He said: “Write the first sentence for me in the book.”
“You want me to write it for you?”
“Yes, write it down.”
“Why?”
“You’re part of the team.”
“I don’t feel that. I hate teams.”
“You think about it then. There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other even though we don’t know each other’s names. But we rely on each other all the time. We’re a team, we’re the ones who haven’t given in, who’ll go on fighting. I tell you, Anna, sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you’ve written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won’t have to write it.”
“All right, I’ll write your first sentence for you.”
“Good. Write it, and I’ll come back and get the book and say goodbye and I’ll be on my way.”
“Where are you going?”
“You know quite well I don’t know.”
“Sometime you’re going to have to know.”
“All right, all right, but I’m not mature yet, have you forgotten?”
“Perhaps you’d better go back to America.”
“Why not? Love’s the same the world over.”
I laughed, and I went to the pretty new notebook, while he went off downstairs, and I wrote: “On a dry hillside in Algeria, a soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle.”
[Here Anna’s handwriting ended, the golden notebook continued in Saul Green’s handwriting, a short novel about the Algerian soldier. This soldier was a farmer who was aware that what he felt about life was not what he was expected to feel. By whom? By an invisible they, who might be God, or the State, or Law, or Order. He was captured, tortured by the French, escaped, rejoined the F.L.N., and found himself torturing, under orders to do so, French prisoners. He knew that he should feel something about this that he did not in fact feel. He discussed his state of mind late one night with one of the French prisoners whom he had tortured. The French prisoner was a young intellectual, a student of philosophy. This young man (the two men were talking secretly in the prisoner’s cell) complained that he was in an intellectual prison-house. He recognised, had recognised for years, that he never had a thought, or an emotion, that didn’t instantly fall into pigeon-holes, one marked “Marx” and one marked “Freud.” His thoughts and emotions were like marbles rolling into predetermined slots, he complained. The young Algerian soldier found this interesting, he didn’t find that at all, he said, what troubled him—though of course it didn’t really trouble him, and he felt it should—was that nothing he thought or felt was what was expected of him. The Algerian soldier said he envied the Frenchman—or rather, he felt he ought to be envying him. While the French student said he envied the Algerian from the bottom of his heart: he wished that just once, just once in his life, he felt or thought something that was his own, spontaneous, undirected, not willed on him by Grandfathers Freud and Marx. The voices of the two young men had risen more than was wise, particularly that of the French student, crying out against his situation. The Commanding Officer came in, found the Algerian talking, like a brother, with the prisoner he was supposed to be guarding. The Algerian soldier said: “Sir, I did what I was ordered: I tortured this man. You did not tell me I should not talk with him.” The Commanding Officer decided that his man was some sort of a spy, probably recruited while he had been a prisoner. He ordered him to be shot. The Algerian soldier and the French student were shot together, on the hillside, with the rising sun in their faces, side by side, the next morning.]
[This short novel was later published and did rather well.]
Free Women: 5
MOLLY GETS MARRIED AND ANNA HAS AN AFFAIR
When Janet first asked her mother if she could go to boarding-school, Anna was reluctant. She hated everything boarding-schools stood for. Having made enquiries about various “progressive” schools, she talked to Janet again; but meanwhile the little girl had brought home a friend of hers, already at a conventional boarding-school, to help persuade her mother. The two children, bright-eyed and apprehensive that Anna might refuse, chattered about uniforms, dormitories, school outings and so on; and Anna understood that a “progressive” school was just what Janet did not want. She was saying, in fact, “I want to be ordinary, I don’t want to be like you.” She had taken a look at the world of disorder, experiment, where people lived from day to day, like balls perpetually jigging on the top of jets of prancing water; keeping themselves open for any new feeling or adventure, and had decided it was not for her. Anna said: “Janet, do you realise how different it will be from anything you’ve ever known? It means going for walks in crocodiles, like soldiers, and looking like everyone else, and doing things regularly at certain times. If you’re not careful you’re going to come out of it like a processed pea, just like everyone else.” “Yes, I know,” said the thirteen-year-old, smiling. The smile said: I know you hate all that, but why should I? “It will be a conflict for you.” “I don’t think it will,” said Janet, suddenly sullen, reacting away from the idea that she could ever accept her mother’s way of life enough to be in conflict over it.
Anna understood, when Janet had gone to school, how much she had depended on the discipline which having a child had enforced on her—getting up at a certain time in the morning, going to bed soon enough not to be tired because of having to get up early, arranging regular meals, organising her moods so as not to upset the child.
She was alone in the enormous flat. She should move to a smaller one. She did not want to let rooms again, the idea of another experience like the one with Ronnie and Ivor frightened her. And it frightened her that it frightened her—what was happening to her, that she shrank from the complications of people, shrank from being involved? It was a betrayal of what she felt she ought to be. She compromised: she would stay in the flat another year; she would let a room; she would look around for a suitable job.
Everything seemed to have changed. Janet was gone. Marion and Tommy, paid for by Richard, went off to Sicily, taking with them a large number of books on Africa. They intended to visit Dolci, to find out if they could, as Marion put it, “be of any help to the poor thing. Do you know Anna, I keep a photograph of him on my desk all the time?”
Molly was also alone in an empty house, having lost her son to her ex-husband’s second wife. She invited Richard’s sons to stay with her. Richard was delighted, although he still blamed Molly’s life for his son’s blindness. Molly entertained the boys while Richard went to Canada with his secretary to arrange the financing of three new steel mills. This trip was something like a honeymoon, since Marion had now agreed to a divorce.
Anna discovered she was spending most of her time doing nothing at all; and decided the remedy for her condition was a man. She prescribed this for herself like a medicine.
She was telephoned by a friend of Molly’s she had no time for, because she was busy with Richard’s sons. This man was Nelson, an American script-writer whom she had met at Molly’s, and sometimes had dinner with.
When he rang Anna he said: “I must warn you against seeing me at all. I’m in danger of finding my wife impossible for the third time.”
At dinner they talked mostly about politics. “The difference between a red in Europe and a red in America is that in Europe a red is a communist; but in America he is a man who has never taken out a Party card out of caution or cowardice. In Europe you have communists and fellow-travellers. In America you have communists and ex-reds. I—and I insist on the difference, was a red. I don’t want to get into any more trouble than I am in already. Well now I’ve defined my position, will you take me home with you tonight?”
Anna was thinking: There’s only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best. What’s the use of always hankering after Michael?
So she spent the night with Nelson. He was, as she soon understood, in bad sexual trouble; she conspired with him, out of chivalry, i
n pretending there was nothing seriously wrong. They parted in the morning with friendship. Then she found herself weeping, in a low helpless depression. She told herself that the cure for this was not to sit alone, but to ring up one of her men friends. She did nothing of the sort, she was unable to face seeing anyone, let alone another “affair.”
Anna found that she was spending her time in a curious way. She had always read newspapers, journals, magazines in large quantities; she suffered from the vice of her kind, that she had to know what was going on everywhere. But now, having woken late, and drunk coffee, she would sit on the floor of the big room, surrounded by half a dozen daily newspapers, a dozen weekly journals, reading them, slowly, over and over again. She was trying to fit things together. Whereas, before, her reading had been to form a picture of what was taking place all over the world, now a form of order familiar to her had disappeared. It seemed as if her mind had become an area of differing balances, she was balancing facts, events, against each other. It was not a question of a sequence of events, with their probable consequences. It was as if she, Anna, were a central point of awareness, being attacked by a million unco-ordinated facts, and the central point would disappear if she proved unable to weigh and balance the facts, take them all into account. Thus, she would find herself staring at the statement: “The ignition hazard from the thermal radiation of 10 M.T. surface burst will extend over a circle of about 25 miles in radius. A fire circle of 25 miles radius encompasses an area of 1,900 square miles and if the weapon detonates near the intended aiming point, will include the most densely populated sections of the target complex which means that under certain clear atmospheric conditions everyone and everything within this tremendous area would probably be subject to a grave thermal hazard and many consumed in the holocaust,”—and now it was not the words that were terrible but that she could not make what they said match imaginatively with: “I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.” So that she would stare at these two sets of words, until the words themselves seemed to detach themselves from the page and slide away, as if they had detached themselves from their own meaning. Yet the meaning remained, unconfirmed by the words, and probably more terrible (though she did not know why) because the words had failed to confine it. And so, having been defeated by these two sets of words, she would put them aside and turn her attention to another set: “It is too little realised in Europe that there is no status quo in Africa as it is at present ordered.” “Formality, I think (not, as Mr Smith suggests, a neo-neo-romanticism), may be the coming mode.” So that she was spending hours sitting on the floor, all her attention focused on selected fragments of print. Soon a new activity began. She carefully cut out the patches of print from newspapers and journals and stuck them on the walls with drawing-pins. The white walls of the big room were covered all over with large and small cuttings from papers. She walked carefully around the walls, looking at the statements pinned there. When she ran out of drawing-pins, she told herself it was stupid to go on with a meaningless occupation; yet she put on a coat, went down to the street, and bought two boxes of drawing-pins and methodically attached the still unanchored fragments of print to the walls. But the newspapers piled up, landing on her door-mat every morning in a great thick pack of print, and every morning she sat, fighting to order this new supply of material—and going out to buy more drawing-pins.
It occurred to her that she was going mad. This was “the breakdown” she had foreseen; the “cracking-up.” Yet it did not seem to her that she was even slightly mad; but rather that people who were not as obsessed as she was with the inchoate world mirrored in the newspapers were all out of touch with an awful necessity. Yet she knew she was mad. And while she could not prevent herself from the careful obsessed business of reading masses of print, and cutting out pieces, and pinning them all over her walls, she knew that on the day Janet came home from school, she would become Anna, Anna the responsible, and the obsession would go away. She knew that Janet’s mother being sane and responsible was far more important than the necessity of understanding the world; and one thing depended on the other. The world would never get itself understood, be ordered by words, be “named,” unless Janet’s mother remained a woman who was able to be responsible.
The knowledge that Janet would be home in a month nagged at Anna inside her obsession with newspaper facts. It turned her towards the four notebooks which she had neglected ever since Tommy’s accident. She turned the pages of these books over and over, but had no connection with them. She knew that some sort of guilt, which she did not understand, cut her off from them. The guilt was of course connected with Tommy. She did not know, would never know, if Tommy’s attempt at suicide was triggered off by reading her notebooks; or, if this were true, whether there was something in particular which had upset him; or whether she was in fact arrogant. “It’s arrogant, Anna; it’s irresponsible.” Yes, he had said that; but beyond knowing she had let him down, that she had not been able to give him something he needed, she did not understand what had happened.
One afternoon she went to sleep and dreamed. She knew it was a dream she had often had before, in one form or another. She had two children. One was Janet, plump and glossy with health. The other was Tommy, a small baby, and she was starving him. Her breasts were empty, because Janet had had all the milk in them; and so Tommy was thin and puny, dwindling before her eyes from starvation. He vanished altogether, in a tiny coil of pale bony staring flesh, before she woke, which she did in a fever of anxiety, self-division and guilt. Yet, awake, she could see no reason why she should have dreamed of Tommy being starved by her. And besides, she knew that in other dreams of this cycle, the “starved” figure might be anyone, perhaps someone she had passed in the street whose face had haunted her. Yet there was no doubt she felt responsible for this half-glimpsed person, for why otherwise should she dream of having failed him—or her?
After this dream, she went feverishly back to work, cutting out news items, fastening them to the wall.
That evening, sitting on the floor, playing jazz, desperate because of her inability to “make sense” out of the bits of print, she felt a new sensation, like a hallucination, a new and hitherto not understood picture of the world. This understanding was altogether terrible; a reality different from anything she had known before as reality, and it came from a country of feeling she had never visited. It was not being “depressed”; or being “unhappy”; of feeling “discouraged”; the essence of the experience was that such words, like joy or happiness, were meaningless. Coming around from this illumination—which was timeless; so that Anna did not know how long it had lasted, she knew she had had an experience for which there were no words—it was beyond the region where words could be made to have sense.
Yet she again stood before the notebooks, letting her hand with the stylo in it (which looked, with its fragile entrails showing, like a sea-animal, a sea-horse) wait above first one, then another, to let the nature of the “illumination” decide for itself where it should be written; but the four notebooks, with their various sub-divisions and categories, remained as they were, and Anna laid down her pen.
She tried various passages of music, some jazz, some bits of Bach, some Stravinsky, thinking that perhaps music might say what words could not; but this was one of the times, increasingly frequent, when music seemed to irritate her, seemed to attack the membranes of her inner ear, which repulsed sounds as if they were enemies.
She said to herself: I don’t know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature inaccurate. If I thought they were capable of expressing the truth I wouldn’t keep journals which I refuse to let anyone see—except, of course, Tommy.
That night she hardly slept; she lay awake re-thinking thoughts already so familiar to her she was bored even by their approach—political thoughts, the patterns of action in our time. It was a descent int
o banality; because as usual she concluded that any act she might make would be without faith, that is, without faith in “good” and “bad,” but simply a sort of provisional act, hoping it might turn out well, but with no more than that hope. Yet from this attitude of mind she might very well find herself making decisions that would cost her her life, or her freedom.
She woke very early, and soon found herself standing in the middle of the kitchen, her hands full of bits of newspaper and drawing-pins, the walls of her big room being entirely covered as far as she could reach, with clippings. She was shocked into laying aside the new clippings, and the bundles of journals and papers. She was thinking: but there’s no sensible reason why I should be shocked by starting on a second room, when I wasn’t shocked by covering the whole of the first room—or at least, not shocked enough to stop.
Nevertheless, she was encouraged because she would stick up no more fragments of print, offering unassimilable information. She stood in the middle of the big room, telling herself to strip the walls. But she was unable to. She was again moving from point to point, around the room, matching statement with statement, one set of words with another.
While she was doing this, the telephone rang. It was a friend of Molly’s. An American left-winger needed a room for a few days. Anna joked that if he was an American he would be writing an epic novel, be in psychoanalysis, and in the process of divorcing his second wife; but said he could have a room. He telephoned later to say he would be over that afternoon at five. Anna dressed to receive him, realising that she had not dressed, except to go out and buy odd bits of food and drawing-pins, for several weeks. Just before five he telephoned again to say he couldn’t come, he had to see his agent. Anna was struck by the careful detail he put into his account of the appointment with the agent. A few minutes later Molly’s friend rang again to say that Milt (the American) was coming over to a party at her place, and would Anna like to come too? Anna was annoyed, shrugged off the annoyance; refused the invitation, put on her dressing-gown again, and returned to the floor, surrounded by newspapers.