The Golden Notebook

Anna’s frustration with her first novel, Frontiers of War, becomes easier to understand as she records her increasingly ridiculous meetings with film producers who willfully ignore Anna’s intentions. When one producer asks her “what is the central theme of your lovely book?,” he emphasizes that he wants a simple answer—the television audience, of course, does not want to grapple with anything complicated. Anna answers, “It is, simply, about the colour bar” (284), that is, apartheid—a topic about which nothing is simple. Not only is her sarcasm misunderstood, but the producer has the temerity to suggest that the racial dimension of the book is not really all that important; neither is the setting in Africa. This certainly informs Anna’s vehemence in refusing to write (or, at least, to admit she is writing) another novel.

The nostalgia explored in the first section of the black notebook also returns, though this time Anna’s cynicism about how the book has been received turns it acid. She tells the misguided producer that what she really wants to do with the adaptation of the book is “to make a comedy out of it” (286). He is intrigued, and she describes her idea: a dashing young pilot falls in love and goes off to war, where he is killed in action. When the producer is puzzled—this does not sound like a comedy—Anna retorts, “You were acute enough to see what the book was really about—nostalgia for death. […] Well, I’m ashamed and I’d like to make reparation—let’s make a comedy about useless heroism” (287). All the while they are talking, the news reports in the background about a new war in Asia. The threat of war also underscores Anna’s discomfort with her novel, her reluctance to continue writing.

When Anna admits to the American producer that she is a communist, this, too, is bound up in war—the Cold War, in this instance. The American producer becomes immediately wary of Anna, shocked by the association. When the producer introduces Anna to her American friend, Anna notes that she makes the introduction “with difficulty, because what she is feeling is: I am introducing a friend to an enemy” (296). The undercurrent of us versus them, of allies and enemies—the either/or nature of the post-war era—serves as a continuation of the war years themselves. War is ever-present and never-ending. The entries in the red notebook that follow emphasize this, as Anna and Molly discuss the war in Quemoy: “We were both frightened, perhaps this will be the beginning of a new war” (296). They do not just mean the skirmish on the island, but the possibility for a new worldwide conflagration. This also shows, again, how Anna’s concerns and the notebooks themselves overlap and run together.

The red notebook continues with an uncomfortable discussion about Stalin’s blatant propaganda and an absurd parody of a communist-friendly story. During the discussion about politics, Anna notes, “Not once does one of us say: something is fundamentally wrong; yet the implication of what we say amounts to that” (301). They are trapped both by groupthink and by desperation; if they can no longer believe in the promise of Party politics, then what is left to believe in, especially amid continuing violence throughout the world. The parody highlights the gap between the reality and the vision: Comrade Ted would no more be invited to criticize Stalin’s policies (and live to tell about it) than Anna or anyone else in the British Communist Party. They are—and always have been—wholly irrelevant. This is the impotence that seeps into Anna’s life. Later, in the blue notebook, she will be unable to prevent the publication of more propaganda akin to the story of Comrade Ted.

In the yellow notebook, Ella tries to carry on after the affair with Paul is over. She speaks of her inability to break free of her attachment: “She must liberate herself. This was an intellectual decision, unbacked by moral energy” (306). Later, she recognizes that this is a trap created by old attitudes about men and women, about how relationships work: “I am always having, as it were, to cancel myself out. I ought to be like a man, caring more for my work than for people” (314). But that is not the answer, either: just as the above dichotomies function to support the ideological foundations of war, so too do the essentializing distinctions between what men are allowed to do and what women are supposed to do limit the possibilities for true liberation, for the creation of art and an authentic identity. Ella’s struggle with these gendered expectations echoes Anna’s own, further developing the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman that emerges as a major theme in this novel. Ella’s decision to take the flight back to England, even though she is terrified that the plane will crash, is tantamount to suicide—the ultimate “cancelling out” of her person. The brief affair with the American leads Ella back into the same trap, having sex with a married man who will leave. She accommodates him sexually, garnering little pleasure of her own.

This echoes as the blue notebook begins with Anna’s acknowledgment that Michael is intent on leaving her. In an attempt to accommodate him intellectually (as Ella accommodates the American sexually), she will record events just as they happen: “Very well then; he says I make up stories about our life together. I shall write down, as truthfully as I can, every stage of a day” (331). She does this, but ultimately, the act gives her nothing but dissatisfaction; she crosses through the whole section and pronounces the experiment a “failure” (368). The question remains whether it is a failure because Anna does not or cannot write the truth, or because she has been goaded into the experiment by a critical lover who ultimately leaves her.

As in the previous notebook with Ella, Anna appeases her lover when Michael acts like a jealous child over Anna’s need to take care of her daughter. She understands his impulse and resents him for it: “If I were a man I’d be the same” (334). But she is not a man, and the period that she forgot is coming reminds her, quite literally, that she is a woman. Like Ella, Anna is struggling to find an identity that does not pivot between two poles, wherein a man rescinds all responsibility for childcare and a woman dedicates all her emotional energy to a man. At the same time, she is struggling to find her identity as an artist. Her feelings for her novel, Frontiers of War, are as palpable as her feelings toward her own mutinous body: “I am ashamed of the psychological impulse that created Frontiers of War” (349), just as she is ashamed of the smell of her period, washing herself several times in the bathroom at work. The female and the artist are conflated here, both objects that reek of shame. However, near the end of the blue notebook, one senses that Anna will eventually rid herself of this shame as she enters a phase of discovery. After she accepts that the affair with Michael is over—he has always degraded her writing—she understands that “I’m shedding a skin, or being born again” (353). In endings are the endless possibilities for new beginnings.