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‘Pain?’ she queried softly.
‘Well, my dear, people don’t come to you because they are suffering from an excess of happiness.’
‘No, they usually come, like you, because they say they can’t feel.’
‘But now I can feel. I’m open to everything. But no sooner do you accomplish that, than you say quickly — put it away, put the pain away where it can’t hurt, turn it into a story or into history. But I don’t want to put it away. Yes, I know what you want me to say — that because I’ve rescued so much private pain-material — because I’m damned if I’ll call it anything else, and “worked through it” and accepted it and made it general, because of that I’m free and strong. Well all right, I’ll accept it and say it. And what now? I’m tired of the wolves and the castle and the forests and the priests. I can cope with them in any form they choose to present themselves. But I’ve told you, I want to walk off, by myself, Anna Freeman.’
‘By yourself?’ she said again.
‘Because I’m convinced that there are whole areas of me made by the kind of experience women haven’t had before …’
The small smile was already beginning on her face — it was the ‘conducting smile’ of our sessions together, we were back as analyst and patient.
I said: ‘No, don’t smile yet. I believe I’m living the kind of life women never lived before.’
‘Never?’ she said, and behind her voice I could hear the sounds she always evoked at such moments — seas lapping on old beaches, voices of people centuries dead. She had the capacity to evoke a feeling of vast areas of time by a smile or a tone of voice that could delight me, rest me, fill me with joy — but I didn’t want it just then.
‘Never,’ I said.
‘The details change, but the form is the same,’ she said.
‘No,’ I insisted.
‘In what way are you different? Are you saying there haven’t been artist-women before? There haven’t been women who were independent? There haven’t been women who insisted on sexual freedom? I tell you, there are a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.’
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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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