Last week
I went to buy a new blank notebook. The situation had gotten pretty desperate: the
scraps of paper I was using were taped to other scraps. Somehow I went to
my campus bookstore three times before I could find where they were keeping
them. But how many to get? I needed one for my teaching notes, one for notes on
various writing projects, one for a personal journal. Should there be one to
take notes on things I was reading? Some of those were related to the writing
projects, but some might be extensions of the journal. And sometimes the
journal would turn into a story if I got bored with telling it straight. Someone
suggested another one for to-do lists and life management. In the end I bought
four, but already they're all mixed up, what is in one should be in the other
. . .
"Shouldn't
you just get one?" someone asked. Oh no, I said, haven't you read The
Golden Notebook? That's how she went crazy.
The title
of Doris Lessing's most famous and ambitious novel is a dream of integration.
Anna, Lessing's protagonist, has one notebook for memories of childhood, one
accounting for her political life, one in which she writes a novel, "Free
Women," and one personal journal. Trying to bring them together into a
single one, she falls apart. In any earlier version of this blog I had a
line across the top taken from The Golden Notebook: "Men. Women.
Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love. . ."
I first
read The Golden
Notebook in a Modern English Literature course in college. The
professor was a little self-conscious about teaching this feminist classic to a
bunch of young feminists at a woman's college, so he asked if any of us wanted
to teach it. Being the not-yet-recovering terminally "good student" I
was at the time, I volunteered. I guess it was the first time I did what I now
do for a living. As a graduate student not quite a decade later, I tried to
teach it. I got called for jury duty just as we were to start. Now when I
look at the cover, I think of the dark bench and the video screens of the
Brooklyn courthouse, hoping my name would not be called for just a little
longer so I could figure out how to lead a discussion of what the Communist
Party might have meant to British housewives of the 1950s.
For as
long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. For as long as I can
remember, also, that desire, and what it might mean to articulate, let alone
fulfill, it, has terrified me. Is it selfish? Is it a way of setting
oneself apart from others? Was it setting oneself up for failure? Would it make
it more difficult to enjoy friendship, romance, and the other consolations of
what is sometimes mistakenly called everyday life? Does it mean shirking one's
responsibilities to be a thinking person who acts in the world from conviction,
political and otherwise? No book I know makes me think about these questions
the way The Golden Notebook has. Does trying to live the different lives
Anna tries to - peruse writing, romance and sex, to be a political person in
the world - feel impossible because of external constraints, or will these things
always come into conflict? We see experiences get mulled over, reworked,
transposed into fiction. We see how much more went into the shaping of Free
Women than is in the book. So how much more must have gone into The Golden
Notebook? How much of a life can a book contain? Should it aspire to be
"better" than a life - more finely tuned - or should it give us an
intimation of life in all its messiness? Towards the end there is a series
of sketches for stories and novels Anna thinks of writing. I once thought about
trying to do a series of exercises around them, except they are already
complete as they are. How many of these sit in our notebooks, or in the
notebooks of someone who lived to 94 and published 50 novels?
When
people talk about The Golden Notebook, they tend to talk a lot about
the sixties, and that generation of feminism, and how this is or is not
"relatable" to young women today, and how Lessing came to antagonize
the feminists who revered her. But the other thing that has stuck with me from
Lessing is her accounts of her early life - what Anna was writing in her black
notebook. This is a woman whose father worked at the Imperial Bank of Persia,
who came of age in a country called Rhodesia and saw the Communist Party there
as a way to escape and create and intellectual life. If anyone truly had a long
20th century, it was her. Her famous cantankerousness always seemed
well-earned. In the first part of her memoir, Under My Skin, Lessing talks
about the shadow the First World War cast across her childhood:
"There
were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people
whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their
proper course by the war - my mother was one. During that trip through the
villages of France, then in Scotland and towns in England, were revived in me
the raging emotions of my childhood, a protest, an anguish, my parents'. I felt
too incredulity, but that was a later emotion: how could it have happened? . .
I wonder how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had
the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak. We
are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget
it."
The last
veterans of that war are gone now, and soon the children who were the last to
remember it will be gone too. In place of their memories we will write essays
on "the idea of memory." Throughout Under My Skin she expresses
credulity that things really were as she remembered them. If I were
writing this at thirty, she says at one point, it would be one book. At forty
another. And what would it be should I write it at 85? It was, and is all
of these, and now it is ours.
