The Golden Notebook (52 page)

in 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 sexless-ness) 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. That evening he asked me to an evening party at his house. I said I'd go. After he left I knew I shouldn't go because I felt uneasy about it. Yet on the face of it, why not? He'd never be my lover, and so we were friends, so why not go and meet his friends, his wife? As soon as I entered their flat I realised how much I had not been using my imagination, how stupid I had chosen to be. Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching out for happiness. Well, entering the flat, I knew I had chosen not to think, and I was ashamed and humiliated. A large rented flat, full of tasteless, anonymous furniture. And I knew that when they moved into a house and filled it with their own chosen things, they would still be anonymous- that was the quality, anonymity. The safety of anonymity. Yes, and I understand that too, too well. They mentioned the rent of this flat and I was filled with disbelief. Thirty pounds a week, it's a fortune, it's crazy. There were about twelve people, all Americans to do with television or the films--'show business' people; and of course they joked about it. 'We're show biz, and why not? Nothing wrong with that, is there?' They all knew each other, their 'knowing each other' was on the basis of being show business, on the arbitrary contacts of their work; yet they were friendly, it was an attractive, accepting, casual friendliness. I liked it, it reminded me of the casual, informal friendliness of the white people of Africa. 'Hallo. Hallo! How are you? My house is yours, though I've only met you once.' Yet I liked it. By English standards they were all rich. In England people as rich as they are don't talk about it. An atmosphere of money all the time, anxious money, with these American people. Yet, with all the money, everything so expensive (which they apparently take for granted), a middle-class atmosphere that is hard to define. I sat there, trying to define it. It's a kind of deliberate ordinariness, a scaling-down of the individual; it's as if they all have, built in, a need to fit themselves to what is expected. And yet one likes them so much, they are such good people, one watches them full of pain because they choose to scale themselves down, to set limits. The limits are money-limits. (Yet why?-half of them were left-wingers, had been black-listed, were in England because they couldn't earn in America. Yet money, money, money all the time.) Yes, I could feel the money-anxiety, it was in the air, like a question. Yet the rent of Nelson's big ugly flat would keep an English middle-class family in comfort. I was secretly fascinated by Nelson's wife-half the ordinary curiosity-what is this new person like? But the other half I was ashamed of-what does she lack that I have? Nothing-that I could see. She is attractive. A tall, very thin, almost bony, Jewish woman; very attractive, with striking bold features, everything emphasised, big mobile mouth, big, rather beautiful curved nose, large prominent striking black eyes. And colourful dashing clothes. A loud shrill voice (which I hated, I hate loud voices), and an emphatic laugh. A great style and assurance about her, which of course I envied, I always do. And then, looking at her, I knew it was a superficial self-assurance. For she never took her eyes off Nelson. Never, not for one moment. (Whereas he wouldn't look at her, he was afraid to.) That quality I begin to recognise in American women-the surface competence, the assurance. And underneath the anxiety. They have a nervous, frightened look to their shoulders. They are frightened. They look as if they were out in a space somewhere by themselves, pretending that they are not alone. They have the look of people alone, people isolated. But pretending not to be alone. They frighten me. Well, from the moment Nelson came in, she never took her eyes off him. He came in with a wisecrack, the self-punishing, self-defining humour that scares me, because it accepts so much: 'The man is two hours late, and for why?-because he was getting loaded, to face the social happy evening ahead of him.' (And all his friends laughed- though they were the social happy evening.) And she replied, in the same style, gay and tense and accusing: 'But the woman knew he'd be two hours late, because of the happy social evening, so the dinner's fixed to be ready at ten, please don't give yourself one minute's concern over it!' And so they all laughed, and her eyes, apparently so black and bold, so full of apparent self-assurance, were fixed on him, anxious and afraid. 'Scotch? Nelson?' she asked, after serving the others; and her voice was suddenly a shrill plea. 'Double,' he said; aggressive and challenging; and they, looked at each other a moment, it was a sudden exposed moment; and the others joked and laughed to cover it. That was another thing that I began to understand-they covered up for each other, all the time. It gave me the most uneasy feeling, watching the easy friendliness, knowing that they were on guard for dangerous moments like this one, so that they could cover up. I was the only English person present, and they were nice about it, for they are nice people, with an instinct for generosity: they made a lot of self-mocking jokes about the stock American attitudes towards the English; and they were very funny, and I laughed a great deal, and felt bad, because I didn't know how to be easily self-mocking in return. We drank a lot; it was a gathering where people set themselves, from the moment of entering, to get just so much drink inside them as soon as possible. Well, I'm not used to it, and so I was drunker than anyone, and very quickly, though they drank very much more than I did. I noticed a tiny blonde woman, in a tight Chinese green-brocade dress. Really beautiful she was, with a tiny neat exquisiteness. She was, or is, the fourth wife of a big ugly dark man, a film tycoon of some kind. She had four doubles in an hour, yet she was cool, controlled, charming; watching her husband's drinking anxiously, babying him out of getting really drunk. 'My baby doesn't really need that new drink,'-cooing at him, baby talk. And he: 'Oh, yes, your baby needs that drink and he's going to have it.' And she stroked and patted him: 'My little baby's not going to drink, no he isn't, because his momma says so.' And good Lord, he didn't. She caressed and babied him, and I thought it was insulting; until I saw this was the basis of this marriage-the beautiful green Chinese dress and the long beautiful earrings, in return for mothering him, babying him. I was embarrassed. No one else was embarrassed. I realised, as I sat there, much too tight, watching them; out of it because I can't talk the cool wise-cracking talk, that I was above all embarrassed; and afraid that next time there was a dangerous corner they wouldn't cover up in time, there'd be some awful explosion. Well, about midnight there was; but I understood there was no need to be scared, because they were all far ahead of me in some area of sophistication well beyond anything I was used to; and it was their self-aware, self-parodying humour that insulated them against real hurt. Protected them, that is, until the moment when the violence exploded into another divorce, or drunken breakdown. I kept watching Nelson's wife, so bold and attractive and vital, her eyes fixed on Nelson every moment of the evening. Her eyes had a kind of wide, blank, disorganised look about them. I knew the look, but couldn't place it, then at last remembered: Mrs. Boothby's eyes were like that when she was cracking up, at the end of the story; they were frantic and disorganised, yet staring wide with the effort not to show the state she was in. And Nelson's wife was locked, I could see, in some permanent, controlled hysteria. Then I understood that they all were; they were all people on the extreme edge of themselves, controlling it, holding it, while hysteria flickered in the good-humoured barbed talk, in the shrewd, on-guard eyes. Yet they were all used to it, they had been living inside it for years; it was not strange to them, only to me. And yet, sitting there in a corner, not drinking any more, because I had got tight too quickly, and was in the over-aware, oversensitive state of having drunk too much too quickly and waiting for it all to subside-I understood that this was not so new to me as I imagined; this was nothing more than I had seen in a hundred English marriages, English homes; it was the same thing taken a stage further, taken into awareness and self-consciousness. They were, I understood, above all self-conscious people, aware of themselves all the time; and it was from the awareness, a self-disgusted awareness, that the humour came. The humour was not at all the verbal play, harmless and intellectualised, that the English use; but a sort of disinfection, a making-harmless, a 'naming' to save themselves from pain. It was like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye. It was quite late, as I've said, about midnight, that I heard Nelson's wife's voice, loud and shrill, saying: 'O. K., O. K., I know what's coming next. You're not going to write that script. So why waste your time on Nelson, Bill?' (Bill was the big aggressive husband of the tiny tactful mothering blonde.) She went on, to Bill, who looked determinedly good-humoured: 'He's going to talk and talk again for months, but he'll turn you down at the end of it, and waste his time on another masterpiece that never gets itself on the stage...' Then she laughed, a laugh full of apology, but wild and hysterical. Then Nelson, grabbing the stage, so to speak, before Bill could shield him, which he was ready to do: 'That's right, that's my wife, her husband wastes time writing masterpieces-well, did I have a play on Broadway, or didn't I?' He shrieked this last at her, shrieking like a woman, his face black with hate of her, and a naked, panicking fear. And they all began laughing, the roomful of people began to laugh and joke, to cover the dangerous moment, and Bill said: 'How do y'know I won't turn Nelson down, it might come to that, it might be my turn to write the masterpiece, I can feel it coming on.' (With a look at his pretty blonde wife which said: Don't worry honey, you know I'm just covering up, don't you?) But it was no good their covering up, the group self-protection was not strong enough for the moment of violence. Nelson and his wife were alone, forgetting all of us, standing at the other side of the room, locked in hatred for each other, and a desperate yearning plea to each other; they were not conscious of us any longer; yet in spite of everything, they were using the deadly, hysterical, self-punishing humour. The wisecrack: NELSON: Yeah. Hear that baby? Bill's going to write the Death of a Salesman for our time, he's going to beat me to it, and whose fault will that be-my ever-loving wife's fault, who else? SHE (shrill and laughing, her eyes frantic with anxiety, moving in her face uncontrolled, like small black molluscs, writhing under a knife): Oh, it's my fault, of course, who else's could it be? That's what I'm for, isn't it? NELSON: Yes, of course that's what you are for. You cover up for me, I know it. And 1 love you for it. But did I or did I not have that play on Broadway? And all those fine notices? Or did I just imagine it? SHE: Twelve years ago. Oh, you were a fine American citizen then, no black-lists in sight. And what have you been doing since! HE: O. K., so they've beaten me. Do you imagine I don't know it? Do you have to rub it in? I tell you, they don't need firing squads and prison to beat people. It's much easier than that... well, about me. Yeah, about me... SHE: You're black-listed, you're a hero, that's your alibi for the rest of your life... HE: No, dove; no baby, you're my alibi for the rest of my life-who wakes me every morning of my life at four a. m., screaming and wailing that you and your children'll end up on the Bowery if I don't write some more crap for our good friend Bill here? SHE (laughing, her face distorted with laughter): O. K., so I wake up at four every morning. O. K., so I'm scared. Want me to move to the spare room? HE: Yeah, I want you to move to the spare room. I could use that three hours every morning for working in. If I could remember how to work. (Suddenly laughing.) Except that I'd be in the spare room with you saying I was scared I might end up on the Bowery. How's that for a project? You and I on the Bowery together, together until death-do-us-part, love until death. SHE: You could make a comedy of it, I'd laugh my head off. HE: Yeah, my ever-loving wife'd laugh her head off if I ended on the Bowery. (Laughing.) But the joke is, if you were there, stranded drunk in