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After the wild, painful, laughing dance, everyone dancing in parody, and urging all the other members of the group to keep up the parody, for their dear lives’ sake, we all say good night and go home.
Nelson’s wife kisses me at parting. We all kiss each other, one big happy family, though I know, and they know, that any member of this group could fall out of it tomorrow, from failure, or drunkenness or unconformity, and never be seen again. Nelson’s wife’s kiss on my cheeks - first left, then right, is half-warm and genuine, as if to say: I’m sorry, we can’t help it, it’s nothing to do with you; and half-exploratory, as if to say: I want to know what you’ve got for Nelson that I haven’t.
And we even exchange glances, ironic and bitter, saying: Well, it’s got nothing to do with either of us, not really!
The kiss makes me uncomfortable, nevertheless, and I feel an impostor. Because I was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.
Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected.
The evening after the party I was at home sitting in a chair, exhausted. An image kept coming into my mind: it was like a shot from a film, then it was as if I was seeing a sequence from a film. A man and a woman, on a roof-top above a busy city, but the noise and the movement of the city are far beneath them. They wander aimlessly on the roof-top, sometimes embracing, but almost experimentally, as if they are thinking: How does this taste - then they separate again and aimlessly move about the roof. Then the man goes to the woman and says: I love you. And she says, in terror: What do you mean? He says: I love you. So she embraces him, and he moves away, with nervous haste, and she says: Why did you say you loved me? And he says: I wanted to hear how it would sound. And she says: But I love you, I love you, I love you - and he goes off to the very edge of the roof and stands there, ready to jump - he will jump if she says even once again: I love you.
When I slept I dreamed this film sequence - in colour. Now it was not on a roof-top, but in a thin tinted mist or fog, an exquisitely-coloured fog swirled and a man and a woman wandered in it. She was trying to find him, but when she bumped into him, or found him, he nervously moved away from her; looking back at her, then away, and away again.
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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
Recent comments:
Lenelle Moïse on Page 373 (July 11, 2010)
"Today - years after TGN Project launched - I am rereading Adrienne..."
Naomi Alderman on Resting Here: (February 17, 2009)
"Oh Lenelle, you’ve said a lot of things I wanted to..."
Philippa Levine on Final thoughts (February 10, 2009)
"Trying to wrap up what the experience of sharing The..."
Nona Willis Aronowitz on Final thoughts (February 9, 2009)
"“But I feel I can see in this book, and in..."
Harriet Rubin on and… (February 9, 2009)
"Laura, you’ve said more clearly what I meant: that..."
Laura Kipnis on and… (February 6, 2009)
"That’s interesting as I actually found that the Brutalman..."- Harriet Rubin on and… (February 5, 2009)
"I enjoyed this experience of reading in public for a great..." - Lenelle Moïse on Feminist manifesto in 2008…? (January 6, 2009)
"I’m with you, Nona. As someone..." - Nona Willis Aronowitz on Page 503 (January 2, 2009)
"Maybe it’s just me, but this ending seemed almost..." - Philippa Levine on Page 503 (December 31, 2008)
"I suspect you’re right about this, Laura. It’s an..." - Philippa Levine on Page 410 (December 31, 2008)
"I don’t know how much difference it would make if we..." - Philippa Levine on Page 486 (December 31, 2008)
"I do think of it as a realist novel, yes. We’re not..." - Laura Kipnis on Page 503 (December 31, 2008)
"I was stunned to read in the after-matter section (in the UK..." - Laura Kipnis on Page 486 (December 31, 2008)
"Do you really think of this as a realist novel, Philippa? The..." - Laura Kipnis on Page 485 (December 31, 2008)
"This is romantic–or at least collaborative: it’s Saul..." - Naomi Alderman on Page 410 (December 30, 2008)
"Yes, I agree about the publishing industry. It’s mostly..." - Naomi Alderman on Page 410 (December 30, 2008)
"“She was Sumo sized, dressed like the farmer in the dell,..." - Naomi Alderman on Page 410 (December 30, 2008)
"“The male world demands male ideas, voices, and..." - Naomi Alderman on Page 410 (December 30, 2008)
"OK, many of the things being said in this thread are quite..." - Harriet Rubin on Page 410 (December 30, 2008)
"I wish I could make my point better, because I think it is..."
Laura Kipnis December 10th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Another wonderful marriage! “The ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close…” There seem to be 2 types of marriages in this book: estranged or neurotically pain-giving. It’s hard to say who comes off the worse: husbands or wives, but clearly marriage has a horribly deforming effect on both parties.
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Nona Willis Aronowitz December 19th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
At the same time, Anna is admitting exactly what she yearns for–whether love or hate, she wants to be bound to someone beyond the confines of the mysterious, cerebral mistress who is so much more compelling (for a moment) than a wife. Anna acknowledges here that you can’t hate someone so much (as Nelson and his life appear to) unless you love them too. Anna is facing her defiant isolation here…perhaps admitting that the reason she hasn’t found a ‘real man’ is because she is incapable of letting someone get close, even if it is “bitterly” so. She feels jealous and morally superior to these characters at the same time. What is worse, she seems to ask…being alone or being “tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving”? (As Laura points out, these two seem to be the only options.)
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Lenelle Moïse December 20th, 2008 at 11:05 am
This love-torture dynamic between Nelson and his wife–the random all-knowing hostility of helpless soulmates–is what Anna achieves with Saul. On UK p. 551 she says, “I was aching with the need for Saul, and I wanted to abuse him and call him names. Then of course he would say: Oh poor Anna, I’m sorry, then we would make love.” Anna observes the toxic codependency between Nelson and his wife, goes home and creates a similar situation for herself. Saul becomes her Nelson, Anna’s own American live-in pain-dealer.
As far as who comes off worse, I think the husbands and wives are on equal evil ground in this novel. On UK p. 556, Anna decides: “I felt towards him as if he were brother, as if, like a brother, it wouldn’t matter how we strayed from each other, how far apart we were, we would always be flesh of one flesh, and think each other’s thoughts.” Twins of neurotic pain-giving! Anna and Saul eventually develop the ability to literally finish each other’s sentences…
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Harriet Rubin December 21st, 2008 at 8:18 am
Nelson and his wife remind me of George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the first evocation I can recall of a couple yoked together by anger and batt;e, rather than by any semblance of romantic or plain old dutiful love. The title is a joke based on”who’s afraid of the big bad wolf.” It’s interesting that the play was first produced in 1962, the same year as the original publication of TGN.I wonder if the institution of marriage was showing the first signs of disintegrating, the winds of the sexual revolution starting to be felt by “first responders” like playwright Edward Albee and Lessing. The way Lessing saw marriage–as a sham and a fraud–is sort of the way we are seeing all kinds of institutions, like banks, government, even the American empire.
“Hope” says Obama. Well, there is so little hope when you really start to look at how much air or illusion everything is based upon.
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Laura Kipnis December 22nd, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Interesting point that 1962 was the pub. date for both Virgina Woolf and GN as Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, a scathing indictment of suburban marriage, came out in 1963. I have a favorite line from Friedan where she quotes a local doctor as saying “You’d be surprised at the number of these happy suburban wives who simply go berserk one night, and run shrieking through the street without any clothes on.”
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Harriet Rubin December 22nd, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Fascinating, Laura. Those were the good old days, when women could shriek and go berserk. See what therapy has done? Tamed us.
Anna keeps mentioning that film producers court her. Was there ever a movie of TGN? Bob Stein: here’s a project for you. Films of the great lost books starting with TGN.
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