Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words.The Golden Notebook is a book that resists being pigeonholed, but if it's about anything, it seems to be about this idea of literature as an imperfect artform; limited as it is by an author's evolving perspectives, the reading audience's general ignorance about the author's influences, and the inadequacy of words themselves in capturing “truth”. In order to expose all of this, author Doris Lessing blew apart the traditional narrative form and presents us with a unique structure: In periodic straight storytelling (which appear under the title “Free Women”), we meet Anna Wulf as a middle-aged single mother who has one successful novel under her belt, and while the royalties from it pays all her bills, she is unable to write another. In between bitchfests with her best friend (and fellow former Communist) Molly, Anna keeps four notebooks that are colour-coded to record different ideas: the black notebook records Anna's memories of living in Africa during WWII (and also demonstrates how the successful novel Anna had based on this time differs significantly from actual events; which in turn demonstrates the fiction author's process. The black notebook also records current efforts to adapt the book for film or television.); the red notebook records Anna's history with the Communist Party and her slow disenchantment with its bureaucracy and hypocrisy (not to mention the horror she felt as her idealism was challenged as the truth of Stalin's despotism reached the West); the blue notebook is meant as a straight diary (recording everything from daily routines to fantasies of throwing herself out the window); and the yellow notebook is an ongoing fictionalised version of Anna's alter ego “Ella” living through all the same experiences as Anna does in the “Free Women” sections. Fragmenting her ideas like this leads to Anna herself eventually “cracking up”, and in a final golden covered notebook, she synthesises everything back into a short work of fiction. In this way, we readers can understand everything that lurks under the surface of the written words and try to determine if the author has finally captured truth
My edition of The Golden Notebook, which was originally released in 1962, has two later introductions added by the author in 1971 and 1993. In each, a rather bitter Lessing rails against readers – whether casual, academic, or professional critics – who fail to understand what she was getting at. In particular, she didn't appreciate second-wave feminists holding up this book as their own because, “This novel was not a trumpet for Women's Liberation”. Yet even today, The Golden Notebook is on every list of Best Feminist Fiction, and I don't get it. Sure, in the “Free Women” sections we have two independent women living in conservative 1950s Britain. But though both Anna and Molly support themselves and their children, they also both desperately wish that they were married, and both submit themselves to unsatisfactory affairs (with primarily married men), and Anna, for five years, allowed her married lover to dictate what she wore, how she managed her time with her daughter, and when he would come and go, all as Anna worried over cooking the favourite foods that might tempt him to stay a bit longer. This is feminist fiction?
The good: There were many interesting observations, and especially where the African and Communist sections overlapped: communists dismissed black nationalism as dangerously right-wing and it's made clear that the struggle for class equality had nothing to do with racial equality. Even those white colonials who went off to fight “the racialist devil” in the Second World War failed to see the irony of opposing “a creed they would all die to defend on their own soil”. (And these bits are likely doubly interesting to me as I just finished Invisible Man which showed the exact same attitudes playing out in America at the same time.) I liked the peek inside the Communist Party of Britain, and particularly this idea:
I can’t stop thinking about this phenomenon — that when two of us meet, our discussions are on a totally different level than when there are three people present. Two people, and it is two persons, from a critical tradition, discussing politics as people not communists would discuss them. (By people not communists I mean that they wouldn’t be recognized as communists, except for the jargon, by an outsider listening in.) But more than two, and a different spirit altogether is present. This is particularly true of what is said about Stalin. Although I am quite prepared to believe that he is mad and a murderer (though remembering always what Michael says — that this is a time when it is impossible to know the truth about anything), I like to hear people use that tone of simple, friendly respect for him. Because if that tone were to be thrown aside, something very important would go with it, paradoxically enough, a faith in the possibilities of democracy, of decency. A dream would be dead — for our time, at least.What made Arthur Miller's The Crucible a powerful metaphor about McCarthyism is the entire notion of the Salem witch hunt: the injustice of burning witches at the stake (or hanging them, if you rather) when witches don't exist. It's always been my impression that McCarthy's witch hunt involved the misuse of governmental powers and cowards pointing fingers in order to save their own skins and innocent people being prosecuted or blackballed unfairly, but it's important to remember that communists certainly did exist and they certainly were meeting in secret and plotting. While this might, of necessity, have been an underground activity in the States, it's interesting to see that in Britain it's all aboveboard with daylight meetings and communists on every electoral ballot. But as in the passage I quoted, it was also interesting to see how ineffective the communists were: unable to speak freely when there were three or more people present, groupthink taking over and honest beliefs overshadowed by sloganeering. I'm glad The Golden Notebook exists just to preserve these times.
The not so good: In nearly every conversation in the yellow notebook or the “Free Women” sections (whether with a lover or a colleague or with her dear friend Molly/Julia), Anna/Ella is anxious or frustrated or angry or despairing. And this mood rubs off: I found myself constantly anxious or frustrated or angry or despairing. Or bored: In over six hundred small font pages, Anna/Ella repeats the same unsatisfactory experiences with these cheating lovers over and over, and has the same guarded conversations with her friends, and fails to grow or learn from all the repetition. I was more than ready for this book to end by the time it was done. The following is from Lessing's 1971 introduction:
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice versa. Don't read a book out if its time right for you.The Golden Notebook was on my radar because of its presence on so many lists of the “Books You Need to Read Before You Die”, and it's ironic that Lessing herself was warning against that kind of impetus. Perhaps I read this out of its right time for me (although I'm certain I would have gotten nothing out of it in my twenties or thirties) or perhaps I should have simply dropped it when I found it dragging. In the end, I appreciate what Lessing achieved with experimenting with the form of a novel, but I didn't enjoy the actual meat with which she dressed those bones. I have no one to whom I'd recommend this book.
