by Joan Didion
Even given Mrs. Lessing’s tendency to confront all ideas tabula rasa, we are dealing here with less than astonishing stuff. The idea that there is sanity in insanity, that truth Ues on the far side of madness, informs not only a considerable spread of Western literature but also, so commonly is it now held, an entire generation’s experiment with hallucinogens. Most of Mrs. Lessing’s thoughts about the cultural definition of insanity reflect or run parallel to those of Laing, and yet the idea was already so prevalent that Laing cannot even be said to have popularized it: his innovation was only to have taken it out of the realm of instinctive knowledge and into the limited context of psychiatric therapy. Although Mrs. Lessing apparently thought the content of Briefing for a Descent into Hell so startling that she was impelled to add an explanatory afterword, a two-page parable about the ignorance of certain psychiatrists at large London teaching hospitals, she had herself dealt before with this very material. In The Golden Notebook Anna makes this note for a story: “A man whose ‘sense of reality’ has gone; and because of it, has a deeper sense of reality than ‘normal’ people.” By the time Mrs. Lessing finished The Four-Gated City she had refined the proposition: Lynda Coldridge’s deeper sense of reality is not the result but the definition of her madness. So laboriously is this notion developed in the closing three hundred pages of The Four-Gated City that one would have thought that Mrs. Lessing had more or less exhausted its literary possibilities.
But she was less and less interested in literary possibilities, which is where we strike the faultline. “If I saw it in terms of an artistic problem, then it’d be easy, wouldn’t it,” Anna tells her friend Molly, in The Golden Notebook, as explanation of her disinclination to write another book. “We could have ever such intelligent chats about the modern novel.” This may seem a little on the easy side, even to the reader who is willing to overlook Anna’s later assertion that she cannot write because “a Chinese peasant” is looking over her shoulder. (“Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F. L. N.”) Madame Bovary told us more about bourgeois life than several generations of Marxists have, but there does not seem much doubt that Flaubert saw it as an artistic problem.
That Mrs. Lessing does not suggests her particular dilemma. What we are witnessing here is a writer undergoing a profound and continuing cultural trauma, a woman of determinedly Utopian and distinctly teleological bent assaulted at every turn by fresh evidence that the world is not exactly improving as promised. And, because such is the particular quality of her mind, she is compelled in the face of this evidence to look even more frenetically for the final cause, the unambiguous answer.
In the beginning her search was less frenzied. She came out of Southern Rhodesia imprinted ineradicably by precisely the kind of rigid agrarian world that most easily makes storytellers of its exiled children. What British Africa gave her, besides those images of a sky so empty and a society so inflexible as to make the slightest tremor in either worth remarking upon, was a way of perceiving the rest of her life: for a long time to come she could interpret all she saw in terms of “injustice,” not merely the injustice of white man to black, of colonizer to colonized, but the more general injustices of class and particularly of sex. She grew up knowing not only what hard frontiers do to women but what women then do to the men who keep them there. She could hear in all her memories that “voice of the suffering female” passed on from mothers to daughters in a chain broken only at great cost.
Of these memories she wrote a first novel, The Grass Is Singing, entirely traditional in its conventions. Reality was there, waiting to be observed by an omniscient third person. The Grass Is Singing was neat in its construction, relatively scrupulous in its maintenance of tone, predicated upon a world of constants. Its characters moved through that world unconscious of knowledge shared by author and reader. The novel was, in brief, everything Mrs. Lessing was to reject as “false” and “evasive” by the time she wrote The Golden Notebook. “Why not write down, simply, what happened between Molly and her son today?” Anna demands of herself. “Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? Why don’t I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself....I shall keep a diary.”
It would be hard to imagine a character more unrelievedly self-conscious, or more insistently the author’s surrogate, than Anna Gould in The Golden Notebook. The entire intention of the novel is to shatter the conventional distance of fiction, to deny all distinction between toad and garden, to “write down, simply, what happens.” Call the writer Anna Gould or call her Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook is the diary of a writer in shock. There she is in London, 1950. A young woman determined to forge a life as a “free woman,” as an “intellectual,” she has come out of a simple society into what Robert Penn Warren once called the convulsion of the world, and she is finding some equivocation in the answers so clear to her in Africa. Her expectations give off a bright and dated valiance. Her disenchantments are all too familiar. The sheer will, the granitic ambitiousness of The Golden Notebook overrides everything else about it. Great raw hunks of undigested experience, unedited transcripts of what happened between Molly and her son today, overwhelming memories and rejections of those memories as sentimental, the fracturing of a sensibility beginning for the first time to doubt its perceptions: all of it runs out of the teller’s mind and into the reader’s with deliberate disregard for the nature of the words in between. The teller creates “characters” and “scenes” only to deny their validity. She berates herself for clinging to the “certainty” of her memories in the face of the general uncertainty. Mrs. Lessing looms through The Golden Notebook as a woman driven by doubts not only about what to tell but about the validity of telling it at all.
Yet she continued to write, and to write fiction. Not until the end of the five-volume Children of Violence series did one sense a weakening of that compulsion to remember, and a metastasis of that cognitive frenzy for answers. She had seen, by then, a great deal go, had seized a great many answers and lost them. Organized politics went early. Freudian determinism seemed incompatible. The Africa of her memory was another country. The voice she felt most deeply, that of women trying to define their relationships to one another and to men, first went shrill and then, appropriated by and reduced to a “movement,” slipped below the range of her attention. She had been betrayed by all those answers and more, and yet, increasingly possessed, her only response has been to look for another. That she is scarcely alone in this possession is what lends her quest its great interest: the impulse to final solutions has been not only Mrs. Lessing’s dilemma but the guiding delusion of her time. It is not an impulse I hold high, but there is something finally very moving about her tenacity.
1971
Georgia O’Keeffe
“WHERE I WAS born and where and how I have lived is unimportant,” Georgia O’Keeffe told us in the book of paintings and words published in her ninetieth year on earth. She seemed to be advising us to forget the beautiful face in the Stieghtz photographs. She appeared to be dismissing the rather condescending romance that had attached to her by then, the romance of extreme good looks and advanced age and deliberate isolation. “It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.” I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe “Sky Above Clouds” canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. “Who drew it,” she whispered after a while. I told her. “I need to talk to her,” she said finally.
My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker, that the painting was the
painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character. Style is character. It seemed to me that afternoon that I had rarely seen so instinctive an application of this familiar principle, and I recall being pleased not only that my daughter responded to style as character but that it was Georgia O’Keeffe’s particular style to which she responded: this was a hard woman who had imposed her 192 square feet of clouds on Chicago.
“Hardness” has not been in our century a quality much admired in women, nor in the past twenty years has it even been in official favor for men. When hardness surfaces in the very old we tend to transform it into “crustiness” or eccentricity, some tonic pepperiness to be indulged at a distance. On the evidence of her work and what she has said about it, Georgia O’Keeffe is neither “crusty” nor eccentric. She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees. This is a woman who could early on dismiss most of her contemporaries as “dreamy,” and would later single out one she liked as “a very poor painter.” (And then add, apparently by way of softening the judgment: “I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.”) This is a woman who in 1939 could advise her admirers that they were missing her point, that their appreciation of her famous flowers was merely sentimental. “When I paint a red hill,” she observed coolly in the catalogue for an exhibition that year, “you say it is too bad that I don’t always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone’s heart. A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s heart.” This is a woman who could describe the genesis of one of her most well-known paintings—the “Cow’s Skull: Red, White and Blue” owned by the Metropolitan—as an act of quite deliberate and derisive orneriness. “I thought of the city men I had been seeing in the East,” she wrote. “They talked so often of writing the Great American Novel—the Great American Play—the Great American Poetry....So as I was painting my cow’s head on blue I thought to myself, I’ll make it an American painting. They will not think it great with the red stripes down the sides—Red,White and Blue—but they will notice it. ’”
The city men. The men. They. The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly aggressive paintings. It was those city men who stood accused of sentimentalizing her flowers: “I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.” And I don’t. Imagine those words spoken, and the sound you hear is don’t tread on me. “The men” believed it impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York, “The men” didn’t think much of her bright color, so she made it brighter. The men yearned toward Europe so she went to Texas, and then New Mexico. The men talked about Cezanne, “long involved remarks about the ‘plastic quality’ of his form and color,” and took one another’s long involved remarks, in the view of this angelic rattlesnake in their midst, altogether too seriously. “I can paint one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men,” the woman who regarded herself always as an outsider remembers thinking one day in 1922, and she did: a painting of a shed “all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.” She called this act of rancor “The Shanty” and hung it in her next show. “The men seemed to approve of it,” she reported fifty-four years later, her contempt undimmed. “They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-colored painting.”
Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it. On the surface her upbringing was conventional. She was a child on the Wisconsin prairie who played with china dolls and painted watercolors with cloudy skies because sunlight was too hard to paint and, with her brother and sisters, listened every night to her mother read stories of the Wild West, of Texas, of Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. She told adults that she wanted to be an artist and was embarrassed when they asked what kind of artist she wanted to be: she had no idea “what kind.” She had no idea what artists did. She had never seen a picture that interested her, other than a pen-and-ink Maid of Athens in one of her mother’s books, some Mother Goose illustrations printed on cloth, a tablet cover that showed a little girl with pink roses, and the painting of Arabs on horseback that hung in her grandmother’s parlor. At thirteen, in a Dominican convent, she was mortified when the sister corrected her drawing. At Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia she painted lilacs and sneaked time alone to walk out to where she could see the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the horizon. At the Art Institute in Chicago she was shocked by the presence of live models and wanted to abandon anatomy lessons. At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girls’ school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care.
At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. “That evening star fascinated me,” she wrote. “It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.” In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record. Ten watercolors were made from that star.
1976
IV. SOJOURNS
In The Islands
1969: I HAD better tell you where I am, and why. I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together. My husband is here, and our daughter, age three. She is blond and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach. She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected. In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway. My husband watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.
The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action. My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair. In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.
I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moments
high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels “real bad” about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.
You will perceive that such a view of the world presents difficulties. I have trouble making certain connections. I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure. I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic, holding always before me the examples of Axel Heyst in Victory and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte Rittenmayer in The Wild Palms and a few dozen others like them, believing as they did that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments, promises made and somehow kept outside the range of normal social experience. I still believe that, but I have trouble reconciling salvation with those ignorant armies camped in my mind. I could indulge here in a little idle generalization, could lay off my own state of profound emotional shock on the larger cultural breakdown, could talk fast about convulsions in the society and alienation and anomie and maybe even assassination, but that would be just one more stylish shell game. I am not the society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.