If before this book you wanted to be a writer, if after you finished it you still wanted to be a writer, then all the power to you.What concerns us here is an English white heterosexual female, mother, author, communist. Upper-class, unmarried, unconsciously feminist. Neurotic, classist, homophobic, probably racist, there aren’t enough interactions with people of color to tell, but it seems likely considering the upbringing, the upbringing of the English society attuned to her personal attributes, her physical features, her financial stability, her sexuality mentality and race.Do you have the story? Do you feel the pigeonholing begin? Do you sense your survival tactics classifying this contextual chorus as quickly as characterization consoles the contributors of compositions of caliber, of classics? Do you ease your way in expectations, do you settle your mind in the proper slots of when to be amused, when to be terrified, when to be aroused, when to be offended?Because that’s what she does. She, Mrs. Anna Wulf, neé Anna Freeman (in actuality a ‘free’ woman, but let us save the carpings over lazy linguistics for another time), sees her world and feels the effects of that streamlined ideological training (you knew those words were coming, I love analyzing via this manner too much for a review to escape without them), and through some combination of fate and fortune can put them into words. The jargon of socialists versus the uninitiated working class (look at that discourse analysis class being put to work), the conflict between the expectations of men and those of women (look, I put men first, what does say about me), the pandering contempt of public society for the word ‘artist’ (oh you’re supposed to be tortured, however else would you come up with such delightful things for us, we couldn’t bear it if you wasted your talents, disappointed the rest of us who haven’t been blessed with such insight into the human condition).She sees homosexuals as less than ‘real men’, she who cannot fathom the mixing of ‘male’ and ‘female’, cannot think outside the dichotomy of the gender lines of the English, no Kinsey scale formatting, confusing sexuality and mismatches between mind and body, just two words and the fearful gap . She talks of Africa as if it were something to be ‘saved’ by white people, we must let the Africans, those ‘poor things’, come to their true civilized calling but god forbid we accredit their myriad cultures or trust them as equals or look to them as experienced and authorized experts for a second, it is much better if we stick to our learning and reasoning and fall in circling patterns of thought that only work on paper. Children are a mystery, a mainframe of serialized progressions that cannot possibly successfully analyze the world and people around them, cannot possibly be capable of resignation with life, not when their parents need them to cope with their own. That would be monstrous. She separates. Here is this book, this book composed without thought of composition, received with open arms by the popular opinion, full of lies and stereotypes and standards spiced with the slightest hint of chaos, the smallest fracture of ‘fighting the system’, that thrill, that excitement, feeding the average conformer their daily dose of moralizing self-righteousness, their carefully controlled observance of ‘the real world’. And now she is the ‘artist’, that tortured soul like so many others, who is not only unhappy but is supposed to be unhappy and learn how to be from those others (Joyce and Woolf and Kafka and Fitzgerald and Koestler and so many others who were truly unhappy), unhappy for the rest of us poor souls who cannot comprehend that talent, that quirk, and must rely on others who can, give us that side of madness that you have been blessed with that we who can cope so well with reality and its broken ideologies cannot ever have. And now she cannot write, because there are parts of her that fit within the system and parts of her that don’t, there are parts that she successfully absorbed in her progression of existence and parts that never quite deadened the natural rejection, parts that give her pleasure and parts that give her pain, pain of guilt that increases with every observation, every analysis, every laying out of personal problems alongside the horrors of the world and finding the former severely lacking, a diagnosis of ‘it could be worse; it shouldn't hurt’, a conjectured solution of wishing to be a man so as to be able to fuck, so as to be able to ignore the shamed agony and bleeding of the vagina and all its myriad biological woes, so as to be able to ignore all that masculine patronizing and pigeonholing, that oedipal complex compensation, so as to be able to not think with feelings and feel with thought as so many men appear to be capable of.Nothing is certain but death and taxes, and so those with life and those with money have the recipe for happiness. That is what everyone strives for, that is the goal the world round, and those who are threatened in both categories don’t want to believe that eventual stabilization will not bring them peace. They don’t want to believe that after the attainment of both there exists the realm of the small ills, the tiny hurts, the malformations of identit(y/ies/?) in coping with ideas and the machines that drive it, the emptiness that sinks in after the distracting thoughts of fleeing a massacre and keeping a job and the adrenaline of panic fade away. The possibility that whatever brain chemistry has been equipped cannot deal with what reality demands of its conscripts, demands that do not include the slightest hint of empathy for illnesses of the neurons. Plenty of paranoia and fear and conscious ignorance, yes. Kindness or understanding, no.Selfish. Self-ish. Angry-ish, sad-ish, complicated-ish. Not quite there. Not quite the sublime self, the inherent rights, the pure drive for living, that brave entity that copes with so much in the effort to exist. Selfish. Working for money is selfish; who are you to only put forth efforts that you are paid for, selling yourself in whatever form for a small pittance? Fighting for your rights is selfish; who are you to say that what you have is not good enough, who are you to judge that it is not equal to everyone else, you and your inherent bias and will subsumed by this ‘oppressed’ self? Running for your life is selfish; who are you to say that you do not want to die, when so many others have gone before you, in agonized desperation that you cannot even begin to imagine?And my god now you want to write about it? Go ahead. Go ahead with your need for income, your need for validation, your need for life, your selfish whims, your unconscious prejudices, your broken self that you think is oh so painful but really, you’re hardly that ‘special snowflake’ that you coddle so, that overly analytical stereotypical mess that cries about one thing but is secretly bigoted about everything else it doesn’t have to deal with that can’t even exist like the rest of us normal people, who may not have your talents but can cope just fine with a 9 to 5 job two kids and a spouse yes sirree we do just fine with our drinking our abuse our categorical separations our unconscious hypocrisies our identities set on the straight and narrow that we cannot feel straining and breaking at the seams. We deal just fine with the emptiness of words created by a species for communication and nothing more, we don’t see an object and think of the history that led to its creation and all its ill-fitting complexities and contradictions, we don’t regard a person and register their ancestral lines of being oppressive and being oppressed. We don’t look at ourselves and clinically observe the prejudice that led from this day of education here, this dangerous misconception that was born from this experience there, that disillusionment with what we are complicit with by existing. So much of it that is violence and blood. So many cannibal identities trapping behind with the punctured equilibrium of our past. So many coping mechanism selves trotting forth in our unrealistic idealistic opportunistic future.We can hide from those feelings. We can be cold. We can be in control and funnel ourselves through the necessary fault lines, the civilized dichotomies, the socioeconomic machine.Tell us, why should we care if you write about what causes you pain, if it does not cause us pain? Tell us, why should we care if you write about what you cannot cope with and hate that you cannot cope, if we can cope? Tell us, why should we care if you write about how we hurt you, if we do not know why it should? Tell us, why should we care when you question the rules, if those are the rules that we play by? Tell us, why should we care when you want to break the rules, if the rules are what we cannot imagine living without? Tell us, writer with money and intellect and security grown in comfort subsisting on a small effort grown profitable by chance because of your birth and your ancestry that so many of us would happily trade you for, why should we care about your problems when they are not all the problems?Tell us, writer, you egotistical masochist, you lazy worm, you overly sensitive prat that cannot bear for your works to be commercialized and conformed and can afford to do so without sacrificing your standard of living, you sycophantic preacher who only wishes for social justice in the areas you are hurt by, you witless freak who cannot live a ‘normal life’, you coward pandering at indecision, pandering at mental illness, pandering at suicide, pandering at life.Tell us, writer, why should we care when you strip away the world and show us how ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and every word known and unknown are winding labyrinths of infinite complexity mating in an obscene frenzy within every thing, every person, every concept.Tell us, writer, why should we care if you cannot deal with it like the rest of us.Tell us.
Like every really, really good book I read, this one left me somewhat at a loss for words. Nonetheless, I'll try to do it some justice if I can.I hesitated to read this book for a long time because of the description it always gets: Anna, a writer, keeps four different notebooks, one about her experiences in Africa, one about the Communist Party, one of autobiographical fiction, and one that's a diary. At the end of her psychic chain and in love with an American writer, she decides to combine them all into one golden notebook.* And so on. This to me sounded, well, really boring. Not going to sugar-coat it. Luckily, it wasn't at all; this is a fat book, no doubt, but it does grab you right from the beginning, and I'll say that I finished the last 350 pages in a single feverish day. This quote from the back also helped:"What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know you're quite capable of better."Not because it demonstrates top-notch prose (Lessing's prose verges more toward the unassuming than toward the pyrotechnic, though it's still tight, disciplined, and a pleasure to read) but because the sentiment is one that I agree with.As that quote should demonstrate, The Golden Notebook isn't about notebooks, or feminism, or communism, or any other ism, despite what people will tell you. Lessing herself, in her introduction, both marveled at the fact that people made such diverse claims about what the book was "about," and railed against the fact that almost nobody seemed to see the whole picture the way she did.So what IS it about? Were I pressed, I would say it's about how to cope with all the first-world problems that go along with being conscious of third-world problems. Anna, the central character, is both a Communist and a feminist (though the latter word doesn't get bandied about--this book may have been from before the term was popular), meaning she's concerned with inequality. She's spent some time in Africa, observing the abject failure of the communist dream. She's spent some time volunteering for the Communist Party in England, watching them feebly try to defend Stalin's actions in the late '40s and early '50s. And she's spent her whole life in and out of ill-fated romances with men who seem normal but are monsters, or men who seem normal but are shadows of their former selves, or men who seem perfect but inexplicably leave her. So in short, Anna spends her life fighting personal battles against chauvinism and impersonal battles against global inequality, and both sets of battles, so far as we see in the book, are futile.Anna's endless meditation on this futility is one thing I found particularly helpful and illuminating--specifically the conclusion that the futility of a given project in no way constitutes a reason not to attempt it. E.g. everyone in the US knows his or her vote doesn't count; lots of people use that idea as a reason not to vote, and I imagine Anna has nothing but contempt for them. Some people vote anyway, and this is the right choice, but the justification is complex, and to try to express it here would be to oversimplify--just read the book!One other thing that left a big impression on me was that The Golden Notebook is deeply concerned, even on a structural level, with how women think and perceive, and how that differs from the way men think and perceive. You would think that you could understand something of this just by reading books by female authors, but I suspect that many female authors try to write from a more universal perspective, in order to capture a more universal audience.Lessing, as an author of integrity above all (see the above quote if you don't believe me), is never tempted to do such a thing, and the results are fascinating. In her book, Anna and Molly converse in such a way that the meaning of the words they say is not even close to the whole of the communication. Facial expressions (and I'm not talking about something as facile as smiling v. frowning, I'm talking about minuscule variations--a real smile, a fake smile, a twitch, a quick eye movement, etc.), tone and timbre of voice, body language, spatial positioning, and other less tangible factors are equally important, or maybe even more important than content. Anna in particular is so perceptive when it comes to these nuances that it can seem like telepathy--she often knows what a given character is going to say or do before it happens--and it's completely believable. Here's an extended example that includes everything I've mentioned so far. Anna is talking with her Communist friend Molly's son about his businessman father (Molly and the father are divorced):He said unexpectedly: "You know, he's not stupid at all."[Anna:]"I don't think we've said that he is."Tommy smiled patiently, saying: You're dishonest. He said aloud: "When I said I didn't want those jobs he asked why, and I told him, and he said, I reacted like that because of the influence of the communist party."Anna laughed: I told you so; and said: "He means your mother and me."Tommy waited for her to have finished saying what he had expected her to say, and said: "There you are. That's not what he meant. No wonder you all think each other stupid; you expect each other to be. When I see my father and my mother together, I don't recognise them, they're so stupid. And you too, when you are with Richard.""Well what did he mean, then?""He said that what I replied to his offers summed up the real influence of the communist parties on the West. He said that anyone who has been, or is, in the C.P., or who has had anything to do with it is a megalomaniac. He said that if he was Chief of Police trying to root out communists somewhere, he'd ask one question: Would you go to an undeveloped country and run a country clinic for fifty people? All the Reds would answer: 'No, because what's the point of improving the health of fifty people when the basic organisation of society is unchanged.' He leaned forward, confronting her, and insisted: "Well, Anna?" She smiled and nodded: All right; but it was not enough. She said: "No, that's not stupid at all."He leaned back, relieved. But having rescued his father, so to speak, from Molly's and Anna's scorn, he now paid them their due: "But I said to him, that test wouldn't rule you or my mother out, because both of you would go to that clinic, wouldn't you?" It was important to him that she should say yes; but Anna insisted on honesty, for her own sake. "Yes, I would, but he's right. That's exactly how I'd feel."Obviously, this little passage touches on the futility-theme, although only on the surface compared to where the rest of the book goes. What's more interesting is that you can tell even from this small example that the way dialogue is handled in The Golden Notebook is quite unusual, and has to be, because it's not just covering quoted conversation, it's covering all the other variables I mentioned above. Anna interprets "You're dishonest" from nothing more than a patient smile; she sees confrontation in a lean; and the sum of all the nonverbal information he's given her over the course of the conversation makes her sure of the correct answer to his final question. And she's always right. Not only that, but every movement she makes comes attached to a meaning: for her, a laugh can and does mean specifically 'I told you so'; a smile can indicate concession, although she notes it's 'not enough.' Every word she can't say because it would be too painful (whether to her or her interlocutor) aloud, she consigns to a subtle gesture or expression or movement--the meaning still gets communicated, although the recipient may or may not notice.This noticing is important too, and Anna's thoughts about it get close to the root of why women seem so inscrutable to men, and vice versa. Some men in The Golden Notebook are perceptive enough to have a conversation on the same plane as Anna; Tommy, above, is one of them. Most of them, including Richard, are not. Anna constantly marvels at the fact that most men treat the text of what they say as the most important, or even only, aspect of the communication, and the fact that this preference causes all sorts of grave miscommunication between men and women. Possibly this is all obvious; certainly it must be obvious to anyone who's studied this sort of thing. But it's still illuminating to see it play out over the course of the novel, and though I'm familiar with the concept too, I don't feel like I'm the more perceptive type--I constantly struggle to interpret shrugs, leans, smiles, etc. So the book has all sorts of interesting case studies for me.If none of this sounds remotely interesting to you, then you may not like the book. But if that's not the case, give it a try; Lessing is the real deal. *It seemed particularly lame to me that she would make a 'golden' notebook if she'd already had a yellow one, but I imagine this very specific qualm stems from a climbing incident in which I was attempting to belay my partner on two ropes simultaneously,** and it was key for each rope to have a name, so that I could give slack with one while taking it in with the other, and though one rope was mostly orange and the other one mostly blue--I kid you not--my partner insisted on referring to them as 'yellow' and 'gold.'**This technique is for minimizing the likelihood that a crucial rope will be severed by a falling rock, if you're curious.
Do You like book The Golden Notebook (1999)?
I came to “The Golden Notebook” because I desired initiation into the glorious mysteries of the female temple, but Lessing found me an unworthy supplicant. Even after I realized that she denied me access at the portal, I kept reading with an admixture of delight and confusion because I wanted to better understand humanity and myself from the perspective of a brilliant and literary woman. Anna Wulf suffers from fragmentation. “The point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up.'" A single mother and a communist, Anna lives in London off the royalties of her best-selling novel, but now she suffers writer’s block as she works on her second book. Anna lives a disillusioned and displaced life in the 1950’s after her married lover, Michael, abandons her for another mistress. Meanwhile, Hollywood bombards her with offers to “adapt” (i.e., completely change) her book for film, but Anna refuses to surrender her artistic freedom. The plot, easy to understand (even if Lessing’s “message” is not), reveals Anna’s journey through her different selves: her party membership; her life in Africa; her stillborn second novel; her friendship with her best friend, Molly; and her serial relationships with married men. The atmosphere is tense with: 1) the fear of annihilation by the newly invented hydrogen bomb (metaphoric of fission—and the power of fusion); and 2) the disintegration of the British Empire through decolonization (fission) as well as the creation of new nations (fusion). Moreover, the splintering of groups such as the Communist Party and various African nationalist movements into different warring factions mirrors the fragmentation within Anna. "Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it." (59)The beautiful and elegant complexity of the book’s structure mimics the complexity of fragmented Anna, who keeps four colored notebooks in an effort to compartmentalize her different identities. In these notebooks, I hear voices of William James, J.G. Frazer, and Carl Jung. "But 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." (453) The intricate structure of the book also made me think of the mysteries of the cosmos with its exploding matter (fragmentation) as well as the search for a unifying concept of physics (wholeness). Does Anna find “healing?” Is Anna able to integrate these individual parts of herself in her final notebook, the Golden Notebook? Can a near psychic breakdown and wild dreams of tigers lead to reintegration? I also detect a second theme of freedom, and the frame story, entitled “Free Women,” is partially ironic because the women perceive that they are not really free. “’Free women,' said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: 'They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.'" (4) Yet, Anna and Molly (citizens of a liberal democracy and economically independent women) are indeed “free women” compared to the colonized Africans, citizens of the Iron Curtain, or other people in the UK living on subsistence wages. Moreover, Anna voluntarily surrenders much of her freedom as she succumbs to paralyzing jealousy in a series of unfulfilling relationships with married men. Her own jealousy suggests that she is not as committed to the ideal of freedom as she thinks. Indeed, she criticizes men for their lack of jealousy or possessiveness, an attitude that surprised me coming from a "free woman." One may read this book as a paradigm for women heroically attempting to assert their own individuality in male dominated society, but I am not convinced that this masterpiece is best interpreted as a “feminist” novel. I wonder how much Anna might speak for Lessing: "Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself." (217). Yet, I was uncomfortable with the way Lessing depicted intellectual and sensitive men, and I kept asking Lessing, “Doris, what about me?” [Anna denies she has a “castration complex,” yet her scorn, her emasculatory descriptions, and her lack of sympathy for conflicted male characters possibly indicate evidence to the contrary.] Anna repeatedly demeans men as impotent or effeminate and dishes it out with relish. Then, contrarily, she criticizes them for acting as typical males—as if there were such a species in a world populated by 7 billion individuals. At times, I felt as if Anna were kicking me out of her bed and Lessing were kicking me out of her book, but I tried to understand that some of this was related to fear-based thinking based on past experiences with men that were not my fault and that I should not take it personally. Do our past relationships prevent defragmentation and wholeness? Then it was pointed out to me that Anna projects her shortcomings to her partners and that the unflattering depictions of men are possibly Anna's reflection upon her own flaws—she is harsh on others but harsher on herself. "She understood suddenly that she would never come with this man. She thought: for women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words." (311) I see these themes of fragmentation and freedom as challenges that affect all humans-- regardless of gender. Indeed, it seems that wholeness and freedom would require us to recognize the mixture of masculine and feminine attributes in all healthy individuals. Perhaps, all attempts to dissect and label and organize our perceptions into an orderly fashion will fail, but “The Golden Notebook” inspires me to search for my million little contradictory pieces and rearrange them to create a mosaic of freedom and wholeness. In a desire to please, I have too often surrendered control over my emotional weather—a tendency that Lessing has helped me to recognize, and she has inspired me to resolve to allow compromise but no further capitulation, which repeatedly leads to resentment and failure. Molly’s son opines: I think people need other people to be kind to them….Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth." (498). I believe this. But some of us crave this kindness so badly that we are unkind to ourselves. People in search of kindness are apt to be disappointed unless they provide it for themselves; however, Anna is not kind and can exhibit cutting brutality. She states: “I don’t feel kind. I’d like to shout and scream and break everything down.” (633) May the kind people of the world find each other.Lessing is a strong female writer, and I am an androgynous reader (in Virginia Woolf’s literary sense of the word). Therefore, I accept Lessing’s consolation prize of self-understanding-- even if I am condemned to remain an outsider to the guarded hearts of the females in her novel. I ponder how I shall approach the Golden Notebook in five years. This time I read as a meek supplicant. Next time, I come as a strong and free man who will remain true to himself and hope that the female will have the grace to accept my independence, vulnerability, and humanity-- even as I seek to understand and respect hers. Until then, I dream not of tigers but of a time when male and female will find their common hopes, share their fears, celebrate their differences, and grant each other grace so that they may build that mosaic together. August 23, 2014.
—Steve Sckenda
Setting 1950's London. "Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.' " — Doris Lessing Introduction (The Golden Notebook) Just starting this book...which was written after her wonderful look (from a mid-life crisis talented woman's viewpoint) The Summer Before the Dark." On the cover of my dated paperback copy (1968), her book earlier work, The Golden Notebook, is promoted. Quoting NY Times Reporters on author Doris Lessing's recent Nobel literature prize: "Ms. Lessing’s strongest legacy may be that she inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook.” In its citation, the Swedish Academy said: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship.”Ms. Lessing wrote candidly about the inner lives of women and rejected the notion that they should limit their lives to marriage and children. “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, tracked the story of Anna Wulf, a woman who wanted to live freely and was, in some ways, Ms. Lessing’s alter ego. Because she frankly described anger and aggression in women, she was attacked as “unfeminine.” In response Ms. Lessing wrote, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.”
—Fenixbird SandS
I was discussing Flaubert the other day with notgettingenough, and remarked on how surprisingly different all his books are. Salammbô, as I say in my review, is completely different from Madame Bovary. La Tentation de Saint Antoine, which I'm currently reading, is completely different from both of them. But apart from Madame Bovary, firmly established as one of the most famous novels of all time, Flaubert's books are not widely read these days. You get the impression that people wish he'd done more naturalistic psychological studies and not, you know, experimented so damn much.Not commented that Michael Frayn, one of her personal heroes, had the same problem. And I remembered an interview with Doris Lessing where she talked about her science-fiction phase. "People would have preferred me to carry on rewriting The Golden Notebook for ever," she said, "but I wanted to do something else."Well, even though The Golden Notebook is a fine book, and I prefer it to Shikasta and its successors, I think she was absolutely right. She didn't say so in the interview, but a large chunk of the book is already more or less recycled out of A Ripple From The Storm - if she'd repeated herself again she'd have died of boredom, although it was obviously the safe choice. She's one of the most courageous authors I know, and I find her artistic integrity absolutely awe-inspiring.
—Manny
