The Golden Notebook (24 page)

thinks a great deal about the invisible woman to whom Paul returns (and to whom he will always return), and it is now not out of triumph, but envy. She envies her. She slowly, involuntarily, builds up a picture in her mind of a serene, calm, unjealous, unenvious, undemanding woman, full of resources of happiness inside herself, self-sufficient, yet always ready to give happiness when it is asked for. It occurs to Ella (but much later, about three years on) that this is a remarkable image to have developed, since it does not correspond to anything at all Paul says about his wife. So where does the picture come from? Slowly Ella understands that this is what she would like to be herself, this imagined woman is her own shadow, everything she is not. Because by now she knows, and is frightened of, her utter dependence on Paul. Every fibre of herself is woven with him, and she cannot imagine living without him. The mere idea of being without him causes a black cold fear to enclose her, so she does not think of it. And she is clinging, so she comes to realise, to this image of the other woman, the third, as a sort of safety or protection for herself. The second motif is in fact part of the first, though this would not be apparent until the end of the novel-Paul's jealousy. The jealousy increases, and is linked with the rhythm of his slow withdrawal. He accuses her, half-laughing, half-serious, of sleeping with other men. In a cafe he accuses her of making eyes at a man she has not even noticed. To begin with, she laughs at him. Later she grows bitter, but always suppresses bitterness, it is too dangerous. Then, as she comes to understand the image she has created of the other serene, etc., woman, she wonders about Paul's jealousy, and comes to think-not from bitterness, but to understand it, what it really means. It occurs to her that Paul's shadow, his imagined third, is a self-hating rake, free, casual, heartless. (This is the role he sometimes plays, self-mockingly, with her.) So what it means is, that in coming together with Ella, in a serious relationship, the rake in himself has been banished, pushed aside, and now stands in the wings of his personality, temporarily unused, waiting to return. And Ella now sees, side by side with the wise, serene, calm woman, her shadow, the shape of this compulsive self-hating womaniser. These two discordant figures move side by side, keeping pace with Ella and Paul. And there comes a moment (but right at the end of the novel, its culmination) when Ella thinks: Paul's shadow-figure, the man he sees everywhere, even in a man I haven't even noticed, is this almost musical-comedy libertine. So that means that Paul with me is using his 'positive' self. (Julia's phrase.) With me he is good. But I have as a shadow a good woman, grown-up and strong and un-asking. Which means that I am using with him my 'negative' self. So this bitterness I feel growing in me, against him, is a mockery of the truth. In fact, he's better than I am, in this relationship. These invisible figures that keep us company all the time prove it. Subsidiary motifs. Her novel. He asks what she is writing and she tells him. Reluctantly, because his voice is always full of distrust when he mentions her writing. She says: 'It's a novel about suicide.' 'And what do you know about suicide?' 'Nothing, I'm just writing it.' (To Julia she makes bitter jokes about Jane Austen hiding her novels under the blotting paper when people come into the room; quotes Stendhal's dictum that any woman under fifty who writes, should do so under a pseudonym.) During the next few days he tells her stories about his patients who are suicidal. It takes her a long time to understand he is doing this because he thinks she is too naive and ignorant to write about suicide. (And she even agrees with him.) He is instructing her. She begins to hide her work from him. She says she doesn't care about 'being a writer, she just wants to write the book, to see what will happen.' This makes no sense to him, it seems, and soon he begins to complain that she is using his professional knowledge to get facts for the novel. The motif of Julia. Paul dislikes Ella's relationship with Julia. He sees it as a pact against him, and makes professional jokes about the Lesbian aspects of this friendship. At which Ella says that in that case, his friendships with men are homosexual? But he says she has no sense of humour. At first Ella's instinct is to sacrifice Julia for Paul; but later their friendship does change, it becomes critical of Paul. The conversations between the two women are sophisticated, full of critical insight, implicitly critical of men. Yet Ella does not feel this is disloyalty to Paul, because these conversations come from a different world; the world of sophisticated insight has nothing to do with her feeling for Paul. The motif of Ella's maternal love for Michael. She is always fighting to get Paul to be a father to the child and always failing. And Paul says: 'You'll come to be glad yet, you'll see I was right.' Which can only mean: When I've left you, you'll be glad I didn't form close ties with your son. And so Ella chooses not to hear it. The motif of Paul's attitude to his profession. He is split on this. He takes his work for his patients seriously, but makes fun of the jargon he uses. He will tell a story about a patient, full of subtlety and depth, but using the language of literature and of emotion. Then he will judge the same anecdote in psychoanalytical terms, giving it a different dimension. And then, five minutes later, he will be making the most intelligent and ironical fun of the terms he has just used as yardsticks to judge the literary standards, the emotional truths. And at each moment, in each personality-literary, psychoanalytical, the man who distrusts all systems of thought that consider themselves final-he will be serious and expect Ella to accept him, fully for that moment; and he resents it when she attempts to link these personalities in him. Their life together becomes full of phrases, and symbols. 'Mrs. Brown' means his patients and her women who ask for help. 'Your literary lunches,' is his phrase for her infidelities, used sometimes humourously, sometimes seriously. 'Your treatise on suicide.' Her novel, his attitude to it. And another phrase which becomes more and more important, though when he uses it first she does not understand how deep an attitude in him it reflects. 'We are both boulder-pushers.' This is his phrase for what he sees as his own failure. His fight to get out of his poor background, to win scholarships, to get the highest medical degrees, came out of an ambition to be a creative scientist. But he knows now he will never be this original scientist. And this defect has been partly caused by what is best in him, his abiding, tireless compassion for the poor, the ignorant, the sick. He has always, at a point when he should have chosen the library or the laboratory, chosen the weak instead. He will never now be a discoverer or a blazer of new paths. He has become a man who fights a middle-class, reactionary medical superintendent who wants to keep his wards locked and his patients in strait jackets. 'You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents, into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. We push the boulder. I sometimes wish I had died before I got this job I wanted so much-I thought of it as something creative. How do I spend my time? Telling Dr Shackerly, a frightened little man from Birmingham who bullies his wife because he doesn't know how to love a woman, that he must open the doors of his hospital, that he must not keep poor sick people shut in a cell lined with buttoned white leather in the dark, and that straitjackets are stupid. That is how I spend my days. And treating illness that is caused by a society so stupid that... And you, Ella. You tell the wives of workmen who are all just as good as their masters to use the styles and furnishings made fashionable by businessmen who use snobbery to make money. And you tell poor women who are slaves of everyone's stupidity to go out and join a social club or to take up a healthful hobby of some kind, to take their minds off the fact they are unloved. And if the healthful hobby doesn't work, and why should it, they end up in my Out-patients... I wish I had died, Ella. I wish I had died. No, of course you don't understand that, I can see from your face you don't...' Death again. Death come out of her novel and into her life. And yet death in the form of energy, for this man works like a madman, out of a furious angry compassion, this man who says he wishes he were dead never rests from work for the helpless. It is as if this novel were already written and I were reading it. And now I see it whole I see another theme, of which I was not conscious when I began it. The theme is, naivety. From the moment Ella meets Paul and loves him, from the moment she uses the word love, there is the birth of naivety. And so now, looking back at my relationship with Michael (I used the name of my real lover for Ella's fictitious son with the small over-eager smile with which a patient offers an analyst evidence he has been waiting for but which the patient is convinced is irrelevant), I see above all my naivety. Any intelligent person could have foreseen the end of this affair from its beginning. And yet I, Anna, like Ella with Paul, refused to see it. Paul gave birth to Ella, the naive Ella. He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety. Now, when I am drawn to a man, I can assess the depth of a possible relationship with him by the degree to which the naive Anna is re-created in me. Sometimes when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship. What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety. The end of the affair. Though that was not the word that Ella used then. She used it afterwards, and with bitterness. Ella first understands that Paul is withdrawing from her at the moment when she realises he is not helping her with the letters. He says: 'What's the use? I deal with widow Brown all day at the hospital. I can't do any good, not really. I help one here and there. Ultimately the boulder-pushers don't really help anything. We imagine we do. Psychiatry and welfare work, it's putting poultices on unnecessary misery.' 'But Paul, you know you help them.' 'All the time I'm thinking, we are all obsolete. What sort of a doctor is it who sees his patients as symptoms of a world sickness?' 'If it were true you really feel like that, you wouldn't work so hard.' He hesitated, then delivered this blow: 'But Ella, you're my mistress, not my wife. Why do you want me to share all the serious business of life with you?' Ella was angry. 'Every night you lie in my bed and tell me everything. I am your wife.' As she said it, she knew she was signing the warrant for the end. It seemed a terrible cowardice that she had not said it before. He reacted with a small offended laugh, a gesture of withdrawal. Ella finishes her novel and it is accepted for publication. She knows it is a quite good novel, nothing very startling. If she were to read it she would report that it was a small, honest novel. But Paul reads it and reacts with elaborate sarcasm. He says: 'Well, we men might just as well resign from life.' She is frightened, and says: 'What do you mean?' Yet she laughs, because of the dramatic way he says it, parodying himself. Now he drops his self-parody and says with great seriousness: 'My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution-they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.' 'But Paul, that doesn't mean anything to me.' 'I saw a film last week, I went by myself, I didn't take you, that was a film for a man by himself.' 'What film?' 'Did you know that a woman can now have children without a man?' 'But what on earth for?' 'You can apply ice to a woman's ovaries, for instance. She can have a child. Men are no longer necessary to humanity.' At once Ella laughs, and with confidence. 'But what woman in her senses would want ice applied to her ovaries instead of a man?' Paul laughs too. 'For all that Ella, and joking apart, it's a sign of the times.' At which Ella cries out: 'My God, Paul, if at any time during the last five years you'd asked me to have a baby, I'd have been so happy.' The instinctive, startled movement of withdrawal from her. Then the deliberate careful answer, laughing: 'But, Ella, it's the principle of the thing. Men are no longer necessary.' 'Oh, principles,' says Ella, laughing. 'You're mad. I always said you were.' At which he says, soberly: 'Well, maybe you're right. You are very sane, Ella. You always were. You say I'm mad. I know it. I get madder and madder. Sometimes I wonder why they don't lock me up instead of my patients. And you get saner and saner. It's your strength. You'll have ice applied to your ovaries yet.' At which she cries out, so hurt that she doesn't care any longer how she sounds to him: 'You are mad. Let me tell you I'd rather die than have a child like that. Don't you know that ever since I've known you I've wanted to have your child? Ever since I've known you everything has been so joyful that...' She sees his face, which instinctively rejects what she has just said. 'Well, all right then. But