research paper

7 4 D I S S E N T W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

©

W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 D I S S E N T 7 5

The Golden Notebook: Doris Lessing’s Rendezvous with the Zeitgeist

J O N A H R A S K I N

They’re almost all dead now, the renowned intellectuals who once belonged to the British Communist Party: Eric Hobsbawm most recently, along with Christopher Hill, George Rudé, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Donna Torr. Although they did much to change the way history and literature came to be written in the twentieth century, most are largely forgotten, except by academics and their students.

The one survivor from the heyday of the British radical Left is Doris Lessing, ninety- three years old as of this writing in the fall of 2012. Long ago, Lessing moved on from Marxism and communism, turned to Sufi Islam for wisdom, wrote “space fiction,” as she called it, and won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. The award recognized a complex body of work—more than sixty books—that spoke to readers all over the world about the life and the death of the earth itself.

If asked to pick Lessing’s greatest novel, most critics and teachers would probably choose The Golden Notebook. In this work, she looked back at her own experience on the Left and also anticipated the novels that she would write in the next forty years of her life, in which she explored dreams, memory, and the paradoxes of language itself. When The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, Irving Howe called it “the most absorbing and exciting piece of new fiction I have read in a decade; it moves with the beat of our time, and it is true.” The novel describes women aching to be free, whites and blacks in colonial Africa, and Communist Party members who are neither red devils nor noble comrades but as messed

up and crazy as any of their adversaries. The British media recently observed the

fiftieth anniversary of The Golden Notebook by treating it as a novel primarily for women. A BBC interviewer asked Lessing where her images came from, whether men had mistreated her, and why she decided to write about menstruation. “It never crossed my mind not to write about menstruation,” she responded. The Golden Notebook, she explained, was “not meant to be a blow against my husband.” But, she added, “It really does matter who makes the tea.”

The novel does not have a conventional plot; at times, it jumps around like a hand- held movie camera, appropriate for a work that aims to show history and humanity lurching into chaos. In the opening section, which briefly echoes Jane Austen, two English women, Anna Wulf and Molly Jacobs, sit and talk about their lives. They return repeatedly in the narrative, but the bulk of the book presents Wulf’s four notebooks, which explore her separate selves and illustrate the themes of crack-up, romantic break-up, and societal disintegration. Some readers were troubled by Lessing’s innovative form, espe- cially her use of the notebooks. But readers who had come of age with television and with the metafictional experiments of the late 1950s and early 1960s embraced Lessing’s bold undertaking.

Then, too, reading The Golden Notebook gave one the feeling of peering into the mind of a writer with writer’s block who doesn’t complete her sentences, puts others in brackets, makes lists, and veers into poetry. The sections in which Wulf and Jacobs chat and gossip give the impression of eaves- dropping on conversations meant only for

R E C O N S I D E R A T I O N S

7 6 D I S S E N T W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

R E C O N S I D E R A T I O N S

women. Wulf’s descriptions of her relation- ships with men strip away the romance of the Gothic novel and the modern love story meant for lonely women. The Golden Notebook preceded Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media by two years, but Lessing’s novel resembles what McLuhan would call a “mosaic.” It includes references to all the modern media—TV, radio, recorded music, newspapers, and movies—and illustrates their fragmenting impact on the characters’ thoughts and feelings.

I loved the novel when I read it in 1968 and assigned it to my students at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I saw it as the quintessential twentieth-century British postmodern novel. It required and demanded collaboration between writer and reader to create meaning. Moreover, it seemed to fit Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of the “anti- novel,” a work of fiction that upsets tradition and carves out new forms and patterns that reflect cultural and historical change.

Alas, few of these suburban teenagers shared my enthusiasm. They were willing to read short novels with short sentences and madcap humor by Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. But Lessing demanded that readers think hard about thinking itself, scrutinize human motives, and examine the clash between ideals and sordid realities. In a time of revolutionary romanticism embraced by hippies, Yippies, Weathermen, Black Panthers, and radical feminists, she warned against the temptation to imagine that any revolution would be easy and joyful. When I told her that she seemed to view history as a series of explosions, she responded, “It is. I feel as if the Bomb has gone off inside myself and in people around me.” She added, “Some terrible new thing is happening. Maybe it’ll be marvelous. Who knows? It’s hard to distinguish between the marvelous and the terrible.”

The Golden Notebook didn’t really find an audience in the United States until the late 1960s, when women’s liberation took to the streets and feminists appeared on television. Women read it in consciousness-raising groups, and passed it on to their mothers and

their aunts, though Lessing didn’t encourage women to regard her book as a bible of feminism, or see her as their champion. I heard The Golden Notebook as a wake-up call directed toward male radicals such as myself. It depicted men like me honestly, particularly in our relationships with women. Lessing’s American radicals act as though they’re permanently underground and can only act in clandestine ways. Their politics has warped their personalities, and their personalities have warped their politics.

Near the end of The Golden Notebook, Saul Green—an American writer and an ex-communist—tells Wulf, “You remember everything, you probably remember every- thing I’ve ever said. You remember everything that’s happened to you.” Green might mean to compliment Wulf, but his comment sounds more like criticism than praise. Apparently based on the radical novelist Clancy Sigal, who lived in London for years and has said he was Lessing’s real-life lover, Green is intensely competitive with Anna. “The truth is,” he says, “I resent you for having written a book which was a success.” A polemical novel that aims to tell the truth about the rise and fall of communists and communism, as well as about writers and their memories, The Golden Notebook offers a host of characters who make emphatic statements such as “the truth is” and “the point is.”

That’s probably because many commu- nists and ex-communists talked that way in the days when communist parties outside the United States still boasted large member- ships and when the Soviet Union was a world power. Every communication, every manifesto, and every book by a communist had to have a point or a message either for or against the working class, for or against the bourgeoisie, for or against furthering the class struggle.

The Golden Notebook describes the culture of the Left, with its book clubs, front groups, and folk heroes in which Lessing came of age. Green knows the gestures and the language of communism as well as does Wulf; as a writer, he also surely knows that to tell Anna she remembers everything is like telling her she suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder and, by inference, is a writer who gathers

W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 D I S S E N T 7 7

R E C O N S I D E R A T I O N S

memories and plops them down on the page, without much real imagination or art.

Still, Green has a point. Wulf has an excellent memory and Lessing does, too. For her, forgetting isn’t simply a momentary lapse but an active refusal to preserve the past. It’s an invitation to open the floodgates to nostalgia, which she has always abhorred.

Not to remember is to take part in the collective amnesia that, as Lessing has long insisted, blanketed whole cultures and coun- tries under fascism, communism, and in the West as well. In the first of the notebooks in The Golden Notebook, which is largely about memory itself, Wulf confronts what she calls the “anti-humanist bullying about the evapo- ration of the personality.” Some of her refer- ences might be lost to today’s readers; she’s all worked up about such heated topics from the 1950s such as alienation, the “lonely crowd,“ and the loss of self. Still, her point is worth repeating, especially to postmodern intel- lectuals who argue that everything’s just a narrative, that there is no reality and no truth. For Lessing, the historical record matters.

Indeed, Lessing belongs to the cultural tradition of George Orwell, a crafty artist and shrewd propagandist, who knew the difference between polemical writing and literature in which the author presents the reader with a picture, a puzzle, a narrative, a few clues, and doesn’t impose a moral or a lesson from without. Even as a communist, Lessing read Stendhal, Dickens, and Tolstoy as well as socialist-realist fiction whose didactic tone she could never bring herself to imitate. If joining the Communist Party was, she told me, “the most neurotic choice I ever made in my life,” not writing socialist realism was one of the healthiest.

Creating The Golden Notebook and washing communism out of her head had to be quite therapeutic. Wulf sees a psychiatrist she calls “Mother Sugar,” but it’s by writing her note- books that she comes to terms with herself and heals herself from the trauma of both communism and the Cold War.

Lessing is not the only notable contemporary writer to mine autobiography for fiction. From the overtly self-referential novel in which the

writer offers a portrait of herself or himself, to the roman à clef with a cast of characters based on actual individuals, to the fiction that uses personal experience as the slimmest of starting points, autobiographical fiction comes in all shapes and styles. Lessing has written two fascinating volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, that reveal events and people behind The Golden Notebook and explore Lessing’s own state of mind when she wrote the book.

Today, many readers assume that nearly everything writers put into fiction must be based on something real they experienced. Interviewers on the radio and at literary events routinely ask novelists questions about the ties between themselves, their own family members, and their fictional characters. Lessing is annoyed by that line of questioning, though she has written other novels besides The Golden Notebook that invite autobiographical speculations—with titles such as Memoirs of a Survivor and Diary of a Good Neighbor.

For Lessing, however, the point has almost always been to create novels that come as close to “raw experience” as possible or create the illusion of raw experience: what it’s like to crack up, for example, and what it’s like to feel that the world is in chaos. “I’ve never gone mad,” she told me not long ago. “But I know what it’s like.”

Her essay “Writing Autobiography” offers her clearest thinking on the subject of fiction and nonfiction and truth and reality, and it clarifies important issues. “Novels don’t have to be the truth. Autobiographies do have to be,” she wrote. Lessing also seems to contradict herself when she says, in the first volume of her autobiography, that fiction does a better job of telling the truth than autobiog- raphy. Moreover, she believes that an autobi- ography “uses a lot of novelist’s tricks.”

Lessing uses such tricks in her fiction. The Golden Notebook includes newspaper clip- pings about “The Bomb” and “The Reds” from the 1950s. Moreover, by presenting The Golden Notebook itself as a series of notebooks written by her main character, each named for a specific color—black, red, yellow, blue, and golden—Lessing meant to provide a sense of unfiltered, unadulterated experience itself.

7 8 D I S S E N T W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

R E C O N S I D E R A T I O N S

But anyone who concludes that the note- books in The Golden Notebook are the author’s actual diaries and not novels within the novel would be mistaken. Years ago, Lessing told me that she kept diaries and added, crypti- cally, that they would not be published “for a long time.” This was not, she insisted, because of what they’d reveal about her, but for what they’d say about others—those who went mad and committed suicide even in the midst of “Swinging London” during the 1960s. “I don’t think there will be any big surprises for people who have read my books when and if they read my diaries,” she added. “It’s all there for people to see in the novels.”

Lessing always meant her characters to be representative figures as well as distinctive individuals. The Royal Air Force pilots and the white settlers in the African sections of The Golden Notebook are clearly “types.” They are emblematic of a social class, a group, a tribe, and yet are not abstractions such as one finds in Thomas Hardy’s novels of rural English life. Lessing’s people have idiosyncratic ways of walking, talking, dancing, and dreaming. Details distinguish them from the herd.

Saul Green, who appears near the end of The Golden Notebook, is a typical American left- wing writer, though he has quirks all his own. At one point, he sits down on the edge of the bed in which he and Anna have made love and, with absolute sincerity in his voice, tells her that, “the trouble is, when we took each other on, you took fidelity for granted, and I didn’t. I’ve never been faithful to anyone.” In response, she dismisses him and a whole society, too: “Like all Americans, you’ve got mother-trouble.”

Wulf and Jacobs represent British left-wing women who lived through the 1930s. They talk about the Spanish Civil War and works by Gorky and Mayakovsky that once swept them away and persuaded them to write. Their eccentricities and individualities come across from the very start of the novel, when they chat about husbands, children, psycho- analysis, an alcoholic friend, and “the really deadly skeleton in the communist closet.”

I’ve known Lessing for more than forty years and can hardly be a disinterested critic of her

work. Almost everything that I’ve thought and written about her books has been shaped by our personal connection and conversations. Not long ago, I dredged up bits and pieces of our many talks over the decades and asked her if she had the same memories. Had she really told me that she’d written a whole novel—and then destroyed it—about a communist and a fascist who share the same prison cell and argue about ideology the whole time? Yes, she said, and wasn’t sorry she had destroyed it. It was “rubbish.” But she had also written a play within the novel and had, much to her regret, tossed that into the dustbin, too.

So, I’ve learned to trust my memories of Lessing, though I also have more than memories to guide me. There are notes from our encounters, transcripts of the four inter- views with her that I’ve published from 1969 to 2007, plus forty or so years of letters and postcards. I know that the interviews, letters, and notes aren’t a substitute for close readings and rigorous interpretations of her fiction, but they’ve been a real asset to me.

When I first read The Golden Notebook I knew nothing about the author herself and wasn’t curious about her life. But in 1969, when I heard that Lessing would be on the campus where I was teaching, I knew I had to meet her. In fact, the day we were introduced, I learned that she wanted to come to my class on British literature and meet the students. I didn’t have to ask, nor did I have to request an interview or go through channels. She wanted to talk, to reach the students that I thought of as the “children of violence”—a phrase I borrowed from her.

What drew us together from the start was a deep-seated distrust of academia, academics, and the systems of formal education. As she put it in the 1971 introduction to The Golden Notebook, “Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other peoples’ opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply.” What she wanted from me and from my students was our own opinions and feelings, not a regurgitation or a paraphrase of anyone else’s. Authenticity was a kind of credo for her; she was unwilling to put up with cant, and wasn’t afraid to say what she thought and felt. Perhaps more than any other writer I have met, including Anthony Burgess

W I N T E R 2 0 1 3 D I S S E N T 7 9

R E C O N S I D E R A T I O N S

and Gore Vidal, she was always the same person on stage as she was off it.

After we met, she pointed out how gullible I was. If I wanted to know how violent left-wing groups such as the Weather Underground and the Red Army Fraction in West Germany operated, she advised me to find out with whom RAF leader Ulrike Meinhof, Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground, and the other fugitive boys and girls were having sex. Politics, she argued, was sexual, and sex political. Her experience in the Communist Party taught her to be wary of ideologies, slogans, and appeals to “the people” and “the comrades,” and to look instead at how individuals in movements and organizations lived their own lives day to day. Envy, jealousy, fear, and possessiveness motivated even those, or especially those, who seemed pure and selfless.

My own parents, though Americans, came from the same generation as Lessing. Like her, they had been communists in the 1930s and 1940s and had grown up reading many of the same books and authors, especially the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. As a boy in the 1950s, I heard adults talk about Stalin, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, socialist realism, Trotsky and Trotskyists, nuclear testing, and the hydrogen bomb— all of which I later read about in The Golden Notebook. After I told her my personal history, she said, “Well, then The Golden Notebook is a perfect novel for you.”

But would younger generations understand it? she wanted to know. By the 1970s, she worried, and rightly so, that readers who had not lived through the Cold War and the anti- communist crusades of the 1950s would miss much of what she had meant to convey in the book. To reach young readers, she began to write novels set in outer space and on distant planets in which she returns to many of the same themes of the colonial world, empire, and revolution that she explored in The Golden Notebook.

Lessing also taught me how difficult it is to recognize the Zeitgeist of the era one is living through. “This hippie era isn’t going to last forever, you know,” she said in 1969. I didn’t

believe her. If only my generation wouldn’t make the same mistakes as her generation was a message she repeated again and again. She hoped, too, that we wouldn’t fall in love with the sound of our own words, that we wouldn’t embrace charismatic leaders who knew all the gestures, but who didn’t really care about “the democratic process.”

For years, I have called myself a Lessingite, though she never encouraged me to do so; she had had her fill of followers during her time in the Communist Party. She certainly didn’t want to do my thinking for me or for anyone else. Perhaps the most lasting lesson she taught me was about writing itself: she discovered what she wanted to say in the process of writing. I began this essay not knowing where it would take me or how it would end. On one of my last visits to Lessing in London, I told her that I thought that her novels described journeys. “Well, I think they do,” she said. “After all, isn’t life itself a journey?” Out of the shards of her own broken journey she captured the crazy Zeitgeist of the sixties. For writers today who would capture our elusive Zeitgeist, she would urge a total rejection of nostalgia, suspicion of the big impersonal voice of governments, and respect for the realities of everyday life. I wonder, is there anyone left still listening to Lessing?

Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation, the editor of The Radical Jack London, and a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University.

Are You Moving? Please notify us one month in advance of your

change of address at www.dissentmagazine.org or send both your old and new addresses to:

The Sheridan Press Attn: Penn Press Journals

P.O.Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331 Phone: 717-632-3535 (ask for subscriber services)

Fax: 717-633-8920 Email: [email protected]

Copyright of Dissent (00123846) is the property of University of Pennsylvania Press and its content may not be

copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.