Thoughts at reading the first 250 pages of the book:
Rambling treatment on communism, made less interesting by the fact that I simply do not
care about the major or minor characters, their thoughts, ideas, their situation and involvement in politics of their day and age which should have been relevant for a later generation far removed from the politics following the Second World War, but the author seems to have little disregard for an audience other than that of her time and age. The feministic ideals are apparent but too shallow to have a considerable impression on me. The Black Book has so far been a tiresome tirade on Anna’s experiences with her novel, the inception of the idea which flowered into her only novel correlated with her theories on communism and involvement and eventual disillusion with the said political ideology.
I still don’t care about Paul, Jimmy, Ted and Willi despite the exhausting details of their in-party lives – the characters in Anna’s journal entry are just that, characters and not people. I’m not concerned with their misfortunes and personality traits, they are neither inspiring not interesting, rather seem irrelevant to the initial plot of two women discussing highly charged domestic affairs. Here’s to hoping these minor male characters are bought to sense in the book ahead.
Excerpt
“And the others? Paul and Willi together, talking about history—interminably. Jimmy in argument with Paul—usually about history; but in fact what Jimmy was saying, over and over again, was that Paul was frivolous, cold, heartless. But Paul and Ted had no connection with each other, they did not even quarrel.”
“But instead of the hard drinks he wanted us to order, we asked for wine, and he brought us chilled white Cape wine. It was very good wine; and we did not want to drink the raw Cape brandy Mr Boothby brought us but we did drink it, and then some more wine.”
Skipping lines terminally. Tedious and boring read on political agendas and political activism. Anna’s introversion is excluded, the diary detailing on observations rather than personal learning and emotional experiences. Throughout the diary entries, Anna seems like a bland author far removed from her fellows despite having shared an important phase of her life within them.
Thoughts on the first 850 pages
After the tedious blathering covering the first four, five hundred pages, Anna’s half-finished story of Ella brought about the true beauty of the novel – Ella and Paul’s characters breathe fresh refinement into a novel that is just now beginning to form shape. Interesting, vibrant and true to life the story of Ella and Paul, and the commencement of a doomed relationship provides for an interesting, introspective read.
Thoughts on Chapter 2
I find myself skipping yet again the story of Comrade Stalin. Why must Anna, or rather Lessing, brazenly torture the reader with outdated, intangible, politically motivated stories which seem so disconnected to the “original” plot of the story (that of Anna and Molly’s lives) that it virtually renders the reader (myself alone) uninterested and dispirited.
Thank goodness, the Stalin story lasted a few pages and still I have no mind for revisiting them since by now I know that would be futile.
Ella’s aborted relationship with Paul has had dire effects on her, much relatable to any harsh breakup one goes through. While I was reading Ella’s story, I kept reimagining Anna as if the writer and her character are inseparable, two extensions of one person. Ella is Anna, Anna is Ella (or at least what she hopes to be).
Thoughts on the Third Half
The De Silva story profoundly angered me, which if I can trace back is the exact response the writer (or feminists as a whole) want to elicit from me: to viciously loathe the male gender. Anna’s portrayal of De Silva is nothing short of ridiculous, and it was not only his character that made me furious but also that of Anna who is briefing in her diary his hateful personality, his childish need for mothering, yet she sleeps with him the very night he bares a grim story to her.
So far all the men Anna has associated with have been married, with dutiful albeit miserable wives and a handful of children. Anna seems to care for the poor wives only when a certain time has lapsed in her relationship with a married man and when he starts to show his true colours, his weaknesses and shortcomings. That is when Anna begins to pity the home bound wives, she begins to sympathise with them just and only when the man begins to fall short of her expectations. This behaviour is ugly and notorious, and does it not go against the feminist ideals? In other words, Anna uses a married man for as long as he succeeds to meet her expectations, and when he begins to fall at par, she discards him using his wife and character traits as a crutch.
Thoughts on Chapter 4
Anna’s relationship with Saul Green is undetermined. She is in love with a hurtful, indifferent, very complex man despite having been in a relationship with all previous men who exhibited the same traits Saul Green does single-handedly. It is pitiful and ugly. Has Anna learnt nothing? Did she fall in love with Saul only when she claimed to herself that she might? Did that very question trigger her feelings even when she knew deep in her heart he was bad for her? Or has she come about to love him because he needs mothering, since all the previous men in her life were in need of constant pampering?
This brings me to another point, that of the novel being a solely feminist read. Do feminists believe that all men have an inherent need to be nurtured? This may even be derived from the Freudian concept of Oedipus Complex, but in this case it runs the other way around. Isn’t it dangerous for women to believe that any male around them is there to seek validation of the self, that they must be a crutch for them? The men in the novel are definitely portrayed as such, but I tend to disagree with harsh conviction. Yes, women are naturally inclined to be softer in matters of heart, are more nurturing than their male counterpart but that does not give one the right to treat their men as they would a child, to extend to them the same ideas and thoughts as one would with a young one. This is a dangerous book in terms of the hatred it invokes against the male gender and how it typifies their kind.
What is the meaning and implication of an androgynous mind? Anna seems to refer to it time and time again, this time in reference to Saul Green – the multifaceted, troubled man she has taken under her wings as a lover and as a child:
“I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place”
Now that the tumultuous relationship between Anna and Saul had ended, I sighed with relief only to find out a few pages later that she would go to bed yet again with an American, a novelist, a broken half, a man-child Milt and to add to that, a tenant of hers. I’m aggravated to say the least.
“You don’t think there’s something slightly extraordinary about a state of affairs where a man walks into a woman’s flat and says: I’ve got to share our bed because I fall into space if I sleep alone, but I can’t make love to you because if I do I’ll hate you?”…
And later:
“In the morning she felt from deadly cold in her arms, a weight of terrible cold, like holding death. She slowly rubbed him warm and awake. Warm, awake, and grateful, he came into her. But by then she was already armed against him, she could not prevent herself from being tense, she could not relax.”
This duplicitous, self-antagonising behaviour exhibited by Anna who keeps making the same mistakes over and over have gotten tedious and rotten by now. As much as I enjoyed reading about her chaotic relationship with Saul, her slow descent into madness around him, I was much relieved when it ended. And now we are here again, the last few pages of this momentous novel and I feel as a reader I have learnt as little from this story as Anna has from her life.
What a flat ending! Molly’s getting married, Anna will be dishing out marriage advice, Tommy and Marion and Richard will continue living their usual lives; I’m unmoved by Paul, Willi, Ted, Jimmy, MaryAnn, Mrs. Boothsby and the whole Mashopi Hotel gang…on the whole an unfulfilled, quick ending to an otherwise unnecessarily long, rambling novel marked by keen insights here and there. My first impressions remain unchanged.
“The point is,” said Anna, “as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.”
So perhaps the end of the novel is justified in terms of not only Anna’s growth, but that of political ideologies, and other ideals the society vouches for.
FREE WOMEN 1:
ANNA MEETS HER FRIEND MOLLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1957 AFTER A SEPARATION
• The two women were alone in the London flat. “The point is,” said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, “the point is, that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up.”
• When the two women went out together, Anna deliberately effaced herself and played to the dramatic Molly. When they were alone, she tended to take the lead
• Molly, abrupt, straightforward, tactless, had frankly domineered Anna
• But now, sitting with Molly talking, as they had so many hundreds of times before, Anna was saying to herself: 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.
• And so had his eyes been, like Tommy’s even when he was looking at someone: as if turned inwards on himself
• “They aren’t—what I mean is—they aren’t what they do; but if I start working with you, then I’ll be what I do. Don’t you see that?”
• She did not want Tommy flushed out of the safe period of contemplation she was offering him by the fire of Richard’s ridicule.
• “I didn’t know Anna was writing at all, these days,” said Molly, coming in firmly. “I don’t,” said Anna, quickly. “There you are,” said Tommy. “Why do you say that?” “I remember telling you that I’d been afflicted with an awful feeling of disgust, of futility. Perhaps I don’t like spreading those emotions.”
• “Do you realise how many of the things we say are just echoes.”
• “I reverted to my most primitive communist phase—you remember, when one thinks all one has to do is to shoot the bastards—that is, before one learned their opposite numbers are just as irresponsible”
• “Because this is the country we know. The other countries are the places we don’t think in.”
• “Well he’s currently in prison so I suppose by this time next year he’ll be Prime Minister.”
• She covered the windows over, listening with pleasure to the intimate sliding sound of the curtain runners in their deep grooves
• When I said that to Mother Sugar she replied with the small nod of satisfaction people use for these resounding truths, that the artist writes out of an incapacity to live. I remember the nausea I felt when she said it; I feel the reluctance of disgust now when I write it: it is because this business about art and the artist has become so debased, the property of every sloppy-minded amateur that any person with a real connection with the arts wants to run a hundred miles at the sight of the small satisfied nod, the complacent smile
• Now, writing about it, I have to switch it off, or “a story” would begin to emerge, a novel, and not the truth. 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
• Yet the communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions.
• 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
• Anna,” he said, or chanted. “Anna, beautiful Anna, absurd Anna, mad Anna, our consolation in this wilderness, Anna of the tolerantly amused black eyes
• George needed a woman to submit to him, he needed a woman to be under his spell physically. And men can no longer dominate women in this way without feeling guilty about it
• If there is a couple in the centre of a group with a real full sexual relationship it acts like a catalyst for the others, and often, indeed, destroys the group altogether
• 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. And all the time, down our cold faces, pressed together, the hot tears were running.
• Better the evils we know
• A born talker, never stops talking, but the most interesting kind of talker there is, she never knows what she is going to say until it is out of her mouth, so that she is continually blushing, catching herself up short, explaining just what it is she has meant, or laughing nervously. Or she stops with a puzzled frown in the middle of a sentence, as if to say: “Surely I don’t think that?” So while she talks she has the appearance of someone listening
• There are hundreds and thousands of people, all over the country, simmering away in misery and no one cares
• She was thinking: If I go, I’ll have to iron something to wear. She almost got up to examine her clothes, but frowned and thought: If I’m thinking of what to wear, that means that I really want to go? How odd. Perhaps I do want to go? After all, I’m always doing this, saying I won’t do something, then I change my mind. The point is, my mind is probably already made up. But which way? I don’t change my mind. I suddenly find myself doing something when I’ve said I wouldn’t. Yes. And now I’ve no idea at all what I’ve decided.
• To move, mile after mile, through the weight of ugliness that is London in its faceless peripheral wastes made her angry; then the anger ebbed out, leaving fear
• Looking around again she saw it was not a party, but an association of people who were there because the Wests had said: “It’s time we asked some people around,” and they had come saying: “I suppose we’ve got to go over to the Wests.”
• “On the surface everything’s fine—all quiet and tame and suburban. But underneath it’s poisonous. It’s full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.”
• Every fibre of herself is woven with him, and she cannot imagine living without him. The mere idea of being without him causes a black cold fear to enclose her, so she does not think of it. And she is clinging, so she comes to realise, to this image of the other woman, the third, as a sort of safety or protection for herself.
• “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.”
• And yet I, Anna, like Ella with Paul, refused to see it. Paul gave birth to Ella, the naïve Ella. He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.
• What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety.
• She told herself that she knew no one who was absorbed heart and soul in the work they did; everyone seemed to work reluctantly, or with cynicism, or with a divided mind, so
• Ella had a dream which was unpleasant and disturbing. She was in the ugly little house, with its little rooms that were all different from each other. She was Paul’s wife, and only by an effort of will could she prevent the house disintegrating, and flying off in all directions because of the conflict between the rooms. She decided she must furnish the whole house again, in one style, hers. But as soon as she hung new curtains or painted a room out, Muriel’s room was re-created. Ella was like a ghost in this house and she realised it would hold together, somehow, as long as Muriel’s spirit was in it and it was holding together precisely because every room belonged to a different epoch, a different spirit. And Ella saw herself standing in the kitchen, her hand on the pile of Women at Home; she was a “sexy piece” (she could hear the words being said, by Dr West) with a tight coloured skirt and a very tight jersey and her hair was cut fashionably. And Ella realised that Muriel was not there after all, she had gone to Nigeria to join Paul, and Ella was waiting in the house until Paul came back.
• Yes, the stupid faith and naivety and trust had led, quite logically, into her standing at the window waiting for a man whom she knew, quite well, would never come to her again.
• To show a woman loving a man one should show her cooking a meal for him or opening a bottle of wine for the meal, while she waits for his ring at the door. Or waking in the morning before he does to see his face change from the calm of sleep into a smile of welcome. Yes. To be repeated a thousand times. But that isn’t literature. Probably better as a film. Yes, the physical quality of life, that’s living, and not the analysis afterwards, or the moments of discord or premonition. A shot in a film: Ella slowly peeling an orange, handing Paul yellow segments of the fruit, which he takes, one after another, thoughtfully, frowning: he is thinking of something else.
• She is there because she cannot deeply feel about anything. She is frozen
• “But yesterday I met a woman who has been in psychoanalysis for ten years—an American naturally.”
• It occurred to me, looking at this room, that the raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was valuable in it and I should hold fast to it
• All I can remember when I wake is that I have been crying. When I told Mrs Marks, she said: “The tears we shed in our sleep are the only genuine tears we shed in our lives. The waking tears are self-pity.” I said: “That’s very poetic, but I can’t believe you mean it.” “And why not?” “Because when I go to sleep knowing I am going to cry, there’s pleasure in it.”
• “All self-knowledge is knowing, on deeper and deeper levels, what one knew before.”
• 12th Jan, 1952 When President Truman told the world, early in 1950, that the U.S. would accelerate efforts to produce the H-bomb—which would have, according to the scientists, an explosive effect 1,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, or equal to twenty million tons of T.N.T.—Albert Einstein pointed out quietly that there “emerges, more and more distinctly, the spectre of general annihilation.” Statesman
FREE WOMEN 2:
TWO VISITS, SOME TELEPHONE CALLS AND A TRAGEDY
• And it isn’t even as if I can compare present offerings with some beautiful past experience, because I can’t remember ever being really satisfied, I’ve never said: Yes, this is it
• He said that if he was Chief of Police trying to root out communists somewhere, he’d ask one question: Would you go to an undeveloped country and run a country clinic for fifty people? All the Reds would answer: “No, because what’s the point of improving the health of fifty people when the basic organisation of society is unchanged.”
• What he actually said was, the result of the communist countries on Europe is that people can’t be bothered. Because everyone’s got used to the idea of whole countries changing completely in about three years—like China or Russia. And if they can’t see a complete change ahead, they can’t be bothered
• “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.”
• “I’m serious. Now tell me. You used to live by a philosophy—well didn’t you?” “I suppose so.” “And now you say, the communist myth. So what do you live by now? No, don’t use words like stoicism, it doesn’t mean anything.” “It seems to me something like this—every so often, perhaps once in a century, there’s a sort of—act of faith. A well of faith fills up, and there’s an enormous heave forward in one country or another, and that’s a forward movement for the whole world. Because it’s an act of imagination—of what is possible for the whole world. In our century it was 1917 in Russia. And in China. Then the well runs dry, because, as you say, the cruelty and the ugliness are too strong. Then the well slowly fills again. And then there’s another painful lurch forward.” “A lurch forward?” he said. “Yes.” “In spite of everything, a lurch forward?” “Yes—because every time the dream gets stronger. If people can imagine something, there’ll come a time when they’ll achieve it.”
• I can’t stop thinking about this phenomenon—that when two of us meet, our discussions are on a totally different level than when there are three people present. Two people, and it is two persons, from a critical tradition, discussing politics as people not communists would discuss them
• Remembering always what Michael says—that this is a time when it is impossible to know the truth about anything
• She had never, since he had left her, been able to achieve a vaginal orgasm; she was able to reach the sharp violence of the exterior orgasm, her hand becoming Paul’s hand, mourning as she did so, the loss of her real self. She slept, overstimulated, nervous, exhausted, cheated
• She was unable, so weakened was she as an independent being, to enjoy sitting at a table publicly without a man’s protection,
• Ella found herself in the grip of a sensation which, when she examined it, turned out to be loneliness. It was as if, between her and the groups of people, were a space of cold air, an emotional vacuum. The sensation was of physical cold, of physical isolation. She was thinking of Paul again: so powerfully that it seemed inconceivable that he should not simply walk in through a door and come up to her
• Ella was thinking: But with Paul, I would have come in that time—so what’s wrong?—it’s not enough to say, I don’t love this man? She understood suddenly that she would never come with this man. She thought: 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. I could never have an orgasm with this man, I can give pleasure and that’s all. But why not? Am I saying that I can never come except with a man I love? Because what sort of a desert am I condemning myself to if that’s true?
• He smiled, his eyes shut. The smile was strong and warm; out of another world than the one where he says: But Anna, why should I count? I felt “nonsense,” of course he won’t leave me; he can’t smile at me, like that, and mean to leave me. I lay down beside him, on my back…
• I say something like this: “Art during the Middle Ages was communal, unindividual; it came out of a group consciousness. It was without the driving painful individuality of the art of the bourgeois era. And one day, we will leave behind the driving egotism of individual art. We will return to an art which will express not man’s self-divisions and separateness from his fellows but his responsibility for his fellows and his brotherhood. Art from the West…”
• I say: “That’s treachery.” “To what?” “To humanism.” He thinks and says: “The idea of humanism will change like everything else.” I say: “Then it will become something else. But humanism stands for the whole person, the whole individual, striving to become as conscious and responsible as possible about everything in the universe
FREE WOMEN 3:
TOMMY ADJUSTS HIMSELF TO BEING BLIND WHILE THE OLDER PEOPLE TRY TO HELP HIM
• Now she put her face in her hands and wept, differently, through her whole body. When she had finished crying, she looked up and said, trying to smile: “I oughtn’t to cry. He’ll hear me.” There was gallantry in that smile even now.
• At precisely three o’clock she was presenting herself to Richard’s secretary, telling herself that of course he would make a point of keeping her waiting. About ten minutes she judged would be the amount of time necessary to feed his vanity. Fifteen minutes later she was informed she might enter.
• But the happy or well-mated insects stood all around us, one above the other, with their bright round idiotic black eyes staring
• A writer is the conscience of the world.
• Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.
• She thinks that nothing has occurred which has not been happening all her life
• 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.
• I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course, Anna
• For she is remembering Paul’s saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.
• He remains alone, withdrawing from his wife into books and the dry, spare dreams of a man who might have been a poet or a mystic. And in fact, when he dies, journals, poems, fragments of prose are found in locked drawers.
• Keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary
• 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
• For words are form, and if I am at a pitch where shape, form, expression are nothing, then I am nothing, for it has become clear to me, reading the notebooks, that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence. This intelligence is dissolving and I am very frightened
• And Nelson’s wife was locked, I could see, in some permanent, controlled hysteria. Then I understood that they all were; they were all people on the extreme edge of themselves, controlling it, holding it, while hysteria flickered in the good-humoured barbed talk, in the shrewd, on-guard eyes.
FREE WOMEN 4:
ANNA AND MOLLY INFLUENCE TOMMY, FOR THE BETTER. MARION LEAVES RICHARD. ANNA DOES NOT FEEL HERSELF
• He said: Do you realise how many generations it takes to make a society where buses run on time? Where business letters get answered efficiently? Where you can trust your ministers not to take bribes?
• When the sex is over, she knows that for him it has meant accomplishing something. She says sharply, out of instinctive knowledge, not knowing she was going to say it: “You’ve just been making love to someone else.” He says quickly: “How did you know?” And then, just as if he has not said, how did you know, he says: “I haven’t. You’re imagining it.” Then, because of her tense miserable silence, he says, sullen: “I didn’t think it would matter. You have to understand, I don’t take it seriously.” This last remark makes her feel diminished and destroyed, as if she does not exist as a woman.
• 14 A SHORT NOVEL A man and a woman, married or in a long relationship, secretly read each other’s diaries in which (and it is a point of honour with them both) their thoughts about each other are recorded with the utmost frankness. Both know that the other is reading what he/she writes, but for a while objectivity is maintained. Then, slowly, they begin writing falsely, first unconsciously; then consciously, so as to influence the other. The position is reached where each keeps two diaries, one for private use, and locked up; and the second for the other to read. Then one of them makes a slip of the tongue, or a mistake, and the other accuses him/her of having found the secret diary. A terrible quarrel which drives them apart forever, not because of the original diaries—“but we both knew we were reading those diaries, that doesn’t count, how can you be so dishonest as to read my private diary!”
• I’d forgotten, something from my child hood. I used at night to sit up in bed and play what I called “the game.” First I created the room I sat in, object by object, “naming” everything, bed, chair, curtains, till it was whole in my mind, then move out of the room, creating the house, then out of the house, slowly creating the street, then rise into the air, looking down on London, at the enormous sprawling wastes of London, but holding at the same time the room and the house and the street in my mind, and then England, the shape of England in Britain, then the little group of islands lying against the continent, then slowly, slowly, I would create the world, continent by continent, ocean by ocean (but the point of “the game” was to create this vastness while holding the bedroom, the house, the street in their littleness in my mind at the same time), until the point was reached where I moved out into space, and watched the world, a sunlit ball in the sky, turning and rolling beneath me. Then, having reached that point, with the stars around me, and the little earth turning underneath me, I’d try to imagine at the same time, a drop of water, swarming with life, or a green leaf. Sometimes I could reach what I wanted, a simultaneous knowledge of vastness and of smallness. Or I would concentrate on a single creature, a small coloured fish in a pool, or a single flower, or a moth, and try to create, to “name” the being of the flower, the moth, the fish, slowly creating around it the forest, or the sea-pool, or the space of blowing night air that tilted my wings. And then, out, suddenly, from the smallness into space.
• I’d forgotten what making love with a real man is like. And I’d forgotten what it was like to lie in the arms of a man one loves. I’d forgotten what it was like to be in love like this, so that a step on the stair makes one’s heart beat, and the warmth of his shoulder against my palm is all the joy there is in life.
• Something strange happens when one writes about oneself. That is, one’s self direct, not one’s self projected. The result is cold, pitiless, judging. Or if not judging, then there’s no life in it—yes, that’s it, it’s lifeless.
• When he leaves the flat “to go for a little walk” my nerves seem to stretch out and follow him, as if tied to him.
• I thought: He’s right to hate me and to prefer other women, I’m hateful. And I began to think longingly of this other woman out there, kind and generous and strong enough to give him what he needed without asking for anything in return. I remember Mother Sugar and how she “taught” me about the obsessions of jealousy being part homosexuality. But the lesson at the time seemed rather academic, nothing to do with me, Anna. I wondered if I wanted to make love with that woman he was with now.
• I think how I, Anna Wulf, sit here waiting, not knowing who is going to come down the stairs, the gentle brotherly affectionate man, who knows me, Anna; or a furtive and cunning child; or a madman full of hate.
• These last three days I have been inside madness. When he came downstairs he looked very ill; his eyes were sharp bright wary animals inside circles of brownish bruised flesh; his mouth was tight, like a weapon. He had a jaunty soldier air, and I knew all his energies were absorbed in simply holding himself together. All his different personalities were fused in the being who fought only for survival. He gave me repeated glances of appeal, of which he was not aware. This was only a creature at the limits of itself
• I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place,
• Anna, is it only me? I feel as if I’m living inside a sort of improbable farce.” “No, it isn’t only you.” “I know, and that makes it even worse.”
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
• 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.
• “There’s a great black mountain. It’s human stupidity. There are a group of people who push a boulder up the mountain. When they’ve got a few feet up, there’s a war, or the wrong sort of revolution, and the boulder rolls down—not to the bottom, it always manages to end a few inches higher than when it started. So the group of people put their shoulders to the boulder and start pushing again. Meanwhile, at the top of the mountain stand a few great men. Sometimes they look down and nod and say: Good, the boulder-pushers are still on duty. But meanwhile we are meditating about the nature of space, or what it will be like when the world is full of people who don’t hate and fear and murder”
• Saul wanted to see what would happen. And so did I. I could feel in myself, stronger than anything else, a spiteful, positively joyous interest—as if he, Saul and I were two unknown quantities, two forces anonymous, without personality. It was as if the room held two totally malignant beings who, if the other suddenly fell dead or began screaming with pain, would say: “Well, so that’s it, is it?”
• “I’m going to give you the first sentence then. There are the two women you are, Anna. Write down: The two women were alone in the London flat.” “You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?” “Why say it like that? Write it, Anna.” I wrote it. “You’re going to write that book, you’re going to write it, you’re going to finish it.”
FREE WOMEN 5:
MOLLY GETS MARRIED AND ANNA HAS AN AFFAIR
• There’s only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best. What’s the use of always hankering after Michael?
• It was as if she, Anna, were a central point of awareness, being attacked by a million unco-ordinated facts, and the central point would disappear if she proved unable to weigh and balance the facts, take them all into account
• “None of you ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.”
FuzzyRants 