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Cy Maitland
In the red notebook, Jack is a historian of the Soviet communist movement and Anna’s closest confidant at the British Communist Party, who often helps mediate her meetings with Comrade John Butte. Anna and Jack agree that their organization has lost sight of its purpose and become a Stalinist propaganda machine, and they also have fascinating conversations about their problems with the Party and the Soviet Union. Unlike Anna, Jack has spent so much of his life intertwined in the Party that he feels he cannot leave, and after she quits, they appear to drift apart. Torn between his beliefs and his organizational commitment, Jack represents the tragedy of dedicated political activism that is also the tragedy of politics: the conflict of individual values with the collective interest (the values of a party versus the interests of society, but also the values of an individual versus the values of a party). A version of Jack also appears in Anna’s novel The Shadow of the Third in the yellow notebook, as an editor at Ella’s magazine who collaborates on a series of articles with her, and later sleeps with her before pontificating about his conflicting feelings for his wife.
Jack Quotes in The Golden Notebook
The The Golden Notebook quotes below are all either spoken by Jack or refer to Jack. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Notebooks: 2 Quotes
15th September, 1954
A normal day. During the course of a discussion with John Butte and Jack I decided to leave the Party. I must now be careful not to start hating the Party in the way we do hate stages of our life we have outgrown. Noted signs of it already: moments of disliking Jack which were quite irrational. Janet as usual, no problems. Molly worried, I think with reason, over Tommy. She has a hunch he will marry his new girl. Well, her hunches usually come off. I realized that Michael had finally decided to break it off. I must pull myself together.
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After Anna attempts to record every event of her day on September 15, she ultimately crosses out her entire entry and offers this bare version of the day instead. The reader gets two perspectives on the same experience, one full of life and affect, the other a set of dead, empty facts. Beyond showing how Anna’s often finicky authorial choices shape the reader’s access to her “truth,” this also implies that there is much in Anna’s life the reader might not be privy to because her notebooks so often evacuate her experience of all detail. Beyond revealing Anna’s struggle to Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis conse
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Jack Character Timeline in The Golden Notebook
The timeline below shows where the character Jack appears in The Golden Notebook. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
The Notebooks: 2
...have shot one another if they had been in Russia; after John left, Anna and Jack discussed the changes in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death—Jack was the only person with...
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...“to defeat the sour musty smell,” before heading up to John’s office. She remembers what Jack has told her about John’s energy and brilliance in the past; she laments how the...
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...“captive critic,” as John’s “youthful self, sitting opposite him, which he has to defeat.” When Jack evokes a specific criticism from her, John bangs his fist and yells, “Publish and be...
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...and realizing that the Party’s actual operations in no way match her interesting conversations with Jack, Anna decides that she has to quit. She affirms that “both books will be published”...
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...public mirror to her feelings about art; despite her hopes for communal art, she and Jack recently realized that their conversations are all about “the individual conscience.”
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The bulk of Anna’s work is what Jack jokingly calls “welfare work.” Before she begins work, she goes downstairs and washes, wondering whether...
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...She doubts that her “welfare work” has made any real difference and decides to visit Jack.
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Jack is a historian of the Party in the Soviet Union—his writings are too truthful to...
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...she “must now be careful not to start hating” it, as she started to with Jack. Janet is “as usual”; Molly is distraught over Tommy; Anna understands “that Michael had finally...
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The Notebooks: 3
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...
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Ella sleeps with Jack, who is “the efficient type of lover.” She feels tearful and blames her own double...
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