The Golden Notebook (51 page)

night, the wolf-dream, let's say, more highly developed, there'd be a certain look on your face. And I know what the look means because I feel it myself- recognition. The pleasure of recognition, of a bit of rescue-work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form. Another bit of chaos rescued and "named." Do you know how you smile when I "name" something? It's as if you'd just saved someone from drowning. And I know the feeling. It's joy. But there's something terrible in it-because I've never known joy, awake, as I do, asleep, during a certain kind of dream-when the wolves come down out of the forest, or when the castle gates open, or when I'm standing before the ruined white temple on the white sands with the blue sea and sky behind it, or when I'm flying like Icarus-during these dreams, no matter what frightening material they incorporate, I could cry with happiness. And I know why-it's because all the pain, and the killing and the violence is safely held in the story and it can't hurt me.' She was silent, looking at me intently. I said: 'Are you saying perhaps that I'm not ready to go on further? Well, I think that if I'm capable of being impatient, of wanting it, I must be ready for the next stage?' 'And what is the next stage?' 'The next stage is, surely, that I leave the safety of myth and Anna Wulf walks forward alone.' 'Alone?' she said, and added drily, 'You're a communist, or so you say, but you want to go alone. Isn't that what you'd call a contradiction?' And so we laughed, and it might have ended there, but I went on: 'You talk about individuation. So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognises one part after another of his earlier life as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I felt then, is only the reflection of that great archetypal dream, or epic story, or stage in history, then he is free, because he has separated himself from the experience, or fitted it like a piece of mosaic into a very old pattern, and by the act of setting it into place, is free of the individual pain of it.' 'Pain?' she queried softly. 'Well, my dear, people don't come to you because they are suffering from an excess of happiness.' 'No, they usually come, like you, because they say they can't feel.' 'But now I can feel. I'm open to everything. But no sooner do you accomplish that, than you say quickly-put it away, put the pain away where it can't hurt, turn it into a story or into history. But I don't want to put it away. Yes, I know what you want me to say-that because I've rescued so much private pain-material-because I'm damned if I'll call it anything else, and "worked through it" and accepted it and made it general, because of that I'm free and strong. Well all right, I'll accept it and say it. And what now? I'm tired of the wolves and the castles and the forests and the priests. I can cope with them in any form they choose to present themselves. But I've told you, I want to walk off, by myself, Anna Freeman.' 'By yourself?' she said again. 'Because I'm convinced that there are whole areas of me made by the kind of experience women haven't had before The small smile was already beginning on her face-it was the 'conducting smile' of our sessions together, we were back as analyst and patient. I said: 'No, don't smile yet. I believe I'm living the kind of life women never lived before.' 'Never?' she said, and behind her voice I could hear the sounds she always evoked at such moments-seas lapping on old beaches, voices of people centuries dead. She had the capacity to evoke a feeling of vast areas of time by a smile or a tone of voice that could delight me, rest me, fill me with joy-but I didn't want it just then. 'Never,' I said. 'The details change, but the form is the same,' she said. 'No,' I insisted. 'In what way are you different? Are you saying there haven't been artist-women before? There haven't been women who were independent? There haven't been women who insisted on sexual freedom! I tell you, there are a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.' 'They didn't look at themselves as I do. They didn't feel as I do. How could they? 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 crossbow. It isn't true. There is something new in the world. And I don't want to hear, when I've had 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...' 'Isn't it?' she said, smiling. 'No, because the dream of the golden age is a million times more powerful because it's possible, just as total destruction is possible. Probably because both are possible.' 'What do you want me to say then?' 'I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be new...' I saw the look on her face, and said: 'You are saying that nothing I feel or think is new?' 'I have never said...' she began, and then switched to the royal we... 'we have never said or suggested that further development of the human race isn't possible. You aren't accusing me of that, are you? Because it's the opposite of what we say.' 'I'm accusing you of behaving as if you didn't believe it. Look, if I'd said to you when I came in this afternoon: Yesterday I met a man at a party and I recognised in him the wolf, or the knight, or the monk, you'd nod and you'd smile. And we'd both feel the joy of recognition. But if I'd said: Yesterday I met a man at a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought: Yes, there's a hint of something- there's a crack in that man's personality like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape-terrible perhaps, or marvellous, but something new-if I said that, you'd frown.' 'Did you meet such a man?' she demanded, practically. 'No. I didn't. But sometimes I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across, they're split, means they are keeping themselves open for something.' She said, after a long, thoughtful silence: 'Anna, you shouldn't be saying this to me at all.' I was surprised. I said: 'You're not deliberately inviting me to be dishonest with you?' 'No. I'm saying that you should be writing again.' I was angry, of course, and of course she knew I was going to be. '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.' 'And so?' 'It would be a record of how I saw myself at a certain point. Because the record of an hour in the first week, let's say, of my seeing you, and an hour now, would be so different that...' 'And so?' 'And besides, there are literary problems, problems of taste you never seem to think of. What you and I have done together is essentially to break down shame. In the first week of knowing you I wouldn't have been able to say: I remember the feeling of violent repulsion and shame and curiosity I felt when I saw my father naked. It took me months to break down barriers in myself so I could say something like that. But now I can say something like:... because I wanted my father to die and-but the person reading it, without the subjective experience, the breaking down, would be shocked, as by the sight of blood or a word that has associations of shame, and the shock would swallow everything else.' She said drily: 'My dear Anna, you are using our experience together to re-enforce your rationalisations for not writing.' 'Oh, my God no, that is not all I'm saying.' 'Or are you saying that some books are for a minority of people?' 'My dear Mrs. Marks, you know quite well it would be against my principles to admit any such idea, even if I had it.' 'Very well then, if you had it, tell me why some books are for the minority.' I thought, and then said: 'It's a question of form.' 'Form? What about the content of yours? I understood that you people insisted on separating form and content?' 'My people may separate them, I don't. At least, not till this moment. But now I'll say it's a question of form. 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.' 'So it is formless works of art, if such a thing were possible, that are for the minority?' 'But I don't hold the belief that some books are for the minority. You know I don't. I don't hold the aristocratic view of art.' 'My dear Anna, your attitude to art is so aristocratic that you write, when you do, for yourself only.' 'And so do all the others,' I heard myself muttering. 'What others?' 'The others, all over the world, who are writing away in secret books, because they are afraid of what they are thinking.' 'So you are afraid of what you are thinking?' And she reached out for her appointment book, marking the end of our hour. [At this point, another thick black line across the page.] When I came to this new flat and arranged my big room the first thing I did was to buy the trestle table and lay my notebooks on it. And yet in the other flat in Molly's house, the notebooks were stuffed into a suitcase under the bed. I didn't buy them on a plan. I don't think I ever, until I came here, actually said to myself: I 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. In Molly's house the notebooks were something I never thought about; and certainly not as work, or a responsibility. The things that are important in life creep up on one unawares, one doesn't expect them, one hasn't given them shape in one's mind. One recognises them, when they've appeared, that's all. When I came to this flat it was to give room, not only to a man (Michael or his successor) but to the notebooks. And in fact I now see moving to this flat as giving room to the notebooks. For I hadn't been here a week before I had bought the trestle table and laid out the books on it. And then I read them. I hadn't read them through since I first began to keep them. I was disturbed by reading them. First, because I had not realised before how the experience of being rejected by Michael had affected me; how it had changed, or apparently had changed, my whole personality. But above all, because I didn't recognise myself. Matching what I had written with what I remembered it all seemed false. And this-the untruthfulness of what I had written was because of something I had not thought of before-my sterility. The deepening note of criticism, of defensiveness, of dislike. It was then I decided to use the blue notebook, this one, as nothing but a record of facts. 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 mind 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. It occurs to me that what is happening is a breakdown of me, Anna, and this is how I am becoming aware of it. 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. Last night I had a recurrence of that dream which, as I told Mother Sugar, was the most frightening of all the different types of cycles of dreams. When she asked me to 'give a name to it' (to give it form), I said it was the nightmare about destruction. Later, when I dreamed it again, and she said: Give it a name, I was able to go further: I said it was the nightmare about the principle of spite, or malice- joy in spite. The first time I dreamed it, the principle, or figure, took form in a certain vase I had then, a peasant wooden vase from Russia, that someone had brought back. It was bulbous, rather jolly and naive in shape, and covered with crude red and black and gilt patterns. This vase, in my dream, had a personality, and the personality was the nightmare, for it represented something anarchistic and uncontrollable, something destructive. This figure, or object, for it was not human, more like a species of elf or pixie, danced and jumped with a jerky cocky liveliness and it menaced not only me, but everything that was alive, but impersonally, and without reason. This was when I 'named' the dream as about destruction. The next time I dreamed, months later, but instantly recognised it as the same dream, the principle or element took shape in an old man, almost dwarf-like, infinitely more terrifying than the vase-object, because he was part human. This old man smiled and giggled and sniggered, was ugly, vital and powerful, and again, what he represented was pure spite, malice, joy