Anita Brookner

Precipitations fall thickly and heavily in Abel Gance’s Napoleon: snow in the courtyard of the college in Brienne, feathers from savaged pillows, rain and hail on the drums at the siege of Toulon, song-sheets fluttering down at the National Convention, confetti at the extraordinary Bal des Victimes, at which everyone present had to have lost a relative on the scaffold or to have been reprieved himself. This migraine-inducing technique, confined to a screen the size of an old-fashioned glass lantern slide, tests one’s nerve and endurance much as those of the recruits in the Army of Italy were tested before General Bonaparte, lanky, scarecrowish, hat planted sideways, won them to confidence, excitement and triumph. By the end of the day-long showing, the audience rose in a comparable mood of exaltation as the screen opened out onto an immense triple montage of red, white and blue, with a long last image of exploding galaxies.

Fashion, according to Baudelaire, is a moral affair. It is, more specifically, the obligation laid upon a woman to transform herself, outwardly and visibly, into a work of art, or, at the very least, into a work of artifice, thus acknowledging the distance that must be measured between her natural and unredeemed state and the peculiar idol she must become if she espouses the work of self-admonition and self-regulation, and therefore of disguise, constraint, impassivity. She must do this because, naked and unashamed, she once performed the original act or sin of flouting God’s will and of bringing man to full knowledge of himself. Since that time she has served as a constant reminder of the fallen state, and, to Baudelaire, was only tolerable when her body was corseted, her legs disguised by a crinoline, her arms immobilised by the dropped sleeves of her low-cut bodice, and her face rendered unrecognisable by rice powder, rouge and kohl. At once travestied and made inaccessible, she could then take her place in a box at the opera, and inscrutably fulfil her duties both to the passing scene and to the demands of her conscience. Or, rather, to the demands of Baudelaire’s conscience. A failed dandy himself, he appreciated signs of effort in others; the loose, the slipshod, the revealing drove him to bitterness, and the unbound hair of his mistress was only too closely associated in his mind with her venality. ‘La femme est naturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable.’

Mrs Jean Harris, a trim widow of 56, was a woman who had reason to congratulate herself on making a success of her life. She had risen from undistinguished but respectable suburban beginnings to the position of headmistress of the select Madeira School for girls, in McLean, Virginia. She had married young and had two fine sons. She had kept her looks, and, apart from the occasional bout of depression or fatigue, her health. She was well respected in the academic world, was an active fund-raiser, and presented to the girls in her charge a picture of independence, decorum and high moral standards. So high, indeed, were these moral standards that the penalties she inflicted on her girls for such relatively unimportant misdemeanours as drinking beer or smoking marijuana met with some criticism, not only from the girls themselves but from her colleagues and from the school board. Yet such criticism was powerless to modify Mrs Harris’s actions, for it was clear, even to those who did not warm to her, that Mrs Harris was a lady whose behaviour was so impeccable that she expected no less of others. Mrs Harris did not drink beer or smoke marijuana. But she did something else. On the night of 10 March 1980, Mrs Harris took a gun, got into her car, drove for five hours to Westchester, woke her lover of 14 years, Dr Herman Tarnower, from his sleep, shot him, then left him dying on the floor while she went back to her car and began to drive away. She did not intend to escape. In any event, the police were already approaching, alerted by Tarnower’s housekeeper, Suzanne van der Vreken. Mrs Harris was taken to the police station and in due course brought to trial. She was convicted of murder in the second degree and condemned to serve a sentence of a minimum of 15 years.

The Golden Notebook takes one back not only in time but in consciousness. It is just 20 years old, and yet, reread from the standpoint of 1982, it seems to belong to an immensely confusing period, weighed down by the anxieties of a decade that now seems remote, incomprehensible to those for whom the Sixties signify permissiveness, euphoria, liberty, and pleasure. It reminds us, among other things, that the Sixties inherited the dilemmas of the Fifties, surely the dreariest decade this century, and made an all too conscious attempt to bury them. Reading The Golden Notebook when it first appeared, I remember being impressed by its entirely grown-up seriousness; it connected in my mind with its not dissimilar counterpart in France, Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins. Both were concerned, overwhelmingly, with the lives led by thinking women, in and out of politics; both had to do with loyalty, disillusion, the fragmentation of beliefs formerly held to be indissoluble, and the effects of such fragmentation on the personality. More significantly, both had to do with the paradox of the thinking woman’s attitude to love and expectation in her personal life, and it is salutary, and not a little shocking, to reflect on how much has been gained, and how much more lost, in the 20 years of The Golden Notebook’s history.