Yes—it has been very good for me on the whole, although I come across great areas of ignorance that would have been covered in school had I stayed. But I know many writers who have been circumscribed by academia; when you’re always being taught to compare, it does stop your creativity.
I once visited a writers’ group run by a university in the States, and it was a most punishing experience. It was filled with extremely bright people; they had all read everything. One of their number would bring material with them to the group where it would be criticized viciously by the others. I would never have survived a creative writing course! They savaged each other, and what they were creating was critics, not writers. I’m prepared to bet on that.
You’ve lived through one of the most tumultuous centuries in our history. How has that affected you?
Well, I’ve lived through Hitler, ranting and raving; Mussolini too; the Soviet Union, which we thought would last for all time; the British Empire, which seemed impregnable; the color bar in Rhodesia and elsewhere; the heyday of European empires. It was inconceivable to think these would disappear. They seemed permanent. Now not one of them remains—and I think that that is a recipe for optimism!
About the book
Guarded Welcome by Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook, first published in 1962, has had 50 years of an up-and-down life after a difficult birth. A researcher will sometimes say to me: “I was surprised what bad reviews the book got at its start.” I was surprised at the sourness and bad temper of some of them, full of epithets like “man-hater,” “ballbreaker.” But there was mainly astonishment. Then as now there was a cry that the novel is dead, with a demand for new kinds of novel, but not one of these reviewers noticed that the book had an original structure. This work has since then enlivened a thousand academic departments, but what I said then was that The Golden Notebook had a shape, a composition, that itself was a statement, a communication. If they wanted a new kind of novel, then wasn’t this one? But no, “embittered,” “unfair,” and so on. This writer, not long from a very provincial colony, lost any residual awe for the metropolitan literati at a stroke. What was so evident then as now is that the reviewers tend to be overemotional. For any writer to criticize critics invites a yawn, but I was justified.
The “structure” was this. A short conventional novel, which can stand by itself, is interleaved with notebooks, diaries, comments about what went into it, in itself reflecting what many writers feel on finishing a novel: despair that their neat pattern of a novel excludes so much of the life that made it.
While most of the UK reception was hostile, I had champions. Nicholas Tomalin, a well-known journalist, wrote to me, took me to a pub and repeated his main message: “Don’t take any notice of them; they are an ignorant lot.” The poet Edwin Muir wrote to me with the same message. In America, Robert Gottlieb, not yet the most brilliant publisher in NewYork, and the critic Hugh Leonard, defended The Golden Notebook. It was published widely in Europe, with a very mixed welcome, from one extreme—the Swedish actress who greeted me with “It’s not your book, it’s mine; I never read anything but the Blue Notebook, and never will till I die”—to the other, such as a favorite publisher who hated it so much he said he wished he could refuse to publish it. France and Germany took ten years to publish it, saying it was too abrasive, too inflammatory, but published it in the 1970s, just in time for the feminist movement.
“France and Germany took ten years to publish The Golden Notebook, saying it was too abrasive, too inflammatory, but published it in the 1970s, just in time for the feminist movement.”
It was written in the late fifties, after the famous Khrushchev speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow. This speech, acknowledging just some of Stalin’s crimes, was like a depth charge under the left, large parts of which insisted that “the capitalist press” had invented it. I was joking, but then could no longer joke, that every time the phone rang another comrade had had a religious conversion, taken to drink, committed suicide, or turned into his or her opposite. The collapse of communism created many a fine businessman. If you have spent your life analyzing the crimes of capitalism, there could not be a better apprenticeship for becoming one.
I knew this was an extraordinary time; I was watching extraordinary events. I wanted to record them. I had often wished I could read novels that had never been written. Something from the Chartist movement? A novel about Marx’s household, so conventional, or, as we used to say, bourgeois, with the servant as mistress, the devoted daughter, the nasty son-in-law? I wanted to capture the flavor of 1956 and later, and I think I did. The novel could not be written now. Any novelist finds it difficult conveying the atmosphere of a time that has gone. Some of the tales from that surreal cold war may have a young person laughing incredulously, but at the time they meant death, torture, imprisonment.
“Some of the tales from that surreal cold war may have a young person laughing incredulously, but at the time they meant death, torture, imprisonment.”
Meantime, other “feminist bibles” had appeared, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex being the best. Which brings me to something no one believes. When I wrote The Golden Notebook it never occurred to me I was writing “a feminist bible.” The sixties feminists were not the first in the arena. “The Woman Question” dated from the fifteenth century. In communist circles in the forties and fifties feminist issues were much discussed. But the second sentence of The Golden Notebook is: “‘The point is,’ said Anna, ‘as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’ “This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its “structure” said. Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture.
So I became “a feminist icon.” But what had I said in The Golden Notebook? That any kind of singlemindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness. (This may be observed most easily in religion and politics.)
If the dialogue that so affected (and still affects) women was straight from life, then a very interesting question has to arise. Why does what is written have so much more impact than what is said? Apparently my reporting of how women criticized men was a revelation. But why? Surely not to any woman? Yet what she must have heard all her life struck her as dynamite when written down.
Yet The Golden Notebook wasn’t only a tract on feminism. I have always had letters from men interested in the politics, or in the madness issues. Another letter, a perennial, is on these lines: “I have given your book to my wife/girlfriend/daughter to show her that women don’t always talk about cooking and children.”
The book keeps popping up unexpectedly. The first translation in China was a much-bowdlerized edition sold as porn. What I like best is hearing that The Golden Notebook is on reading lists for political or history classes.
The reason for its continued vitality is, I feel, not literary. When I wrote it, I felt I was living through an explosion of contradictory possibilities. The energy of that somehow got into The Golden Notebook, gave it impetus.
Read on
Have You Read? More by Doris Lessing
ESSENTIAL DORIS LESSING CD: EXCERPTS FROM THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK READ BY THE AUTHOR
ALFRED & EMILY
In this extraordinary book, Lessing offers a moving meditation on parents and children, war and memory, as she explores the lives of her parents, two individuals irrevocably damaged by the Great War. In the fictional first half of Alfred & Emily, Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have led had there been no war. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the war, the family’s move to Africa, and the impact of their strained union on their daughter, a young woman growing up in a strange land.
THE GRASS IS SINGING
Set in Southern Rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing’s first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social criti
que. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little, the ennui of years on the farm works its slow poison, and Mary’s despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses—master and slave—are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial Africa.
The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing’s imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman’s struggle against a ruthless fate.
TIME BITES: VIEWS AND REVIEWS
In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing’s essays, we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has learned, over the course of a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, to read the world differently. From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays cover an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing’s clear-eyed vision and clearly expressed prose.
THE CLEFT
In the last years of his life, a contemplative Roman senator embarks on one last epic endeavor: to retell the history of human creation and reveal the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child—a boy—the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.
In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.
MARA AND DANN
Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven-year-old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best.
THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA’S DAUGHTER, GRIOT AND THE SNOW DOG
Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization. With his trusted companions—Mara’s daughter, his hope for the future; the abandoned child-soldier Griot, who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories; and the snow dog, a faithful friend who brings him back from the depths of despair—Dann embarks on a strange and captivating adventure in a suddenly colder, more watery climate in the north.
THE GRANDMOTHERS: FOUR SHORT NOVELS
In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other’s teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.
THE SWEETEST DREAM
Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table: her two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and fresh-off-the-street friends. It’s the early 1960s and certainly “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons live with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife’s problem child at Frances’s feet. And the world’s political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination….
Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream—and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward—from one of the greatest writers of our time.
BEN, IN THE WORLD
At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes, Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and how he fares in it, will horrify and captivate until the novel’s dramatic finale.
LOVE, AGAIN
Love, Again tells the story of a sixty-five-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her sanity. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous twenty-eight-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature thirty-five-year-old director Henry. Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today.
UNDER MY SKIN: VOLUME ONE OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TO 1949
The experiences absorbed through these “skins too few” are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing’s childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics. Under My Skin, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, offers a rare opportunity to discover the forces that shaped one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
WALKING IN THE SHADE: VOLUME TWO OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY—1949–1962
The second volume of Doris Lessing’s extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949–62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, under her arm, to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities.
THE REAL THING: STORIES AND SKETCHES
The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the pieces are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, its transitoriness, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing’s fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship
between the sexes.
AFRICAN LAUGHTER
Based on her memories of growing up in Southern Rhodesia and the experiences of four visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and 1990s, African Laughter is Lessing’s poignant study of the homeland from which she was exiled for twenty-five years. With rich detail and intimate understanding, she tackles the role that changing racial and social dynamics, the onslaught of AIDS, political corruption, and ecological factors have played in Zimbabwe’s evolution from colonial territory to modern nation.
PRISONS WE CHOOSE TO LIVE INSIDE: ESSAYS
With her signature candor and clarity, Lessing explores new ways to view ourselves and the society we live in, and gives us fresh answers to such enduring questions as how to think for ourselves and how to understand what we know.
IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH: A DOCUMENTARY
In Pursuit of the English is a novelist’s account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you’ve probably never met or even read about—though they are the real English.
The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliant piece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.
GOING HOME: A MEMOIR
Going Home is Doris Lessing’s account of her first journey back to Africa, the land in which she grew up and in which so much of her emotion and her concern are still invested. Returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she found that her love of Africa had remained as strong as her hatred of the idea of “white supremacy” espoused by its ruling class. Going Home evokes brilliantly the experience of the people, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country.
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