The Golden Notebook

  It occurs to me that what is happening is a breakdown of me, Anna, and this is how I am becoming aware of it. For words are form, and if I am at a pitch where shape, form, expression are nothing, then I am nothing, for it has become clear to me, reading the notebooks, that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence. This intelligence is dissolving and I am very frightened.

  Last night I had a recurrence of that dream which, as I told Mother Sugar, was the most frightening of all the different types of cycles of dreams. When she asked me to “give a name to it” (to give it form), I said it was the nightmare about destruction. Later, when I dreamed it again, and she said: Give it a name, I was able to go further: I said it was the nightmare about the principle of spite, or malice—joy in spite.

  The first time I dreamed it, the principle, or figure, took form in a certain vase I had then, a peasant wooden vase from Russia, that someone had brought back. It was bulbous, rather jolly and naïve in shape, and covered with crude red and black and gilt patterns. This vase, in my dream, had a personality, and the personality was the nightmare, for it represented something anarchistic and uncontrollable, something destructive. This figure, or object, for it was not human, more like a species of elf or pixie, danced and jumped with a jerky cocky liveliness and it menaced not only me, but everything that was alive, but impersonally, and without reason. This was when I “named” the dream as about destruction. The next time I dreamed, months later, but instantly recognised it as the same dream, the principle or element took shape in an old man, almost dwarf-like, infinitely more terrifying than the vase-object, because he was part human. This old man smiled and giggled and sniggered, was ugly, vital and powerful, and again, what he represented was pure spite, malice, joy in a destructive impulse. This was when I “named” the dream as about joy in spite. And I dreamed the dream again, always when particularly tired, or under stress, or in conflict, when I could feel that the walls of myself were thin or in danger. The element took a variety of shapes, usually that of a very old man or woman (yet there was a suggestion of a double sex, or even sexlessness) and the figure was always very lively, in spite of having a wooden leg, or a crutch, or a hump, or being deformed in some way. And the creature was always powerful, with an inner vitality which I knew was caused by a purposeless, undirected, causeless spite. It mocked and jibed and hurt, wished murder, wished death. And yet it was always vibrant with joy. Telling Mother Sugar of this dream, re-created for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, she asked as usual: “And how do you name it?” and I replied as usual with the words spite, malice, pleasure in hurt; and she enquired: “Only negative qualities, nothing good about it?” “Nothing,” I said, surprised. “And there is nothing creative at all there?” “Not for me.”

  She then smiled in the way I knew meant that I should think more about it, and I asked: “If this figure is an elemental and creative force, for good as well as for evil, then why should I fear it so terribly?” “Perhaps as you dream deeper you’ll feel the vitality as good as well as bad.”

  “It’s so dangerous to me that as soon as I feel the atmosphere of that figure, even before the figure has appeared, and I know the dream is beginning, I struggle and scream to wake up.”

  “It is dangerous to you as long as you fear it—” This with the homely, emphatic, mother-nod, which always, in spite of everything, and no matter how deep I was embroiled in some hurt or problem, made me want to laugh. And I did laugh, often, helpless in my chair, while she sat smiling, for she had spoken as people do of animals or snakes: they won’t hurt you if you don’t fear them.

  And I thought, as I often did, that she was having it both ways: for if this figure, or element, was so familiar to her in the dreams or fantasies of her patients that she instantly recognised it, then why was it my responsibility that the thing was totally evil? Only the word evil is too human a word for a principle felt to be, in spite of what part-human shapes it chose to assume, as essentially inhuman.

  In other words, it was up to me to force this thing to be good as well as bad? That was what she was saying?

  Last night I dreamed the dream again, and this time it was more terrifying than anything I’ve experienced, because I felt the terror, the helplessness, in face of the uncontrolled force for destruction, when there was no object or thing or even a dwarf to hold it. I was in a dream with another person, who I did not immediately recognise; and then I understood that this terrible malicious force was in that person who was a friend. And so I forced myself awake out of the dream, screaming, and when I awoke I put a name to the person in my dream, knowing that for the first time the principle was embodied in a human being. And when I knew who the person was, I was even more frightened. For it was safer to have that terrible frightening force held in a shape associated with the mythical or the magical, than loose, or as it were at large, in a person, and in a person who had the power to move me.

  Once really awake, and looking back at the dream from the condition of being awake, I was frightened because if the element is now outside of myth, and inside another human being, then it can only mean it is loose in me also, or can only too easily be evoked.

  I should now write down the experience to which the dream related.

  [At this point Anna had drawn a heavy black line across the page. After it she had written:]

  I drew that line because I didn’t want to write it. As if writing about it sucks me even further into danger. Yet I have to hold fast to this—that Anna, the thinking Anna, can look at what Anna feels and “name” it.

  What is happening is something new in my life. I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding, in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is the beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will now be part of me and I must deal with it.

  It is easy now, looking back over my life, to say: That Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or “named”—yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: Yes, that’s what I was. I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical, using femaleness as a sort of standard or yardstick to measure and discard men. Yes—something like that. I was an Anna who invited defeat from men without even being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and become—but what?) I was stuck fast in an emotion common to women of our time, that can turn them bitter, or Lesbian, or solitary. Yes, that Anna, during that time was…

  [Another black line across the page:]

  About three weeks ago I went to a political meeting. This one was informal, at Molly’s house. Comrade Harry, one of the top academics in the C.P., recently went to Russia, to find out, as a Jew, what had happened to the Jews in the “black years” before Stalin died. He fought the communist brass to go at all; they tried to stop him. He used threats, saying if they would not let him go, would not help him, he would publicise the fact. He went; came back with terrible information; they did not want any of it made known. His argument the usual one from the “intellectuals” of this time: just for once the communist party should admit and explain what everyone knew to be true. Their argument, the old argument of the communist bureaucracy—solidarity with the Soviet Union at all cost, which means admitting as little as possible. They agreed to publish a limited report, leaving out the worst of the horrors. He has been conducting a series of meetings for communists and ex-communists in which he has been speaking about what he discovered. Now the brass are furious, and are threatening him with expulsion; threatening members who go to his meetings with expulsion. He is going to resign.

  There were forty-odd people in Molly’s living-room. All “intellectuals.”
What Harry told us was very bad, but not much worse than we knew from the newspapers. I noticed a man sitting next to me listening quietly. His quietness impressed me in an emotional gathering. We smiled at each other at one point with the painful irony that is the mark of our kind now. The formal meeting ended, and about ten people remained. I recognised the atmosphere of the “closed meeting”—more was to follow, the non-communists were expected to leave. But after a hesitation Harry and the others said we could stay. Harry then spoke again. What we had heard before was terrible; what we heard now worse even than what the most virulent anti-communist papers were printing. They were in no position to get the real facts and Harry had been. He spoke of the tortures, the beatings-up, the most cynical kinds of murder. About Jews being locked in cages designed in the Middle Ages for torture, of being tortured with instruments taken from museums. And so on.

  What he was saying now was on a different level of horror from what he had said before, to the meeting of forty people. When he had finished, we asked questions; each answer brought out something new and terrible. What we were seeing was something we knew very well from our own experience: a communist, determined to be honest, yet fighting every inch of the way even now not to have to admit the truth about the Soviet Union. When he had finished speaking, the quiet man, whose name turned out to be Nelson (an American), got up and broke into passionate oratory. The word comes easily because he spoke well, and obviously out of a great deal of political experience. A strong voice, and practised. But now he was accusatory. He said that the reason why the communist parties of the West had collapsed, or would collapse, was because they were incapable of telling the truth about anything; and because of their long habit of telling lies to the world, could no longer distinguish the truth even to themselves. Yet tonight, he said, after the Twentieth Congress and everything we had learned about the conditions of communism, we saw a leading comrade and one we all know to have fought for the truth inside the Party against people more cynical than he, deliberately dividing the truth into two one, a mild truth, for the public meeting of forty, and another, a harsher truth, for a closed group. Harry was embarrassed and upset. We did not know then of the threats being used against him by the top brass to stop him speaking at all. He said, however, that the truth was so terrible that as few people as possible should know about it—used the same arguments, in short, that he was fighting the bureaucrats for using.

  And now suddenly Nelson got up again and launched into an even more violent, self-accusing denunciation. It was hysterical. And everyone was becoming hysterical—I could feel the hysteria rising in myself. I recognised an atmosphere I recognised from “the dream about destruction.” It was the feeling or atmosphere that was a prelude to the entrance of the figure of destruction. I got up, and thanked Harry—after all, it was two years since I had been a Party member, with no right in the closed meeting. I went downstairs—Molly was crying in the kitchen. She said: “It’s all very well for you, you aren’t Jewish.”

  In the street I found Nelson had come down behind me. He said he would take me home. He was quiet again; and I forgot the self-beating note of his speech. He is a man of about forty, Jewish, American, pleasant-looking, a bit of a paterfamilias. I knew I was attracted to him and…

  [Another heavy black line. Then:]

  The reason why I don’t want to write this is because I have to fight to write about sex. Extraordinary how strong this prohibition is.

  I am making this too complicated—too much about the meeting. Yet Nelson and I would not have so easily been in communion without having shared all that experience, even though it had been in different countries. On that first evening he stayed late. He was courting me. He was talking about me, the sort of life I led. And women always respond at once to men who understand we are on some kind of frontier. I suppose I could say that they “name” us. We feel safe with them. He went up to see Janet, sleeping. His interest in her was genuine. Three children of his own. Married for seventeen years. His marriage a direct consequence of his having fought in Spain. The tone of the evening was serious, responsible, grown-up. After he left I used the word—grown-up. And I matched him against the men I’ve been encountering recently (why?) the men-babies. My spirits so high I cautioned myself. I was marvelling, again, how easy it is, living deprived, to forget love, joy, delight. For nearly two years now, the disappointing encounters, one emotional snub after another. I had drawn in my emotional skirts, became guarded in my responses. Now, after one evening with Nelson I had forgotten all that. He came to see me next day. Janet just on her way out to play with friends. Nelson and she instantly friendly. He was speaking as more than a potential lover. He was leaving his wife, he said, needed a real relationship with a woman. He would come that evening “after Janet was asleep.” I loved him for the sense of the “after Janet was asleep” and the understanding of the sort of life I have. When he came that evening he was very late, and in a different mood—garrulous, talking compulsively, his eyes darting everywhere, never meeting mine. I felt my spirits sink; it was from my own sudden nervousness and apprehension that I understood, before my mind understood it, that this was going to be another disappointment. He talked of Spain, of the war. He was condemning himself, as he had at the meeting, breast-beating, hysterical, for taking part in the Communist Party betrayals. He said that innocent people had been shot, through him, though he had not believed at the time they were innocent. (Yet as he spoke of this, the feeling kept going through me: he’s not really sorry, not really; his hysteria and the noise are a defence against feeling, because it’s too terrible, the guilt he would have to feel.) He was also, at moments, very funny, with the American self-punishing humour. At midnight he left, or rather slunk off, still talking at the top of his voice, looking guilty. He talked himself out, so to speak. I began thinking about his wife. But I wouldn’t admit what my instincts told me quite clearly was wrong. Next morning, unannounced, he came back. I couldn’t recognise him as the loud hysterical man—he was sober and responsible and humorous. He took me into bed and then I knew what was wrong. I asked him if it was always like this. He was disconcerted (and this told me more about his sex relationships than anything) that I frankly spoke about it while he tried to pretend he didn’t understand me. Then he said he had a mortal terror of sex, could never stay inside a woman for longer than a few seconds, and had never been different. And I saw, from the nervous, instinctively repulsive haste with which he moved away from me, the haste with which he dressed, how deep was his fear. He said he had started psycho-analysis, expected to be “cured” soon. (I could not help wanting to laugh at the word “cured” which is how people talk, going into psycho-analysis, the clinical talk, as if one were submitting finally to a desperate operation that would change one into something else.) Afterwards, our relation had changed—a friendliness, a trust. Because of the trust, we would go on seeing each other.

  We did. That was months ago. What frightens me now is—why did I go on with it? It wasn’t the self-flattery: I can cure this man. Not at all. I know better, I’ve known too many of the sexual cripples. It wasn’t really compassion. Though that was part of it. I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men’s criticising us for being “castrating,” etc.—all the other words and phrases of the same kind. (Nelson says his wife is “castrating”—this makes me angry, thinking of the misery she must have lived through.) For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. Molly for instance. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men.

  No, what terrifies me is my willingness. It is what Mother Sugar would call “the negative side” of the women’s need to placate, to submit. Now I am not Anna, I have no will, I can’t move out of a situation once it has started, I just go along with it.

  Within a week of my having gone to bed with Nelson the first time I was
in a situation I had no control over. The man Nelson, the responsible quiet man, had vanished. I could no longer even remember him. Even the words, the language of emotional responsibility had gone. He was driven by a shrill compulsive hysteria, in which I was also caught up. We went to bed for the second time: to the accompaniment of a highly verbal, bitterly humorous self-denunciation which switched at once into hysterical abuse of all women. Then he vanished from my life for nearly two weeks. I was more nervous, more depressed than I can remember being. I was sexless, too. I had no sex—nothing. A long way off I could see Anna, who belonged to a world of normality and warmth. I could see her but I could not remember what it was like to be alive, as she was. He rang me twice, making excuses, insultingly obvious, because there was no need for them—they were excuses made to “a woman,” to “women,” to “the enemy,” not to Anna; in his good moments he’d be incapable of such insensitivity. I had, in my mind, written him off as a lover, but intended to keep him as a friend. There’s a kinship between us, the relationship of a certain kind of self-knowledge, of despair. Well, and then one evening he came over, unannounced, and in his other, his “good” personality. And listening to him then I could not remember what he was like when hysterical and driven. I sat there and looked at him, in the same way as I look at the sane and happy Anna—he’s out of reach, she’s out of reach, moving beyond a glass wall. Oh, yes, I understand that glass wall certain kinds of Americans live behind, I understand it too well—don’t touch me, for God’s sake don’t touch me, don’t touch me because I’m afraid of feeling.