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I cooked and we slept. This morning I woke first and his face, sleeping, was ill and thin. I thought it was impossible he should go, I couldn’t let him, he was in no state to go.
He woke, and I was fighting the desire to say: You can’t go. I must look after you. I’ll do anything if only you’ll say you’ll stay with me.
I knew he was fighting his own weakness. I was wondering what would have happened if, all those weeks ago, he had not put up his arms around my neck, unconsciously, in his sleep. I wanted, then, for him to put his arms up around my neck. I lay, fighting not to touch him, as he was fighting not to appeal to me, and I was thinking how extraordinary, that an act of kindness, of pity, could be such a betrayal. My brain blacked out with exhaustion, and while it did, the pain of pity took me over and I cradled him in my arms, knowing it was a betrayal. He clung to me, immediately, for a second of genuine closeness. Then, at once, my falseness created his, for he murmured, in a child’s voice: ‘Ise a good boy,’ not as he had ever whispered to his own mother, for those words could never have been his, they were out of literature. And he murmured them mawkishly, in parody. But not quite. Yet as I looked down at him, I saw his sharp ill face show first, the sentimental falseness that went with the words; then a grimace of pain; then, seeing me look down, in horror, his grey eyes narrowed into a pure hating challenge, and we looked at each other helpless with our mutual shame and humiliation. Then his face relaxed. For a few seconds he slept, blacked out, as I had blacked out the moment before, just before I had bent to put my arms around him. Then he jerked himself out of sleep, all tenseness and fight, jerked himself out of my arms, glancing alert and efficient around the room for enemies, then stood up; all in one moment, so fast did these reactions follow each other.
He said: ‘We can’t either of us ever go lower than that.’
I said: ‘No.’
‘Well that’s played out,’ he said.
‘Buttoned up and finished,’ I said.
He went up to pack his few things into his bag and cases.
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4 Comments
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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Philippa Levine December 19th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Precisely because the novel sets itself up as a realist novel, I found the Golden Notebook section unconvincing – not to say I didn’t find it disturbing (I did, tremendously), but something about it didn’t ring true for me. I just don’t see Anna descending into madness – she’s too shrewd, already too prone to self-criticism and analysis to descend so quickly into madness, surely. Thus her experience in these pages felt constructed, unreal, experimental to me (as much, by the way, in literary terms as in terms of Anna’s experimentalism) but in the end more an exercise than a reality, if that makes sense. I don’t know if this was Anna “trying out” ‘madness’ or if this was Anna trying to work out what Saul experiences. Maybe it’s something else entirely, but it didn’t work for me within the structures of a realist novel. Maybe that’s Lessing’s point – don’t rely on my realism, I’ll let you down in the end, just like everyone (including soon-to-be-married) Molly lets Anna down. (Even her psycho-analyst lets her down…)
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Laura Kipnis December 31st, 2008 at 9:07 am
Do you really think of this as a realist novel, Philippa? The frame is realist, sure–the Free Women sections–but overall I think of it more as an attack on the realist novel, marshaling all these experimental techniques: the notebooks, those lists of story ideas and so on. Also I keep thinking back to her bringing up Joyce which we discussed previously, and wondering what kind of influence he might have been, particularly in the descending into madness sections in which she seems to be attempting a stream-of-consciousness style writing.
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Philippa Levine December 31st, 2008 at 11:43 am
I do think of it as a realist novel, yes. We’re not talking 19th-century realism here, palpably, but I think it’s a variation on a theme, as it were. Almost like a series of “nested” realist novels (novels within novels, notebooks, within novels) but all of them about the here-and-now and about a consciousness that strikes me as markedly different than you see in Joyce. What anchors the book, for me at any rate, is as much its materialist politics (the concern with the bomb, with wars and revolutions and revolutionary politics, and with racism and injustice) and it seems to me much more foregrounded here than in other experimental forms. That is, I see this as a realist novel that’s consciously experimenting with (but not necessarily attacking) that form but never wholly laying it aside. I like that.
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Nona Willis Aronowitz December 26th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Definitely more of an exercise; Anna admits this wholeheartedly later in the last few pages with Milt. She refers to her daughter as a reason why the bout will be short-lived; really, though, I agree with Philippa that Anna is too introspective and analytical to let herself go like that. Hence the overcompensation in the last few pages, when she has submitted to relative normalcy.
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