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That was the material that made Frontiers of War. Of course, the two ‘stories’ have nothing at all in common. I remember very clearly the moment I knew I would write it. I was standing on the steps of the bedroom block of the Mashopi hotel with a cold hard glittering moonlight all around me. Down beyond the eucalyptus trees on the railway lines a goods train had come in and was standing and hissing and clattering off clouds of white steam. Near the train was George’s parked lorry, and behind it the caravan, a brown painted box of a thing that looked like a flimsy packing case. George was in the caravan at that moment with Marie — I had just seen her creep down and climb in. The wet cooling flower-beds smelt strongly of growth. From the dance room came the drumming of Johnnie’s piano. Behind me I could hear the voices of Paul and Jimmy talking to Willi, and Paul’s sudden young laugh. I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility, of danger, the secret ugly frightening pulse of war itself, of the death that we all wanted, for each other and for ourselves.
[A date, some months later.]
I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being ‘objective’. Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.
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About
The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Golden Notebook, digitized the book for us and generously gave permission to reproduce it here in its entirety at no cost.
Additional support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and New York University
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Nona Willis Aronowitz November 20th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
‘I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being ‘objective.’ ‘
Comments like these make me wince–they are the classic observations made by a self-conscious diary-writer. ‘Too narcissistic, too involved in my own world…why do I even keep a diary?’ one thinks. Weirdly, these self-reflections about writing have so far been my favorite parts of this book, because they are so self-deprecating and grounded…they really make me respect process a little more, not only about my own writing but about Lessing’s work itself.
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Naomi Alderman November 21st, 2008 at 1:36 am
I really agree: when she reflects on writing the book feels lively to me, hopeful and full of new ideas. When she’s describing the lives of her characters it’s often full of ennui and hopelessness. Ella’s writing the book about suicide later on seems almost a parody of that tendency. The classic existential-intellectual writer: ‘my novel is about suicide’. Ella must have been awesome fun at parties.
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Helen Oyeyemi November 21st, 2008 at 2:02 am
Nona, I love the parts where Anna tries to identify and regulate her own process as well, the self-deprecation but also her attempts to understand what she was written and why she can’t write anymore, why she is sacking herself from her position as a writer. Elsewhere (page 65 of the online edition) she reflects that Frontiers of War may have been successful because it was fuelled by an emotion (probably the same nostalgia she talks about on this page) that compelled over and above the subject matter. I loved that idea of a book that batters reason, demanding attention with the urgency as a child screaming on a pavement…never mind what the child’s screaming about, go-go-go &c
Anna seems troubled that the nostalgia takes her the same way as she transmits it.
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Lenelle Moïse November 25th, 2008 at 2:21 am
“Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again.”
At this line, I thought, “Imagine how poor Jackson and Marie must feel.”
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