The Golden Notebook (58 page)

distortions imposed during the era of Comrade Stalin, I promise you that I will read it.' Apparently Harry had been overcome by her embarrassment because of her lack of manners. They spent some minutes reassuring each other. Then Olga went off to see Jimmy to say that his friend was over-excited. I asked Jimmy what happened next. 'I don't know. We had to get dressed and packed in a hurry, then we flew back. Harry was silent and rather ill-looking but that's all. He made a point of thanking me for getting him on to the delegation: a very valuable experience, he said it was. I went over to see him last week. He's married the widow at last and she's pregnant, I don't know what that proves, if anything.' [Here a double black line marked the end of the red notebook.] [The yellow notebook continued:] *1 A SHORT STORY A woman, starved for love, meets a man rather younger than herself, younger perhaps in emotional experience than in years; or perhaps in the depth of his emotional experience. She deludes herself about the nature of the man; for him, another love affair merely. *2 A SHORT STORY A man uses grown-up language, the language of emotionally grown people, to gain a woman. She slowly understands that this language comes from an idea in his head, it has nothing to do with his emotions; in fact he is an adolescent boy emotionally. Yet, knowing this, she cannot prevent herself being moved and won by the language. *3 A SHORT STORY Saw in the review of a book recently: 'One of those unfortunate affairs-women, even the nicest of them, tend to fall in love with men quite unworthy of them.' This review, of course, written by a man. The truth is that when 'nice women' fall in love with 'unworthy men' it is always either because these men have 'named' them, or because they have an ambiguous uncreated quality impossible to the 'good' or 'nice' men. The normal, the good men, are finished and completed and without potentialities. The story to be about my friend Annie in Central Africa, a 'nice woman' married to a 'nice man.' He was a civil servant, solid, responsible, and he wrote bad poetry in secret. She fell in love with a hard-drinking womanising miner. Not an organised miner, the manager, or clerk, or owner. He moved from small mine to small mine that were always precarious, on the point of making a fortune or of failing. He left a mine when it failed or was sold to a big combine. I was with the two of them one evening. He was just in from some mine in the bush three hundred miles off. There she was, rather fat, flushed, a pretty girl buried in a matron. He looked over at her and said: 'Annie, you were born to be the wife of a pirate.' I remember how we laughed, because it was ludicrous, pirates in that suburban little room in the city; pirates and the nice kind husband and Annie, the good wife, so guilty because of this affair, more of the imagination than the flesh, with the roving miner. Yet I remember when he said it, how gratefully she looked at him. He drank himself to death, years later. I got a letter from her, after years of silence: 'You remember X? He died. You'll understand me-the meaning of my life has gone.' This story, translated into English terms, should be the nice suburban wife in love with a hopeless coffee-bar bum, who says he is going to write, and perhaps does, one day, but that isn't the point. This story to be written from the point of view of the entirely responsible and decent husband, unable to understand the attraction of this bum. *4 A SHORT STORY A healthy woman, in love with a man. She finds herself becoming ill, with symptoms she has never had in her life. She slowly understands that this illness is not hers, she understands the man is ill. She understands the nature of the illness, not from him, how he acts or what he says, but from how his illness is reflected in herself. *5 A SHORT STORY A woman who has fallen in love, against her will. She is happy. And yet, in the middle of the night, she wakes. He starts up, as if in danger. He says: No, no, no. Then, consciousness and control. He slowly lays himself down again, in silence. She wants to say: What is it you are saying No to? For she is filled with fear. She does not say it. She sinks back to sleep, and weeps in her sleep. She wakes; he is still awake. She says, anxiously, Is that your heart beating? He, sullen: No, it's yours. *6 A SHORT STORY A man and a woman, in a love affair. She, for hunger of love, he for refuge. One afternoon he says, very carefully: 'I have to go and see-' But she knows it is an excuse, while she listens to a long, detailed explanation, for she is full of dismay. She says, 'Of course. Of course.' He says, with a sudden loud young laugh, very aggressive: 'You are very permissive,' and she says: 'What do you mean, permissive? I'm not your keeper, don't make me into an American woman.' He comes into her bed, very late, and she turns to him, just awake. She feels his arms about her, cautious, measured. She understands he doesn't want to make love to her. His penis is limp, though (and this annoys her, the naivety of it) moving himself against her thighs. She says, sharp: 'I'm sleepy.' He stops moving. She feels bad, because he might feel hurt. Suddenly she realises he is very big. She is dismayed because he wants her just because she has refused. Yet she is in love, and she turns to him. When the sex is over, she knows that for him it has meant accomplishing something. She says sharply, out of instinctive knowledge, not knowing she was going to say it: 'You've just been making love to someone else.' He says quickly: 'How did you know?' And then, just as if he has not said, how did you know, he says: 'I haven't. You're imagining it.' Then, because of her tense miserable silence, he says, sullen: 'I didn't think it would matter. You have to understand, I don't take it seriously.' This last remark makes her feel diminished and destroyed, as if she does not exist as a woman. *7 A SHORT STORY A wandering man happens to land in the house of a woman whom he likes and whom he needs. He is a man with a long experience of women needing love. Usually he limits himself. But this time, the words he uses, the emotions he allows himself, are ambiguous, because he needs her kindness for a time. He makes love to her, but for him the sex is no worse or better than what he has experienced a hundred times before. He realises that his need for temporary refuge has trapped him into what he most dreads: a woman saying, I love you. He cuts it. Says good-bye, formally, on the level of a friendship ending. Goes. Writes in his diary: Left London. Anna reproachful. She hated me. Well, so be it. And another entry, months later, which could read either: Anna married, good. Or: Anna committed suicide. Pity, a nice woman. *8 A SHORT STORY A woman artist--painter, writer, doesn't matter which, lives alone. But her whole life is oriented around an absent man for whom she is waiting. Her flat too big, for instance. Her mind is filled with shapes of the man who will enter her Ufe, meanwhile she ceases to paint or to write. Yet in her mind she is still 'an artist.' Finally a man enters her life, some kind of artist, but one who has not yet crystallised as one. Her personality as 'an artist' goes into his, he feeds off it, works from it, as if she were a dynamo that fed energy into him. Finally he emerges, a real artist, fulfilled; the artist in her dead. The moment when she is no longer an artist, he leaves her, he needs the woman who has this quality, so that he can create. *9 A SHORT NOVEL An American 'ex-red' comes to London. No money, no friends. Black-listed in the film and television worlds. The American colony in London, or rather, the American 'ex-red' colony, know him as the man who started criticising Stalinist attitudes in the communist party three or four years before they had the courage to do it. He goes to them for help, feeling that as he has been justified by events, they will forget their hostility. But their attitudes to him are still what they were when they were still dutiful party members or fellow-travellers. He is still a renegade, this in spite of the fact that their attitudes have changed, and they are now beating their breasts because they didn't break with the party earlier. A rumour starts among them, a man who was formerly a dogmatic non-critical communist, but now hysterically breast-beating, that this new American is an agent of the F. B. I. The colony accept this rumour as fact, refuse him friendship and help. While they are ostracising this man, they are talking self-righteously about the secret police in Russia, and the behaviour of the anti-American activity committees and the informers, ex-reds. The new American commits suicide. Then they all sit around remembering incidents from the political past, finding reasons to dislike him, to drown their guilt. *10 A SHORT STORY A man or a woman who has, because of some mental condition, lost a sense of time. A film, obviously, marvellous what one could do with it. Well I'd never have a chance to write it, so there's no point thinking about it. But I can't help thinking about it. A man whose 'sense of reality' has gone; and because of it, has a deeper sense of reality than 'normal' people. Today Dave said, quite casually: 'That man of yours, Michael, the fact that he's turning you down, you shouldn't let it affect you. Who are you if you can be broken up by someone being fool enough not to take you on?' He spoke as if Michael were still in the process of 'turning me down' instead of its being years old. And of course he was talking about himself. He was, for a moment, Michael. My sense of reality shivered and broke. But something very clear was there, all the same, a sort of illumination, though it would be hard to say what. (This art of comment belongs to the blue notebook, not this one.) *11 A SHORT NOVEL Two people together, in any kind of relationship-mother, son; father, daughter; lovers; it doesn't matter. One of them acutely neurotic. The neurotic hands on his or her state to the other, who takes it over, leaving the sick one well, the well one sick. I remember Mother Sugar telling me a story about a patient. A young man had come to see her convinced he was in desperate psychological trouble. She could find nothing wrong with him. She asked him to send along his father to her. One by one all the family, five of them, arrived in her consulting room. She found them all normal. Then the mother came. She, apparently 'normal,' was in fact extremely neurotic, but maintaining her balance by passing it on to her family, particularly to the youngest son. Eventually Mother Sugar treated the mother, though there was terrible trouble getting her to come for treatment. And the young man who had come in the first place found the pressure lifting off him. I remember her saying: Yes, often it's the most 'normal' member of a family or a group who is really sick, but simply because they have strong personalities, they survive, because other, weaker personalities, express their illness for them. (This sort of comment belongs to the blue notebook. I must keep them separate.) *12 A SHORT STORY A husband, unfaithful to his wife, not because he is in love with another woman, but in order to assert his independence of the married state, comes back from sleeping with the other woman, with every intention of being discreet, but 'accidentally' does something to give the show away. This 'accident,' scent or lipstick or forgetting to wash off the smell of sex, is in fact why he did it in the first place, though he doesn't know it. He needed to say to his wife: 'I'm not going to belong to you.' *13 A SHORT NOVEL, TO BE CALLED 'THE MAN WHO IS FREE OF WOMEN.' A man of about fifty, a bachelor, or perhaps was married for a short time, his wife died, or he got divorced. If an American, he is divorced, but if English, he has this wife tucked away somewhere, he might even live with her or share a house, but without real emotional contact. At fifty, he has had a couple of dozen affairs, three or four serious. These serious affairs were with women who hoped to marry him, they lingered on, in what were really marriages without formal ties, he broke the affairs off at the point where he had to marry them. At fifty he is dry, anxious about his sexuality, has five or six women friends, all ex-mistresses, now married. He is a cuckoo in half a dozen families, the old family friend. He is like a child, dependent on women, gets vaguer and more inefficient, is always ringing up some woman to do something for him. Outwardly a dapper, ironic intelligent man, making an impression on younger women for a week or so. He has these affairs with girls or much younger women, then returns to the older women who fulfil the function of kindly nannies or nursemaids. *14 A SHORT NOVEL A man and a woman, married or in a long relationship, secretly read each other's diaries in which (and it is a point of honour with them both) their thoughts about each other are recorded with the utmost frankness. Both know that the other is reading what he/she writes, but for a while objectivity is maintained. Then, slowly, they begin writing falsely, first unconsciously; then consciously, so as to influence the other. The position is reached where each keeps two diaries, one for private use, and locked up; and the second for the other to read. Then one of them makes a slip of the tongue, or a mistake, and the other accuses him/her of having found the secret diary. A terrible quarrel which drives them apart forever, not because of the original diaries-'but we both knew we were reading those diaries, that doesn't count, how can you be so dishonest as to read my private diary!' *15 A SHORT STORY An American man, English woman. She, in all her attitudes, emotions, expects to be possessed and taken. He, in all his attitudes and emotions, expects to be taken. Regards himself as an instrument to be used, by her, for her pleasure. Emotional deadlock. Then they discuss it: the discussion, on sexual emotional attitudes turns into a comparison of the two different societies. *16 A SHORT STORY Man and a woman, both sexually proud and experienced, seldom meeting others as experienced. Suddenly both afflicted by dislike for the other, an emotion which, when examined (and they are nothing if not self-examiners), turns out to be dislike for themselves. They have found their mirrors, take a good look, grimace, leave each other. When they meet it is with a wry sort of acknowledgement, become good friends on this basis, after a time this wry ironical friendship turns into love. But love is barred to them because of the first stark experience, without emotion. *17 A SHORT NOVEL Two rakes, male and female, together. Their concourse has the following ironical rhythm. He takes her, she wary from experience, but she slowly succumbs emotionally. At the moment when