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This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!
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The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: Pages 583 – 613
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The Golden Notebook. (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Anna and Saul have sex, which improves their mood. He leaves Anna's room and goes upstairs. She continues to lie on her bed, feeling good about herself. Then, as she hears him starting to pace around upstairs, she feels increasing anxiety. He returns and urges her to put on some clothes. She claims they're influencing each other's moods even when they're in different rooms. He says he's going out, and leaves. She feels happiness again, and then swings back into anxiety and disgust. She feels she's farther from sanity than ever before.
She feels the floor bulge up underneath her, and gets back into bed. She slides into a very shallow sleep, and dreams of being in a zoo cage with a tiger sleeping on its top. A detached part of her warns her to get out of the cage. She also realizes that Saul must be far braver and stronger than she is because he's been battling this insanity for years, and she's caving into it after only a couple of weeks.
She tries to fly up from the cage, and makes it as far as the top. There she identifies with the tiger which sleeps peacefully, and identifies Saul with the tiger. She hears men drawing near in the dream, and urges the tiger to run so they won't put it back in the cage. The tiger claws her arm, and then runs. Anna starts getting distracted, thinking she should write a play about herself, Saul, and the tiger. The detached part of herself that wants personality integration urges her to pay attention.
She dreams about a projectionist running separate filmstrips that show the parts of her life she's been keeping separate in her notebooks: the Mashopi hotel, et cetera. The projectionist who taunts her in a snotty, disapproving voice is Saul.
Two of the figures in her life put themselves together into a single, unified man: it's Michael, her Czech lover who left her after five years together, and Paul Tanner who is the character in the Yellow Notebook based on Michael. This single man tells Anna that she's one of the boulder-pushers of life. The boulder-pushers are the responsible members of society who follow the great revolutionary visionaries who exist within clouds of idealism on the mountain top. The boulder-pushers keep struggling to make the primitive masses stick to the lofty principles that the visionaries hand down before wafting onwards.
Saul returns from his walk, and looks in on her. Anna manages to say that the two of them are very bad for each other and that since he's stronger than she is, he should find the strength to break off their affair. He immediately gets defensive, seeing her as kicking him out. Then she screams at him and says that he would have left anyway when Janet comes home though he might have stayed had Janet been a son. They both settle down and put on some jazz. She feels better.
He mourns the fact that so many of his friends have gotten married and had kids, and that respectability has caused them to forsake their former revolutionary values. She horrifies him by rather patronizingly predicting that he's going to mature into a wise and serene old man. She adds that only the "cannibals" who chewed up the weak when they were young get to mature into wise old men. The weak themselves just fall by the wayside. She adds that they're both boulder-pushers, and explains what that is.
Saul has a sudden psychotic break back to what Anna thinks of as (page 600) "the naked ego." He starts raving and repeating the personal pronoun "I-I-I-I" and goes on in this vein for a few pages while Anna stops listening, puts on some jazz, switches records, turns off the record player, gets a bottle of Scotch, and sits on the floor to drink. As she gets drunk, she starts crying in a heavily contrived way as if she's deliberately wallowing in female victimhood. Predictably, the two of them have some very bad sex.
They sleep and then wake the next day, exhausted. She's happy at first. Then Saul claims ostentatiously that he's going out – obviously he's trying to provoke Anna's reaction over his intent to see another woman. They bicker briefly in their usual pattern, and he leaves. Anna thinks to herself that words are insufficient to communicate the insights she receives in her madness. Then she gets back into bed and goes to sleep.
Anna has her dream again of the projectionist who speeds up the separate movies of her life until they blend into a seamless whole. The projectionist runs it at different speeds, pointing things out to her. She has an insight that cruelty and injustice are at the heart of the human experience, and therefore so is (page 606) a small, painful endurance like blades of grass that poke up through the metal wreckage after the bombs have fallen and melted the earth's crust. It's the will to go on. She reflects that she's always concentrated on the heroic, beautiful, and intelligent. Therefore even now she finds it hard to accept that the small, painful endurance could be the biggest thing of all.
Anna wakes in the late afternoon, and the flat is cold and dark. She's immediately overcome with self-pity and wishes Saul were there so they could have some more bad sex.
She gets an idea for a short story in which a woman pursues sexual emancipation by taking two men as lovers, wanting to get to the point of freedom where she enjoys them both equally and without attachment. The men become aware of each other as rivals. One falls in love with the woman. The other becomes cool and guarded. The woman responds by falling in love with the one who loves her, and freezing up with the guarded one. She then despairs because she's less free than ever. But she lies and announces her freedom from being attached to either one of them. The one who really loves her is so hurt that he leaves. She is then left with the guarded one with whom she can have cold, little intellectual conversations.
Saul returns and tells her that (1) she needs to laugh more, and (2) she needs to start writing again. Anna protests rather pretentiously that every time she sits down to write, someone metaphorically comes into the room and stops her – someone like one of Castro's soldiers or an Algerian freedom fighter, et cetera. In essence, she can't write because it doesn't feel like a worthy enough thing to do in the face of the injustice she sees in the world. Saul insists that she do it anyway.
He gives her the first sentence of her next novel and orders her to write it down, which she does: "The two women were alone in the London flat." (This is also the first sentence of The Golden Notebook itself.) She reciprocates by giving him the first sentence of his next novel: "On a dry hillside in Algeria, the soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle." He says he'll write that novel if she will write that sentence down in her new golden notebook and then give it to him, which she does. He asks her to cook for him, and they eat and fall asleep.
The next morning, Anna wakes first and knows that it is essential for the mental health of each of them that he move on. Nevertheless, she gives in to a weak and sentimental impulse to hold him and exploit his illness, making him feel like he's not well enough to leave yet. He in turn snuggles up to her like an overly self-pitying child. Then the two of them spring apart. He declares that they can't descend much lower than that. She agrees, and says that at least it's now over and done. He goes and packs his bags, and then comes back for the golden notebook. She hands it over and they part on good terms.
The golden notebook then ends with Anna's handwriting and picks up with Saul's short novel in his handwriting. We get a summary of the novel as follows:
An Algerian farmer becomes a soldier and joins the FLN (Algerian liberation movement) against French rule. He also realizes that nothing he's ever felt about life falls in line with what the authority figures in his life from God on down to his parents have ever expected him to feel. He gets captured by the French, tortured, and escapes to rejoin the FLN. Then on orders from the FLN, he tortures a French prisoner. He's aware that he's expected to feel something about this, but he doesn't know what. Late at night, he returns to chat with the poor French guy. His prisoner admits that he has the opposite problem from the Algerian: everything he feels can be compartmentalized into either Marxism or Freudianism. He has no original thoughts. The two of them get so absorbed in their conversation that their voices carry to the FLN commanding officer who wants to know why his man is talking to the French guy like a brother. Assuming his man is a spy, the C.O. has both of them shot side-by-side at dawn the next morning.
A note under this by Anna adds the information that this short novel was later published and did rather well.
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