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Yet why should Anna feel responsible? … It isn’t as if one doesn’t have enough trouble with ‘normal’ men, she said to herself, trying to dissipate her uneasiness with humour. But the humour failed. She tried again: It’s my home, my home, my home — this time attempting to fill herself with strong proprietary emotions. This failed too: she sat thinking: Yet why do I have a home at all? Because I wrote a book I am ashamed of, and it made a lot of money. Luck, luck, that’s all. And I hate all that — my home, my possessions, my rights. And yet come to the point where I’m uncomfortable, I fall back on it just like everyone else. Mine. Property. Possessions. I’m going to protect Janet because of my property. What’s the use of protecting her? She will grow up in England, a country full of men who are little boys and homosexuals and the half-homosexuals … but this tired thought vanished in a strong wave of genuine emotion — By God, there are a few real men left, and I’m going to see she gets one of them. I’m going to see she grows up to recognize a real man when she meets one. Ronnie’s going to have to leave.
With which she went to the bathroom, to get ready for bed. The lights were on. She stopped at the door. Ronnie stood anxiously peering into the mirror over the shelf where she kept her cosmetics. He was patting lotion on to his cheeks with her cottonwool, and trying to smooth out the lines on his forehead.
Anna said: ‘Like my lotion better than yours?’
He turned, without surprise. She saw that he had intended her to find him there.
‘My dear,’ he said, graceful and coquettish, ‘I was trying your lotion out. Does it do anything for you?’
‘Not much,’ said Anna. She leaned at the door, watching, waiting to be enlightened.
He was wearing an expensive silk dressing-gown in a soft hazy purple, with a reddish cravat tucked into it. He wore expensive red leather Moorish slippers, thonged with gold. He looked as if he should be in some harem, and not in this flat in the wastes of London’s student-land. Now he stood with his head on one side, patting the waves of black, faintly greying hair with a manicured hand. ‘I did try a rinse,’ he remarked, ‘but the grey shows through.’
‘Distinguished, really,’ said Anna. She had now understood: terrified that she might throw him out, he was appealing to her as one girl to another. She tried to tell herself she was amused. The truth was she was disgusted, and ashamed that she was.
‘But my dear Anna,’ he lisped winningly, ‘Looking distinguished is all very well, if one is — if I can put it that way — on the employing side.’
‘But Ronnie,’ Anna said, succumbing despite her disgust, and playing the role she was expected to play: ‘You look very charming, in spite of the odd grey hair. I’m sure dozens of people must find you devastating.’
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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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Philippa Levine December 4th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
“She will grow up in England, a country full of men who are little boys and homosexuals and the half-homosexuals … but this tired thought vanished in a strong wave of genuine emotion — By God, there are a few real men left, and I’m going to see she gets one of them. I’m going to see she grows up to recognize a real man when she meets one. Ronnie’s going to have to leave.”
So my hard time got even harder with this paragraph. Of course, I don’t want to attribute these sentiments to Lessing in an overly simplistic way, and perhaps Lessing wants us to raise an eyebrow at Anna’s lack of grace here, or to see the vulnerability that her attachment to particular forms of masculinity implies — but this was just so tough to read…
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Naomi Alderman December 5th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Yes, it was very hard to read. Without trying to excuse it, I wonder if it also points up Anna’s loathing for her femaleness again. She’s a very good mother, actually. The description of how she first explained Tommy’s hospital stay as the result of an “accident” but then intuited that this had made Janet afraid and so understood that she had to reassure her that they’d never have a revolver in the house - this was beautifully done; she’s doing well by her daughter.
And yet there must be a man, there must be marriage. And not any man, but a ‘real man’. She, Anna, must ‘get’ a ‘real man’ for Janet. Moreover this is so that Janet can “recognize a real man when she meets one”. So that what? So that Janet, too, can have unfulfilling sex with married men who don’t care about her? She can’t see that it might be OK for her to raise her child alone.
You know, I do think Anna’s thoughts of all of this are horrible but I suspect that Lessing sees this, at least somewhat too. Not that it necessarily matters what Lessing thought when she wrote the novel. I think the novel’s set up, though, to allow us to see how masochistic so many of Anna’s thoughts are. This seems to me another way in which she is punishing herself: demanding that she ‘get’ a ‘real man’, whom she would not want, berating herself for not wanting one.
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Laura Kipnis December 9th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
This anxiety about “real men” reminds me of the anxiety about “real orgasms.” I think it’s possible to read this AS anxiety, that is, in a symptomatic way, rather than as a reflection of Lessing or her characters having the right or wrong values.
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Laura Kipnis December 9th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
PS: She actually does sort of self-diagnose her own condition at the top of 359–she reads her reaction to Ronnie as symptomatic of her own vulnerable state:
“And when had this new frightened vulnerable Anna been born? She knew: it was when Michael had abandoned her.”
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