The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
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 weekend, 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 crystallise 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
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 know 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.”
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 of 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 enjoyably 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, unfin
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 she 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?”