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The Golden Notebook: A Novel
The Golden Notebook: A Novel
The Golden Notebook: A Novel
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The Golden Notebook: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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"The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women."  — New York Times Book Review

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMay 14, 2013
ISBN9780062295002
The Golden Notebook: A Novel
Author

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.

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Rating: 3.6691634384519345 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It took me a little while, but once this book started clicking for me (thanks largely to Juliet Stevenson’s narration of the audiobook), I couldn’t get enough of it.This is not an easy book, but keeping track of the different notebooks and storylines is so worth it. Beautiful and very quotable. It deal with a lot: feminism, communism, Africa, mental health, marriage, friendship, and more. The format of the book can be a bit challenging, but I really connected with it. This quote speaks to me, as a 40-year-old reader who probably wouldn’t have appreciated this book nearly as much when I was younger: ‘Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.’I gave the book 4 stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I gave this book a three, but that was because I couldn't decide whether to give it 1 or 5. I loved the whole premise of a British communist "free woman" with South African past. I absolutely loved the Mashopi Hotel story line. I loved the idea of different note books to reflect different personalities. However, it was soooo long! I couldn't put it down in the beginning but in the end I couldn't wait for it to finish. I found in the end of the book a lot of passages were repetitive and didn't carry too much extra information. In the end, I'm glad I've read it but I don't think I will re-read it or recommend it to anyone
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals” page 385.Still under the effects of the inebriating The Brothers K, I thought the best way to overcome a book hungover was to get drunk again. Reckless and foolish, I know.My head still spinning around and my heart wrenched into a tight ball as I write these lines. “The Golden notebook” is not a kind book.It has challenged my patience and tolerance with its apparent non direction. I have even despised Anna, the narrator of the story, thinking her naive, selfish and snobbish.But being a woman who dwells in constant contradiction, I have irrevocably fallen under the spell of Lessing Anna’s radical voice. A woman, writer and mother who says the unsayable, thinks the unthinkable and puts it all down in her notebooks in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.Four Notebooks pouring with self contempt, full of disillusionment, tolls for searching clues in her past in order to reconcile her unbearably miserable present.The black recalls Anna’s youth in wartime Rhodesia, her initial involvement with the Communist Party and how her early experiences served as material for her later successful novel. Also a retrospective insight in which Anna can’t neither recognize herself nor her ingenuous expectations on women’s independence and liberation.”What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing so well the complexities behind them?” page 115.The red portrays her political doubts with shocking power and blistering honesty, threading radical exploration of communism together with Anna’s growing need for truth-seeking rather than political ideology.I found her growing estrangement with The Party especially poignant when she starts feeling dubious about ends justifying means and the cynicism of some “comrades”.”Yet why do I have a home at all? Because I wrote a book I am ashamed of, and it made a lot of money. Luck, luck, that’s all. And I hate all that – ‘my’ home, ‘my’ possessions, ‘my’ rights. And yet come to the point where I’m uncomfortable, I fall back on it like everyone else. Mine. Property. Possessions.” page 356The yellow notebook was the one that struck me the most but at the same time also shined out with unexpected recognition. Anna’s futile effort to write as a third person, naming her creation Ella, in an attempt to distance herself from the inadequacy and constant failures of her relationships with men reminded me strongly of D.H. Lawrence’s reflections on sexuality, morality and motherhood.Anna’s reaffirmed feelings of independence reacting against the vanity, egoism and insecurities of her usually married male partners contrast with her constant displays of traditional female behavior (expecting to stop being the mistress to become the wife). It all sounded so real and sincere to me that I felt Anna’s sufferings and sorrows as my own.“I am unhappy because I have lost some kind of independence, some freedom; but my being ‘free’ has nothing to do with writing a novel; it has to do with my attitude towards a man, and that has been proved dishonest, because I am in pieces.” page 283.Finally, the blue notebook appears as an accurate account of everyday life where intertwined switches of mood, rambling thoughts and semi-deranged descriptions of dreams become a crude testimony of existential doubts.”But-isn’t there something wrong with the fact that my sleep is more satisfying, exciting, enjoyable than anything that happens to me awake?” page 217.Defragmented pieces of unconsciousness create the most truthful and frightening image of a woman who questions the different versions of herself to find her long lost wholeness.Doris Lessing addresses the conflicts between the maternal and erotic life, of the difficulties to conduct a career, or at least to try to, while raising a child, of the letdown that comes along with exploration of political ideologies, of the hardships of facing a mental breakdown, of the frustration of being a liberated woman but still be dependant on a masculine presence in her life. And she does it all looking at the reader straight in the eye, without blinking.And don’t get me wrong, I don’t see Lessing as some sort of personal feminist hero, I don’t think that is the point. But then, as now, being in my early thirties, this novel has helped to steer me towards knowing which questions to ask and which answers are better left unsought.Everything. Life, love, death, the myriad beings buried deep inside me. Everything has become Golden clear. Because there has to be a crack in everything so that the light gets in.The failures and inadequacies of my past.The bleakness of my upcoming future.The beauty and the futility of it all, so worth the effort.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was so disappointed in Doris Lessing's novel "The Golden Notebook"; having recently read and loved her debut novel "The Grass is Singing", I was looking forward to reading her most challenging and well-regarded work. However, I found the 600-page tome to be nothing but a chore, populated by unlikable, selfish characters.The novel's central character is Anna, a writer, who has been scribbling notes about her life, her politics, her plans for novels and her past work in Africa. She is depressed and allows a number of weak and selfish men into her life. In a way, I felt I was being browbeaten with these details... every couple of pages, I said "Yes, I get it she's depressed... Yes, I get it, she has horrible choices in men." The novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, that at least appears to be semi-autobiographical (I'm not sure if it really is.... perhaps this is Lessing's genius and it had nothing to do with her own life.) I kept wondering are these the types of people who live in Lessing's life? Selfish, self-absorbed and with few redeeming qualities?I don't mind reading a novel that feels like work if there is a payoff in the end with some revelation or satisfying conclusion. Unfortunately, "The Golden Notebook" just seemed like work for work's sake.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Have decided to give this 4 stars in the end; it's a book that I loved and hated at the same time, and yet it really speaks to me, so 4 stars it is...I really liked Lessing's writing; though I found the first part a bit hard to get into, I really got drawn in by the second part and very much enjoyed her style. I also really liked how the separate books discuss different aspects of Anna's life, and yet all come together and are intricately connected to eachother.I think Lessing touches upon some very important issues in this novel, and though it sometimes gets somewhat long-winding, I generally think she makes good points in her discussions. She discusses racism and inequality, feminism and relationships, capitalism and communism, and the emptiness of modern life with great detail and some great thoughts that leave you with something to ponder.What made me hate the book though, was the overall negativity: it seems like Lessing's world is a pretty hopeless place, where men and women are always fighting and happy marriages don't exist, and where capitalism is terrible, but communism really isn't that great either, and where prejudice and discrimination abounds. Though in some cases I agree with the points she makes, it gets rather depressing, and I think she often gets a bit too negative...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Brilliant, complicated, original, occasionally hard going, but always worth it. This is one of the books that made women of my mother's generation see the world in a new way: fifty years on, it isn't quite as shocking and subversive any more — we're slowly getting used to seeing discussions of menstruation and female orgasms in print, and we're not quite as excited about Khrushchev and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU as our parents were. But most of what Lessing has to say about those things still matters, nonetheless.I was much more engaged than I expected to be by the theme of mental breakdown that runs through the book: from the high praise the book always gets from my mental-health-professional friends, I was resigned to being confronted with a lot of unintelligible Freud/Jung/Lacan jargon, but it isn't like that at all. The description of Anna's tottering on the edge of sanity is alarmingly easy to identify with. I was very struck by the way that is woven in with the different levels of fiction in the novel, and by the implied relations of fiction to real life. Definitely not just an historical document, but a book it's still worth reading half a century later.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My wife was unsure about this because 'the author is too obviously a communist'. My reading of this brilliant novel is quite different. Yes of course only someone with direct experience could write from such an insider perspective, but the perspective of the novel is deeply sceptical about communism as indeed about many other things. Don't read if you don't like women (or wimmin); but otherwise don't miss it!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This was a must-read during my later years in college when feminism was just getting started. Not just in Women's Studies courses (which were JUST getting started) but friends would press it upon you. So I read it, but I don't recall liking it that much. Maybe this is another one I should take another look at.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Over the years, I have read bits and pieces by Doris Lessing. I liked those works – a lot. But something held me back from a full on committal to her novels. Then I read an article about her work, which praised The Golden Notebook as her masterpiece. I had tried to read it three decades or so ago, and I could not get into it. This was one of my earliest deployments of “The Rule of 50.” About Twenty years ago, I tried again, but I got no further. About a month ago, I decided to try once more. Unfortunately, my copy of the book had disappeared. I bought another copy, and the new one had an introduction by Doris. This detailed look into her life, her writings, and her philosophy open wide the doors of understanding. This time I was determined to read the entire The Golden Notebook.Doris May Lessing had an amazingly interesting and widely varying life. She was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer, and short story writer. She was born October 22, 1919 in Kermanshah, Iran, and she died in London November 17, 2013. The introduction to my newest copy of the book has an extensive introduction to the novel. I do not recall whether or not my original copy had the Intro, but I found it to be most helpful in digging through the layers to an understanding of her, her life, and her worksAs my readers can imagine from the introduction, this novel will be a challenge; however, readers interested in writers, philosophy, politics, and fiction will be rewarded with an amazing experience. The story revolves around four journals Doris kept from a young age. The journals were green, blue, red, and black. Each deals with a different aspect of her life – politics, a memoir, her written work, and a diary. She then took these four books and wove into them a story of two women. Anna is a character who seems a lot like Doris. Anna is a writer, and she is telling the story of Ella, who seems a whole lot like Anna and Doris.Some of her paragraphs go on for well over two or even three pages. If you delve into this wonderful and amazing novel, take some serious concentration pills, a pencil, and note book paper. Here is a sample of a conversation between Anna and Saul, her then current love interest. Lessing wrote, “‘you can’t go on like this, you’ve got to start writing again.’ // ‘Obviously if I could, I would.’ // ‘No, Anna, that’s not good enough. Why don’t you write that short story you’ve just told me about? No, I don’t want all that hokum you usually give me—tell me in one simple sentence, why not. You can call in Christmas cracker mottoes if you like, but while I was walking about I was thinking that you could simplify it in your mind, boil it all down to something, then you could take a good long look at it and beat it.’ // I began to laugh, but he said: ‘No, Anna, you’re going to really crack up unless you do.’ // ‘Very well then. I can’t write that story or any other story, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me.’ // ‘Who? Do you know?’ // ‘Of course I know. It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F.L.N. Or Mr. Mathlong. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?’” (609). I also noticed some references to other characters and story-lines. I has pleased to read of a character who reminded me of Martha Quest, the title character in her first of four novels in the Children of Violence series. Reach beyond what you usually read, and stretch you reading skills with The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. 5 stars--Jim, 2/8/17
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing First let me say that I cheated a bit and listened to this 27 hour audiobook and that part was a mistake. It made the divisions in the story more difficult to understand and I ended up going back and getting the ebook to make sense of it afterword.
    The book hit me much like Madame Bovary did back when I read it first but I understand the problem now and can honestly say that I see why it is considered a feminist classic and how it contributed to the body of work that eventually won Doris Lessing the Nobel Prize in Literature.
    The book is incredibly problematic in many ways right from the start. The point of the book though, is the introspection into the four notebooks where the main character looks at all the ways in which the bubble of her life as an upper middle class white heterosexual in the society of England just afte WWII is problematic. While I'm sure problematic would not be the word Lessing would have used at the time, this is where we've come in looking at books and feminism and all the intersections of life. As part of this, there is also a diversity problem throughout. Nevertheless, we do get to see some people who still have representation issues and though the characters aren't treated well, it's a part of the book that the main character spends time writing in the notebooks about her treatment of them, her feelings about it, and sometimes debating other tactics. None of this makes her noble, but it definitely makes the book ahead of its time. For the record, it was originally published in 1962, which is a year before The Feminine Mystique. Along with the aforementioned notes about people, she also takes a long and introspective look at her life, her role in society, the way society treats her and the things expected of her by everyone.
    Like I said, it was a book ahead of its time. It's problematic in many aspects right from the start but the point is looking at her life. For me, that makes the nature of the problems a part of the plot and not an afterthought or something the writer neglected to care about. The whole point is seeing for yourself if you are a racist or sexist or hetero-sexist.
    Some minor spoilers ahead.
    To elaborate on what I was getting at above, this book is great in that it so well explains that plight of women in several walks of life during it's time. The part that bothers me is intricate to what makes it great. It's so true.
    Yes, it gets quite complicated and it may be difficult to understand what I mean by that in a review and I did think at first that maybe it was just me and I just really identified with the women the story is about. But it's not. I know that because I also get the ebook, as I mentioned above, which has two introductions that were written by the author, one in 1993 and the other in 1971. She has received enough fanmail and letters stated this that I know I'm not alone in that.
    What I mean by the "plight of women" is that there are things that we all know happened back in the time that this book was made that we like to gloss over. We watch old movies where men say things that we would not consider a compliment if said now and the women laugh and then we laugh as if it's okay because those aren't real women anyway, right? Well, many of those very things had to be a part of the culture, it only makes sense when it pops up in, literally everything made in the time. Let's go ahead and add in the feeling that there is a requirement to have sex with a guy who buys you dinner now, let alone in a time before the Women's Liberation movement.
    So yeah, what made me squirm as I read the story wasn't that I didn't like it as a masterful piece of work with a beautiful prose that just makes you feel what the characters feel, but the idea of living and breathing in that world terrifies me. A lot. Like, A LOT. It's not Hunger Games level, but it's not necessarily far off either.
    I grew up knowing that there were lots of women around me that felt like they had to just be happy with the man they married despite affairs and poor treatment because they were unemployable and he was a decent provider for their kids. And just like with some of the men here, it was her kids, not their kids together. These guys don't feel anything for their children, they aren't a part of their lives. Having kids was a favor they did for the women they kept all but chained to the house. Now, don't get me wrong, house-wives are great. It's the idea of a man looking at his housewife as if she exists as a burden to him and having children with her solely to give her life meaning because he won't "let" her do that by any other means or because she feels bound by society to make that the meaning of her life that I have a problem with.
    Part of what makes this so clear is that the book itself isn't about a housewife, it's about a serial mistress. She doesn't want to be married. I don't want to spoil all the details of why and her circumstances, but this gives us the window through which we get to see these men. Married men in pursuit of her as their girl on the side and then we get to walk through her thought process and whether or not she wants to sleep with them and whether or not she does in spite of desire but out of obligation. All of these things leave her in positions that I would loathe finding myself in as well as most of the other women in the book. Before I get accused of making the distinction, though I don't think it should be necessary, I do understand that this is her circle and the people she finds herself around. I'm sure there were plenty of perfectly happy marriages with men who didn't sleep around. This book isn't about those marriages or those men.
    What makes it a truly interesting book despite all the things that terrify me is that what makes the plot move along is Anna's introspection that is brought on by her notebooks. She has written a successful book and is compartmentalising in an effort to find adequate inspiration for a new book. Her introspection makes her take a second look at everything, even the most menial, repetitive, or normal things. For example, she mentions washing up several times a day while on her period and changing out her tampons. She doesn't just mention it but thinks on how it makes her feel, how it effects what happens throughout the day that she has to take this extra precaution.
    The commentary on communism is an interesting one that I've never really heard before. It makes sense to see it in the beginning as something hopeful on that level but I love that it is also broken down into people and how people can so easily break a concept like communism. My dad once said (and he was probably quoting but he's my original source) that communism is a great idea until you add people to it. I remember working to figure out what that meant and realizing that it does sound like it should create a better world, then later realizing that some greedy people will always come along and destroy it all. This, of course, was well after the Cold War ended and that cat was out of the bag. I'm sure I was watching something that mentioned something about it.
    Due to her experience in Africa and the nature of her first novel, Anna does also get introspective about racism and even colonialism. The plot of that first novel would be considered very problematic these days and she realizes it in the book and spends some time on why and how and what she could have done differently but that it would not have sold that way. No one would have believed it or wanted to see it if she had told the real truth.
    I found her dreams toward the end with the projectionist interesting. I had a similar, though different, experience recounting events in my life as I had started to become better versed in feminism these last few years and started to see all the little ways that I had bought into internalized misogyny. I had been a girl who said that I wasn't like other girls because I genuinely didn't like many other girls at the time. The list of faux pas from back then goes on, but the introspection was an important part of it. It's a little jarring when you sit down to it, at least it was for me and I appreciate that it was equally so for Anna.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Op zich is de structuur van dit boek: een doorlopend verhaal, doorsneden door fragmenten van de 4 notitieboekjes die de hoofdpersoon bijhoudt, best een leuke vondst. De afwisseling van dialogen, introspectie en externe beschrijving maken het geheel redelijk goed volgbaar. En de thema's: de door Lessing zelf zo vermaledijde "sex war", het ambigue engagement binnen de Communistische Partij, en de moeilijke strijd van het hoofdpersonage voor haar mentale gezondheid, zijn zeker de moeite. Maar toch: het geheel overtuigt me niet en af en toe zat ik te denken: wat langdradig. Lessing weet alleszins de moeilijke verhouding tussen mannen en vrouwen en de problematische omgang van individuen met de werkelijkheid goed in de verf te zetten, maar ze doet dat op een te gekunstelde, te geconstrueerde manier.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A breath-taking, overwhelming, everlastingly signficant and important portrait of 'free and independent' women's struggles - however, it would be against Lessing's wish to simplify it as a feminist pioneering book so we want to be careful about it. It is a book written by an author who couldn't help with her front-line left-wing, intellectual, and cold-war upbringing who indulged all of this into this too clever, thorough, highly analytical and intellectual book. I found myself wanting to highlight almost every sentence Lessing produced - reading it is also a most self-indulgent experience!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Kafka said "a book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." This book is an ice-axe. It's about "modern women", in the fifties, and about their relationships with men, and lack thereof. Also, it's about the communist party, and ambigous feelings towards it. On the one hand, the main characters are attracted to the CP, otoh, they know what's happening in Russia and they are appalled by it. These feelings are similar to what lefty students felt in the seventies. Lessing writes about two women, friends, sharing a house. One, Anna, has written a succesful novel and is writing stories, one of which is about two women, friends, sharing a house. One of these, Ella, has written a novel. So it's a novel in a novel in a novel. I wouldn't be surprised if the character in Ella's novel also wrote a novel, etc. If you read the novel carefully, you get to see the similarities and the differences between the Anna story and the Ella story. I take it that you can retrieve some of the Doris story - i.e. the autobiographic component of the novel - by applying the Ella-Anna relationship to the Anna-Doris relationship. But that's just my theory. Anyway, although the book was written in 1962, it's certainly worthwhile. I don't think that the next generations of readers will recognize the context and the themes, so it may become less popular in the future.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Golden Notebook is a thought-provoking, if occasionally meandering, page-turner set mainly in England in the 1950s. It is primarily about Anna Wulf, writer of one successful novel, and her fight with writers’ block as she struggles to put the absolute truth (and only the truth) into words. While I did find the pace of my reading slow down in the last 1/5th or so of the book, it was absolutely worth pushing through and finishing.Despite characters that are mostly unlikable, or at the least, unsympathetic, I found the book to be engrossing. The utilization of the story-within-a-story narrative is expertly done. As the stories develop and come together, I came to more than one realization. The first was that there were even more levels than merely stories-within-a-story. The second was that perhaps none of it had been the truth the whole time, and that perhaps Anna was right when she recognized that the truth is something that automatically becomes untrue once you’ve written it down. Coming to that second realization (that it was likely that nothing in the previous 600+ pages was “true” per se) would normally make a reader feel that the endeavor had been a colossal waste of time, or at the least feel cheated. However, TGN is so well-done that despite this, you still feel fulfilled and rewarded for having read it. Maybe everything that Anna has told us is untrue, but those details are of little consequence when compared to the experience of TGN as a whole—and it is something you have to experience; you will never get an honest feel for this book by reading reviews or synopses. Notwithstanding my general praise of TGN as a creative work, the feminist in me finds the general mood of unhappiness in the book problematic. Anna and her friend Molly are “free women” (i.e. they are independent and do as they please) yet neither seems terribly happy with her life. Anna jumps from relationship to relationship (and frequently, married man to married man) and never seems happy; she bemoans the lack of faithful men she’s been able to find, yet never does anything to break out of it. And internally she’s falling apart, as evidenced in the multiple notebooks she keeps. I might describe Molly as content, but we don’t have access to her internal workings as we do with Anna. This gloom may be simply something used to capture the mood of what a electively single woman faced at that time, but I still find it disconcerting. Nevertheless, the voracious reader (and hopeful one-day writer) in me feels like TGN is just SO good, calling it a novel is almost an insult. This book is a work of master craftsmanship. I recommend it to any smart, voracious reader, and to all writers and would-be writers.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An incredible book -- a book that should have earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature long before now when she was finally awarded the prize.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    While this book seems scattered, and the end doesn't seem to justify the means, it is an interesting read that has given me much to think about.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Big thick book. Bigger than I usually read, but I was committed after not very many pages. About the novel, about politics, about women and men. The structure was fascinating, the way the different parts of the book talked about one another. I read Lessing's introduction maybe three times and found it deeper each reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love Doris Lessing, but I admit that when I first read the Golden Notebook (about..40 years ago) I found it slow going and fascinating both. I've always thought Lessing was a great writer who now and then had editors who fell asleep during paragraphs or something.
    It's a pivotal book in the women's history shelf, if only to get a glimpse of how it was back in the day.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I don't really know what to think about this book, but I can tell you one thing - it's a book that refuses to be summed up by a one-sentence description. Instead, here's a list of some of what it's about: friendships between women, Communism, single motherhood, sexual mores, psychoanalysis, writing, suicide, marriage, British colonies in Africa, race, class and gender divides, British vs. American tendencies, insanity, independence, love, losing faith in a cause, losing faith in oneself, public vs. private faces. Oh, and apparently it is supposed to be some sort of feminist touchstone, although Lessing says she didn't write it with that intention and I didn't personally read it that way myself.I seesawed frequently between being intrigued and being bored. There's no doubt that Lessing's writing is engaging, but it didn't overcome the subject matter of some sections for me. I am not that interested in reading 50 pages on the future of Communism in the wake of realizations that Stalin was a monster. I'm not that interested in reading 3 pages of headlines that our main character, Anna, has clipped from newspapers and pasted into her journal. (Those 3 or 4 pages *felt* like 50 to me.) The structure of the novel was intriguing, although I admit I didn't entirely get it until near the end - I have no idea if a reader is supposed to have picked up on it before that. My attention was held by the relationships between Anna and the major players in her life - her friend Molly and Molly's ex-husband, Richard, and their son, Tommy. Anna's relationship with her daughter, Janet, had some moments and expressions of emotions that any parent will recognize. Anna's relationships with men and her reflections thereupon were like the rest - sometimes interesting, sometimes so much tedious navel-gazing and justification.Recommended for: anyone who wanted confirmation that bohemians are just as miserable as anyone else, people who think eating your vegetables before getting dessert makes dessert more rewarding, people with more patience for abstract whining and over-analyzing than me. Quote: "She seems to me so fragile that I want to put out my hand to save her from a wrong step, or a careless movement; and at the same time so strong that she is immortal. I feel what I felt with sleeping Michael, a need to laugh out in triumph, because of this marvelous, precarious immortal human being, in spite of the weight of death."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I found this book initially very difficult to read. The first notebook went on and on. I remember thinking to myself that I couldn't possibly read it. However, as it is considered a 'must read' I forced myself to persist and I am really glad I did. Still current and insightful all these years later.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    More of a 4.5 really, because of a few issues. However, I'm still fairly certain this is a masterpiece. Review to follow.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I admit it, I had thought this would be extremely hard-going. I’d read a couple of Lessing’s other novels and not been taken with them – and even if the first book of her sf quintet, Canopus in Argos Archives, Shikasta, felt to me like being beaten about the head by Ursula K Le Guin. The Golden Notebook, Lessing’s most celebrated novel, I expected to be a bit of a chore – especially given its 576 pages… So I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was an engrossing read. I’m only glad I read it after writing All That Outer Space Allows, as some structural elements of my novel might well have changed and in hindsight I’m not convinced they’d have been improvements. The Golden Notebook is a novel titled ‘Free Women’, about Anna Wulf, writer of a single successful novel based on her years in Africa during WWII, who is now living in London. She is also a communist. Between Sections of ‘Free Women’ are Wulf’s notebooks – black, red, yellow and blue. In the black notebook, she describes her time in Africa – on which her one published novel, ‘Frontiers of War’ (and which I kept on mis-thinking as Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War) was based – and later, her life in London. The red notebook details Wulf’s politics and her interactions with the Communist Party. The yellow notebook is a fictionalisation of Wulf’s own life, title ‘The Shadow of the Third’, in which Wulf’s part is played by a woman called Ella. And the blue notebook starts out as a diary, but at times is more of a scrapbook, filled with newspaper cuttings. The five narratives, despite covering similar ground, don’t actually confuse The Golden Notebook‘s story, they actually deepen it and successfully show different aspects of Wulf’s character – as a writer, as a communist, her sex life (especially her affairs, none of which last) and her relations with her friends. The more observant among you will have noticed that the title of Lessing’s novel refers to a notebook not yet mentioned. This only appears near the end, opens by describing Anna breaking free of her then-boyfriend, before becoming that boyfriend’s own novel (a précis is given only), since writing is the catalyst the two use to part amicably. I really liked The Golden Notebook, and I honestly hadn’t expected to. I can see how it might have shocked in 1962 – Lessing is very forthright about Wulf’s sex life – and the sharp criticism of the lives women were expected to live can’t have gone down too well. I expect the communism would be more of a turn-off to twenty-first century readers than the sexual politics. But The Golden Notebook does read like a book ahead of its time. Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Golden Notebook is not a task to be undertaken lightly. It's a very dense and complex book, much of which is basically in stream-of-consciousness. The structure alone is daunting, comprised as it is of five different documents--the main character's four different journals, which she keeps simultaneously on four different parts of her life (one of which is a fiction within the fiction) and the omniscient narrator's exposition. It's satisfying, perhaps partly because it is so difficult, but also because the literary quality--especially the historic value--is very high. Think of The Golden Notebook as the aggressive feminine response to James Joyce--both in content and in style. Like Joyce, it often devolves into neurotic navel-gazing, but at least it's navel-gazing of high quality and intelligence.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this when I was a young woman and was profoundly influenced by it. I had a paperback edition which disappeared long ago, much to my chagrin, and I am very glad to have a digital copy of it. It is much how I felt when I was in romantic relationships, and it is profoundly political. You can't help but admire this deep and complex book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Lessing herself has referred to this book as 'narcissistic'; it is also disillusioned, depressed and lacking in grace and wisdom. To wade through stacks of slapdash, tired self-centered nonsense only to find a few tiny good bits along the way is just not worth it. Disappointing, mindnumbing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Some bits were fascinating - but I found others dull and some very irritating
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Golden Notebook - Doris LessingThis novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation; claimed Lessing herself in an essay written in 1971, nearly ten years after The Golden Notebook was published and which serves as a preface to the 1993 edition, but I can understand how it might have been interpreted as such back in the early 1960’s. It is like many of her early novels drawn from her own life experiences, so much so that it seems autobiographical in places. ‘“Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures and emotions - and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas - can’t be yours alone”Doris Lessing - essay1971The subject of the book is Anna Wulf who is a forty something woman living in Earls Court London with her young daughter, she is living on the royalties of a successful novel. She is divorced. She spent the first thirty years or so of her life in Africa (Zimbabwe or perhaps South Africa) where she was a member of the communist party. She is suffering from writers block and although she might not admit it; the need to find a man with whom she can have a loving relationship. She feels adrift and although she has a number of affairs she is lurching toward a severe depression. Her inability to start a new book has coincided with her rejection of the communist party (CP) which has been her ideological and social base for most of her adult life. In an attempt to break out of the downward spiral she starts to write about her feelings, history, day to day events together with an imaginary novel based on current experiences in four separate notebooks. Lessing uses Anna’s notebooks as the basic structure for her novel, linking them with a narrative story called Free Woman which charts Anna’s progress through this painful period of her life.The notebooks hold nothing back and if at times this reader thought he was wading through seas of menstrual blood then this is exactly what was important to Anna Wulf at the time. The notebooks present an intimate picture of Anna’s life and as she is a single parent coping with the social culture of the early 1960’s (where women are second class citizens and as such their sexual life is to be used and abused by men who are in a position to take advantage), she is not afraid to write about her own needs, both as a women and as a politically aware person. She goes to bed with men as and when it feels right for her to do so, there is no shame and no recriminations. She does not spare her vitriol on the men who cheat about their emotions, those that use their dominant position in society to get what they want and she meets or hears about quite a few of those, therefore it is not surprising that The Golden Notebook was/is seen as a cause celebre for women’s liberation both by women readers who felt the same way and by male critics who may have felt emasculated. However Lessing was writing a novel about one woman’s feelings at a certain point in her life, the book is very subjective it is not a clarion call for anything and although many of the men appear weak and unworthy much the same could be said for the women in Anna’s life. Lessing has claimed that her book has been misinterpreted that it’s main subject was the disintegration of Anna Wulf, her descent into near madness at a time when the things that were important to her were also falling apart; for example her inability to get past her writers block, the meltdown inside the British Communist party, her fears for a world under the shadow of the H-bomb and the future of her child as well as her need for love. The disintegration is represented by the four notebooks where the only way that Anna can cope is to compartmentalise her life, but they are not the answer as they lead to more fragmentation as issues and stories from her past appear and reappear in different forms. This is a book that will speak to many people, because of the rawness of it’s emotional content and Lessing may well be right in saying that when an author writes truthfully about herself then others will see their own lives partly reflected. I think that this is why the book does not quite hold together in the way that Lessing wished at the time, because readers were too busy identifying with the characters and failing to see the bigger picture. This may be still true today as for many people times have not changed all that much, but this is not Lessing’s fault. It is certainly not her fault in the way that the book is structured, because its last fifty or so pages are a passionate account of one person’s mental breakdown. Lessing writes imaginatively, saving some of her best prose to describe Anna’s dreams as they become confused with her reality. This writing prefigures some of her writing in her later science fiction novels. It is very effective here. The Golden Notebook is the final notebook in which she writes about her affair with Saul Green, a man who's seems to be suffering from a multi personality disorder. Perhaps it is progress for Anna that she now has only one notebook and even more progress because she can give it away, but when Saul leaves as Anna knows he must taking some strength from their relationship, Anna is once again left with her problems. She still has work to do….A Book that is passionate and powerful and once again mines the authors own life story for much of it’s content. Perhaps it is too powerful for it’s own good, because it does not quite come together for me, but then again that is one of its major themes and so it may be Lessing being more clever than I think she is. Anyway this is an important book for what it says about a brave and independent woman battling against the culture of her times which threatens her very sanity. Plenty of us will find in those intimate details of Anna’s life much to think about and so 4.5 stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book explores the Communist Party, relationships, treatment of women in society and mental illness. Although there are amazing insights into membership in the Communist Party in the'50s and the male/female dynamic, the book seems disjointed, often hard to follow and, at times, somewhat boring. The author's feminist viewpoints are amazingly current considering they were written over 50 years ago. I expected the contents of the four notebooks to be more clearly defined bringing it all together into a cohesive "Golden Notebook". That didn't happen.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    1041 The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing (read 21 Jan 1970) This is another book listed by Time as a Notable Book of the Sixties [the complete list is in my review of The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn here on LibraryThing]. Set This House on Fire [which I read 31 Aug 1969 and did NOT like] was a veritable masterpiece compared to this trash. This book is just nothing. it doesn't have anything. Boring, scatological, inane, disorganized--it is just junk. Notable? Ugh. I must be awful stupid. The book got worse and worse. The part on the "I"--Anna Wulf--and Saul Green took the cake. Stupid, ignorant, asinine people--how can anyone care anything about such impossible moronic people?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I will probably never manage to read this book again so I thought maybe I should write what I remember. It was one of those reading experiences where I remember lots of moments sitting and reading it. It took a while, the better part of a year I think.What made it so difficult to read was being so immensely psychological that practically every sentence needed time to properly land in my brain and resonate. Impact, impact, impact. It's terrifyingly insightful. Lessing is merciless while exploring the women's sexual and familial lives, mental breaks, and lost political hope.Tellingly, I have a paragraph of notes I took while I read it (I never do that) and they are incoherent now: "Children of a man who doesn't love you." "Sex: making room for him when he doesn't deserve it." "Calling yourself free and love when you are buying, sheltering, effacing." That's kind of how it felt to read.I worked hard to get a grasp of the existential feminist need in the book and it was meaningful. Though, Lessing doesn't accept that; this edition includes her 1971 introduction about the book's unintentional involvement in "the sex war" and "Women's Liberation," except this is not "the right way" to read it.Appropriately, my used copy crumbled all to pieces as I got to the end.

Book preview

The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

Introduction

1993

This novel’s progress continues to surprise me, because it keeps putting its head up in new places, and often not where one would expect. The most recent was China, where I was on a trip at the invitation of the main Chinese writers’ association. An edition of 80,000 has just been published, not a large number in that vast country, a small edition for them. It sold out in three days. It had been published once before, and had done well. Everyone has read it, they say, meaning, as this usually does these days, mostly people in universities. The universities I visited in Beijing, Shanghai, Shi’an, and Canton (Guanjou) have a most lively and informed interest in British and American literature. Only now has it occurred to me that universities are more and more our equivalent of the medieval monasteries, keeping things of the mind alive and well in countries where people are too poor to buy books. (Not that China can any longer be described as a poor country.) Recently I got a letter from a waitress in a hotel in Rio saying, "I can’t afford to buy books. My husband works in the university and he is allowed to use the library and he got The Golden Notebook for me and I feel I must tell you…"

I hear that the book is being assigned in history classes and politics classes in schools and universities. This pleases me, since one of the reasons I wrote the novel was that I felt there are blank spaces where novels ought to be, particularly in nineteenth-century literature. For instance, I would like to read novels that give the taste and flavour of the Chartists, and their personal lives, their discussions, their conflicts, and perhaps, the small revolutionary groups that flourished in London in the nineteenth century, most of them dedicated to fomenting revolution in Europe. I think The Golden Notebook is a useful testament to its time, particularly now that communism is dead or dying everywhere, or changing its nature. Nothing seems more improbable than what people believed when this belief has gone with the wind. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

A Yugoslav woman student said to me (this dates the reminiscence), How interesting to read about all those old politics. Old and exotic in communist Yugoslavia, but you may hear too, It describes what happened in my political group in the seventies or "The Golden Notebook describes my life as a woman."

When it first came out it was considered quite an advanced book, but recently it was given to girls of fifteen in a school in North London and they took it in their stride. This year it is being read in a class in the University of Zimbabwe, at the request of black and white students, male and female. They were surprised, so said the teacher, a friend, that the talk of the young communists was idealistic and optimistic in those ancient days before there was a communist regime in Zimbabwe. They associated communism and communists with self-seeking and opportunism. It had not occurred to them that communism had begun as a genuine dream for a better world.

I continue to get letters from men about The Golden Notebook—as many as from women. They may say that it opened their eyes to the feelings and experiences of women, or that what interests them is the politics, or the style of the main American character, who now seems to them quite ridiculously macho. Or a woman writes to say—and this has happened often—that her boyfriend or husband gave her the book, saying it influenced him. I also hear the other side of this when a man says he has just read such-and-such a book and liked it. He was at a university where Doris Lessing was the property of the women’s movement, and so he did not bother to read my books and now he was sorry he didn’t and was writing to tell me so.

Yes, I do get a lot of feedback, and I am always interested, particularly when it is unexpected. In Vermont there is a bookstore called The Golden Notebook

I re-read the novel the other day and remembered the fury of energy that went into it. Probably that is why the book goes on and on as it does—because of its charge. It does have a remarkable vitality. Some of it is the energy of conflict. I was writing my way out of one set of ideas, even out of a way of life, but that is not what I thought while I was doing it. Inside that tight framework is an effer-vescence. Sometimes the energy in a book contradicts its apparent message. The first time I thought about this was when I read Dos-toyevski’s The Devils and found myself invigorated and optimistic when in fact a more pessimistic story can hardly be imagined. The other of my books written with the same intensity could not on the face of it be more different than The Golden Notebook. It is The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight. Both books mark limits.

I meet women in their fifties who say, I was influenced by this book and I gave it to my daughter and she loves it. Or a young woman says, My mother gave me this book because she said it was important to her and now I understand her much better. I used to hear, My mother read it and now I do—so that’s two generations, but the other day I was told of a grandmother who gave it to her son who gave it to his daughter. Three generations. Yes, I am indeed flattered.

Currently I am writing volume one of my autobiography, and thinking about some of the people and events that went into The Golden Notebook, 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.

DORIS LESSING

AUGUST 1993

Introduction

1971

The shape of this novel is as follows:

There is a skeleton, or frame, called Free Women, which is a conventional short novel, about 60,000 words long, and which could stand by itself. But it is divided into five sections and separated by stages of the four Notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue. The Notebooks are kept by Anna Wulf, a central character of Free Women. She keeps four, and not one because, as she recognises, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness—of breakdown. Pressures, inner and outer, end the Notebooks; a heavy black line is drawn across the page of one after another. But now that they are finished, from their fragments can come something new, The Golden Notebook.

Throughout the Notebooks people have discussed, theorised, dogmatised, labelled, compartmented—sometimes in voices so general and representative of the time that they are anonymous, you could put names to them like those in the old Morality Plays, Mr Dogma and Mr I-Am-Free-Because-I-Belong-Nowhere, Miss I-Must-Have-Love-and-Happiness and Mrs. I-Have-to-Be-Good-at-Everything-I-Do, Mr Where-Is-a-Real-Woman? and Miss Where-Is-a-Real-Man?, Mr I’m-Mad-Because-They-Say-I-Am, and Miss Life-through-Experiencing-Everything, Mr I-Make-Revolution-and-Therefore-I-Am, and Mr and Mrs If-We-Deal-Very-Well-with-This-Small-Problem-Then-Perhaps-We-Can-Forget-We-Daren’t-Look-at-the-Big-Ones. But they have also reflected each other, been aspects of each other, given birth to each other’s thoughts and behaviour—are each other, form wholes. In the inner Golden Notebook, things have come together, the divisions have broken down, there is formlessness with the end of fragmentation—the triumph of the second theme, which is that of unity. Anna and Saul Green the American break down. They are crazy, lunatic, mad—what you will. They break down into each other, into other people, break through the false patterns they have made of their pasts, the patterns and formulas they have made to shore up themselves and each other, dissolve. They hear each other’s thoughts, recognise each other in themselves. Saul Green, the man who has been envious and destructive of Anna, now supports her, advises her, gives her the theme for her next book, Free Women—an ironical title, which begins: The two women were alone in the London flat. And Anna, who has been jealous of Saul to the point of insanity, possessive and demanding, gives Saul the pretty new notebook, The Golden Notebook, which she has previously refused to do, gives him the theme for his next book, writing in it the first sentence: On a dry hillside in Algeria a soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle. In the inner Golden Notebook, which is written by both of them, you can no longer distinguish between what is Saul and what is Anna, and between them and the other people in the book.

This theme of breakdown, that sometimes when people crack up it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, has of course been written about by other people, as well as by me, since then. But this is where, apart from the odd short story, I first wrote about it. Here it is rougher, more close to experience, before experience has shaped itself into thought and pattern—more valuable perhaps because it is rawer material.

But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as by hostile ones, as being about the sex war, or was claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war.

I have been in a false position ever since, for the last thing I have wanted to do was to refuse to support women.

To get the subject of Women’s Liberation over with—I support it, of course, because women are second-class citizens, as they are saying energetically and competently in many countries. It can be said that they are succeeding, if only to the extent they are being seriously listened to. All kinds of people previously hostile or indifferent say: I support their aims but I don’t like their shrill voices and their nasty ill-mannered ways. This is an inevitable and easily recognisable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them. I don’t think that Women’s Liberation will change much though—not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.

But this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being on the theme of She is unfeminine, She is a man-hater. This particular reflex seems indestructible. Men—and many women—said that the suffragettes were defeminised, masculine, brutalised. There is no record I have read of any society anywhere when women demanded more than nature offers them that does not also describe this reaction from men—and some women. A lot of women were angry about The Golden Notebook. What women will say to other women, grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism, is often the last thing they will say aloud—a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience with a man they are in love with is still small. Most women will still run like little dogs with stones thrown at them when a man says: You are unfeminine, aggressive, you are unmanning me. It is my belief that any woman who marries or takes seriously in any way at all a man who uses this threat, deserves everything she gets. For such a man is a bully, does not know anything about the world he lives in, or about its history—men and women have taken infinite numbers of roles in the past, and do now, in different societies. So he is ignorant, or fearful about being out of step—a coward…. I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade.

(So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if…)

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallisation of information in society which has not yet taken place. This book was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movements already existed. It came out first ten years ago, in 1962. If it were coming out now for the first time it might be read, and not merely reacted to: things have changed very fast. Certain hypocrisies have gone. For instance, ten, or even five years ago—it has been a sexually contumacious time—novels and plays were being plentifully written by men furiously critical of women—particularly from the States but also in this country—portrayed as bullies and betrayers, but particularly as underminers and sappers. But these attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as womanhating, aggressive or neurotic. It still goes on, of course—but things are better, there is no doubt of it.

I was so immersed in writing this book, that I didn’t think about how it might be received. I was involved not merely because it was hard to write—keeping the plan of it in my head I wrote it from start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult—but because of what I was learning as I wrote. Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it. All sorts of ideas and experiences I didn’t recognise as mine emerged when writing. The actual time of writing, then, and not only the experiences that had gone into the writing, was really traumatic: it changed me. Emerging from this crystallising process, handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about the sex war, and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.

Yet the essence of the book, the organisation of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalise.

Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love…. says Anna, in Free Women, stating a theme—shouting it, announcing a motif with drums and fanfares…or so I imagined. Just as I believed that in a book called The Golden Notebook the inner section called the Golden Notebook might be presumed to be a central point, to carry the weight of the thing, to make a statement.

But no.

Other themes went into the making of this book, which was a crucial time for me: thoughts and themes I had been holding in my mind for years came together.

One was that it was not possible to find a novel which described the intellectual and moral climate of a hundred years ago, in the middle of the last century, in Britain, in the way Tolstoy did it for Russia, Stendhal for France. (At this point it is necessary to make the obligatory disclaimers.) To read The Red and the Black, and Lucien Leuwen is to know that France as if one were living there, to read Anna Karenina is to know that Russia. But a very useful Victorian novel never got itself written. Hardy tells us what it was like to be poor, to have an imagination larger than the possibilities of a very narrow time, to be a victim. George Eliot is good as far as she goes. But I think the penalty she paid for being a Victorian woman was that she had to be shown to be a good woman even when she wasn’t according to the hypocrisies of the time—there is a great deal she does not understand because she is moral. Meredith, that astonishingly underrated writer, is perhaps nearest. Trollope tried the subject but lacked the scope. There isn’t one novel that has the vigour and conflict of ideas in action that is in a good biography of William Morris.

Of course this attempt on my part assumed that that filter which is a woman’s way of looking at life has the same validity as the filter which is a man’s way…setting that problem aside, or rather, not even considering it, I decided that to give the ideological feel of our mid-century, it would have to be set among socialists and marxists, because it has been inside the various chapters of socialism that the great debates of our time have gone on; the movements, the wars, the revolutions, have been seen by their participants as movements of various kinds of socialism, or Marxism, in advance, containment, or retreat. (I think we should at least concede the possibility that people looking back on our time may see it not at all as we do—just as we, looking back on the English, the French, or even the Russian Revolutions see them differently from the people living then.) But Marxism, and its various offshoots, has fermented ideas everywhere, and so fast and energetically that, once way out it has already been absorbed, has become part of ordinary thinking. Ideas that were confined to the far left thirty or forty years ago had pervaded the left generally twenty years ago, and have provided the commonplaces of conventional social thought from right to left for the last ten years. Something so thoroughly absorbed is finished as a force—but it was dominant, and in a novel of the sort I was trying to do, had to be central.

Another thought that I had played with for a long time was that a main character should be some sort of an artist, but with a block. This was because the theme of the artist has been dominant in art for some time—the painter, writer, musician, as exemplar. Every major writer has used it, and most minor ones. Those archetypes, the artist and his mirror-image the businessman, have straddled our culture, one shown as a boorish insensitive, the other as a creator all excesses of sensibility and suffering and a towering egotism which has to be forgiven because of his products—in exactly the same way, of course, as the businessman has to be forgiven for the sake of his. We get used to what we have, and forget that the artist-as-exemplar is a new theme. Heroes a hundred years ago weren’t often artists. They were soldiers and empire builders and explorers and clergymen and politicians—too bad about women who had scarcely succeeded in becoming Florence Nightingale yet. Only oddballs and eccentrics wanted to be artists, and had to fight for it. But to use this theme of our time the artist, the writer, I decided it would have to be developed by giving the creature a block and discussing the reasons for the block. These would have to be linked with the disparity between the overwhelming problems of war, famine, poverty, and the tiny individual who was trying to mirror them. But what was intolerable, what really could not be borne any longer, was this monstrously isolated, monstrously narcissistic, pedestalled paragon. It seems that in their own way the young have seen this and changed it, creating a culture of their own in which hundreds of thousands of people make films, assist in making films, make newspapers of all sorts, make music, paint pictures, write books, take photographs. They have abolished that isolated, creative, sensitive figure—by copying him in hundreds of thousands. A trend has reached an extreme, its conclusion, and so there will be a reaction of some sort, as always happens.

The theme of the artist had to relate to another, subjectivity. When I began writing there was pressure on writers not to be subjective. This pressure began inside communist movements, as a development of the social literary criticism developed in Russia in the nineteenth century, by a group of remarkable talents, of whom Belinsky was the best known, using the arts and particularly literature in the battle against Csarism and oppression. It spread fast everywhere, finding an echo as late as the Fifties, in this country, with the theme of commitment. It is still potent in communist countries. Bothering about your stupid personal concerns when Rome is burning is how it tends to get itself expressed, on the level of ordinary life—and was hard to withstand, coming from one’s nearest and dearest, and from people doing everything one respected most: like, for instance, trying to fight colour prejudice in Southern Africa. Yet all the time novels, stories, art of every sort, became more and more personal. In the Blue Notebook, Anna writes of lectures she has been giving: ‘Art during the Middle Ages was communal, unindividual; it came out of a group consciousness. It was without the driving painful individuality of the art of the bourgeois era. And one day we will leave behind the driving egotism of individual art. We will return to an art which will express not man’s self-divisions and separateness from his fellows but his responsibility for his fellows and his brotherhood. Art from the West becomes more and more a shriek of torment recording pain. Pain is becoming our deepest reality…’ I have been saying something like this. About three months ago, in the middle of this lecture, I began to stammer and couldn’t finish…

Anna’s stammer was because she was evading something. Once a pressure or a current has started, there is no way of avoiding it: there was no way of not being intensely subjective: it was, if you like, the writer’s task for that time. You couldn’t ignore it: you couldn’t write a book about the building of a bridge or a dam and not develop the mind and feelings of the people who built it. (You think this is a caricature?—Not at all. This either/or is at the heart of literary criticism in communist countries at this moment.) At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about petty personal problems was to recognise that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can’t be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of subjectivity, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience—or so you think of it when still a child, "I am falling in love, I am feeling this or that emotion, or thinking that or the other thought"—into something much larger: growing up is after all only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

Another idea was that if the book were shaped in the right way it would make its own comment about the conventional novel: the debate about the novel has been going on since the novel was born, and is not, as one would imagine from reading contemporary academics, something recent. To put the short novel Free Women as a summary and condensation of all that mass of material, was to say something about the conventional novel, another way of describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped.

But my major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

As I have said, this was not noticed.

One reason for this is that the book is more in the European tradition than the English tradition of the novel. Or rather, in the English tradition as viewed at the moment. The English novel after all does include Clarissa and Tristam Shandy, The Tragic Comedians—and Joseph Conrad.

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: Of course I know nothing about German literature. It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

As for the rest—well, it is no accident that I got intelligent criticism from people who were, or who had been, marxists. They saw what I was trying to do. This is because Marxism looks at things as a whole and in relation to each other—or tries to, but its limitations are not the point for the moment. A person who has been influenced by Marxism takes it for granted that an event in Siberia will affect one in Botswana. I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds. But it was an attempt.

This business of seeing what I was trying to do—it brings me to the critics, and the danger of evoking a yawn. This sad bickering between writers and critics, playwrights and critics: the public have got so used to it they think, as of quarrelling children: Ah yes, dear little things, they are at it again. Or: You writers get all that praise, or if not praise, at least all that attention—so why are you so perennially wounded? And the public are quite right. For reasons I won’t go into here, early and valuable experiences in my writing life gave me a sense of perspective about critics and reviewers; but over this novel, The Golden Notebook, I lost it: I thought that for the most part the criticism was too silly to be true. Recovering balance, I understood the problem. It is that writers are looking in the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself who has seen what one is reaching for, and who judges you only by whether you have matched up to your aim or not. I have never yet met a writer who, faced at last with that rare being, a real critic, doesn’t lose all paranoia and become gratefully attentive—he has found what he thinks he needs. But what he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.

It is not possible for reviewers and critics to provide what they purport to provide—and for which writers so ridiculously and childishly yearn.

This is because the critics are not educated for it; their training is in the opposite direction.

It starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he arrives at school. It starts with marks, rewards, places, streams, stars—and still in many places, stripes. This horse-race mentality, the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z has shown himself as better than Writer A. From the very beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms of comparison, of success, and of failure. It is a weeding-out system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my belief—though this is not the place to develop this—that the talents every child has, regardless of his official I.Q, could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgement. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply.

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave—that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed—yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

These children who have spent years inside the training system become critics and reviewers, and cannot give what the author, the artist, so foolishly looks for—imaginative and original judgement. What they can do, and what they do very well, is to tell the writer how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and thinking—the climate of opinion. They are like litmus paper. They are wind gauges—invaluable. They are the most sensitive of barometers of public opinion. You can see changes of mood and opinion here sooner than anywhere except in the political field—it is because these are people whose whole education has been just that—to look outside themselves for their opinions, to adapt themselves to authority figures, to received opinion—a marvellously revealing phrase.

It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don’t believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. 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 judgement. 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.

Like every other writer I get letters all the time from young people who are about to write theses and essays about my books in various countries—but particularly in the United States. They all say: Please give me a list of the articles about your work, the critics who have written about you, the authorities. They also ask for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important, amounting to a dossier, like an immigration department’s.

These requests I answer as follows: Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend months and years writing thousands of words about one book, or even one writer, when there are hundreds of books waiting to be read. You don’t see that you are the victim of a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as your subject, and if you do have to write a thesis—and believe me I am very grateful that what I’ve written is being found useful by you—then why don’t you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black.

Dear Writer—they reply. But I have to know what the authorities say, because if I don’t quote them, my professor won’t give me any marks.

This is an international system, absolutely identical from the Urals to Yugoslavia, from Minnesota to Manchester.

The point is, we are all so used to it, we no longer see how bad it is.

I am not used to it, because I left school when I was fourteen. There was a time I was sorry about this, and believed I had missed out on something valuable. Now I am grateful for a lucky escape. After the publication of The Golden Notebook, I made it my business to find out something about the literary machinery, to examine the process which made a critic, or a reviewer. I looked at innumerable examination papers—and couldn’t believe my eyes; sat in on classes for teaching literature, and couldn’t believe my ears.

You might be saying: That is an exaggerated reaction, and you have no right to it, because you say you have never been part of the system. But I think it is not at all exaggerated, and that the reaction of someone from outside is valuable simply because it is fresh and not biased by allegiance to a particular education.

But after this investigation, I had no difficulty in answering my own questions: Why are they so parochial, so personal, so small-minded? Why do they always atomise, and belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole? Why is their interpretation of the word critic always to find fault? Why are they always seeing writers as in conflict with each other, rather than complementing each other…simple, this is how they are trained to think. That valuable person who understands what you are doing, what you are aiming for, and can give you advice and real criticism, is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even outside the university system; it may be a student just beginning, and still in love with literature, or perhaps it may be a thoughtful person who reads a great deal, following his own instinct.

I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writing theses about one book: "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 of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down—even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written—and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this—are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men; it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught—you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people."

But unfortunately it is nearly always too late.

It did look for a while as if the recent student rebellions might change things, as if their impatience with the dead stuff they are taught might be strong enough to substitute something more fresh and useful. But it seems as if the rebellion is over. Sad. During the lively time in the States, I had letters with accounts of how classes of students had refused their syllabuses, and were bringing to class their own choice of books, those that they had found relevant to their lives. The classes were emotional, sometimes violent, angry, exciting, sizzling with life. Of course this only happened with teachers who were sympathetic, and prepared to stand with the students against authority—prepared for the consequences. There are teachers who know that the way they have to teach is bad and boring—luckily there are still enough, with a bit of luck, to overthrow what is wrong, even if the students themselves have lost impetus.

Meanwhile there is a country where…

Thirty or forty years ago, a critic made a private list of writers and poets which he, personally, considered made up what was valuable in literature, dismissing all others. This list he defended lengthily in print, for The List instantly became a subject for much debate. Millions of words were written for and against—schools and sects, for and against, came into being. The argument, all these years later, still continues…no one finds this state of affairs sad or ridiculous…Where there are critical books of immense complexity and learning, dealing, but often at second- or thirdhand, with original work—novels, plays, stories. The people who write these books form a stratum in universities across the world—they are an international phenomenon, the top layer of literary academia. Their lives are spent in criticising, and in criticising each other’s criticism. They at least regard this activity as more important than the original work. It is possible for literary students to spend more time reading criticism and criticism of criticism than they spend reading poetry, novels, biography, stories. A great many people regard this state of affairs as quite normal, and not sad and ridiculous….

When I recently read an essay about Antony and Cleopatra by a boy shortly to take A levels. It was full of originality and excitement about the play, the feeling that any real teaching about literature aims to produce. The essay was returned by the teacher like this: I cannot mark this essay, you haven’t quoted from the authorities. Few teachers would regard this as sad and ridiculous…

Where people who consider themselves educated, and indeed as superior to and more refined than ordinary non-reading people, will come up to a writer and congratulate him or her on getting a good review somewhere—but will not consider it necessary to read the book in question, or ever to think that what they are interested in is success…

Where when a book comes out on a certain subject, let’s say stargazing, instantly a dozen colleges, societies, television programmes, write to the author asking him to come and speak about stargazing. The last thing it occurs to them to do is to read the book. This behaviour is considered quite normal, and not ridiculous at all…

Where a young man or woman, reviewer or critic, who has not read more of a writer’s work than the book in front of him, will write patronisingly, or as if rather bored with the whole business, or as if considering how many marks to give an essay, about the writer in question—who might have written fifteen books, and have been writing for twenty or thirty years—giving the said writer instruction on what to write next, and how. No one thinks this is absurd, certainly not the young person, critic or reviewer, who has been taught to patronise and itemise everyone for years, from Shakespeare downwards.

Where a Professor of Archeology can write of a South American tribe which has advanced knowledge of plants, and of medicine and of psychological methods: The astonishing thing is that these people have no written language… And no one thinks him absurd.

Where, on the occasion of a centenary of Shelley, in the same week and in three different literary periodicals, three young men, of identical education, from our identical universities, can write critical pieces about Shelley, damning him with the faintest possible praise, and in identically the same tone, as if they were doing Shelley a great favour to mention him at all—and no one seems to think that such a thing can indicate that there is something seriously wrong with our literary system.

Finally…this novel continues to be, for its author, a most instructive experience. For instance. Ten years after I wrote it, I can get, in one week, three letters about it, from three intelligent, well-informed, concerned people, who have taken the trouble to sit down and write to me. One might be in Johannesburg, one in San Francisco, one in Budapest. And here I sit, in London, reading them, at the same time, or one after another—as always, grateful to the writers, and delighted that what I’ve written can stimulate, illuminate—or even annoy. But one letter is entirely about the sex war, about man’s inhumanity to woman, and woman’s inhumanity to man, and the writer has produced pages and pages all about nothing else, for she—but not always a she—can’t see anything else in the book.

The second is about politics, probably from an old Red like myself, and he or she writes many pages about politics, and never mentions any other theme.

These two letters used, when the book was as it were young, to be the most common.

The third letter, once rare but now catching up on the others, is written by a man or a woman who can see nothing in it but the theme of mental illness.

But it is the same book.

And naturally these incidents bring up again questions of what people see when they read a book, and why one person sees one pattern and nothing at all of another pattern, and how odd it is to have, as author, such a clear picture of a book, that is seen so very differently by its readers.

And from this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is that it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it—his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.

And when a book’s pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author—then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

DORIS LESSING

JUNE 1971

Free Women: 1

ANNA MEETS HER FRIEND MOLLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1957 AFTER A SEPARATION

The two women were alone in the London flat.

The point is, said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, the point is, that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up.

Molly was a woman much on the telephone. When it rang she had just enquired: Well, what’s the gossip? Now she said, That’s Richard, and he’s coming over. It seems today’s his only free moment for the next month. Or so he insists.

Well I’m not leaving, said Anna.

No, you stay just where you are.

Molly considered her own appearance—she was wearing trousers and a sweater, both the worse for wear. He’ll have to take me as I come, she concluded, and sat down by the window. He wouldn’t say what it’s about—another crisis with Marion, I suppose.

Didn’t he write to you? asked Anna, cautious.

"Both he and Marion wrote—ever such bonhomous letters. Odd, isn’t it?"

This odd, isn’t it? was the characteristic note of the intimate conversations they designated gossip. But having struck the note, Molly swerved off with: It’s no use talking now, because he’s coming right over, he says.

He’ll probably go when he sees me here, said Anna, cheerfully, but slightly aggressive. Molly glanced at her, keenly, and said: Oh, but why?

It had always been understood that Anna and Richard disliked each other; and before Anna had always left when Richard was expected. Now Molly said: Actually I think he rather likes you, in his heart of hearts. The point is, he’s committed to liking me, on principle—he’s such a fool he’s always got to either like or dislike someone, so all the dislike he won’t admit he has for me gets pushed off on to you.

It’s a pleasure, said Anna. But do you know something? I discovered while you were away that for a lot of people you and I are practically interchangeable.

"You’ve only just understood that?" said Molly, triumphant as always when Anna came up with—as far as she was concerned—facts that were self-evident.

In this relationship a balance had been struck early on: Molly was altogether more worldly-wise than Anna who, for her part, had a superiority of talent.

Anna held her own private views. Now she smiled, admitting that she had been very slow.

When we’re so different in every way, said Molly, it’s odd. I suppose because we both live the same kind of life—not getting married and so on. That’s all they see.

Free women, said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinising glance from her friend: They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

"Well, we do, don’t we? said Molly, rather tart. Well, it’s awfully hard not to," she amended, hastily, because of the look of surprise Anna now gave her. There was a short pause, during which the women did not look at each other but reflected that a year apart was a long time, even for an old friendship.

Molly said at last, sighing: Free. Do you know, when I was away, I was thinking about us, and I’ve decided that we’re a completely new type of woman. We must be, surely?

There’s nothing new under the sun, said Anna, in an attempt at a German accent. Molly, irritated—she spoke half a dozen languages well—said: There’s nothing new under the sun, in a perfect reproduction of a shrewd old woman’s voice, German accented.

Anna grimaced, acknowledging failure. She could not learn languages, and was too self-conscious ever to become somebody else: for a moment Molly had even looked like Mother Sugar, otherwise Mrs Marks, to whom both had gone for psycho-analysis. The reservations both had felt about the solemn and painful ritual were expressed by the pet name, Mother Sugar; which, as time passed, became a name for much more than a person, and indicated a whole way of looking at life—traditional, rooted, conservative, in spite of its scandalous familiarity with everything amoral. In spite of—that was how Anna and Molly, discussing the ritual, had felt it; recently Anna had been feeling more and more it was because of; and this was one of the things she was looking forward to discussing with her friend.

But now Molly, reacting as she had often done in the past, to the slightest suggestion of a criticism from Anna of Mother Sugar, said quickly: All the same, she was wonderful, and I was in much too bad a shape to criticise.

Mother Sugar used to say, ‘You’re Electra,’ or ‘You’re Antigone,’ and that was the end, as far as she was concerned, said Anna.

Well, not quite the end, said Molly, wryly insisting on the painful probing hours both had spent.

Yes, said Anna, unexpectedly insisting, so that Molly, for the third time, looked at her curiously. Yes. Oh I’m not saying she didn’t do me all the good in the world. I’m sure I’d never have coped with what I’ve had to cope with without her. But all the same…I remember quite clearly one afternoon, sitting there—the big room, and the discreet wall lights, and the Buddha and the pictures and the statues.

"Well?" said Molly, now very critical.

Anna, in the face of this unspoken but clear determination not to discuss it, said: I’ve been thinking about it all during the last few months…now I’d like to talk about it with you. After all, we both went through it, and with the same person…

"Well?"

Anna persisted: I remember that afternoon, knowing I’d never go back. It was all that damned art all over the place.

Molly drew in her breath, sharp. She said, quickly: I don’t know what you mean. As Anna did not reply, she said, accusing: And have you written anything since I’ve been away?

No.

I keep telling you, said Molly, her voice shrill, "I’ll never forgive you if you throw that talent away. I mean it. I’ve done it, and I can’t stand watching you—I’ve messed with painting and dancing and acting and scribbling, and now…you’re so talented, Anna. Why? I simply don’t understand."

How can I ever say why, when you’re always so bitter and accusing?

Molly even had tears in her eyes, which were fastened in the most painful reproach on her friend. She brought out with difficulty: At the back of my mind I always thought, well, I’ll get married, so it doesn’t matter my wasting all the talents I was born with. Until recently I was even dreaming about having more children—yes I know it’s idiotic but it’s true. And now I’m forty and Tommy’s grown up. But the point is, if you’re not writing simply because you’re thinking about getting married…

But we both want to get married, said Anna, making it humorous; the tone restored reserve to the conversation; she had understood, with pain, that she was not, after all, going to be able to discuss certain subjects with Molly.

Molly smiled, drily, gave her friend an acute, bitter look, and said: All right, but you’ll be sorry later.

"Sorry, said Anna, laughing, out of surprise. Molly, why is it you’ll never believe other people have the disabilities you have?"

You were lucky enough to be given one talent, and not four.

Perhaps my one talent has had as much pressure on it as your four?

I can’t talk to you in this mood. Shall I make you some tea while we’re waiting for Richard?

I’d rather have beer or something. She added, provocative: I’ve been thinking I might very well take to drink later on.

Molly said, in the older sister’s tone Anna had invited: You shouldn’t make jokes, Anna. Not when you see what it does to people—look at Marion. I wonder if she’s been drinking while I was away?

I can tell you. She has—yes, she came to see me several times.

"She came to see you?"

That’s what I was leading up to, when I said you and I seem to be interchangeable.

Molly tended to be possessive—she showed resentment, as Anna had known she would, as she said: I suppose you’re going to say Richard came to see you too? Anna nodded; and Molly said, briskly, I’ll get us some beer. She returned from the kitchen with two long cold-beaded glasses, and said: Well you’d better tell me all about it before Richard comes, hadn’t you?

Richard was Molly’s husband; or rather, he had been her husband. Molly was the product of what she referred to as one of those ’twenties marriages. Her mother and father had both glittered, but briefly, in the intellectual and bohemian circles that had spun around the great central lights of Huxley, Lawrence, Joyce, etc. Her childhood had been disastrous, since this marriage only lasted a few months. She had married, at the age of eighteen, the son of a friend of her father’s. She knew now she had married out of a need for security and even respectability. The boy Tommy was a product of this marriage. Richard at twenty had already been on the way to becoming the very solid businessman he had since proved himself: and Molly and he had stood their incompatibility for not much more than a year. He had then married Marion, and there were three boys. Tommy had remained with Molly. Richard and she, once the business of the divorce was over, became friends again. Later, Marion became her friend. This, then, was the situation to which Molly often referred as: It’s all very odd, isn’t it?

Richard came to see me about Tommy, said Anna.

What? Why?

Oh—idiotic! He asked me if I thought it was good for Tommy to spend so much time brooding. I said I thought it was good for everyone to brood, if by that he meant, thinking; and that since Tommy was twenty and grown up it was not for us to interfere anyway.

Well it isn’t good for him, said Molly.

He asked me if I thought it would be good for Tommy to go off on some trip or other to Germany—a business trip, with him. I told him to ask Tommy, not me. Of course Tommy said no.

Of course. Well I’m sorry Tommy didn’t go.

But the real reason he came, I think, was because of Marion. But Marion had just been to see me, and had a prior claim so to speak. So I wouldn’t discuss Marion at all. I think it’s likely he’s coming to discuss Marion with you.

Molly was watching Anna closely. How many times did Richard come?

About five or six times.

After a silence, Molly let her anger spurt out with: It’s very odd he seems to expect me almost to control Marion. Why me? Or you? Well, perhaps you’d better go after all. It’s going to be difficult if all sorts of complications have been going on while my back was turned.

Anna said firmly: No, Molly. I didn’t ask Richard to come and see me. I didn’t ask Marion to come and see me. After all, it’s not your fault or mine that we seem to play the same role for people. I said what you would have said—at least, I think so.

There was a note of humorous, even childish pleading in this. But it was deliberate. Molly, the older sister, smiled and said: Well, all right. She continued to observe Anna narrowly; and Anna was careful to appear unaware of it. She did not want to tell Molly what had happened between her and Richard now; not until she could tell her the whole story of the last miserable year.

Is Marion drinking badly?

Yes, I think she is.

And she told you all about it?

Yes. In detail. And what’s odd is, I swear she talked as if I were you—even making slips of the tongue, calling me Molly and so on.

"Well I don’t know, said Molly. Who would ever have thought? And you and I are different as chalk and cheese."

Perhaps not so different, said Anna, drily; but Molly laughed in disbelief.

She was a tallish woman, and big-boned, but she appeared slight, and even boyish. This was because of how she did her hair, which was a rough, streaky gold, cut like a boy’s; and because of her clothes, for which she had a great natural talent. She took pleasure in the various guises she could use: for instance, being a hoyden in lean trousers and sweaters, and then a siren, her large green eyes made-up, her cheek-bones prominent, wearing a dress which made the most of her full breasts.

This was one of the private games she played with life, which Anna envied her; yet in moments of self-rebuke she would tell Anna she was ashamed of herself, she so much enjoyed the different roles: "It’s as if I were really different—don’t you see? I even feel a different person. And there’s something spiteful in it—that man, you know, I told you about him last week—he saw me the first time in my old slacks and my sloppy old jersey, and then I rolled into the restaurant, nothing less than a femme fatale, and he didn’t know how to have me, he couldn’t say a word all evening, and I enjoyed it. Well, Anna?"

But you do enjoy it, Anna would say, laughing.

But Anna was small, thin, dark, brittle, with large black always-on-guard eyes, and a fluffy haircut. She was, on the whole, satisfied with herself, but she was always the same. She envied Molly’s capacity to project her own changes of mood. Anna wore neat, delicate clothes, which tended to be either prim, or perhaps a little odd; and relied upon her delicate white hands, and her small, pointed white face to make an impression. But she was shy, unable to assert herself, and, she was convinced, easily overlooked.

When the two women went out together, Anna deliberately effaced herself and played to the dramatic Molly. When they were alone, she tended to take the lead. But this had by no means been true at the beginning of their friendship.

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