Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook Quotes

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

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.

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.

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 our for happiness.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...

For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

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.

I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You’re a normal human being. What right have you to that?

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag—and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be," he said, obstinately. "But perhaps I don't feel myself worthy of such a wealth of opportunity?

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Her source of self respect was that she had not - as she put it - given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.

I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains

So much of my life has been twisted and painful that now when happiness floods right through me like being flooded over with warm glittering blue water, I can't believe it. I say to myself: I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I'm happy.

People don’t mind immoral messages. They don’t mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex’s sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t stand formlessness.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and others won't. But once having been there, there's a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it's not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It's a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don't we? And perhaps the condition of your existing at all is precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns - have you thought of that?

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.

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.

We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from choosing other partners. We did not. That I did not, isn't surprising, because of that quality in me I call lethargy, or curiosity, which always keeps me in a situation long after I should leave 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 criticizing 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.

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

Solamente hay una manera de leer, que es huronear en bibliotecas y librerías, tomar libros que llamen la atención, leyendo solamente esos, echándolos a un lado cuando aburren, saltándose las partes pesadas y nunca, absolutamente nunca, leer algo por sentido del deber o porque forme parte de una moda o de un movimiento. Recuerde que el libro que le aburre cuando tiene veinte o treinta años, le abrirá perspectivas cuando llegue a los cuarenta o a los cincuenta años, o viceversa. No lea un libro que no sea para usted el momento oportuno.

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)

A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.' 'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is,

If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I'm cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take?

We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it—us?

Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And

Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.’ He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. ‘What position?’ - I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments.

…el libro está vivo y es poderoso, fructificador y capaz de promover el pensamiento y la discusión solamente cuando su forma, intencionalidad y plan no se comprenden, debido a que el momento de captar la forma, la intencionalidad y el plan coincide con el momento en que no queda ya nada por extraer.

The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.

Yes, it’s because it’s one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics—even such a long time ago.

He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

But when you get down to it, it’s all a lie. You sit here writing and writing, but no one can see it—that’s arrogant, I told you so before. And you aren’t even honest enough to let yourself be what you are—everything’s divided off and split up. So what’s the use of patronising me and saying: You’re in a bad phase. If you’re not in a bad phase, then it’s because you can’t be in a phase, you take care to divide yourself into compartments. If things are a chaos, then that’s what they are. I don’t think there’s a pattern anywhere—you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren’t good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else. All the best people can be good to one other person or their families. But that’s egotism, it isn’t being good. We aren’t any better than the animals, we just pretend to be.

Writing is so much more problematic than drawing, full of moral pitfalls, ambiguity, public responsibility. If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the shape of the day? One of Doris Lessing's days in The Golden Notebook is fifty-four pages long. It's complete; the rest are summaries - the "impression" of a day foisted artfully upon the reader by providing a few details. Fiction is made this way - as lineal perspective gives the illusion of three dimensions in drawing. But does the selection of a day - that you begin by knowing you must remember and observe - really affect it? Do you change the balance, distort the truth? The period itself, its choice and selection, does that not in itself constitute a kind of misconstruction, and the rest follow subconsciously?

She had known it all the time: I'm so enormously exhausted, so utterly, basically tired, and in fibre of myself, that to know I haven't got to go through with living is like a reprieve. How extraordinary! And every one of these people, with the possible exception of this exuberant young man, is terrified that the machine is going to crash, and yet we all trooped obediently into it. So perhaps we all feel the same way?

And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of ‘personality’. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the ‘personality’ doesn’t exist any more. It’s the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We’re told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I’ve even been believing it.

Please don't be alarmed, you'd be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves.

You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.

On nous définit encore, même les gens les plus évolués, en fonctions de nos relations avec les hommes.

Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can’t be yours alone.

...Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer.

she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.

I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.

The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.’ ‘Everyone’s mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?’ ‘It should matter to us, surely?

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist.

I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

But my poor Saul, there’s no help for you, you’re heading straight for it. What about all those marvelous people we know, aged about fifty or sixty? Well, there are a few of them…marvelous, mature, wise people. Real people, the phrase is, radiating serenity. And how did they get to be that way? Well, we know, don’t we? Every blood one of them’s got a history of emotional crime, oh the sad bleeding corpses that litter the road to maturity of the wise, serene man or woman of fifty-odd! You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Do you really think it's right for a socialist to get what he wants by making a fool of an old woman?' 'I'm earning her a lot of money.' 'I was talking about sex,' said Paul, and Willi said: 'I don't know what you mean.' He didn't. Men are far more unconscious than women about using their sex this way; far less honest.

You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can’t be anything else. You can’t change that.’ ‘Well then, I think that’s the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.’ ‘Then I don’t follow you. And I don’t want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.

The thought [behind the Golden Notebook] was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young, black, white, men, women, capitalism, socialism: these great dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorization, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common.

Literature is analysis after the event.

That’s what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…” Her eyes reddened and filled, and again she determinedly blinked them clear.

My brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable.

There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

For better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.

Women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create a man.

Half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I’ve seen it over and over again. If

Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is. So

I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for

When a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her - of emotional and sexual responses that grows in its own laws, its own logic.

If you choose to make an nonentity of yourself, do, but don't stick that label on me.

Pagan? Ah,that is a joyous word for the aridity of Godless modern man!

I remembered the words particularly: Somebody pulled a thread of the fabric and it all dissolved.

As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what’s-wrong-with-men session, then I won’t go home, I’ll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. And when we part, there’ll be a sudden resentment, a rancour—because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women…Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done with it all, finished with the men vs. women business, all the complaints and the reproaches and the betrayals. Besides, it’s dishonest. We’ve chosen to live a certain way, knowing the penalties, or if we didn’t we know now, so why whine and complain…and besides, if I’m not careful, Molly and I will descend into a kind of twin old-maidhood where we sit around saying to each other, Do you remember how that man, what-was-his-name said that insensitive thing, it must have been in 1947…

The things that are important in life creep up on one unawared, one doesn't expect them, one hasn't given them shape in one's mind. One recognizes them, when they've appeared, that's all.

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?” “Yes,” Ted had said. “Then I can’t help you,” Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy

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.

Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody.

I mean,’ said Marion happily, ‘it’s a continent in chains, well, isn’t it?’ (Tribune, thought Anna; or possibly the Daily Worker.) ‘And measures ought to be taken immediately to restore the Africans’ faith in justice if it is not already too late.’ (The New Statesman, thought Anna.) ‘Well at least the situation ought to be thoroughly gone into in the interests of everybody.’ (The Manchester Guardian, at a time of acute crisis.) ‘But Anna, I don’t understand your attitude. Surely you’ll admit there’s evidence that something’s gone wrong?’ (The Times, editorializing a week after the news that the white administration has shot twenty Africans and imprisoned fifty more without trial.)

his look was both self-congratulatory and full of cynical cruelty. I came home, conscious of a feeling of disgust so much more powerful than usual that I sat down and made myself read the novel for the first time since it was published.

You must admit he radiates an atmosphere of the suburbs. Odd. But they all do—I mean those tycoons, they all did. One could positively see the labour-saving devices and the kiddies all in their slumber-wear, coming down to kiss daddy good night. Bloody complacent swine they all are.

Écrire sur soi-même c'est écrire sur les autres, puisque vos problèmes, vos souffrances, vos plaisirs, vos émotions -et vos idées extraordinaires et remarquables- ne peuvent pas n'appartenir qu'à vous. La façon de régler le problème de la "subjectivité", cette affreuse tendance à se préoccuper de l'infime individu qui se trouve en même temps pris dans une explosion de possibilités terribles et merveilleuses, consiste à voir en lui un microcosme et ainsi à dépasser le personnel général, comme le fait évidemment la vie, transformant une expérience intime -du moins le croyez-vous- lorsque vous êtes encore enfant, "je suis amoureuse", "j'éprouve telle ou telle émotion, je pense telle ou telle chose" -en quelque chose de plus ample: grandir consiste en fin de compte à comprendre que sa propre expérience incroyable et unique est ce que tout le monde partage.

We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognise it as frustrated idealism—now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It’s the first time I’ve believed he was capable of it.) He

The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to the brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised, When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected—yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: ‘We have won!’ At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: It is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in that smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The offer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The six soldiers are shaken and sick; now they will go and drink to drown the memory of their murder. But the man who was bound, is now free, smiles as they stumble away, cursing and hating him, just as they would have cursed and hated the other, now dead. And in this man’s smile at the six innocent soldiers there is a terrible understanding irony. This is the nightmare.

The novel had a framework made by thinking. The thought was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young; black, white; men, women; capitalism, socialism; these dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorisation, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common. That was the thought, which made the shape or pattern of 'The Golden Notebook'. But the emotions were stronger than the thought. This is why I have always seen TGN as a failure: a failure in my terms, of what I had meant. For has this book changed by an iota our tendency to think like computers set to sort everything - people, ideas, history - into boxes? No, it has not. Yet why should I have such a hubristic thought? But I was in the grip of discovery, of revelation. I had only just seen this Truth: I was watching my own mind working like a sorting machine, and I was appalled.

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s. I have the paperback copy I read at the time, and it’s dog-eared, epiphany after epiphany marked so that I could easily refer back to them. Does anyone read The Golden Notebook nowadays? I

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence.

He looked like his father. That is to say he was a closely-welded, round youth, dark, like his father, with not a trace of Molly’s dash and vivacity. But unlike Richard, whose tenacious obstinacy was open, smouldering in his dark eyes and displayed in every impatient efficient movement, Tommy had a look of being buttoned in, a prisoner of his own nature. He

Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, 'Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time'. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, 'We know that what we're doing is wrong.

The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word ‘artist’ used by the enemy. I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this — why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game — that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all — not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by “tolerantly amused eyes” was years away from me. I don’t think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of

It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing—I mean, it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning, to do without something one wants. It’s not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I’m capable of doing something bigger. Or I’m a person who needs love, and I’m doing without it. What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.

Saw in the review of a book recently: “One of those unfortunate affairs—women, even the nicest of them, tend to fall in love with men quite unworthy of them.” This review, of course, written by a man. The truth is that when “nice women” fall in love with “unworthy men” it is always either because these men have “named” them, or because they have an ambiguous uncreated quality impossible to the “good” or “nice” men. The normal, the good men, are finished and completed and without potentialities.

This war was presented to us as a crusade against the evil doctrines of Hitler, against racialism, etc., yet the whole of that enormous land-mass, about half the total area of Africa, was conducted on precisely Hitler’s assumption—that some human beings are better than others because of their race. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil—those Africans with any education at all. They

It is like remembering a particularly intense love affair, or a sexual obsession. And it is extraordinary how, as the nostalgia deepens, the excitement “stories” begin to form, to breed like cells under a microscope. And yet it is so powerful, that nostalgia, that I can only write this, a few sentences at a time. Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue.

As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical — a man wouldn’t use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to, was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalized sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake, and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively.

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it.

To get the subject of Women’s Liberation over with—I support it, of course, because women are second-class citizens, as they are saying energetically and competently in many countries. It can be said that they are succeeding, if only to the extent they are being seriously listened to. All kinds of people previously hostile or indifferent say: ‘I support their aims but I don’t like their shrill voices and their nasty ill-mannered ways.’ This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this were a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh. But there was more to it, in Maryrose’s case. “Maryrose,” said Ted, bluffly, looking down at the gleaming little head at rest on his shoulder, “why don’t you love any of us, why don’t you let any of us love you?” Maryrose merely smiled, and even in this broken light, branch-and-leaf-stippled, her brown eyes showed enormous and shone softly. “Maryrose has a broken heart,” observed Willi above my head. “Broken hearts belong to old-fashioned novels,” said Paul. “They don’t go with the time we live in.” “On the contrary,” said Ted. “There are more broken hearts than there have ever been, just because of the times we live in. In fact I’m sure any heart we are ever likely to meet is so cracked and jarred and split it’s just a mass of scar tissue.” Maryrose smiled up at Ted, shyly, but gratefully, and said seriously: “Yes, of course that’s true.

Richard, his face red with anger over his too-yellow, too-tight shirt, held a glass of whisky between two hands, turning it round and round, looking down into it. “Thanks,” he said at last, “I will.” He spoke with such a stubborn confidence in the quality of what he was going to offer his son, that Anna and Molly again raised their eyebrows at each other, conveying that the whole conversation had been wasted, as usual. Richard intercepted this glance, and said: “You two are so extraordinarily naïve.” “About business?” said Molly, with her loud jolly laugh. “About big business,” said Anna quietly, amused, who had been surprised, during her conversations with Richard, to discover the extent of his power. This had not caused his image to enlarge, for her; rather he had seemed to shrink, against a background of international money. And she had loved Molly the more for her total lack of respect for this man who had been her husband, and who was in fact one of the financial powers of the country.

But Willi had withdrawn himself. For one thing, he did not approve of such bohemianism as collective bedroom breakfasts. “If we were married,” he had complained, “it might be all right.” I laughed at him, and he said: “Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.” He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. “What position?”—I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. “Yes, Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.” “Always have been?”—inviting him to remember his history. “For as long as it matters.” “Matters to you—not to me.” But we had had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use—the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us—the truth was that we shocked each other in our deepest feelings and instincts all the time. So

Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc. etc., and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film. When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper, ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of …’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my minds starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can’t write any longer. Or only when I write fast, without looking back at what I have written. For if I look back, then the words swim and have no sense and I am conscious only of me, Anna, as a pulse in a great darkness, and the words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.

People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own Communist Parties, to think about a subject that one day will be a subject for sociologists. Which is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of the existence of a Communist Party. People or groups of people who don’t even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the Communist Party, and this is true of all countries where there has been even a tiny Communist Party. In our own small town, a year after Russia entered the war, and the left had recovered because of it, there had come into existence (apart from the direct activities of the Party which is not what I am talking about) a small orchestra, readers’ circles, two dramatic groups, a film society, an amateur survey of the conditions of urban African children which, when it was published, stirred the white conscience and was the beginning of a long-overdue sense of guilt, and half a dozen discussion groups on African problems. For the first time in its existence there was something like a cultural life in that town. And it was enjoyed by hundreds of people who knew of the communists only as a group of people to hate. And of course a good many of these phenomena were disapproved of by the communists themselves, then at their most energetic and dogmatic. Yet the communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions.

And from this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is that it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it—his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.

That's not left wing. That's a la mode.

We're back at the blade of grass again, that will press up through the bits of rusted steel a thousand years after the bombs have exploded and the world's crust has melted. Because the force of will in the blade of grass is the same as the small painful endurance.

Well, the cure for the sort of condition I am in is work. I shall write another novel. But the trouble is, with the last one there was never a point when I said: I shall write a novel. I found I was writing a novel. Well, I must put myself in the same state of mind—a kind of open readiness, a passive waiting. Then perhaps one day I’ll find myself writing.

I have never, in all my life, been so desperately and wildly and painfully happy as I was then. It was so strong I couldn’t believe it. I remember saying to myself, This is it, this is being happy, and at the same time I was appalled because it had come out of so much ugliness and unhappiness.

That’s what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…

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.

As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. And the pattern of an affair, even one that has lasted five years and has been as close as a marriage, is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn’t think like that at all.

That’s the point—anything might be true anywhere, there’s never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible—everything’s so crazy, anything at all’s possible.

Anna switched off; something inside her went dead, or moved apart from what was happening. She became a shell. She stood there, looking at words like love, friendship, duty, responsibility and knew them to be all lies.

I lay on the bed, happy. Being happy, the joy that filled me then was stronger than all the misery and the madness in the world, or so I felt it. But then happiness began to leak away, and I lay and I thought: What is this thing we need so much? (By we, meaning women.) And what is it worth? I had it with Michael, but it meant nothing to him, for if it did, he wouldn’t have left me. And now I have it with Saul, grabbing at it as if it were a glass of water and I were thirsty. But think about it, and it vanishes. I did not want to think about it. If I did there would be nothing between me and the little dwarf-plant in the pot on the window-sill, between me and the slippery horror of the curtains, or even the crocodile waiting in the reeds. I lay on the bed in the dark, listening to Saul crashing and banging over my head, and I was already betrayed. Because Saul had forgotten the ‘happiness’. By the act of going upstairs, he had put a gulf between himself and happiness.

Tội ác thực sự của Đảng Cộng sản Anh chính là vô số những con người tuyệt vời đã bị nó hoặc là bẻ gãy, hoặc là làm cho trở thành dân văn phòng khô như ngói, chẻ sợi tóc làm tư, sống khép kín trong một nhóm cùng các đảng viên khác và mất liên hệ với tất cả những gì diễn ra trên chinh đất nước mình.

Nước mắt chảy trong giấc ngủ là giọt nước mắt thật nhất chảy trong cuộc đời của chúng ta. Những giọt nước mắt lúc thức chỉ là tự thương hại mà thôi.

Chúng ta đang đóng vai tình nhân nhưng đã vượt qua lứa tuổi làm tình nhân lâu lắm rồi

Bất cứ điều gì cũng đều tốt đẹp hơn một nỗi sợ hãi chúng ta từng biết đến

Mọi người đều chỉ là kẻ ăn thịt người nếu như không để cho nhau được yên.

Chỉ có một tội lỗi thật sự và đấy là tự thuyết phục mình rằng điều tốt nhì là điều tốt nhất.

Why is she frozen?’ ‘She is afraid.’ ‘What of?’ ‘Of death.’ Sh nodded, and I broke in across the game and said: ‘No, not of my death. It seems to me that ever since I can remember anything the real thing that has been happening in the world was death and destruction. It seems to me it is stronger than life.

Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this were a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh.

It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism and then rescued from it by crystallising what one learns into a sort of intellectual primitivism-one is forced back into myth, and folk lore and everything that belongs to the savage or undeveloped stages of society. For if I say to you: I recognise in that dream, such and such a myth; or in that emotion about my father, that folk-tale; or the atmosphere of that memory is the same as an English ballad-then you smile, you are satisfied. As far as you are concerned, I've gone beyond the childish, I've transmuted it and saved it, by embodying it in myth. But in fact all I do, or you do, is to fish among the childish memories of an individual, and merge them with the art or ideas that belong to the childhood of a people.

Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter — yet it’s the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense.

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticizes her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being ‘a career woman’. This woman who, throughout the five years of their affair in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticized her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does — sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she ‘really’ is. He has rejected her ‘real’ self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected. Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.

It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism and then rescued from it by crystallising what one learns into a sort of intellectual primitivism-one is forced back into myth, and folk lore and everything that belongs to the savage or undeveloped stages of society. For if I say to you: I recognise in that dream,such and such a myth; or in that emotion about my father, that folk-tale; or the atmosphere of that memory is the same as an English ballad-then you smile, you are satisfied. As far as you are concerned, I've gone beyond the childish, I've transmuted it and saved it, by embodying it in myth. But in fact all I do, or you do, is to fish among the childish memories. of an individual, and merge them with the art or ideas that belong to the childhood of a people.

I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world. And I don’t want to hear, when I’ve had an encounter with some mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men’s minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it’s hard enough to come by) of a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date …

I was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is. Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected.

I've thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you'd use in a novel. I'd be careful not to use them. Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I'd bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night, would instantly agree with this classification-would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant. And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality.' Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and re-create them in my memory,suddenly I know it's nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later,she'd make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she'd be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she 'broke down,' or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this antihumanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I've known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George's over-grateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifyingly patient smile... I've written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I'm clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing I so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I'd never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin. And so I'll write again that George was a good man.

It's a hard case,' said Paul. 'First, I'm twenty. That means I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with women. Second, I'm twenty. I have all my life before me, and frankly the prospect often appals me. Thirdly, I'm twenty, and I'm in love with Anna and my heart is breaking.

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.

What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.' 'Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.' 'But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should?

No, there's a group of hardened, fossilised men opposed by fresh young revolutionaries as John Butte once was, forming between them a whole, a balance. And then a group of fossilised hardened men like John Butte, opposed by a group of fresh and lively-minded and critical people. But the core of deadness, of dry thought, could not exist without lively shoots of fresh life, to be turned so fast, in their turn, into dead sapless wood. In other words, I, 'Comrade Anna'- and the ironical tone of Comrade Butte's voice now frightens me when I remember it-keep Comrade Butte in existence, feed him, and in due course will become him. And as I think this, that there is no right, no wrong, simply a process, a wheel turning, I become frightened, because everything in me cries out against such a view of life, and I am back inside a nightmare which it seems I've been locked in for years, whenever I'm off guard. The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to a brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised. When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected-yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: 'We have won!' At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: it is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in that smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The officer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The six soldiers are shaken and sick; now they will go and drink to drown the memory of their murder. But the man who was bound, is now free, smiles as they stumble away, cursing and hating him, just as they would have cursed and hated the other, now dead. And in this man's smile at the six innocent soldiers there is a terrible understanding irony. This is the nightmare.

That’s what I feel too—people aren’t taking responsibility for each other. You said the socialists had ceased to be a moral force, for the time, at least, because they wouldn’t take moral responsibility. Except for a few people. You said that, didn’t you—well then. But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that’s not being responsible.” “A very great

I was back in disgust. I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from the three points of heat, and I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never really understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. The texture of the carpet was abhorrent to me, a dead processed thing; my body was a thin, meagre, spiky sort of vegetable, like an unsunned plant; and when I touched the hair on my head it was dead. I felt the floor bulge up under me. The walls were losing their density. I knew I was moving down into a new dimension, further away from sanity than I had ever been. I knew I had to get to the bed fast. I could not walk, so I let myself down on my hands and knees and crawled to the bed and lay on it, covering myself.

But she did have a sulky bursting prowling sort of energy, because she was in that state so many young girls go through―a state of sexual obsession that can be like a sort of trance. When I was fifteen, still living in Baker Street with my father, I spent some months in that state, so that now I can't walk through that area without remembering, half amused, half embarrassed, an emotional condition which was so strong it had the power to absorb into it pavements, houses, shop windows. What was interesting about June was this: surely nature should have arranged matters so that the men she met must be aware of what afflicted her. Not at all. That first evening Maryrose and I involuntarily exchanged glances and nearly laughed out loud from recognition and amused pity. We did not, because we also understood that the so obvious fact was not obvious to the men and we wanted to protect her from their laughter. All the women in the place were aware of June. I remember sitting one morning on the verandah with Mrs. Lattimer, the pretty red-haired woman who flirted with young Stanley Lett, and June came into sight prowling blindly under the gum-trees by the railway lines. It was like watching a sleepwalker. She would take half a dozen steps, staring across the valley at the piled blue mountains, lift her hands to her hair, so that her body, tightly outlined in bright red cotton, showed every straining line and the sweat patches dark under the armpits―then drop her arms, her fists clenched at her sides. She would stand motionless, then walk on again, pause, seem to dream, kick at the cinders with the toe of high white sandal, and so on, slowly, till she was out of sight beyond the sun-glittering gum-trees. Mrs. Lattimore let out a deep rich sigh, laughed her weak indulgent laugh, and said: 'My God, I wouldn't be a girl again for a million pounds. My God, to go through all that again, not for a million million.' And Maryrose and I agreed. Yet, although to us every appearance of this girl was so powerfully embarrassing, the men did not see it and we took care not to betray her. There is a female chivalry, woman for woman, as strong as any other kind of loyalty. Or perhaps it was we didn't want brought home to us the deficiencies of imagination of our own men.

He said, cold: “If you say so, I’ve got to believe you.”Then he leaped over at me, and grabbed my shoulders and shook me: “I hate you for being normal, I hate you for it. You’re a normal human being. What right have you to that? I suddenly understood that you remember everything, you probably remember everything I’ve ever said. You remember everything that’s happened to you, it’s intolerable.”His fingers dug into my shoulders and his face was alive with hatred. I said: “Yes, I do remember everything.”But not in triumph. I was aware of myself as he saw me, a woman inexplicably in command of events, because she could look back and see a smile, a movement, gestures; hear words, explanations—a woman inside time. I disliked the solemnity, the pompousness of that upright little custodian of the truth. When he said: “It’s like being a prisoner, living with someone who knows what you said last week, or can say: three days ago you did so and so,”I could feel a prisoner with him, because I longed to be free of my own ordering, commenting memory. I felt my sense of identity fade. My stomach clenched and my back began to hurt.

Anyone could tell us two writers shouldn’t be together. Or rather, that a competitive American shouldn’t be with a woman who has written a book.”“That’s right,”he said. “It’s a challenge to my sexual superiority, and that isn’t a joke.”“I know it isn’t. But please don’t give me any more of your pompous socialist lectures about the equality of men and women.”“I shall probably give you pompous lectures because I enjoy it. But I won’t believe in them myself. The truth is, I resent you for having written a book which was a success. And I’ve come to the conclusion I’ve always been a hypocrite, and in fact I enjoy a society where women are second-class citizens, I enjoy being boss and being flattered.”“Good,”I said. “Because in a society where not one man in ten thousand begins to understand the ways in which women are second-class citizens, we have to rely for company on the men who are at least not hypocrites.

Saul came into my room, prowling around and around, restless, and he saw the new notebook, and pounced on it. “Oh this is pretty,”he said. “What is it for?”“I don’t know yet.”“Then I want it,”he said. I nearly said: “All right, have it,”watching in myself a need to give spouting like water from a whale. I was annoyed at myself, because I wanted it, yet so nearly gave it to him. I knew this need to comply was part of the sadistic-masochistic cycle we are in. I said: “No, you can’t have it.”It cost me a great deal to say it—I even stammered. He took the book up and said, laughing: “Gimme, gimme, gimme.”I said: “No.”He had expected me to give it, because he had made a joke of the gimme, gimme; and now he stood glancing at me sideways, and murmuring, not laughing at all, gimme, gimme, gimme, in a child’s voice. He had become a child. I saw how the new personality, or rather, the old one, entered him like an animal entering a thicket. His body curved and crouched, became a weapon; his face, which when he is “himself,”is good-humoured, shrewd, sceptical, was the face of a little murderer. He whipped around, holding the book, ready to run for the door; (* 19) and I saw him clearly, the slum kid, member of a gang of slum kids, lifting something from a shop counter, or running from the police. I said: “No, you can’t have it,”as I would have done to a child, and he came to himself, slowly, all the tension going out of him; and he laid the book down, good-humoured again, even grateful. I thought how odd it was, that he should need the authority of someone who could say no, and yet it was my life he had drifted into, I who find it so hard to say no. Because now I had said no, and he laid the book down, every line of him expressing the deprived child who had had something he very badly wanted denied to him, I felt stricken. I wanted to say: Take it, for God’s sake, it’s not important. But now I couldn’t say it, and I was frightened at how quickly this unimportant thing, the new pretty book, had become part of the fight. He stood for a while, by the door, forlorn; while I watched him straighten himself, and saw how a thousand times in his childhood he had straightened himself, stiffened his shoulders, and “put it under his belt,”as he had told me everyone must do when they had trouble.

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.

For she is remembering Paul’s saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

Meantime, other “feminist bibles”had appeared, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex being the best. Which brings me to something no one believes. When I wrote The Golden Notebook it never occurred to me I was writing “a feminist bible.”The sixties feminists were not the first in the arena. “The Woman Question”dated from the fifteenth century. In communist circles in the forties and fifties feminist issues were much discussed. But the second sentence of The Golden Notebook is: “‘The point is,’said Anna, ‘as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’“This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its “structure”said. Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture. So I became “a feminist icon.”But what had I said in The Golden Notebook? That any kind of singlemindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness. (This may be observed most easily in religion and politics.)

But you know how it is—it’s always that moment, when a man looks all wounded in his masculinity, one can’t bear it, one needs to bolster him up.” “Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?” “Yes, but I never seem to learn.

Ella had considered this before, with amusement. But she is thinking: No. If they had thought us Lesbian it would have attracted them, they would have been around in swarms. Every man I’ve ever known has spoken with relish—either openly or unconsciously, about Lesbians. It’s an aspect of their incredible vanity: seeing themselves as redeemers of these lost females

Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticises her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being “a career woman.” This woman who, throughout the five years of their affair, in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticised her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties, and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does—sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she “really” is. He has rejected her “real” self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected

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.

It must be about six o’clock. My knees are tense. I realise that what I used to refer to, to Mother Sugar, as “the housewife’s disease”has taken hold of me. The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael’s-breakfast-don’t-forget-I’m-out-of-tea-etc.-etc. With this useless but apparently unavoidable tension resentment is also switched on. Resentment against what? An unfairness. That I should have to spend so much of my time worrying over details. The resentment focuses itself on Michael; although I know with my intelligence it has nothing to do with Michael. And yet I do resent him, because he will spend his day, served by secretaries, nurses, women in all kinds of capacities, who will take this weight off him. I try to relax myself, to switch off the current. But my limbs have started to ache, and I must turn over.

But the anger is not related to him. Long ago, in the course of the sessions with Mother Sugar, I learned that the resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. I can see it in women’s faces, their voices, every day, or in the letters that come to the office. The woman’s emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky ones like me—fight it. It is a tiring fight.

The fight with my various forms of dissatisfaction tires me; but I know this is not a personal fight. When I talk about this with other women, they tell me they have to fight all kinds of guilt they recognise as irrational, usually to do with working, or wanting time for themselves; and the guilt is a habit of the nerves from the past, just as my happiness a few moments ago was a habit of the nerves from a situation that is finished.

Michael takes me from behind, half asleep, fierce and close. He is taking me impersonally, and so I do not respond as I do when he is loving Anna. And besides with one half of my mind I am thinking how, if I hear Janet’s soft feet outside, I must be up and across the room to stop her coming in. She never comes in until seven; that is the rule; I do not expect her to come in; yet I have to be alert. While Michael grips me and fills me the noises next door continue, and I know he hears them too, and that part of the pleasure, for him, is to take me in hazard; that Janet, the little girl, the eight-year-old, represents for him partly women—other women, whom he betrays to sleep with me; and partly, child; the essence of child, against whom he is asserting his rights to live. He never speaks of his own children without a small, half-affectionate, half-aggressive laugh—his heirs, and his assassins. My child, a few feet away through the wall, he will not allow to cheat him of his freedom. When we are finished, he says: “And now, Anna, I suppose you are going to desert me for Janet?” And he sounds like a child who feels himself slighted for a younger brother or sister. I laugh and kiss him; although the resentment is suddenly so strong I clench my teeth against it. I control it, as always, by thinking: If I were a man I’d be the same. The control and discipline of being a mother came so hard to me, that I can’t delude myself that if I’d been a man, and not forced into self-control, I’d have been any different. And yet for the few moments it takes for me to put on the wrap to go into Janet, the resentment is like a raging poison. Before I go in to Janet I wash myself quickly between the legs so that the smell of sex may not disturb her, even though she doesn’t yet know what it is. I like the smell, and hate to wash it off so quickly; and the fact that I must adds to my bad temper.

As Tommy had said, Richard behind his desk was impressive in a way she would never have expected possible. The head offices of this empire occupied four floors of an ancient and ugly building in the City. These offices were of course not where the actual business was done; but rather a showcase for the personalities of Richard and his associates. The decor was tactful and international. One would not have been surprised to see it anywhere in the world. From the moment one entered the great front door, the lift, corridors, waiting rooms, were a long but discreet preparation for the moment one finally entered Richard’s office. The floor was six inches deep in thick dark pile. The walls were of dark glass between white panels. It was lit unemphatically; and apparently from behind the various wall plants that trailed well-tended greenery from level to level. Richard, his sullen and obstinate body cancelled by anonymous suiting, sat behind a desk that looked like a tomb in greenish marble.

I remember someone saying that the importance of any public man can be gauged by the number of mellifluous young men he has about him.

Anna directed the silent, compassionate thought towards her daughter: Well my poor girl, you’d better get used to it early, because you’re going to have to live in a world full of it.

And as she did so she could see herself go through a process which, it seemed to her, she was now having to make use of a hundred times a day: she straightened herself, toughened herself, became wary; and because she was so tired, because “the well was dry,” she set her brain on the alert, a small critical, dry machine. She could even feel that intelligence there, at work, defensive and efficient—a machine. And she thought: this intelligence, it’s the only barrier between me and—but this time she did finish it, she knew how to end the sentence. Between me and cracking up. Yes.

A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for months. The point of the novel would be the contrast between the surface of his life, which was orderly and planned, yet without any long-term objective, and an underlying motif which had reference only to the suicide, which would lead up to the suicide. His plans for his future were all vague and impossible, in contrast with the sharp practicality of his present life. The undercurrent of despair or madness or illogicalness would lead on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future. So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide. The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of his life would be understood—a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality, commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood at the moment of death that the link between the dark need for death, and death, itself, had been the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity, but intimations of madness.

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.

She was using the water as she had used the fruit earlier—to calm herself, to assure herself of the possibility of normality. Yet all the time she was thinking: I’m right off balance. I feel as if the atmosphere of this flat were being poisoned, as if a spirit of perverse and ugly spite were everywhere. Yet it’s nonsense. The truth is, everything I’m thinking at the moment is wrong. I can feel it is…and yet I’m saving myself by this sort of thinking. Saving myself from what? She felt ill again, and frightened, as she had on the tube. She thought: I’ve got to stop it, I simply must—though she could not have said what she had to stop. I’ll go next door, she decided, and sit down, and—she did not finish the thought, but she had a mental image of a dry well, slowly filling up with water. Yes; that’s what’s wrong with me—I’m dry. I’m empty.

Nevertheless two men good-humouredly greeted her, and both times she froze into nervous annoyance, and walked on with hastening steps. She got into her bedroom and locked the door as if against a danger. Then she sat at the window and thought that five years before the dinner alone would have been pleasant because of its solitariness, and because of the possibilities of an encounter; and the walk home from the restaurant alone delightful. And she would certainly have had a cup of coffee or a drink with one or other of the two men. So what had happened to her? It was true that with Paul she had taught herself never to look at a man, even casually, because of his jealousy; she was, with him, like a protected indoors woman from a Latin country. But she had imagined this was an outward conformity to save him from self-inflicted pain. Now she saw that her whole personality had changed. For some time she sat, listless, at the window, watching the darkening but blossoming city, and told herself she should make herself walk through its streets, and force herself into talking to people; she should let herself be picked up and flirt a little. But she understood she was as incapable of walking down the hotel stairs, leaving her key at the desk and going into the streets, as if she had just served a prison sentence for four years in solitary confinement and then told to behave normally. She went to bed. She was unable to sleep.

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows: in this case, that women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don’t live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly…I am always coming to the conclusion that my real emotions are foolish, I am always having, as it were, to cancel myself out. I ought to be like a man, caring more for my work than for people; I ought to put my work first, and take men as they come, or find an ordinary comfortable man for bread and butter reasons—but I won’t do it, I can’t be like that…

Before Anna’s eyes she changed from a little girl into a sombre woman. She sat staring: serious, ironical. “Don’t you see, I’ve got to think it’s funny?” “Yes, I do.” “It happened all at once, at breakfast one morning. Richard’s always been horrid at breakfast. He’s always bad tempered and he nags at me. But the funny thing is, why did I let him? And he was going on and on, nagging away about me seeing Tommy so much. And suddenly, it was like a sort of revelation. It really was, Anna. He was sort of bouncing up and down the breakfast room. And his face was red. And he was so bad tempered. And I was listening to his voice. He’s got an ugly voice, hasn’t he? It’s a bully’s voice, isn’t it?” “Yes, it is.” “And I thought—Anna I wish I could explain it. It was really a revelation. I thought: I’ve been married to him for years and years, and all that time I’ve been—wrapped up in him. Well women are, aren’t they? I’ve thought of nothing else. I’ve cried myself to sleep night after night for years. And I’ve made scenes, and been a fool and been unhappy and…The point is, what for? I’m serious Anna.” Anna smiled, and Marion went on: “Because the point is, he’s not anything, is he? He’s not even very good-looking. He’s not even very intelligent—I don’t care if he is ever so important and a captain of industry. Do you see what I mean?” “Well, and then?” “I thought, My God, for that creature I’ve ruined my life. I remember the moment exactly. I was sitting at the breakfast-table, wearing a sort of negligee thing I’d bought because he likes me in that sort of thing—you know, frills and flowers, or well, he used to like me in them. I’ve always hated them. And I thought, for years and years I’ve even been wearing clothes I hated, just to please this creature.” Anna laughed. Marion was laughing, her handsome face alive with self-critical irony, and her eyes sad and truthful. “It’s humiliating, isn’t it Anna?” “Yes, it is.” “But I bet you’ve never made a fool of yourself about any stupid man. You’ve got too much sense.” “That’s what you think,” said Anna drily. But she saw this was a mistake; it was necessary for Marion to see her, Anna, as self-sufficient, and non-vulnerable. Marion, not hearing what Anna had said, insisted: “No, you’ve got too much sense, and that’s why I admire you.

You’re suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain 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.

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.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly less stupid than we are to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have always known, they have known for ten thousand years, that to lock a human being into solitary confinement can make a madman of him or an animal. They have always known that a poor man frightened of the police and his landlord is a slave. They have always known that frightened people are cruel. They have always known that violence breeds violence. And we know it. But do the great masses of the world know it? No. It is our job to tell them. Because the great men can't be bothered. Their imaginations are already occupied with how to colonise Venus; they are already creating in their minds visions of a society full of free and noble human beings. Meanwhile, human beings are ten thousand years behind them, imprisoned in fear. The great men can't be bothered. And they are right. Because they know we are here, the boulder-pushers. They know we will go on pushing the boulder up the lower slopes of an immensely high mountain, while they stand on the top of the mountain, already free. All our lives, you and I, we will use all our energies, all our talents, into pushng that boulder another inch up the mountain. And they rely on us and they are right; and that is why we are not useless after all.

It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’s no hope for us. We’re going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.

As I was saying, that’s the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream.

I was marvelling, again, how easy it is, living deprived, to forget love, joy, delight.

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.

Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel.

Why should I be expected to shut up about everything I believe in?

You always take it for granted that women are better than men.

I'd rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I'm not saying I'm choosing failure. I mean, one doesn't choose failure, does one? I know what I don't want, but not what I do want.

It's painful thinking of the people one has been cruel to.

That they were both ‘insecure’ and ‘unrooted’, words which dated from the era of Mother Sugar, they both freely acknowledged. But Anna had recently been learning to use these words in a different way, not as something to be apologized for, but as flags or banners for an attitude that amounted to a different philosophy.

What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point I am entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere

I don't think there's a pattern anywhere - you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren't good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else.

Why am I so ungrateful when I suffer so little compared to other women?

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable.

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.

I think people need other people to be kind to them.

Emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that's why people are measuring it out.

No one does anything to me, I do it to myself.

If a person can be invaded by a personality who isn't theirs, why can't people - I mean people in the mass be invaded by alien personalities.

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.