The Golden Notebook (50 page)

you should have taught her?' For she is remembering Paul's saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men. The book slowly lowers to her father's lean and stick-like thighs. The yellowish, dry, lean face has flushed, and the blue eyes were protuberant, like an insect's: 'Look here. Marriage as far as I'm concerned-well! Well, you're sitting there, so I suppose that's a justification of it.' Ella says: 'I suppose I ought to say I'm sorry-but I want to know about her. She was my mother after all.' 'I don't think of her. Not for years. I think of her sometimes when you do me the honour of a visit.' 'Is that why I feel you don't like seeing me much?' says Ella, but smiling and forcing him to look at her. 'I never said that, did I? I don't feel it. But all these family ties-family stuff, marriage, that sort of thing, it seems pretty unreal to me. You're my daughter, so I believe. Must be, knowing your mother. I don't feel it. Blood ties-do you feel it? I don't.' 'Yes,' says Ella. 'When I'm here with you, I feel some sort of a bond. I don't know what.' 'No, I don't either.' The old man has recovered himself, and is again in a remote place, safe from the hurt of personal emotions. 'We're human beings-whatever that may mean. I don't know. I'm pleased to see you, when you do me the honour. Don't think you're not welcome. But I'm getting old. You don't know what that means yet. All that stuff, family, children, that sort of thing, seems unreal. It's not what matters. To me at least' 'What does matter then?' 'God, I suppose. Whatever that may mean. Oh, of course, I know it means nothing to you. Why should it? Used to get a glimpse sometimes. In the desert-the army, you know. Or in danger. Sometimes now, at night. I think being alone-it's important. People, human beings, that kind of thing, it's just a mess. People should leave each other alone.' He takes a sip of whisky, stares at her, with a look of being astonished at what he sees. 'You're my daughter. So I believe. I know nothing about you. Help you any way I can of course. You'll get what money I have when I go-but you know that. Not that it's much. But I don't want to know about your life- shouldn't approve of it anyway, I suppose.' 'No, I don't think you would.' 'That husband of yours, a stick, couldn't understand it.' 'It was a long time ago. Suppose I told you that I'd loved a married man for five years and that was the most important thing in my life?' 'Your business. Not mine. And men since, I suppose. You're not like your mother, that's something. More like a woman I had after she died.' 'Why didn't you marry her?' 'She was married. Stuck to her husband. Well, she was right, I suppose. In that line it was the best thing in my life, but that line-it never was the most important to me.' 'You don't ever wonder about me? What I'm doing? You don't think about your grandson?' And now he was clearly in full retreat, he didn't like this pressure at all. 'No. Oh, he's a jolly little chap. Always pleased to see him. But he'll turn into a cannibal like everyone else.' 'A cannibal?' 'Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone. As for you-what do I know about you? You're a modern woman, don't know anything about them.' 'A modern woman,' says Ella drily, smiling. 'Yes. Your book, I suppose. I suppose you're after something of your own the way we all are. And good luck to you. We can't help each other. People don't help each other, they are better apart.' With which he lifts his book, having given her a final warning that the conversation is over by means of a short abrupt stare. Ella, alone in her room, looks into her private pool, waiting for the shadows to form, for the story to shape itself. She sees a young professional officer, shy, proud and inarticulate. She sees a shy and cheerful young wife. And now a memory, not an image, rises to the surface: she sees this scene: late at night, in her bedroom, she is pretending to be asleep. Her father and mother are standing in the middle of the room. He puts his arms about her, she is bashful and coy like a girl. He kisses her, then she runs fast out of the bedroom in tears. He stands alone, angry, pulling at his moustache. He remains alone, withdrawing from his wife into books and the dry, spare dreams of a man who might have been a poet or a mystic. And in fact, when he dies, journals, poems, fragments of prose are found in locked drawers. Ella is surprised by this conclusion. She had never thought of her father as a man who might write poetry, or write at all. She visits her father again, as soon as she can. Late at night, in the silent room where the fire burns slowly in the wall, she asks: 'Father, have you ever written poetry?' The book descends to his lean thighs with a bump and he stares at her. 'How the hell did you know?' 'I don't know. I just thought perhaps you did.' 'I've never told a soul.' 'Can I see them?' He sits a while, pulling at his fierce old moustache that is now white. Then he gets up and unlocks a drawer. He hands her a sheaf of poems. They are all poems about solitude, loss, fortitude, the adventures of isolation. They are usually about soldiers. T. E. Lawrence: 'A lean and austere man among lean men.' Rommel: 'And at evening lovers pause outside the town, where an acre or so of crosses lean in the sand.' Cromwell: 'Faiths, mountains, monuments and rocks...' T. E. Lawrence again: '... yet travels wild escarpments of the soul.' And T. E. Lawrence again who renounced: 'The clarity, the action and the clean rewards, and owned himself beat, like all who come to words.' Ella hands them back. The wild old man takes the poems and locks them up again. 'You've never thought of having them published.' 'Certainly not. What for?' 'I just wondered.' 'Of course you're different. You write to get published. Well, I suppose people do.' 'You never said, did you like my novel? Did you read it?' 'Like it? It was written well, that sort of thing. But that poor stick, what did he want to kill himself for?' 'People do.' 'What? Everyone wants to at some time or another. But why write about it?' 'You may be right.' 'I'm not saying I'm right. That's what I feel. It's the difference between my lot and yours.' 'What, killing ourselves?' 'No. You ask such a lot. Happiness. That sort of thing. Happiness! I don't remember thinking about it. Your lot- you seem to think something's owed to you. It's because of the communists.' 'What?' says Ella, startled and amused. 'Yes, your lot, you're all reds.' 'But I'm not a communist. You're mixing me up with my friend Julia. And even she's stopped being one.' 'It's all the same thing. They've got at you. You all think you can do anything.' 'Well, I think that's true-somewhere at the back of the minds of "our lot" is the belief that anything is possible. You seemed to be content with so little.' 'Content? Content! What sort of word is that.' 'I mean that for better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.' The old man sits, fierce and resentful. 'That young sap in your book, he thought of nothing but killing himself.' 'Perhaps because something was owed to him, it's owed to everyone, and he didn't get it.' 'Perhaps, you say? Perhaps? You wrote it, so you ought to know.' 'Perhaps next time I'll try to write about that-people who deliberately try to be something else, try to break then own form as it were.' 'You talk as if--a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.' This conversation with her father starts a new train of thought for Ella. Now, looking for the outlines of a story and finding, again and again, nothing but patterns of defeat, death, irony, she deliberately refuses them. She tries to force patterns of happiness or simple life. But she fails. Then she finds herself thinking: I've got to accept the patterns of self-knowledge which mean unhappiness or at least a dryness. But I can twist it into victory. A man and a woman-yes. Both at the end of their tether. Both cracking up because of a deliberate attempt to transcend their own limits. And out of the chaos, a new kind of strength. Ella looks inwards, as into a pool, to find this story imaged; but it remains a series of dry sentences in her mind. She waits, she waits patiently, for the images to form, to take on life. [For something like eighteen months the blue notebook consisted of short entries different in style not only from previous entries in the blue notebook but from anything else in the notebooks. This section began:] 17th October, 1954: Anna Freeman, born 10th November, 1922, a daughter of Colonel Frank Freeman and May Fortescue; lived 23 Baker Street; educated Girls' High School, Hampstead; spent six years Central Africa-1939 to 1945; married Max Wulf 1945; one daughter, born 1946; divorced Max Wulf 1947; joined Communist Party 1950, left it 1954. [Each day had its entry, consisting of short factual statements: 'Got up early. Read so-and-so. Saw so-and-so. Janet is sick. Janet is well. Molly is offered a part she likes/doesn't like, etc' After a date in March 1956, a line in heavy black was drawn across the page, marking the end of the neat small entries. And the last eighteen months had been ruled out, every page, with a thick black cross. And now Anna continued in a different writing, not the clear small script of the daily entries, but fluent, rapid, in parts almost unintelligible with the speed it had been written:] So all that is a failure too. The blue notebook, which I had expected to be the most truthful of the notebooks, is worse than any of them. I expected a terse record of facts to present some sort of a pattern when I read it over, but this sort of record is as false as the account of what happened on 15th September, 1954, which I read now embarrassed because of its emotionalism and because of its assumption that if I wrote 'at nine-thirty I went to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated,' this would be more real than if I simply wrote what I thought. And yet I still don't understand why. Because although in life things like going to the lavatory or changing a tampon when one has one's period are dealt with on an almost unconscious level, I can recall every detail of a day two years ago because I remember that Molly had blood on her skirt and I had to warn her to go upstairs and change before her son came in. And of course this is not a literary problem at all; it is the same as the 'experience' with Mother Sugar. I remember saying to her that for the larger part of our time together her task was to make me conscious of, to become preoccupied by, physical facts which we spend our childhood learning to ignore so as to live at all. And then she made the obvious reply: that the 'learning' in childhood was of the wrong kind, or otherwise I would not need to be sitting opposite her in a chair asking for her help three times a week. To which I replied, knowing I would get no answer to it, or at least, not on the level I wanted, since I knew that what I was saying was the 'intellectualising' to which she attributed my emotional troubles: 'It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism and then rescued from it by crystallising what one learns into a sort of intellectual primitivism-one is forced back into myth, and folk lore and everything that belongs to the savage or undeveloped stages of society. For if I say to you: I recognise in that dream, such and such a myth; or in that emotion about my father, that folk-tale; or the atmosphere of that memory is the same as an English ballad-then you smile, you are satisfied. As far as you are concerned, I've gone beyond the childish, I've transmuted it and saved it, by embodying it in myth. But in fact all I do, or you do, is to fish among the childish memories. of an individual, and merge them with the art or ideas that belong to the childhood of a people. At which, of course, she smiled. And I said: 'I'm now using your own weapons against you. I'm talking not of what you say, but how you react. Because the moments when you're really pleased and excited; the moments when your face comes alive are those when I say the dream I had last night was of the same stuff of Hans Andersin's story about the Little Mermaid. But when I try to use an experience, a memory, a dream, in modern terms, try to speak of it critically or drily or with complexity, you almost seem bored or impatient. So I deduce from this that what really pleases you, what really moves you, is the world of the primitive. Do you realise that I've never once, not once, spoken of an experience I've had, or a dream, in the way one would speak of it to a friend, or the way you would speak of it, outside this room, to a friend, without earning a frown from you-and I swear the frown or the impatience is something you aren't conscious of. Or are you going to say that the frown is deliberate, because you think I'm not really ready to move forward out of the world of myth?' 'And so?' she said, smiling. I said: 'That's better-you'd smile like that if I were talking to you in a drawing-room-yes, I know you're going to say that this isn't a drawing-room, and I'm here because I'm in trouble.' 'And so?'-smiling. 'I'm going to make the obvious point that perhaps the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say-he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.' 'Would you say you were better or worse for your experience with me?' 'But now you're back in the consulting room. Of course I'm better. But that's a clinical term. I'm afraid of being better at the cost of living inside myth and dreams. Psychoanalysis stands or falls on whether it makes better human beings, morally better, not clinically more healthy. What you are really asking me now is: Am I able to live more easily now than I did? Am I less in conflict, less in doubt, less neurotic in short? Well, you know that I am.' I remember how she sat opposite me, the alert, vigorous old woman, with her efficient blouse and skirt, her white hair dragged back into a hasty knot, frowning at me. I was pleased because of the frown-we were outside, for a moment, the analyst-patient relationship. 'Look,' I said. 'If I were sitting here, describing a dream I'd had last