The Golden Notebook is probably Doris Lessing’s most famous novel. Published in 1962, it was acclaimed for its use of an involuted structure which interrogates the novel form. The novel was also prescient in its exploration of therapeutic journeys into madness. Other dominant themes are the shaping pressure of language within social groups, and the acknowledgement of areas of female sexuality which were previously largely taboo. The Golden Notebook also convincingly presents the ideological climate of London during the 1950s, a decade in which the British Communist Party strongly influenced Socialism and Left Wing politics before the party’s inexorable decline, fuelled by recrimination and revelations after the death of Stalin in 1953. The decade of the fifties was extraordinarily fruitful in Lessing’s development as a writer. Books, stories, plays and poems, including the first three novels of the “Children of Violence” sequence, emerged from this period. She began writing The Golden Notebook during the mid- to late fifties, while she was simultaneously producing prose fiction with linear plots and conventional unified characters. This testifies to Lessing’s skill in ranging across different genres and continuously varying her writing practices.
The intricate form of the novel comprises interwoven narrative sequences, fragments of texts, “bundles” of newspaper cuttings from 1950-1957, diary entries, segments of play script, novel synopses and pastiches. Mixing literary discourses is not especially experimental. This strategy has been used widely, for example, in Gothic novels. However, in The Golden Notebook, unusually for British fiction of the early 1960s, the fragmented structure is a vehicle for realist representation. Lessing sets her novel, for the most part, in a recognisable postwar London and depicts the day-to-day life of (often politically active) intellectuals, artists and writers. Unusually too, Lessing uses a conventional novel, ironically entitled Free Women, to frame and fragment The Golden Notebook. Her aim was to show through the positioning of Free Women, which both encloses and is enclosed by the more inventive sections of the novel, that “this small neat thing” could not be true to experiences “so rough and apparently formless and unshaped” (Lessing’s Preface to The Golden Notebook, 1971, p.13). “[T]his small neat thing” totals approximately 60,000 words and has five interleaved parts or chapters. If the separated parts were assembled in sequence, Free Women would constitute a rather slim, but self-contained, novel. Unlike the exuberant work of prose fiction which weaves through it, Free Women uses literary devices commonly found in nineteenth-century novels. An omniscient narrator is one of these. In addition, each chapter begins with one or two italicised sentences which summarise the plot — an echo of the epigraph. The domestic settings are convincingly described and the plot moves forward chronologically in a sequence of cause and effect. The last pages of the fifth chapter wind up the stories of all the characters – another recurring characteristic of conventional forms of the novel. Given these familiar novelistic devices, one might also expect the narrator of the embedded novel to make overt moral judgements, for example in the style of George Eliot. However, a neutral tone is maintained throughout, comparable perhaps to the tone of Henry James’s early novels. There is, nevertheless, a strong sense of character development through suffering, which is a common theme in nineteenth-century fiction. The moral impetus of the novel grows out of the narrator’s sustained exploration of character and motive, primarily through dialogue and succinct commentary. The narrative recounts the story of Anna Wulf and Molly Jacobs, the “free” women of the title. Without digressions, it tells how they learn to make the best of social, professional and gendered constraints on their lives. The conventional aspects of Free Women, which would scarcely be noticeable to a reader engrossed in a non-experimental nineteenth-century novel, are strongly emphasised in The Golden Notebook through juxtaposition and contrast.
By commenting on its own novelistic form, The Golden Notebook resembles the contemporary French Nouveau Roman, but the similarity stops there. The mixing and embedding of discourses to service realist representation is arguably the novel’s most experimental aspect. This mode of writing influenced the trend towards mixed-genre novels which followed in its wake. Lessing describes in the Preface how traumatic it was for her to write the novel consecutively. The reader too is faced with the task of lacing the strands together into patterns of thematic similarity. The novel, then, has many affinities with literary novels of the 1960s by demanding a great deal from its readers. They need to “write” the novel in their imagination. The Golden Notebook is not a book for bedtime because immersion in its pages before sleep courts the danger of misplacing the bookmark! This low-tech aid, the bookmark, is invaluable in negotiating the exciting loops and swirls of stories that overlap and appear to run riot in the broad narrative spaces of this novel.
The layered structure of Lessing’s novel is underpinned, not by the use of multiple narrators, but by a single, fictional consciousness which organises its multiple components. This single, though not unified, consciousness belongs to a Lessing-like character called Anna Wulf. (The reader has already encountered this character in Free Women, but from a more distanced perspective). Sometimes her presence as narrator is overt; sometimes she dramatises herself as a character called Ella; and at other times she is hidden behind various textual refractions. This character experiments with different aspects of the self, different “voices” and different discourses. Perhaps Anna herself can best describe how the book is organised. On arriving at her new flat:
[T]he first thing I did was to buy the trestle table and lay my notebooks on it. . . . I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary. (pp.417-8)
The reader empathises closely with Anna – or at least one version of Anna – in the blue notebook. Here she confides to her diary that “it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page” (p.418) and “what is happening is a breakdown of me” (p.419). Anna’s slide into madness is mirrored in four repeated sequences of her black, red, yellow and blue notebooks. Painful and frightening as it is to confront her inner demons, Anna’s psychic journey is far from sterile. It allows her to break free from self-limitation into fuller and richer dimensions of consciousness. A way-point in the journey is symbolised when Anna draws heavy black lines under the last entries in the four notebooks and buys herself a notebook with a cover of dull gold. This golden notebook is a summation of her excursion into madness with her lover, Saul Green (a character probably based on Lessing’s companion, Clancy Sigal, during the 1950s). Together they “write” the golden notebook, allowing their personalities to dissolve into each other in mental breakdown. Both emerge without writer’s block; both offer the other the first sentences of their next novels. Anna’s novel, in keeping with the self-reflexive form of The Golden Notebook, will be titled Free Women.
On the outer limits of sanity in the blue notebook, Anna dreams of a foul, androgynous dwarf, which she eventually acknowledges as part of her own psyche and, in Jungian terms, as part of our collective unconscious selves:
I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counter-part, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. (p.518)
The dream celebrates destruction, acknowledging through oxymoron what a more “civilised” discourse could not articulate. This honest recognition of the baseness and divisions of her psyche brings Anna to a more stable sense of self. In the golden notebook she continues to dream through most of the experiences recorded in the black, red, yellow and blue notebooks. Memories from her young adulthood in Africa, fragments from her first novel The Frontiers of War (these two subjects come mainly from the black notebook), experiences of being an analysand, lover and writer, all accelerate past her mind’s eye like a projected film. Saul, her fellow-traveller in breakdown, inhabits other personalities, spitting out the pronoun “I, I, I, I, like a machine-gun ejaculating regularly” (p.545). He vigorously resists Anna’s prediction that neither of them is destined for heroic futures after breakdown. They will both, she says, become “boulder-pushers”, small contributors only to the great forces of historical change (p.544). Their shared breakdown is accompanied by continuous talking, which circulates each of their experiences in a rather Beckettian manner, until they have worked their way through to a “blueprint” for their futures (p.553). It is also accompanied by sex, which is full of tenderness and repulsion in more or less equal measure. Extreme physical sensations of ecstasy and disgust are recounted without prudery from Anna’s perspective. Bearing in mind two historical factors: firstly, in late 1960 the (failed) prosecution of Penguin Paperbacks, under The Obscene Publications Act, for publishing the unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover took place; and secondly, it was a historical period strongly characterised by double moral standards for judging male- and female-authored fiction; then these descriptions of female sexual experience in The Golden Notebook were quite radical.
Lessing was in tune with, if not ahead of, her time with regard to popular attitudes to mental breakdown. The benefits of exploring and expanding the mind, whether through psycho-analysis, meditation, Eastern Transcendentalism or recreational drugs, had a high public profile in the media during the 1960s. Neither new religious movements nor drugs are referred to in The Golden Notebook, but the idea of surrendering to one’s dreams and allowing the unconscious to express itself untramelled is central to the novel. Anna’s psychic journey mirrors the anti-psychiatric theories of R. D. Laing, a psychologist whose influence on Lessing’s writing during the 1960s she openly acknowledges. Laingian concepts strengthened in later books, such as The Four-gated City (1969) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) before giving way to Lessing’s increasing interest in Sufism (see entry on The Memoirs of a Survivor [1974], q.v.). Laing’s book The Divided Self (1960), among others, was hugely influential in bringing theories about the therapeutic value of madness to the general public during the 1960s.
It is clear then why Lessing expresses great disappointment in her 1972 Preface that critics reductively interpreted her novel as “being about the sex war” (p.8). On the contrary, she states, her central theme was the psyche’s capacity to dismiss “false dichotomies and divisions” and to mature beyond the compartmentalisation of experience (p.8). It is also clear why contemporary reviews, given the nascent interest in women’s issues in the early 1960s, focused on sexual politics to the exclusion of everything else in this complex book. As Lessing concedes, in the act of reading “one person sees one pattern and nothing at all of another pattern” (p.20). Despite her protests that her book was used as “a tract about the sex war” (p.10), feminist literary criticism has persisted in interpreting the novel as a clarion on behalf of women. Margaret Drabble (1972), Elaine Showalter (1979) and Lorna Sage (1983) exemplify just a few eminent critics who have commented on the feminine writing and the sexual politics of The Golden Notebook. A degree of resentment from committed feminists towards Lessing, concerning her position in relation to feminism, resurfaced as recently as 2001 at the Edinburgh Book Festival (see Links). Lessing’s position however has remained consistent. She takes the long view, describing Women’s Liberation as a minor force for political and social change, while at the same time making the assumption 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” (p.11). Like it or not, Lessing’s finely balanced affiliation to women’s perspectives is bound to cause controversy when committed feminists wish to claim her as one of their own.
How is one to read The Golden Notebook more than forty years after its publication? Any interpretation needs to allow for the pluralism of the book and the inevitability that social, historical and cultural change will throw a different light on its multi-faceted preoccupations. Anti-psychiatric practices and self-healing through deliberate immersion in madness did not survive as a popular interest in Britain beyond the 1970s. This facet of the novel, therefore, seems to be of more historical than current interest. The same critical judgement might be made of the red notebook which primarily charts Anna Wulf’s temporary membership of the British Communist Party during the 1950s (a fictionalised version of Lessing’s own Marxist leanings and membership of the BCP from 1952-6). However, Lessing’s astute description of group dynamics and the tyranny of the shared language of party politics provide insights into human nature which are universal and enduring. The following extract from Anna’s diary suggests as much about non-political social groups as about the exigencies of communist party membership:
[T]his evening had dinner with Joyce, New Statesman circles, and she started to attack Soviet Union. Instantly I found myself doing that automatic-defence-of-Soviet-Union act, which I can’t stand when other people do it. She went on; I went on. For her, she was in the presence of a communist so she started on certain clichés. I returned them. Twice tried to break the thing, start on a different level, failed – the Anna realises that once she was “in the fold, so to speak”, she was “entitled to the elaborate ironies and complicities of the initiated” (p.152). The language of any group pressures its members into non-thinking conformity. Anna’s description shows that an exclusive vocabulary marks the insider from the outsider, most obviously perhaps in the nominal title “Comrade”, and frames their behaviour and role-play as strongly as any uniform.
More subtlely, The Golden Notebook demonstrates that group membership can be reinforced by tone of voice or knowing silences, especially within small family groups or personal friendships. For instance, Anna and Molly, the main characters of Free Women, use an amused, sardonic tone in their conversations, frequently punctuated by the phrase “odd, isn’t it?” (p.25). When their lives become intolerably painful, the tone of voice and the shrugging body language eventually fail to express the enormities of their emotional suffering (predominantly caused by the attempted suicide of Molly’s son which leaves him blind). Unlike the exchanges between Anna and Saul, Anna and Molly do not progress towards more authentic expressions of their suffering. Their friendship falters as their shared language becomes brittle and artificial. The Golden Notebook, therefore, explores many versions of the relationship between the individual and the collective. While its notebooks and stories show the gregariousness of human nature, they also confirm that close-knit groups can entrap and stultify any individual who completely identifies with them, often prompting disingenuousness or a sense of betrayal. Perhaps this philosophy explains some of the reasons why Lessing refuses to align herself with the feminist lobby.
Both the embedded novel and the summative golden notebook in The Golden Notebook end with forward-looking conclusions. Anna in Free Women, having put behind her the manic behaviour of covering the walls of her room with newspaper cuttings, opts for teaching and marriage-guidance counselling. (The motif of pinned-up news cuttings and madness is repeated in The Four-gated City, 1969). Anna, in the golden notebook, emerges from her derangement ready to write Free Women. The metafictional plane of The Golden Notebook demonstrates that she successfully completes this novel. As Anna predicted, her future fictional life accepts a degree of “boulder-pushing”, namely compromise. Nonetheless, Anna’s incremental progress in professional and literary fields is autonomous, in keeping with the convincing realism and honesty of the rest of the book. It remains to be asked what might be the source of the continued academic and international interest in this novel? It probably ensues from the breadth and depth of its enfolding themes. For Lessing enthusiasts, the novel is a seedbed for many of the preoccupations to which she returns in later work. For new readers, the untangling of its intricate patterns is a challenge and reward in itself. It is a bracing novel in its depiction of the generosity and brutality of human beings. It never succumbs to political correctness. Molly’s son, for instance, after learning to accommodate his blindness, proceeds to bully her emotionally and manipulate others. The misuse of power by a disabled or malformed member of a family is revisited as a theme in Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child (1988), again without a shred of sentimentality.
To conclude, The Golden Notebook was innovative in form and contributed to a broadening tendency towards mixed-genre and formally self-reflexive novels in British fiction from the 1960s onwards. However, its continued acclaim probably owes more to its penetrating insights into social relationships. Such insights came from the double perspective of Lessing’s position as both an ex-colonial and a woman writer who was forging, with energy and passion, a glowing literary reputation for herself in postwar London. Future readers of the novel no doubt will find new avenues of human interest to pursue inside its maze of themes and stories.
[Page references are to the Flamingo paperback edition of The Golden Notebook, 1993]
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Citation: Scullion, Val. "The Golden Notebook". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=722, accessed 16 October 2024.]
