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27th March, 1950
I am crying in my sleep. All I can remember when I wake is that I have been crying. When I told Mrs Marks, she said: ‘The tears we shed in our sleep are the only genuine tears we shed in our lives. The waking tears are self-pity.’ I said: ‘That’s very poetic, but I can’t believe you mean it.’ ‘And why not?’ ‘Because when I go to sleep knowing I am going to cry, there’s pleasure in it.’ She smiles; I wait for it — but by now she is not going to help me. ‘You aren’t going to suggest,’ I say, ironical, ‘that I am a masochist?’ She nods: of course. ‘There’s pleasure in pain,’ I say, sounding the trumpet for her. She nods. I say: ‘Mrs Marks, that sad nostalgic pain that makes me cry is the same emotion I wrote that damned book out of.’ She sits up, straight, shocked. Because I could describe a book, art, that noble activity, as damned. I say: ‘All you’ve done is to bring me, step by step, to the subjective knowledge of what I knew before anyway, that the root of that book was poisoned.’ She says: ‘All self-knowledge is knowing, on deeper and deeper levels, what one knew before.’ I say: ‘But that isn’t good enough.’ She nods and sits thinking. I know something is coming but I don’t know what. Then she says: ‘Do you keep a diary?’ ‘Off and on.’ ‘Do you write in it what happens here?’ ‘Sometimes.’ She nods. And I know what is in her mind. It is that the process, writing a diary, is the beginning of what she thinks of as unfreezing, the releasing of the ‘block’ that stops me writing. I felt so angry, so resentful, that I couldn’t say anything. I felt as if, in mentioning the diary, in making it part of her process, so to speak, she was robbing me of it.
[At this point the diary stopped, as a personal document. It continued in the form of newspaper cuttings, carefully pasted in and dated.]
March, 50
The modeller calls this the ‘H-Bomb Style’, explaining that the ‘H’ is for peroxide of hydrogen, used for colouring. The hair is dressed to rise in waves as from a bomb-burst, at the nape of the neck. Daily Telegraph
July 13th, 50
There were cheers in Congress today when Mr Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat, urged that President Truman should tell the North Koreans to withdraw within a week or their towns would be atom-bombed. Express
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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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Helen Oyeyemi November 21st, 2008 at 2:12 am
Curious as to what you guys think the function (if there is a function) of the newspaper cuttings replacing diary entries for the next eight pages is…?
I find it numbing, but it would feel too disappointingly easy for these entries to stand for Anna’s individual consciousness dispersing into a ‘world consciousness’ as international politics begins to terrify her. This is probably far-fetched, but given Anna’s discovery that she is crying in her sleep, i.e. that she is in much more psychological distress than she can ever allow herself to be aware of when awake, maybe the newspaper cuttings serve as withdrawal from further discussion of the tears while asleep? Much the way people talk about ‘non-personal’ topics to maintain polite distance between themselves and a stranger, we’re being held at arms length as readers?
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Philippa Levine November 22nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
I was astounded by this section, though numbed a bit too, like Helen. It does go on a long time…The news cuttings certainly do act as a veritable scrap book of a moment. But for me what really stood out was how these headlines — about the Cold War, bombs, war, armaments, and overall annihilation — were sandwiched between descriptions of her meetings with her psychoanalyst. That blew me away (sorry for the pun on the bombings…)
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Naomi Alderman November 23rd, 2008 at 6:07 am
I thought this was fascinating. It seems to me to be set up directly as a response to the psychotherapy. Anna feels that the diary has been taken from her by her therapist; she wants to be able to hold something back from therapy. Her therapist points out that this is counterproductive.
But Anna still wants to hold something in reserve: it seems to me that using the impersonal newspaper cuttings is her way of commenting on the world without writing. If she writes, she will have to accept that she ought to mention it in therapy. Instead, she’s pasting in stories that are relevant to the themes she’s already written about.
The first story is particularly startling: an H-bomb hairstyle. It wraps together her concerns about women, about the politics of the time, her fears about the future, and her sense of hopelessness.
Of course these stories also cover the years of her relationship with Michael, which seems to have been so painful she can only talk about it sidelong, as the fictionalised account of Ella’s relationship with Paul. These stories of world madness, of destruction and looming disaster seem to comment on that relationship too. The personal and the political are one.
I love her discussions with her therapist on pages 228 and 229 in the UK edition. Anna suggests that her therapy has been self-centred, that these pasted stories have reminded her that there’s a world outside her “precious soul”. Later, Anna says that she “can’t pick up a newspaper without what’s in it seeming so overwhelmingly terrible that nothing I could write would seem to have any point”. Mrs Marks says “Then you shouldn’t read the newspapers”. Wonderful response.
Anna is saying: I am dwarfed and made to feel meaningless and self-centred by the world; these newspaper stories are a proof of my smallness. The stories represent ‘objective truth’, the unimportance of self she tries to describe to Molly (page 66, UK version) “we’ll never be any use…. it’s not much loss is it… a few people of a certain type saying they’ve had it, they’re finished. Why not? It’s almost arrogant not to be able to.”
Mrs Marks is suggesting, it seems to me, that ‘objective truth’ is perhaps non-existent, at the least it’s unimportant. If reading the newspapers makes you stop writing, stop reading them. If the world makes you feel too dwarfed to create, turn away from the world.
Anna angrily feels that Mrs Marks is trying to make her write a novel. She doesn’t want to write a novel. It’s delicious: we’re reading the novel she doesn’t want to be writing.
So these pasted pieces are an assertion about the nature of the artist, too. Even when Anna tries not to create, she’s still creating this novel. Accept writing or reject it, Anna, either way you’re still doing it.
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Nona Willis Aronowitz November 28th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I would have to agree with Naomi’s assessment, that the newspaper clippings are an acknowledgement of the misery around her. Anna’s cynicism about psychotherapy centers around feeling guilty about her narcissism. She refuses to believe the simple analysis that she is a masochist–rather, she must be reacting to the rest of the world. Anna’s is a common reaction of incredibly inward and educated people: they seek therapy and then feel frustrated and embarrassed at how self-centered it is. And this would probably go double if one was a communist!
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Naomi Alderman November 29th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Much more of a surfacey comment occurred to me about this passage today as I was reading on. It’s very useful as a reference for the rest of the book! I was reading today and wondered “is the date of this part before or after Stalin died?”. And there the answer was. So, it’s a clever little ready-reference too, enabling Lessing to skip around in time in the rest of the novel, as long as all the fragments are dated.
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