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This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!
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The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: Pages 501 - 517
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Black Notebook: (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Here we get many news clippings of violence in Africa. Then Anna records a dream in which a film crew shoots her novel Frontiers of War. It looks very accurate at first, and then Anna realizes that it's completely untrue to her vision. The director tells her that it doesn't matter what version they film so long as they film something. Anna realizes that her dream is about total sterility. She draws a double black line across the page, marking the End of the Black Notebook!
Red Notebook: More news clippings related to violence in Africa. Here Anna underlines the word freedom wherever she sees it: a total of 679 times. She includes an extended story told to her by one of the comrades Jimmy about a mutual friend Comrade Harry.
Harry fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Communists, got disillusioned with Stalin, became a Trotskyist, and then became disillusioned with Trotsky. Back in Britain during the Second World War, he gets turned down for military service because of damage to his leg sustained in the Spanish conflict. He devotes himself to teaching disadvantaged children – sometimes as much as 18 hours a day. Meanwhile, he's renting a room from an air force widow who is in love with him, getting fluent in Russian, and preparing himself for the inevitable day when the Soviet Union will recognize his greatness and invite him over to help them return to the ideological purity of Lenin's values.
On impulse, Jimmy invites Harry to join him and a delegation of British teachers bound for the Soviet Union. Harry labors under the misconception that he is important enough either to (1) get invited by Khrushchev himself to reform the Soviet Union, or (2) get arrested and sent to Siberia. He ends up lecturing their poor little exhausted guide for hours about ideology while she politely listens and tries not to fall asleep.
Finally Jimmy blurts out a confession that he invited Harry along on impulse. Harry realizes that he's not important. He looks crushed but thanks Jimmy for the learning experience. They go home to Britain, and Jimmy later hears that Harry married the widow and got her pregnant. He's not sure what, if anything, this signifies about Harry's outlook on life.
Anna draws a double black line across the page, marking the End of the Red Notebook!
Yellow Notebook: Listed here are several ideas for short stories. All are psychological examinations of relationships between a man and a woman. Most stories have the man unable to commit, trying to manipulate the woman, causing the woman to manifest his own psychological illness for him, or trying to usurp her creativity as an artist. Anna's last piece in the Yellow Notebook is a description in an overwrought style of three guys bumming around New York City that reads like a parody of Charles Bukowski. Anna adds, "If I've gone back to pastiche, then it's time to stop." She draws a double black line across the page, marking the End of the Yellow Notebook!
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