The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing
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people who have already been canvassed, marked ‘doubtful’. My job to see them again, and talk them into voting for the CP. As I leave the campaign HQ, discussion about the right way to dress for canvassing—most of these women much better dressed than the women of the area. ‘I don’t think it’s right to dress differently than usual,’ says one woman, ‘it’s a kind of cheating.’ ‘Yes, but if you turn up at the door too posh, they get on the defensive.’ Comrade Bill, laughing and good-natured—the same energetic good-nature as Molly, when she’s absorbed in detailed work, says: ‘What matters is to get results.’ The two women chide him for being dishonest. ‘We’ve got to be honest in everything we do, because otherwise they won’t trust us.’ The names I am given are of people scattered over a wide area of working streets. A very ugly area of uniform, small, poor houses. A main station half a mile away, shedding thick smoke all around. Dark clouds, low and thick, and the smoke drifting up to join them. The first house has a cracked fading door. Mrs C, in a sagging wool dress and apron, a worn-down woman. She has two small boys, well-dressed and kept. I say I am from the CP; she nods. I say: ‘I understand you are undecided whether to vote for us?’ She says: ‘I’ve got nothing against you.’ She’s not hostile, but polite. She says: ‘The lady who came last week left a book.’ (A pamphlet.) Finally she says: ‘But we’ve always voted Labour, dear.’ I mark the card Labour, crossing out the ‘doubtful’, and go on. The next, a Cypriot. This house even poorer, a young man looking harassed, a pretty dark girl, a new baby. Scarcely any furniture. New in England. It emerges that the point they are ‘doubtful’ about is whether they are entitled to the vote at all. I explain that they are. Both very good-natured, but wanting me to leave, the baby is crying, an atmosphere of pressure and harassment. The man says he doesn’t mind the communists but he doesn’t like the Russians. My feeling is they won’t trouble to vote, but I leave the card ‘doubtful’ and go on to the next. A well-kept house, with a crowd of teddy-boys outside. Wolf-whistles and friendly jibes as I arrive. I disturb the housewife, who is pregnant and has been lying down. Before letting me in, she complains to her son that he said he was going to the shops for her. He says he will go later: a nice-looking, tough, well-dressed boy of sixteen or so—all the children in the area well-dressed, even when their parents are not. ‘What do you want?’ she says to me. ‘I’m from the CP’—and explain. She says: ‘Yes, we’ve had you before.’ Polite, but indifferent. After a discussion during which it’s hard to get her to agree or disagree with anything, she says her husband has always voted Labour, and she does what her husband says. As I leave she shouts at her son, but he drifts off with a group of his friends, grinning. She yells at him. But this scene has a feeling of good-nature about it: she doesn’t really expect him to go shopping for her, but shouts at him on principle, while he expects her to shout at him, and doesn’t really mind. At the next house, the woman at once and eagerly offers a cup of tea, says she likes elections, ‘people keep dropping in for a bit of a talk.’ In short, she’s lonely. She talks on and on about her personal problems on a dragging, listless harassed note. (Of the houses I visited this was the one which seemed to me to contain the real trouble, real misery.) She said she had three small children, was bored, wanted to go back to work, her husband wouldn’t let her. She talked and talked and talked, obsessively, I was there nearly three hours, couldn’t leave. When I finally asked her if she was voting for the CP, she said: ‘Yes, if you like, dear’—which I’m sure she had said to all the canvassers. She added that her husband always voted Labour. I changed the ‘doubtful’ to Labour, and went on. At about ten that night I went back, with all the cards but three changed to Labour, and handed them in to Comrade Bill. I said: ‘We have some pretty optimistic canvassers.’ He flicked the cards over, without comment, replaced them in their boxes, and remarked loudly for the benefit of other canvassers coming in: ‘There’s real support for our policy, we’ll get our candidate in yet.’ I canvassed three afternoons in all, the other two not ‘doubtfuls’ but going into houses for the first time. Found two CP voters, both Party members, the rest all Labour. Five lonely women going mad quietly by themselves, in spite of husband and children or rather because of them. The quality they all had: self-doubt. A guilt because they were not happy. The phrase they all used: ‘There must be something wrong with me.’ Back in the campaign HQ I mentioned these women to the woman in charge for the afternoon. She said: ‘Yes, wherever I go canvassing, I get the heeby-jeebies. This country’s full of women going mad all by themselves.’ A pause, then she added, with a slight aggressiveness, the other side of the self-doubt, the guilt shown by the women I’d talked to: ‘Well, I used to be the same until I joined the Party and got myself a purpose in life.’ I’ve been thinking about this—the truth is, these women interest me much more than the election campaign. Election Day: Labour in, reduced majority. Communist Candidate loses deposit. Joke. (In campaign HQ Maker of joke, Comrade Bill.) ‘If we’d got another two thousand votes, the Labour majority would have been on a knife-edge. Every cloud has a silver lining.’
Jean Barker. Wife of minor Party official. Aged thirty-four. Small, dark, plump. Rather plain. Husband patronizes her. She wears permanently, a look of strained, enquiring good-nature. Comes around collecting Party dues. 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. She has started a novel, says she hasn’t got time to finish it. I have not yet met one Party member, anywhere, who has not written, half-written, or is not planning to write a novel, short stories, or a play. I find this an extraordinary fact, though I don’t understand it. Because of her verbal incontinence, which shocks people, or makes them laugh, she is developing the personality of a clown, or a licensed humorist. She has no sense of humour at all. But when she hears some remark she makes that surprises her, she knows from experience that people will laugh, or be upset, so she laughs herself, in a puzzled nervous way, then hurries on. She has three children. She and her husband very ambitious for them, goad them through school, to get scholarships. Children carefully educated in the Party ‘line’, conditions in Russia, etc. They have the defensive closed-in look with strangers of people knowing themselves to be in a minority. With communists, they tend to show off their Party know-how, while their parents look on, proud.
Jean works as a manager of a canteen. Long hours. Keeps her flat and her children and herself very well. Secretary of local Party branch. She is dissatisfied with herself. ‘I’m not doing enough, I mean the Party’s not enough, I get fed up, just paper work, like an office, doesn’t mean anything.’ Laughs, nervously. ‘George—’ (her husband) ‘says that’s the incorrect attitude, but I don’t see why I should always have to bow down. I mean, they’re wrong often enough, aren’t they?’ Laughs, ‘I decided to do something worthwhile for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean something different. After all, even the leading comrades are talking about sectarianism, aren’t they…well of course the leading comrades should be the first to say it…’ Laughs. ‘Though that’s not what seems to happen…anyway, I decided to do something useful for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean, something different. So now I have a class of backward children on Saturday afternoons. I used to be a teacher, you know. I coach them. No, not Party children, just ordinary children.’ Laughs. ‘Fifteen of them. It’s hard work. George says I’d be better occupied making Party members, but I wanted to do something really useful…’ And so on. The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but who have a powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the Party is their family. The poet, Paul, who got drunk last week and said he was sick and disgusted with the Party, but he joined it in 1935, and if he left it, he’d be leaving ‘his whole life’.
[The yellow notebook looked like the manuscript of a novel, for it was called The Shadow of the Third. It certainly began like a novel:]
Julia’s voice came loud up the stairs: ‘Ella, aren’t you going to the party? Are you going to use the bath? If not, I will.’ Ella did not answer. For one thing, she was sitting on her son’s bed, waiting for him