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She liked him so much now that for her it was as if the episode in the field had not happened. He took her home and came into the hall after her, still talking. They went up the stairs, and Ella was thinking: I suppose we’ll have some coffee and then he’ll go. She was quite genuine in this. And yet, when he again made love to her, she again thought: Yes, it’s right, because we’ve been so close together all evening. Afterwards, when he complained: ‘Of course you knew I’d make love to you again,’ she would reply: ‘Of course I didn’t. And if you hadn’t it wouldn’t have mattered.’ At which he would either reply: ‘Oh, what a hypocrite!’ Or: ‘Then you’ve no right to be so unconscious of your motives.’
Being with Paul Tanner, that night, was the deepest experience Ella had had with a man; so different from anything she had known before that everything in the past became irrelevant. This feeling was so final, that when, towards early morning, Paul asked: ‘What does Julia think about this sort of thing?’ Ella replied vaguely: ‘What sort of thing?’
‘Last week, for instance. You said you brought a man home from a party.’
‘You’re mad,’ she said, laughing comfortably. They lay in the dark. She turned her head to see his face; a dark line of cheek showed against the light from the window; there was something remote and lonely about it, and she thought: He’s got into the same mood he was in earlier. But this time it did not disturb her, for the simplicity of the warm touch of his thigh against hers made the remoteness of his face irrelevant.
‘But what does Julia say?’
‘What about?’
‘What will she say in the morning?’
‘Why should she say anything at all?’
‘I see,’ he said briefly; and got up and added: ‘I’ll have to go home and shave and get a clean shirt.’
That week he came to her every night, late, when Michael was asleep. And he left early every morning, to ‘pick up a clean shirt’.
Ella was completely happy. She drifted along on a soft tide of not-thinking. When Paul made a remark from ‘his negative personality’, she was so sure of her emotions that she replied: ‘Oh, you’re so stupid, I told you, you don’t understand anything.’ (The word negative was Julia’s, used after a glimpse of Paul on the stairs: ‘There’s something bitter and negative about that face.’) She was thinking that soon he would marry her. Or perhaps not soon. It would be at the right time, and he would know when that was. His marriage must be no marriage at all, if he could stay with her, night after night, going home at dawn, ‘for a clean shirt’.
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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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Naomi Alderman November 22nd, 2008 at 5:41 pm
“She was thinking that soon he would marry her. Or perhaps not soon. It would be at the right time, and he would know when that was.”
In the margin of my copy I wrote “this reads like Jane Austen”, and then I was excited to find that Lessing introduces the shadow of Jane Austen a few pages on (page 194, UK edition) where Ella, trying to write “makes bitter jokes about Jane Austen hiding her novels under the blotting paper when people come into the room”.
Women and writing, women and marriage. Ella wants Paul to marry her even though her first marriage was unhappy, even though Paul’s marriage is unhappy, even though nothing in this novel seems to indicate that any marriage will ever be happy. Ella wants marriage. She wants it as if, like the women in Pride and Prejudice, there is no other place for a woman to put herself.
But Ella is a fiction created by a fiction (Anna). And the shade of Austen is an interesting one to introduce: Austen never married. Austen wrote. She wrote about marriage, inventing a romance leading to marriage between people who had intellectual and emotional companionship in a time when that wasn’t considered any sort of prerequisite for the union. But she herself turned down the potential for such a union.
Is part of Ella’s function to help Anna understand her own desire for marriage? In the first section of Free Women, Anna herself is much more ambivalent about it. She worries that she and Molly are descending into “twin old-maidhood” (page 62 UK edition) but the authorial voice of Lessing notes that Molly’s self-respect comes from not having “given up and crawled into… a safe marriage” (page 36, UK edition).
Can a woman write about marriage and be married? Why do women want to be married? What is the point of marriage? I believe there’s good evidence that marriage still makes men (on average) happier and women (on average) more unhappy, so these are still very live questions. Like Elizabeth Bennet, Ella wants marriage. Like Austen, Anna is unmarried. Could Austen have written, hiding her notes under the blotter, if she’d been married?
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Lenelle Moïse November 25th, 2008 at 3:04 am
“They went up the stairs, and Ella was thinking: I suppose we’ll have some coffee and then he’ll go. She was quite genuine in this. And yet, when he again made love to her, she again thought: Yes, it’s right, because we’ve been so close together all evening.”
In love making, Paul is in action and Ella, comfortably, allows herself to be acted upon. This encounter reads a bit like an out of body experience. It reminded me of the lyrics of Ani Difranco’s song SWIM:
i was floating above myself
watching her do just what you wanted
poor little friendly ghost
wondering why her whole house feels haunted
Ella is a bit of an electrical outlet. She waits, she receives, she reacts. Meanwhile, they are doomed and she is in complete denial.
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Naomi Alderman November 22nd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
It occurs to me that the Stendahl quote on page 194 (UK edition) is relevant here too. “Any woman under fifty who writes, should do so under a pseudonym.” Of course the thing that women typically change their names to do is get married. Lessing seems to me here to be needling at the question: can a woman both write and be married? I believe she herself was divorced before she published her first novel.
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