Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, 50 years on

Diana Athill

Of course I read The Golden Notebook as soon as it came out. Everyone did. But I took against it. I and most of my friends, who were more or less the same age as Doris Lessing, felt, as she did, that society was in a shocking mess and that socialism was probably the answer, so most of us flirted with the idea of joining the Communist party. My own reason for not, in the end, doing so was that I knew myself to be too frivolous for the necessary commitment, and there was also a streak of something more respectable in my motive: I felt dubious about ends justifying means, which I took to be an important part of Communist thinking. Those of us who did not choose to join the party (the majority) had no trouble believing the evidence of Stalinist horrors that soon began to leak out of Russia, because that evidence was far more convincing than Communist pieties; so I soon became impatient with a book full of minute analysis of the dismay and distress of party members when they had to face the ugly truth which had been accepted by everyone else for years. Their situation was interesting, but not so tremendously interesting as all that. Lessing's involvement with it made me think of the Holy Roman Emperor's supposed comment on an opera by Mozart: "Too many notes." On this subject Lessing had written "too many words".

Her other important theme, the situation of women, would have appealed to me much more if it had not been for the elaborate structure in which she had chosen to wrap it, her tendency to overstate, and her style. This seemed to me often to become stiff, particularly in the heavy-handed passages of dialogue between Anna and Molly. The switches of mood that occurred so often in these were unconvincing and so obviously engineered to exemplify the points Lessing wanted to make. I loved her earlier writing about her life in Africa, which was relaxed and vivid, and which I recognised again when The Golden Notebook's story took it to Africa, but when it moved to London the style became clumsier. It tended to be assertive, and I agree with Montaigne that assertiveness provokes resistance. Although Lessing writes with feeling about the uncertainties and frailties of her women characters, there is a slightly pompous solemnity – almost didacticism – in the atmosphere that prevails in The Golden Notebook, as though its author were not searching out the truth, but stating that she knows it – always a dangerous thing for anyone to do.

Or so it seemed to me when I first read it. Going back to it, I find it easier to forgive the clumsiness of its structure, and that stiffness – to admire the boldness of its ambition and be moved by its passion. It is certainly impressive, looming so large in the landscape of 20th-century literature. But I cannot say that it was a landmark book for me.

Margaret Drabble

The Golden Notebook is a novel of shocking power and blistering honesty. I first read it about five years after its publication, when I was about 30, and it had an overwhelming impact. I remember vividly the state of excitement, terror and awe in which I read it, a semi-deranged state not unlike that of Lessing's narrator, Anna, in her north London flat. Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos. She managed to make sense of her material, but at enormous risk. Luckily for me, I had already published three novels, and I had three children to keep me sane. Otherwise I might never have found my own voice. I might have gone off the rails completely.

It's impossible to calculate all it taught me and the warnings it gave me, but to begin with motherhood: Lessing writes about the conflicts between the maternal and the erotic life, of the responsibility that can keep a suicidal mother alive in the midst of breakdown, of the efforts (sometimes disastrous) to conduct a career while rearing a child. She has never had any time for would-be women writers who complain that pregnancies silenced them or reduced their output: get on with it, that was her bracing advice. She did see the problems women writers face as being different from those faced by men, and although she vehemently rejected the feminist label, of course we read her as a feminist. She spoke for us, in the sexual confusion of the 1960s.

As a feminist and a free woman, living a life of what was then striking promiscuity, her protagonist Anna Wulf displays some curiously traditional female behaviour, which is even more puzzling on rereading. On one page she can declare, shockingly but truthfully, that "every woman believes in her heart that if a man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency." But this same woman (albeit writing in a different notebook, about a later period in her life) is discovered preparing a meal for the man she loves and knows she is about to lose. Much care is lavished on this memorable set piece describing a breaded veal escalope with mushroom in sour cream, a dish that the defaulting man never turns up to eat. Throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing. It's almost like being in a Kerouac novel. And yet it seemed liberating at the time.

Liberating indeed was all that discussion of menstruation and orgasm and frigidity. These subjects were about to hit the new women's magazines, but they hadn't yet quite made it, and we were enthralled by this direct confrontation with literary decorum. Anna's excessive fear of her own body odours is alarming, and one is not quite sure if it is intended to be neurotic, but at least it is named. James Joyce named defecation, and Lessing named menstruation. As for orgasm – well, we knew about that from Freud and the Kinsey Report as well as from real life, but we'd never seen it written about in this personal, descriptive, anecdotal, confessional, aggressive way. Again, Lessing's views are simultaneously progressive and conservative. She puts sexually conservative views into the mouth of Mother Sugar, the wise old Jungian analyst, but Anna seems to share them, and there is much inner debate about whether a woman can have an orgasm with a man she does not love, whether vaginal orgasm is superior to the clitoral orgasm (she decides it is), and whether a woman needs a "real man". I remember finding this concept of a "real man" very worrying at the time, and I still do.

Anna, in her various manifestations, thinks most Englishmen are not real men. Those few that are real men are unfaithful and polygamous, but most men are unsatisfactory – rude to their wives, unable to give pleasure, bullying, selfish, indifferent to their children, eager to marry a younger secretary. Even the good-hearted ones come too quickly. No wonder Lessing's work was described as ball-breaking and "castrating", a word she often invokes. Experienced women had not written openly like this in the history of literature. It must have been terrifying. The pact of polite silence had been broken for ever.

The insistence on a lack of "real men" spills over into a homophobia more disturbing than the exposure of heterosexual male sexual vanity and insecurity. England is described as a country "full of men who are little boys and homosexuals and … half-homosexuals", and Americans don't fare much better. Anna's lodger Ivor and his partner Ronnie are "frightened men who measure out their emotions like weighed groceries". I noted this censoriously 40 years ago, when homophobia was more common than it is now, and it seems even more offensive today. Lessing has never been much interested in being fair or balanced. Anna/Lessing did note that Ivor and Ronnie's relationship was illegal, and there is a hint of speculation that that was why they behaved as they did. But she disapproved of them. She seems to have disapproved of lesbians, too, although brother-sister incest appears to be viewed as harmless. Lessing's moral spectrum is full of surprises and challenges, and that is one of the reasons why she is such an important writer. She takes little for granted.

I haven't left myself much space to praise Lessing's extraordinarily innovative experiment with the novel form, although this too deeply impressed me when I was young. It is not like anything else: it's in a different league from the other experimental novels of the 1960s in its grappling with narrative, identity, tone, truth. This is not experiment for its own sake, it is in no way modernist or ludic or post-modern, although one of the passages I know by heart is the one in which she writes: "Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want … The real experience can't be described … I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better."

Lessing is relentlessly truth-seeking, not ideologically experimental. Labels such as modernism meant nothing to her. When I was in China with her in 1993, we were introduced to our audiences by a Chinese professor whose specialist area of study was Joyce. He described himself as a scholar of modernism. "I don't call Joyce very modern," Doris muttered, as an aside. She made her own place. She didn't like categories. She didn't even recognise them.

Rachel Cusk

The Golden Notebook is a radical work, whose character nonetheless derives from and is encompassed by literary tradition. Doris Lessing set out to write a novel that was neither morally deformed by the politics and mores of its own reality nor was forced to process the deformity through modernist techniques. But if The Golden Notebook is a consciously traditional text, its forebears are Tolstoy and Stendhal and Chekhov, not Jane Austen or George Eliot. The evasiveness of the English novel has nothing in common with Lessing's personal and political realism at all. Of the English novelists, only DH Lawrence can be found – though found strongly – in the make-up of The Golden Notebook, and something of the loathing and rejection Lawrence inspired was to be Lessing's, too.

The Golden Notebook's radicalism lies not in the author's intention to break with or rebel against past forms, but to take breakage itself – or "breakdown", her preferred word – as her subject. That subject is made concrete in the person of a writer, Anna Wulf, who cannot write. In creating Anna, Lessing created also a distinction of which the book itself fell foul when it came out in 1962. In this novel the artist is not potent but bankrupt. Anna can't write because, as she admits, what she writes isn't true. "The parochialism of our culture is intense," Lessing wrote in her 1971 preface to the novel, in which she confesses that although she believed she had a balanced and indeed humble view of the value of literary criticism, over the hostile reception to The Golden Notebook she "lost it". "There is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap." The narrative's remarkable construction, through which its ambitions "to talk through the way it was shaped" are so brilliantly realised, was – when it first emerged – subjected to precisely the reductive reading against which it militates. If The Golden Notebook has one unmistakable theme, it is the danger of uncoupling the personal from the universal, of seeing the subjective as inimical to – even undermining of – objectivity. The novel's extraordinary achievement lies in its demonstration of subjectivity as elemental, as a life force whose containment, as Anna Wulf has discovered, causes human identity to collapse. "Nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others." Early critics and readers of The Golden Notebook did not see things this way at all. They saw a book by a woman about a woman, and in "personalising" the novel enforced the very limitation against which it warns. Even though the failure of Marxism is one of The Golden Notebook's great subjects, Lessing admits that the intelligent early readings of the text came largely from Marxist critics, who were able to "look at things as a whole and in relation to each other".

Lessing resisted the labelling of The Golden Notebook as a feminist novel, though she conceded that it was written "as though the attitudes that have been created by the Women's Liberation movements already existed". Hence the misunderstandings by her critics: "some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assumed a crystallisation of information in society which has not yet taken place". In fact, what Lessing concerns herself with in the novel is the adjustment of the relationship between men and women as it was being lived in the contemporary era, not its distillation as "opinion". This adjustment was many-faceted, infinitely complex, and her great achievement – like Lawrence's in The Rainbow and Women in Love – was to posit the individual, male and female, as a structure through which evolving forces and historical currents pass. In a sense The Golden Notebook begins where Lawrence left off, with the idea of "free women" – a phrase Lessing uses as the title of the novel's freestanding interior text. Like him, she writes intimately about sex, parenthood, creativity, work, belief and politics, and like him she does so not through people with enormous power or importance in the world but through a concept of intelligent private life that acts as a prism for these larger forces.

The idea of the notebooks, however, is what makes Lessing's vision even more radical than Lawrence's and it remains of great significance to 21st-century readers. As a paradigm of the modern self, the set of different-coloured notebooks belonging to the writer (and divorcee, and single parent) Anna Wulf continues to serve the novel's themes of compartmentalisation and breakdown half a century on. These notebooks represent the strain to personality of unintegrated consciousness, and it remains as characteristic of (female) experience now as then that what Lessing calls the existence of "false dichotomies and divisions" – the self as fragmentary and compartmentalised and thus as potentially dishonest in and of itself – damages individuality and its status in culture. The artificial-personal supplants the universal-personal; truth becomes intermittent and fractured, calling for madness, breakdown and disintegration of personality in order for division and falsehood to be swept away. The different notebooks can no longer be written in: only the book of synthesis, the golden notebook, has a future. This compelling idea, so classical in its interpretations of violence and change, continues to offer a valid way of thinking about who we are and why. Indeed, the modern reader may find The Golden Notebook far franker, more open, more intellectual and more politically and personally revolutionising a text than its first readers did. She may find it more necessary, or even perhaps more shocking, for it makes our age seem prim and puritanical and half-witted by comparison, not to mention more parochial. Doris Lessing has always been a writer interested in the future, so I doubt this would come as any surprise to her at all.

Natalie Hanman

The Golden Notebook is the book I have given most as a gift since I read it for the first time nearly a decade ago, in my early 20s. If a new acquaintance becomes a new friend, or an old friend is in trouble, and I have not already spotted the novel's reassuringly solid spine on their bookshelf, I pass on a copy and tell them that reading this book changed me – as Doris Lessing said the writing of it did her.

Lessing published The Golden Notebook in 1962, as the so-called second wave of the women's movement was gathering pace. It is set in the wake of the cold war Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist speech of 1956 and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising against Communist rule, with the spectre of nuclear oblivion haunting its pages. The protagonist Anna Wulf – a thirtysomething published writer, mother and political radical – is undergoing a breakdown.

Why did all this speak to me, then, a young woman born under the Thatcher government, raised in comfortable conservatism in rural southern England, and coming of voting age under Blair's New Labour? The context of my political upbringing was shaped by individualism, neoliberalism, consumerism and "post"-feminism; it could not be further from the ideologies held by the novel's central characters. That is, of course, precisely what appealed – John Mullan, in his Guardian Review Book Club columns on the novel, has identified this "vein of vicarious nostalgia" often felt by readers of the novel who were unborn when its defining events took place.

"It's all due to the times we live in," a doctor tells Anna when she describes an episode of madness. When I left school, the Tories finally kicked out of office, I was promised change by a beaming Tony Blair. The times I lived in then felt like a trick. It is too simplistic to say that the communism of The Golden Notebook offered an appealing alternative – especially when any political certainties the characters hold are so thoroughly satirised by the novel's end, with Anna joining the Labour party and her friend Molly swapping political gatherings for marriage – but reading the novel was one of the things that jolted me into thinking an alternative was possible. Its intense engagement with global politics offered sharp relief from the bland cynicism of my generation: even when some young people marched against the Iraq war – to little avail – many more were too busy shopping to vote.

Anna's struggle with formlessness, with the seemingly separate and competing parts of herself, mirrored on a first reading my struggle in young adulthood – who was I, who did I want to be? This was only in part about being, or becoming, a woman. In the novel's 1971 preface, Lessing writes derisively of how the book was "claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war". I'm just guessing, but maybe she bridles at the suggestion that women are the only ones throughout history who have been systemically disadvantaged, or that men are the only ones to do the exploiting. In my reading of the novel, then and now, it was never solely about women and men. It certainly would be odd if a novel full of Marxists confined itself to this power relation alone. Indeed, Lessing has an acute eye for all those small shifts in a room that reveal the many different power relations being negotiated from moment to moment.

The debates Anna has in the novel, with herself and others, I think start to conceive of gender as a relational thing: not just about women, and a particular type of woman at that (white, middle class and so on), versus men, but about all the ways in which people struggle together, through complex intersections of sex, class, race and location. In this sense, it is a mistake to claim the novel as only of feminism's second wave (such clear-cut chronological narratives often seem nonsensical anyway), for it attempts to take "the personal is political" to a more inclusive place than, say, Betty Friedan's conceptualisation of the "problem that has no name". That Lessing probes some of the diversity of our lived experiences rather than only dull dichotomies felt thrilling to me then.

Coming back to the novel now, in my early 30s, is like discovering an old diary: in the writing of her four experimental notebooks, Anna puts her politics and personal life under reflexive scrutiny, with constant self-questioning; in the turned-down corners and scribbled margins of certain of those pages, I tried to do the same. Some of that seems awkward now, and certainly dated. For the times have changed again.

When I reread The Golden Notebook earlier this year, the global financial crisis was being met by an array of inventive protests, and I had a newborn baby sleeping on my chest; now, I write this in snatches of half-hour slots as my four-month-old naps upstairs. The wonderful, frightening discombobulation of early motherhood: how do I reconcile that with my politics, my feminism? Again: who am I, who do I want to be? And is there hope for ongoing unsolved dilemmas – such as childcare, and how best to rethink our commitments to work, home and community – in the fact that capitalism is now in crisis, or can we only despair as it takes ever more vicious forms when under attack?

I did not find any answers in The Golden Notebook when I first read it, nor did I identify with Anna Wulf – Anna Freeman – as some sort of personal feminist hero. I do not think that was the point. But then, as now, it helped to steer me towards knowing which questions to ask, in order to try to do things differently. That's why I gave the novel as a gift, and will continue to do so.