She knew him well, 'naming' him a hundred times more sophisticated than his English equivalent, by which she meant that he was the inhabitant of a country of desperation still uncharted by Europe. He began to apologise, as they climbed the stairs, for going to his agent; but she interrupted by asking if he had enjoyed the party. He gave an abrupt laugh, and said: 'Well, you've caught me out.' 'You could always have said that you wanted to go to a party,' she said. They were in the kitchen, examining each other, smiling. Anna was thinking: A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, Perhaps this is the man. That's the reason I was annoyed because he lied about the party. How boring it all is, these ever-so-expected emotions. She said: 'Would you like to see the room?' He stood with his hand on the back of a yellow-painted kitchen chair, supporting himself because he had had too much to drink at the party, and said: 'Yes, I would.' But he did not move. She said: 'You have the advantage of me-I'm sober. But there are some things I must say. First, I do know that all Americans are not rich, the rent is low.' He smiled. 'Second, you're writing the epic American novel and...' 'Wrong, I haven't started yet.' 'Also, you are in psycho-analysis because you have problems.' 'Wrong again, I went to a headshrinker once and decided I could do better for myself.' 'Well that's a good thing, it will be possible to talk to you at least.' 'What are you being so defensive about?' 'I should have said aggressive, myself,' said Anna, laughing She noted, with interest, that she might just as easily have wept. He said: 'I dropped in at this unseemly hour because I want to sleep here tonight. I've been at the Y, which in every city I've been in is my least favourite place. I've taken the liberty of bringing my case, which I have with transparent cunning left outside the door.' 'Then bring it in,' said Anna. He went downstairs to fetch the case. Anna went into the big room to fetch linen for his bed. She went in without thinking; but when she heard him close behind her, she froze as she understood just how that room must look. The floor was billowing with newspapers and journals; the walls were papered with cuttings; the bed was unmade. She turned to him with sheets and pillowcases, saying: 'If you could make your own bed...' But he was already in the room, examining it from behind shrewdly focused lenses. Then he sat on her trestle table where the notebooks lay, swinging his legs. He looked at her (she saw herself, in a faded red gown, her hair lying in straight black wisps around an unmade-up face) at the walls and at the floor and at the bed. Then he said, in a mock-shocked voice: 'Gee.' But his face showed concern. 'They said you were a left-winger,' said Anna, in appeal; interested that this was what she instinctively said in explanation of the state of affairs. 'Vintage, post-war.' 'I'm waiting for you to say: I and the other three socialists in the States are going to...' The other four.' He approached a wall as if he were stalking it, took off his glasses to look at its papering (revealing eyes that swam with myopia) and said again: 'Gee.' He carefully fitted back his spectacles, and said: 'I once knew a man who was a first-rate newspaper correspondent. If you very naturally want to know what his relation to me was, he was my father-figure. A red. Then one thing and another caught up with him, yeah, that's one way of describing it, and now and for the last three years he's been sitting in a cold-water flat in New