The Golden Notebook (63 page)

just as the other remarks were stock from the red cupboard. I said: 'During the cold war, when the communist hue and cry was at its height, the intellectuals here were the same. Yes, I know everyone's forgotten about it, now everyone's shocked at Mc Carthy, but at the same time, our intellectuals were playing it all down, saying things were not as bad as they seemed. Just as their opposite numbers were doing in the States. Our liberals were mostly defending, either openly or by implication, the anti-American activity committees. A leading editor could write a hysterical letter to the gutter press saying if only he'd known that X and Y, who were old friends of his, were spies, he'd have gone straight to M.I.5 with information about them. No one thought the worse of him. And all the literary societies and organisations were engaged in the most primitive sort of anti-communism-what they said, or a great deal of it, was quite true, of course, but the point is, they were simply saying what might have been found any day in the gutter press, no attempt to really understand anything, they were in full cry, a pack of barking dogs. And so I know quite well that if the heat had been turned on even a little harder, we'd have had our intellectuals packing anti-British activity committees, and meanwhile, we, the reds, were lying black is white.' 'Well?' 'Well, judging from what we've seen happening in the last thirty years, in the democracies, let alone the dictatorships, the number of people in a society really prepared to stand against a current, really ready to fight for the truth at all costs is so small that...' He suddenly said: 'Excuse me,' and walked out with his stiff blind walk. I sat in the kitchen and thought over what I'd just said. I and all the people I knew well, some of them fine people, had been sunk inside the communist conformity and lied to themselves or to others. And the 'liberal' or 'free' intellectuals could be and had been swung into witch-hunts of one kind or another very easily. Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born. I sat there, discouraged and depressed. Because in all of us brought up in a Western democracy there is this built-in belief that freedom and liberty will strengthen, will survive pressures, and the belief seems to survive any evidence against it. This belief is probably in itself a danger. Sitting there I had a vision of the world with nations, systems, economic blocks, hardening and consolidating; a world where it would become increasingly ludicrous even to talk about freedom, or the individual conscience. I know that this sort of vision has been written about, it's something one has read, but for a moment it wasn't words, ideas, but something I felt, in the substance of my flesh and nerves, as true. Saul came back down the stairs, dressed. He was now what I call 'himself,' and he said simply, with a kind of whimsical humour: 'I'm sorry I walked out, but I couldn't take what you were saying.' I said: 'Every line of thought I pursue these days turns out to be bleak and depressing. Perhaps I can't take it either.' He came over to me and put his arms around me. He said: 'We are comforting each other. What for, I wonder?' Then, with his arms around me still: 'We've got to remember that people with our kind of experience are bound to be depressed and unhopeful.' 'Or perhaps it's precisely people with our kind of experience who are most likely to know the truth, because we know what we've been capable of ourselves?' I offered him lunch, and now we talked about his childhood. A classically bad childhood, broken home, etc. After lunch he went upstairs saying he wanted to work. Almost immediately he came down, and leaned against the door frame, remarking: 'I used to be able to work for hours at a stretch, now I can't work for more than an hour without a break.' I felt the jar again. Now, having thought it all out, it is quite clear, but then I was confused. For he was talking as if he had worked for an hour instead of perhaps five minutes. He stood there, lounging, restless. Then he said: 'I've a friend back home whose parents separated when he was a kid. Do you think it might have affected him?' For a moment I couldn't answer, because 'the friend' was so obviously himself. But he'd been talking about his parents not ten minutes before. I said: 'Yes, I'm sure your parents' splitting up has affected you.' He jerked himself up, his face closed into suspicion, and he said: 'How did you know?' (*10) I said: 'You've got a bad memory, you told me about your parents a few minutes ago.' He stood, alert, watchful, thinking. His face was sharp with suspicious thought. Then he said in a scramble of words: 'Oh, I was thinking about my friend, that's all...' He turned and went upstairs. I sat, confused, fitting things together. He had genuinely forgotten he had told me. And I remembered half a dozen occasions in the last few days-he had told me something, and then mentioned it a few minutes later again as if it were a new subject. Yesterday, for instance, he said: 'Do you remember when I first came here?' speaking as if had been here many months. And another time he said: 'That time we went to the Indian restaurant,' when we'd been there that day for lunch. I went into the big room and shut my door. We have an understanding that when my door is shut, I'm not to be disturbed. Sometimes, with my door shut, I hear him walking up and down overhead, or coming halfway down the stairs, and it's as if a pressure is on me to open the door, and I do. But today I shut the door fast, and sat on my bed and tried to think. I was sweating lightly, and my hands were cold, and I couldn't breathe properly. I was clenched with anxiety, and saying over and over again: This isn't my anxiety state, it isn't mine-didn't help at all. (*11) I lay on the floor on my back with a cushion under my head, relaxed my limbs and played 'the game.' Or tried to. No use, for I could hear Saul upstairs, prowling around. Every movement he made went through me. I thought I should get out of the house, see someone. Who? I knew I couldn't discuss Saul with Molly. I telephoned her nevertheless, and she asked casually: 'How's Saul?' and I said: 'Fine.' She remarked she had seen Jane Bond, who is 'in a real state over him.' I hadn't thought of Jane Bond for some days, so I talked quickly of something, and lay down on the floor again. Last night Saul had said: 'I must take a little walk or I won't be able to sleep.' He had been gone about three hours. Jane Bond lives about half an hour away walking, ten minutes by bus. Yes, he had telephoned someone before he left. That meant, he had arranged with Jane, from my home, to meet her to make love, gone over, made love, come back, got into my bed, slept. No, we didn't make love last night. Because, unconsciously, I was defending myself against the pain of knowledge. (Yet with my intelligence I don't care, it's the creature inside me who cares, who is jealous, who sulks and wants to hurt back.) He knocked, said through the door, 'Don't want to disturb you, I'm going for a little walk.' Without knowing I was going to do this, I went to the door, opened it-he had already started off down the stairs, and asked: 'Are you going to see Jane Bond?' He stiffened, then slowly turned and faced me. 'No, I'm going for a walk.' I didn't say anything, because I was thinking it was not possible he should lie, when I asked him directly. I should have asked: 'Did you see Jane Bond last night?' I realise now I didn't because I was afraid he would say no. I made some bright and unimportant remark, and turned away, shutting the door. I couldn't think or even move. I was ill. I kept saying to myself: He's got to go, he's got to leave here. But I knew I couldn't ask him to go, so I kept saying to myself: Then you must try to detach yourself. When he came back, I knew I'd been waiting for his step for hours. It was nearly dark by then. He called a loud over-friendly greeting to me and went straight into the bathroom. (*12) I sat there thinking: It's simply not possible that this man should come straight back from Jane Bond and then go and wash off sex, knowing that I must know what he was doing. It's not possible. And yet I knew it was possible. I sat screwing myself up to say: Saul have you been sleeping with Jane Bond? When he came in I said it. He gave his loud, crude laugh, and said: 'No, I haven't.' Then he looked at me closely and came over and put his arms around me. He did so simply and warmly that I immediately succumbed. He said, very friendly: 'Now Anna, you're much too sensitive about everything. Take things easy.' He caressed me a little and then said: 'I think you ought to try and understand something-we're very different people. And another thing, the way you were living here before I came wasn't good for you. It's all right, I'm here.' With this he laid me down on the bed and began soothing me, as if I were ill. And in fact I was. My mind was churning and my stomach churned. I couldn't think, because the man who was being so gentle was the same man who made me ill. Later he said: 'And now make me supper, it'll be good for you. God help you, but you're a real domestic woman, you ought to be married to a nice settled husband somewhere.' Then, sullen, (*13) 'God help me, I always i seem to pick them.' I made him supper. This morning, early, the telephone rang. I answered it and it was Jane Bond. I woke Saul, told him, left the room and went to the bathroom, where I made a lot of noise, running water, etc. When I came back he was back in bed, curled up, half asleep. I was expecting him to tell me what Jane had said or wanted, but he didn't mention the telephone call. I was angry again. Yet the whole of last night was warm and affectionate, he had turned to me like a lover in his sleep, kissing and touching me, and even using my name, so it was meant for me. I didn't know what to feel. After breakfast he said he had to go out. He made a long, detailed explanation of having to see some man in the film industry. I knew, because of the wooden obstinate look on his face, and because of the unnecessary complication of the explanations, that he was going to see Jane Bond, he had made an arrangement to see her when she telephoned him. As soon as he left I went up to his room. Everything extremely neat and tidy. Then I began to look among his papers. I remember thinking, without any shock at myself, but as if it were my right, because he lied, that this was the first time in my life I had read another person's letters or private papers. I was angry and sick but very methodical. I found a stack of letters rubber-banded together in one corner, from a girl in America. They had been lovers. She complained he hadn't written. Then another stack of letters from a girl in Paris- again, complaints that he hadn't written. I put the letters back, not carefully, but anyhow, and looked for something else. Then I found stacks of diaries. (*14) I remember thinking it was odd that his diaries ran chronologically, not all split up like mine are. I leafed through some of the earlier ones, not reading them, but getting an impression, an unending list of new places, different jobs, an endless list of girls' names. And as a thread through the diversity of place-names, women's names, details of loneliness, detachment, isolation. I sat there on his bed, trying to marry the two images, the man I knew, and the man pictured here, who is totally self-pitying, cold, calculating, emotionless. Then I remembered that when I read my notebooks I didn't recognise myself. Something strange happens when one writes about oneself. That is, one's self direct, not one's self projected. The result is cold, pitiless, judging. Or if not judging, then there's no life in it-yes, that's it, it's lifeless. I realise, in writing this, I'm back at the point in the black notebook where I wrote about Willi. If Saul said, about his diaries, or, summing his younger self up from his later self: I was a swine, the way I treated women. Or: I'm right to treat women the way I do. Or: I'm simply writing a record of what happened, I'm not making moral judgements about myself-well, whatever he said, it would be irrelevant. Because what is left out of his diaries is vitality, life, charm. 'Willi allowed his spectacles to glitter across the room and said...' 'Saul, standing four-square and solid, grinning slightly-grinning derisively at his own seducer's pose, drawled: Come'n baby, let's fuck, I like your style.' I went on reading entries, first appalled by the cold ruthlessness of them; then translating them, from knowing Saul, into life. So I found myself continually shifting mood, from anger, a woman's anger, into the delight one feels at whatever is alive, the delight of recognition. Then the delight vanished as I came across an entry which frightened me, because I had already written it, out of some other kind of knowledge, in my yellow notebook. It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living. Three entries: 'Must get out of Detroit, I've got from it all I need. Mavis making trouble. I was crazy for her a week ago, now nothing. Strange.' Then: 'Mavis came to my apartment last night. I had Joan with me. Had to go out into the hall and send Mavis away.' Then: 'Got a letter from Jake in Detroit. Mavis cut her wrists with a razor. They got her to hospital in time. Pity, a nice girl.' There were no more references to Mavis. I was angry, with the cold, vindictive anger of the sex war; so angry I simply switched off my imagination. I left the mass of diaries. They would have taken weeks to read and I wasn't interested. I was curious now to know what he had written about me. I found the date he had come to this flat. 'Saw Anna Wulf. If I'm going to stick around London, it'll do. Mary offered me a room, but I saw trouble there. She's a good lay, but that's all. Anna doesn't attract me. A good thing in the circumstances. Mary made a scene. Jane at the party. We danced, practically fucked on the dance floor. Small, slight, boyish-took her home. Fucked all night-oh boy!' 'Today, talking to Anna, can't remember anything I said, I don't think she noticed anything.' No entries for some days. Then: 'Funny thing, I like Anna better than anyone, but I don't enjoy sleeping with her. Perhaps time to move on? Jane making trouble. Well screw these dames, literally!' 'Anna making trouble about Jane. Well too bad for her.' 'Broke with Jane. Pity, she's the best lay I've had in this bloody