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It was easy when I was a child. It seems to me now that I must have lived for years in a state of exhilaration, because of ‘the game’. But now it is very hard. This afternoon I was exhausted after a few moments. Yet I did succeed, just for a few seconds, to watch the earth turn beneath me, while the sunlight deepened on the belly of Asia and the Americas fell into darkness.
Saul Green came to see the room and to leave his things. I took him straight up to the room, he gave one glance at it and said: ‘Fine, fine.’ This was so off-hand I asked if he expected to leave again soon. He gave me a quick wary look, which I already knew to be characteristic, and began long careful explanations, in the same tone he had used for his apologies about the day in the country. Reminded, I said: ‘I believe you spent the day exploring Soho with Jane Bond.’ He looked startled, then offended — but quite extraordinarily offended, as if he’d been caught out in some crime, then his face changed, it became wary and careful, and he started off on a long explanation about changed plans, etc., and the explanation was even more extraordinary, since it was clearly all untrue. Suddenly I got bored, and said that I had only asked about the room because I intended to move to another flat, so if he planned a long stay, he should look for somewhere else. He said it was Fine, it was Fine. It seemed as if he wasn’t listening, and that he hadn’t seen the room at all. But he came out after me, leaving his bags. Then I said my landlady’s piece, about there being ‘no restrictions’, making it a joke, but he didn’t understand, so I had to spell it out, that if he wanted girls in his room I didn’t mind. Was surprised by his laugh — loud, abrupt, offended. He said he was glad I assumed he was a normal young man; this was so American, the automatic reaction one is used to when virility is in question, so I didn’t make the joke I had been going to, about the previous occupant of the room. Altogether I felt everything to be jarring, discordant, so I went down to the kitchen, leaving him to follow if he wanted. I had made coffee, and he came into the kitchen on his way out so I offered him a cup. He hesitated. He was examining me. I have never in my life been subjected to as brutal a sexual inspection as that one. There was no humour in it, no warmth, just the stockman’s comparison-making. It was so frank that I said: ‘I hope I pass,’ but he gave his abrupt offended laugh again and said: ‘Fine, Fine’ — in other words, he was either unconscious he had been making a list of my vital statistics, or he was too prudish to acknowledge it. So I left it, and we had coffee.
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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:
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Laura Kipnis December 16th, 2008 at 11:04 am
FYI: Saul Green is based on Clancy Sigal, an American writer and communist who was one of Lessing’s lovers; apparently HE then wrote a novel in which Lessing is a character, also not treated very kindly. (He’s also written a biography of his mother and the screenplay for the movie Frida among other things–I read his autobiography years ago when it came out but remember nothing of it.)
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Laura Kipnis December 22nd, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Oops! I’m corrected today in the forum by a reader calling himself “Brutalman” (who seems awfully familiar with the Clancy Sigal oeuvre), that “no such animal” as a Sigal autobiography exists. But there definitely WAS a book by Sigal that I did indeed read, maybe 15 years ago(?) –either a memoir or a roman a clef–in which Lessing or a Lessing-like character appears.
Perhaps Brutalman will say more? He seems to have his own unique viewpoint on the Anna-Saul relationship, and it would be interesting to know more. The plot (and dialogue) thickens!
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Laura Kipnis December 22nd, 2008 at 10:36 pm
I must admit that I’m now a little over-intrigued by the entry of Brutalman into the conversation, whose 12/22 post *does* sound a bit like Saul Green sounds on the page. We’ve all been so absorbed and horrified by the Anna-Saul dynamic, we’ve performed all this critique and analysis–what if Saul suddenly decided to talk back? Or in lieu of Saul, Lessing’s inspiration for him, who I believe lives in Hollywood these days, but maybe I’m getting too carried away with the whole literary detective thing, or have spent too much time in the company of Anna, and her predilection for brutal men.
One of the unanticipated possibilities this kind of on-line book discussion-experiment opens up, I guess–the characters weigh in.
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Harriet Rubin December 23rd, 2008 at 6:31 am
A quick search reveals not just one Sigal memoir, but two: one about his childhood and his union organizer mother, and the other about being a patient of R.D.Laing’s.
Sigal also wrote the script for Frida, if you want to talk about a man who knows his “brutal sexual inspection” number, the Diego Rivera character is another brutalman.
If this is Sigal weighing in, it’s fun to hear his tough, direct tone in the midst of our intellectualization of TGN. A sort of in your face difference either of men’s voices and women’s, or of the presence of powerful men from an earlier time versus men now. The big shouldered guys who were “my” Clancy Sigals–my assessors– were money guys and CEOs whose personas would easily crumble. Brutalman sounds much more fibrous and insightful.
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Laura Kipnis December 24th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Although Saul, as described by Lessing, was constantly crumbling: he vacillates between playing the tough guy and falling apart. What reminded me of Saul in Brutalman’s post was the “ain’t” (”ain’t no such animal”), since Saul is always calling Anna “lady,” like a movie gangster or a cowboy. If someone wanted to play the close reader on the small fragment we have from Brutalman, you see the same vacillation between injury (”that hurts”–said ironically, but still) and the tough guy thing (the sobriquet, the endorsement of brutal sexual inspection…) I’m out on a limb here admittedly–over-reaching as a close reader not to mention being entirely rude to our correspondent by picking apart his words– but it does make me wonder how much Lessing was novelizing and how much she was a brilliant chronicler: I mean to what extent these notebooks were indeed her journals, and if the Saul-Anna episodes are so vivid because they’re transcribed from life.
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Harriet Rubin December 24th, 2008 at 10:01 am
And to be presumptuously forensic, who but the author of at least two personal books–on mom and shrink–could authentically claim that Sigal had NOT written a memoir. Who but the author would know how much was, in these books, fictionalized or omitted.
Until you identified the real-life Saul, Laura, I thought that Lessing was crafting Anna’s ultimate counterpart, her heroine’s male’est version: an Anna who was childless, American, who could slip in and out of relationships and truths and lies at will, and who was unbound by a female morality. Now, I’m persuaded by the opposite possibility: Maybe these journals and TGN are ripped from her life. If you read Clancy Sigal’s report on being a patient of RD Laing’s, you find the same shifts from adventurousness and acceptance to anxiety and distrust that characterize Saul, and via your explication, Brutalman.
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