ESSAY
Doris Lessing’s ‘Golden Notebook’ and Our Era of Unrest
Doris Lessing in 1994.
Doris Lessing in 1994.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
ByKaran Mahajan
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NY Times, PublishedAug. 15, 2020UpdatedAug. 22, 2020
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When Doris Lessing, the British-Zimbabwean novelistwho died in 2013
<https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/books/doris-lessing-novelist-who-won-2007-nobel-is-dead-at-94.html?_r=0>,
sat down to write “The Golden Notebook” in the 1950s, she was responding
to a feeling of defeat in leftist circles, one similar to the whiplash
experienced by liberals after the election of President Trump. The
marquee intellectual philosophy of the young 20th century — communism —
was sagging from the revelation that “Father Stalin” had overseen the
death of millions; communist stalwarts in the West, like Lessing, felt
they’d had the carpet pulled out from under them. They became
intellectually homeless. Meanwhile, Senator Joseph McCarthy was raving
like a proto-Trump at left-leaning Americans. What had this generation’s
progressive causes amounted to?
Then there were more personal crises. In the 1950s, from the tumult of
wartime emerged a new type of woman whom Lessing, in “The Golden
Notebook,” terms a “free woman”: Such a woman could work, raise children
on her own, date around. Yet just as members of today’s Tinder
generation can be flummoxed by a surfeit of options, she often felt
depressed by the new freedom, and worried whether her emotions were
“still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists.”
Lessing herself was one of these women. She had married twice in
Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) — where she was an activist against
racial segregation — and had come to London, where she published the
best-selling novel “The Grass Is Singing” and embarked on a series of
love affairs. Her third novel, “The Golden Notebook,” was her most
heroic reckoning with a “kind of experience women haven’t had before.”
Published in 1962, the book was labeled a feminist classic, though like
all labels this one has the effect of reducing it.
The book is far from a manifesto. It charts a smart, sensitive woman’s
exhaustion with modern gender dynamics, “the men vs. women business.” It
is also, to my mind, the novel that best captures the mood of our own
era of political unrest.
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Bombarded on all sides by news and newness, we, too, feel exhausted and
don’t know how to respond. Anna, the protagonist, is, like Lessing, a
novelist from Africa. At the start, she is living with her 10-year-old
daughter in a flat in the “wastes of London’s student-land” and is
blocked, unable or unwilling to write for the public after a very
successful first novel set in Africa. “At the moment I sit down to
write,” she admits, “someone comes into the room, looks over my
shoulders, and stops me. … It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of
Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F.L.N.” Her
plight is more than just a form of white liberal guilt or piety. Anna is
hopelessly split among identities: exile, communist, novelist, mother,
lover. How to put all these strands into one book without delicately
pickling each in its own predictable social novel?
As a writer torn between countries and careers, I have often struggled
with such questions, and I have seen few more brilliant solutions to the
problem than the daring form of “The Golden Notebook.” While the novel
is framed by a conventional and delicious third-person story of Anna and
her best friend chatting about their lives, it is broken by Joycean
interludes of frightening honesty, the so-called notebooks in which Anna
pours out her guts.
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Each notebook is given a color, corresponding to its theme. In the black
notebook, Anna tracks her memories of being a young and unseeing
privileged white activist in racist Rhodesia during World War II; in the
red, her experiences as a reluctant and then disillusioned member of the
British Communist Party. In the yellow, we find fragments of a novel
based on her love life; in the blue, a record of daily events. In each
she pitilessly examines her fear of speaking the truth about her
condition. “People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves,”
Lessing writes, adding elsewhere: “I see that people everywhere are
trying not to feel. Cool, cool, cool, that’s the word.”
Anna quits years of therapy, recognizing it is an evasive way of
“rescuing the formless into form.” Thinking back to her successful first
novel, Anna wonders: “Why did I not write an account of what had
happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the
material that fueled it. … Why a story at all — not that it was a bad
story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?”
What she wants to do is quit simplifying and pruning, and inhabit the
chaos of life — the breakups, the contradictions, the depressions, the
sexual enchantments. At one point she realizes that her “life has always
been crude, unfinished, raw, tentative … the raw unfinished quality in
my life was precisely what was valuable in it.” She adds that “sometimes
I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across,
they’re split, means they are keeping themselves open for something.”
She dreams of generating “a new kind of strength” out of chaos, of
wearing words like “insecure” and “unrooted” as a sort of badge. (How
different this is from our current generation of nationalists, whose
desperation for roots drives them back to imagined Edens.) At the end of
the novel she abandons all divisions and sweeps everything into a single
“golden notebook.”
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This sounds fine in theory, but what does chaos look like in a novel? As
it turns out, a lot like the fierce, fast, minutely attuned
autobiographical writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard — whom Lessing predates
by 50 years. The form of the notebooks allows Lessing to pour out the
contents of her brilliant mind in lyrical cascades of prose: the varying
moods of a love affair with an ex-communist bipolar American;
discussions with racist and foolish film scouts who want to adapt Anna’s
African novel to an English setting, wiping clean its political content;
the cancel culture of the British Communist Party; what it feels like to
wash off your menstrual blood in the toilet while at a party office.
The novel doesn’t progress so much as thicken, like molasses. Unlike her
male postcolonial contemporaries and fellow Nobel laureates V. S.
Naipaul or J. M. Coetzee, Lessing — like Anna — is unafraid to dirty her
hands in the quest for truth. She might write with an acid touch but she
doesn’t keep an Olympian distance from new causes or passionate affairs.
Imagine if a woman who had engaged in every Twitter battle, canvassed
for Obama, joined Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and thrown her lot
behind Senator Bernie Sanders before falling out with the sexist Bernie
bros were now writing a book about the experience of being pulled in a
thousand different directions.
Yet, while often blistering in its depiction of political groups, the
novel seeks to transcend what Anna calls her own “critical, balancing
little brain.” In the yellow notebook’s novel-within-a-novel, a married
psychiatrist explains the meaning of his life to his lover: “You and I
are the boulder-pushers,” he says. “We spend our lives fighting to get
people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that
the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years
that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse.
They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened
of his landlord and of the police is a slave. … But do the great
enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task,
Ella, yours and mine, to tell them.”
This is bleak, but not hopeless. It is as moving and cleareyed a defense
of activism as I have read. It is also, perhaps, an author’s
self-deprecating observation about her own novel, which she might have
felt was a boulder she was pushing up a mountain of untruth. But it
isn’t a boulder. It is a comet from the 1960s.
Karan Mahajan is the author of the novels “Family Planning” and “The
Association of Small Bombs,” a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award.
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