The Golden Notebook Read online

  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 moment in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I could 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?

  I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company; yet I know that what made the film company so excited about the possibilities of that novel as a film was precisely what made it successful as a novel. 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. And I know that in order to write another, to write those fifty reports on society which I have the material to write, I would have to deliberately whip up in myself that same emotion. And it would be that emotion which would make those fifty books novels and not reportage.

  When I think back to that time, those weekends spent at the Mashopi Hotel, with that group of people, I have to first switch something off in me; 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. 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. And the people who read Frontiers of War will have had fed in them this emotion, even though they were not conscious of it. That is why I am ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime.

  The group was composed of people thrown together by chance, and who knew they would not meet again as soon as this particular phase of the war was over. They all knew and acknowledged with the utmost frankness that they had nothing in common.

  Whatever fervours, beliefs, and awful necessities the war created in other parts of the world, it was characterised in ours, right from the start, by double-feeling. It was immediately evident that for us war was going to be a very fine thing. This wasn’t a complicated thing that needed to be explained by experts. Material prosperity hit Central and South Africa tangibly; there was suddenly a great deal more money for everyone, and this was true even of the Africans, even in an economy designed to see that they had the minimum necessary to keep them alive and working. Nor were there any serious shortages of commodities to buy with the money. Not serious enough at least to interfere with the enjoyment of life. Local manufacturers began to make what had been imported before, thus proving in another way that war has two faces—it was such a torpid, slovenly economy, based as it was on the most inefficient and backward labour force, that it needed some sort of jolt from outside. The war was such a jolt.

  There was another reason for cynicism—because people began to be cynical, when they were tired of being ashamed, as they were, to start with. 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 enjoyed the sight of the white baases so eager to go off and fight on any available battle-front against a creed they would all die to defend on their own soil. Right through the war, the correspondence columns of the papers were crammed with arguments about whether it was safe to put so much as a popgun into the hands of any African soldier since he was likely to turn it against his white masters, or to use this useful knowledge later. It was decided, quite rightly, that it was not safe.

  Here were two good reasons why the war had for us, from the very beginnings, its enjoyable ironies.

  (I am again falling into the wrong tone—and yet I hate that tone, and yet we all lived inside it for months and years, and it did us all, I am sure, a great deal of damage. It was self-punishing, a locking of feeling, an inability or a refusal to fit conflicting things together to make a whole; so that one can live inside it, no matter how terrible. The refusal means one can neither change nor destroy; the refusal means ultimately either death or impoverishment of the individual.)

  I will try to put down the facts merely. For the general population the war had two phases. The first when things were going badly and defeat was possible; this phase ended, finally, at Stalingrad. The second phase was simply sticking it out until victory.

  For us, and I mean by us the left and the liberals associated with the left, the war had three phases. The first was when Russia disowned the war. This locked the loyalties of us all—the half hundred or hundred people whose emotional spring was a faith in the Soviet Union. This period ended when Hitler attacked Russia. Immediately there was a burst of energy.

  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. That 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 of 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.

  For us, then (and this was true of all the cities up and down our part of Africa), a period of intense activity began. This phase, one of jubilant confidence, ended some time in 1944, well before the end of the war. This change was not due to an outside event, like a change in the Soviet Union’s “lin
e”; but was internal, and self-developing, and, looking back, I can see its beginning almost from the first day of the establishment of the “communist” group. Of course all the discussion clubs, groups, etc., died when the Cold War began and any sort of interest in China and the Soviet Union became suspect instead of fashionable. (The purely cultural organisations like orchestras, drama groups and so on continued.) But when “left” or “progressive” or “communist” feeling—whichever word is right, and at this distance it’s hard to say—was at its height in our town, the inner group of people who had initiated it were already falling into inertia, or bewilderment or at best worked out of a sense of duty. At the time, of course, no one understood it; but it was inevitable. It is now obvious that inherent in the structure of a communist party or group is a self-dividing principle. Any communist party anywhere exists and perhaps even flourishes by this process of discarding individuals or groups; not because of personal merits or demerits, but according to how they accord with the inner dynamism of the party at any given moment. Nothing happened in our small, amateur and indeed ludicrous group that hadn’t happened right back with the Iskra group in London at the beginning of the century, at the start of organised communism. If we had known anything at all about the history of our own movement we would have been saved from the cynicism, the frustration, the bewilderment—but that isn’t what I want to say now. In our case, the inner logic of “centralism” made the process of disintegration inevitable because we had no links at all with what African movements there were—that was before the birth of any Nationalist movement, before any kind of trade union. There were then a few Africans who met secretly under the noses of the police but they didn’t trust us, because we were white. One or two came to ask our advice on technical questions but we never knew what was really in their minds. The situation was that a group of highly militant white politicos, equipped with every kind of information about organising revolutionary movements were operating in a vacuum because the black masses hadn’t begun to stir, and wouldn’t for another few years. And this was true of the communist party in South Africa too. The battles and conflicts and debates inside our group which might have driven it into growth, had we not been an alien body, without roots, destroyed us very fast. Inside a year our group was split, equipped with subgroups, traitors, and a loyal hard core whose personnel, save for one or two men, kept changing. Because we did not understand the process, it sapped our emotional energy. But while I know that the process of self-destruction began almost at birth, I can’t quite pinpoint that moment when the tone of our talk and behaviour changed. We were working as hard, but it was to the accompaniment of a steadily deepening cynicism. And our jokes, outside the formal meetings, were contrary to what we said, and thought we believed in. It is from that period of my life that I know how to watch the jokes people make. A slightly malicious tone, a cynical edge to a voice, can have developed inside ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality. I’ve seen it often, and in many other places than political or communist organisations.

  The group I want to write about became a group after a terrible fight in “the party.” (I have to put it in inverted commas because it was never officially constituted, more a kind of emotional entity.) It split in two, and over something not very important—so unimportant I can’t even remember what it was, only the horrified wonder we all felt that so much hatred and bitterness could have been caused by a minor question of organisation. The two groups agreed to continue to work together—so much sanity remained to us; but we had different policies. I want to laugh out of a kind of despair even now—it was all so irrelevant, the truth was the group was like a group of exiles, with exiles’ fevered bitterness over trifles. And we were all—twenty or so of us, exiles; because our ideas were so far in advance of the country’s development. Yes, now I remember that the quarrel was because one half of the organisation complained that certain members were not “rooted in the country.” We split on these lines.

  And now for our small sub-group. There were three men from the aircamps, who had known each other first at Oxford—Paul, Jimmy and Ted. Then George Hounslow, who worked on the roads. Then Willi Rodde, the refugee from Germany. Myself. Maryrose who had actually been born in the country. I was the odd man out in this group because I was the only one who was free. Free in the sense that I had chosen to come to the Colony in the first place and could leave it when I liked. And why did I not leave it? I hated the place, and had done so since I first came to it in 1939 to marry and become a tobacco farmer’s wife. I met Steven in London the year before, when he was on holiday. The day after I arrived on the farm I knew I liked Steven but could never stand the life. But instead of returning to London I went into the city and became a secretary. For years my life seems to have consisted of activities I began to do provisionally, temporarily, with half a heart, and which I then stayed with. For instance I became “a communist” because the left people were the only people in the town with any kind of moral energy, the only people who took it for granted that the colour bar was monstrous. And yet there were always two personalities in me, the “communist” and Anna, and Anna judged the communist all the time. And vice-versa. Some kind of lethargy I suppose. I knew the war was coming and it would be hard to get a passage home, yet I stayed. Yet I did not enjoy the life, I don’t enjoy pleasure, but I went to sun-downer parties and dances and I played tennis and enjoyed the sun. It seems such a long time ago that I can’t feel myself doing any of these things. I can’t “remember” what it was like to be Mr Campbell’s secretary or to dance every night, etc. It happened to someone else. I can see myself though, but even that wasn’t true until I found an old photograph the other day which showed a small, thin, brittle black-and-white girl, almost doll-like. I was more sophisticated than the colonial girls of course; but far less experienced—in a colony people have far more room to do as they like. Girls can do things there that I’d have to fight to do in England. My sophistication was literary and social. Compared with a girl like Maryrose, for all her apparent fragility and vulnerability, I was a baby. The photograph shows me standing on the Club steps, holding a racket. I look amused and critical; it’s a sharp little face. I never acquired that admirable Colonial quality—good humour. (Why is it admirable? Yet I enjoy it.) But I can’t remember what I felt, except that I repeated to myself every day, even after the war began, that now I must book my passage home. About then I met Willi Rodde and got involved with politics. Not for the first time. I was too young of course to have been involved with Spain, but friends had been; so communism and the left was nothing new to me. I did not like Willi. He did not like me. Yet we began to live together, or as much as is possible in a small town where everyone knows what you do. We had rooms in the same hotel and shared meals. We were together for nearly three years. Yet we neither liked nor understood each other. We did not even enjoy sleeping together. Of course then I was inexperienced, having slept only with Steven, and that briefly. But even then I knew, as Willi knew, that we were incompatible. Having learned about sex since, I know that the word incompatible means something very real. It doesn’t mean, not being in love, or not being in sympathy, or not being patient, or being ignorant. Two people can be sexually incompatible who are perfectly happy in bed with other people, as if the very chemical structures of their bodies were hostile. Well, Willi and I understood this so well that our vanity wasn’t involved. Our emotions were, about this point only. 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 the situation long after I should leave it. Weakness? Until I wrote that word I never thought of it as applying to me. But I suppose it does. Willi, however, was not weak. On the contrary he was the most ruthless person I have ever known.

&nbs
p; Having written that, I am astounded. What do I mean? He was capable of great kindness. And now I remember that all those years ago, I discovered that no matter what adjective I applied to Willi, I could always use the opposite. Yes. I have looked in my old papers. I find a list, headed Willi:

  Ruthless

  Kind

  Cold

  Warm

  Sentimental

  Realistic

  And so on, down the page; and underneath I wrote: “From the process of writing these words about Willi I have discovered I know nothing about him. About someone one understands, one doesn’t have to make lists of words.”

  But really what I discovered, though I didn’t know it then, was that in describing any personality all these words are meaningless. To describe a person one says: “Willi, sitting stiffly at the head of the table, allowed his round spectacles to glitter at the people watching him and said, formally, but with a gruff clumsy humour….” Something like that. But the point is, and it is the point that obsesses me (and how odd this obsession should be showing itself, so long ago, in helpless lists of opposing words, not knowing what it would develop into), once I say that words like good/bad, strong/weak, are irrelevant, I am accepting amorality, and I do accept it the moment I start to write “a story,” “a novel,” because I simply don’t care. All I care about is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their reality. And after twenty years of living in and around the left, which means twenty years’ preoccupation with this question of morality in art, that is all I am left with. So what I am saying is, in fact, that the human personality, that unique flame, is so sacred to me, that everything else becomes unimportant? Is that what I am saying? And if so, what does it mean?