The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

a glass brimming with wine, and said: ‘Sods and comrades, stop lolling about, the moment has come to tell me the news.’

      We stirred, became animated, forgot our sleepiness. We listened while Willi gave George information about the political situation in town. George was an extremely serious man. And he had a deep reverence for Willi—for Willi’s brain. He was convinced of his own stupidity. He was convinced, and very likely had been all his life, of his general inadequacy and also of his ugliness.

      In fact he was rather good-looking, or at least women always responded to him, even when they were not aware of it. Mrs Lattimore, for instance, the pretty red-head, who often exclaimed how repulsive she thought him, but could never take her eyes off him. He was quite tall, but looked shorter, because of his broad shoulders, which he carried stooped forward. His body narrowed fast from the broad shoulders to his flanks. He had a bull-like set to him, all his movements were stubborn, and abrupt with the subdued controlled irritation of power kept in leash and unwillingly so. It was because of his family life which was difficult. At home he was, and he had had to be for many years, patient, self-sacrificing, disciplined. By nature I would say he was none of these things. Perhaps this was the reason for his need to run himself down, for his lack of belief in himself. He was a man who could have been much bigger than his life had given him room to be. He knew this, I think; and because he secretly felt guilty at being frustrated by his family circumstances, his self-denigration was a way of punishing himself? I don’t know…or perhaps he punished himself in this way for his continual unfaithfulness to his wife? One has to be much older than I was then to understand George’s relationship with his wife. He had a fierce loyal compassion for her, the compassion of one victim for another.

      He was one of the most lovable people I have ever known. He was certainly the funniest. He was spontaneously irresistibly funny. I’ve seen him keep a room full of people laughing helplessly from the time the bar closed until the sun rose. We lay about on the beds and on the floor laughing so that we couldn’t move. Yet next day, remembering the jokes, they weren’t particularly funny. Yet we were sick laughing—it was partly because of his face, which was handsome, but copybook handsome, almost dull in its regularity, so that one expected him to talk to rule; but I think mostly because he had a very long narrow upper lip, which gave a look of wooden, and almost stupid, obstinacy to his face. Then out came the sad, self-punishing, irresistible stream of talk, and he watched us rolling with laughter, yet never laughed with his victims, but watched with positive astonishment, as if he were thinking: Well I can’t be as hopeless as I think I am if I can make all these clever people laugh like this.

      He was about forty. That is, twelve years older than the oldest of us, Willi. We would never have thought of it, but he couldn’t forget it. He was a man who would always watch each year slide past as if jewels were slipping one by one through his fingers into the sea. This was because of his feeling for women. His other passion was politics. Not the least of his burdens was that he had been brought up by parents who came from slap in the middle of the old socialist tradition in Britain—a nineteenth-century socialism—rationalist, practical, above all, religiously anti-religious. And such an upbringing was not calculated to make him fit in with the people of the Colony. He was an isolated and lonely man, living in a tiny, backward, isolated town. We, this group of people so much younger than he, were the first real friends he had in years. We all loved him. But I don’t believe for a moment he knew it, or would allow himself to know it. His humility was too strong. In particular, his humility in relation to Willi. I remember once, exasperated because of the way he would sit, expressing reverence for Willi with every part of him, while Willi laid down the law about something or other, I said: ‘For God’s sake, George, you’re such a nice man, and I can’t stand seeing you lick the boots of a man like Willi.’

      ‘But if I had Willi’s brain,’ he replied and it was typical of him he didn’t enquire how I could make such remarks about a man with whom, after all, I was living—‘if I had his brain I’d be the happiest man in the world.’ And then his upper lip narrowed in self-mockery: ‘What do you mean nice? I’m a sod, you know I am. I tell you the things I do and then you say I’m nice.’ He was referring to what he told Willi and me, but no one else, about his relations with women

      I’ve thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you’d use in a novel. I’d be careful not to use them.

      Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I’d bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night would instantly agree with this classification—would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant.

      And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of ‘personality’. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the ‘personality’ doesn’t exist any more. It’s the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We’re told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I’ve even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and recreate them in my memory, suddenly I know it’s nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later, she’d make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she’d be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she ‘broke down’, or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this anti-humanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I’ve known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George’s overgrateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifying patient smile…I’ve written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember, all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I’m clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I’d never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin.

      And so I’ll write again that George was a good man. And that I could not stand seeing him turn into an awkward schoolboy when he listened to Willi…that evening he received the facts about the troubles in the left groups in town with humility, and a nod which said that he would think about them privately, and at length—because of course he was too stupid to make up his mind about anything without hours and hours of thought, even though the rest of us were so clever we didn’t need it.

      We, all of us, considered that Willi had been cavalier in his analysis; he had spoken as if he had been in committee, had conveyed nothing of our new disquiet, the new tone of disbelief and mockery.

      And Paul, repudiating Willi, now chose to tell George, in his own way, of the truth. He began a dialogue with Ted. I remember watching Ted and wondering if he would respond to the light, whimsical challenge. Ted hesitated, looked uncomfortable, but joined in. And because it was not his character, it was against his deep beliefs, there was an exaggerated wild quality to his talk that jarred us more than listening to Paul.

      Paul had begun by describing a committee meeting with ‘two-men-and-a-half’ deciding the whole fate of the African continent ‘without, of course, any reference to the Africans themselves’. (This was of course, treachery—to admit, in front of outsiders like Stanley Lett and Johnnie the pianist that we could have any doubts about our beliefs.