Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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odd…well, I must be rushing home.’
‘I thought you said Janet was staying with a friend?’
‘Yes, but I’ve got things to do.’
They kissed, briskly. That they had not been able to meet each other was communicated by a small, tender, even humorous squeeze of the hand. Anna went out into the street to walk home. She lived a few minutes’ walk away, in Earls Court. Before she turned into the street she lived in she automatically cut out the sight of it. She did not live in the street, or even in the building, but in the flat; and she would not let the sight return to her eyes until her front door was shut behind her.
The rooms were on two floors at the top of the house, five large rooms, two down and three up. Michael had persuaded Anna, four years before, to move into her own flat. It was bad for her, he had said, to live in Molly’s house, always under the wing of the big sister. When she had complained she could not afford it, he had told her to let a room. She had moved, imagining he would share this life with her; but he had left her shortly afterwards. For a time she had continued to live in the pattern he had set for her. There were two students in one big room, her daughter in another, and her own bedroom and living-room were organized for two people—herself and Michael. One of the students left, but she did not bother to replace him. She took a revulsion against her bedroom, which had been planned for Michael to share, and moved down to the living-room, where she slept and attended to her notebooks. Upstairs still lived the student, a youth from Wales. Sometimes Anna thought that it could be said she was sharing a flat with a young man; but he was a homosexual, and there was no tension in the arrangement. They hardly saw one another. Anna attended to her own life while Janet was at school, a couple of blocks away; and when Janet was home, devoted herself to her. An old woman came in once a week to clean the place. Money trickled in irregularly from her only novel, Frontiers of War, once a best-seller, which still earned just enough for her to live on. The flat was attractive, white painted, with bright floors. The balustrades and banisters of the stairs made white patterns against red paper.
This was the framework of Anna’s life. But it was only alone, in the big room, that she was herself. It was an oblong room, recessed to take a narrow bed. Around the bed were stacked books, papers, a telephone. There were three tall windows in the outer wall. At one end of the room, near the fireplace, was a desk with a typewriter, at which she dealt with letters, and the book reviews and articles she sometimes, but infrequently, wrote. At the other end was a long trestle table, painted black. A drawer held the four notebooks. The top of this table was always kept clear. The walls and ceilings of the room were white, but shabbied by the dark air of London. The floor was painted black. The bed had a black cover. The long curtains were a dull red.
Anna now passed slowly from one to another of the three windows, examining the thin and discoloured sunshine that failed to reach the pavements which were the floor of the rift between high Victorian houses. She covered the windows over, listening with pleasure to the intimate sliding sound of the curtain runners in their deep grooves, and to the soft swish, swish, swish of the heavy silk meeting and folding together. She switched the light on over the trestle table, so that the glossy black shone, mirroring a red gleam from the near curtain. She laid the four notebooks out, one after another, side by side.
She used an old-fashioned music-stool for this occupation, and she now spun it high, almost as high as the table itself, and sat, looking down at the four notebooks as if she were a general on the top of a mountain, watching her armies deploy in the valley below.
[The four notebooks were identical, about eighteen inches square, with shiny covers, like the texture of a cheap watered silk. But the colours distinguished them—black, red, yellow and blue. When the covers were laid back, exposing the four first pages, it seemed that order had not immediately imposed itself. In each, the first page or two showed broken scribblings and half-sentences. Then a title appeared, as if Anna had, almost automatically, divided herself into four, and then, from the nature of what she had written, named these divisions. And this is what had happened. The first book, the black notebook, began with doodlings, scattered musical symbols, treble signs that shifted into the £ sign and back again; then a complicated design of interlocking circles, then words:]
black
dark, it is so dark
it is dark
there is a kind of darkness here
[And then, in a changed startled writing:]
Every time I sit down to write, and let my mind go easy, the words, It is so dark, or something to do with darkness. Terror. The terror of this city. Fear of being alone. Only one thing stops me from jumping up and screaming or running to the telephone to ring somebody, it is to deliberately think myself back into that hot light…white light, the light, closed eyes, the red light hot on the eyeballs. The rough pulsing heat of a granite boulder. My palm flat on it, moving over the lichens. The grain of the lichens. Tiny, like minute animals’ ears, a warm rough silk on my palm, dragging insistently at the pores of my skin. And hot. The smell of the sun on hot rock. Dry and hot, and the silk of dust on my cheek, smelling of sun, the sun. Letters from the agent about the novel. Every time one of them arrives I want to laugh—the laughter of disgust. Bad laughter, the laughter of helplessness, a self-punishment. Unreal letters, when I think of a slope of hot pored granite, my cheeks against hot rock, the red light on my eyelids. Lunch with the agent. Unreal—the novel is more and more a sort of creature with its own life. Frontiers of War now has nothing to do with me, it is a property of other people. Agent said it should be a film. Said no. She was patient—her job to be.
[A date was scribbled here—1951.]
(1952) Had lunch with film man. Discussed cast for Frontiers. So incredible wanted to laugh. I said no. Found myself being persuaded into it. Got up quickly and cut it short, even caught myself seeing the words Frontiers of War up outside a cinema. Though of course he wanted to call it Forbidden Love.
(1953) Spent all morning trying to remember myself back into sitting under the trees in the vlei near Mashopi. Failed.
[Here appeared the title or heading of the notebook:]
THE DARK
[The pages were divided down the middle by a neat black line, and the subdivisions headed:]
Source Money
[Under the left word were fragments of sentences, scenes remembered, letters from friends in Central Africa gummed to the page. On the other side, a record of transactions to do with Frontiers of War, money received from translations, etc., accounts of business interviews and so on.
After a few pages the entries on the left ceased. For three years the black notebook had in it nothing but business and practical entries which appeared to have absorbed the memories of physical Africa. The entries on the left began again opposite a typed manifesto-like sheet gummed to the page, which was a synopsis of Frontiers of War, now changed to Forbidden Love, written by Anna with her tongue in her cheek, and approved by the synopsis desk in her agent’s office:]
Dashing young Peter Carey, his brilliant scholastic career at Oxford broken by World War II, is posted to Central Africa with the sky-blue-uniformed youth of the RAF to be trained as a pilot. Idealistic and inflammable, young Peter is shocked by the go-getting, colour-ridden small-town society he finds, falls in with the local group of high-living lefts, who exploit his naive young radicalism. During the week they clamour about the injustices meted out to the blacks; week-ends they live it up in a lush out-of-town hotel run by John-Bull-type landlord Boothby and his comely wife, whose pretty teen-age daughter falls in love with Peter. He encourages her, with all the thoughtlessness of youth; while Mrs