The Golden Notebook: The Notebooks: 3 Summary & Analysis

Both columns of the black notebook are now filled. Under “Source,” on November 11, 1955: A man kicks a pigeon, expecting it to fly away, but it hits a lamppost and falls to the ground. A woman yells at him and a crowd gathers as the pigeon writhes on the ground. Two boys mock the woman’s concern and “an efficient frowning man” proclaims the pigeon dead, then picks it up, and finds himself unsure what to do with the body. The woman follows the kicker, demanding his name and address, until the boys distract her and start making fun of the efficient man, who threatens to call the police. They leave; the woman takes the pigeon to bury it at home.

November 12: Anna dreams about the pigeon, realizing only upon waking that it reminds her of a story from Africa, one weekend at the Mashopi Hotel. Mrs Boothby brings a .22 rifle to breakfast, asking if anyone can shoot—which Paul Blackenhurst can—because Mr Boothby wants pigeon pie. She directs Paul to a nearby marsh, and he goes with Jimmy, Willi, Maryrose, and Anna out into the veld after breakfast.

The group passes “a million white butterflies” and a cloud of other insects mating furiously, “the very emblem of stupidity.” Paul Blackenhurst suggests that the butterflies are also “pursuing vile sex”; Paul and Jimmy crouch down to pull busy grasshoppers off one another and reorganize two couples, re-matching insects with others of their own size—but the bugs return to their initial pairings. Jimmy jokes that perhaps some are same-sex couples. Everyone is uncomfortable, although they would not have been if Paul had said the same thing. Paul crushes his two insect couples, which offends Maryrose, and gives a speech imitating Stalin, which alienates everyone.

They walk on through the veld; Anna remembers the distinct kind of heat, which suggests that it must have been October or November, a few months before Paul Blackenhurst died the morning after eloping with Anna down this same path in the veld. They reach a clump of trees—they see only one pigeon but hear innumerable, maddening cicadas. Paul shoots the pigeon and, like a hunting dog, Jimmy retrieves it. They can hear more pigeons in the distance. Jimmy pokes at some holes he finds in the sand and, irritated, Paul takes his grass-stem and unearths the insect that made them.

Two more pigeons arrive; Paul Blackenhurst shoots them and Jimmy reluctantly retrieves them. Then one more—Paul splatters Jimmy’s arm with blood but fails to kill the bird. Jimmy challenges him to finish the job, but the bird dies before Paul can figure out what to do. Jimmy angrily calls him “damned lucky,” and Paul acknowledges that “the Gods favour me,” but remarks that he could not have killed the pigeon with his own hands. They still need two more. They watch the ant-eating insect that dug the sand pits trap and kill two ants. Paul explains that these “realities of nature” make him grateful to have come to Africa; Jimmy says, “I hate this country” and declares that he cannot wait to return home.

Another pigeon approaches, but turns and flies away; some farmworkers pass with averted eyes and an obvious fear of the rifle-carrying white people. Paul Blackenhurst goes into a tongue-in-cheek speech about how the colony has enough resources for its million and a half blacks—like the whole world, says Maryrose. Humorlessly, Willi says to look to “the philosophy of the class struggle,” and everyone but Maryrose laughs at him. Paul asks Maryrose why she never laughs—she did when she was with her brother, of course, for she was happy (which none of the others have ever been). Paul shoots another bird on his second try, then retrieves it himself when Jimmy refuses.

Paul Blackenhurst insists on shooting one more bird, describing the “toothsome pie” that they might all share with Mr Boothby and asking whether the others would remember the pigeons’ “tender songs” while eating them; the women would, and Paul says that they are tender, too. He speaks of the fields they can see being covered with houses for workers and criticizes “the simple savagery” of Africans—another joke on Willi, who falls for it easily. Maryrose reassures Willi that they are laughing at his predictability, not his words. Paul disagrees—Willi is wrong—and imagines seeing industry here when he becomes an investor in the future. Three more birds appear, Paul shoots them and Jimmy brings them back. They have enough pigeons, so it is time to head back.

A large beetle approaches, and Jimmy puts it in the ant-eater pit, where it fights with the other insect; another bird lands, and Paul Blackenhurst shoots it, and another, which does not die—but he wrings its neck, then digs out the anteater, which has been decapitated, its jaws stuck in the beetle. He blames Jimmy for “upset[ting] the balance of nature.” They stand up, the cicadas begin shrieking again, and two more pigeons land at the other clump of trees—at Maryrose’s request, Paul refrains from shooting them. The two walk off together; the others remark that they would be a perfect couple, but of course Maryrose has ill feelings toward Paul. They make the return trip in silence, noticing that nearly all the insects have disappeared.

Under the heading “Money”: A New Zealand review asks Anna for stories, which she does not write, and then journals, which she thinks are better kept private. She writes an imaginary journal, that of “a young American living on an allowance from his father,” traveling in Europe, writing occasionally, disdaining his home country. In entries from April 16 to June 30 in Paris, London, and Italy, the imaginary character names various women, laments his father’s inability to understand his art, makes absurd declarations about what “a writer is,” drops the names of various novelists, plans to kill himself, and publishes a book of pornography, for which his father sends him money as a congratulations.

Anna shows this to “the young American writer James Schafter,” and they add some more entries before getting it published in an American review. Schafter is a peculiar kind of writer; once for two weeks, he gave his worst critic a generous tour of London—the critic insisted that he would “never allow personal feelings to interfere with my critical conscience,” but published a nuanced and favorable review after two weeks. Unlike most young writers, James embraces corruption rather than naivety, openly and shamelessly flattering directors and critics, treating it as a joke and sometimes reaping benefits from it. “Integrity is the poor man’s codpiece,” he insists.

Anna and Schafter decide to invent another journal, this one written by a middle-aged woman, who had spent several years in Africa and “was afflicted with sensibility.” The journal is meant for another of James’s enemies, Rupert, the “wet, limp, hysterical, homosexual, intelligent” editor of Zenith, who has asked Anna for material. On Easter Week, the journal begins with a lengthy description of a Russian Orthodox Church; the people there were “few, yes. But real. This was reality. I was aware of reality.” The fictional diarist meditates on paganism and sexualizes the priests, finds a deeper awareness and decides she is an agnostic, not an atheist; she goes to a literary party and proposes making a play out of Anna’s book, which exposes the true injustice of colonialism: “the tragedy of the whites.” She surveys the advantages of clean linens on her way to bed.

On Easter Sunday, this character has lunch with someone named Harry and they discussed adapting Frontiers of War by having the white farmer convince the “young African girl” to get an education and elevate herself past her family of “crude Reserve Natives.” She falls in love and accuses him of rape when she learns his true, civilizing motives; this supposedly shows how white people, with their “superior spiritual status,” get “dragged down into the animal mud of Africa.” Anna’s fictionalized version of herself celebrates the “beautiful experience” with a bath.

Anna is apprehensive about her parodied character, whom the editors happily accept. Anna insists that the editors promise to publish the journal anonymously.

Pasted in the notebook is a story, “Blood on the Banana Leaves,” that James Schafter has written in lieu of the 12 reviews he is supposed to send a literary magazine. After this, he gives up on further parody and writes his serious reviews. In the story, clumsily written and full of heavy-handed racial metaphors, an African couple, John and Noni, lament the violence of colonialism on a stormy night before revealing that Noni has been raped and impregnated by a white man. John goes away to exact revenge, and crude descriptions of the land and plants in the storm close the story, serving as a metaphor for the couple’s pain.

Anna has pinned in a review of her novel from August, 1952, in Soviet Writing. It claims she reveals “the real truth behind British Imperialism!” but criticizes her picture of the class struggle: how could the airman and cook meet, and “where are the working masses” and “class conscious fighters?” Another review, from the Soviet Gazette, in 1954, begins by lauding the “majestic and untamed” land and criticizing the unrealistic expectations set by Anna’s excellent opening lines. It hopes that she will eventually learn “that a true artistic work must have a revolutionary life—asserting content, ideological profundity, humaneness, as well as artistic quality.” Anna’s heroines, it insists, are “not yet typical of the deep moral potentialities of the future.”

A third review, from the Soviet Journal for Literature for Colonial Freedom in 1956, claims that Anna is a “petty psychologiser” of the colonial situation, out of touch with the heroic nationalist struggles. She must “learn from our [Soviet] literature” to overcome her negativity and join the march of historical progress.

The red notebook continues on November 13, 1955: The Party changes in the two years following Stalin’s death; Anna and four other ex-members meet nine current members “with full trust.” They are deciding how to reform the British Party and cut its suffocating ties to the Soviet Union. Anna is thrilled, for the first time in many years. An enormous assemblage of newspaper clippings, letters, and schedule documents are stuck in the notebook here.

On August 11, 1956: As before in her life, Anna spends “weeks and months in frenzied political activity” but accomplishes “absolutely nothing.” The new group grows fast, but an Austrian visitor’s speech illustrates its limits: everyone seems to recognize that the Party leadership is hopelessly corrupt, but “instead of drawing the obvious conclusions” that this leadership must be overthrown, Anna’s band of rebels simply hopes their superiors will resign. Anna notes that people ignore this speech because of its satirical tone, a tone often shared by the finest speeches at such meetings. She says she has reread the previous notebook entry and finds herself “amazed at our naivety.”

On September 20, 1956: Anna stops attending meetings. The rebellious sect understands the risk of creating two competing parties that will denounce each other, but has no better plan; people are quitting the Party en masse, “broken-hearted and cynical to the degree that they were loyal and innocent before.” Some are eager to restart the whole cycle of rethinking and reorganizing. Molly calls to say that Tommy has become one of these eager reformists; he reminds Molly of her younger self and seems to believe that socialism will magically emerge in the West next week.

Anna’s novel The Shadow of the Third continues in the yellow notebook. “The third” in the novel’s title used to be Paul Tanner’s wife, then it was Ella’s alter ego based on “fantasies about Paul’s wife,” then her memory of him, and now Ella, who imagines herself “whole, healthy, and happy” as she “cracks.” The “thirds” are connected by normal, “respectable” emotions that Ella rejects.

Ella moves out of Julia’s flat, creating animosity between them. Ella realizes that Julia used to dominate her but now merely complains about her. However, Ella used to be “rather like a willing captive, with the captive’s hidden core of independence.” Leaving Julia feels like leaving her mother or a marriage.

Ella feels “more alone than she ever has been,” as her closest friendship has fallen into “hatred and resentment,” while Ella continues to ruminate about Paul Tanner. Ella also learns that Julia has “protected [her] from a certain kind of attention”—she sees the difference between living alone as a woman and living with another woman. Dr West tries and fails to start an affair with her; instead, he ends up with Patricia Brent, his last choice. Ella is amused but angered at Patricia’s reverence for him; she resents Dr West despite feeling that his search for an affair is understandable.

Ella talks with Julia at a mutual friend’s house, and “their relations are chilly” until she mentions Dr West. Julia replies with a story about an actor from the theater who once came over to complain about his wife, coerced her into sleeping with him through guilt, and then turned out to be impotent. She gave him another chance and he performed no better, calling her a “castrating woman” on his way out.

Ella gets four phone calls from men at work in the next few weeks and tells Julia, who “shows a flash of triumph.” They share an awkward silence, considering Ella’s departure and the possibility that others believed they were lesbians. Ella thinks that men would have flocked to her and Julia even more in that case, believing themselves “redeemers of these lost females.” At home, Ella “literally feels poisoned by” her own bitterness. She notes that she used to get the same attention a decade before, but considered herself superior to the men’s wives. Now, she thinks she is starting to sound like a spinster.

Ella and one of the magazine’s subeditors, Jack, are coming up with articles about women’s emotional problems. They pick both official and satirical private titles for each article. On their last night working together, he drives her home, and she knows he will try and sleep with her. She feels unattracted to him because of Paul Tanner—who also did not attract her at first.

Ella sleeps with Jack, who is “the efficient type of lover.” She feels tearful and blames her own double standard; Jack mentions that his wife is “a good girl” but begins revealing his resentment for her, and Ella knows that she is a tool for him to explore that resentment—and that, when he returns home, his wife will immediately know he has been sleeping around. She decides to give up sex and not tell Julia.

At lunch the next day, Ella nevertheless tells Julia about her experience and decision to stop having sex. She worries that her own bitterness will turn into Patricia Brent’s joking criticism of men; Julia’s “is turning rapidly into a corroding contempt.” Ella thinks of them as psychologically lesbian, but manages to refrain from mentioning her overarching dissatisfaction with men to Julia. Ella “begins to suffer torments of sexual desire,” which she has never felt without a specific man in mind; she masturbates to “fantasies of hatred about men,” feeling humiliated. She realizes “she is falling into a lie,” the one that men “contain” women’s sexuality. She continues to refuse the advances of men she cannot love.

Ella starts going to parties again, and she meets a Canadian script-writer whose wife is “professionally beautiful.” He shows up at Ella’s apartment the next morning—they have sex without feeling, and afterward he says he counts himself happy, with work and his wife and now his “girl” (Ella), who has become part of his “project or plan for a happy life.” He seems to think they will continue an affair, and she tells him that things are over, that neither of them have “much conviction in it.” He says he is sexually unsatisfied with his wife and seems to think that he satisfies Ella because “he has a large penis; he is ‘good in bed.’ And that’s it.” He jokes about her appearance; she wonders why “all these intelligent men” suddenly act stupid around women.

Ella finds Julia “sardonic rather than bitter.” Julia explains that the impotent actor has made another advance, and Ella wonders whether he has forgotten what he did, or whether “we’re all in a sort of sexual mad house.” Ella says this is the price they pay for being “free women,” and Julia laments that the men are not free, but rather stuck on “the old idea of good women and bad women.” Ella finds it freeing for men that they can get erections with anyone, but Julia insists that eight of her last ten partners have been unable to.

For some time, Ella “becomes completely sexless” and no longer feels any desire, but understands that this is “the other side of being possessed by sex.” She starts looking for “the book which is already written inside her.”

Anna, who insists that she is Anna, declares that she is also Ella, but sometimes not Ella—she does not understand how “Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella.” At a party once, Anna met a girl named Ella, who had penetrating eyes and knew that she needed exactly “an inch of red wine” to get intoxicated—which is “not Anna at all.”

Ella thinks of a story: a woman gives up her whole life, emotional and professional, for her affair with a man, who criticizes her for trying to be “a career woman” and sustain a social life. When he leaves her, she “becomes everything he has criticized her for being,” as a means of revenge. Then she meets the man again, and he falls in love with her, wanting her to have been a promiscuous socialite all along. She rejects him, because “he has rejected her ‘real’ self.” Worried that the story might come to life, Ella never writes it.

Ella thinks of another story that features a woman “over-ready for serious love,” and a man “playing at the role of a serious lover because of some need for asylum or refuge.” The woman “turns into a jailor,” feeling a different, possessive version of herself take over. She insists she was never jealous. Ella wonders where this story came from—perhaps from the way her husband treated her. She does not write this story, either, feeling it is not hers.

Ella visits her father, who is as solitary and unchanging as always. Ella wonders what her parents’ marriage must have been like and finally asks—her father is alarmed, apparently having forgotten her mother, whom he says was “altogether too good” for him, but lacked “all that sort of thing,” which Ella gets him to clarify was “sex, if that’s what you call it.” Ella asks whether he tried to “teach her,” but he says he just “went out and bought myself a woman. What did you expect?”

Ella’s father says that Ella was justification enough of his marriage. Family seems “pretty unreal” to him; he has never felt “blood ties.” They agree they have a bond, but it must be something else besides blood. He claims that God, “whatever that may mean,” is the most important thing for him, and that “people should leave each other alone.” He knows nothing about Ella’s life and does not want to. She insists that her affair was more important than her marriage; he says the same of his. Ella’s son, her father says, will “turn into a cannibal like everyone else.” He insists that “people don’t help each other, they are better apart,” and ends the conversation.

Alone, Ella remembers her mother running when her father kissed her; he spent his days alone with books, stuffing drawers with unshared writings, which would eventually surprise Ella. When she asks if he writes poems, he is astonished and brings her a sheaf of them, about isolation and adventure, mostly from the perspective of soldiers from history. Like Ella, her father never thought of publishing; he has read her novel, but thinks suicide an unworthy topic—everyone considers it, but Ella was wrong to write about it, he explains.

Ella’s father thinks that Ella is especially wrong to demand happiness from life (he says it is because of her communism). She insists that people can change, but he refuses to think so. In trying to write thereafter, she continues to get stuck in “patterns of defeat, death, irony” but eventually decides to “twist it into victory”: a story about a man and woman “both cracking up because of a deliberate attempt to transcend their own limits.” She waits for the story to form itself inside her.

For eighteen months, the blue notebook consists of short, factual notes, such as one expounding most of the concrete dates in Anna’s life (birth, death, Africa, marriage, joining and leaving the Party). This is all crossed out, and below it, she writes rapidly, nearly illegibly, that “all that is a failure too,” for it seems more false than any of the other notebooks, worse than even the day-long description of September 15, 1954.

This question of truthfulness is not literary—it’s like psychoanalysis. Anna remembers telling Mother Sugar that the procedure seems to reduce one’s knowledge to the infantile “intellectual primitivism” of myth and emotion. Mother Sugar smiled at this suggestion, Anna remembers, and not at her critical analysis of her emotions. During this session, which happened years ago, Anna had told Mother Sugar that neurosis might mean “being highly conscious and developed,” accepting the conflicts that others block out in order to feel whole and sane.

Anna continues recounting the old psychoanalysis session. Mother Sugar asks if Anna is “better or worse” from analysis, and Anna says that she does not want to be “better at the cost of living inside myth and dreams,” that she is less in conflict, but perhaps not morally better. For a moment, as Mother Sugar frowns, Anna feels like they are having an authentic moment, outside the context of the analysis. Anna explains that, were she describing a dream, Mother Sugar’s smile would signal “the pleasure of recognition, of a bit of rescue-work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form,” naming something—but also negating pleasure, like the joy of dreams, “safely held in the story,” which can never be matched in waking life.

Anna asks whether Mother Sugar thinks she is “ready for the next stage,” by which she means the one where “I leave the safety of myth and Anna Wulf walks forward alone.” Mother Sugar makes a joke about Anna’s communism, and Anna says that Mother Sugar seems to think individuation is about recognizing one’s experiences as aspects of universal human experience, in order to place them as archetypes or pieces of history, which allows one to disavow one’s individual ownership over them. Anna has learned to feel through analysis, but then she is asked to “put it away, put the pain away where it can’t hurt, turn it into a story or into history.” She refuses: she is “free and strong” because she has done this, “and what now?”

Anna repeats that she wants “to walk off, by myself, Anna Freeman,” living in a way women have never been able to. Mother Sugar reminds her that women have achieved art, independence, and sexual freedom in the past. Anna insists her unique accomplishment is her refusal to see herself in the terms of history, to simply fulfill “the old dream of the golden age” or any other dream—she wants to cut off the “old and cyclic” from the new and creative in herself.

Mother Sugar frowns, but assures Anna that she fully believes in people’s potential to change. However, Anna insists that Mother Sugar’s actions—her smiles and frowns—belie this belief. Anna says she thinks people’s cracks are proof that “they are keeping themselves open for something.”

Mother Sugar says that Anna should be writing, instead of saying this all to her—she could even write their sessions down. Anna suggests that the context of their relationship means she can say things she could never simply say to a reader—Mother Sugar asks whether she might be able to write for a minority. This goes against Anna’s principles, but regardless, it is still a problem of form, because people “can’t stand formlessness.” Yet she does not “hold the aristocratic view of art,” although Mother Sugar thinks the fact that she only writes for herself is aristocratic. But Anna reminds her that people around the world are “writing away in secret books, because they are afraid of what they are thinking.” Mother Sugar asks if Anna is afraid of what she is thinking and reaches for appointment book; the session is over.

After drawing a black line, Anna recounts buying the table for her notebooks; she never planned to have the four notebooks she has today, but since moving to her flat, she has given them room in her life. Moving has also led her to read through the books for the first time, which reminds her how much Michael’s rejection impacted her. She is also “disturbed” because she cannot recognize herself in her writing due to her “sterility” and critical tone. The “record of facts” in much of the blue notebook feels alien—words are increasingly “a series of meaningless sounds” whenever she thinks, or when she looks back at the things she does manage to write.

Anna realizes that she is breaking down—if “words are form,” then she is becoming formless, nothingness, her intelligence dissolving. She has a recurring nightmare, which Mother Sugar made her realize was about “joy in spite.” At first, she dreamed that her Russian vase had an “anarchistic and uncontrollable” personality and threatened “everything that was alive.” Usually, it was an old man or woman. Mother Sugar could not get her to see anything positive in it, although she realized she should not fear it—which she tended to do even before she started to dream. Anna felt it unfair that it should be her responsibility “to force this thing to be good as well as bad.” She had the dream again last night, and it was more terrifying than ever, because the force was in a trusted friend, which means it was also her.

Anna says she will write about “the experience to which the dream related,” but simply draws a black line and writes that she does not want to. Most people “have a sense of shape, of unfolding, in their lives,” and she can “name” her past selves, but… she trails off without finishing her idea and draws another black line.

Anna remembers going to a political meeting at Molly’s house a few weeks before. A Jewish intellectual, Comrade Harry, managed to go to the Soviet Union and learn about the regime’s horrific anti-Semitism, but at the meeting he tries, as usual, to hide the worst of it from the British Party. He does not even mention it until most of the attendees have left for the meeting’s “closed” second phase. An American named Nelson gets up and accuses Harry’s mendacity of destroying the West’s communist movements.

Anna ends up sleeping with Nelson, but feels unable to write about it and draws another black line. Then she continues her recollection. Nelson genuinely asks her about her life—he seems so “grown-up,” unlike the rest of the other men who are chasing her, and she realizes “how easy it is, living deprived, to forget love, joy, delight.” He is already leaving his wife, and he gets along with Janet immediately.

That night, Nelson is nervous and talkative, and he leaves abruptly at midnight. The next morning, he is normal again, but it soon becomes clear that “he had a mortal terror of sex, could never stay inside a woman for longer than a few seconds, and had never been different.” Yet they develop a trust, and Anna convinces herself she can “cure” him, even though she knows she is really following women’s “deep instinctive need to build a man up.”

After a week, Nelson becomes “driven by a shrill compulsive hysteria.” The second time they sleep together, he speaks out against all women, then disappears for two weeks, leaving Anna distant and depressed and occasionally calling to make excuses (to “women,” not to her). Then he visits, seeming perfectly charming, and Anna agrees to come to his home for a party, since she has decided they would just be friends.

Anna is “ashamed and humiliated” to see Nelson’s huge but “tasteless, anonymous” flat, full of friendly, rich, and uninteresting Americans. Nelson’s wife is attractive and stylish, seemingly self-assured but, under the surface, clearly anxious and paranoid about her husband, who never returns her continual stare. The Americans traffic in self-deprecating humor and cover up Nelson’s obvious tension with his wife. They also drink excessively, and Anna follows suit, becoming the drunkest person there. She observes a couple, “a tiny blonde woman” who drinks four double scotches in an hour and her “big ugly dark” husband, whom she infantilizes and begs to stop drinking. This is clearly “the basis of this marriage.”

Nelson’s wife, and everyone else, seems “in some permanent, controlled hysteria,” the same as English couples, but self-aware about it and willing to “name” their problems to avert pain. Around midnight, Nelson, his wife, and the blonde’s husband, Bill, get into an argument in front of the whole room, which simply laughs away the tension. In the corner, Nelson and his wife joke their way through an argument about his career (which she thinks is stagnant) and her incessant worry (which he finds intolerable).

Everyone else starts dancing, and Nelson decides to dance with Anna instead of his wife. As a joke, he even propositions her in front of everyone, but Anna can see from his wife’s expression that they have probably already fought about her. Despite this, she kisses Anna’s cheeks on her way out, and Anna realizes that Nelson and his wife share “the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving.” Anna feels acutely certain that Nelson will never leave his wife.

The following evening, Anna gets stuck on the image of a man and woman wandering around a rooftop. He tells her he loves her, but she is terrified—he just “wanted to hear how it would sound,” and she really loves him, which nearly drives him to jump off.

That morning, Nelson calls to tell Anna he wants to marry her, but then starts yelling at her, as if at his wife or analyst (who was on vacation). After an hour, he calls again, his normal self, but insisting that Anna tell him he has not hurt her. He says he can “imagine really loving someone,” which would be a “blueprint for the future,” and Anna is charmed. After their conversation, Anna wonders how men can talk to women in the way Nelson just did—to hurt them and then demand to be assured that they hadn’t, to create “a parody of meaning.” This is when Anna has the nightmare about Nelson, the friend who turned out to have “the smile of joyful spite.”

While the dream has not repeated, Anna has rejected a man she met at Molly’s house, for she is afraid of failing again. After another black line on the page, she describes this man, De Silva, who had returned to his native Ceylon from London years ago after failing to make a living as a journalist. His family and wife did not get along, and all of the sudden he returned to London on a whim and borrowed money. He is “cool, detached, witty,” and has since found another job; he propositions Anna, and she refuses, as she would refuse any man, but invites him to a dinner. At the dinner, he insists his wife is suddenly no longer planning on moving to London but now hoping to stay in Ceylon.

After dinner, De Silva insists on telling Anna a story. High on marijuana, he once walked up to a girl in the street and asked if she would sleep with him. Surprisingly, she said yes. He asked that she let him pretend to be “desperately in love with [her],” but ignore it; he said it was fascinating and wonderful, but she could not stay in her role. He felt he had “never been so in love. But she kept spoiling it by responding.” The girl was angry, of course, but he did not care and never saw her again.

Later, De Silva tells another story, about his friend B.B., permanently unsatisfied with his marriage, who was sleeping with his cleaning woman. The cleaning woman told De Silva that she loved B.B. but was only with him “because his wife isn’t good for him.” De Silva slept with the woman, too, and then B.B.’s wife came back, delighted to find him visiting. He told her about B.B.’s affair and she was furious. De Silva says he did it just “to see what would happen, that’s all,” and smiles the exact same smile from Anna’s nightmare. However, his desire “to see what will happen” is something Anna shares, like the feeling of “it didn’t matter to me.”

Anna spends the night with De Silva “because it didn’t matter.” At times, he seems like a desperate infant, and they are both “friendly and detached” in the morning. But he grows “angry and vicious” when she says she does not plan to have sex with him again. She suggests that he would not care whether they slept together again; he insists that he does indeed care, but she dismisses him regardless.

De Silva calls later and asks to have “a friend of mine” sleep in Janet’s room. Anna is confused, then calls him back to clarify, and he confirms that he was planning to sleep with a prostitute in Janet’s room, so that Anna could hear them have sex. He wails and cries like a child and asks for forgiveness. Then he sends two letters, one detached, one “the hysterical wail of a child.” Anna sees him as “incarnate, the principle of joy-in-giving-pain.” He appears in her nightmares, and soon Molly calls to inform her that he left his wife and children well before moving to London. Anna later meets B.B., who speaks well of De Silva, even though he is not paying his wife’s allowance and still likes B.B.’s cleaning woman.