The Golden Notebook

Dated November 1955, Anna is writing about the continuing crisis with the British Communist Party. The leadership has become overwhelmed by bureaucratic concerns, some believe. She then pastes in clippings related to the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, held in February of 1956. By the summer, her tone has turned decidedly pessimistic: “Not for the first time in my life I realise I have spent weeks and months in frenzied political activity and have achieved absolutely nothing. More, that I might have foreseen it would achieve nothing” (446). By the fall, she has quit attending meetings.

Anna’s novel-in-progress, The Shadow of the Third, continues in this section, but only in rough outline form. Ella continues to fall apart after her break-up with Paul; she moves out of Julia’s flat, and the friendship between the two women is damaged as a result. Ella feels very lonely. Dr. West suggests Ella should have an affair with him. When Ella and Julia do talk, they talk about the betrayals they experience at the hands of the various men who casually come in and out of their lives. Ella falls into a brief affair with one of her colleagues; he, too, is married with children. She decides not to have sex again until she is actually in love. Quickly, she becomes gripped by sexual desire. She gives in to her impulses and has sex with a man she meets at a party. He is critical of her, and of his wife. Ella finally “becomes completely sexless” and “decides to write again” (459). After a space break in the text, Anna admits that Ella is a version of herself.

The perspective returns to Ella, who goes to visit her father. He expresses a guarded love for her, and Ella asks him about his marriage. He is embarrassed, but admits that Ella’s mother was not sexually knowledgeable; this led him to have affairs with sex workers. Ella is frustrated and wants to ask her father why he did not help her mother, teach her how to engage sexually. Her father does not want to know about Ella’s life, about what “modern women” get up to (464). She asks if he ever read her novel, the one about suicide. He says that he did read it, but that he does not understand it: “You ask such a lot. Happiness. That sort of thing. […] Your lot—you seem to think something’s owed to you” (466). The conversation makes her think about a new way of thinking, of writing, wherein unhappiness is accepted in the search for something more significant.

This section of the notebook starts with brief factual entries about Anna’s life and activities. Then it turns to an overview of her time in psychoanalysis with “Mother Sugar,” or Mrs. Marks. They discuss the purpose of therapy, as well as Anna’s conviction that this is a new moment in history, that women in particular and people in general are undergoing truly novel experiences. Mrs. Marks disagrees and continues to encourage Anna to write again.

She then writes about keeping her notebooks and how they help her to maintain her identity, an integral self. She records a terrifying recurring nightmare she has, a dream in which the destructive impulse is embodied in a fantastic creature or an old man or a sexless entity. It takes joy in evil and in the disintegration of the world. When she tells Mrs. Marks about the dream, the analyst insists that it is a dream about creation, about writing; if Anna can overcome her fear, she will be able to see the purpose of the dream. She notes that she feels herself changing.

Anna then records a meeting of the British Communist Party, wherein there is a struggle over whether to tell the truth about the Soviet Union or not. She feels the same destructive energy at the meeting that she experiences in her dream. She also talks about an affair she conducts with an American, Nelson, who is married. She attends a party he hosts, along with his wife, and witnesses a quarrel between them; she becomes aware that Nelson’s wife knows of his affairs. Later, Nelson admits to Anna that he told his wife about their relationship; Anna is angry, feeling she has been used as a pawn in a marital dispute. She also realizes that the couple will stay together, locked in a pattern they cannot break.

She writes of another encounter she has with a journalist from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), De Silva, who is also married. She does not like him very much, but she sleeps with him because “it didn’t matter to me” (501). When she refuses to sleep with him again, he becomes vindictive and cruel. He wants to bring another woman to Anna’s house so that he can have sex with her while Anna listens. Later, Anna dreams about De Silva, who turns into the destructive entity from her earlier nightmares. She hears that he has “abandoned his wife without money, with the two children” (503) and that he is now conducting an affair with the lover of one of his friends.