The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  “You’ll find another well-tempered woman in the next city.”

  “If I’m lucky.”

  “And I hope you are.”

  “Yes, I know you do. I know it. And thank you…Anna, I’m going to beat it. You’ve every reason to think that I won’t. But I shall. I know I shall.”

  “Then good luck,” said Anna, smiling.

  Before he left, they stood in the kitchen, both near tears, reluctant to make the break.

  “You aren’t going to give in, Anna?”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be a pity.”

  “And besides, you might want to drop in again some time for a night or two.”

  “All right. You are entitled to say that.”

  “But next time I’ll be occupied. For one thing, I’m getting a job.”

  “Oh don’t tell me, let me guess. You’re going to do social work? You’re going to—let me think it out for myself—you’re going to be a psychiatric social worker or teach school or something like that?”

  “Something like that.”

  “We all come to it.”

  “You, however, will be saved from it because of your epic novel.”

  “Unkind, Anna, unkind.”

  “I don’t feel kind. I’d like to shout and scream and break everything down.”

  “As I was saying, that’s the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream.”

  “Well thanks anyhow for pulling me out—of what I was in.”

  “Any time.”

  They kissed. He jumped lightly down the stairs, his suitcase in his hand, turning at the bottom to say: “You should have said—I’ll write.”

  “But we won’t.”

  “No, but let’s preserve the forms, the forms at least of…” He was gone, with a wave of his hand.

  When Janet came home she found Anna in the process of finding another, smaller flat, and getting a job.

  Molly had telephoned Anna, to say she was getting married. The two women met in Molly’s kitchen, where Molly was preparing them salad and omelettes.

  “Who is he?”

  “You don’t know him. He’s what we used to refer to as a progressive businessman. You know, the poor Jewish boy from the East End who got rich and salved his conscience by giving money to the communist party. Now they just give money to progressive causes.”

  “Oh he’s got money?”

  “Quantities. And a house in Hampstead.” Molly turned her back to her friend, while Anna digested this.

  “What are you going to do with this house?”

  “Can’t you guess?” Molly turned, the briskness of her former irony back in her voice. Her smile was wry and gallant.

  “You don’t mean that Marion and Tommy are going to take it?”

  “What else? Haven’t you seen them?”

  “No, nor Richard.”

  “Well. Tommy’s all set to follow in Richard’s footsteps. He’s already installed, and taking things over, and Richard’s slowly going to ease out and settle down with Jean.”

  “You mean, he’s all happy and content?”

  “Well I saw him with a pretty bit last week in the street, but don’t let’s jump to conclusions.”

  “No, don’t let’s.”

  “Tommy is very definite about not being all reactionary and unprogressive like Richard. He says the world is going to be changed by the efforts of progressive big business and putting pressure on Government departments.”

  “Well he, at least, is in tune with our times.”

  “Please don’t, Anna.”

  “Well, how’s Marion?”

  “She’s bought a dress shop in Knightsbridge. She’s going to sell good clothes—you know, good clothes as distinct from smart clothes? She’s already surrounded by a gaggle of little queers who exploit her, and she adores them and she giggles a lot and drinks just a little too much, and thinks they are ever such fun.”

  Molly’s hands lay on her lap, fitted together at the fingertips, exercising malicious no-comment.

  “Well.”

  “And how about your American?”

  “Well I had an affair with him.”

  “Not the most sensible thing you ever did, I should have thought.”

  Anna laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Getting married to a man who has a house in Hampstead is going to make you very remote from the emotional rat-race.”

  “Yes, thank God.”

  “I’m going to take a job.”

  “You mean, you’re not going to write?”

  “No.”

  Molly turned away, and flipped omelettes on to plates, filling a basket with bread. She determinedly said nothing.

  “Do you remember Dr North?” said Anna.

  “Of course.”

  “He’s starting a sort of marriage welfare centre—half-official, half-private. He says three-quarters of the people who come to him with aches and pains are in fact in trouble with their marriages. Or lack of marriages.”

  “And you’re going to dish out good advice.”

  “Something like that. And I’m going to join the Labour Party and teach a night class twice a week for delinquent kids.”

  “So we’re both going to be integrated with British life at its roots.”

  “I was carefully avoiding that tone.”

  “You’re right—it’s just the idea of you doing matrimonial welfare work.”

  “I’m very good at other people’s marriages.”

  “Oh, quite so. Well perhaps you’ll find me in that chair opposite you one of these days.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Me too. There’s nothing like knowing the exact dimensions of the bed you’re going to fit yourself into.” Annoyed with herself, Molly’s hands made an irritated gesture, and she grimaced and said: “You’re a bad influence on me, Anna. I was perfectly resigned to it all until you came in. Actually I think we’ll get on very well.”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Anna.

  A small silence. “It’s all very odd, isn’t it Anna?”

  “Very.”

  Shortly after, Anna said she had to get back to Janet, who would have returned by now from the cinema, where she had been with a friend.

  The two women kissed and separated.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  2 Meet Doris Lessing

  4 Q & A: Doris Lessing Talks to Sarah O’Reilly About The Golden Notebook

  About the book

  11 Guarded Welcome by Doris Lessing

  Read on

  15 Have You Read? More by Doris Lessing

  About the author

  Meet Doris Lessing

  DORIS LESSING was born of British parents in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 and was taken to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when she was five years old. She spent her childhood on a large farm there and moved to England in 1949. She brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which was published in 1950 with outstanding success in Britain, the United States, and ten European countries.

  Lessing’s fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, she has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual’s own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, criticized the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and exposed the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to her outspokenness on the color bar, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

  Since the publication of The Grass Is Singing, Lessing’s internatio
nal reputation not only as a novelist but as a nonfiction and short-story writer has flourished. For her collection of short novels, Five, she was honored with the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954. She was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1981, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982. Among her celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and The Memoirs of a Survivor.

  Shikasta, the first in the series of five novels known as Canopus in Argos: Archives, was published in 1979. Her novel The Good Terrorist won the W. H. Smith Literary Award for 1985, and the Mondello Prize in Italy that year. The Fifth Child won the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy, an award voted on by students in their final year at school. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 was turned into an opera by Philip Glass, with a libretto by the author, and premiered in Houston. Her most recent books include Alfred & Emily; The Cleft; The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog; The Sweetest Dream; The Grandmothers; and two volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade. Of writing her autobiographies she has said, “I have to conclude that fiction is better at ‘the truth’ than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don’t begin to understand.”

  A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, Lessing was recently awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other prestigious international awards. In 2007 Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in North London.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Q & A: Doris Lessing Talks to Sarah O’Reilly About The Golden Notebook

  You’ve written that The Golden Notebook is a book that people reacted to rather than read when it was first published. Can you speak a little about how it was written, and the unexpected reaction it got?

  The first thing to say is that the book was written at absolute white heat. It didn’t take me much more than a year. I decided on the frame novel, Free Women, and then I interleaved it with the notebooks. And once I had ventured into the area of the book, a kind of pattern began to emerge in my material of which I had not previously been aware. You have to watch out for it. In this case, although no one will ever believe it, I was completely unconscious of writing a feminist book. I was simply writing about what I saw. For example, I had a woman friend at that time who was very bitter about men, in a way that I don’t think women are now. She was a single woman, and she wanted a bloke, and she wanted to be married. But she was always having affairs with married men, and she was angry with them. Yet she was living the kind of life that invited it. I was interested in that. A journalist recently said to me, quite severely, “You have these two women, and all the married men around see them as fair prey.” I replied how very true that was. He was rather angry with me for agreeing with the statement—perhaps men are more faithful now. But I do remember that at the time when I was writing The Golden Notebook there was an atmosphere of women being angry that men left them to look after the kids, had affairs and so on. I was just writing what I saw; I wasn’t trying to make a feminist point with my book, although apparently I did. Academics and the like will never ever understand this. They’ve been taught to look at the book not as a process, which is how a writer would see it, but as a finished object with this or that message.

  “Although no one will ever believe it, I was completely unconscious of writing a feminist book. I was simply writing about what I saw.”

  Why do you think its appeal has endured to writing about this day?

  I think it’s because of the book’s vitality, which I find most fascinating. I’m sure it’s because at the time I was writing everything was so fraught, difficult, and contradictory. You must remember that in the 1950s there were two types of comrades, roughly: those who would rather die than admit that there was anything wrong with the Soviet Union, and those who knew it was in a terrible state and were waiting for someone to say that. So when Khrushchev gave his speech at the Twentieth Party Congress (which satisfied neither side) half of them became terribly upset because he had criticized Stalin and the other half were furious because the job had only been half done…. It was a terribly difficult time. People’s hearts were broken.

  The experience must have left you very suspicious of any form of political ideology.

  Very. I don’t think it’s easy for any of my generation to take to political ideology. We’ve seen too much of it—and how it ends up.

  “I am very interested in the growth of communities founded on religious principles that’s happening now because I’ve got a feeling that that is where the next ideology will come from.”

  Are there any political ideologies worth believing in today?

  I don’t think so. I just don’t like these big ideas because I’ve seen what happens to them. What I do think is worthwhile is the smaller objective, because that can’t be overtaken by some lunatic or other. But there is a great vacuum at the moment. I am very interested in the growth of communities founded on religious principles that’s happening now because I’ve got a feeling that that is where the next ideology will come from. In terms of my lot, however, I think we’re immune. Or I hope that we are.

  Do you worry that younger generations are so apathetic?

  No, not at all—at least you’re not talking rubbish about the Soviet Union! I think it’s rather healthy. But there is a vacuum. I can easily imagine a charismatic chap sweeping you all away…and you wouldn’t realize.

  In The Golden Notebook Ella is haunted by the letters she receives from women whose lives seem to have stopped dead in their tracks.

  That was what I found then. This is an actual memory from the 1950s: I was out canvassing for the Communist Party in a big block of flats near Somers Town, going from door to door, and behind every one I found a woman going crazy, a woman bored out of her mind with small children. I am from the colonies where women were much freer, but in England I found only a sink of misery. It was a shock. These women needed a social worker. They were talking in ways I’d never heard people talk. They wanted jobs, they wanted education, but their husbands weren’t going to help them—that all happened ten years later when the women’s movement came about.

  When I found this was going on in the 1950s I went to the Party and said, “Look, I’ve found these women going crazy: they are bored, what are you going to do about it?” and they were not interested. They did nothing, and I stopped canvassing.

  What did you read growing up?

  When I was young I read everything there was to read. All the classics. That was my education, really. I don’t know which influenced me more than others. Perhaps the Russians: Dostoevsky, Chekhov. That is true of my generation and the one after; so many were influenced by this constellation of genius, and there hasn’t been one really since, with the exception of Proust.

  In the book Anna writes about Thomas Mann, comparing the modern-day “novel reports” unfavorably to his philosophical works…

  Thomas Mann marked the end of a kind of literary culture which I think, unfortunately, is now gone completely. We, all of us who revere that culture, know we’re just a lot of dinosaurs, the past. Mann was writing out of an established, respected literary tradition which has been swept away.

  “Thomas Mann marked the end of a kind of literary culture which I think, unfortunately, is now gone completely. We, all of us who revere that culture, know we’re just a lot of dinosaurs, the past.”

  When I was writing The Golden Notebook in the late fifties I was looking back in time, and I was very conscious that things were changing, and, my God, have they changed—completely. Thomas Mann couldn’t be now. If he came out with one solid, theoretical, philosophical novel after another today, on and on to the end of his life, who woul
d read him? Who would bother?

  I hear that a new edited edition of War and Peace has been published, for example, which leaves out the philosophy. It’s just story now.

  Do you regularly read anything by younger generations of writers?

  I’m trying to write a book at the moment, and it is very hard to find time to think about anything else, because I have to grab an hour here, half an hour there. So reading other people’s books is more than I can stand at the moment! Instead they pile up, leaning against the walls of my study. Too many books!

  Do you always stop reading when you embark on a new book?

  I have stopped with my current book, because my time is running out. I’m 87, I’m not going to live forever and I want to finish this book I’m writing now. I’ll go back to being a good reader when I finish it.

  Can you talk a little about the project?

  It is a book about my parents, who were very damaged by the First World War [Alfred & Emily, published August 2008]. I have given them normal lives, totally ordinary lives, as if there had been no war. It is a book that I really care about, but writing it is very painful because they had such terrible lives, these people. History treated them so badly. I want to give them a good life.

  It is a very antiwar book. Though I’m not setting out to write it as such, that is what is emerging. Both my parents were remarkable in different ways, but it occurred to me rather late that while it was very obvious that my father was done in by war, the impact on my mother was much more difficult to see. Now I propose to put that right. I once said in my autobiography that living is like going up a mountain: every time you go a little higher up, the view looks completely different. And that is exactly what is happening as I write this book: the view of my mother is looking completely different.

  You left school at 14 and never went to university. Do you think this unusual path has been a help to your creativity?