The Notebooks

The Black Notebook

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The main block of the hotel stood directly by the main road, and consisted of the bar and the dining-room with the kitchens behind it. There was a verandah along the front supported by wooden pillars, up which plants grew. We sat on benches in silence, yawning, suddenly exhausted and very hungry. Soon Mrs Boothby, summoned from her own house by her husband, let us into the dining-room and shut the doors again so that travellers might not come in and demand food. This was one of the Colony’s main roads, and always full of cars. Mrs Boothby was a large, full-bodied woman, very plain, with a highly-coloured face and tightly-crimped colourless hair. She wore tight corsets, and her buttocks shelved out abruptly, and her bosom was high like a shelf in front. She was pleasant, kindly, anxious to oblige, but dignified. She apologized, that as we were so late, she could not serve a full dinner, but she would do her best. Then, with a nod and a good night, she left us to the waiter, who was sulky at being kept in so long after his proper hours. We ate plates of good thick roast beef, roast potatoes, carrots. And afterwards, apple pie and cream and the local cheese. It was English pub food, cooked with care. The big dining-room was silent. All the tables gleamed with readiness for tomorrow’s breakfast. The windows and doors were hung with heavy floral linen. Headlights from the passing cars continually lightened the linen, obliterating the pattern, so that the reds and blues of the flowers glowed out very bright when the dazzle of light had swept on and up the road towards the city. We were all sleepy and not very talkative. But I felt better after a while, because Paul and Willi, as usual, were treating the waiter as a servant, ordering him about and making demands, and suddenly Ted came to himself, and began talking to the man as a human being — and with even more warmth than usual, so I could see he was ashamed of his moment on the verandah. While Ted made enquiries about the man’s family, his work, his life, offering information about himself, Paul and Willi simply ate, as always on these occasions. They had made their position clear long ago. ‘Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?’ ‘Yes,’ Ted had said. ‘Then I can’t help you,’ Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy was demanding more to drink. He was already drunk; he got drunk more quickly than anyone I’ve known. Soon Mr Boothby came in and said that as travellers we were entitled to drink — making it plain why we had been allowed to eat so late in the first place. But instead of the hard drinks he wanted us to order, we asked for wine, and he brought us chilled white Cape wine. It was very good wine; and we did not want to drink the raw Cape brandy Mr Boothby brought us but we did drink it, and then some more wine. And then Willi announced that we were all coming down next week-end, and could Mr Boothby arrange rooms for us. Mr Boothby said it was no trouble at all — offering us a bill that we had difficulty in raising the money to settle.

The Notebooks

The Black Notebook

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2 Comments

  1. Naomi Alderman November 10th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    ‘Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?’

    Ouch. Lessing absolutely skewers the inconsistencies of this group of intellectuals. There’s this, on the subject of class, then on the next page there’s the discussion of how their principles lead them to condemn black nationalism as “right-wing deviation” and then just a few paragraphs further on, a scene in which Maryrose

    “spoke with confidence; but… the men did not reply… she grew uneasy and appealed ‘I’m not saying it right, but you see what I mean…’ Because she had appealed, the men were restored, and Willi said benevolently: ‘Of course you say it right. Anyone as beautiful as you can’t say it wrong.’”

    They seem, to me, strangely similar to Richard, earlier on. They want things to happen their way. They want change, but they want to be able to control that change, for it to fit in with their worldview.

    Personally, and this is in no way a criticism, I don’t especially like any of the characters in this novel so far. I do like that in the novel, though. I think people get far too hung up on having fictional characters be “likeable”. Better they should be interesting; and these people are very interesting indeed.

    1. Philippa Levine November 13th, 2008 at 12:06 am

      I’m with Naomi: this is not a likeable bunch of characters and surely Lessing deliberately sets the book up that way. I like the way this subverts easy identification with any character: their comments, behaviours, activities are not all that predictable, making it hard for readers to do that “oh my, I see myself in this person” thing. (Yes, I’m often guilty…)
      The inconsistency (even Willi!) of the characters makes them, for me at least, more real, even if not necessarily people I want to meet (yeah, yeah, I know they’re fictional, but I hope you know what I mean by that). As a historian, I often find myself loathing, liking, admiring etc. the people I’m researching — in that arena, I often get to read their letters, sometimes their diaries, and often other people’s reactions to them — not that different, of course, from how Lessing “archives” her characters’ lives and personalities. What price the distinction, then, between grimly realist fiction (even given its psychoanalytic element) such as this and the work of the historian, I wonder?
      I wandered off Naomi’s point there, but I do think the question she implicitly asked about what we demand of our fiction (characters we like, characters with whom we can identify) has a great deal of resonance, and maybe well beyond fiction too.