Chapter 9. The Golden Notebook

Whoever he be who looks in this
He shall be cursed,
That is my wish.
Saul Green, his book. (! ! !)

It is so dark in this flat, so dark, it is as if darkness were the shape of cold. I went through the flat turning on light everywhere, the dark retreated to outside the windows, a cold shape trying to press its way in. But when I turned on the light in my big room, I knew this was wrong, light was foreign to it, so I let the dark come back, controlled by the two paraffin heaters and the glow from the gas fire. I lay down, and thought of the little earth, half of it in cold dark, swinging in immense spaces of darkness. Soon after I lay down Saul came and lay beside me. ‘This is an extraordinary room,’ he said, ‘it’s like a world.’ His arm under my neck was warm and strong, and we made love. He slept, and when he woke he was warm, not full of the deathly cold which frightens me. Then he remarked: ‘Well now perhaps I can work.’ The egoism was so direct, like mine when I need something, that I began to laugh. He laughed, and we couldn’t stop. We rolled on the bed laughing and then on the floor. Then he jumped up off the floor, saying in a prissy English voice: ‘This won’t do, it won’t do at all,’ and went out, still laughing.

The devils had gone out of the flat. That is how I thought, sitting on my bed naked, warmed by the heat from the three fires. The devils. As if the fear, the terror, the anxiety were not inside me, inside Saul, but some force from outside which chose its moments to come and go. I thought like that, lying to myself; because I needed that moment of pure happiness — me, Anna, sitting naked on the bed, my breasts pressing between my naked arms, and the smell of sex and sweat. It seemed to me that the warm strength of my body’s happiness was enough to drive away all the fear in the world. Then the feet began again upstairs, moving, driven, from place to place above my head, like armies moving. My stomach clenched. I watched my happiness leak away. I was all at once in a new state of being, one foreign to me. I realized my body was distasteful to me. This has never happened to me before; and I even said to myself: Hullo, this is new, this is something I have read about. I remembered Nelson telling me how sometimes he looked at his wife’s body and hated it for its femaleness; he hated it because of the hair in the armpits and around the crotch. Sometimes, he said, he saw his wife as a sort of spider, all clutching arms and legs around a hairy central devouring mouth. I sat on my bed and I looked at my thin white legs and my thin white arms, and at my breasts. My wet sticky centre seemed disgusting, and when I saw my breasts all I could think of was how they were when they were full of milk, and instead of this being pleasurable, it was revolting. This feeling of being alien to my own body caused my head to swim, until I anchored myself, clutching out for something, to the thought that what I was experiencing was not my thought at all. I was experiencing, imaginatively, for the first time, the emotions of a homosexual. For the first time the homosexual literature of disgust made sense to me. I realized how much homosexual feeling there is floating loose everywhere, and in people who would never recognize the word as theirs.