Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty (PDFDrive)

Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook

After Fifty
This page intentionally left blank
Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
After Fifty
Edited by
Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer
doris lessing’s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK after fifty
Copyright © Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-48837-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-50406-0 ISBN 978-1-137-47742-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-44742-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doris Lessing’s The golden notebook after fifty / edited by Alice Ridout,
Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Lessing, Doris, 1919–2013. Golden notebook. I. Ridout, Alice,

editor. II. Rubenstein, Roberta, 1944– editor.
III. Singer, Sandra, 1957– editor.
PR6023.E833G634 2015
823 .914—dc23 2014045793
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Integra Software Services
First edition: May 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In Memoriam
Doris May Lessing
1919–2013
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Part I Politics and Geopolitics
1 “Across the Frontiers”: Reading Africa in The Golden

Notebook 13
Julie Cairnie
2 Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence 33

Mark Pedretti
3 “Through That Gap the Future Might Pour”: Dreaming the

Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook 55
Cornelius Collins
4 Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism in The Golden

Notebook 73
Sandra Singer
Part II Autobiographical, Aesthetic, and Theoretical

Reconsiderations
5 The Golden Notebook, Disguised Autobiography, and Roman

à Clef 99
Roberta Rubenstein
viii ● Contents
6 Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Positioning

The Golden Notebook in the Twentieth-Century Canon 115
Tonya Krouse
7 “So Why Write Novels?” The Golden Notebook, Mikhail

Bakhtin, and the Politics of Authorship 135
Sophia Barnes
8 Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit 153

Alice Ridout
Part III “Timing Is All”: Personal Reminiscences
9 The Golden Notebook, Serendipity, and Me 173

Paul Schlueter
10 I Remember Doris Lessing and Her Illimitable Novel 181

Jonah Raskin
11 Timing Is All: The Golden Notebook Then and Now 195

Florence Howe
12 The Golden Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading 209

Gillian Beer
Index 213
Acknowledgments
The co-editors of this volume especially thank our contributors for their
work, their professionalism in responding to our feedback, and their patience.
Thanks also go to our editors at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull and Ryan Jenkins, for
their enthusiasm for this project and their helpful guidance along the way;
and to Susan Watkins for her perceptive reading of the manuscript and her
valuable recommendations.
We are grateful to Clancy Sigal and the Harry Ransom Center, Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin, for permission to quote from unpublished materials
in the Clancy Sigal Archive and to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to
publish Roberta Rubenstein’s chapter, adapted from her book Literary Half-
Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef (2014). We gratefully
acknowledge permission from Gillian Beer and Taylor and Francis to repub-
lish “Gillian Beer on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” which appeared
first in Women: A Cultural Review 21.1 (2010): 26–27. We thank Alice
Jackson Wright for permission to quote from her poem cited in Florence
Howe’s chapter in this volume.
Finally, we wish to express our deepest gratitude to Paul Gregory, Charles
R. Larson, and Daniel Singer for their loving support.
Contributors
Sophia Barnes teaches in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the Univer-
sity of Sydney, Australia. She has previously published in Doris Lessing Studies
and is currently working on a manuscript titled We Must Go On Writing:
Lessing, Bakhtin and the Politics of Authorship.
Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of

Cambridge. Among her books are Darwin’s Plots (1983, 3rd ed. 2009), Open
Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), and Virginia Woolf: The Com-
mon Ground (1996). Her collected and annotated edition of Lewis Carroll’s
poems, Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense, was published by Penguin in 2012.
She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1998.
Julie Cairnie is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre

Studies at the University of Guelph. Her research interests include African
childhood memoirs, postcolonial sport, and whiteness studies. She has pub-
lished and presented widely in these areas. Her most recent book is Moving
Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the Twenty-First Century (2012),
a multimedia collection that she co-edited with Dobrota Pucherova.
Cornelius Collins teaches in the English Department at Fordham University

in the Bronx, NY. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University and is at
work on a manuscript titled The Fiction of Apocalypse: Globalization Narratives
of Decline and Collapse after the Cold War. As of 2015, he is President of the
Doris Lessing Society.
Florence Howe taught English composition and literature for thirty years,
eleven of them at Goucher College. She and others founded The Feminist
Press in 1970. In 1971, she and the Press moved to the SUNY College at
Old Westbury; in 1985, she and the Press moved to The City University
of New York. She retired as professor and as publisher in 2000, returned in
2005, and retired again in 2008. She regards her most important publishing
work as the Women Writing in India and the Women Writing Africa volumes.
xii ● Notes on Contributors
Her recent publications include a memoir, A Life in Motion (2011), and a

long essay, “Lost and Found and What Happened Next,” published in Con-
temporary Women’s Writing in 2013. She is working on a new memoir called
What I Left Out. She maintains a web site: www.florencehowe.net.
Tonya Krouse is Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University,

where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary British literature,
gender and sexuality in literature, and critical theory. Her book, The Opposite
of Desire: Sex and Pleasure in the Modernist Novel (2009), examines the depic-
tion of sex and sexuality in D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.
Her critical essays have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Virginia
Woolf Miscellany, and Doris Lessing Studies, as well as in edited collections.
Krouse served as President of the Doris Lessing Society from 2009 to 2012.
Mark Pedretti is the Director of the Writing Center at Claremont Graduate

University. He is currently working on a book about early British nuclear
culture and literature.
Jonah Raskin, Professor Emeritus at Sonoma State University, is the author

of fourteen books, including The Mythology of Imperialism: A Revolutionary
Critique of Modern British Literature; For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of
Abbie Hoffman; American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Birth of the
Beat Generation; Fields Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in
California; and, most recently, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American
Literature. He is also the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on
War and Revolution. A performance poet, he has published seven chapbooks
including More Poems, Better Poems, Auras, and Snapshots of Ireland.
Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film at

Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. She is the author of Contempo-
rary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (2012) and co-editor of
Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (2009). She was President of the Doris Lessing
Society (2012–2015).
Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American University in

Washington, D.C. Her book, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Break-
ing the Forms of Consciousness (1979), was one of the first scholarly studies
of Lessing. She has published numerous essays and book chapters on Lessing
as well as four other studies of fiction by modern and contemporary women
writers: Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (1987), Home Matters:
Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction (2001),
Notes on Contributors ● xiii
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (2009), and, most recently,
Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef (2014).
Paul Schlueter (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University) is the author, editor,

or co-editor of a dozen books, including the first university press study of
Lessing’s fiction, The Novels of Doris Lessing (1973); the pioneering collection
of essays by and about Lessing, A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, and
Interviews (1974); a study of Shirley Ann Grau (1981); and An Encyclopedia of
British Women Writers (1988, 1999). In addition, he has published numerous
essays, reference book entries, and reviews.
Sandra Singer is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre

Studies at the University of Guelph. Since her doctoral work at the University
of Cambridge, she has been active in Lessing scholarship, in particular, co-
editing Doris Lessing Studies and Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times (2010).
She is working on an essay collection, J. J. Steinfeld: Essays on His Works, and a
book on the 9–11 novel’s intersections with narratives of terror, trauma, and
terrorism.
Introduction
L
ike many of her readers, Doris Lessing has repeatedly reread her most
famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962). She has always been alert
to the ways in which the context of the reader can generate diverse
interpretations of a text, akin to her protagonist, Anna Wulf, who offers con-
tradictory reviews of her previously published novel, Frontiers of War, in 1951
and then “from 1954 on” (58). In her most famous rereading of The Golden
Notebook, her 1971 Preface, Lessing expressed her irritation at the impact of
readers’ contexts on the readings they produce:
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 movement 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. (xiv)
Lessing’s insistence on the potential posed by the ten-year anniversary of

the publication of this novel for informed readings, rather than mere reac-
tions to its undertaking or to specific social and political issues, is instructive.
These anniversaries, she implicitly argues, offer important opportunities for
those engaged in the reading, rereading, and misreading of her novel. Indeed,
the editors of this collection, responding to Lessing’s cue, regard the fiftieth
anniversary of her novel as a fresh opportunity to assess its literary afterlife.
Sophia Barnes, a contributor to this volume, suggests that this attentiveness
to the very process of authoring and reading texts is The Golden Notebook’s
enduring contribution. All but one of the twelve chapters in this volume
were composed specifically to commemorate the golden anniversary of The
Golden Notebook. All of them are responses to the specific context of the
reader, freshly understood through the temporal gap between the moment
of publication in 1962 and our current moment.
2 ● Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer
Following Lessing’s 1971 Preface, things would continue to “change . . .

very fast”; several chapters in this volume respond directly to the opportunity
for historical retrospection. In “Guarded Welcome,” her own rereading
of the novel approximately fifty years after its publication, Lessing states,
“I knew this was an extraordinary time; I was watching extraordinary events”
(“P.S.” 13). Revisiting those “extraordinary events” now that we have seen
their consequences play out facilitates new interpretations, such as Cornelius
Collins’s argument that the novel’s focus on experiences of fragmentation
anticipates the disordered world of globalization that would follow the Cold
War or Alice Ridout’s argument that The Golden Notebook is an enabling
text for “chick lit.” Retrospective rereadings also often uncover compara-
tive links between writers that were not apparent at the time of publication.
This kind of retrospective comparison is evident in Sandra Singer’s consid-
eration of the novel in the context of the British New Left and the “Angry
Young Men,” as well as in Sophia Barnes’s rereading of The Golden Note-
book with and through the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Arguably,
it is only once a period has concluded that periodization can commence.
The fifty-plus year interlude since this novel’s publication enables Tonya
Krouse to explore the ways in which the novel illuminates twenty-first-
century scholarly efforts to reperiodize twentieth-century literature. For Mark
Pedretti, Lessing’s novel disrupts the American tendency to align the threat of
nuclear annihilation with the period of postmodernism and, instead, calls
for a specifically British understanding of the impact of nuclear weapons
on literature of the period. Julie Cairnie’s chapter reminds us that the
categorization of literature occurs not just across time but also in space.
She considers particularly the representation of Southern Rhodesia in The
Golden Notebook and the novel’s influence on Rhodesian and Zimbabwean
writing.
The fifty-plus years since the publication of The Golden Notebook are
measures not only of developments in literary and political history, how-
ever. They were, of course, also the lived years of Lessing’s own life, and
Lessing’s recent death (November 17, 2013) at the age of ninety-four makes
stocktaking of this, her most famous work, especially poignant and pertinent.
This passage of time resulted in a practical consequence that makes possi-
ble the work of Roberta Rubenstein’s chapter. During this time span, the
personal diaries and other documents of Clancy Sigal became archival arti-
facts, thereby enabling Rubenstein’s groundbreaking interrogation of Lessing’s
claim regarding The Golden Notebook that she “made it up” (Walking 344).
During those years, three of our contributors developed personal relationships
with Lessing. The closing section of this collection consists of personal reflec-
tions from Paul Schlueter, Jonah Raskin, and Florence Howe that uniquely
Introduction ● 3
document the transformative impact of Lessing and her famous novel on their
own lives. These are accompanied by Gillian Beer’s piece contemplating the
“[t]wo big things” that she experienced in 1962: marriage and reading The
Golden Notebook.
By the end of her 1971 Preface, Lessing comes to terms with the diversity
of (mis)interpretations her novel has generated. She acknowledges that a book
is “alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discus-
sion 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” (Preface to The Golden
Notebook xxix, Lessing’s emphasis). The chapters collected here suggest that,
more than fifty years on, there is still, fruitfully, much for readers to “mis-
understand” and “get out of ” The Golden Notebook. Just over a half-century
of chronological distance from the novel and its mid-fifties setting and pre-
occupations has enabled new geopolitical, theoretical, social, aesthetic, and
autobiographical approaches through which to appreciate and reevaluate this
ever-provocative text. Several chapters included in this collection read the
novel against the grain—and, indeed, even against authorial authority itself.
The contributors to this volume retain their critical independence despite
Lessing’s stated objections to analytical critique, respectfully challenging her
objections to scholarly readings and “misreadings.” The diverse approaches
to Lessing’s masterpiece, written by both established and emerging scholars
across several generations and nationalities—American, Canadian, British,
and Australian—offer timely insights for twenty-first-century scholars, stu-
dents, and other readers of this major novel of the twentieth century. From
multiple perspectives, the contributors to this volume address the novel’s his-
torically precise—and prescient—geopolitical dimensions, its aesthetic and
autobiographical aspects, and its profound effect on its readers, including
those who were personally acquainted with Lessing.
Part I, “Politics and Geopolitics,” includes four chapters that consider
the novel’s specific contribution to debates about Lessing’s place in Southern
Rhodesian and Zimbabwean literature, nuclear deterrence, the communist
dream, and second-wave feminism and homophobia in Britain during the
fifties as depicted in realist fiction and left-wing theater of the period. Julie
Cairnie’s “ ‘Across the Frontiers’: Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook”
draws attention to the importance of this novel’s African content. Cairnie
focuses on the black notebook in particular, the four sections of which reveal
the text’s internal struggle with the importance of Africa in Anna Wulf ’s pre-
viously published novel, Frontiers of War. Cairnie argues that the early reviews
of The Golden Notebook replicate the television and film producers’ reactions
to Anna’s novel in their tendency to erase Africa from discussions of the
novel. Instead of following the trend to focus on the relationships between

white women and men, Cairnie addresses the relationships between white
and black women. While acknowledging that the circumstances are histori-
cally fraught, Cairnie identifies possibilities for convergences between white
and black women that also open up the question of this novel’s relevance to
black and white Zimbabwean women writers.
In “Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence,” Mark Pedretti
contends that Lessing’s personal commitment to antinuclear politics, includ-
ing her presence during the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disar-
mament in 1957 and her participation in the first Aldermaston March of
1958 (along with several of the subsequent annual marches), “should alert us
to the ways that the bomb might manifest itself in a seminal text like The
Golden Notebook.” Through a historical lens, Pedretti demonstrates that the
function of Lessing’s representation in The Golden Notebook of the matter of
nuclear armament has been either overlooked or assimilated to a decidedly
American Cold War narrative that aligns the subject of nuclear weapons with
a broadly understood postmodernism. Pedretti contends that this periodizing
practice does a disservice to the distinctly British encounter with the threat
of nuclear annihilation and that The Golden Notebook explores and articulates
the nuclear question in a novel manner. Much of the psychological fragmenta-
tion depicted in Lessing’s novel can be understood as a critical response to the
paradoxical logic of nuclear deterrence, a logic that resists analysis through the
postmodern critique of the humanist subject. Tracing this critique, Pedretti
articulates one strand of an emergent field of British nuclear criticism and
makes the case that it is distinct from its American counterpart.
Cornelius Collins also explores the theme of global risk in Lessing’s novel
through his examination of representations of fragmentation, as expressed in
two specific formal aspects of the narrative: the several assemblages of news-
paper cuttings and Anna Wulf ’s numerous recorded dreams. He pursues these
“most outward- and inward-facing of the modes that Doris Lessing portrays
as available for interpreting the world” defined by the social and psychic
disintegration of postwar Western life. The Golden Notebook expresses both
formally and thematically the fragmentation of the “coherent world-picture
and dreamworld” that communism initially provided for Anna Wulf and for
Doris Lessing. In his chapter “ ‘Through That Gap the Future Might Pour’:
Dreaming the Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook,” Collins situ-
ates Lessing and her novel in the context of a postwar British Left in search of
a replacement for the lost “dreamworld” of mid-twentieth-century socialism.
To that end, he examines the role of dreams and other experimental narrative
forms that Lessing employs in The Golden Notebook to imagine life after com-
munism and, in a less conscious way, to begin to envision world geopolitics
Introduction ● 5
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even at that apocalyptic stage of her
thinking, Collins suggests, Lessing was able to anticipate the more disordered
and even violent world of economic globalization that would follow the end
of the Cold War. Collins’s historicization of the dreamworld of the novel
extends previous critical discussion that has focused on these elements of the
novel in more specifically psychological terms.
Also focusing on the fifties context of the novel, Sandra Singer examines
a different aspect of left-wing ideology from those articulated by Pedretti
and Collins: the British Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great
Britain of the fifties. “Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism in The
Golden Notebook” revisits the emergence of the British New Left—including
the “Angry Young Men” of the fifties in Britain—that is an important con-
text for The Golden Notebook. Raymond Williams and other figures of the
New Left debated the merits of literary realism and appreciated the political
implications of realism as a form that binds literary works to lived experience.
Doris Lessing’s early commitment to narrative realism resulted in her lively
record of the recent historical past—particularly as reflected in The Golden
Notebook—with her representation of communism at mid-century in Great
Britain. On the other hand, The Golden Notebook takes account of sexual-
ities, most notably progenerative second-wave feminist challenges to male
hegemony in the New Left; the novel underscores repressive sociocultural
attitudes and practices, including laws that discriminated against homosex-
uality in Britain during the fifties. Singer’s chapter explores thematic and
formal correspondences (and differences) between sexualities represented in
the gritty “kitchen sink” realism expressed in the London theater during the
same period, focusing on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Shelagh
Delaney’s A Taste of Honey in relation to The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing,
“[a]s a former colonial and for generational reasons,” is distanced from the
British Left whose character types she critiques in the novel.
In Part II, “Autobiographical, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Reconsiderations,”
Roberta Rubenstein continues the critical exploration of assumptions about
genre by examining the relationship between fiction and autobiography.
During the mid-fifties, Doris Lessing was involved in a complex intimate rela-
tionship with Clancy Sigal, then an unpublished but aspiring American writer
who lived with her while she was composing The Golden Notebook. In “The
Golden Notebook, Disguised Autobiography, and Roman à Clef,” Rubenstein
illuminates a number of parallels between characters and events in The Golden
Notebook and details in unpublished archival materials written by Sigal. She
argues that the relationship between Lessing and Sigal significantly influenced
Lessing’s conception and composition of the final sections of her novel. Not
only are the fictitious Anna Wulf and Saul Green closely based on Lessing’s
relationship with Sigal; Rubenstein further establishes that “just as Anna Wulf
secretly reads Saul Green’s private journal, so Lessing secretly read Clancy
Sigal’s private journal.” Regarding The Golden Notebook as, in part, a roman
à clef, Rubenstein explores Lessing’s creative and at times transparent use of
autobiographical material in her fiction. Her chapter raises provocative issues
concerning the transformation of autobiographical experiences into fiction.
Tonya Krouse takes a historical approach to The Golden Notebook, arguing
that the novel is central to twenty-first-century scholarly efforts to reperiodize
twentieth-century literature. In “Between Modernism and Postmodernism:
Positioning The Golden Notebook in the Twentieth-Century Canon,” Krouse
focuses closely on the dream sequences in the novel, finding that these
narrative arcs offer “alternate criteria” for determining aesthetic merit in
literature. The dream sequences disrupt systems of binary thinking that
have “govern[ed] Western metaphysics, and, more specifically, aesthetic the-
ory.” The Golden Notebook, challenging through its form the typical criteria
that shape discourse regarding placement in the literary canon, upsets not
only generic conventions but readerly expectations of both early and late
twentieth-century literature.
Approaching The Golden Notebook from a different theoretical perspective,
Sophia Barnes applies Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of discourse and aesthetic
activity to her polyphonic reading of The Golden Notebook. Rather than
looking back to locate the relationship between autobiography and history
through archival materials, as does Rubenstein, or through ideology, as do
Cairnie, Pedretti, Collins, and Singer in the chapters included in Part I of
this volume, Barnes looks forward to new readings—ones that were not or
could not have been formulated when Lessing’s novel was first published in
1962. In “ ‘So Why Write Novels?’ The Golden Notebook, Mikhail Bakhtin,
and the Politics of Authorship,” Barnes advances the discussion of Lessing’s
best-known work as metafiction. The structural and rhetorical openness of
the novel resonates with Lessing’s efforts to create a narrative form equal
to the complexity of its themes. Through the application of Bakhtin’s the-
ory, Barnes highlights the radicalism of Lessing’s authorship and positions
The Golden Notebook as a philosophically central text in twentieth-century
literature in English.
In “Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit,” Alice Ridout places
The Golden Notebook in conversation with the late twentieth-century popular
literary genre of “chick lit” to consider what each narrative form offers as
a way to understand the other. She argues that The Golden Notebook is an
enabling text for “chick lit,” especially in its revealing depiction of women’s
embodied experience and its use of the fictional diary form. Comparing The
Golden Notebook with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary encourages a more
Introduction ● 7
suspicious reading of the diary as a form that can function as a means for
Foucauldian “discipline” for women. Ridout concludes by considering the
reasons for the “two different attitudes to ‘women’s writing’ ” evident in chick
lit’s embrace of and Lessing’s resistance to this categorization.
Among those whose scholarly careers have been shaped by critical explo-
ration of Doris Lessing’s work, several have been further enriched by their
personal connection to the writer herself. The authors of the four personal
reflections included in Part III, “Timing Is All: Personal Reminiscences,”
encountered The Golden Notebook soon after it was first published. In addi-
tion, Paul Schlueter, Jonah Raskin, and Florence Howe all met Lessing during
the decade or so after The Golden Notebook was published in 1962. Although
Gillian Beer did not know Lessing personally, she was aware of the trans-
formative influence of the novel from the time of its publication. These
scholars recall the ways in which their personal encounters with Lessing are
intertwined with their appreciation of her fiction. Both the author and her
work have continued to influence and inspire them long beyond their initial
encounters with Lessing.
Paul Schlueter, a pioneer scholar of Lessing’s work, uses the felicitous word
“serendipity” to focus on several pivotal moments in his academic career in
which Lessing’s fiction decisively shaped his academic destiny. In “The Golden
Notebook, Serendipity, and Me,” Schlueter describes the unique opportuni-
ties that led to his career-long engagement with Lessing scholarship as well
as his enduring friendship with the author. As a doctoral student at Southern
Illinois University, he first read The Golden Notebook in 1963. The experience
set him on his scholarly path, prompting him to write what became one of
the earliest published essays on the novel, followed by what became several
“firsts”: the first doctoral dissertation on Lessing—subsequently published
as the first monograph on her fiction—and the first collection, edited by
Schlueter, of interviews and essays on the writer and her oeuvre to that date.
Schlueter’s initial meeting with Lessing in a London coffee shop in 1973 was
the first of what became many visits and conversations between them over
the succeeding four decades. He regards The Golden Notebook as a “catalyst
for personal change” that affected not only his own life but also the lives of
many other readers of the novel. In his chapter, he also shares his knowledge
of a unique typographical feature that appeared only in the first edition of
The Golden Notebook and is unknown to most scholars and readers of the
novel.
Jonah Raskin’s connection to Doris Lessing also features an aspect of
“serendipity.” During the mid-sixties, Raskin, then a young professor of
English, assigned The Golden Notebook to an undergraduate class at SUNY,
Stony Brook. Several years later, when Doris Lessing visited New York in
May 1969, he conducted a day-long interview with her, the first of what
would, over the years, become several interviews. That first interview captured
Lessing’s views on significant intersections between literature and politics, a
strand that remained central to her writing. In “I Remember Doris Lessing
and Her Illimitable Novel”—recollections that are “part memoir, part liter-
ary essay”—Raskin retraces the ways in which both The Golden Notebook and
Lessing herself significantly influenced his personal awakening, political edu-
cation, and understanding of the workings of memory. He contends that the
understanding of a text as complex and multilayered as The Golden Notebook
derives from a collaboration between author and reader, who “create meaning
together.”
Florence Howe, in her aptly titled “Timing is All: The Golden Notebook
Then and Now”—the first part of which title the co-editors of this volume
have borrowed for the title of this section—retraces what she regards as the
“improbable path” that led from her essay-reviews of the five volumes of
Lessing’s Children of Violence series for the Nation during the sixties to the
establishment of The Feminist Press in 1970. Like Paul Schlueter, she first
read The Golden Notebook in 1963 and, two years later, interviewed Lessing
in the first of what became several conversations with her. Howe reflects on
the ways in which The Golden Notebook entered her awareness as a form-
breaking narrative that was also a stirring articulation of resistance to racism
in southern Africa during a time when Howe was deeply committed to the
civil rights movement in America. At that time, she was not aware of the gen-
der issues of the novel that galvanized feminist readers; as Howe phrases it,
“Fifty years ago, while many of the world’s women were ready for feminism,
Doris Lessing and I were not.” Indeed, in that regard, Howe was closer to the
ideal reader whom Lessing hoped would appreciate The Golden Notebook for
its innovative, form-breaking structure and as a novel of ideas. Howe further
reflects on the evolution of her political consciousness and on the ways in
which contemporary readers regard The Golden Notebook, a half-century after
its publication, in relation to the evolution of feminism and other movements
and ideas, both political and nonpolitical.
Gillian Beer recognized the centrality of The Golden Notebook when it was
first published in England in 1962. Reflecting on that moment fifty years
later, she recalls that the novel had the force of a revelation for her because it
so powerfully expressed a whole cross section of experiences—notably, female
experience and intimate relations between the sexes—that had not previ-
ously been captured in the pages of fiction. As she observes in “The Golden
Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading,” the novel expressed (and
expresses) the truth that “politics is fundamental, that individuals whether
male or female are coursed through by the shared hopes and fears of their lived
Introduction ● 9
historical moment. But also that they live that moment differently from each
other.” Comparing her initial reading of the novel in 1962 with her critical
insights upon rereading it half a century later, Beer highlights these and other
aspects of The Golden Notebook, paying tribute not only to the novel’s literary
complexity and political ambition but to Doris Lessing’s courage in imagining
and composing it.
Together, the chapters collected in this volume offer scholars and other
readers of Doris Lessing new ways to reconsider, reevaluate, and celebrate
Lessing’s now-classic novel. More than half a century since its first publi-
cation, The Golden Notebook continues to challenge, surprise, and inspire
twenty-first century readers. It is unquestionably still “alive and potent and
fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion” (Preface xxvii).
Works Cited
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: HarperPerennial Modern
Classics, 2008. Print.
——. “P.S.: Insights, Interviews and More . . . ” The Golden Notebook. 1962.
New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2008. P.S. 1–24. Print.
——. Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962. New York:
HarperCollins, 1997. Print.
PART I
Politics and Geopolitics

CHAPTER 1
“Across the Frontiers”1:

Reading Africa
in The Golden Notebook
Julie Cairnie
Introduction
M
any readers—whether devotee or dissenter—have personal and
sometimes even visceral recollections of reading Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook. Having mostly avoided it for the last twenty-
five years—which I attribute to being an Africanist—it is my turn to tell
a complicated story of my own reluctant engagement with Lessing’s mag-
num opus. In fact, the first Lessing book I read was The Grass Is Singing;
it was also the first properly African book I read—notwithstanding David
Livingstone’s Missionary Travels when I was an adolescent. It was 1989, and
I was an undergraduate student posted as a volunteer teacher at a secondary
school in the chrome-mining village of Mutorashanga, Zimbabwe. I had
only one or two books with me, and so rummaged through the cardboard
boxes full of well-read books in the mostly empty school library.2 I learned
later that Banket—where Lessing grew up and where she too rifled through
boxes of books with anticipation and pleasure—was only about forty kilo-
meters away (Under My Skin 88–89). In the library’s boxes, I found books
by Lessing, Ngugi, Achebe, and other writers in the Heinemann African
Writers series.3 I can still recall the worn cover of Lessing’s first novel: a
photograph of a black male servant’s torso, his hands holding a tattered tea
service. I read the back-cover description of a poor white woman’s place in
the complex racial politics of white-ruled Southern Rhodesia. I was in post-
independence Zimbabwe, where the racial politics were also confusing. Why
14 ● Julie Cairnie
was there still a “country club” with only one black member?4 Why were
black Zimbabweans deferential to me, a young white university student from
a working-class family in Canada? This book intrigued me, and I hoped it
could help me understand race, gender, and class politics in Zimbabwe—then
and now. “Then” and “Now,” a formulation Lessing employs throughout
African Laughter to mark both divergence and convergence between the past
and the present, is a useful way of framing scholars’ ongoing and shifting
engagements with Lessing’s oeuvre.
Like those who are enthralled by The Golden Notebook, I have reread The
Grass Is Singing several times, wrote on it for my doctoral dissertation, and,
as a university instructor, regularly include it on course syllabi. It never fails
to engage me. As a student, I resisted reading The Golden Notebook, choosing
instead to read the Children of Violence series. Under My Skin and African
Laughter were published while I was working on my doctorate, and I read
these autobiographical accounts with relish. When I undertook comprehen-
sive exams in Women’s Writing, Feminist Theory and Postcolonial Literature
and Theory, it became more difficult to avoid Lessing’s tome. I read it, but
treated it perfunctorily on my exams, and completely neglected it in my
dissertation. No one pushed me to account for this avoidance. My reading—
then and now—involves getting to the African bits, the black notebook, and
moments in the other notebooks and in Free Women that recollect Anna
Wulf ’s African past and introduce her African friends and colleagues.
Lessing recalls an encounter with a Swedish actress in the sixties who
declared, “ ‘It’s not your book, it’s mine, I never read anything but the Blue
Notebook, and never will till I die’ ” (“Guarded Welcome”). While I don’t
wish to engage in such hyperbole, my book is the black notebook. Full dis-
closure: I get bored by the novel’s psychoanalytic elements and its reflections
on the Left’s loss of idealism after the revelation of the Stalinist purges, but
I am intrigued by critics’ attentiveness to the ways in which its radical struc-
ture mirrors its radical themes. I concur with Diana Athill’s assessment that
the African sections are “relaxed and vivid,” but when the narrative shifts
“to London the style bec[o]me[s] clumsier” (“Doris Lessing’s Golden Note-
book, 50 Years On”). Ours is a fairly isolated position. More than fifty years
after the publication of The Golden Notebook, few reviewers and critics, even
Lessing herself, see Africa in the text. Lessing would dismiss reading for
Africa as a compartmentalization of the novel, a practice that she loathes and
associates with the worst habits of academics. Eve Bertelsen, in her essay in
Approaches to Teaching The Golden Notebook, points out the “obscur[ity]”
of Southern Rhodesia for most readers (30). My objective here is to cen-
tralize “Central Africa”5 in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook by pointing out
that the text as a whole explores relationships “across the frontiers” and that
Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook ● 15
in the black notebook these “frontiers” are manifest as both the gender and
the colour bar.
In an interview with Eve Bertelsen, Lessing insists that she is both an
African and a European writer (“New Frontier” 120); she has little trouble
reconciling opposites that, in African Laughter, she identifies as “convergence
zones” (305). Yet in biographies and obituaries Lessing is mostly identified
as a British writer and The Golden Notebook is presented as most relevant
to European and North American (white) women.6 In the fifties and sixties,
the setting and publication period of the novel, Lessing was closely aligned
with European Leftist culture and with debates about gender and sexuality.
In Southern Rhodesia at the time, the Communist Party was active in its
opposition to the colour bar and advocated for African enfranchisement, but
debates around gender and sexuality were deferred for decades. In the black
notebook, however, gender and sexuality are understood through the lens of
race identity and politics in a specific and also ambiguous place: the rural
and hybrid British/African Mashopi hotel during World War II. How does
the text’s seeming convergence of the British and the African elements (polit-
ical, aesthetic, perspectival) make it more or less relevant to Africanists like
me, as well as to white and black Zimbabwean women writers, Lessing’s lit-
erary descendants, and inheritors of The Golden Notebook?7 In Zimbabwean
Alexandra Fuller’s review of Lessing’s life and work in National Geographic, she
attends sparely to The Golden Notebook, but does suggest that Lessing couldn’t
have written this novel if she “had been raised in London, say, or New Jersey,
instead of Rhodesia” (Fuller, “First Person”). How is Fuller’s claim compli-
cated by the fact that Lessing herself fails to mention Africa in her fiftieth
anniversary reflections on The Golden Notebook? (“Guarded Welcome”).
I am encouraged by Lessing’s observation in an interview with Margarete
von Schwarzkopf that the novel continues to “bear many kinds of fruit”
(103). Here is what I hope is a satisfying contribution to the repast. After
more than fifty years of critical and popular engagement with The Golden
Notebook, it is time to query the centrality of Africa. All four segments of
the black notebook reveal the text’s internal struggle with the importance of
Africa in Anna Wulf ’s novel: is Africa central to the story’s meaning, or is it
just an exotic or figurative setting? In the novel itself reviewers and television
producers repeatedly misread or minimize the African setting. This inter-
nal struggle is reflected in the text’s reception, as reviewers and critics tend
to minimize or eliminate Africa in their commentaries on The Golden Note-
book itself. It is the convergence of the internal and external place of Africa
that engages my attention as an Africanist and postcolonial scholar. I argue
that the black notebook continues the text’s engagement with flawed and
failed relationships “across the frontiers” of gender and race. In addition to
the relationships that are mostly highlighted in reviews and criticism, those
between white women and men, there are subsumed relationships, such as
the historically fraught one between white and black women. Anna observes
black women (as is the case with Marie, “the cook’s wife,” as she seems to
willingly enter her white lover’s caravan) and obliquely identifies with black
women (as is the case in the two cross-racial rape fantasies). While the black
notebook reveals the gulf between white and black women’s lives, there are
some glimpses of the potential of convergence and even “common purpose.”
All of this opens up the question of The Golden Notebook’s relevance to white
and black Zimbabwean women writers and gives new impetus to the text in
African and even postcolonial contexts.
Reviews and Reflections

Despite its age, The Golden Notebook is still regularly reviewed and critiqued,
and sustained reviews, reflections, and revisions appear throughout the text
itself. Reviews, then, are both external and internal to the novel. In both
locations they tend to be disputatious, argumentative, and impassioned. The
history of book reviewing dates back to the eighteenth century, and through-
out this long period writers have been engaged with how their book is received
by the critics. As Jane Hu puts it in her study of the decline of the book review,
“Most often, dissatisfaction with the state of book reviewing has come not
from the readers who are the reviewers’ intended audience, but from writers
who have felt their work mishandled, unjustly ignored, or cruelly misunder-
stood.” While Lessing was mostly frustrated by the many misreadings of The
Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf is also frustrated but more interested in the ways
in which her novel, Frontiers of War, facilitates such misreadings. In keep-
ing with this self-reflexivity, Anna writes her own scathing self-reviews.8 The
question, then, is how does The Golden Notebook facilitate readings that
ignore Africa and relationships “across the frontiers” of gender and race? How
do reviews, both internal and external to the text, contribute to this erasure
of the text’s more complex relational politics?
A number of reviews collapse the difference between Doris Lessing and
Anna Wulf. In “A Singular Survivor,” Emma Brockes cites one of the most
virulent contemporary reviews: “In a 1962 issue of Vogue, Siriol Hugh-Jones,
the magazine’s former features editor, unleashed a tirade of abuse on that tri-
umvirate of women writers: Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Lessing. . . . But
it was Lessing for whom the author reserved her most indignant disapproval.
Here was a woman, ‘dismal, drab, embarrassing.’ ” Further, “ ‘Mrs Lessing
leaves one with a really terrible impression of a woman—shrewish, naggy,
self-righteous’ ” (Brockes). Other reviewers, as Lessing recalls in “Guarded
Welcome,” castigated her as a “man-hater” and “ballsbreaker.” After Lessing
won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, the Canadian writer Marian
Botsford Fraser wrote, “Readers, beware. The Golden Notebook is one of
the most frustrating tomes ever concocted”; it is, in the end, “[a]ll about
Doris.” Roberta Rubenstein offers a reasoned argument about the (limited)
parallels between Lessing and Wulf in her review essay, “Going on Fifty: Doris
Lessing’s The Golden Notebook”:
[E]ach grew up in southern Africa, moved to London as a divorced mother of

a toddler, and published a first novel set in southern Africa during the Second
World War . . . . Yet unlike Doris Lessing—who has published nearly three-
dozen novels in both realistic and speculative modes, to say nothing of nearly
a dozen volumes of short stories, a graphic novel, several plays, two volumes
of autobiography, London sketches, librettos for opera scores, and two collec-
tions of pieces devoted solely to the subject of cats—her fictional protagonist
is unable to write another novel because she is emotionally and aesthetically
blocked.
Clearly the parallels are limited, but Anna manages to write the components
that comprise The Golden Notebook, and like Lessing, has to contend with
scathing reviews of her work. In many ways, the novel is prescient of its own
fraught review history. Anna must battle readers who distort her first and
only novel, Frontiers of War. These readers attempt to eradicate the issue of
relationships and intimacy across the colour bar—and something analogous
happens in readings of The Golden Notebook itself.
In a lengthy review in The New Republic in 1962, Irving Howe accu-
rately predicted, “this novel will be discussed repeatedly in the years to come.”
According to Jonathan Clowes, Lessing’s agent, she was “ ‘a bit surprised by
[the] fuss [over The Golden Notebook]. She’s never bothered too much about
reviews because she says that, historically, they are often shown to be totally
wrong’ ” (Brockes). In “Guarded Welcome,” Lessing notes “the sourness and
bad temper of some of them” and recalls, “most of the UK reception was
hostile.” Women novelists, avowed feminists, and empathetic women readers
continue to review The Golden Notebook; their focus is often personal and
the book is depicted as one that “changes” women. In a panel discussion on
the book’s impact on women writers on the occasion of its fiftieth anniver-
sary, the young British writer Natalie Hanman claims that “reading this book
changed me,” while the older novelist Diana Athill registers her irritation
with the “overstated” political message (“Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook,
50 Years On”). Lessing argues that “[t]he novel could not be written now”
(“Guarded Welcome”), but reviewers often comment on the ways in which
the book continues to speak to various women’s experiences. Most reviews
focus on the so-called “sex war,” on relationships between women and men,
and also between women—and always white. Some reviews, such as Anita
Brookner’s 1982 review, briefly acknowledge the text’s treatment of Africa

but most reviews (and criticism) ignore Africa altogether.
Reviewing the significance of Anna’s African past is a central task in the
black notebook. Reviews are in fact central to this notebook, assuming one
form or another in each of the four segments. This is hardly surprising
given that the black notebook “is to do with Anna Wulf the writer” (The
Golden Notebook 418), and her concern that her best-selling novel indulges
in colonial nostalgia and naïve political ambition; the critical reviews—while
annoying, trite, and perhaps misguided—corroborate her worry. The first
part includes a self-review of the novel (74–75); the second documents her
exchanges with two TV producers who wish to reinterpret and relocate her
novel geographically (257–66); the third includes mostly patronizing reviews
of the novel in the Soviet press (391–93); and the fourth and final section
closes with an account of Anna’s dream of a TV film version of the novel,
using someone else’s script, but filmed in Central Africa—not England or
America, as the two TV producers insist (461–62).
Like The Golden Notebook as a whole, the black notebook is comprised of
both internal and external modes of criticism. I wish to trace this trajectory of
reviews in order to elucidate the emergence of something like an ethical meet-
ing across the gender and colour bars—an unexamined but key theme in The
Golden Notebook. In many ways, the black notebook is a sustained reflection
on Frontiers of War. Readers of The Golden Notebook are only provided with
synopses or reviews of the novel, including Anna’s own in the first part of the
black notebook. We are never trusted with the text itself. It is here that Anna
records the real story that inspired the novel, and that she assesses as more
honest and true: “I have to switch something off in me; now, writing about
it, I have to switch it off, or ‘a story’ would begin to emerge, a novel, and not
the truth” (78). After some brief reflections on her disassociation from Fron-
tiers of War, Anna records an ironic synopsis of a projected film version of her
novel, renamed Forbidden Love. It is rife with hyperbole, sentimentality, and
racial stereotypes: “They spend their last night together in each other’s arms,
in the only place where white and black may meet, in the brothel by the sul-
lied waters of the town’s river” (73). Anna experiences a “feeling of disgust”
after writing this, and then goes home to “read the novel for the first time
since it was published” (74). She writes a review that she divides into two
sections: according to how she would have reviewed her own novel “in 1951,
when it came out,” and “from 1954 on” (74). The first review acknowledges
the “novelty” of the setting, but criticizes the “unoriginal theme” (74). In both
reviews “strong emotion” is responsible for the novel’s flaws. It is only in the
1954 review that Anna points out that this “report from the racial frontiers”
says “very little new . . . about the black-white conflict” (75). In Postcolonial
Whiteness Alfred Lopez argues, “Self-reflexive moments are not offensive in

themselves, as long as the critic doesn’t languish there . . . . Such white guilt
has been both the enabling condition of postcolonial studies and its worst
enemy” (23). Anna does write a more truthful version of that story but also
returns throughout the black notebook to a variety of external reviews and
reflections on a novel that Anna “can’t read . . . without feeling ashamed” (77).
While Anna understands that Frontiers of War indulges in a “lying nos-
talgia,” she is disturbed that “[n]ot one of the reviewers saw it” (77). The
reviewers range from capitalist TV producers, who wish to expunge the
African setting, to Soviet book reviewers, who misapprehend that setting.
The entirety of the second part of the black notebook is devoted to Anna’s
letter exchanges and disastrous meetings with two TV film producers. When
asked by the first, “ ‘Tell me, Anna, what would you say, if you were asked,
what is the central theme of your lovely book?,’ ” Anna responds, “ ‘the colour
bar’ ” (258). He expresses mock horror regarding such injustices, but casually
suggests “ ‘changing the locale to England.’ ” The “ ‘utterly beastly . . . colour
thing’ ” could be expunged and emphasis redirected to the novel’s “ ‘simple
love story’ ” (259). A similar meeting takes place with a woman producer
from America. Anna leaves both meetings frustrated by their attempts to
manipulate her message. Both producers pressure her to eradicate Africa from
Frontiers of War, and something analogous happens in reviews of The Golden
Notebook.
The third segment of the black notebook closes with three reviews of the
novel in Soviet journals; in varying ways, all three misapprehend the African
setting. One regrets that the heroine is not “an African organized worker from
a factory,” an odd suggestion given that most black people at the time were
employed as domestic, agricultural, or mine workers. Another refers to Africa
as “majestic” and “untamed,” hardly adjectives that describe the space of the
urban proletariat (392). In the fourth and final segment of the black note-
book, which is less than two pages, readers are told that the remainder of
the notebook is filled with newspaper clippings about “violence, death, riot-
ing, hatred, in some part of Africa”; and that “[t]here was only one entry in
Anna’s handwriting.” She transcribes a dream about a TV film production of
her novel, over which she has no control: the script was “written by someone
else” (461). How do their respective texts facilitate these endemic misreadings
and misapprehensions of Africa?
Reading the Black Notebook

Critics carve up The Golden Notebook according to our own proclivities.
In “Guarded Welcome,” and elsewhere too, Lessing insists that the novel
is about fragmentation and madness, and that the experimental structure

matches these themes: “But the second sentence of The Golden Notebook
is: ‘The point is,’ said Anna, ‘as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’
This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its ‘structure’ said.
Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a
fast-fragmenting culture.” Lessing was astounded by critics’ and fans’ zeal-
ous insistence that the novel was a “feminist bible,” and expressed concern
that she was heralded as “a feminist icon” (“Guarded Welcome”). By con-
trast, some critics focus almost entirely on its formal experimentation, as
does Nick Bentley: “It is in the Black Notebook in particular that Lessing,
through Anna, begins to question the validity and veracity of realism as a
form of writing” (47–48). This is true, but there is no attention to the par-
ticular context of this questioning and only a brief, inaccurate geographical
reference to Anna’s “experiences in South Africa” (48). Even Sarah De Mul, in
her article on Lessing’s representation of Zimbabwe, argues that The Golden
Notebook signals Lessing’s shift away from “the social inequalities in colo-
nial Africa,” and that this shift is accompanied by a “formal transition” (37).
Only a few critics, including Sharon Wilson and Joseph Boone, attend to the
text’s African theme and engagement with Africa. Wilson argues that the text’s
interest in romance and fabulism parallels its disruption of colonial binaries
(18–19), while Boone studies the correspondence between homophobia and
miscegenation.
What emerges from a reading of the various strands of criticism is a com-
mon interest in the failures and flaws of relationships “across the frontiers” of
gender mostly, and the ways in which this is captured by experiments in genre.
There are few sustained readings of the black notebook,9 and here I argue that
its African setting is not incidental but central to the rest of the novel’s for-
mal and thematic engagements. My reading is concerned with “convergence
zones” between white and black, men and women—and, importantly, with
the struggle to represent relationships across the colour bar. I’m not interested
in offering a reading that, as Bertelsen argues, reveals the “uncanny accuracy”
(“The Golden Notebook: The African Background” 34) of the black note-
book’s representation of cross-racial relationships. While Lessing may have
marginalized the gender politics of The Golden Notebook by subordinating
them to what she regarded as the more important themes of fragmentation
and madness, it is my contention that the black notebook is prescient of
later debates about the ways in which white and black women might reach
“across the frontiers” to work for “common purpose” (Daymond xv). And
because apartheid in South Africa and the colour bar in Southern Rhodesia
delayed feminism’s arrival, these questions were only articulated in the last
few decades, long after the feminist revolutions of the sixties and seventies
in Europe and North America. Anna’s understanding of black women’s lives

is mediated through white men: she is an observer of Marie’s affair with the
white working-class man, George Hounslow, who provides her with a ques-
tionable narrative of the relationship’s equitability; the men in her circle invite
her to identify with black women in their own sexual fantasies and she pas-
sively but uncomfortably acquiesces. The black notebook not only exposes
white women’s complicity in these dysfunctional colonial intimacies but also
gestures to the albeit remote possibility of ethical and equitable relationships
between white and black women.
The Golden Notebook is a novel about relationships. Accordingly, the black
notebook explores a range of relationships, but within the context of the
Mashopi hotel in Southern Rhodesia rather than, say, Anna Wulf ’s flat in
London. There is, however, an exchange between the two seemingly dis-
parate locations, and this is captured in the hybrid hotel, as Paul Blackenhurst
explains: “ ‘You’d never believe it—slammed right down in the middle of the
bush, all surrounded by kopjes and savages and general exotica, the Mashopi
hotel, and a bar with darts and a shove-halfpenny board, and steak and kid-
ney pie’ ” (94). The relationships that receive the most attention are between
white men and women in “the group”: Anna’s relationship with Willi, her
encounters with Paul and George, and the women’s relationships with the
men more generally. Anna’s relationship with Maryrose has far less signifi-
cance. All of these are similar to the kinds of relationships explored in the
lengthier London sections of the book. In Africa, the relationships that are
most controversial are between the Boothbys’ cook (Jackson) and Paul, and
the cook’s wife (Marie) and George. The relationship between Jackson and
Marie (who are rarely named) is never narrativized; as Lessing has repeatedly
pointed out, she knew little of the intimate lives of Africans. Most of the first
segment of the black notebook is situated at the hotel, and Anna wants to
retrieve her African past through a revisionist lens. Almost immediately after
writing this section, however, she laments that she has produced yet another
nostalgic narrative (150). Crucially, this section ends with Anna’s observation
of Marie, the inspiration for her novel, Frontiers of War.
Anna observes that white men ruin both “the Boothbys’ cook” and “the
cook’s wife”; her language uncovers the striking parallels between Paul’s
“friendship” with Jackson and George’s “affair” with Marie. Both involve the
touching of the body across the colour bar, verboten in Southern Rhodesia,
as Paul understands when he puts his arm around Jackson’s shoulder in
full view of Mrs. Boothby: “And this contact between black and white
flesh was deliberate, to provoke any white person that might be watching”
(137). On the same page that Paul confusingly declares his love for Jackson,
“ ‘Anna dear, I would not love you so much if I didn’t love Jackson more,’ ”
George gushes, “ ‘Do you know, Anna, I love that woman, I love that woman
so much that . . . ’ ” (141, ellipsis in original). Both men employ terms of
endearment—friend, mistress—that obscure the complex power dynamics of
the relationships. Paul and George intimate that they are in consensual rela-
tionships, but Anna’s narrative recollection reveals much more complicated
racial and sexual power structures. George rationalizes, “ ‘Surely if one doesn’t
like the colour bar, she’s entitled to the proper word, as a measure of respect,
so to speak’ ” (129). The label “mistress” erases the fact that Marie is black,
and not “entitled” even to the limited privileges and agency of a white mis-
tress to a married man. Anna is witness to this argument between George and
Willi but makes limited interventions. While George in part recognizes his
hypocrisy (129), he fails to acknowledge the power relationship—a point only
partly understood when Anna, aroused, recognizes that he “needed a woman
to submit to him” (126). A young privileged idealist, Paul is using Jackson
mostly for shock value (119) and in the end is content to be addressed as
“Nkos” (chief ): after all, he concludes, it fits his “station in life” (123). These
two relationships function as, to borrow Eve Bertelsen’s phrase, “a remarkable
microcosm” of colonial Rhodesia’s complex sexual and racial politics (“The
Golden Notebook: The African Background” 36).
Anna recognizes that it is the homosexual relationship, or the mere sug-
gestion of it—white/white, white/black—that leads to Jackson and Marie’s
exile from Mashopi and the group. First, Jimmy kisses Paul “in the pres-
ence of Mrs Boothby” (143). Later that night Jackson tries to help a drunken
Jimmy to his feet: “Jimmy awoke, saw Jackson and lifted his arms like a newly
roused child and put them around Jackson’s neck. The black man said: ‘Baas
Jimmy, Baas Jimmy, you must go to bed. You must not be here.’ And Jimmy
said, ‘You love me, Jackson, don’t you, you love me, none of the others love
me’ ” (145). A witness to this scene, Anna notices Jackson’s face before he is
aware of the presence of others in the kitchen: “[h]e did not know that he was
being watched”; his face is “angry and troubled” (145). Though emotions and
thoughts exist beneath the mask of subservience, Anna has perspectival lim-
its. Does Jackson resent the false intimacy, his subjection to both flagrant and
masked instances of white supremacy and authority? In Manning the Nation,
Kizito Muchemwa and Robert Muponde argue that Zimbabwean masculin-
ities are not and never have been “homogeneous and univocal” (xvi). A man
like Jackson needs to be understood in terms of his fractured patriarchal
authority; after all, he has no control over white men’s (and women’s) use of
his own body (and his wife’s). Another witness to the scene between Jackson
and Jimmy, Mrs. Boothby, immediately fires Jackson, an action that severely
disrupts his ability to function as a husband and a father figure. Regarding the
“repressed subject of homosexuality” (399) in The Golden Notebook, Joseph
Boone argues that it is expelled, like Jackson, from the narrative—or perhaps
sublimated. Boone suggests, “In Anna’s novel . . . the miscegenation is much
more romanticized” (402). The more acceptable pairing is between George
and Marie, but does Anna see Marie as clearly as Jackson? Even her vision of
him is circumscribed.
Marie is a more elusive character than her husband. She is “the woman in
the caravan,” “the cook’s wife,” and “the mistress.” Anna’s relationship with
Marie is mediated through George; they never, as far as we know, talk, even
superficially. Although it is never stated, at the beginning of the Mashopi
memoir it is implied that “the woman in the caravan” is white, and Anna
is “jealous” of her (129). When she learns that the woman is black she is
“shocked” (130), but, unlike Willi, she is ready to acknowledge her hypocrisy.
George, linking the two women through his desires, creates a new, but indi-
rect, intimacy between them: “ ‘Anna, I could take you to bed now—and
then Marie, that’s my black girl, and then go back to my wife tonight and
have her, and be happy with all three of you’ ” (133–34). As George declares
his triadic fantasy with his hand on her breast, Anna is torn between arousal
and repulsion; ultimately, though, she “feel[s] caged” (134). A writer, she does
not imagine herself into Marie’s life and perspective, something she does later
with black men (516–17; Boone 399).
Frantz Fanon does something similar in his reflections on cross-racial sex-
uality and desire in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon attempts to articulate
black women’s desire for white men, but ultimately only explores the terrible
impact on black men: a profound sense of “insignificance” (50). In a similar
vein, Marie speaks once, as reported by George, and only to convey her hus-
band’s kindness: “ ‘He’s a good husband to me,’ she said. ‘He’s kind to me and
all my children’ ” (141). Anna is more interested in watching than listening
to Marie. Recent feminist scholarship, including Margaret Daymond’s South
African Feminisms, has emphasized listening. In her introduction to the col-
lection of essays, Daymond insists that white South African women need to
“listen” to black South African women (xxi), but this is complicated at the
Mashopi hotel in The Golden Notebook, where black and white women have
few opportunities for exchange. Marie “creep[ing] down” to George’s cara-
van (150) provides the inspiration for Anna’s Frontiers of War, but there is no
understanding of the black woman’s motivation or desire. This final moment
in the first segment of the black notebook captures the failure of women to
connect across the colour bar to form a “community of purpose” (Daymond
xix) that isn’t mediated by colonial patriarchy.10
In addition to being an observer whose view is both facilitated and
obscured by white male intimates, Anna is invited by white men—as she
describes it in the third segment of the black notebook—to participate in an
erotics of identification: two rape fantasies. Scattered throughout The Golden

Notebook are moments when Anna tries to imagine herself as other people.
Once she tries to imagine herself as an African man, her friend Mr. Mathlong,
but ends up as “the mad Charlie Themba.” What she imagines is a colonial
fantasy of African savagery from which there is no retreat (516–17). Enact-
ing a form of violent penetration, from Anna’s perspective, he “melted into
me” (517). It is an unsettling psychological and isolated experience. In the
same segment of the black notebook, Anna recalls that at Mashopi, the men
in her group invited the two white women (Anna and Maryrose) to par-
ticipate in a rape fantasy in which they were captured Mashona women
ravished by Matabele warriors. Paul explains that “we [the men] will die a
painful death,” but “[y]ou lucky women” will be “dragged off ” by the “vir-
ile Matabele.” The two men who are caught kissing, Paul and Jimmy, propel
this fantasy forward while the two women mildly (through subtle head move-
ments) repudiate their desire for such a scenario (373–74, emphasis added).
The scene is interesting on several levels: it accentuates the homoerotics of the
cross-racial sexual fantasy11 ; it exposes the ongoing concern over Black Peril
in forties Southern Rhodesia12 ; and, perhaps most importantly, it reveals the
white women’s reluctance to occupy a black woman’s embodied experience.
Later in this notebook, Anna pastes a pastiche story by James Schaffer,
“Blood on the Banana Leaves,” its exaggerated irony missed by the edi-
tor of a literary magazine who “ask[ed] to be allowed to publish it” (389).
Once again, a white man’s narrative mediates Anna’s relationship to the black
woman (and, by extension, the black man). The story captures a hyper-
bolic exchange between John and Noni, an African couple who must reckon
with Noni’s rape by “the white trader” (389). The story’s symbolism is over-
wrought (“cannibal-raped soil,” “raped banana leaves”); the child from the
rape is a result of “mingling bloods” (391). John must join his “brothers”
in the city and “seek out the white man’s lust and kill it” (391). This lust
is for African land and African women, a problematical pairing. The story
gives voice to the black woman, but this is compromised by its content and
form, and by its eroticizing of Noni and her rape. Her body is described
as a series of parts: “new-lipsticked lips” (389), “sway[ing] hips,” “maiden
thighs,” and “mysterious giving womb” (390). Even though Anna did not
write the story—although it is possible that James Schaffer might be another
of Anna’s several writing personas—she participated in its dissemination, and
the unnamed editor of Anna’s notebooks declares, “Anna and he wrote no
more bits of pastiche” (389). It is implied, but never stated, that Anna is
ashamed of her complicity with fantasies about rape and black women.
The end of the black notebook leaves us with an ambiguous scene, Anna’s
dream about a film set in Central Africa. Someone has turned her novel into
a screenplay and she no longer has control over the story. There is the direc-
tor, the cast brought from England, and an African technical crew. Black
men operate the cameras, which appear to be guns, and corroborate in the
recording of what actually happened. The scene demonstrates the uneasy
collaboration of black and white men—but both white women and black
women are absented from this scene. There is significant ambiguity in the
black notebook’s final moment.
Conclusion: The Legacy of The Golden Notebook for

Zimbabwean Women Writers
As Margaret Daymond points out in her introduction to South African
Feminisms, South Africa (and Southern Rhodesia) missed the feminist revolu-
tion of the sixties and seventies. It was not until the end of apartheid in South
Africa (1994) and white minority rule in Southern Rhodesia (1980) that gen-
der studies began to proliferate in these countries. In Southern Rhodesia,
the relationships between black and white women were at best paternalistic
(as evidenced in the Homecraft Movements13 ), often exploitative and even
brutal. At mid-century, white Rhodesian women fought to ensure that only
black men worked in their homes as domestic laborers (and this explains
the central place of Jackson in the Mashopi hotel and Moses in the Turn-
ers’ home in The Grass Is Singing). White women feared that their husbands
would be drawn to black women’s primitive sensuality. A vivid instance of
this occurs when Mary observes black women “suckling” their babies in The
Grass Is Singing, and it is present in The Golden Notebook when Anna admits
she feels “resentment” and “jealousy” toward Marie. Given such conditions,
it was difficult—and continues to be difficult—for women to form alliances
“across the frontiers” of race. Both The Grass Is Singing and The Golden
Notebook expose the impediments to such relationships in colonial South-
ern Rhodesia. Daymond identifies the “historical relatedness” (xxxi) of white
and black women as an opportunity to form, as Mohanty puts it, “strategic
coalitions” (53). The question remains: does The Golden Notebook transcend
categories and speak to contemporary white and black Zimbabwean women
writers? Can it be construed as an African text?
Alexandra Fuller argues that Lessing had a “significant influence on all
Zimbabwean writers” (Neary), and Panashe Chigumadzi claims that Lessing
is “from Zimbabwe, but the world” too (David Smith). Lessing was deeply
interested in “giving back,” as NoViolet Bulawayo puts it (Robert Smith); in
the eighties and nineties, she was active in promoting literacy and distributing
books in Zimbabwe. Throughout African Laughter, she recounts her involve-
ment with the “Book Team”; at the start of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
she acknowledges the dearth of books in Zimbabwean schools; and posthu-

mously she donated 3,000 books to the Harare Public Library. Lessing has
exercised considerable influence on white Zimbabwean women writers, per-
haps most notably Fuller, who finally opts for memoir over fiction and, in
her National Geographic obituary on Lessing, even claims a personal connec-
tion to the writer through John Wisdom, a family friend and Lessing’s son
from her first marriage. Ashleigh Harris identifies memoir as the preferred
expression of white Zimbabwean identity (105), but the route from fiction
to memoir can be long and fraught. In “My Africa,” Fuller explains, “At the
start, I tried to write my life as fiction. I wrote eight or nine spectacularly
unsuccessful novels . . . . But the novels still felt like lies” (307). Fuller is not
alone in choosing memoir,14 and it is telling that Anna Wulf makes a sim-
ilarly conscious and difficult choice as she moves away from fiction toward
memoir to describe her African past in the black notebook. While Anna’s first
and only novel is a success, Fuller never managed to publish any of her eight
or nine novels, and decides (similarly to Anna) that memoir is more truthful
and honest.
While white women writers might identify with Lessing as a model for
their own desired subject positions, black Zimbabwean women writers have
a more ambivalent or ambiguous relationship to Lessing and, especially,
The Golden Notebook. While Anna refuses to identify with black women,
Lessing openly declares the parallels between young intelligent black girls in
Zimbabwe and her younger white intelligent self; in her Nobel acceptance
speech, she refers to an intelligent young black mother who identifies with
Anna Karenina. There is no sustained engagement with Lessing’s influence on
black Zimbabwean women writers, but it is there, if subtly: in the appearance
of “Doris” in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and in Petina Gappah’s
“Miss McConkey of Bridgewater Close.” It is also evident in the complex
ways in which writers such as Dangarembga, Vera, and Bulawayo reckon with
African pasts through the multifocal lenses of gender, race, and literary exper-
iment and innovation. All three of these award-winning writers explore the
predicament of memory and history for women and girls in Zimbabwe: the
past is revisioned and revisited, as is the case in all of Vera’s fiction, including
Nehanda; new forms are necessary, as is evident in Dangarembga’s modifi-
cation of the conventions of the bildungsroman; and disastrous encounters
unfold between white and black women, as happens throughout Bulawayo’s
We Need New Names.15
My reading of The Golden Notebook has been deliberately limited; I won-
der if anything else is possible given the breadth of Lessing’s most famous
novel. In this chapter, I have examined the internal and external dimen-
sions of the text—through reviews, reflections, and revisions; and through
white and black women’s relationships in Southern Rhodesia—in order to

comprehend the possibility of ethical relationships and intimacies “across the
frontiers” of gender and race. This possibility is evident in Anna’s discom-
fort with the ways in which white men mediate her relationships with black
women as well as her feelings of shame about her own representations of
black women. Another frontier to negotiate is that of generations. What is
the legacy of The Golden Notebook for contemporary Africanists and African
writers? Reviews and criticism of The Golden Notebook need to engage with
its complex racial and gender politics in order to accent its relevance to read-
ers, writers, and critics who continue to avoid it. I began this chapter with a
story about my emerging engagement with a (for me) neglected text. Anthony
O’Brien’s plea, it is time “to ask new questions of old histories” (55), can be
applied to a fresh review of the Africa represented in The Golden Notebook.
Notes
1. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook 75.
2. Lessing herself has written movingly on the paucity of books in Zimbabwe’s
schools in the eighties. See her Nobel speech (2007).
3. A few weeks later, a boy at a soccer match introduced me to the work of the
iconoclastic Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera. More than two decades
later, I co-edited a creative and critical collection on Marechera, Moving Spirit.
The seeds of our scholarship can be sown in unconventional ways.
4. Lessing talks about the persistence of the club in her interview with Eve Bertelsen:
“The club I’m told is exactly the same. When I went back [to Zimbabwe in 1982]
they said if I went to the club I would see that nothing whatsoever’s changed”
(“New Frontier” 137). The club I visited, Mutorashanga Country Club, appeared
in a 2002 article in The Telegraph: “The photograph published in yesterday’s
paper of white farmers and their families at the Mutorashanga Country Club in
Zimbabwe records the end of an era . . . . Cecil Rhodes’s imperial dream” (“The
End of Rhodes’s Dream”).
5. The narrator refers to “Central Africa,” rather than “Southern Rhodesia,” in
introducing the context of the black notebook. This is a clear reference to the
Central African Federation (CAF), which comprised Southern Rhodesia, North-
ern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. The Federation lasted from 1953 to 1963, and
thus covers the period of the novel.
6. An important exception to this is Alice Ridout’s work on transnational Lessing
studies. Ridout resists the impulse to “categorize [Lessing’s] work and ‘place,’ ”
and instead “identif[ies] her as a ‘Third Culture Kid’ and plac[es] her in the
context of recent theories of cosmopolitanism” (107). She goes on to “suggest
that the theory of ‘third culture’ could offer another such context [to The Golden
Notebook] and one that (particularly in international education) would be more
accessible to contemporary students” (124).
7. In “Book Slut,” a bookstore owner recalls that he read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Ner-
vous Conditions and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook “[b]efore spending a
summer in Zimbabwe” (Warsett). Both are set in the past and during periods of
war, but I am not aware of any scholarly study of their convergences.
8. A similar point is highlighted in another essay on the state of contemporary book
reviews: when a writer recalls the most “devastating review [he] ever received,” he
replies, “ ‘My answer was that it had never been written because the only person
who could write it was me. I know myself, my writing, and my weaknesses better
than anyone’ ” (Ciabattari).
9. See Susan Watkins’s chapter in Doris Lessing, “The Politics of Loss: Melancholy
Cosmopolitanism,” for an adroit reading of the Mashopi segments in The Golden
Notebook. Watkins convincingly argues that they are central to the novel’s focus
on “the loss of meaningful political engagement” (58).
10. See Eva Hunter’s article, “A Change of Thinking: White Women’s Writing.”
Hunter explores the wide gulf that continues to separate white and black women
in South Africa, and that is captured in white women’s writing.
11. Curiously, Boone does not examine this moment in his study of “sexual
apartheid” in Libidinal Currents.
12. See Jock McCulloch’s Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern
Rhodesia, 1902–1935, for a comprehensive examination of the “moral panics”
that besieged the colony. The regime was far more concerned with the separation
of black men and white women, rather than the more prevalent liaisons between
white men and black women.
13. See Carolyn Martin Shaw, “Sticks and Stones: Black and White Women in the
Homecraft Movement in Colonial Zimbabwe.”
14. See Jennifer Armstrong, Minus the Morning; Cathy Buckle, African Tears; Wendy
Kann, Casting with a Fragile Thread ; Chris Mears, Goodbye Rhodesia; and Lauren
St John, Rainbow’s End.
15. In an interview with Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Bulawayo identifies Yvonne Vera
as the writer who “inspires me more than any other writer because I care about
the same things she cares about; from the poetic grace of language to (feminist)
themes to the writer’s spirit of courage, that bravery to say things that would not
normally be said” (NoViolet Mhka Bulawayo Speaks!”).
Works Cited
Armstrong, Jennifer. Minus the Morning: A Zimbabwean/Rhodesian Memoir. Raleigh,
NC: Lulu, 2009. Print.
Bentley, Nick. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fic-
tion.” Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Ed. Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins. London:
Continuum, 2009. 44–60. Print.
Bertelsen, Eve. “Acknowledging a New Frontier.” Doris Lessing: Conversations. Ed. Earl
G. Ingersoll. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1994. 120–45. Print.
——. “The Golden Notebook: The African Background.” Approaches to Teaching

Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Ed. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose.
New York: MLA, 1989. 30–36. Print.
Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism.
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print.
Brockes, Emma. “A Singular Survivor.” The Guardian: n. pag. 24 Apr. 1999. Web.
8 July 2014.
Brookner, Anita. “Women against Men.” London Review of Books 4.17 (2 Sept. 1982):
19–20. Print.
Buckle, Cathy. African Tears: The Zimbabwe Land Invasions. Johannesburg: Covos-
Day, 2001. Print.
Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. New York: Little, Brown and Company,
2013. Print.
Cairnie, Julie, and Dobrota Pucherova. Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo
Marechera in the Twenty-First Century. Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012. Print.
Ciabattari, Jane. “The Future of Book Reviews: Critics vs. Amazon Reviewers.” The
Daily Beast: n. pag. 12 May 2011. Web. 8 July 2014.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. Seattle: Seal Press, 1989. Print.
Daymond, Margaret. “Introduction.” South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and
Criticism 1990–1994. Ed. M. J. Daymond. New York and London: Garland, 1996.
xiii–xlix. Print.
De Mul, Sarah. “Doris Lessing, Feminism, and the Representation of Zimbabwe.”
European Journal of Women’s Studies 16.1 (2009): 33–51. Print.
“Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, 50 Years On.” The Guardian: n. pag. 6 Apr. 2012.
Web. 8 July 2014.
“The End of Rhodes’s Dream.” The Telegraph: n. pag. 8 Aug. 2002. Web. 8 July 2014.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. 1952.
New York: Grove Press, 1967. Print.
Fraser, Marian Botsford. The Golden Notebook. In “Great Disappointments: Ten LRC
Contributors Warn of ‘Classic’ Books with Oversized Reputations.” Literary Review
of Canada: n. pag. Dec. 2007. Web. 8 July 2014.
Fuller, Alexandra. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. New York:
Random, 2001. Print.
——. “First Person: Admiring Doris Lessing’s Decision to Forgo an Ordinary, Decent
Life.” National Geographic: n. pag. 19 Nov. 2013. Web. 29 June 2014.
——. “My Africa.” Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. New
York: Random House, 2001. 305–308. Print.
Gappah, Petina. “Miss McConkey of Bridgewater Close.” The Guardian: n. pag. 5
Dec. 2009. Web. 21 June 2014.
Harris, Ashleigh. “Writing Home: Inscriptions of Whiteness/Descriptions of Belong-
ing in White Zimbabwean Memoir-autobiography.” Versions of Zimbabwe: New
Approaches to Literature and Culture. Ed. Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac.
Harare: Weaver Press, 2005. 103–17. Print.
Howe, Irving. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook Was the Most Exciting Novel of
the 1960s.” New Republic: n. pag. 1962. Web. 8 July 2014.
Hu, Jane. “A Short History of Book Reviewing’s Long Decline.” The Awl: n. pag.
15 June 2012. Web. 8 July 2014.
Hunter, Eva. “A Change of Thinking: White Women’s Writing.” Current Writing: Text
and Reception in Southern Africa 21.1–2 (2009): 78–96. Print.
Kann, Wendy. Casting with a Fragile Thread (A Story of Sisters and Africa). New York:
Picador, 2006. Print.
Lessing, Doris. African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe. London: Flamingo, 1992.
——. “Doris Lessing: On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.” Nobel Lecture: n. pag. 7
Dec. 2007. Web. 8 July 2014.
——. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. Print.
——. The Grass Is Singing. 1950. London: Heinemann, 1983. Print.
——. “Guarded Welcome: Doris Lessing on the History of The Golden Notebook’s
Troubled Reception.” The Guardian: n. pag. 27 Jan. 2007. Web. 21 June 2014.
——. Time Bites: Views and Reviews. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Print.
——. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. London:
Livingstone, David. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. London:
J. Murray, 1857. Print.
Lopez, Alfred J. “Introduction: Whiteness After Empire.” Postcolonial Whiteness:
A Critical Reader on Race and Empire. Ed. Alfred J. Lopez. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2005. 1–30. Print.
McCulloch, Jock. Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–
1935. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. Print.
Mears, Chris. Goodbye Rhodesia. East Sussex: Antony Rowe, 2005. Print.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and
the Politics of Feminism.” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Ed.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1991. Print.
Muchemwa, Kizito Z., and Robert Muponde. “Introduction: Manning the Nation.”
Manning the Nation: Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society. Ed. Kizito
Muchemwa and Robert Muponde. Johannesburg: Jacana Press, 2007. xv–xxiii.
Print.
Mushakavanhu, Tinashe. “Moments with a Nobel Laureate: Doris Lessing.” Mazwi:
A Zimbabwean Journal n.d. Web. 8 July 2014.
——. “NoViolet Mhka Bulawayo Speaks!” Mazwi: A Zimbabwean Journal n.d. Web.
8 July 2014.
Neary, Lynn. “Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing.” NPR Books: n. pag.
11 Oct. 2007. Web. 8 July 2014.
O’Brien, Anthony. “Staging Whiteness: Beckett, Havel, Maponya.” Theatre Journal
46 (1994): 45–61. Print.
Ridout, Alice. “Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin: The Autobiography of a Cosmopolitan
‘Third Culture Kid.’ ” Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Ed. Alice Ridout and Susan
Watkins. London: Continuum, 2009. 107–28. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “Going on Fifty: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” The
Women’s Review of Books 29.5 (Sept.–Oct. 2012): 24. Web. 8 July 2014.
Shaw, Carolyn Martin. “Sticks and Stones: Black and White Women in the Homecraft
Movement in Colonial Zimbabwe.” Race/Ethnicity 1.2 (Spring 2008): 253–78.
Print.
Smith, David. “Doris Lessing’s Last Gift: 3,000 Books Donated to Public Library in
Zimbabwe.” The Guardian: n. page. 26 Aug. 2014. Web. 8 July 2014.
Smith, Robert. “NoViolet Bulawayo: The Interview. Word Christchurch.”
Christchurch City Libraries Blog 2 Sept. 2014. Web. 20 Sept. 2014.
St John, Lauren. Rainbow’s End: A Memoir of Childhood, War, and an African Farm.
New York: Scribner, 2007. Print.
Vera, Yvonne. Nehanda. Harare: Baobab, 1993. Print.
von Schwarzkopf, Margarete. “Placing Their Fingers on the Wounds of Our Times.”
Doris Lessing: Conversations. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Princeton: Ontario Review Press,
1994. 102–108. Print.
Warsett, Gili. “An Interview with David Del Vicchio of Idlewild Books.” Bookslut: n.
pag. Nov. 2008. Web 8 July 2014.
Watkins, Susan. Doris Lessing. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2010.
Print.
Wilson, Sharon. “Postcolonial Identities in The Golden Notebook.” Doris Lessing
Studies 28.1 (Winter 2009): 17–21. Print.
CHAPTER 2
Doris Lessing and the Madness

of Nuclear Deterrence
Mark Pedretti
D
oris Lessing’s long and multifaceted history of antinuclear activism
is by this point well known. She was present at the formation of
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957 and par-
ticipated in the famous first Aldermaston March of 1958 (and several of the
subsequent annual marches), an event she later recounted in The Four-Gated
City (1969).1 But, according to her autobiography Walking in the Shade, after
she was spuriously conscripted into the Committee of a Hundred, the CND’s
de facto leadership, she grew frustrated with the organized antinuclear move-
ment for many of the same reasons she had previously become disenchanted
with communism:
Here again was the potent and charismatic leader, this time Ralph Schoenman,
a young American. It was he who spoke, in that style perfected by History itself,
combining idealism with a cold, clipped precision, and full of contempt for
opponents, who were by definition cowards, poltroons, and morally defective,
for the people in this room had on their shoulders the responsibility for the
future of all humankind. (294)
Although she remained consistently engaged in antinuclear politics, Lessing

would later make waves in the eighties by turning against the CND’s promo-
tion of total disarmament, instead to advocate for civil defense. She argued
that a rational plan for protecting England’s citizenry would ensure the sur-
vival of some human remnant in the event of a full-scale nuclear war—even
though civil defense was roundly condemned by its opponents for making
war more likely by virtue of being prepared for it, putting her in the camp of
34 ● Mark Pedretti
Martin Amis’s writers who “just don’t get it” when it comes to thinking about
the bomb (5).2 Nonetheless, Per Wästberg, in his introduction to her Nobel
Prize address, included Lessing’s abiding attention to the threat of nuclear
war among her many contributions, offering a synoptic vantage on a life-
long engagement with questions about the implications of humanity’s most
destructive weapon.3
Given this abiding stance, it is surprising that Lessing’s literary engage-
ments with nuclear weapons have not been more than a minor concern
in scholarly criticism of her fiction. Even though the atomic bomb makes
frequent appearances in The Golden Notebook, it does so in some of the
novel’s most opaque passages, making it easy to overlook in favor of the
more ready-to-hand questions that punctuate these same scenes. Nonethe-
less, Lessing’s personal investment in antinuclear politics should alert us to the
ways that the bomb might manifest itself in a seminal text like The Golden
Notebook. While that subject has been well explored in the context of her
later, more speculative fiction, this chapter attempts to trace the lineaments
of Lessing’s antinuclear posture in her landmark novel, filling a critical gap
in approaches to understanding The Golden Notebook. I will contend that
this critical oversight of the nuclear question in The Golden Notebook has
everything to do with its assimilation to a particular form of “nuclear criti-
cism” that treats postwar fiction under a broad umbrella of postmodernism,
but where the latter is also inflected by a distinctly American experience
of the Cold War threat of total annihilation. While this critical narrative
does a great deal to situate the stylistic facets of postmodernism in their
historical moment, it also covers over national variations that might dis-
tinguish postwar British literature from its American counterpart. That is,
inasmuch as Lessing’s engagement in The Golden Notebook with the subject
of nuclear weapons has been treated critically according to a conventional
understanding of the stylistic tropes of postmodernism, it has also implic-
itly aligned the text with a broader, decisively American Cold War narrative.
I hope to demonstrate how The Golden Notebook resists the universal author-
ity afforded to this American narrative while also arguing for a distinct set
of coordinates for charting an as yet unrecognized field of British nuclear
literature.
Postmodernism and National Narratives of the Atomic Age

When Lessing’s literary engagements with nuclear weapons have been
addressed in the criticism of her novels, they have been assimilated to a
decidedly American strain of “nuclear criticism,”4 premised in large part on
the United States’ national Cold War narrative. The reasons for this could
Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence ● 35
not be more obvious: as one of the primary Cold War belligerents and the
only nation to detonate atomic bombs during wartime, the United States
became a privileged place where the discourses of nuclear weapons (strategic,
geopolitical, historical, psychological, popular, etc.) were constituted. Inas-
much as the United States was the originator, perpetrator, proliferator, and
sometime defender of the bomb, its self-fashioned narratives have become
determinative of the very being of the bomb itself. Correspondingly, the
bomb also represented a persistent source of literary fascination for postwar
American writers: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Agee, Herman Wouk,
Pat Frank, Pearl S. Buck, Tillie Olsen, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon,
Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and Richard Powers—not to
mention science-fiction luminaries like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and
Isaac Asimov—have all written significantly about the imagined prospect of
nuclear war.5 While there are certainly exceptions to this national monopoly
(Nevil Shute, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, and Martin Amis come read-
ily to mind), the United States has arguably produced more literature about
nuclear weapons and war than has any other nation. Apparently, as a result,
nuclear literature from other national traditions has been generally under-
stood according to the topoi articulated by American nuclear literature and
the criticism about it.
Those topoi were largely established at a 1984 conference at Cornell Uni-
versity on the subject of “nuclear criticism,” and later published in a special
issue of Diacritics. The critical tradition inaugurated there by notable scholars
like Jacques Derrida and Frances Ferguson, and later augmented and modi-
fied by Richard Klein and Alan Nadel, among others, has largely set the tone
for how literature regarding the bomb is interpreted. While Peter Schwenger
contended in 1992 that “the work that followed in nuclear criticism is already
too variegated, and too extensive, to sum up readily” (xii), the hindsight of
twenty additional years allows us to recognize certain predictable tropes of
this critical practice, which continue to inform more recent studies of Cold
War literary production. In particular, the majority of (American) criticism
of (American) nuclear literature has fastidiously emphasized what Derrida
famously referred to in his Cornell paper, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” as the
“fabulously textual” nature of nuclear war. Derrida observes that since nuclear
war has never taken place, “one can only talk and write about it. . . . The ter-
rifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never
the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text” (23). In light of this
problem of reference, “nuclear war” can be seen as “an extreme example of
the dominance of the signifier over the signified” (Schwenger xv) and thus
aligned with the play of signification found in a broader postmodernism or
poststructuralism.
Derrida goes on to imbricate the nuclear epoch more deeply with his
own project of deconstruction, arguing that “the hypothesis of this total
destruction watches over deconstruction, it guides its footsteps” by offering a
vantage from which to view the history of historicity in its totality (27), and
thus offering an intriguing critical possibility linking a rigorous deconstruc-
tion with the nuclear age—one that, nevertheless, remains largely unrealized.
Instead, a more basic notion of linguistic indeterminacy and self-reference—
the hallmarks of American literary postmodernism—has become axiomatic
in the broader critical field. Tony Jackson, for instance, attributes to the
nuclear age an almost causal force in the advent of the postmodern, arguing,
“Though many historical elements had to combine to create some kind of
sufficient conditions for this historical appearance” of postmodernism, “Cold
War nuclear anxiety, which is to say the Cold War sense of an ending, is one
most important such element” (325). While Jackson makes it plain that “I do
not claim that deterrence thinking straightforwardly caused poststructural-
ist (or more broadly, postmodern) conceptuality to emerge,” the distinction
between causation and correlation seems minimal: “I do hold that the Cold
War atmosphere was instrumental in enabling such conceptuality to appear
and thrive as it did” (327, emphasis in original). Similarly, Tobin Siebers
finds in the poststructuralist critique of agency an analogue to Cold War
fears about irrational action, “fail-safe systems,” and the risk of accidental
launch.6 And Alan Nadel’s seminal text Containment Culture: American Nar-
ratives, Postmodernism, and the Nuclear Age (1995) proceeds by examining the
production of a discourse of domestic “containment” to marginalize sexual,
racial, and political Others in the fifties, but which, in somewhat predictable
fashion, undoes itself under the weight of “its blindness, its contradictions,
and its duplicities . . . displaying many traits that would later be associated
with ‘postmodernism’ ” (3).
The syllogism thus runs like this: the atomic bomb is an American inven-
tion; postwar American authors have written extensively about the bomb;
the form of that literature has largely taken the shape of what we would
call “postmodernism”; criticism about that literature is reliant upon, if not
productive of, the poststructural problematic of linguistic reference; ergo, lit-
erature about the bomb must be periodized as belonging to the postmodern
epoch and according to this central, and decidedly national, problematic.
Nadel’s text is certainly exemplary in this regard, along with similar studies
from the first wave of “nuclear criticism” in the nineties like Schwenger’s,
Siebers’s, or Margot Henriksen’s Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Cul-
ture in the Atomic Age (1997). But this assumption lives on in Daniel
Grausam’s more recent On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the
Cold War (2011), which seeks “to identify the historical connection between
postmodernism and the nuclear age” (17); and in Daniel Cordle’s States of
Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism, and United States Fiction and Prose
(2008), which starts with the premise that
the issues of representation raised by nuclear contexts can be seen

as, if not identical, certainly continuous with those associated with
postmodernism. . . . Furthermore, representational challenges posed to lan-
guage and literature by the sheer scale of destruction threatened by nuclear
technology are contiguous with the postmodern preoccupation with problem-
atic relations between signifier and signified. (7–8)7
Cordle’s pronouncement is a succinct statement of the assumption that

has guided the vast majority of “nuclear criticism,” and has correspond-
ingly emphasized a particularly American narrative of postmodernism orga-
nized around familiar set-pieces of indeterminacy, fragmentation, irony, and
pastiche.8
The Golden Notebook has been equally drawn into this critical whirlwind.
Perhaps because of Lessing’s later Canopus in Argos novels (1979–83), in
which her turn to “space fiction” evinces a more obvious postmodernism,9
the formal experimentation of earlier novels like The Golden Notebook and
The Four-Gated City has undergone a kind of retrospective reperiodization.
Even when taken on its own terms, the “fragmented relativity of forms”
in The Golden Notebook is treated as a sign of its incipient postmodernism
(Duyfhuizen 210). Molly Hite, for one, has contended that the novel’s cri-
tiques of both narrative-historical totality and a unified subject, along with
“meaningful statements describing the incapacity of language to mean,” sug-
gest that it “has more in common with the narrative ruptures of postmodern
writing than either its critical reception or its own injunctions to holism
might indicate” (20, 17).10 The text’s attention to nuclear issues, however,
has largely been treated in passing; it has only recently received sustained
consideration in Sarah Henstra’s The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-
Century English Fiction (2009), where Henstra nevertheless largely recapitu-
lates the critical narrative I have sketched above. In her account, irony is the
privileged figure for addressing the “unmournable” event of a future nuclear
war and the fragmentation of time it entails: “While Lessing resists one kind
of irony as defeatist and crippling, another, perhaps deeper irony proves to be
necessary to existence: to live as though death wasn’t around the corner, to
speak as though words weren’t futile and meaningless” (108).11 This empha-
sis on irony places us back in familiar postmodern territory, sweeping The
Golden Notebook into the dominant critical narrative of American “nuclear
criticism.”
This postmodern/“post-nuclear” alignment12 certainly has much to rec-

ommend it, and Henstra’s reading is illuminating in calling attention to
the narrative and psychological dilemmas implied by a “proleptic mourn-
ing, a future-oriented grief in abeyance” (81) that can only be worked
through via Julia Kristeva’s concept of melancholia, thus adding a valuable
dimension to the conversation about our relation to nuclear weapons. More
generally, I doubt that anyone would question whether later nuclear texts
like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest (1996) should be interpreted otherwise than under a rubric of
postmodernism. But I have argued elsewhere that this synchronic/diachronic
alignment of narrative style and historical epoch is problematic in terms of
how it treats early Cold War authors like John Hersey and John Hawkes (or,
for that matter, Lowell, Plath, Ralph Ellison, or William S. Burroughs) as
proto-postmodern.13 In this chapter, I want to extend that critique by fol-
lowing Fredric Jameson’s argument for the necessity of national distinctions
in the practice of periodization.14 That is, if the rhetoric of postmodernism
has dominated the discussion of nuclear literature, and if that version of
postmodernism is distinctly American in character, then we are justified in
asking, What might we gain if we step outside of that guiding literary-critical
rubric, if we view Cold War literary production from the perspective of
nations other than the constitutive binary of the United States and the Soviet
Union?15
Working with, while revising, many of Henstra’s premises, I believe
that Lessing’s text can function as a crucial site at which to interro-
gate these national and historical periodizing assumptions. In lieu of the
American/postmodern homology that has dominated the study of nuclear
literature, I will argue that The Golden Notebook offers a different way to
understand the nuclear epoch, on both its formal and national axes, from
a vantage outside of those of its primary belligerents. While it is impos-
sible to reduce any single text to what Jameson would term its “national
allegory” (“Third-World Literature” 69), I find Lessing’s watershed novel
instructive in articulating the trajectory of a distinctly British field of nuclear
literature, irreducible to the tenets of either American postmodernism or
European deconstruction.16 The British national experience of the Cold War,
and the threat of its nuclear annihilation, had its own vicissitudes, its own
Weltanschauung, its own unique moments and events (the relative impor-
tance of, say, the Suez Crisis of 1956 over the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962).
This national context is something that the tradition of literary criticism
has heretofore overlooked, or at the least subsumed under the rhetoric of
its guiding American-postmodern narrative. In this regard, Britain’s partic-
ipation in the Cold War is notably distinct from that of its American ally:
it was more vulnerable, more susceptible to the whims of the hostile parties
between which it was geographically and politically caught. The Golden Note-
book offers a crucial site at which to witness the political and aesthetic stakes
of that predicament.
British Nuclear Policy and the Psychology of Deterrence

The British national narrative of nuclear weapons is markedly different from
that of the United States. While the United States had enough landmass to
anticipate national survival, Britain quickly recognized in the early postwar
period its own vulnerability to nuclear attack. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
when the threat of atomic bombardment in the United Kingdom was min-
imal, the country nonetheless began to prepare civil defense measures, in
many ways modeled on the fire brigades of the Blitz. Prior to the advent
of the hydrogen bomb, Britain understood nuclear attack as an extreme ver-
sion of what the nation had endured in World War II, and thus protected
against it with all of the same civil defense measures: first aid, shelters, and
firefighting. Nonetheless, these measures made the atomic bomb a visible part
of postwar British consciousness. Much more than the “nuclear unconscious”
that American critics claim pervaded the landscape on one side of the Atlantic
(Davis xviii), the British Civil Defence Corps constituted, on the other, a per-
sistent reminder of the threat of nuclear annihilation woven into the fabric
of daily civic life. As Matthew Grant, studying recently declassified Home
Office documents of the postwar period, has observed:
Civil defence is important not just for the plans to meet an attack that never
came, vital though that is[;] it is also central to what actually happened in
the cold war. Civil defence was a real, living and breathing cold war policy
that had ramifications for the government’s wider defence policy and which
itself can only be understood as part of a set of interlocking factors shaping
Britain’s early cold war response. . . . Every year from 1950 to 1963, bar the
election year of 1959, ordinary Britons were confronted with a vast array of
advertising encouraging them to volunteer for training to fight a nuclear war
in one of the civil defence services, with the Civil Defence Corps taking the
lead. Newspaper advertisements, ministerial broadcasts and public speeches,
cinema shorts, television and radio items, and local measures such as door-to-
door approaches, leafleting, and the staging of pageants and demonstrations at
fetes and country fairs all showed the public what civil defence was, what it
could do, and how important it was. (4)
In these ways, the threat of nuclear war was never far from the British national
imagination, constantly reinscribed through a set of micro-practices that were
so ordinary as to elide comment. If the nuclear threat in the United States
constituted, as William Chaloupka has claimed, “a compulsion” by which
“we invoke the nuke, all the time” (17), then in Britain nuclear weapons were
normalized through the daily preparation for their eventual use.
In addition to this distinguishing nuclear habitus, Britain embraced a doc-
trine of nuclear deterrence much earlier than either the United States or its
NATO allies. By the time that both the United States and the Soviet Union
had tested thermonuclear hydrogen bombs in 1954—capable of destruction
on a scale far greater than the fission bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and, as Robert Jay Lifton has said, literally “limitless, infinite” in their destruc-
tive potential (Genocidal Mentality 26)—British policymakers realized that,
in the event of even a limited nuclear war, the “offshore island” (to borrow
from the title of Marghanita Laski’s play) would be rapidly and summar-
ily destroyed. Following on the heels of the “Strath Report” of 1955, the
British public became acutely aware either that a full-scale thermonuclear war
between the United States (which still maintained forward projection bases in
England) and the Soviet Union would handily wipe out the British homeland
in one fell swoop or that the ensuing radiation cloud from regional targets
would produce the same effect, only days or weeks slower. As a result, Britain
recognized that its only hope for winning a nuclear war was never to fight
one; it would protect itself through the threat of nuclear retaliation rather
than its execution. As Roger Ruston has contended, Britain had no choice,
in the midst of postwar reconstruction, but “to solve the economic problem
of building massive deterrent power” by embracing “the fact that such deter-
rence appeared openly permissible [as] a direct result of the breakup of the
moral consensus that accompanied the bombing campaigns of World War
II” (43, emphasis in original). So complete was this embrace of deterrence
that The Economist could confidently claim in 1955:
Defence is now deterrence. Even with atomic bombs this was increasingly evi-
dent. . . . But with H-bombs, there is little or no defence, and the deterrent is
overwhelming. Attack has become much the best part of defence, and by the
same token the readiness to attack has become much more likely to succeed
in its main objective of preventing the war from ever happening. The new
doctrine is not easy to assimilate. But it is cast-iron in its logic.
(“From Defence to Deterrence” 723)
Years before the United States’ doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction,

Britain carved out a distinct strategic position in the early Cold War era,
which thus makes the reactions of its publics—literary or otherwise—worthy
of consideration.
As a doctrine, deterrence—a robust and aggressive military posture
intended to prevent war rather than to start it—relies on paradox. Leaving
aside the strategic contradiction of announcing a military threat in order
never to use it,17 Lifton has argued that adopting a doctrine of nuclear
deterrence entails a kind of psychological double-dealing, in which we must
overlook the glaring “nuclear absurdity” of preparing for our own extinction
and thus rely on the very weapons that threaten us by turning a blind eye to
what they can actually do (Genocidal Mentality 2, 4). In this convoluted logic,
the bomb becomes the cure for its own disease, forcing an embrace of what
Nadel calls the “dual nature” of nuclear power, as both salvation and ultimate
menace (18). To maintain this contradictory identity requires one to borrow
from quantum mechanics the concept of complementarity:
[Italian physicist Emilio Segrè said,] “Two magnitudes are complementary

when the measurement of one of them prevents the accurate simultaneous
measurement of the other. Similarly, two concepts are complementary when
one imposes limitations on the other.” The definition seems to suggest that
one can simultaneously imagine the bomb as destructive and evil on the one
hand and as a means of human redemption on the other, but that the two posi-
tions cannot be combined or reconciled with one another, because that would
lead to the mismeasure or distortion of one of them.
(Lifton, Genocidal Mentality 112)
Ironically, the same revolution in physics that made possible the splitting of
the atom also provides a conceptual framework to hold its irreconcilable dual
nature in mental suspense.
In Lifton’s account, deterrence is actually subject-producing, generating
a “nuclear-weapons self ” capable of living with the contradiction of its dual
nature (Genocidal Mentality 213). That nuclear subject exists in a dissocia-
tive state, assigning portions of itself to each mutually exclusive aspect of the
deterrence framework:
Advocates of deterrence policies see a “bright side” to nuclear weapons: their

ostensible value for preventing war while maintaining national security. But
only by in some way shielding one’s mind from the dark horrors the weapons
would bring about “if deterrence fails,” can one embrace—or, at least, accept—
their beneficence. Thus deterrence requires a psychological aberration, by
which the mind separates, or “dissociates,” from certain of its elements.
(Genocidal Mentality 192)
Importantly—and I will return to this point later—this separation should

not be understood as a schism or a fracture, as though various parts of a pre-
viously unified psyche were assigned to different regions of the dissociated
self. Lifton describes the dissociative process as one of doubling, the reproduc-
tion of whole but discrete selves that inhabit the different subject positions
required by the contradictions of deterrence. The production of the nuclear

subject is an act of multiplication, not division. And once the self is doubled
in this way, there is nothing to prevent its further self-replication, doubling
and doubling again, ad infinitum. Moreover, the simple act of living in the
shadow of deterrence is enough to produce this kind of doubled subjectivity:
“In a real way we all lead something of a ‘double life’: we are aware at some
level that in a moment we and everyone and everything we have ever touched
or loved could be annihilated, and yet we go about our ordinary routines as
though no such threat exists” (Genocidal Mentality 38). It is this concept of
doubling, I contend, that can help us make sense of some of the more chal-
lenging aspects of The Golden Notebook while also situating it within a history
of British nuclear policy.
“Being several different people at once with no sense of time”

The atomic bomb first appears in The Golden Notebook in Anna’s blue note-
book, when she begins to add to the “personal document” of her diary
newspaper clippings detailing the Korean war, the Rosenberg trial, and
American, British, and Soviet nuclear tests (239–49). As she will later tell her
therapist, Mrs. Marks, also known as “Mother Sugar,” these clippings func-
tion as a supplement to her “experience” (250), both adding to and taking the
place of the interiority the journal is supposed to record. When Mother Sugar
asks Anna whether this “record of war, murder, chaos, misery . . . seems to you
the truth of the last few years,” Anna responds by intimating that these world-
historical events are in fact producing her subjectivity, “as if I were involved
in [them] personally” (250–51). Anna insists that they are not in her diary
merely for perspective or for aphoristic wisdom—“all right, everything has
two faces, etc.” (251)—but are in fact forming her identity. Mother Sugar,
with her “Jungian proclivities” for archetypal totality (Hite 18), is unable to
understand how the terror of the bomb could be working on Anna in this
way, and, like so many of their sessions, the conversation ends in an impasse.
But, importantly, this therapeutic stalemate cannot be the result of a ruptured
or fissured consciousness on Anna’s part, for that would be simply the defi-
cient condition of coherent self-identity, and Mrs. Marks would not be so
baffled by it. Rather, the bomb seems to be working on Anna in a different
way, no less constitutive, but outside of the fragmented/unified dichotomy
that undergirds her therapy sessions.
This process of subject formation takes place for Anna primarily in her
dreams, perhaps as part of her “nuclear unconscious”; her newspaper clip-
pings serve as “an instruction to [her] self of how to dream?” asks Mother
Sugar (251). Anna’s detailed descriptions of her dreams, taken together, might
constitute a narrative of her experience in the shadow of nuclear destruction.

In particular, the bomb makes a large appearance in a central passage where
Anna recounts one of her dreams:
I stood in a blue mist of space while the globe turned, wearing shades of red
for the communist countries, and a patchwork of colours for the rest of the
world. . . . Then I look and it is like a vision—time has gone and the whole
history of man, the long story of mankind, is present in what I see now, and
it is like a great soaring hymn of joy and triumph in which pain is a small
lively counterpoint. And I look and I see the red areas are being invaded by the
bright different colours of the other parts of the world. The colours are melting
and flowing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the world becomes
whole, all one beautiful glittering colour, but a colour I have never seen in life.
This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell
up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes—I was suddenly standing in
space, in silence. Beneath me was silence. The slowly turning world was slowly
dissolving, disintegrating and flying off into fragments, all through space, so
that all around me were weightless fragments drifting about, bouncing into
each other and drifting away. The world had gone, and there was chaos. I was
alone in chaos. And very clear in my ear a small voice said: Somebody pulled a
thread of the fabric and it all dissolved. I woke up, joyful and elated. (298–99)
It is fairly easy to link this dream up with Anna’s (or, for that matter, Lessing’s)
disaffection from the Communist Party and the “terribly dry anguish” (90)
she feels at what can only be described as the loss of the utopian imagina-
tion (more on this point later). But why, as she envisions the world literally
being blown to smithereens, does she feel this incredible joy? Anna admits
that she does not fully understand the dream, its meaning slipping from the
grasp of her consciousness, as dreams do (299); all she is left with are the
words of the “small voice.” To unpack those words, we must look at Anna’s
other, recurring dream, “the most frightening of all the different types of
cycles of dreams . . . the nightmare about destruction . . . the nightmare about
the principle of spite, or malice—joy in spite” (477). The nightmare takes
many forms: a vase, an old man or woman, a dwarf, a friend, even Anna her-
self (477–79, 563); but in each form “it menaced not only me, but everything
that was alive, but impersonally, without reason” (477). In a later iteration of
the dream, the imagery of nuclear catastrophe becomes more explicit:
For a moment I blacked out and revisited my nightmare where I knew, but
really knew, how war waited, me running down the emptied street of white
dirtied buildings in a silent city but filled with human beings silent with
waiting, while somewhere close the small, ugly container of death exploded,
soft, soft, it exploded into the waiting silence, spread death, crumbling the
buildings, breaking the substance of life, disintegrating the structure of flesh,

while I screamed, soundless, no one hearing, just as all the other human beings
in the silent buildings screamed, no one hearing. (629)
Connecting these two dreams suggests that Anna is dreaming about the
“dual nature” of nuclear power, its capacity to be used for both creation and
destruction—or at least this is the interpretation that Mother Sugar seeks to
foist onto it: “If this figure is an elemental and creative force, for good as well
as for evil, then why should I fear it so terribly?” Anna asks, to which Mother
Sugar replies, “Perhaps as you dream deeper you’ll feel the vitality as good as
well as bad. . . . It is dangerous to you as long as you fear it” (478). This could
not be a more succinct description of the logic of deterrence, which relies
almost exclusively on the perceived danger of its threat—in the case of nuclear
war, total annihilation—rather than its actuality. As the dream metastasizes
over the course of the novel, merging with Anna’s “game” of “a simultaneous
knowledge of vastness and smallness” (548), the force of destruction takes on
a dark, unrepresentable aspect:
It was “the game,” but it came out of terror. I was invaded by terror, the terror
of nightmares, I was experiencing the fear of war as one does in nightmares,
not the intellectual balancing of probabilities, possibilities, but knowing, with
my nerves and imagination, the fear of war. . . . A few days before, words like
democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of under-
standing of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power.
I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this know-
ing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force, that the great armouries
of the world have their inner force, and that my terror, the real nerve-terror of
the nightmare, was part of the force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of
knowing.
(588–89, emphasis in original)
Later Anna again dreams of the destructive force as “a terrible yearning nos-
talgia . . . , the longing for death” (594–95), finding what Lifton in another
context calls the Götterdammerung impulse, the desire for a final orgiastic
spasm of violence to fulfill the destructive teleology of the bomb.18
The terror of nuclear war, “working in us all, towards fruition” (Golden
Notebook 594), exceeds Anna’s ability to put it into language, concepts,
or images, because it entails conceiving of “omnicide,” the end of every-
thing (Lifton, Genocidal Mentality 3). As a result of the sheer magnitude of
destruction that the dream entails—including, not incidentally, the destruc-
tion of the consciousness that imagines it19 —she is unable to represent the
creative/destructive force to herself: “I can’t communicate, even to myself

when I read it back,” Anna says, “the knowledge of destruction as a force.
I was lying limp on the floor last night, feeling like a vision the power of
destruction, feeling it so strongly that it will stay with me for the rest of my
life, but the knowledge isn’t in the words I write down now” (589). This vision
constitutes for Anna a “real experience,” which “can’t be described. I think,
bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better.
Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but
not words” (633). There are no such symbols in The Golden Notebook, only
the extradiegetic announcement, in brackets, of black lines across the pages
of Anna’s colored journals.
In spite of the dream’s unrepresentability, Mother Sugar asks Anna, in the
parlance of the text, to “name” it, to give form to its essential “formlessness,”
its “uncontrolled force of destruction” (474, 479). Inasmuch as Mother Sugar
is implicitly asking Anna to accept the logic of deterrence—“it is dangerous
to you as long as you fear it”—she is also attempting to inoculate against
the threat of nuclear war; “naming” is, for Anna, a “making-harmless” that
domesticates its unimaginable possibility. The Golden Notebook was published
only two years after nuclear strategist Herman Kahn’s seminal On Thermonu-
clear War (1960), a sustained argument against considering nuclear war as
“unthinkable,” instead offering a host of policy prescriptions and strategic
considerations for how to fight, survive, and even win a full-scale nuclear
conflict. Kahn contended that it was necessary for rational policymakers (bor-
rowing from the title of his 1962 sequel) to “think about the unthinkable” in
order to devise a comprehensive nuclear war-fighting strategy:
One should not shroud the possibilities or consequences of a war with an

air of hypotheticalness, unreality, or improbability with which most people
associate the risk of war. We are assuming that the unthinkable has actu-
ally occurred and are asking: Why?, When?, and How? with the emphasis
on the last two questions rather than the first. . . . Some war planners find it
as hard to think through the course of a war as most of the lay readers of
this book will. . . . To some extent we must try to think a war right through to its
termination.
(163, emphasis in original)
Undertaken to demystify the nuclear threat, Kahn’s prescription is, for some-
one like Anna, a warrant for actually engaging in nuclear warfare; by moving
it from the realm of the unthinkable to the thinkable, from the sublime to the
representable, Kahn brings nuclear war within the range of the human imagi-
nation and thus human action.20 Representation increases its probability and,
even if nuclear war is in some sense survivable, this is what Anna cannot abide
in her conversation with Mother Sugar:
If I said to you that the H bomb has fallen and obliterated half of Europe, you’d
click with your tongue, tck, tck, and then, if I was weeping and wailing, you’d
invite me, with an admonitory frown or a gesture, to remember, or to take into
account some emotion I was willfully excluding. What emotion? Why, joy, of
course. Consider, my child, you’d say, or imply, the creative aspects of destruc-
tion! Consider the creative implications of the power locked in the atom! Allow
your mind to rest on those first blades of tentative green grass that will poke
into the light out of the lava in a million years time! (545)
The preposterousness of such attenuated hope in the face of the unthinkable

possibility of nuclear war—Anna later says, “I don’t think I’m prepared to give
all that much reverence to that damned blade of grass, even now” (636)—
forces Anna reluctantly around the Ferris wheel of deterrence ideology, and
to embrace the weapons that cause her fear in the first place.
Molly Hite has contended that Anna’s “cracking up” is a matter of her
personality splitting into pieces, and that her response to nuclear fear, to
“limit emotion” (545), is “not to have resisted fragmentation, but to have
been reduced to a single fragment” (Hite 18). I would counter that Anna
experiences a psychic doubling, rather than division, and that this process
spills over into her narrative mode. Anna understands herself as “living the
kind of life women never lived before” because “they didn’t look at them-
selves as I do. They didn’t feel as I do. How could they? I don’t want to be
told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the
H-bomb exploding, that people felt this way about the crossbow. It isn’t true.
There is something new in the world” (472). On the basis of this historical
novelty, “I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the
recurring history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might
be new” (472–73). If the atomic bomb produces a novel psychic temporality,
something other than the eternally recurring archetypes of Mother Sugar’s
Jungian psychology, then it requires a different self—or selves—to exist in it.
From there, Anna “had no sense of time, and seemed to be several different
people” (574). The self-identity of the “I” begins to replicate endlessly: “I was
listening and not listening, as if to a speech I had written someone else was
delivering. Yes, that was me, that was everyone, the I. I. I. I am. I am. I am
going to. I won’t be. I shall. I want. I.” (628). The impersonality of the bomb
is contrasted with the multiple personalities of Anna’s multiplying “I.” The
act of writing multiplies these selves, “as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the
page,” even though, in reading her own notebook, “I didn’t recognize myself,”
“as if it were written about someone else” (472, 561).
The most obvious instance of these multiple narrative selves occurs in the
yellow notebook of Anna’s fiction, where she has begun a novel entitled The
Shadow of the Third, in which a duplicate Anna, named Ella, also stricken
with writer’s block, is preparing to write a novel of her own:
The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had
not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when
he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for
months. . . . The undercurrent of despair or madness or illogicalness would lead
on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future.
So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed
substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide.
The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of
his life would be understood—a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality,
commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood, at the moment of
death, that the link between the dark need for death, and death itself, had been
the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the
order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity,
but intimations of madness. (173)
Buried inside the hypothetical novel within the fictional novel within the
imaginary notebook within The Golden Notebook, Lessing gives us, in
refracted form, an allegory for the suicidal impulse of nuclear deterrence,
according to a temporality that can only be understood retrospectively, from
the vantage of the event of absolute ending. The title of this hypothetical
novel alone should be instructive: the shadow of the third what? World
war? If the nuclear threat is thus contained within the multiple mirror-like
duplications of one of The Golden Notebook’s segments, then we might ask
whether there is also at work “a simultaneous knowledge of vastness and of
smallness”—that is, a similar principle at work on the level of Lessing’s text as
a whole. Near the end of the novel, when Anna buys a new golden notebook,
it is tempting to see this as a moment leading to her psychic integration,
when her various selves come back together on the strength of her promise to
“start a new notebook, all of myself in one book” (607). Tempting, until we
realize that the line Saul proposes for Anna’s new notebook is the first line of
Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, “The two women were alone in the London
flat” (3, 639), and that, as Hite has observed, we recognize the structure of the
text as an impossible object, where the inside contains the outside, or, at best,
a Möbius strip, where the linearity of narrative is revealed as an infinite loop
(22). This suggests that the text does not resolve the multiplicity of Anna’s
narratorial selves but merely contains it, in the segmented form of the note-
books themselves. And that first line of the text is balanced by the last, “The
two women kissed and separated” (666), suggesting a chiasmic structure for
the text as a whole, and one that doubles the duplication of “the two women,”
Anna and Molly, who, as Claire Sprague has observed, may both be versions
of Anna in the first place. Furthermore, if we also take Anna as a surrogate
for Lessing’s own working-through of the problems in conventional fiction,21
then each of these duplications is multiplied exponentially.
Periodization and British Nuclear Culture

In the final analysis, it is not essential that we distinguish Anna’s “cracking up”
as a form either of fragmentation or of doubling, but in either case it would
be hasty to equate it with a more general critique of humanism that would
automatically align it with the postmodern.22 I have been contending that
starting down the postmodern path (atomic bomb = United States = postwar
American literature = postmodernism) entails a whole host of assumptions
that cover over the historical and national specificity of Lessing’s, or Britain’s,
encounter with nuclear weapons. Rather than equating The Golden Notebook
with universal (or at least universalized) narratives of apocalypticism and the
play of signification, we can begin to historicize the text around a specific set
of coordinates more relevant for the Cold War’s supporting players. The early
reliance on deterrence is one of those coordinates, but so are civil defense and
the perceived loss of great power status that accompanied the end of the colo-
nial empire—very much a concern that hovers in the background of Anna’s
often ironized African memoir in the black notebook.23 Inasmuch as these
coordinates tell a different story of the Cold War, they also offer an oppor-
tunity to reappraise the body of British literature in which the atomic bomb
plays even a tangential role, which runs, following Dominic Head’s exhaus-
tive survey, from Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950) and Angus
Wilson’s The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) to John Fowles’s Daniel Martin
(1977) and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), among others.24 But they
also suggest that reliance upon a garden variety notion of postmodernism may
not offer the most useful periodizing concept for that task.
Instead, I would propose that we follow Tonya Krouse’s suggestion that
“readers might usefully locate The Golden Notebook betwixt and between
modernist and postmodernist conceptions of the subject,” not to mention
notions of style, representation, and reference (40). Similarly, Nick Bentley’s
argument that the text should be periodized according to a qualified, dis-
tinctly British postmodernism, situated between its American cousin and
European deconstruction, and which “takes on board many of the attitudes
and radical skepticism of postmodernism, but maintains an ethical basis and
a dialogue with realism” (57), amounts to positioning it between modernist
utopianism and postmodern “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard

xxiv). Both Krouse and Bentley, however, appear unable to name the distinct
space they are trying to articulate for Lessing as anything other than some
kind of hybrid, “neither/nor,” or “between,” according to the rigid terms
of the modern/postmodern dichotomy. I would suggest, following Jameson,
that this betweenness might be better conceived under the designation of “late
modernism,” precisely the kind of transitional concept necessary for recog-
nizing that modernism did not disappear overnight and that postmodernism
did not suddenly come into being with the destruction of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Late modernism is not, for Jameson, simply a kind of attenuated
rehearsing of modernism’s foundational impulses, but the dialectical moment
when its utopian desires encounter the limits of their historical conditions of
possibility.25 That is, if the revolutionary energies of modernism required an
open and transformable future in which to “make it new,” then the threat
of nuclear destruction forecloses that horizon; late modernism would be the
attempt to resuscitate, rework, or otherwise repurpose the stylistic and polit-
ical tools of modernism to address this new historical situation, and would
thus name a kind of frustrated, impossible desire, or, with Henstra, a kind of
melancholia for the loss of the future as such.
This narrative of revolutionary exhaustion is, of course, one of The Golden
Notebook’s other predominant themes, in Anna Wulf ’s disaffection from
communism. She offers a diagnosis of the “frustrated idealism” (93) of her
present that sounds very much like the late modernist disposition I am briefly
sketching here:
Why do our lot never admit failure? Never. It might be better for us if we did.
And it’s not only love and men. Why can’t we say something like this—we are
people, because of the accident of how we were situated in history, who were so
powerfully part—but only in our imaginations, and that’s the point—with the
great dream, that now we have to admit that the great dream has faded and the
truth is something else—that we’ll never be of any use. After all Molly, it’s not
much loss is it, a few people, a few people of a certain type, saying that they’ve
had it, they’re finished. Why not? It’s almost arrogant not to be able to. (53)
The story of Anna’s estrangement from the Communist Party of Great Britain
is largely recounted in the red notebook, and thus rarely crosses paths with
her nuclear nightmares in the blue and the yellow notebooks (although she
does at one point blame the Communist Party’s dissolution on the Cold War
[67]). And yet Anna clings tenaciously to “the dream” of “a painful lurch
forward,” an epochal, revolutionary or evolutionary shift in social organiza-
tion and human behavior, “a forward movement for the whole world” (275).
It would be a mistake, however, to understand that dream as anything other
than merely “waiting for things to change,” or to find in it the redemptive

promise of an historical break or rupture through which “the future might
pour in a different shape” (473).26 When the future does come pouring in for
Lessing, as it does in The Four-Gated City, it comes in the form of nuclear
disaster.
Notes
1. See esp. pp. 427–66.
2. For this evolution, see Hazleton.
3. Curiously, Lessing herself did not address nuclear weapons in her acceptance
speech, perhaps only circumlocuting the subject as one of “the horrors that we all
of us easily imagine.” See Lessing, “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.”
4. I use this term somewhat loosely to refer to any and all criticism about literature
that takes nuclear weapons and nuclear war as explicit referents. This usage is
similar to that suggested by Daniel Cordle, who argues that we have entered a
“second phase” of nuclear criticism no longer organized solely around the Cold
War threat of imminent destruction, allowing for a reappraisal of what constitutes
the relevant body of nuclear texts and commentary. This is markedly different
than Richard Klein’s pioneering, if more restricted, usage of the term in “Proposal
for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism.” I will discuss Klein’s usage,
and its limitations, below.
5. For an exhaustive bibliography of nuclear fiction, see Brians.
6. See esp. Chapter 2.
7. To be fair, Cordle does attempt to situate American literature globally by making
some brief forays into British, Canadian, and Australian literature, but his focus
remains predominantly on literature produced in the United States.
8. For postmodernism as a particularly American avant-garde, see Huyssen.
9. See, for instance, Roberts.
10. For other readings of The Golden Notebook as postmodern, see also Draine and
Michael.
11. Henstra’s chapter on Lessing also begins by insisting on the causal force of the
bomb on and for postmodernism:
If it were possible to point to one thing that divides the two halves of
the twentieth century for western society, that thing would be the advent
of thermonuclear weapons. . . . In fact, many theorists of postmodernism
have turned to nuclearism and Cold War fear to account for the
peculiarities of their subject: fragmentation, desperation, fantasy, rela-
tivism, futility, the play of language in the face of an absurd or absent
“reality.” (80)
This is, as we have already seen, a more confident assertion of this linkage than
those of the “many theorists” Henstra summarizes.
12. For this terminology, see R. Wilson.
13. See Pedretti.
14. Jameson has argued persuasively for understanding modernism (and, by exten-
sion, postmodernism) according to distinct national variations and temporalities,
in A Singular Modernity; see esp. “Transitional Modes” 97–138.
15. For the US/SU symmetry, see Klein and Warner.
16. Lessing has pointed out The Golden Notebook’s European affinities while also
acknowledging the difficulties for a British author to write a “novel of ideas”:
“The parochialism of our culture is intense” (Preface xix). While it is beyond
the scope of this chapter either to consider these affinities in detail or to trace a
genealogy from the European novel to Derridian deconstruction, her suggestion
that The Golden Notebook is something of a hybrid national form hints at the
kind of “betweenness” I am suggesting here.
17. On the paradoxes of deterrence as a strategic doctrine, see McCanles.
18. See Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, esp. pp. 485–87.
19. This paradox of imagining one’s own nonexistence has been explored by
Ferguson.
20. For nuclear war-winning, see Gray and Payne, and Tucker; for the risks of
thinkability, see Amis.
21. This assumption is evident in, for example, Bentley, but see also Hite.
22. For such an alignment, see Henstra 88–89.
23. For civil defense, see Grant; for great power status, see Ruston, esp. Chapter 5;
and for Lessing’s postcolonialism in The Golden Notebook, see Yelin and
S. Wilson.
24. See Head, esp. Chapter 1.
25. See Jameson, A Singular Modernity, esp. Part II.
26. It should be clear by this point that I side with Jameson in the debates about
postmodernism, finding something like Lyotard’s notion of the postmodern as a
creative energy buried within the modern to be both ahistorical and reductive.
For a more eloquent account of this critique, see Anderson, esp. Chapter 3.
Works Cited
Amis, Martin. Einstein’s Monsters. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Print.
Bentley, Nick. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical
Fiction.” Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Ed. Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins.
New York: Continuum, 2009. 44–60. Print.
Brians, Paul. Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984. Kent, OH: Kent
State UP, 1987. Print.
Chaloupka, William. Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Print.
Cordle, Daniel. States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism, and United States
Fiction and Prose. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008. Print.
Davis, Walter. Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative. Albany:
State U of New York P, 2001. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven
Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (Summer
1984): 20–31. Print.
Draine, Betsy. Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the
Novels of Doris Lessing. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983. Print.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “Review of Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and
Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing, by Betsy Draine.” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 3.1/2 (Spring-Autumn 1984): 209–10. Print.
Ferguson, Frances. “The Nuclear Sublime.” Diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984): 4–10.
Print.
“From Defence to Deterrence.” The Economist 26 Feb. 1955: 723–25. Print.
Grant, Matthew. After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945–68.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Grausam, Daniel. On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War.
Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011. Print.
Gray, Colin, and Keith Payne. “Victory Is Possible.” Foreign Policy 39 (Summer 1980):
14–27. Print.
Hazleton, Lesley. “Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism, and ‘Space Fiction.’ ”
New York Times Magazine 25 July 1982: 20–29. Print.
Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
Henriksen, Margot. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print.
Henstra, Sarah. The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Hite, Molly. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City: Ideol-
ogy, Coherence, and Possibility.” Twentieth Century Literature 34.1 (1988): 16–29.
Print.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Print.
Jackson, Tony. “Postmodernism, Narrative, and the Cold War Sense of an Ending.”
Narrative 8.3 (Oct. 2000): 324–38. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London:
Verso, 2002. Print.
——. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text
15 (1986): 65–88. Print.
Kahn, Herman. On Thermonuclear War. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960. Print.
Klein, Richard. “Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism.”
Diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984): 2–3. Print.
Klein, Richard, and William Warner. “Nuclear Coincidence and the Korean Airline
Disaster.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 2–21. Print.
Krouse, Tonya. “Freedom as Effacement in The Golden Notebook: Theorizing Plea-
sure, Subjectivity, and Authority.” Journal of Modern Literature 29.3 (2006): 39–56.
Print.
Laski, Marghanita. The Offshore Island. London: Cresset Press, 1959. Print.
Lessing, Doris. The Four-Gated City. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Print.
——. The Golden Notebook. New York: Ballantine Books, 1962. Print.
——. “Nobel Lecture: On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.” Nobelprize.org.
7 Dec. 2007. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/
literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html>
——. Preface. 1971. The Golden Notebook. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Print.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.
New York: Basic Books, 1986. Print.
Lifton, Robert Jay, and Eric Markusen. The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and
Nuclear Threat. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Print.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984. Print.
McCanles, Michael. “Machiavelli and the Paradoxes of Deterrence.” Diacritics 14.2
(Summer 1984): 11–19. Print.
Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and Atomic
Age. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print.
Pedretti, Mark. “Allegories of Hiroshima: Toward a Rhetoric of Nuclear Modernism.”
The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World. Ed. Michael
Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2013. 166–91. Print.
Roberts, Robin. “Post-Modernism and Feminist Science Fiction.” Science Fiction
Studies 17.2 (July 1990): 136–52. Print.
Ruston, Roger. A Say in the End of the World: Morals and Nuclear Weapons Policy,
1941–1987. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Print.
Schwenger, Peter. Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Print.
Siebers, Tobin. Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1993. Print.
Sprague, Claire. “Doubletalk and Doubles Talk in The Golden Notebook.” Papers on
Language and Literature 17 (1982): 181–97. Print.
Tucker, Robert W. “The Nuclear Debate.” Foreign Affairs 63.1 (Fall 1984): 1–32.
Print.
Wästberg, Per. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007—Presentation Speech.”
Nobelprize.org. 7 Dec. 2007. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nobelprize.org/
nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/presentation-speech.html>
Wilson, Rob. “Postmodern as Post-Nuclear: Landscape as Nuclear Grid.”
Ethics/Aesthetics: Post-Modern Positions. Ed. Robert Merrill. Washington, DC:
Maisonneuve Press, 1988. 169–92. Print.
Wilson, Sharon. “Postcolonial Identities in The Golden Notebook.” Doris Lessing
Studies 28.1 (Winter/Spring 2009): 17–21. Print.
Yelin, Louise. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine
Gordimer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. Print.
CHAPTER 3
“Through That Gap the Future Might

Pour”: Dreaming the Post-Cold War
World in The Golden Notebook
Cornelius Collins
O
ne of the complexities a reader encounters in the formal design of
The Golden Notebook is the text’s constitution by a dizzying assort-
ment of subtexts of varying style and mode. There are not only the
five notebooks kept by Anna Wulf and the manuscript of her new novel, Free
Women, which frames them, but these inner texts are themselves filled with
recounted stories, fictional scenarios, memory exercises, and literary paro-
dies. At the experimental edge of this range of material are two particular
forms: the several assemblages of newspaper cuttings—the reports of violence,
unrest, and war which, at different times, Anna pastes into each notebook and
with which she covers the walls of her flat near the emotional climax of the
novel—and numerous recorded dreams. These, like the newspaper cuttings,
appear in nearly all sections of The Golden Notebook. In this chapter, I want
to pursue the links between these most outward- and inward-facing of the
modes that Doris Lessing portrays as available for interpreting the world, for
together they advance her search, with this novel, for a literary form relevant
to what Anna calls “the fragmentation of everything” in the social and psychic
environment of postwar Western life (GN 288). This “painful disintegra-
tion,” I will emphasize, includes the coherent world-picture and dreamworld
that communism had provided but which has for Anna—as it had for Lessing
and many of her erstwhile comrades in the fifties Britain—been seen to shat-
ter, crack up, or dissolve “against the density of our experience” (288). As she
contemplates the fragmentation of her dreamworld, Anna is afforded visions
of a mostly disordered future that, in geopolitical discourse, would emerge as
56 ● Cornelius Collins
a possibility only after the sudden end of the Cold War three decades later.
In this novel, however, and at this more apocalyptic stage in her thinking,
Lessing can choose only chaos, or “total destruction” (452), as the alterna-
tive for portraying the social forms and thought patterns that have driven the
proliferation of violence and madness she sees in the modern world.
“And it all dissolved”: Misreading the Signs of the Times

First, to dreams. It is not surprising that many of the dreams in this intensely
painful book are nightmares, which often torment Anna’s lovers and are, too,
the type of dream she herself most often and vividly recalls: the recurring
menace of the dwarfed old man, which she names the dream of “joy-
in-destruction” (474), terrifying and beautiful visions of hydrogen bomb
explosions, and the scene of the political prisoner who gladly exchanges places
with his executioner as the revolution arrives. The prevalence of such signifi-
cant dreaming in this novel—not only as an indicator of psychic disturbance
but a form by which to apprehend such disturbing truths in the contem-
porary world as nuclear terror and political disillusion—contributes to its
reputation as a key transitional text in Lessing’s canon. In this widely cited
transition, The Golden Notebook begins the author’s move away from a “pre-
vious reliance on realism” in her early fiction and marks “a turning point or
break,” as Nick Bentley explains, toward her “developmental experimenta-
tion with fictional form, in which her views on the ideological implications
of fiction undergo at first a crisis, and then a reformation into a new style
of writing, pointing towards her ‘inner space’ fiction of the later 1960s and
1970s” (44).1 On the other hand, Claire Sprague points out that dreams fea-
ture in Lessing’s work starting with her first novel in 1950, observing that
“[f ]rom The Grass Is Singing on, dreams are critical registers of the past and
present for her characters”; indeed, Sprague suggests, Lessing “probably finds
the psychoanalytic theory of dreams, both the Freudian and the Jungian,
more usable than any other aspect of psychoanalytic thought” (3). Sprague
alludes here to the pointed stance toward psychoanalysis that Lessing devel-
ops through Martha Quest in the Children of Violence series and again in
The Golden Notebook, where Anna and Molly share critical reflections on
their experience with Mother Sugar (Mrs. Marks), the “witch-doctor” who
has analyzed them both (60). Crucial for my argument here, though, is the
interest that Lessing nonetheless takes in dreams as a site of meaning, and
not only for “past and present”: as I will show later, Anna’s departure from
psychoanalysis rests primarily on her disagreement with the direction of the
discipline’s orientation of its dreamwork, which is exclusively toward the past.
Anna, by contrast, uses dreams not only to investigate her subjective psychic
Dreaming the Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook ● 57
formation but to project possible social futures in visions inflected, naturally,

by her situation and ideological disposition. That is, as much as they reflect
personal experience, dreams for Anna—a character profoundly invested in
and affected by her perception of shifts in world geopolitical structure—
incorporate hopes for, fears about, and insights into the changing global
system.
One uncharacteristically positive, “marvellous” dream in the novel is
related by Anna on August 28, 1954 (283), in the red notebook, whose mate-
rial primarily concerns her involvement with the Communist Party of Great
Britain (CPGB). The dream begins with a vision of “an enormous web of
beautiful fabric stretched out” to portray all “the myths of mankind,” but
embroidered so vividly as not to simply represent the myths but to embody
them, “so that the soft glittering web was alive” (284). The embroidery com-
bines a mosaic of colors, yet somehow “the overall feeling this expanse of
fabric gave was of redness, a sort of variegated glowing red” (284). In her
dream, Anna weeps with joy when she recognizes the shape of the material
as “a map of the Soviet Union,” which expands “outwards like a soft glitter-
ing sea” to cover first Eastern Europe, then China: in effect, the formation
of the communist bloc of the Second World during the Cold War. Anna’s
perspective then shifts to “out in space somewhere,” a position that enables
her to see the globe “wearing shades of red for the communist countries, and
a patchwork of colours for the rest of the world” (285). Struck with “appre-
hension,” then fear and dizziness, Anna recognizes in her vision “the whole
history of man, the long story of mankind . . . a great soaring hymn of joy and
triumph,” initiated by the creation of the USSR and the successful struggle
of international communism, “in which pain is a small lively counterpoint”
(285). Next, this fantasia appears to develop beyond current history, as Anna
sees “that the red areas are being invaded by the bright different colours of the
other parts of the world . . . melting and flowing into each other, indescribably
beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful glittering colour,
but a colour I have never seen in life” (285). Thus communism appears to
act as a vanguard for the achievement of a harmonious, cosmopolitan world
beyond nations and classes.
But the dream concludes with a more ambiguous image, as “everything
suddenly bursts, explodes”; and Anna sees that “[t]he slowly turning world
was slowly dissolving, disintegrating and flying off into fragments, all through
space, so that all around me were weightless fragments drifting about, bounc-
ing into each other and drifting away,” leaving Anna “alone in chaos” after
“[t]he world had gone” (285). As she wakes, “joyful and elated,” she catches
after the dream’s meaning, but it escapes her until later that morning, when
she recalls the dream’s vision, its emotion, and in particular a sentence of
explanation spoken into her ear at its end by “a small voice”: “Somebody
pulled a thread of the fabric and it all dissolved” (285). In her elation, Anna
does not examine the dream’s potentially more troubling geopolitical impli-
cations; instead, she associates its images of wholism and reparation to her
personal life, in which she is absorbed by love for Michael, who is sharing
her dream bed: “Then I thought: The truth is I don’t care a damn about pol-
itics or philosophy or anything else, all I care about is that Michael should
turn in the dark and put his face against my breasts” (285). In her bliss,
she reflects that “so much of my life has been twisted and painful that now
when happiness floods right through me . . . I can’t believe it. I say to myself:
I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I’m happy” (286). Three weeks after
this rare episode of feeling secure and integrated in her identity—and after
an interruption in the text for another installment of The Shadow of the
Third in the yellow notebook—on September 17, 1954, Anna records in
the blue notebook both Michael’s leaving her and her leaving of the CPGB,
thus instilling the novel’s characteristic irony upon the fleeting moment of
seemingly uncomplicated joy.
Signs of this joyous dream’s ambiguity as a symbolic prophecy, whether
personal or political, are evident in its immediate context in the novel’s frag-
mented plot. It occurs after Anna and Molly spend an evening researching
Quemoy, a group of China Sea islands (now called Kinmen) that in the fifties
were a flashpoint between China and Taiwan and, by extension, between the
communist and capitalist blocs in the early Cold War. “Frightened” of “a new
war,” the women also discuss their growing unease with the evidence of con-
tinuing ruthlessness in the management echelons of the Communist Party, or
Stalinism a year after Stalin’s death (283). Molly relates having pressed Party
officials at “H. Q.” on such issues as the political “disappearances” of dissi-
dents in Czechoslovakia and reports of anti-Semitism in the USSR with her
injunction, “Look, you people have got to understand something pretty soon
or you’ll have no one left in your Party—you’ve got to learn to tell the truth
and stop all this hole-and-corner conspiracy and telling lies about things”
(283). Here Molly echoes several moments in the novel where Anna articu-
lates conflicted feelings about “the Party,” a constant area of tension during
her affiliation with the CPGB since returning to Britain after the war. Later
that night, Michael, himself a political exile from Czechoslovakia, dismisses
the women’s moral agitation and chides Anna for her continuing efforts at
“faith”: “the fact is that literally millions of perfectly sound human beings
have left the Party (if they weren’t murdered first) and they left it because
they were leaving behind murder, cynicism, horror, betrayal” (284), suggest-
ing that Anna and Molly are indulging in narcissistic fantasy to think that
it even matters whether they stay or go. But Michael himself is ambivalent,
finally saying, after reflection: “Well we tried. We did try. It didn’t come off,
but . . . let’s go to bed, Anna” (284).
Thus, Anna’s dream of the Soviet Union’s apparently catalytic role in “the
long story of mankind” is precipitated by Michael’s reference to the “dream”
of world transformation articulated in communism. Anna and Molly’s invest-
ment in the question of whether to stay in the Party briefly activates his
nostalgia or some trace of his attitude that has not been disillusioned toward
the dream that “didn’t come off.” In curtailing discussion of the current status
of the movement, Michael invites Anna to substitute her personal, sexual (and
temporary) involvement with him for the ardor of her social dreaming, and
on this night she follows him all the way through her interpretation of her
dream vision—as a consequence mistaking, I suggest, a premonition of an era
of destructive globalization for a fleeting vision of achieved cosmopolitanism.
Lessing here begins to sketch a line of thought she would explore extensively
in such later works as The Four-Gated City (1969), Briefing for a Descent into
Hell (1971), and The Summer Before the Dark (1973), that dreams, because
of their symbolic register and nonrational origin, have the potential to make
visible certain important but overlooked patterns not only in the nature of the
individual psyche but in the history—and future—of the groups in which the
individual takes part. This same nonrational or emotional quality, however,
opens the dream to confusion with other aspects of the individual’s psychic
conditioning, thus producing Anna’s misrecognition of this moment with
Michael, who is subject to his own degree of emotional instability. Anna con-
tinues to dream, however, throughout the novel, as she goes deeper into the
fragmentation and unhappiness that she fails to apprehend in this dream. Her
work to interpret, through dreams and other experimental narratives, visions
of a world order to come is a reflection of Lessing’s own search for a new
world-picture in the wake of a loss of faith in communism. Her glimpses of
the future, I will explain below, represent emergent world trends that Lessing
would soon come to analyze more precisely and to identify with what we now
call globalization.2
The Lost Dream of a Better World

Geopolitics, then, is one of the thematic areas in The Golden Notebook—
apart from its exploration of psychic, emotional, or mystical states—where
dreams emerge as meaningful visionary texts. For “the dream” is a figure of the
communist discourse with which Anna is imbued: cited often in the novel,
this dream vision is, I suggest, the inner core or ground note of her usually
tortured attraction to communism. Readers of the novel are sure to wonder
just why she prolongs her affiliation with the Party when, as with the other
divisions in her life, she feels so ambivalent toward it, a conflict expressed
even during the nostalgically recalled Mashopi sequences from the war era.
Anna is unable to abandon the dream, even if she can’t believe in it. Just after
the “marvellous” dream recounted earlier, she pastes an earlier piece of writing
into the red notebook, an account of a Party writers’ group meeting in 1952,
before Stalin’s death, during which the members discuss the latest theoretical
pamphlet issued in his name. In this reflection, Anna demonstrates the split
between her ironic, analytical perspective and her ideological attachment—
on the one hand, bothered that no one will state publicly that “This pamphlet
is bad” (287) and, on the other hand, warmed to hear Party veterans “use that
simple, friendly tone of respect” for the great leader (288). For if that tone
were to be lost to the “dry and painful” tone each displays in private exchanges
where sound judgment and critical reason are more easily expressed, then “a
faith in the possibilities of democracy, of decency” would be lost as well (288).
And a “dream would be dead—for our time, at least” (288).
The affective power of this dream is not confined to Anna’s emotional
relationship with communism. Michael, too, associates his communist expe-
rience with dreams, but in a correspondingly negative way: wakened from
a nightmare, he tells Anna, “if you insist on sleeping with a man who is
the history of Europe over the last twenty years, you mustn’t complain if he
has uneasy dreams” (317). The “dream” is invoked again at a Party meeting
set soon after Stalin’s crimes were (partially) revealed by Khrushchev at the
Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956.
A speaker from the floor ironically mocks the CPGB gathering for believing
that Stalin-era officials can be trusted to reform their power-consolidating
habits: “My dear Comrades . . . every time you reach this point in your delib-
erations you . . . go off into some day-dream and talk as if all you have to do
is to appeal to the leading comrades to resign all at once because it would be
in the best interests of the Party if they did” (428). And in the first scene of
the novel, in 1957, Anna reminds Molly that “the great dream has faded and
the truth is something else” (51).
This gap or split between “the dream” and “the truth,” represented from
Anna’s perspective as pain, tension, or bitterness, is consistent with the his-
torical experience of communists in the West, as amply recorded in British
writings about the period and in current historiography. As an epigraph for
her memoir of disillusionment, The Death of Uncle Joe (1997), longtime
writer for the Daily Worker Alison Macleod cites André Gide’s contribution
to The God That Failed, the sensational anthology of apostate confessions
by ex-communists published in the United States and the United Kingdom
in 1950. In the quoted passage, Gide laments, “Who can ever say what the
Soviet Union had been for me? Far more than the country of my choice,
an example and an inspiration—it represented what I had always dreamed of

but no longer dared hope; it was something towards which all my longing was
directed; it was a land where I imagined Utopia was in process of becoming
reality” (Macleod 1). For this reason, splitting from the Party meant, at root,
giving up on the dream, a withdrawal that for Anna Wulf is as painful as the
end of her love affair with Michael and her struggle with her writing. Like-
wise, as historian Lawrence Black explains by citing Mervyn Jones’s memoir
Chances (1987), many British socialists and communists felt “the trauma of
leaving the party [as] ‘a political disaster . . . as painful to them as the loss of
a friendship or the break-up of a love affair to the average individual’ ” (22).
Thus the emotional significance of Anna’s loss of faith in the communist
dream should not be overlooked in interpreting the novel, as might other-
wise be suggested by the red notebook’s thinning out over the course of the
text, as well as the tendency of literary critics thus far, especially in the United
States, to focus on the text’s thematic engagement with issues of gender and
identity3 —issues that are, however, closely linked to the communist theme by
their common concern with overcoming fragmentation, since Anna’s lovers
themselves tend to be male and “red.”4
In the novel, Anna articulates three primary motives for her attraction to
communism, two of which correspond to historians’ analyses of wider trends
in Party membership. The first motive associates morality with practicality:
that in the context of specific social injustices, communism was the only ide-
ological program available which offered both a comprehensive critique and
a course of action. Of her experience as a young woman in Africa during
the war, Anna declares, “I became ‘a communist’ because the left people were
the only people in the town with any kind of moral energy, the only peo-
ple who took it for granted that the colour bar was monstrous” (66).5 Anna’s
1922 birthdate makes her a contemporary of Alison Macleod, who reports
coming to a similar conviction based on a different threat to the conscience:
“My political life had begun at 13. I do mean 13. That was when Hitler came
to power [1933], and I began to tell my schoolmates that nobody was doing
anything against Hitler except the Communists” (258). Thus, left-radicalism
often presented itself as the first option for the “children of violence” in the
raising of their social consciousness.
But in addition to this practical, issue-based affiliation, British commu-
nism found appeal in a more generalized sense of moral enterprise, derived
from the affective experience of solidarity, a feeling of cohesiveness, and an
attachment to a purposive framework. Thus, when after a day of canvassing
votes for the Party, Anna comments to her superior on the quality of loneli-
ness she has observed in her interviews with lumpen-proletariat housewives,
the woman replies, “Yes . . . This country’s full of women going mad all by
themselves. . . . Well, I used to be the same until I joined the Party and
got myself a purpose in life” (159). Rather than highlighting the commu-
nist movement’s strength as an established avenue for social justice, here the
incentive for affiliation has a purely formal quality: a respectable life of virtu-
ous busyness is the implied reward for being active in the Party, precluding
any need to assess its progress toward its goals or to evaluate the morality of
the “purpose” it affords. (Although this incident satirizes the Party official by
calling into question the integrity of her type of ideological attachment, her
remark nonetheless poignantly echoes Anna’s fears and doubts about herself,
exemplifying the novel’s rich metafictional layering.) Later in the red note-
book, Anna reflects with characteristic ambivalence, “when I leave the Party,
this is what I am going to miss—the company of people who have spent
their lives in a certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that
their lives must be related to a central philosophy” (327), and Molly shares
both sides of these feelings, the wish to stay and the intention to leave. Black
confirms, “The insularity of socialism co-existed with a firm sense of together-
ness. As much as a body of shared beliefs, it was to values like fellowship that
socialists were loyal” (24). This affiliation produced a “familial aspect” (Black
30), which in the novel is reflected in Comrade Jack, the gentle, older Party
hand who supervises Anna’s work for the literary review and is one of the
few characters without a sexual factor in his relationship with Anna (though
Anna silently makes negative assumptions about the quality of his marriage
during their strained conversation on her departure from the Party). Indeed,
Anna observes more generally that, as with Jack, “[t]he Communist Party is
largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but who have a
powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the
Party is their family” (160).
Breaking the Forms to Meet Something New

Such an “atmosphere” of goodwill and accomplishment, however, can grow
oppressive as it hardens into a program—or pattern. This last term, always
problematic for Lessing and Anna, is one Alison Macleod also employs in her
description of how “the rank-and-file comrades, the stooges like myself, were
deceived” by their willful blindness to the destructive procedures of Stalinism:
“Marxism gave life a pattern. . . . We, with our pattern, understood what was
going on. Whatever did not fit into our pattern we could, with an effort,
ignore” (12). Of socialism in Britain, Black writes that “[it] provided a home,
but could confine. This was particularly true of the CPGB, whose politics
were rebellious in content, but disciplined in form” (24). Thus as enabling
a platform for political redress as communism may have seemed to offer
through its activist and affective dimensions,6 it becomes for Anna a lim-
ited and limiting framework when her world-picture changes such that it
no longer fits a rigid pattern of interpretation. It also fails as a framework
when the reality of Soviet communism is revealed to have deviated from the
textual patterns it generated, such as in the writings of CPGB members in
the novel, which Anna finds pathetic for their formulaic extolling of Stalin
and the working class, their naive reception as “[g]ood honest basic stuff,”
in the words of a Party writer, when everyone inwardly knows their falsity
(291). Beyond whatever specific content fills the “truth” about communism
under Stalin—confirmed by reports from the Twentieth Congress in 1956,
by which point, however, Anna (although not Lessing7 ) has already left the
Party—in any case the pattern of communist-derived dreaming represents an
important example of the “conventions and norms” of society and conscious-
ness that, Roberta Rubenstein has established, Lessing uses Anna to question
and struggle with (9). Communism is among the “forms” that, at least until
the ambiguous ending of The Golden Notebook, Anna shows herself deter-
mined not to preserve, however painful and disorienting to her mind is their
destruction.
At the same time, the third aspect of communism that does attract Anna
is one that follows from her interest in breaking the forms, and it emerges
from her critique of psychoanalysis. Anna’s debate with Mother Sugar turns
precisely on this issue of patterning: she complains that, for the analyst,
successfully working through one’s subjective experience means only success-
fully recognizing how the experience may be “fitted . . . like a piece of mosaic
into a very old pattern” woven of myth, literature, epic, and historical stages
(451). Anna’s response, then, reflects in part a historical materialist critique of
psychoanalysis’s characteristically modernist impulse to discover a universal,
timeless structure in “the psyche,” rather than interpreting psychic symptoms
as historically and locally situated. We may compare Anna’s earlier interpre-
tation of her visionary dream, which begins from just such a universalist
figure—a fabric embroidered with “the myths of all mankind”—but devel-
ops into a historical fantasia of the international communist movement, and
culminates, Anna then felt, in a border-dissolving joy.
Therefore, Anna says, “when . . . terrified by a dream of total annihilation,
because of the H-bomb exploding,” she does not want this experience to be
reduced to the notion that “people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t
true” (452). Mass warfare and atomic weapons loom as uniquely twentieth-
century problems, unforeseen by modern myth-makers like Marx (although
perhaps by late Freud). Conversely, Anna insists, “There is something new in
the world. . . . And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision . . . of
a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute
of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden
age brought up to date . . . ” (452, Lessing’s final ellipsis). The status of what
is “new in the world” is promising but ambiguously split: represented by
either the hydrogen bomb or the realm of freedom and abundance, both
“total destruction” and a golden age have become technically possible (452).
Still, Anna is fortified by the historical singularity of the current moment,
“convinced that there are whole areas of me made by the kind of experience
women haven’t had before” (451), and she glimpses the opening to a better
alternative at unanticipated, mysterious moments: “Yesterday I met a man at
a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought: Yes, there’s a hint of
something—there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in a dam, and
through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible per-
haps, or marvellous, but something new” (453, emphasis in original). Here
the “crack up” announced on the novel’s first page as afflicting “everything”
is not (or not simply) a symptom of madness but a potential point of access
through broken form to a more fluid, open future, freed from the destructive
patterns of the past and present. The “something” that betokens “a different
shape” for the future, dark or light, is for Anna in this March 1956 record
in the blue notebook a necessarily vague, nameless, even irrational entity, for
here she comes to the end of her psychoanalysis and, like many in Britain, she
has long since lost her faith in communism.
Papering over Lost Dreamworlds with Blueprints

If the thirties and forties were “the heyday of British communism” (Morgan
26), then “[f ]or many communist intellectuals . . . 1956 was a watershed”
(91), in light of Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Congress and, later
that year, the Soviets’ repression in Hungary, which resulted in a “member-
ship haemorrhage” from the CPGB (87). Still, as Geoff Andrews writes, so
long as communism actually existed in the world, “the Soviet Union remained
for some a positive example of what an alternative society could be like” (14).
The nostalgia evoked in the myth of “the lost world of British communism”
by Party journalists like Raphael Samuel, while intolerable to Lessing (or, in
the novel, to Anna), was mitigated by the persistence of the world geopolitical
split of the Cold War, which in some measure sustained hope that a different,
better future “might pour” through a gap in the Iron Curtain.
The patterning effect that Lessing describes in The Golden Notebook took
hold on both sides of the split, according to cultural historian Susan Buck-
Morss, where the Iron Curtain became a “geophysical manifestation” of
competing “political imaginaries” and “the great divide served . . . the unstated
purpose of isolating the political imaginaries themselves, protecting each from
being undermined by the logic of the other” (35–36). Shaping each polit-
ical imaginary, communist and capitalist, was its “dreamworld,” its vision
of utopia achieved, “models of mass-democratic sovereignty in East and
West” (35).8 For Buck-Morss, both of these dreamworlds, as “ideal types,”
acquired ironic undertones as they “actually developed historically,” for each
“contained an inherent contradiction, a destabilizing tension . . . that was not
caused by the enemy ‘other’ ” (39), in that the communist world put its faith
in an economic mode that turned out to consistently run behind the pro-
duction of the capitalist world, while the capitalist world premised itself on
a system of consumer markets organized by nation-states whose sovereignty
is increasingly undermined by the success of the global capitalist economy.
In the British context of The Golden Notebook, by comparison, one reason for
the chronically ironic attitude of the characters is the displacement of their
dreamworld onto the other side of Buck-Morss’s great divide, their residence
in a society whose dominant ideals they reject as untrue.
While in the novel the dreamworld is an attractive and meaningful con-
cept for Anna Wulf, it eventually becomes aligned with the false and rigid
patterning of disciplined communists, who are invested in outmoded illu-
sions and blind to what is newly happening to the world outside their paths,
or “blueprints,” to the future. “Blueprints” emerge late in the novel as a tex-
tual metaphor to which Anna is problematically drawn, such as when it is
suggested to her by Nelson, her blacklisted American lover in the blue note-
book, that “if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through
for someone . . . then it’s a kind of blueprint for the future, isn’t it?” (474,
Lessing’s ellipsis). Anna responds positively, “because it seems to me that half
of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we
try to imagine; and so we ended this conversation, with every appearance of
comradeship” (474). The source of this metaphor in the addled Nelson, who
has announced he is just going into psychoanalysis at a point when Anna has
long moved beyond it, should be enough evidence for the reader to ques-
tion its applicability to Anna’s authentic needs; but note as well the “half ”
measure of her commitment to the idea and the mere “appearance” of fellow
feeling with Nelson, who will seem to have a completely different personality
each time he enters the text, such that this radical split is his only identifiable
character trait. Thus, while the “blueprint” comes packaged in the novel as a
potentially enabling measure for moving forward from a destructive present,
the broader evidence suggests that for Lessing it represents an inadequately
sketchy, overly schematized attempt at mapping the future. It is opposed to
and supersedes the more nebulous “dreamworld,” which, perhaps because of
its basis in less rationalist modes of apprehension, has the potential to capture
deeper and more essential truths but is less simple and stable and therefore
more prone to misreading or dismissal. This is particularly so in a Cold War

context, where competing capitalist and communist “blueprints” so domi-
nate social and political discourse that all other alternatives are pushed to the
margins and discredited.
Posited by Nelson as a personal metaphor, the “blueprint” concept gets
attached to Anna’s attempt at integration with more conviction in her final
conversation with Saul Green, in the Golden Notebook, who counters her
defeatist irony by saying, “We’ve got to believe in our beautiful impossi-
ble blueprints,” suggesting that they will be “saved” by “what we seriously
put on our agendas” (609). Most immediately, Saul here seems to support
Anna’s identity as a writer, leading her to begin a novel, based perhaps on the
nightmare of the exchanged soldiers, that Saul will complete, as well as giv-
ing her what is revealed to be the first sentence of both Free Women and
The Golden Notebook (“The two women were alone in the London flat,”
3, 610). However, the retrenched utopianism of believing in the “beauti-
ful impossible blueprints” uncomfortably resembles the ironic suggestion to
“preserve the forms,” which is how Saul’s inspiring message is transmitted a
few pages later by his simplified Free Women analogue, Milt, in an incom-
plete sentence near the conclusion of the novel (633). It is also a phrase first
uttered by Richard, Molly’s capitalist husband, who declares, “ ‘I preserve the
forms’ . . . with such a readiness to conform to what they both expected of
him” that Anna and Molly laugh (25). In this case, “preserving the forms,”
or the “blueprints” scripted by ideological convention, represents something
different from the usual meaning it assumes in the text: the prospect of going
on in full knowledge of the impossibility of the dreamworld. That sense of
“preserving the forms” is the ironic position that, throughout the novel, Anna
pointedly refuses to accept—until the end of Free Women (and The Golden
Notebook), when she does so, intending to take on the role of a “boulder-
pusher” by getting a job as “a psychiatric social worker or teach[ing] school
or something like that” (633)—in essence, the “blueprint” for a liberal or
social-democrat.9
Rather, for Richard, “preserving the forms” represents an even more trans-
parent use of convention as a social mask to place over what is otherwise
recognized as the reality of formlessness. This chaos—or anarchy—is what
Richard promotes via his “background of international money” (23), and it is
the political truth about the contemporary world that Anna is just beginning
to discover in these chronologically last sections of the novel: “You know,
there’s a very interesting state of anarchy up there,” she tells Molly, who is
ignorant of the extent of her husband’s power and connections. “That lot up
there, they don’t believe in anything” (42). In this remark, Anna expresses
an insight about post-Cold War geopolitics, the world beyond “the great
divide” of competing political imaginaries: the world of globalized finan-

cial capitalism that would emerge as the real pattern after the Cold War,
where contemporary society is managed, crisis to crisis, without any other
“blueprint” than profit.10 Buck-Morss writes that “the historical rupture” of
the Cold War world “felt like sudden sanity,” but that, after a short time,
“new constellations of power began to coalesce” (xi), forestalling the dream
of mass-democratic happiness. In The Golden Notebook, such a new struc-
ture of power is glimpsed only haphazardly in moments such as Anna’s nearly
thrown-away insights about Richard’s anarchic command of finance.
The end of the Cold War eventually brought the end of the dreamworld
that had sustained the vision of an alternative society, even for ironic or nos-
talgic utopianists in the West. According to Buck-Morss, when “the Cold
War world disintegrated . . . [t]he imaginary topology of two irreconcilable
enemies, ready and able to defend themselves by destroying life on this
planet, disappeared with the abruptness of a disappearing dream” (xi). This
description returns us to Anna’s “joyous” dream, in which she witnesses the
transformation of the mythic structure of mankind by the extension of “red”
forces. In her dream interpretation, briefly lost in her personal joy in love with
Michael, the stage that Anna misses, or apprehends but misinterprets, is the
dissolution of the dreamworld, announced to her by a small voice that, by
Buck-Morss’s description, will prove prophetic: “Somebody pulled a thread
of the fabric and it all dissolved” (GN 285). The red dreamworld, which
never extends beyond the boundaries of the historical communist bloc, is not
only subsumed by the multicolored mosaic, but “invaded by the bright dif-
ferent colours of the other parts of the world,” until the globe disintegrates,
and Anna sits among the spinning fragments, “in chaos.” Thus, the dream
is not one of simple joy, but of joy-in-destruction, the complex exhibited in
her dreams of the dwarfed man; the communist zone, which promised to
bring newness into the world, manifests gloriously but then collapses under
pressure from the outside, to be replaced by fragments.
“War would explode, chaos would follow”11 :

Searching for Order in the News
Thus, read accurately, Anna’s dream suggests that chaos is the world’s only
visible alternative to oppressive social forms, perhaps even its basic truth. But
this position is represented most vividly not in Anna’s dreams but in her
collections of newspaper cuttings. Her red and black notebooks eventually
“abandon” their “original intention” and devolve into archives of “violence,
death, rioting, hatred,” collated from newspaper reports (501). Similarly, hav-
ing surfaced from one of the emotional troughs of her affair with Saul Green
in the Golden Notebook, Anna returns to reading the newspapers to find that
“[d]uring the week things had developed—a war here, a dispute there” (561).
The ubiquity of the violence “in the newspapers strewn all round me” at this
point causes Anna to be “invaded by terror, the terror of nightmares” that,
though based on irrational emotion, confirms “a new sort of understanding
of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power” (562).
Here Anna recalls a recent “vision of the world” she experienced, a scene
of “nations, systems, economic blocks, hardening and consolidating” so as
to threaten “freedom, or the individual conscience” (541). With these terms,
Anna assumes an uncharacteristic, partisan language of anti-totalitarianism of
the Cold War, illustrating her detachment at this stage from the communist
dreamworld that previously guided her. However, the First World is equally
implicated in her vision of hardened power blocs; there is a sense that the
ultimate nightmare for a “free”-thinking former colonial, former revolution-
ary woman, ill at home in the West, is the consolidation of violence by two
equally oppressive superstates and their alliances.
However, Anna’s Cold War vision is at odds with the textual man-
ner through which she explores the worsening global conditions, which is
through the fragmentary headlines and combinations of words (604) that
lead her to search for patterns in the violence. Whereas dreams as recounted
in the novel seem to afford visions of the changing world-picture in which
the individual is naturally implicated, newspaper cuttings provide scattered
samples of prevailing conditions, far and wide, which the writer (whether
Anna, as reader of the headlines, or Lessing, as their compiler) has yet to
find an adequate framework for organizing. In the novel’s concluding Free
Women section, Anna’s process of surrounding herself with newspapers and
“reading them, slowly, over and over again” is described in more detail (619).
Her intention is “trying to fit things together,” which suggests the determina-
tion to find a pattern, but “[w]hereas, before, her reading had been to form a
picture of what was taking place all over the world, now a form of order famil-
iar to her had disappeared. . . . It was as if she, Anna, were a central point of
awareness, being attacked by a million unco-ordinated facts” (619). Here is
the textual analogue to the joyous dream in which the invasion of the com-
munist area by variegated fragments caused the world to disappear and the
dream to dissolve, leaving Anna the observer “alone in chaos.” Now Anna the
reader sits alone in chaos, “a form of order familiar to her” having collapsed.
Her concern to interpret the “selected fragments of print” (620) indicates
her insight into the new force that will control “the patterns of action in
our time” (623), which I suggest is the “international money” and unprinci-
pled “anarchy” of economic globalization that emerges from the Cold War.
In this novel, however, this prophetic vision cannot yet be clearly articulated
or straightforwardly communicated: Anna’s obsessive cutting and pinning
“bits of newspaper” first to “the walls of her big room,” then to the walls
of a second room, is the primary sign of madness detected by Milt when
he arrives to stay in the flat. The first of what he calls “strong measures” he
takes to save Anna from going, as she puts it, “round the bend” is to tear
down “that nonsense off my walls” (631), and soon Anna is joking about
preserving the forms. One of her final ironic comments concerns Tommy’s
decision to join his father Richard’s firm, an example of “progressive big busi-
ness” whose mission is “putting pressure on Government departments” (634).
This calling—by which, as Buck-Morss puts it, “the capitalist global economy
increasingly threaten[s] to escape the control of nation-state political units”
(39)—Anna remarks as “in tune with our times” (634). But it is one that, at
least within the bounds of the apparently conventionally oriented novel, Free
Women, Anna appears finally to accept with irony rather than anguish.
At the end of the decade, Lessing returned to the trope of the obses-
sive researcher into “the patterns of action in our time,” with the character
Mark Coldridge in The Four-Gated City (1969), the final volume in the Chil-
dren of Violence series. Like Anna, Coldridge is a writer who on the basis
of a communist phase has come to reject the success of his first novel, then
also rejects communism. In response, he searches, like Anna, for authentic
insight into “what was really happening—you know, really happening” (312,
emphasis in original), but to do so he assembles, rather than newspaper frag-
ments, “two enormous maps” on the walls of his study. On them he plots not
only outbreaks of war and violence—the basic material that Anna struggles
to comprehend with her newspaper cuttings—but also underlying patterns
of poverty, incarceration, and environmental contamination, and these he
coordinates with sites of weapons research and drug manufacture.12 While
in The Golden Notebook it is, perhaps fundamentally, the existential terror of
the Cold War’s “hardening and consolidating” power blocs that drives Anna
to attend to the growing violence in her world, her analysis remains unde-
veloped, at the stage of chaos: her “unanchored fragments” of text simply
represent “the inchoate world mirrored in the newspapers” (621). By looking
beyond the exclusively Cold War pattern of nuclear superstates, Coldridge
can discern the pattern-in-chaos that eludes Anna, or that she only grasps in
moments of visionary dreaming or bitter irony and then puts aside. Rather
than the consolidating of nation-state power, it is the complex of deteriorat-
ing world conditions, what Coldridge terms “local catastrophic occurrences”
(576), driven by the globalization of the capitalist economy and its side
effects, that emerges as the next future of the world. Remarkably, Lessing
made this determination and expressed it in her fiction long before the end
of the Cold War. In The Golden Notebook, she advances considerably toward
this understanding through the painful examination of the fragments of her
dreamworld.
Notes
1. The critical narrative of a transition away from realism has been important for
many readings of Lessing’s work; for an influential example, see Hite. Bentley
goes on to challenge this narrative, however, at least with respect to The Golden
Notebook, suggesting instead that the novel is an experiment in “critical fiction,”
in the manner of Brecht’s theater. Likewise, in her analysis of the transition nar-
rative, Ridout claims that in their focus on The Golden Notebook as a transitional
text, critics have often neglected the text itself, which she argues is positioned
by Lessing at the “threshold” of the conventional realist novel in order to cri-
tique the form’s “ideological and aesthetic assumptions,” primarily through the
mode of parody (Contemporary Women Writers Look Back 49, 53). Furthermore,
the underlying premise for the transition narrative—that realism was Lessing’s
predominant style at the beginning of her career—has recently been put under
pressure by such critics as Watkins, who concedes that the “early fiction is broadly
realist” but points out that “the stresses and strains in [Lessing’s] adoption of this
mode become more visible . . . from the vantage point of hindsight” (28) and
argues that throughout the fifties “her use of the realist form” is marked by “an
unease” with it (52).
2. On the relation of Lessing’s political views to her use of literary form, and the
connection of this issue to her departure from communism, see “ ‘What Is the
Function of the Storyteller?’ ” by Ridout, who suggests that one of the most
important aspects of Lessing’s “post-Communist” writing, including The Golden
Notebook, is a general shift in narrative perspective, from one that reflects “com-
mitment and moral certainty” to one that promotes “doubt and critical distance”
(85).
3. A de-emphasis on the communist narrative in Anna’s past also may take its cue
from Lessing, whose comments on her communist experience in recent decades,
including in her autobiography, tend to minimize the extent of her commitment.
The intensity of the experience as reflected in The Golden Notebook, however,
suggests otherwise.
4. Here, I leave open the interpretive question of whether Anna’s/Ella’s lovers are all
projections of essentially two people, an exiled Czech and a blacklisted American.
5. Lessing writes much the same in Walking in the Shade. One significant differ-
ence between Anna Wulf ’s background as a character and the outlines of Doris
Lessing’s biography is that Anna is born and spends her girlhood in England, only
coming to Africa in adolescence, whereas Lessing was born of English parents in
Persia and grew up in Southern Rhodesia, not coming to London until she was
nearly thirty.
6. The actual impact of the Party’s activism in the United Kingdom on any matter of
social justice is in any case questionable, since historians claim that throughout
the postwar years it carried out a “more or less unbroken reorientation toward
the norms of the British left” as it tried to compete with the less radical, more
broadly appealing social-democratic alternatives in a period of generally increas-
ing prosperity. The CPGB’s “faltering progress” in electoral terms even before
1956 resulted in a “demotivated” situation, reflected in Anna’s poor results when

canvassing a Labour neighborhood, as well as the hanging question of when, not
if, she will leave the Party (Morgan, Cohen, and Flinn 19).
7. In an overview of Lessing’s intellectual formation as a Marxist, Greene notes that
the author “left the party in 1956, her break precipitated, like that of many other
British leftists, by Stalin and the invasion of Hungary” (104).
8. Buck-Morss adapts the “dreamworld” concept from the cultural-materialist theo-
rization of modernity of Walter Benjamin, using it to name the mirroring utopias
of, specifically, mass production in the East and mass consumption in the West.
I borrow the term to name the somewhat more general idea of a world without
class violence or material want hoped for by British communists, including Anna
Wulf.
9. In this reading, I join Sarah Henstra in questioning “most commentators” on
the novel who have seen Anna as successful in her “embrace of disparate ele-
ments into an inclusive, multi-vocal perspective” (17). Irony seems to me the
dominant note; here I follow Molly Hite’s interpretation, in her important 1988
essay on this novel and The Four-Gated City, of “the triumph” of the ironic tone
at the conclusion of Free Women, where Anna and Molly are last seen “each
going off to attend to her own compromised ideals” (22). Thus, as Claire Sprague
observes, the reader should “beware of overdoing any judgment that the inner
Golden Notebook—or even the outer, for that matter—represents unity or syn-
thesis. The existence of alternate or discrepant endings . . . should be enough
to suggest continuing process, contradiction, irony, uncertainty—anything but
clear, unambiguous unity” (66).
10. See Samir Amin for an analysis of how the “management” of inequality and
scarcity, not their solution, is the primary goal of the multinational stewards of
economic globalization since the end of the Cold War.
11. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook 562.
12. Elsewhere I have discussed this text and The Memoirs of a Survivor as examples
of Lessing’s prophetic “global phase” of the late sixties and early seventies; see
Collins.
Works Cited
Amin, Samir. Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary
Society. 1997. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed, 2014. Print.
Andrews, Geoff. Endgame and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism
1964–1991. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2004. Print.
Bentley, Nick. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical
Fiction.” Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Ed. Susan Watkins and Alice Ridout.
New York: Continuum, 2009. 44–60. Print.
Black, Lawrence. The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–64.
New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in the
West. Cambridge: MIT, 2000. Print.
Collins, Cornelius. “ ‘A Horizontal, Almost Nationless Organisation’: Doris Lessing’s
Prophecies of Globalization.” Twentieth-Century Literature 56.2 (Summer 2010):
221–44. Print.
Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1994.
Print.
Henstra, Sarah. “Nuclear Cassandra: Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Note-
book.” Papers on Language and Literature 43.1 (Winter 2007): 1–23. Print.
Hite, Molly. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: Ideology, Coherence, and Pos-
sibility.” Twentieth-Century Literature 34.1 (Spring 1988): 16–29. JSTOR. Web.
22 June 2013.
Lessing, Doris. The Four-Gated City. 1969. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Print.
——. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print.
Harper Collins, 1997. Print.
Macleod, Alison. The Death of Uncle Joe. Suffolk, UK: Merlin, 1997. Print.
Morgan, Kevin, Gidon Cohen, and Andrew Flinn. Communists and British Society
1920–1991. London: Rivers Oram, 2007. Print.
Ridout, Alice. Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia.
Continuum Literary Studies. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.
——. “ ‘What Is the Function of the Storyteller?’: The Relationship Between Why and
How Lessing Writes.” Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times. Ed. Debrah Raschke,
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010.
77–91. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of
Consciousness. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. Print.
Sprague, Claire. Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition.
Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Print.
Watkins, Susan. Doris Lessing. Contemporary World Writers. New York: Manchester
UP, 2010. Print.
CHAPTER 4
Feminist Commitment
to Left-Wing Realism
in The Golden Notebook
Sandra Singer
W
orking with notions of realism, communism, and feminism in The
Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing speaks to our current, multiva-
lent postmodern condition. Yet in 1962, the fractured aesthetic
of the novel seemed to some too narrowly focused on personal issues among
women rather than on wider social concerns of interest to the Left in its time,
which could arguably be captured through realistic representation. Through
the complex portrayal of two independently minded single women—novelist
Anna Wulf and her closest friend, London stage actor Molly Jacobs—the
novel examines issues of concern among the British Left of the fifties. Another
figure in The Golden Notebook—Paul Tanner—emphasizes the way class
and gender concerns can be seen as distinct from one another: he says,
“the great revolution of our time . . . . The Russian Revolution, the Chinese
revolution—they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against
men.”1 Today—more than fifty years hence—Lessing’s deconstructive under-
mining of binary, logocentric notions, such as the oppositions between the
Russian and Chinese revolutions, women and men, or the personal and the
political, is accepted among much of the academic community.
This chapter revisits the British New Left—including the “Angry Young
Men”—that spawned The Golden Notebook. Lessing’s literary realism situates
the majority of her sixty-plus years of writing in relationship to a particular
Western nineteenth-century literary tradition, one that has seen many permu-
tations; among these, The Golden Notebook applies, explores, and critiques
the limitations of the gritty “kitchen sink social realism” that was in vogue
in London theater during the mid-fifties. Lessing, in The Golden Notebook,
74 ● Sandra Singer
expresses key political and narrative concerns in relation to two plays that
came out of either the New Left (John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger) or the
next generation (Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey). These three works offer
different constructions of politically evolving subjects, particularly homosex-
uality, which I discuss later in the chapter. Lessing’s writing, however, remains
at odds with the working-class concerns of both the British Communist Party
and the New Left (formed after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising). As a former
colonial and for generational reasons, she is distanced from the British Left
whose gendered character types she critically analyzes.
Lessing’s Realist Commitment and the British New Left

The Golden Notebook can be viewed in its entirety as the creative production
of Anna Wulf, depicting the postmodern self who is committed to having
sociopolitical impact including but not restricted to writing. A significant
context for The Golden Notebook’s totalizing emphasis that has not so far been
adequately addressed in the criticism is the phenomenon of the British New
Left—an historical upswell of politicized awareness that aimed to separate
itself from the established fifties British Labour Party and the British Commu-
nist Party. The New Left is part of both Lessing’s experience and The Golden
Notebook’s storyworld. Anna Wulf repeatedly refers to the Oxford-spawned
movement among youth (350–51, 521) from which she feels distant, and
to their journal, The Left Review (259); editor Robin Blackburn offered, “it
was this milieu which produced writing by Doris Lessing (The Golden Note-
book)” (Blackburn). Reading the novel in the context of the British New Left
of the fifties and early sixties in effect draws attention to the text as a narrative
within the feminist literary tradition that relates to, but diverges in material
ways from, the largely male New Left ethos depicted in the storyworld.
Lessing’s gendered self-division over class commitment affects her writ-
ing. In the yellow notebook focusing on protagonist Anna’s writer’s block,
her fictional alter ego Ella responds in a medical column in a women’s mag-
azine to women who write in complaining about their ailments. As Lessing’s
sometimes guest and influential American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued,
personal ailments may reveal the “sociological imagination” (Mills). Mills
asserted the importance of framing private concerns as public issues, a view
held by Doris Lessing and R. D. Laing, with whom she was also friendly at
this time.2 In The Golden Notebook, while a male physician, Dr. West, handles
obvious medical concerns, Ella tackles the majority of the letters describing
rooted, socially induced psychological, gendered maladies. Ella’s lover of five
years, the physician Paul Tanner, acknowledges that the women’s problems are
socially derived and, further, reflect class concerns. Paul names these women
Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism ● 75
contributors “Mrs Browns” and one of the activities Ella and Paul share is
devising responses to their letters (188). “He helped her with her letters from
‘Mrs Brown,’ and this was a very great pleasure to her, working together over
these people for whom she could sometimes do something” (195). As part
of the English feminist literary canon, the figurative “Mrs Brown” represents
conventional, anonymous ordinariness, but she is nonetheless viewed as sig-
nificant by Virginia Woolf in her 1924 essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”
Wanting to avoid androcentric views of sexual difference, Woolf broods over
how to distinguish the seemingly nondescript Mrs. Brown.3
From the letters, Ella and Paul interpret the women’s projected identities
ethnographically and debate how to respond to them ethically. Class position-
ing of Western feminist privilege is crucial to The Golden Notebook. Arrogance
is an accusation Anna/Ella attributes to herself throughout (51, 174, 343,
621). Anna is accused by Saul of the same trait, based on her unwillingness to
communicate through a return to writing fiction (610). Formerly working-
class Paul sees the importance of how they respond to the letters, mostly
from women who describe their ailments, that he and Ella read together as
representing his and her class consciousness, and he insists to Ella that not
attempting a response to the more awkward ones is in fact “arrogant” (174).
A central concern of Anna, her alter ego Ella, and Lessing is that women’s
experience must be heard and understood. Thus, twenty-eight years after the
fact, Lessing countered Robin Blackburn’s description of The Golden Note-
book’s initial reception by early New Left Review editors and derisively added
that, at the time, she had not felt free to voice her concerns within their
male-gendered ethos:
Blackburn claims The Golden Notebook as a product of the milieu of the New
Left. This is quite untrue unless the New Left is now retrospectively to be
expanded to include ideas which in fact it was impossible to discuss with any of
the people I knew, most of whom were much younger that [sic] I was, and who
I thought of as intellectual socialists. The Golden Notebook was not reviewed
in the New Left Review. The young woman who asked to review it and was
refused complained for several hours of a long wet journey to Wales about the
attitudes to women in this milieu, particularly the New Left Review.4
Based on political affiliation and camaraderie, Lessing had reason to expect

that The Golden Notebook would be reviewed by New Left Review, though it
was not. She wrote her early work in London when she was actively involved
with the Angry Young Men, particularly playwright John Osborne and his
circle at the Royal Court Theatre. The title of Osborne’s best-known play,
Look Back in Anger (1956), contributed to the loosely constructed cultural
group’s name and to defining its dialectical, oppositional reflex as understood
by the media.5 A characteristic of the writing of this group was its realistic
portrayal of troubled characters of limited financial means who live in restric-
tive, usually rented, urban dwellings. As the play notes describe, “The action
throughout [Look Back in Anger] takes place in the Porters’ one-room flat in
the Midlands” (3).
Characters like protagonists Jimmy and Alison Porter turn out to be unre-
liable reporters of their own situation. While they seem not to grasp their
unconscious motivations but instead perform symptomatically in their het-
erosexual marriage, the audience is given a window into their drives through
the discourse of the play. For instance, Jimmy raises the notion of “sainthood”
with respect to Alison’s friend Helena Charles, whom he has taken as a lover
after Alison leaves him temporarily. Jimmy calls his lover, Helena, “this saint
in [designer] Dior’s clothing” (53), but later chastises her for her incapacity
to love him: “if you can’t bear the thought . . . of messing up your nice, clean
soul, . . . you’d better give up the whole idea of life, and become a saint . . . .
Because you’ll never make it as a human being. It’s either this world or the
next” (92). After Helena leaves the flat, Alison distances herself from both
sainthood and any notion of social engagement, thereby implying that her
politics are comfortably bourgeois. Distinguishing herself from both Helena
and Jimmy, she says, “I don’t want to be a saint. I want to be a lost cause.
I want to be corrupt and futile!” (93). Here the audience is invited to com-
pare the characters through their relationship to the metonymic concept of
a saint—typically a figure considered removed from worldly concerns and
above social struggles.
Lessing wrote two plays of her own that were performed on the London
stage during this period—Each His Own Wilderness (1958) and Play with a
Tiger (1962).6 These plays contain similarly gritty social realist kitchen sink
dialogue associated with the theater of the Angry Young Men.7 Her often
anthologized dramatic work, Play with a Tiger, expresses a struggle approach-
ing madness between Anna Freeman (Anna Wulf ’s maiden name in The
Golden Notebook) and Dave Miller, very similar to the one enacted by Anna
and Saul in the inner Golden Notebook and described as between Anna and
Dave in yellow notebook 4 (512). Play with a Tiger relies on “its style and
its language for its effect”8 : Dave repeatedly insists that Anna “Open that
window . . . . I will not have you shutting yourself up” (30). This trope oper-
ates in a way similar to the repeated attention to the concept of elevated,
detached sainthood in Osborne’s play. Though she makes no direct reference
to Osborne’s play in the following comment, her remark speaks to the rela-
tionship between story and discourse that their plays share: “I wrote Play with
a Tiger with an apparently conventional opening designed to make the audi-
ence expect a naturalistic play so that when the walls vanished towards the
end of Act One they would be surprised (and I hope pleasantly shocked) to
find they were not going to see this kind of play at all” (3).
Repetition of story through various discursive forms is a literary trope in
The Golden Notebook. The novel seems to make reference to Play with a Tiger,
first produced in London in 1962, where Anna writes, “The tiger is Saul,
I don’t want him to be caught, I want him to be running wild through the
world . . . . I must write a play about Anna and Saul and the tiger . . . . [T]he
‘story’ of the play would be shaped by pain” (The Golden Notebook 587–88).
In the play, Anna tells Dave: “I was thinking—if we can’t breed something
better than we are, we’ve had it, the human race has had it. And then, sud-
denly . . . . He walked in, twitching his tail. An enormous, glossy padding
tiger . . . . Then I heard the keepers shouting after him and wheeling along a
great cage” (Play with a Tiger 55–56). Here the tiger is considered a symbol
of male personal anxiety, just as the aforementioned Mrs Browns represent
female personal anguish.
Regarding the relationship between story and discourse, in her autobi-
ography Walking in the Shade Lessing extemporizes about the productive
shared social and cultural life of the loosely defined left-wing London groups
of the fifties. This shared ethos had the effect of generating various dis-
cursive responses to social factors that nonetheless reveal a similar critical
approach. She writes, “The Angry Young Men was a phenomenon entirely
invented by the newspapers, the media . . . . The Angry Young Men (and I)
were associated with the Royal Court because of John Osborne and because
of the Court’s glamour” (Walking 234–35). Concerning her role in the British
New Left, which split from the British Communist Party and Labour Party in
1956–57, she clarifies, “There were several meetings at my flat, a convenient
venue for people coming in from outside London. The people I remember
clearly are Edward Thompson [renowned British labor historian and essayist
and leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)], John Saville
[British labor economist], Haimi Levy [British Jewish labor activist], Randall
Swingler [English poet]” (217). Each of the mentioned renegades from the
Party, including Lessing herself, held strident, vocal, independent, strongly
argued positions. For example, Haimi Levy went to Russia to argue against
the persecution of Jews and left the Party on his return (Walking 216–17).9
Lessing describes her apartment in Langham Street, “just a short walk from
the New Left and their purlieus, on the other side of Oxford Street, and some-
times they dropped in. I had become a sort of aunt figure, definitely a member
of the Old Guard. By now they had created the New Left Review, which I con-
fess I found unreadable, though I was officially a supporter and at least on the
board” (Walking 288–89). And perhaps most importantly for her emphasis
on the political importance of the New Left beyond Party affiliation, Lessing
adds, “I think the [socially diverse mixing during the annual] Aldermaston
Marches [opposing nuclear weapons deployment starting in 1958] have not
been given enough attention, as a unique social phenomenon . . . . Apart
from war, what other social process could possibly create such a mingling
of apparently incompatible people?” (Walking 307).10
Lessing realized her literary ambitions within this British Left culture
of sociopolitical commitment, which responded to the Stalinist failure and
recognized the importance of scrutinizing other socialist states, as well as
responding to the nuclear threat. Meetings of the predecessor of New Left
Review, The New Reasoner, in which Lessing’s stories such as “The Day
Stalin Died” appeared in 1957, were held in her flat with C. Wright Mills
and Edward and Dorothy Thompson among other left-wing notables in
attendance. As the voice of the anti-nuclear movement, Thompson held
an oppositional stance to US mainstream consensus positions, like those
of Mills and other fellow American travelers. Representative of left-leaning
American men influencing London culturally during the fifties while escaping
McCarthyism, fictional figures Cy Maitland, Saul Green, and Milt, among
others, are interwoven into the fabric of The Golden Notebook.11
First New Left Review editor and latterly renowned cultural studies and
communications studies professor Stuart Hall knew Lessing during this time.
He concurs with her accounting for her distance from the New Left in gener-
ational terms and adds his own historical qualifiers. “Doris was not involved
in the editorial work of the journal. She contributed to it. She was very close
to the Edward Thompson generation, and was one of those independent
intellectuals in the Communist Party in the 1940s. She joined the New Left
Review editorial board, but she was already taking her distance from active
politics” (Hall 499). Literary historian Maroula Joannou further draws out
Lessing’s investment in the London left milieu of the fifties: after immers-
ing herself in anti-racist politics through the Communist Party within forties
Rhodesia, as Anna Wulf does in the black notebook, “In England Lessing
formalized her membership of [sic] the CP and assimilated into the rad-
ical, left-leaning metropolitan intellectual networks of artists, writers and
intellectuals in opposition to the conservative mainstream politics” (164).
Representing the authorial audience for the novel, Janet Hase—the
woman who sought to review The Golden Notebook for New Left Review—
encountered the Left’s ambivalence toward Lessing. Within the New Left,
author Lessing and her narrator/character Anna find themselves struggling
to negotiate gender as well as class differences with the political, intellectual
subculture they sought out. The intensity of Lessing’s engagement with but
objection to identification with this group of readers can be seen in letters
between herself and Edward Thompson included in Walking in the Shade.
One letter in particular “repl[ies] to one of his criticising The Golden Note-
book from a left-wing point of view” (Walking 343) for being “subjective,”
using “past history with New Left Review” (sic), and “copy[ing] bits out of
the Soviet newspapers for [her] imaginary reviews” in the novel (344), all
claims that Lessing denies. She admonishes Thompson for not recognizing
her perspective, as a Rhodesian colonial and, I would add, as a woman with
an “outsider’s view [that] someone with [her] kind of upbringing is bound to
have about Europe.” Nonetheless she signed her reply affectionately—“Love,
Doris” (344).
Generational Gender and Race Issues

Through the grid-like labyrinthine form of The Golden Notebook, Lessing
demonstrates the challenge of being a politically committed writer with
a persuasion toward realist representation in a novel that underscores
socially derived women’s concerns. In this context, Nick Bentley extends the
Lukácsian account of types within socialist and critical realism. He concludes
that The Golden Notebook represents the problems of the mid-century com-
mitted writer—a type, in Lukácsian terms—but told through an attempt to
write a fiction that aims to represent such types realistically. In his words,
“I refer to the novel . . . as a ‘critical fiction’: a form of writing that is pre-
sented as fiction, and operates as fiction, but simultaneously pursues a critical
exploration of the nature of fiction and the mechanisms by which a novel
communicates its meaning in a specific cultural environment” (44–45).
Following on Bentley’s notion of “critical fiction,” one can address an
issue for the contemporary reader of how to interpret Anna’s homopho-
bic assertions in the novel now that its “specific cultural environment” for
grasping gender and queer identities has changed. The Golden Notebook
inscribes homosocial and homosexual relationships as Foucauldian deviance
or Freudian illness. This inscription into a widely regarded feminist classic is
a challenge for contemporary critics, who seek to grasp Anna (and her alter
ego Ella)’s allusions to “real men” or “a normal . . . man” (375, 436, 463, 525,
535, 549, 564) and “real women” (196, 459, 531, 544); her views on adoles-
cent homosexuality (71–72, 76, 118, 138); her anxiety about her (and Molly)
being viewed as lesbian (433, 435, 459, 561); her concern about her daugh-
ter’s friendliness with a gay tenant, Ivor, affecting her well-being (374–75);
and the novel’s derisive remarks on homosexuality, especially in the third-
person, omniscient—though arguably ironic—Free Women sections (45, 52,
419, 584, 634).
In the context of fifties laws in Britain against homosexuality, Anna’s pro-
totypical second-wave feminism has recourse to self-referential homophobic
remarks: for example, she says, “I complain about the difficulties of being my
kind of woman, but good Lord!—I might have been born a Ronnie,” the
exaggeratedly effeminate gay man—a figure by now notorious within Lessing
studies—who moves into her flat to cohabit with Anna’s tenant, Ivor (388).
Introducing homosexuality bespeaks “aesthetic nervousness” about the novel’s
capacity to represent Anna’s struggles with normative and non-normative
gender roles.12 The narrating voices in The Golden Notebook are those of a
character, Anna Wulf, who narrates the entire text in first or third person.
Because of this crafting, the main narrative transaction is between narrator
and narratee. The narratee, a construct, is a reader capable of processing the
intellectually rigorous storyworld debates concerning psychoanalysis, writing,
and communism. The narratee is further challenged to assemble the twenty-
two sections of the novel in order to construct the discursive shape of the
whole.
The narratee also includes contemporary readers who recall the cruel
scenes late in the novel where Anna Wulf first evicts Ronnie, then Ivor,
after they confront her in “the obscene little play that had been prepared
for her” (389). Recognizing that existing laws will make it difficult for them
to find another place to live together in London and specifically considering
the implications of her eviction of Ivor’s lover Ronnie, Anna writes, “she felt
[herself ] a bitch” (392).13 Looking at the discourse of this scenario rather than
scrutinizing its unfolding plot as realist representation, one can conclude that
the novel demonstrates a model for regenerating the powers of parody that
Anna laments as having disappeared since the “thinning of language against
the density of . . . experience” (288). The Golden Notebook executes parody of
parodic performativity, most notably in the scene referred to earlier where
the gay men in her upstairs rental room taunt her while referring to “Fat
buttocky cows . . . . Sagging sweaty breasts” within her earshot “on purpose”
(389). After telling Ivor to leave, Anna imagines him arriving the next day
with “a big bunch of flowers, and the weary smile of a man determined to
humour a woman. ‘To the nicest landlady in the world,’ he murmured” (500)
disingenuously.
Depending on the reader’s interpretation of the scene with the flowers that
ensues, this narrative motif of a man “humour[ing] a woman” is halfhearted
or a parodic performance by Ivor. Anna then hits Ivor “across the face with
them [the flowers],” thus rejecting his gesture, whether insincere or parodic.
Ivor responds, “smiling, his face averted in the parody of a man suffering
unjust punishment” (500, emphasis added). Ivor’s parodying reaction to his
own failed gesture of trying to bring Anna around through the gendered role
of “a man determined to humour a woman” by offering flowers is a model for
the way the novel replenishes the force of parody by using layered discourse.
The performativity of the scene is reinforced by Anna’s observation that Ivor

didn’t expect his supplicating gesture to be successful; he had already with-
drawn or borrowed the exact amount in order to settle back-rent owed to
Anna on his leaving.
In this scene, Lessing’s style is close to the textual density inaugurated by
Osborne’s signature work and demonstrated in her Play with a Tiger. Lessing’s
novel importantly guides an implied (or perhaps ideal) reader to recognize
Ivor and Ronnie as offering an example of metaparody instantiated else-
where in the text. Concerning the homophobia expressed by narrator Anna in
The Golden Notebook, through the mimetic conventions of realist fiction, the
implied author-Lessing reveals internalized homophobia of fifties London.
Judith Kegan Gardiner historicizes fictional Anna’s use of homophobic dis-
course and concludes that “Anna’s homophobia in the novel is shown as fitting
her character and changing situations throughout the novel. It develops from
bemused wartime tolerance to hysterical 1950s counter-identification in par-
allel with both historical changes in British and Communist Party attitudes
and with the demands of a narrative shaped to record Anna’s progress toward
psychological crackup” (17).
The narrative treatment of the subject is sufficient evidence that Lessing
was also critiquing homophobia itself through the example of Anna Wulf ’s
conflict over evicting Ronnie and his lover. When Ivor brings his suitcases
downstairs to move out, Anna reflects: “Oh how sad, this poor young man,
all his possessions locked in a couple of suitcases . . . . [S]he had to suppress
an impulse to give it [the rent money] back to him” (501). Fifties culture
had a limited discourse for expressing rejection of the male-female gender
binary. Lessing’s construction of the author-reader transactions in the scene
involving the flowers serves as a model for interpreting parodic, performative
repetition elsewhere in the novel, which has the effect of showcasing and
valuing alternatives to binary-defined, normative options.
In an earlier black notebook segment, homosexuality presented using real-
ist conventions also illustrates “aesthetic nervousness.” In this instance, Anna’s
“effeminophobia” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term, Gardiner 16) is a gen-
dered, socialized response to the behavior of young Oxford bisexual men who
have been recast as awkward RAF soldiers in wartime Southern Rhodesia.
An “attempt at cross-racial same-sex bonding” (15) is misinterpreted by Mrs.
Boothby, a repressed, hard-working white Rhodesian hotel owner’s wife. She
observed the Rhodesian hotel’s black male cook, Jackson, being embraced by
Jimmy McGrath, a “homosexual” airman (The Golden Notebook 76), after the
cook reached down to see if the RAF flyer—who was lying drunk on the hotel
kitchen floor—was all right. In the caring scene that incenses Mrs. Boothby,
when Jimmy “awoke, [he] saw Jackson and lifted his arms like a newly roused
child and put them around Jackson’s neck. The black man said: ‘Baas Jimmy,
Baas Jimmy, you must go to bed. You must not be here.’ And Jimmy said:
‘You love me Jackson, don’t you, you love me, none of the others love me’ ”
(139–40). Mrs. Boothby, horrified and aghast at what she observes, reacts
malevolently by sending the RAF group away from the hotel, in order to put
an end to what is in fact understood by Anna as innocent touching.
By contrast, a decade later in London, one can see Anna’s intolerance
toward Ivor and Ronnie reflecting the punitive regime of disciplinary coer-
cion evidenced by conceivable violence against homosexual men in Britain;
by McCarthyist political repression in the United States; and, in the com-
munist world, by the post-Khrushchev, post-Twentieth Congress context of
the British Communist Party. It may serve as a telling sign of Anna’s immi-
nent psychological collapse, as Gardiner comments, but Anna’s anxiety over
homosexuality is not resolved by the plot that on one level—depending on
how one reads the work—leads toward her increased conformity, rigidity,
and intolerance. By Free Women 5, the minor character Marion is depicted
by Molly as operating a Knightsbridge dress shop “surrounded by a gaggle of
little queers who exploit her” (634).14 Exploring realism through the lens of
Zola’s theory of vivisection (or live dissection) and focalized through a charac-
ter, the fictional slice of life reveals irksome, internalized fifties homophobic
discourse, which Lessing’s metarealist The Golden Notebook highlights and
narratively investigates. In the same manner of layered banter in Look Back in
Anger, Jimmy Porter symptomatically finds aggressive comic relief through a
quip while reading in a “posh” newspaper (75) about a highbrow American
academic’s view of Shakespeare’s having “changed his sex” while writing The
Tempest (76). In the constructed speech of theater, Jimmy’s defensive remark
raises a barrier against the sexual threat of being abandoned by his wife Alison,
and protects him against any censure for another woman Helena’s “living in
sin with [him]” (76) or for his atypical friendship with his unattached male
flatmate, Cliff.
Lessing’s comparable realist positioning of fifties homophobia in The
Golden Notebook from Anna’s viewpoint is further graspable as a generational
position that may be contrasted with that of youth through abrasive dialogue
in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (which premiered in 1958 while Lessing
was writing The Golden Notebook).15 There are different kinds of alignments
among the three texts I discuss. On the one hand, there is the generational one
(Lessing and Osborne are of the same generation, in contrast to Delaney); on
the other hand, there is the gender alignment: in contrast to Osborne, both
Lessing and Delaney, although women of different generations, were writ-
ing about issues of particular concern to politicized women of their time. In
Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, protagonist seventeen-year-old Jo, alone, pregnant
without the fetus’s father, disparages the homophobia of her forty-year-old

mother Helen, much as Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook is disturbed by
her daughter Janet’s warming to gay flatmates Ronnie and Ivor. Helen is about
Lessing’s age when she wrote The Golden Notebook and Jo is about Delaney’s
age when she wrote her first, celebrated play, A Taste of Honey.
Going beyond potential tolerance of homosexuality signalled by an
author’s inclusiveness, but moving toward the example of the characters’
friendship, one can observe that Jo relies on her conventionally effeminate gay
flatmate Geoffrey Ingram—who performs a camp role analogous to that of
Ronnie and Ivor in The Golden Notebook—more than on her mother for sup-
port throughout her pregnancy. Generational dissension is highlighted after
Geof interferes by soliciting Jo’s mother’s support of her daughter’s pregnancy;
Geof ’s intervention leads negatively to further isolation and health risk for Jo
during delivery. He is exiled on the basis of Jo’s mother Helen’s insufferable
homophobia, manifesting itself as much the same emotive reaction of “angry”
disgust (500–501) that causes Anna to cast Ronnie and Ivor out of her flat.
The mother’s and daughter’s contrasting views on normative sexual behav-
ior and deviance develop further in A Taste of Honey’s conflicting generational
positions on mixed-race marriage and miscegenation. Lessing’s experience of
colonial segregation between blacks and whites would have made it difficult
for her in 1962 to realistically represent the possibility of mixed-race marriage.
While The Golden Notebook reflects laws that prohibited same-sex cohabita-
tion in fifties London, years later, in her autobiography, Lessing commented
on the laws concerning miscegenation in Southern Rhodesia in the forties:
she observes, “While it was a commonplace that white men had sex with
black women, and the continually enlarging Coloured community was there
to prove it, I had only once heard of a white woman having sex with her
black servant. The penalty—for the man—was hanging. Besides, the taboos
were so strong” (Walking 8). In the black notebook, the repugnance Anna
recalls feeling for white road worker George Hounslow (whom she other-
wise admires) when she learns that he sleeps with Marie, Jackson the cook’s
black wife, mirrors her distaste for Ivor and Ronnie’s intimacy. We recognize
a similar strong, visceral reaction in Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing
(1950), when successful white farmer Charlie Slatter witnesses the cross-class
and cross-race intimacy between “poor white” Mary and black servant Moses
in the dinner scene (200–204).
By contrast, the ironic title of Delaney’s play revisits the social prohibition
against miscegenation as a self-evident matter of having good taste. Coura-
geously for the fifties stage, Delaney shows Jo and her unnamed black “Boy”
lover16 discussing marriage and spending Christmas together, during which
time they conceive a child before her lover disappears, she believes forever,
to return to his Navy role. Generational conflict is evident in the sharp dia-
logue between Helen and Jo. Jo opposes homophobic insults against Geof by
others (Helen refers to him as “pansified little freak” 63, 67 and Peter, her
fiancé, names him “little fruitcake parcel” 68, for example). Unaware that her
mother has sent Geof away, Jo maintains a positive image of Geof as a nurtur-
ing friend assisting her pregnancy, while to Helen its result—Geof acting as a
surrogate father for the child—is unthinkable. Further, Jo informs her mother
that “My baby will be black” (86). Helen replies rhetorically: “You mean to
say that . . . that sailor was a black man?” (86), revealing her presumption that
members of the Royal Navy are white, as are other (including health care)
professionals.
Seeing miscegenation as the greatest threat to social cohesion, Helen con-
cludes, “Oh my God! Nothing else can happen to me now” (86), and begins
readying for departure by searching for her hat that, comically, is on her head
(87; see an earlier example of the hat search 33). Delaney introduces pathos
and comic irony into the final mother-daughter exchange when Helen pro-
tectively asks, “Who knows about it [the child’s racial composition]?” and
gets a one-word but significant reply: “Geoffrey” (86). When Helen queries
further how the delivery nurse will cope with seeing a black child emerging
from Jo’s white body during delivery, Jo quips, “Well, she’s black, too” (86).
Helen recommends, if not “Drown[ing]” the child or “Put[ting] it on the stage
and call[ing] it Blackbird” (86–87, emphasis added), that the black delivery
nurse may “adopt it. Dear God in heaven!” (86). The play indulges gritty
working-class realism in the storyworld situation of a white woman birthing
a potentially adoptive black child.17 However, judging by his 1958 Univer-
sities and Left Review essay, New Left cultural and communications scholar
Raymond Williams might have criticized the play for its “personal formula”
structure wherein “a particular pattern is abstracted from the sum of experi-
ence, and persons are created from that” (“Realism and the Contemporary
Novel” 23). Williams’s position on “personal formula” fiction corresponds
to Thompson’s already discussed criticism of The Golden Notebook for being
“subjective.”
The person who “knows about” Jo’s mixed-race pregnancy is Geof; alone
on the stage, Jo “remembers” him at the end of the play (87) that concludes
with her reciting the children’s rhyme, which he sang earlier in the context of
their celebrating together their acceptance of sexual difference amidst other
generational challenges to authority (51, 87).
GEOF: We’re unique!

JO: Young.
GEOF: Unrivalled!
JO: Smashing!
GEOF: We’re bloody marvellous! (50–51)
Directly shaped by the postwar Western anti-establishment culture of opti-

mism and commitment, writers and filmmakers such as Delaney, who were
younger than Lessing and Williams, courageously pried open taboo social
conventions and thereby challenged the presumptions of the past.
A scene of slapstick comic-ironic exchange in A Taste of Honey conjures
what might have been going on during Anna’s daughter Janet’s visits with
Ivor and Ronnie. Though Delaney cultivates much more equanimity in Jo
and Geof ’s relationship than Anna and her tenants demonstrate, Geof is
nonetheless conventionally gendered as the “gay friend of the single female”
type (Jo says, like a “big sister” 54, 55; or a “wife” 55). By implication, the play
dismisses effeminophobia as a reasonable strategy for female self-definition.
While isolated in the ending after Geof is banished by her mother Helen, Jo
engages with Geof in her imagination. The play closes with the repeated ditty
he first recited with reference to Jo. He contrasts her—“pretty miss,/Blessings
light upon you” (87)—with the dark world, referring to the district of “this
dump” of a flat she lives in (her mother Helen’s bourgeois fiancé, Peter’s words
17), which her mother initially rented. Geof recites, “If I had half a crown a
day,/ I’d gladly spend it on you” (87), indicating that, if he had the social and
economic means, he would support the prismatic “light” of Jo’s vision and her
baby’s potential for disrupting cultural gender and racial norms. However, in
the context of the dystopian ending of the drama, when Jo’s flat is reoccupied
by her controlling judgmental mother after she evicts Geof, this repetition in
Jo’s memory must be considered ironic.
Masterpiece and Failure

Delaney’s A Taste of Honey is situated within the gritty kitchen sink realist
tradition of Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, from which the Angry Young
Men took their name, yet by contrast Delaney’s play and Lessing’s play and
novel foreground female-focalized gender concerns.18 What Delaney’s play
has in common with The Golden Notebook is its attention to women’s repro-
ductive issues such as sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childcare, and single
motherhood, focalized through the female characters’ viewpoints. Play with a
Tiger highlights one of Dave’s girlfriends—single Janet Stevens—who is five
months pregnant. Jo in A Taste of Honey goes forward with her pregnancy,
while in Look Back in Anger more conventional, married Alison loses her
pregnancy through miscarriage. In Walking in the Shade, Lessing describes
“[p]eople [like herself ] who have brought up small children without another
parent to share the load” (23). This category of single motherhood, espe-
cially its social and financial precariousness, was not being discussed widely
within fifties public culture. The Golden Notebook explores these themes, with
Anna and Molly each rearing a child on her own, though under different
circumstances: Molly has her former spouse Richard Portmain’s grudging
financial support while she raises their son Tommy, while Anna depends on
diminishing revenues from her successful first novel Frontiers of War to raise
Janet. Both primary caregivers struggle with issues of independence from their
role: Anna finds creative leisure after sending her daughter, Janet, to board-
ing school, while Molly tries to manage her late-adolescent son Tommy’s
dependency after he is blinded by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Though she is freed from domestic constraints, Anna is unhappy with
the incapacity of the “nostalgic” Frontiers of War (The Golden Notebook 145)
to capture the complexity of experience; that concern increases her anxi-
eties about writing another novel—hence her symptomatic efforts to record
her experiences truthfully in the notebooks instead. The layered discourse
within and between sections of The Golden Notebook demonstrates a rich
novelistic model that anticipates the problematic experience of future second-
wave feminists. The narrative discourse is sufficiently complex for directing
the reader’s critique of the historically symptomatic positions Anna and her
fictional doubles purport in the storyworld about sexuality, including that
of gays and lesbians.19 The novel’s form supports querying Anna Wulf as
reliable or unreliable narrator of the facts of her experience and their inter-
pretation. However, the novel’s casting of ideological positions held by a
character may be misconstrued by a less sophisticated and open community
than the actual audience Lessing encountered in the Royal Court Theatre.
The implied audience of her novel is trained by reading the notebooks to
detect the ironic narrator of Free Women 5, for instance, as not the voice of
the implied author. Without the reader appreciating its parody, The Golden
Notebook may unwittingly reinforce fifties cultural stereotypes, which Lessing
saw and rejected in the English parochialism she observed among the Angry
Young Men, whose “work . . . was like an injection of vitality into the withered
arm of British literature . . . . Yet they [we]re extremely provincial . . . . [T]heir
horizons [we]re bounded by their immediate experience of British life and
standards” (Lessing, “The Small Personal Voice,” A Small Personal Voice 15).
In her 1971 Preface to The Golden Notebook, Lessing stated that the
book “was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s
Liberation movements already existed” (xiv). Thus, though it concludes in
1957, The Golden Notebook features prototypical second-wave feminist writer
Anna Wulf, who is deeply engaged with issues of sexuality, family, and
work, and problems with representing her relationship to them as a writer.
Finding herself in the position of challenging second-wave feminist critics

of The Golden Notebook who were understandably attracted to its protago-
nist and themes, Lessing instead wanted to engage the more various class,
race, and gender lines of “a divided civilisation,” as mentioned in the Nobel
Committee’s announcement when Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature.20 The novel thus offers a test situation for evaluating its own realist
aspirations. In the black notebook, Anna tries to depict the airy Maryrose and
enigmatic Willi, who are part of the communist cluster in Southern Rhodesia
in which Anna participated during the war years: Anna claims that her only
concern is to describe the essence of their characters so that a reader can grasp
their intrinsic complexity. Her Marxist aesthetic is Lukácsian. “All I care about
is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their
reality. And after twenty years of living in and around the left, which means
twenty years’ preoccupation with this question of morality in art, that is all
I am left with” (68). Anna’s aspiration here is challenged, disputed, reinforced,
or rejected by other sections of the novel that are metacritical about the capac-
ity for realist representation of the kind Anna describes, thus contributing to
what Bentley calls “critical fiction.”21
Aside from Bentley’s notion of “critical fiction” that describes the metanar-
rative of The Golden Notebook, the novel arguably manages to contribute to
“the realistic tradition” as Williams understood it in his 1958 essay, “Realism
and the Contemporary Novel”:
There is a kind of novel which in fact creates and judges the quality of a whole
way of living in terms of the qualities of persons . . . . [I]t offers a valuing cre-
ation of a whole way of life, a society, that is larger than any of the individuals
composing it, and at the same time valuing creations of individual human
beings, who while belonging to and affected by and helping to define this
way of life, are also, in their own terms, absolute ends in themselves. Neither
element, neither the society nor the individual, is there as a priority. (22)
Lessing’s complex portrayal of the second-wave feminist consciousness of

the woman writer distinguishes her fractured narrative from both Osborne’s
kitchen sink realism and Delaney’s use of it for social satire. Lessing’s
novel exemplifies—to use Raymond Williams’s phrase—“structures of feel-
ing” (“Structures of Feeling,” Marxism and Literature 128–35) of women
at mid-century in Southern Rhodesia and southern England while draw-
ing those worlds together. Ultimately by challenging, through her paratextual
1971 Preface and 1993 Introduction, how The Golden Notebook was reduced
to a feminist tract by non-self-critical readers, Lessing foregrounded the
importance of those intellectual, social, and political positions that had
been underscrutinized. These include the interpretive contexts of dialectical
left-wing debates about realism in its various permutations, gender through

its constructions, and political commitment with all its disappointments and
illusions. Embracing the complexity of lived experience, Lessing uses Anna
Wulf to deconstruct and reconstruct such “isms” as feminism, communism,
and realism. Thus The Golden Notebook offers a model for theorizing the
agency of the woman writer from 1962, at the inception of the present
multivalent postmodern condition.
The Golden Notebook takes account of proposed worlds in feminist and
other theories, through the realist representation of female desire that is pre-
cariously fulfilled by already existing socialized practices. Female experience in
the novel includes close bonds between women such as Anna Wulf and Molly
Jacobs, and heterosexual affairs of up to five years such as Anna’s intimate rela-
tionship with Michael. Whether Anna achieves the goal of becoming a “free
woman” through recovery from some form of madness and her return to writ-
ing is debatable because of factual discrepancies between the lived experience
recorded in the notebooks and the aspirational rhetoric of Free Women.22
Bonnie Zimmerman tackles the ambiguous feminism in the novel:
Just as the feminism of a critical text might be compromised by the fear or

ignorance of lesbianism, so literary texts may be analyzed for heterosexist biases.
In doing so, critics have exposed other destructive myths: for example, . . . the
Freudian myth that lesbianism is exclusively a protest against men, rather than
a positive urge toward women. In The Golden Notebook . . . , for example, this
latter idea provides a major stumbling block in Anna/Ella’s way toward being
a ‘free woman’. A lesbian commitment between Anna and Molly or Ella and
Julia is simply unimaginable, impossible in the textual universe of The Golden
Notebook. Since lesbianism (like male homosexuality) is seen to be an inau-
thentic and pathetic experience, Lessing’s women are compelled to prove their
femininity by floating from one ‘real man’ to another. (172)
In this sense, by design The Golden Notebook may be destined to be both

masterpiece and failure. According to Alice Ridout, “Lessing . . . suggests that
the formal ‘failure’ of the novel is also its success” (50). In her chapter, “ ‘Some
Books Are Not Read in the Right Way’: Parody and Reception in Doris
Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” Ridout examines Lessing’s paratextual non-
fiction critical claims offered up in commentary on her writing.23 One of
the essays she discusses is Lessing’s 1971 Preface to The Golden Notebook,24
in which Lessing objected to the way the novel was regarded as a feminist
tract and claims instead that her project aimed to emphasize the play of
differences between truth claims, rather than reinforcing binary division sig-
nified by us and them, inside and outside, or male and female, dichotomies.
In Lessing’s paratextual remarks, binary divisions, similar in form to left-wing
dialectical theories applied in political practice (or Marxist praxis), are con-
figured as potentially unproductive. As Lessing says, “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” (The Golden Note-
book xv). Reflected in The Golden Notebook’s form, this play of difference
among multiple truth claims resembles deconstructive, semiotic understand-
ing wherein what is not stated—for example, the specific nature of Anna
and Molly’s friendship—may be as important for current interpretation or,
as is often the case with Lessing’s work, may be more important than what is
overtly stressed: the two women’s strained relationships with men.
Accordingly, a current reading of these progenitor second-wave feminists
cast in the realist frame narrative of Free Women is necessarily contextualized
in a widening networked field of contingent interpretations, including those
that now interrogate the text by discovering lesbian potential in their friend-
ship. Zimmerman identifies the Sapphic implications of Molly and Anna’s
friendship through the lens of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own (1929): speaking
of Woolf, Zimmerman claims, “A mind that could envision the revolution-
ary potential of two women alone in a laboratory experimenting with the
substance of their lives did indeed harbor a ‘Sapphic’ imagination” (169,
emphasis added). I emphasize “alone” to draw attention to the memorable
opening of The Golden Notebook and Free Women 1, in which Molly and
Anna are “alone” “after a separation” (3) and are interrupted by Richard’s
“coming over” (3); and the last line of the novel and Free Women 5, in which
“The two women kissed and separated” (635).
The clarity and interpretive authority of the first and last lines of the ironic,
realist frame narrative, Free Women, are further complicated by the struc-
tural fact that the first line of the novel—“The two women were alone in
the London flat” (3)—is given to Anna by Saul Green, with whom she has
a brief, heated, stormy affair and descends into madness, as charted in blue
notebook 4 and the Golden Notebook. According to Zimmerman, “For cen-
turies Sappho was remembered primarily for this mythic transference from
woman-love to man-love. The ‘Phaon myth’ provides an archetypal and inau-
thentic ending for innumerable lesbian stories” (170). Anna is but one of
Saul’s lovers, in response to which she struggles through the inner dichoto-
mous split between defensive jealousy and striving for independence from
his own distracting hyperactivity and ostensible madness. Reinforcing the
Phaon myth, Saul Green’s name can be translated as “asked for fertility”25 ;
he is the author of the first line, advising Anna: “It doesn’t matter if you
fail. Why are you so arrogant? Just begin . . . . I’m going to give you the first
sentence then. There are the two women you are, Anna. Write down: The
two women were alone in the London flat” (610, emphasis added). Based on
Saul’s preamble—“There are the two women you are, Anna”—it is possible to
read the Anna/Molly friendship as both Anna’s having “a positive urge toward
women” (Zimmerman 172) and, more psychologically, as a type of Laingian
insight into Anna’s divided self (Laing, The Divided Self ).
In its method of nontotalizing disassembly, The Golden Notebook shows
that experience cannot be tidily separated out, marked off, and delimited.
When Anna packs away the last of her journals—blue notebook 4—she
decides to “start a new notebook, [putting] all of [her]self in one book” (580);
yet this singular Golden Notebook depicts her complete dissolution with Saul
into a form of madness. If we accept The Golden Notebook as a whole repre-
senting Anna’s consciousness after the release from her writer’s block that is
achieved in relationship to Saul, she and her novel remain decidedly contra-
dictory and the fragments do not complete the whole. Gaps remain, such as
what to make of the overlaid language from the first page of the novel, which
is also page one of the ironic, realist frame, Free Women, that was originally
identified by its different font from the notebooks.26 The Golden Notebook
neither reveals nor excludes Anna’s homosexuality—or homophobia—but
rather remains open to interpretations that have evolved over time.
Notes
1. Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Perennial Classics, 1999) 202. Further
references to the novel are cited parenthetically in the text.
2. According to Dennis H. Wrong in an essay titled “C. Wright Mills Recalled,”
Society 38.6 (Sept./Oct. 2001): 61–64, “New Left student radicals . . . made a
hero and icon of Mills after his premature death, some even suggesting that he
had been murdered in the 116th Street subway station at Columbia at the insti-
gation of his colleagues Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton” (62–63). Mills’s iconic
“The Sociological Imagination was favorably reviewed by Everett Hughes who
later included its title in his presidential address to the American Sociologi-
cal Association, and it was received largely with approval by sociologists in the
Chicago tradition who tended to be hostile to the Harvard-Columbia ambience
that Mills assailed” (63). See also John Summers, “No-Man’s-Land: C. Wright
Mills in England,” Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics
and Culture in Britain, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008) 188.
3. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Collected Essays, ed. Leonard
Woolf, vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1966) 319–37: “Mrs. Brown must be res-
cued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world . . . . [W]riters
shall . . . describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown”
(333, 336).
4. Lessing, letter, London Review of Books 12.7 (5 Apr. 1990), Web, 1 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v12/n07/letters#letter1> Lessing identifies the Australian
reviewer Janet Hase in Walking in the Shade, Volume Two of My Autobiography,

1949–1962 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) 297: “we two colonials were in
that mood when we could not imagine why we had ever come here [to rainy
England] . . . . Janet was complaining all the way that the men of this new rev-
olutionary movement treated the women as dogs-bodies and she was sick of it.
She had wanted to review The Golden Notebook for them, but they wouldn’t let
her. They were interested only in theories and academic ideas” (298). Further
references to Walking in the Shade are cited parenthetically in the text as Walking.
5. John Osborne, Look Back in Anger and Other Plays (London: Faber, 1993).
Further references to the play are cited parenthetically in the text.
6. Lessing’s Play with a Tiger and Other Plays (London: Flamingo, 1996) includes
both Play with a Tiger 1–73 and Each His Own Wilderness 99–186.
7. A well-known scene in The Golden Notebook may derive from Look Back in Anger.
Jimmy reveals to his friend Cliff Lewis that he investigates Alison’s “private prop-
erty” when she is out (33). As Jimmy phrases it, “Living night and day with
another human being has made me predatory and suspicious. I know that the
only way of finding out exactly what’s going on is to catch them when they
don’t know you’re looking. When she goes out, I go through everything—trunks,
cases, drawers, bookcase, everything. Why? To see if there is something of me
somewhere, a reference to me. I want to know if I’m being betrayed” (33). The
scene recalls Anna in blue notebook 4, searching through Saul’s possessions for
evidence about herself, an action that is also described in *14 A Short Novel in
the yellow notebook (514).
8. See Lessing, “Author’s Notes on Directing this Play,” Play with a Tiger. She says,
her emphasis on discourse rather than story (or plot) was intentional: “When
I wrote Play with a Tiger in 1958 I set myself an artistic problem which resulted
from my decision that naturalism, or, if you like, realism, is the greatest enemy of
the theatre; and that I never wanted to write a naturalistic play again” (3). Further
references to the play are cited parenthetically in the text.
9. In The Golden Notebook, Comrade Harry, “one of the top academics in the C.P.,
recently went to Russia, to find out, as a Jew, what had happened to the Jews in
the ‘black years’ before Stalin died” (459). He is disillusioned when he confronts
the Party on his return, to no avail.
10. Lessing is shown among other recognizable cultural figures at the March in
the 2012 Guardian photograph marking The Golden Notebook at fifty: “Doris
Lessing’s Golden Notebook, 50 Years On,” The Guardian 6 April 2012, Web,
1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/06/the-golden-
notebook-50-years-on> One of the Guardian newspaper blogs attributed to
“anavidreader 07 April 2012” comprises the group: “And yes, that is definitely
[John] Berger” on the far right side of the photograph, in addition to Lessing,
Osborne, Sheila (sic) Delaney, and Vanessa Redgrave, who are identified in the
Guardian caption.
11. Lessing mentions, “A great many American friends of mine were destroyed by
McCarthy . . . . In England I helped circulate a petition for the Rosenbergs,” in
“Doris Lessing at Stony Brook: An Interview by Jonah Raskin,” A Small Personal

Voice 73–74. Frederick C. Stern describes The Golden Notebook as “about politics,
especially post-World War II Left and Communist politics . . . . Most of the men
in Anna’s life are Communists or ex-Communists, usually not English men, but
Americans and continental Europeans, and they connect several issues in the
novel” (37, 41, emphasis in original). See his “Politics and The Golden Notebook,”
Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, ed. Carey Kaplan and
Ellen Cronan Rose (New York: MLA, 1989) 37–42.
12. This concept draws from Ato Quayson’s interpreting the way disability figures
in postcolonial fiction. Although he makes no reference to Lessing’s writing,
Quayson’s notion of “aesthetic nervousness” serves to foreground the ideological
work homosexually differentiated bodies perform in the novel: “Literary repre-
sentations . . . refract our world and the ‘subliminal fear and moral panic’ . . . that
arise in the encounter between the non-disabled and the disabled” body (Julie
Nack Ngue, rev. of Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation,
by Ato Quayson, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.3 [2010]:
333). So far as the narrative discourse is concerned, the “encounter between”
the second-wave feminist writer and homosexual men in The Golden Notebook is
comparable.
13. See Neil Miller, “The Struggle for British Law Reform, 1950–1967,” Out of the
Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (New York: Alyson, 2006)
254–70 and Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).
14. In The Golden Notebook, Richard Portmain is divorced from Molly and divorces
Marion, his second wife, during the time encompassed by the novel. In her auto-
biography, Lessing mentions the socio-legal apparatus concerning homosexuality
with respect to English theater, opera, and film director
John Dexter [who] was a friend then. That was before the law about
homosexuality was changed, and he was caught with a boy . . . . He got
six months and was sent to Wormwood Scrubs . . . . John had suffered
no physical ill treatment, but he had been a target for newspaper insults,
he had stood in court and been despised, been sentenced as an evil-doer,
then found himself in that grim place, being punished.
(Walking 240)
15. Delaney is shown with Lessing and Vanessa Redgrave in the Guardian photo-
graph attached to the article celebrating The Golden Notebook fifty years on. See
note 10.
16. Although in the list of characters, he is called “The Boy,” Jo identifies him as
Jimmie. Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (London: Methuen Drama, 2009)
75. Further references to the play are cited parenthetically in the text.
17. The scenario is similar to that of Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, a film about
race and sexuality in the English working class. However, Leigh’s film looks
to the future circumstances of the child Hortense Cumberbatch, later a young
black professional woman optometrist who learns that her adoptive black par-
ents stood in for her white, working-class mother, Cynthia Rose Purley, who, as
an unmarried teenager, could not cope with the social implications of raising a
child. In Leigh’s 1996 film, Hortense could represent the future culturally trans-
gressive implications for the fetus Jo carries in Delaney’s 1958 play. Secrets and
Lies, dir. Mike Leigh, Thin Man Films, 1996, DVD.
18. Regarding one of the gendered themes—reproduction for the single woman—
see also Lessing’s lifelong friend Margaret Drabble’s 1965 novel, The Millstone
(London: Penguin, 1968).
19. In Play with a Tiger, Anna Freeman’s remark to Dave about prostitutes in a
brothel, referred to as “four Lesbians living together” (7)—their “quarrel[ling].
I hate it. Last night they were rolling in the street and pulling each other’s hair
and screaming” (31)—may correspond to the liberating force of the escaped
tiger that injures Anna in the inner Golden Notebook and also in the play:
“He lashed out, I was covered with blood . . . . I’m covered with scars” (Play
with a Tiger 56). In The Golden Notebook, Anna’s scars fortuitously and inex-
plicably heal, as she is renewed by her encounter with Saul: “I saw the blood
running down my arm . . . . Then I saw my arm was not hurt at all, it had already
healed” (587).
20. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007,” Nobelprize.org, 7 Dec. 2007, Web,
1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/
2007/>
21. Yet a comparative reading of the novel alongside A Taste of Honey distinguishes
Lessing’s performance of “critical fiction,” since Lessing and Anna are each writ-
ing “as a woman” concerning a woman writer (Moi). The Golden Notebook is
primarily focalized through the consciousness of Anna and her various projected
selves, so we do not have the same access to Ivor, Ronnie, or Janet’s views as
we do the views of characters in A Taste of Honey, such as those that voice Jo and
Geof ’s potentially “smashing” perspectives (51). Jo and Geof banter about homo-
sexuality, including homosexuals having difficulty with London housing—JO:
“Has your landlady thrown you out? . . . Who did she find you with? . . . It wasn’t
a man, was it?” (47)—and her inquiring about homosexual practice. JO: “I’ve
always wanted to know about people like you . . . . I want to know what you do.
I want to know why you do it. Tell me or get out. GEOF: Right! [He goes to
the door.]” (48, emphasis and square brackets in original). Later, she says to him,
“You know, you’re a cure” for her being “cracked as an old bedbug,” in his words
(74). Female focalization in both texts attends, though differently, to the lacklus-
ter urban social context Osborne’s play delves into through its more narrow focus
on the stubborn unhappiness of the heterosexual marriage of Jimmy and Alison
Porter. Delaney’s play and, to a greater extent, Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and
Play with a Tiger use the female domestic space of the single woman’s flat for the
dramatic purpose of generating realist complexity.
22. Beth Boehm addresses the interpretive challenges that factual discrepancy
raises, along with the invitation to read the text metanarratively. “Reeducating
Readers: Creating New Expectations for The Golden Notebook,” Narrative 5.1
(Jan. 1997): 88–98.
23. See Alice Ridout, “ ‘Some Books Are Not Read in the Right Way’: Parody and
Reception in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” in her Contemporary Women
Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010) 47–68.
24. This essay has preceded the text of The Golden Notebook in every edition of the
novel published since 1972. In 1993, Lessing added an Introduction that further
emphasizes reception. In recent publication such as the 1999 edition from which
I cite here, this short Introduction precedes the 1971 Preface and the text of the
novel.
25. Saul in Hebrew means “asked for.”
26. In his chapter in this volume, Paul Schlueter describes “the quaint, florid
eighteenth-century typeface (Bell) used for the Free Women sections and the
more contemporary, ubiquitous typeface (Times) used for the various notebooks
in the novel’s first British clothbound edition (Michael Joseph, 1962)” (173–74).
Works Cited
Blackburn, Robin. Letter. London Review of Books 12.5 (8 Mar. 1990). Web. 1
Nov. 2014. <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v12/n05/letters#letter1>
Boehm, Beth A. “Reeducating Readers: Creating New Expectations for The Golden
Notebook.” Narrative 5.1 (Jan. 1997): 88–98. Print.
Delaney, Shelagh. A Taste of Honey. 1959. London: Methuen Drama, 2009. Print.
“Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, 50 Years On.” The Guardian 6 April 2012.
Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/06/the-golden-
notebook-50-years-on>
Drabble, Margaret. The Millstone. 1965. London: Penguin, 1968. Print.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Historicizing Homophobia in The Golden Notebook and
‘The Day Stalin Died.’ ” Doris Lessing Studies 25.2 (Winter 2006): 14–18. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart
Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies.
Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. 486–505.
Print.
Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–
1957. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print.
Joannou, Maroula. Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Iden-
tity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012. Print.
Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. 1960. New York: Pantheon, 1969. Print.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: Perennial Classics, 1999.
Print.
——. The Grass Is Singing. 1950. New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2008.
Print.
——. Letter. London Review of Books 12.7 (5 Apr. 1990). Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://
www.lrb.co.uk/v12/n07/letters#letter1>
——. Play with a Tiger and Other Plays. London: Flamingo, 1996. Print.
——. A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Ed. Paul Schlueter. New York:
Vintage, 1975. Print.
——. Walking in the Shade, Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962. New York:
Miller, Neil. Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present.
New York: Alyson, 2006. Print.
Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. Print.
Moi, Toril. “ ‘I Am not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist
Theory Today.” Eurozine. 12 June 2009. Web. 1 Nov. 2014. <http://www.eurozine.
com/articles/2009-06-12-moi-en.html>
Ngue, Julie Nack. “Review of Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Repre-
sentation, by Ato Quayson.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.3
(2010): 333–35. Print.
“The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007.” Nobelprize.org. 7 Dec. 2007. Web. 1
Nov. 2014. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/>
Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger and Other Plays. London: Faber, 1993. Print.
London: Continuum, 2010. Print.
Secrets and Lies. Dir. Mike Leigh. Thin Man Films. 1996. DVD.
Stern, Frederick C. “Politics and The Golden Notebook.” Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook. Ed. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose. New York:
MLA, 1989. 37–42. Print.
Summers, John. “No-Man’s-Land: C. Wright Mills in England.” Penultimate Adven-
tures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain. Ed. Wm. Roger
Louis. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008. 185–99. Print.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.
——. “Realism and the Contemporary Novel.” Universities and Left Review 4
(Summer 1958): 22–25. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf.
Vol. 1. London: Hogarth, 1966. 319–37. Print.
Wrong, Dennis H. “C. Wright Mills Recalled.” Society 38.6 (Sept./Oct. 2001): 61–64.
Print.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Is ‘Chloe Liked Olivia’ a Lesbian Plot?” Women’s Studies
International Forum 6.2 (1983): 169–75. Print.
PART II
Autobiographical, Aesthetic, and Theoretical

Reconsiderations
CHAPTER 5
The Golden Notebook,

Disguised Autobiography,
and Roman à Clef
Roberta Rubenstein
R
egarding the distinctions between autobiographical fact and literary
invention, Doris Lessing observed, “there is no doubt fiction makes
a better job of the truth.”1 She acknowledged that her early fic-
tion contains many autobiographical elements, particularly as reflected in the
experiences of her first narrative alter ego, Martha Quest, in the five-volume
series Children of Violence, as well as elsewhere in her novels and shorter fic-
tion. Admitting that she “mined” actual people, relationships, and events for
fictional purposes,2 she explained, “some people I write about come out of
my life. Some, well, I don’t know where they come from.”3 The third and
fourth volumes of Children of Violence, titled A Ripple from the Storm (1958)
and Landlocked (1965) and based on her involvement with Marxist socialism
and communism in southern Africa in 1943–44, are, according to Lessing,
the most “directly autobiographical” of all of her fiction, after which, she
claimed, she “left autobiography behind” (Skin 267, 298).
However, before she did so, she wrote The Golden Notebook (1962), a
novel that draws significantly and at times quite transparently on her politi-
cal, aesthetic, and intimate experiences during the fifties. During that decade,
she had two significant romantic relationships, each of four years’ duration—
with an émigré Czech psychiatrist whom she gives the pseudonymous name
“Jack” in her autobiography and with an American expatriate named Clancy
Sigal who, though later a novelist and film-script writer, was unpublished
when he and Lessing met. Although fictionalized versions of both relation-
ships figure centrally in The Golden Notebook, Lessing insisted with pique,
“if I were to write an obituary about me and The Golden Notebook it would
100 ● Roberta Rubenstein
consist of me saying very tartly indeed [ . . . ] the words written in a balloon

over my head: ‘Strange as it may seem, I made it up . . . ’ ” (Walking 344,
ellipses in original unless bracketed). I would argue that half a dozen char-
acters and a number of events in The Golden Notebook that Lessing claimed
she “made up” are based much more closely on autobiographical sources than
she acknowledged. This fact is especially significant because the fuzzy bound-
ary between fact and fiction is woven so fundamentally into the fabric of
the novel itself: Anna Wulf, its fictitious author, interrogates from a variety
of perspectives and aesthetic distances the difficulty, if not impossibility, of
expressing through shaped literary language the “authentic” or “true” version
of events and feelings.
The Golden Notebook pivots on a kind of narrative irony: the same Anna
Wulf who struggles relentlessly with the gap between experience and its ver-
bal expression and who protests that she is unable to write a second novel
following Frontiers of War nonetheless writes—indeed writes compulsively
and prolifically—in the notebooks that reflect her emotional and intellec-
tual self-divisions while providing the novel’s structural organization: “a black
notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, con-
cerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my
experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary.”4 Anna’s wording
concerning the function of the blue notebook anticipates the difficulty she
encounters, despite her multiple “tries,” in articulating her experiences with-
out distortion, even in what is apparently the least fictionally transformed
expression of them. Moreover, as first-time readers discover very late in the
novel, Anna is the author not only of the notebooks but of the ostensibly
omniscient “conventional” narrative, Free Women, four portions of which
are interleaved between each round of notebook installments; the fifth and
final installment concludes the narrative.
The notebooks, written between 1954 and 1957 (with the exception of
a couple of entries dated earlier), reflect Anna’s struggle to examine her aes-
thetic premises and political disillusionments, to embrace as well as to stave
off emotional breakdown, and to resolve her writer’s block. By 1956 and
1957, respectively, she “closes” two notebooks: the black and red notebooks
conclude with bracketed statements indicating “a double black line across
the page, marking the end of the notebook” (GN 492, 497). The remaining
three notebook portions—the final segments of the yellow and blue note-
books and the singular inner Golden Notebook—though undated, may be
dated by internal evidence as written sometime between September 1956
and summer 1957 (GN 492, 3). In these segments of the novel, the char-
acter named Saul Green, introduced for the first time in the final segment of
the blue notebook, figures prominently. In this chapter, I focus on some of the
Disguised Autobiography and Roman à Clef ● 101
autobiographical sources that animate the last three sections of the novel and
consider their implications for understanding the porous boundary between
fact and fiction.
Roman à Clef
The Golden Notebook has not traditionally been regarded as a roman à clef
because it has not been assumed to be a “novel with a key.”5 To understand
the disguised autobiographical elements that draw, at times quite transpar-
ently, on Lessing’s romantic liaison with Clancy Sigal, it is useful to know
several indisputable facts: first, the two met in mid-May, 1957, when Sigal, an
American Leftist and aspiring writer seven years younger than Lessing, arrived
at Lessing’s London flat, penniless and seeking to rent the room that she had
available. Soon afterwards, the two became involved in a complex intimate
relationship that lasted until 1960. By the time Sigal arrived, Lessing had
begun to compose the novel that became The Golden Notebook. The com-
position period of the novel, which overlapped in part with the first year
that Lessing and Sigal lived together, was completed sometime in 1958 and
published in 1962.6
Lessing insisted that she composed The Golden Notebook in precisely the
chronologically scrambled order in which readers progress through its pages.
As she explained in the 1971 Preface to the novel, “keeping the plan of it in
my head I wrote it from start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult . . . [in
part] because of what I was learning as I wrote” (GN xvi). The final sections
of the novel not only press against that assertion but also interrogate the
problematic relationships among chronology, fact, fiction, and “truth.” Since
written narratives as physical objects are necessarily linear for readers, they
are limited in the ways they can represent simultaneous events. Even before
Saul Green is introduced by name late in the narrative (GN 511, 513), we
read the fictionalized versions of Anna Wulf ’s complicated emotional and
imaginative responses either to a man very like him or to the man who
is later revealed to be him. Subsequent readings of the novel interrupt and
reframe the initial linear reading experience. Indeed, part of the fascination
of The Golden Notebook is the tension between the traditional expectation
of an internally self-consistent narrative whole and the disruptive organiza-
tion of Anna Wulf ’s narrative(s), the major premise of which is precisely the
impossibility of articulating experience in a linear, chronological, internally
consistent form.
The final segment of the yellow notebook is comprised of nineteen
sketches or synopses, nearly all of which describe seeds for possible stories
or short novels that Anna might construct out of a complex and, for the
most part, emotionally wrenching intimate relationship between a man and

a woman. As readers discover when they read the last segment of the blue
notebook, the numbered sketches in the yellow notebook are linked through
parenthetical numbered asterisks with events recorded in the blue notebook.
One may interpret this purposeful cross-referencing in several ways: either
Anna uncannily anticipates an intimate liaison that will unfold between her-
self and a man before he actually enters her life; or, by fictionalizing the
details, Anna attempts to distance herself from a relationship that has already
begun to consume her emotionally; or—even though readers necessarily
encounter the yellow notebook before the blue notebook—both.7
Many of the yellow notebook sketches feature emotionally destructive or
dysfunctional relationships between a man and a woman who closely resem-
ble the fictitious Anna and Saul. The first numbered sketch appears in its
entirety as follows: “A woman, starved for love, meets a man rather younger
than herself, younger perhaps in emotional experience than in years; or per-
haps in the depth of his emotional experience. She deludes herself about the
nature of the man; for him another love affair merely” (GN 497). Several
sketches focus on the exchange or transfer of neurotic symptoms between two
lovers. In sketch 4, for example, Anna describes “[a] healthy woman, in love
with a man. She finds herself becoming ill, with symptoms she has never had
in her life. She slowly understands that this illness is not hers . . . . She under-
stands the nature of the illness, not from him, how he acts or what he says,
but from how his illness is reflected in herself ” (GN 499). Other sketches
in the yellow notebook focus on the subject of infidelity and gender differ-
ences in emotional and sexual commitment. For example, sketch 6 outlines
the story of “[a] man and a woman, in a love affair. She, for hunger of love,
he for refuge” (GN 499). Just before an intimate moment between them, the
man, in response to the woman’s accusation that he has recently been with
another woman, initially admits as much—“How did you know?”—and then
denies it, attributing her complaint to an overactive imagination. Ultimately,
he concedes that, although her assumption is correct, he “ ‘didn’t think it
would matter. You have to understand, I don’t take it seriously.’ This last
remark makes her feel diminished and destroyed, as if she does not exist as a
woman” (GN 500). In another variation of this moment, sketch 12 describes
a married man who unconsciously wants his unfaithfulness to be discovered
as a way to assert his sexual and emotional independence. “He needed to say
to his wife: ‘I’m not going to belong to you’ ” (GN 502).
Most of Anna’s yellow notebook sketches feature relationships between a
man and a woman who closely resemble not only her and Saul Green but
also Doris Lessing and Clancy Sigal. As I have discovered, Sigal, like Saul
Green, kept private journals.8 According to details recorded in his journals
written during the time he lived with Lessing, along with Sigal’s unpublished
drafts of lightly disguised autobiography that are closely based on them, the
two became lovers soon after Sigal moved into Lessing’s London flat in mid-
May, 1957.
Almost from the beginning of their relationship, the matter of sex-
ual fidelity became a contentious issue. Though it cannot be absolutely
established whether or not Sigal, who was protective of his independence,
continued to see other women once he and Lessing became lovers, Lessing
was absolutely convinced that he routinely did so, while Sigal was dis-
turbed by what he regarded as her irrational jealousy and their different
sexual ground rules. He not only expressed some of these concerns in
his private journal but, apparently at a later point, added a number of
penciled marginal notes and underscorings for possible reference for his
own writing. Two months into their relationship, he wrote in his jour-
nal, “I like being here for the most part, & yet the concept of fidelity, about
which she is so firm, is foreign to me. I like her but I am not crazy to sleep
w/ her. I like sleeping w/ other women but I don’t like them out of bed ½ as
much as Doris. Dilemma. I don’t wish to hurt Doris. But I don’t equally wish
to strangle myself.”9 Two months later, he noted, “Doris’ jealousy drives me
round the bend & will kill us yet . . . ” (“Going Away” Journal, September 6,
1957). In another entry written several weeks later, he comments, “How do
I keep Doris happy & secure and still have other women. A problem. I guess
I stop sleeping w/ other women, which more or less I’ve done. It will proba-
bly kill me” (“Going Away” Journal, October 16, 1957). Though the intense
tone and diction, including the recurring verb “kill,” are no doubt collo-
quial elements that might not be unusual in a private diary, they also hint
at the heightened tensions and the central emotional conflict that Clancy
recognized early in his relationship with Doris.
In The Golden Notebook, near the beginning of the final installment of the
blue notebook that immediately follows the yellow notebook sketches, Anna
describes her utterly contrary feelings toward the new lodger who has taken
the room in her flat. Almost immediately after he arrives, she begins to expe-
rience the “symptoms of an ‘anxiety state’ . . . as if a stranger, afflicted with
symptoms I had never experienced, had taken possession of my body” (GN
521). Despite—and because of—her emotional vulnerability as the result
of her recently ended love affair with Michael, she recognizes that she is
“going to fall in love with Saul Green” (GN 521); indeed, almost from the
moment of his arrival in her flat, she concludes that she is “already in love”
with him (GN 521). The early phase of their relationship is by turns—if not
almost simultaneously—satisfying and contentious. Initially, Anna discounts
the tensions and combative interchanges between herself and Saul because
she feels “so happy, so happy” (GN 525). In the yellow notebook, sketch 5,
she describes a woman who seems modeled on herself—“a woman who has
fallen in love, against her will” (499), but who declares herself “happy” until
the tenor of her feelings shifts from affection to anxiety and fear.
As Anna becomes more deeply involved with Saul Green, her increasing
jealousy heightens her anxieties. As she describes in the final segment of the
blue notebook, each time Saul leaves the flat, she is certain that his purpose is
a casual sexual encounter with another woman (GN 532–33). Unconvinced
by his disavowals, she finds repugnant the fact that he apparently feels no
compunction about making love to her after having recently been intimate
with another woman. During one of his absences, she goes to his room in
search of evidence concerning what she believes is his sexual duplicity. First,
she finds and skims his personal correspondence, which consists of letters
from women with whom he was involved before he met Anna. Then, dis-
covering “stacks of diaries,” she unashamedly begins to read them. Defending
her invasion of her lodger/lover’s privacy, she thinks, “without any shock at
myself, but as if it were my right, because he lied, that this was the first time
in my life I had read another person’s letters or private papers. I was angry
and sick but very methodical” (GN 534). Her first surprised discovery is that
Saul’s journals run chronologically, “not all split up” like her own (GN 534).
Though Anna knows, based on her own notebooks, that diaries are inher-
ently unreliable, she nonetheless finds enough revealing information in Saul’s
journals to affect her understanding of him.
In late October 1957, Clancy Sigal discovered something of great conse-
quence for his relationship with Lessing and for one’s understanding of The
Golden Notebook: just as Anna Wulf secretly reads Saul Green’s private journal,
so Lessing secretly read Clancy Sigal’s private journal. In the left margin of an
entry in which Sigal had recorded some of his complicated feelings about
their relationship, he apparently later appended a decisive note in the margin:
“I know by now she is reading this diary” (“Going Away” Journal, Octo-
ber 30, 1957). In Lessing’s fictionalized version of a similar development in
The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf enters Saul Green’s room when he is away—
not once but repeatedly—to peek into his journals, driven to know not only
what he is doing when he is not with her but what he privately writes about
her. At one point, she is dismayed to read his private observation, “She’s a
good lay, but that’s all. Anna doesn’t attract me . . . . Funny thing, I like Anna
better than anyone, but I don’t enjoy sleeping with her. Perhaps time to move
on?” (GN 535).
Saul’s private observation that he doesn’t enjoy making love to Anna pro-
foundly disturbs her; in her words, the revelation “cut me so deep I couldn’t
breathe for a few moments. Worse, I didn’t understand it” (GN 536). The
discovery undermines her trust in her most authentic emotional responses to

a man during lovemaking, the part of her being that she believes “can’t be
lied to” (GN 536). Earlier in The Golden Notebook, in her examination of the
phases of her by-then-ended relationship with Michael, she describes those
emotional responses more explicitly in terms of the physiological dimension
of sexual intimacy, asserting not only that “Sex is essentially emotional for
women” (GN 200) but that “there is only one real female orgasm and that is
when a man, from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants
all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake . . . ” (GN 202).
Although in the blue notebook Anna does not reiterate her avowals about
emotional surrender with regard to her response to Saul Green’s lovemaking,
readers may recall her earlier heartfelt, albeit controversial and romanticized,
words on the subject.
Early in his relationship with Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal—who suf-
fered from a writer’s block along with a number of physical and emotional
symptoms ranging from cold chills to extreme nightmares (many of which
symptoms are ascribed to Saul Green in The Golden Notebook)—began to
draw on material in his diary to compose autobiographical sketches based
closely on his relationship with Lessing. By then certain that his intimate part-
ner was secretly reading his private diary, Sigal described several variations of
his detective strategy for verifying her eavesdropping—or, equally plausibly,
he varied his fictionalized descriptions of his strategy. Indeed, his multiple
transformations of this decisive true event into various fictional equivalents
reveal his own frequent border crossings between fact and fiction, paralleling
Lessing’s narrative method of drawing on and fictionalizing her experiences.
In what became a kind of cat-and-mouse game between the two of them, Sigal
writes,
I put the journal far back inside a drawer in the bureau and tied a tiny silken
thread between the right-hand knob of the second drawer and left-hand knob
of the fourth (or first and third, just to change locations) to ensure detec-
tion. My “radar” warning system told me Doris scanned my journal, every
day I was [not] home, from sometime in September of 1957 until the spring
of 1958 . . . .10
According to Sigal, Lessing never acknowledged that she was reading his
journal; by contrast, in Lessing’s fictionalized version of their relation-
ship, Anna Wulf ultimately admits her source of information about Saul
Green’s sexual infidelities: “I read your diary” (GN 542). In view of the
autobiographical evidence, The Golden Notebook contains a rather startling
example of the boundary between fact and fiction that Doris Lessing and
her fictional persona—and Lessing’s real-life lover—straddled. One of Anna

Wulf ’s sketches in the final segment of the yellow notebook actually concerns
lovers who mutually snoop into each other’s private diaries. In sketch 14,
Anna imagines this scenario:
A man and a woman, married or in a long relationship, secretly read each

other’s diaries in which (and it is a point of honour with them both) their
thoughts about each other are recorded with the utmost frankness. Both know
that the other is reading what he/she writes, but for a while objectivity is
maintained. Then, slowly, they begin writing falsely, first unconsciously; then
consciously, so as to influence the other. The position is reached where each
keeps two diaries, one for private use, and locked up; and the second for the
other to read. Then one of them makes a slip of the tongue, or a mistake, and
the other accuses him/her of having found the secret diary. A terrible quarrel
which drives them apart forever, not because of the original diaries—“but we
both knew we were reading those diaries, that doesn’t count, how can you be so
dishonest as to read my private diary!”
(GN 503, emphasis in original)
In the curious life/art exchanges that transpired between Doris Lessing

and Clancy Sigal, a related discovery had significantly more disturbing impli-
cations for Sigal: his lover was not simply reading his journals without his
permission but adapting for her novel in progress details about him and their
intimate relationship. At that point, Sigal penciled the marginal note in his
journal, “I find Doris’ ms” (“Going Away” Journal, October 30, 1957). In a
long autobiographical typescript that depends quite closely on details he first
recorded in his journal, he describes his shocked discovery that Lessing’s secret
prying extended beyond sheer curiosity; in her novel in progress, he was being
made into a “character” that he recognized as closely modeled on himself. He
later described the moment in which he discovered what might be regarded
as a kind of literary identity theft: he
found a piece of paper in her typewriter on the kitchen table. (Normally she
worked in the bed-room [sic].) It was headed, “The case of C . . . S . . . ” I read it.
“Ex-Hollywood Red. Comes to London. No money, no friends. A wandering
man, happens to land in the house of a woman whom he likes and whom he
needs. He is a man with a long experience of women needing love. He makes
love to her, but realizes that his need for temporary refuge has trapped him.
Aggressive; hostile to women . . . .” And then followed a curious, pithy short
story or rather an outline for a short story. [ . . . ] I went up to my room in a
state of shock.
(“CS writing about DL” 124, 125,
ellipses in original unless bracketed)
Several phrases that Sigal writes in the first part of the passage from which
I quote duplicate language in two of Anna Wulf ’s sketches in the yellow
notebook, although not in sequence. Sketch 9 begins, “An American ‘ex-red’
comes to London. No money, no friends. Black-listed in the film and televi-
sion worlds” (GN 501). The sketch then describes a series of events that may
or may not correspond with the actual circumstances of Clancy Sigal’s radi-
cal political life, including ostracism by the blacklisted man’s political peers.
The sketch ends with an obviously fictitious event: the man’s suicide. Sketch
7 reads:
A wandering man happens to land in the house of a woman whom he likes and
whom he needs. He is a man with a long experience of women needing love. Usu-
ally he limits himself. But this time, the words he uses, the emotions he allows
himself, are ambiguous, because he needs her kindness for a time. He makes
love to her, but for him the sex is no worse or better than what he has experi-
enced a hundred times before. He realizes that his need for temporary refuge has
trapped him into what he most dreads: a woman saying, I love you. He cuts it.
Says good-bye, formally, on the level of a friendship ending. Goes. Writes in
his diary: Left London. Anna reproachful. She hated me. Well, so be it. And
another entry, months later, which could read either: Anna married, good. Or:
Anna committed suicide. Pity, a nice woman.
(GN 500; I have italicized words that are identical in
Sigal’s draft of his disguised autobiography quoted
above and Anna Wulf ’s yellow notebook sketch.)
One may speculate that Clancy Sigal copied into his own fictional work in
progress several sentences that he discovered on the page he found in Lessing’s
typewriter as evidence of his lover’s overzealous borrowings from his life.
The overlapping language suggests that he borrowed back from Lessing, imi-
tating her method of transforming into fiction the “raw materials” of their
experience together.
Late in the final blue notebook segment of The Golden Notebook—
following several cycles of madness and lucidity that transpire as Anna and
Saul undergo a mental breakdown à deux—the combative dynamic between
them finally begins to change. Saul asks Anna why she writes in four note-
books, to which she responds, “ ‘Obviously, because it’s been necessary to split
myself up, but from now on I shall be using one only’ ” (GN 559). Once she
has admitted to Saul, and to herself, that her four notebooks are the expres-
sion of her profound inner division, she decides to change course, beginning
with the purchase of a new notebook. However, she cannot proceed without a
further struggle with Saul Green. Even as she vows to write “all of [her]self in
one book” (GN 568), Saul, like a spoiled child who is accustomed to having
his own way, covets the notebook for himself. The blue notebook concludes
with Anna’s discovery that he has secretly inscribed “the old schoolboy’s curse”
(GN 567) in her new notebook.
The Golden Notebook opens with that “curse” repeated verbatim. In a
pointed irony that gains even greater effect when one knows that Doris
Lessing secretly read Clancy Sigal’s private journal, Saul’s curse is directed
toward those who might be tempted to pry into others’ private writing:
Whoever he be who looks in this

He shall be cursed,
That is my wish.
Saul Green, his book. (!!!)
(GN 571, emphasis and exclamation points in original)
Saul’s inscription also prompts confusion for the reader: since it is Anna, not
Saul, who writes in the inner Golden Notebook, who inscribed the curse?
As Lessing has explained, “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 other people in the book” (Preface,
GN xiv).
“The real experience can’t be described”

Although Anna Wulf generates thousands upon thousands of words in her
struggle to corral the truth of her experiences into language, she is dismayed
to find that experience eludes not simply her multiple attempts to articulate
them but language itself. Yet—the ultimate paradox of the novel—it is only
by means of language that she can articulate her knowledge that “the real
experience can’t be described” (GN 592). Nonetheless, in her most charac-
teristic strategy for claiming and reclaiming control of herself and her life,
she never surrenders the tool of language despite her utter despair at its lim-
itations. Late in the inner Golden Notebook, she imagines writing a short
story or novel that would capture her transformative discoveries about her-
self. When she describes her idea to Saul Green, he urges her to write her
new idea as fiction rather than offering excuses for why she cannot do so. To
prompt her, he offers her the opening sentence for the new novel. Based on
what he has observed of “the two women” who are Anna, he instructs her
to write in the new Golden Notebook, “ ‘The two women were alone in the
London flat’ ” (GN 597).11 Saul oversimplifies: narratively and psychologi-
cally, there are more than two Annas, just as there are several Saul Greens.
Indeed, The Golden Notebook ultimately demonstrates the inseparability of
two crucial dimensions of Anna Wulf. Her writer’s block is inseparable from
her emotional paralysis; she cannot create artistically until she can free herself
from destructive, often emotionally masochistic, responses in her intimate
relationships. Even as she and Saul recognize that their neurotic relationship
must end for both of their sakes, each facilitates the resolution of the other’s
writer’s block. The sentence that Saul gives Anna is identical to the first sen-
tence of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, bringing Lessing’s metafictional tour
de force almost full circle.
Anna, in friendly reciprocity, offers Saul the first sentence for his own
novel: “On a dry hillside in Algeria, the soldier watched the moonlight
glinting on his rifle” (GN 600). The invisible editor of The Golden Note-
book advises the reader that “[Here Anna’s handwriting ended, the golden
notebook continued in Saul Green’s handwriting, a short novel about the
Algerian soldier]” (GN 600, brackets in original). Following a brief synopsis
of that novel, the inner Golden Notebook concludes with a final separately
bracketed statement: “[This short novel was later published and did rather
well]” (GN 601, brackets in original). The comment suggests that Anna
indeed capitulated to Saul’s wish to keep the golden notebook for himself—
but of course readers know that is not the case, since the actual Golden
Notebook nested within The Golden Notebook contains entirely different
content.
In effect, Anna and Saul turn from emotional and sexual antagonists into
muses for each other’s writing, each becoming for the other the catalyst for
artistic as well as emotional breakthrough. However, the exchange of first
sentences between them is not the actual conclusion of The Golden Note-
book. Rather, it remains for Anna to complete her own novel in progress with
the final section of Free Women. By that point in the novel, virtually every-
thing that a first-time reader has assumed about the narrative as an aesthetic
construction is revealed to be false. Free Women, ostensibly articulated by
an omniscient narrator who bestows objective authority on reported events,
proves to be as fictitious and subjective as everything else in the novel: all
are the work, and words, of Anna Wulf herself. That realization gives par-
ticular ironic weight to Anna’s fictional transformation of the character of
Saul Green. In the final Free Women segment of the novel, Anna condenses,
reduces, alters, and parodies the experiences that she has so minutely and
exhaustively detailed, particularly those recorded in the emotionally intense
final installments of the yellow and blue notebooks and the inner Golden
Notebook. In this version, her emotional breakdown and breakthrough pre-
cede the arrival of a thirty-year-old “American left-winger” (GN 611) who
comes to stay in her flat for five days. Before he arrives, Anna determines quite
consciously that “the remedy for her condition was a man. She prescribed
this for herself like a medicine” (GN 606). Yet, despite herself, when she first
meets Milt (Saul’s counterpart), he triggers her romantic longings: “A woman
without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking,
even if it’s for a half-second, Perhaps this is the man” (GN 612, emphasis in
original).
As Lessing’s Chinese boxes open to reveal one last iteration of the man
who may be “the man,” Milt (no surname) is to Saul Green as Saul Green is
to Clancy Sigal: a character who both resembles and diverges from his model.
Saul’s counterpart in the final Free Women segment of the novel—a mar-
ried man on the verge of divorce—is neither a combative and promiscuous
lover nor a helpful “invisible projectionist” (GN 577); nor is he the catalyst
for Anna Wulf ’s most profound “illumination” (GN 610) about herself. Nor
does he keep a journal. Rather, Milt is more cynical and considerably less
complex than Saul Green. However, like Saul, he is anxious about his rela-
tionships with women; he “can’t sleep alone” (GN 614) but he also “can’t sleep
with women [he likes]” (618). Anna’s account of the time he spends with her
is a surgically pared-down, almost parodied, version of the microscopically
detailed, emotionally oversaturated encounters and exchanges between herself
and Saul Green.12 The description of their relationship reduces the complex-
ity and compresses the elapsed time of the sexual battle and emotional logjam
between Anna and Saul that is so microscopically detailed in the three pre-
ceding notebooks. By the time readers reach the concluding sentence of Free
Women, which is also the concluding sentence of The Golden Notebook—
“The two women kissed and separated” (GN 623)—we understand that the
author of this sentence is the author of the entire novel that begins with what,
many pages later, are revealed to be Saul’s exact words: “The two women were
alone in the London flat” (GN 3 and 597). Or, equally accurately, neither the
fictional Anna Wulf nor Saul Green composed any of the sentences that com-
prise The Golden Notebook—except through the typewriter of their inventor,
Doris Lessing.
“Every novel is a story, but a life isn’t one”

With all due respect to Doris Lessing, I would add that the fictitious Saul
Green of The Golden Notebook is a complex invention—a character that is
both more than and other than the literary double of Clancy Sigal. In the
hundred-plus pages of the novel in which he figures so centrally, Saul is
a larger-than-life character who serves multiple functions in Anna Wulf ’s
struggle for artistic, political, and emotional authenticity and who also serves
multiple functions in Doris Lessing’s interrogation of the permeable bound-
aries between fact and fiction. Moreover, her unauthorized appropriations
ultimately benefited both her and Clancy Sigal artistically: Lessing moved
forward on her composition of The Golden Notebook, drafting some of her
most intense and psychologically probing explorations of a complex intimate
relationship between a man and a woman. Sigal, though initially distressed
by Lessing’s intrusion into his journal and her writing about him in The
Golden Notebook, was ultimately released from his writer’s block by those same
discoveries. By the time Lessing’s novel was published in 1962, he had pub-
lished two novels of his own: the documentary fiction, Weekend in Dinlock
(1961), and an autobiographical novel, Going Away: A Report, A Memoir
(1962). Of note, his own fiction relies on the same literary method of dis-
guised autobiography as does The Golden Notebook. Caricatures of Doris
Lessing figure prominently in his later novels, Zone of the Interior (1976)—
a satirical send-up of the British anti-psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, with whom
Sigal worked closely and under whose tutelage he underwent a psychological
breakdown—and The Secret Defector (1992).13 Both novels may be regarded
as romans à clef.
Even if readers outside of Doris Lessing’s milieu did not know, those in
the know would recognize Clancy Sigal as the source for Saul Green in The
Golden Notebook. Does it matter to our appreciation or understanding of
Lessing’s masterpiece whether readers have the “key” I provide here? In my
view, yes—precisely because the novel itself so insistently interrogates and
repeatedly traverses the borderline between fact and fiction. As Anna Wulf
observes, “The moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc.,
then Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else” (GN 430). Even
acknowledging that the author is necessarily several degrees removed from her
characters, readers of the novel come to see that the boundary lines between
“true” events and actual people and their invented counterparts remain fuzzy.
Yet, in Lessing’s view, no matter how closely art appears to imitate life, the
distinction between them remains: “Every novel is a story, but a life isn’t one,
more of a sprawl of incidents” (Skin 202). The roman à clef form necessarily
pivots on the relationship between the “sprawl of incidents” and the shaped
fictional narrative into which they are transformed. The Golden Notebook is,
by its very design, an aesthetically shaped narrative that intentionally mas-
querades as a “sprawl of incidents” drawn from the “autobiography” of the
fictitious Anna Wulf.
Reproaching her readers for what she regarded as an almost voyeuris-
tic curiosity concerning the autobiographical sources of imaginative writing,
Doris Lessing insisted that any correspondences between life and art are
entirely beside the point. As she phrased it in the first volume of her auto-
biography, “Readers like to think that a story is ‘true.’ ‘Is it autobiographical?’
is the demand. Partly it is, and partly it is not, comes the author’s reply, often
enough in an irritated voice, because the question seems irrelevant: what she
has tried to do is to take the story out of the personal into the general” (Skin
160). No doubt my discoveries of the sources for the character Saul Green
would have displeased Lessing, since they press against her claim to have
taken the story “out of the personal into the general.” Her fictional trans-
formation of her relationship with Clancy Sigal may lead us to consider even
more deeply the core preoccupation of The Golden Notebook: the ever-shifting
and unstable relationship between fact and fiction. In that regard, we may
consider not Anna Wulf ’s but Virginia Woolf ’s sly observation that “fiction
must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are
told.”14 The Golden Notebook invites Lessing’s readers to ponder more deeply
what we are told.
Notes
This chapter is adapted from my book-length exploration of the subject, Literary Half-
Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014), with thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to use some of that material
in this volume.
1. Doris Lessing, Under My Skin 314. Subsequent references in the text are
abbreviated as Skin.
2. Lessing, Walking in the Shade 336. Subsequent references in the text are
abbreviated as Walking.
3. Lessing, Interview by Roy Newquist, A Small Personal Voice, ed. Schlueter, 48.
4. Lessing, The Golden Notebook 445. Subsequent references in the text are to the
HarperPerennial edition (1991), abbreviated as GN.
5. Sean Latham usefully traces the overlapping and intersecting histories of the novel
and the roman à clef, observing, “Almost always published and marketed as works
of pure fiction, such narratives actually encode salacious gossip about a partic-
ular clique or coterie. To unlock these delicious secrets, a key is required, one
that matches the names of characters to the real-life figures upon whom they are
based” (The Art of Scandal 9). While those in possession of the “key” can deduce
the actual people who inhabit the pages of the novel in various degrees of fic-
tional disguise, those who lack such information will regard the same characters
as purely imaginative creations of the author. Even those who presume to possess
the key that unlocks the real-life identities of characters represented as fictitious
ones may not be able to establish in the details a clear line between fact and
invention.
6. As Lessing acknowledged in her autobiography, she was “deeply” involved in writ-
ing the novel in 1957 and 1958 (Walking 261). She explained to an interviewer
that she wrote The Golden Notebook in one year, presumably straddling 1957–58
(“Breaking Down These Forms” 115).
7. Over many years of scholarly analysis of The Golden Notebook, numerous schol-
ars, including myself, have pondered the problematic fictional status of the
character Saul Green. See Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris
Lessing, esp. 89–109; Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story, esp. 55–102; and
Suzette Henke, “Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook: A Paradox of Postmodern Play”
159–87.
8. The journals are located in the Clancy Sigal Archive, Harry Ransom Center,
University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful for permission from Clancy Sigal and
the Harry Ransom Center to quote from them.
9. “Going Away” Journal, 1956–57, July 11, 1957; pencil underscoring added in
original. Box 51.9. Clancy Sigal Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of
Texas, hereafter abbreviated as Sigal Archive, HRC. References in the text to this
journal are abbreviated as “Going Away” Journal (Sigal’s label) along with the
specific date of entry.
10. “CS writing about DL.” Box 50.10, p. 123. Undated [c. 1959–1960]. Sigal
Archive, HRC. Subsequent references in the text are indicated with this title.
11. Concerning the passage in which Saul describes Anna as “two women,” Beth
A. Boehm observes, “Suddenly Molly’s existence as a character in some fictional
‘real’ world—the world we believed was being created by ‘Free Women’—is chal-
lenged; we must ask if she is merely a projection of Anna’s split personality, and
if she is, we then must ask what her appearance in the blue and red notebooks,
the most ‘factual’ of the notebooks, tells us about the ontological relationship of
those texts to some fictional ‘real’ world” (“Reeducating Readers: Creating New
Expectations for The Golden Notebook” 92–93).
12. See Alice Ridout’s analysis of Free Women, which “places a parodic frame around
the entire The Golden Notebook, thereby raising important questions about the
novelist’s project and the limitations of language’s ability to express experience”
(Contemporary Women Writers Look Back 52).
13. See Roberta Rubenstein, Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and
Roman à Clef, Chs. 6 and 7 (131–64).
14. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 16.
Works Cited
Notebook.” Narrative 5.1 (Jan. 1997): 88–98. Print.
Henke, Suzette. “Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook: A Paradox of Postmodern Play.”
Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Lisa Rado. New
York: Garland, 1994. 159–87. Print.
Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary
Feminist Narratives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989. Print.
Latham, Sean. The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef.
New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Lessing, Doris. “Breaking Down These Forms.” Interview with Stephen Gray. Doris
Lessing: Conversations. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press,
1994. 109–19. Print.
——. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: HarperPerennial/Bantam Windstone,
1981. Print.
——. Interview by Roy Newquist. A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews.
Ed. Paul Schlueter. New York: Knopf, 1974. 45–60. Print.
——. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. New York:
——. Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962. Volume Two of My Autobiography.
New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Print.
Continuum Literary Studies. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à
Clef. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
Sigal, Clancy. “CS writing about DL.” TS. Box 50.10. Undated [c. 1959–60.] Clancy
Sigal Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
——. “Going Away” Journal, 1956–57. MS. Box 51.9. Clancy Sigal Archive, Harry
Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. San Diego: Harcourt, 1957. Print.
CHAPTER 6
Between Modernism and

Postmodernism: Positioning
The Golden Notebook in the
Twentieth-Century Canon
Tonya Krouse
F
rom the moment of its publication in 1962, readers, reviewers, and
scholars experienced some difficulty with Doris Lessing’s The Golden
Notebook: it didn’t neatly fit into the typical critical criteria for situating
modern and contemporary novels. Lessing’s attempts to control the recep-
tion of The Golden Notebook have at least partially contributed to this critical
difficulty. Notably, Lessing insisted in her controversial 1971 Preface to the
novel that one of her inspirations “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 . . . . But a very useful Victorian novel never got itself writ-
ten” (xv). For this reason, Lessing declared that one of her aims was to write
a novel that would capture the intellectual and moral climate of the mid-
twentieth century (xvi). Many critics accepted Lessing’s assertions, at least to
some degree, regarding her as “primarily committed to traditional fiction”
(Rapping 32), “refus[ing] to abandon the potential for referential language”
(Fuoroli 151), and trying to work within “the ‘great realist novel’ tradition,
and . . . try[ing] to retain at least that aspect of the nineteenth-century tradi-
tion which used the novel as a vehicle for moral and philosophical dilemmas”
(Wilson 61). Confining interpretations according to Lessing’s criteria, even
if only provisionally, has served to forestall situating the novel firmly within
either modernist or postmodernist aesthetics.
116 ● Tonya Krouse
Other critics, however, challenged Lessing’s self-appraisal of The Golden

Notebook’s form. For example, Katherine Fishburn argues, “Doris Lessing has
never truly been the realist (we) critics thought her. She has only masquer-
aded as one, an authorial Wulf in sheep’s clothing. Behind the mask, she has
always been a metafictionist, a writer of self-conscious fiction” (187). Simi-
larly, Dennis Porter contends that “The Golden Notebook is self-consciously
challenging the realist techniques in which it seemed initially to put its trust”
(57). Nevertheless, these challenges depend on situating realist narrative form
as central to a discussion of Lessing’s work, if only to reject the way that
debates about realism have shaped the critical conversation, resulting in an
impasse in which The Golden Notebook remains a “special case” relegated to
the margins of conversations about modernist or postmodernist canons of
literature.
In the fifty-plus years since the novel’s publication, critics have not reached
consensus about what to do with The Golden Notebook, beyond to acknowl-
edge, as Lessing does in her 1993 Introduction, that the novel “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” (viii). Thus, critics have had to admit The Golden Notebook’s
influence, even as, with characteristics both modern and postmodern—and
neither modern nor postmodern—Lessing’s novel has defied their desires to
pin it down aesthetically in relation to other canonical texts. As ideas about
canonicity and periodization in the twentieth century shift in the new mil-
lennium, however, critics gain the opportunity to assert the status of The
Golden Notebook, not just as a cultural touchstone for understanding the shift-
ing political and social terrain and changing gender roles and expectations at
mid-century but also as a literary achievement.
Historically, accounts of the differences between modernist and
postmodernist literary aesthetics have tended to rely upon two fundamen-
tal oppositions. First, they have emphasized a disparity between the way that
each views the potential for literature to make meaning or to expose universal
truth.1 Second, they have highlighted the formal experiments that charac-
terize the two movements.2 Since The Golden Notebook straddles the fault
line between these oppositions, much criticism has concerned itself with
how to fit the novel into the apparatuses provided by either modernism or
postmodernism for understanding literary texts.
The Golden Notebook has proved difficult to place definitively in a canon of
either modernist or postmodernist literature because of its refusal to adhere to
the rubrics provided by either one or the other. Initially, Lessing’s protagonist
Between Modernism and Postmodernism ● 117
Anna Wulf appears to suffer from writer’s block because she adheres to a
modernist belief in the power of literature to make meaning in an otherwise
chaotic world. She writes early in the black notebook, “I am incapable of
writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an
intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new
way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to
write another novel” (59). Anna’s assertion here indicates that she does in fact
believe that literature should produce some sort of coherent truth and that to
do so is the writer’s responsibility. In this conviction, her difficulty resembles
artist Lily Briscoe’s struggle with the composition of her painting in the first
section of Woolf ’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse.3
Unlike the conclusion of To the Lighthouse, however, in which Lily thinks,
“laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (209),
the conclusion of The Golden Notebook offers no such compensatory closure.
Instead, readers discover in the novel’s interior Golden Notebook that the
opening line of Free Women, which readers had believed to be the “true”
frame story containing Anna’s fabrications and distortions in the black, red,
yellow, and blue notebooks, was in fact a line provided to Anna by Saul
Green (GN 610), thus revealing what readers thought was “real” or “the
truth” to be Anna’s fictional composition, and totally destabilizing what read-
ers had thought they understood about Anna and the novel as a whole.
In this way, The Golden Notebook undermines the modernist ideal of lit-
erature that Anna initially expresses; that ideal is supplanted with a vision
of literature and language as evacuated of representational or epistemologi-
cal authority. As the novel continues, Anna stops believing in the potential
for language to make or convey truth or to “create a new way of look-
ing at life” (GN 59). She comes to think that “literature is analysis after
the event” (GN 216) and that the ideas that she would like to explore are
inappropriate to literary representation. “Probably better as a film,” Anna
writes in the yellow notebook. “Yes, the physical quality of life, that’s living,
and not the analysis afterwards, or the moments of discord or premonition”
(GN 217). With her ongoing writer’s block and concomitant descent into
madness, Anna seeks a form that would disrupt the relationship between
representation and meaning and that would instead align representation
with lived experience, which she believes loses stable meaning in a postwar,
postatomic era.
These concerns about the evacuation of meaning from both lived
experience and language align The Golden Notebook with postmodern aes-
thetics; further, these concerns require a formal experiment that deviates
from the formal experiments of modernist fiction. Anna’s mental breakdown
reflects two related problems: lived experience has lost stable meaning, and
words have lost stable meaning. In contrast to a modernist sensibility, in

which language and literature would have the power to recover meaning
from the chaos of a rapidly changing world through innovations such as
stream-of-consciousness narrative, as The Golden Notebook progresses, such
possibility of recovery through art is lost. Words can no longer accomplish
the performative work that they have done in the past. “I am in a mood
that gets more and more familiar: words lose their meaning suddenly,” Anna
explains. “I find myself listening to a sentence, a phrase, a group of words, as
if they are in a foreign language—the gap between what they are supposed to
mean, and what they in fact say seems unbridgeable” (GN 287). As a con-
sequence, Anna retreats into the personal writing of her notebooks instead
of writing for publication; she retreats into her consciousness. The novel sig-
nifies this retreat through seemingly “realistic” narration, which contravenes
the stream-of-consciousness experiments of modernist writers like Joyce and
Woolf.
Nevertheless, this realistic representation of the postmodern problem of
loss of meaning constitutes not a return to either nineteenth-century real-
ism or twentieth-century modernism but rather a gesture toward a hybrid,
radically naturalistic literary form that refuses to grant literature or language
unifying power. In this regard, The Golden Notebook bridges “the gap between
art and ordinariness” (Gasiorek, “ ‘A Renewed Sense of Difficulty?’ ” 171).
As Andrzej Gasiorek explains, “Many writers, E. M. Forster, Iris Murdoch
and Zadie Smith among them, are indebted to modernism’s innovations and
its preoccupation with ethical complexity, but also engage with aspects of
reality that modernism tended to neglect. Such novelists are in dialogue with
a modernism they don’t entirely endorse but that they see as the necessary
background context to their work” (171–72).4 In addition to looking back
at modernism, Lessing’s novel gestures toward the “hysterical realism” of the
late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a term coined by James Wood in
a review of Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth to describe “the big, ambitious
novel” in which “[t]he conventions of realism are not being abolished but,
on the contrary, exhausted and overworked.” If this is the case, critics might
productively resist the common tendency to split the twentieth century in
half for the purposes of periodization in favor of an alternative that notes the
way that Lessing’s The Golden Notebook bridges the aesthetics of the first and
second halves of the twentieth century and ultimately provides a foundation
for narrative aesthetics in the new millennium.5
As our view of the twentieth century changes in the twenty-first century,
it makes sense to reassess both our periodization of the previous century
and the texts that might be included in a canon of literature that represents
that century. Such a project, I believe, demands a new critical accounting of
Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which so often has fallen through the gap left
between accounts of modernism and postmodernism.6 As Teresa Heffernan
observes, “The terms modernist and postmodernist themselves suggest the
twentieth-century crisis over teleological narratives precisely because they
beg the inevitable question of what can possibly come after the modern or
‘after’ its after”(7). The rubrics of modernism and postmodernism insist on
a “before” and an “after,” a narrative of two ruptures: first, the rejection of
realist narrative; second, the rejection of meaning in art. Lessing’s novel has
never fit neatly into these rubrics: “The Golden Notebook is a pivotal work, but
not in a predictable sense. Certainly it carries forward ideas from Woolf but
it is also immensely prescient in its enactment of a dynamic between radical-
ism and naturalistic transparency” (Bradford 118–19). In other words, The
Golden Notebook has never quite endorsed the ruptures on which contem-
porary literary criticism and theory have relied to mark boundaries within
the canon. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, critical
judgments about how to organize the twentieth-century canon are up for
renewed debate: “In short, the history of the novel, insofar as it was sustained
by a bifurcation of radical versus conservative, postmodern versus counter-
modernist, is over” (Bradford 243). Further, the politics of insisting on a
rupture between modernism and postmodernism has come under theoretical
fire. Given increasing scholarly interest in finding the common threads among
literary works that span the twentieth century, Lessing’s contribution to the
canon of twentieth-century literature becomes much more apparent and the
project of situating The Golden Notebook in that canon becomes much more
urgent.
Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory offers a useful structure through which
we can begin this work. Rancière argues that the preservation of a rigid divi-
sion between modernism and postmodernism disallows us from grappling
with what he calls the “overturning of aesthetics into ethics,” which he says
“obviously cannot be grasped in terms of art’s becoming ‘postmodern’ ” (128).
According to Rancière, “The reign of ethics is not the reign of moral judge-
ments over the operations of art or of political action. On the contrary, it
signifies the constitution of an indistinct sphere in which not only is the
specificity of political and artistic practices dissolved, but so also is that which
formed the very core of ‘old morality’: the distinction between fact and law,
between what is and what ought to be” (109). Rancière’s theory illuminates
the very concerns that drive Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, questioning the
relationship between politics and art, ethics and aesthetics, society and self,
reality and imagination.
Indeed, Anna’s ideas about the relationship between failure—both per-
sonal and political—and the imagination, which she communicates to Molly
in Free Women 1, clearly connect to the ideas that drive Rancière’s claims.
Anna challenges Molly:
Why do our lot never admit failure? Never. It might be better for us if we did.
And it’s not only love and men. Why can’t we say something like this—we are
people, because of the accident of how we were situated in history, who were
so powerfully part—but only in our imaginations, and that’s the point—with
the great dream, that now we have to admit that the great dream has faded and
the truth is something else—that we’ll never be of any use.
(GN 51)
Anna has lost faith not only in the practices of art (aesthetics) and politics
(ethics) but also in the moral foundations of those practices. She believes that
“the great dream” of socialism has been revealed to be a lie; thus, she spends
the rest of the novel attempting both to account for her complicity in that
dream’s failure and to discover a new dream—or dreams—that might give her
life—and her art—purpose.
As Magali Cornier Michael persuasively suggests in Feminism and the
Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction, “Anna’s particular political
and aesthetic dilemma stems from a metaphysical crisis within Western cul-
ture . . . . Since Western rational thought privileges and opposes reason over
madness and order over chaos, reason can engage with chaos only as a
fixed adversary. In contrast, a non-binary, non-hierarchical notion of mad-
ness engages chaos more fully and productively in Lessing’s novel” (93–94).
Michael ultimately concludes that this political and aesthetic dilemma and its
resulting breakdown of the binaries and hierarchies through which Western
culture has historically organized meaning place The Golden Notebook as
fundamentally postmodern in its epistemological and ontological orienta-
tion. This emphasis on the rupture and opposition between modernism
and postmodernism, however, replicates the binary oppositions that Michael
critiques and fails to account for the ethical turn in aesthetics that, again,
“cannot be grasped in terms of art’s becoming ‘postmodern’ ” (Rancière 128).
In the analysis that follows, I suggest that by examining the multiple
dreams with which Anna replaces “the great dream” of socialist politics, it
becomes possible to change the terms through which we evaluate The Golden
Notebook’s aesthetics. Anna’s dreams in the novel’s final installment of the
blue notebook and in the interior Golden Notebook disrupt the opposi-
tion between modernism (totality) and postmodernism (dispersal), gesturing
toward a more integrated, less oppositional view of narrative in the twenti-
eth century. Anna’s dreams in blue notebook 4 and in the interior Golden
Notebook, which recount her mental and emotional breakdown, correspond
thematically to Anna’s four notebooks.
According to Sarah Henstra, Anna’s attempt to “impose order” through

the notebooks
backfires: Anna becomes more and more fragmented, until she suffers a com-
plete breakdown and the contents of the notebooks bleed into one another.
The golden notebook, as the product of this thematic and structural fusion,
is correspondingly impressionistic, fluid, and disorienting. The novel suggests
both the danger of fragmenting life into categories and the need to acquiesce to
a level of fragmentation and chaos, particularly as regards the humanist myth
of ‘self ’ in an age when de-centered subjectivity is the norm. (6–7)
Henstra’s analysis highlights the formal shift that occurs as the narrative moves
into the interior Golden Notebook. It productively indicates the necessity to
identify a liminal space within which the subject can recognize both the dan-
ger in fragmentation to coherent self-identity and the necessity of coming to
terms with fragmentation as a feature of twentieth-century life. Significantly,
however, attention to the dreams that accompany and elucidate Anna’s break-
down demonstrates not that “the contents of the notebooks bleed into one
another” but rather that the import of the notebooks is less their contents
than their distinct thematic and emotional indexes, their form, which return
in a new valence in Anna’s dreams.
Anna’s breakdown does not blur these themes and emotions so much as it
signifies the impossibility and senselessness of prioritizing them.7 Examining
Anna’s dreams, readers see how they at once show a way toward integration
out of chaos and offer a multiplicity of narratives and narrative points of view
through which to understand the historical events of the twentieth century.
Indeed, just as Anna has discovered the “lie” of “the big dream” of socialist
revolution, her own dreams constitute a substitution for that totalizing vision,
allowing her to view the world from various distinct perspectives while also
insisting on the necessity of retaining unified subjectivity as the dreamer.
Anna names her first dream sequence in her descent into madness “joy
in spite,” or “joy in destruction.”8 This dream recurs in the final segment of
the blue notebook, where it first features a dwarf who menaces Anna with
his erection (GN 537), an image that parallels the conflicts that Anna has
with Saul, although in her dream appropriation of Saul, Anna incorporates
his menacing masculinity into her own concept of self. At first she tries to
refuse this part of herself, waking herself up from the dream and trying to
calm herself (GN 537). Still, when she puts herself back to sleep, she can-
not sustain her refusal of this aspect of her subjectivity: “I was the old man,
the old man had become me, but I was also the old woman, so that I was
sexless. I was also spiteful and destructive . . . . I was saying to myself: I’ve
been the malicious old man, and the spiteful old woman, or both together, so
now what next?” (GN 538). These initial versions of the dream signify both
Anna’s and the narrative’s attempt to organize the world through conven-
tional oppositions between masculine and feminine, rational and emotional
understanding, and yet nevertheless these initial versions of the dream, even
as Anna becomes an androgynous “male-female dwarf figure” (GN 568), do
not adequately allow her to see the “truth” of her relationship to Saul or of
her relationship to the mid-century world that the novel depicts and that she
inhabits.
Only in the dream’s final iteration does Anna come to see the emotional
and thematic principles that underlie the blue notebook and make some sense
of those principles. Anna writes, “I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time
there was no disguise anywhere” (GN 568). Indeed, Anna sees herself as the
malicious dwarf, “the principle of joy-in-destruction,” and she sees Saul as
her “counterpart, male-female, my brother and sister” (GN 568). In this
final version of the dream, Anna and Saul come together, “friendly,” courting
death while at the same time they “came together and kissed, in love” (GN
568). Anna’s narrative insists on the merging of opposites and offers a range
of potential interpretations for the dream while the dream is actually being
dreamt. Anna reflects,
It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognised in the
dream those other dreams we all have, when the essence of love, of tenderness, is
concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human
creatures, celebrating destruction . . . . I wondered how such a terrible dream
could leave me rested, and then I remembered Mother Sugar, and thought that
perhaps for the first time I had dreamed the dream “positively”—though what
that means I don’t know.
(GN 568)
In dreaming the dream “positively,” Anna moves beyond the binary oppo-
sitions that characterized the dream’s earlier installments. She is able to fuse
past, present, and future in a complete “reading” of the emotional and the-
matic content that she sought, and failed, to articulate in her experiment with
the blue notebook. In recounting the joy-in-spite dream sequence with realis-
tic language, Anna moves beyond the binary opposition between reality and
imagination and comes to understand her experiences with Saul as part of her
own coming into subjectivity, both as an author and as a person.
According to Michael, “The indeterminate sexual nature of the dwarf in
her dream suggests to Anna that neither creativity nor destruction have innate
ties to biological sex, which helps her overcome the historical association
of authoring and maleness or masculinity” (86). While this interpretation
offers a starting point for understanding this sequence of dreams, it does not
go far enough toward explaining the ways in which this dream challenges
the opposition between femaleness and femininity and maleness and mas-
culinity. These dreams do more than establish Anna’s authority to write as
a woman: they demonstrate her ability to negotiate, if only in a provisional
way, the vast terrain between desire (the imagination, joy and communion
with one’s opposite, the creative impulse) and the event (reality, the chaos
and fragmentation of contemporary life, destruction). In so doing, they indi-
cate the link between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, or, as Rancière
explains, they show that “modernism . . . has only ever been a long contra-
diction between two opposed aesthetic politics, two politics that are opposed
but on the basis of a common core linking the autonomy of art to the antici-
pation of a community to come, and therefore linking this autonomy to the
promise of its own suppression” (128).
Viewing modernism in this way, readers perceive, to borrow Rancière’s
language, that the “postmodern carnival was basically only ever a smoke-
screen hiding the transformation of the second modernism into an ‘ethics’
that is no longer a softened and socialized version of the aesthetic promise
of emancipation, but its pure and simple inversion. This inversion no longer
links art’s specificity to a future emancipation, but instead to an immemorial
and never-ending catastrophe” (129). Lessing’s dream sequences emphasize
the bond between the promise of emancipation and the doom of never-
ending catastrophe as well as indicating the ethical turn that opposing the
two requires.
As Anna dreams of “joy in spite” in various iterations, readers understand
the interpretive inadequacy of privileging multiplicity over unity, fragmenta-
tion over totality, or vice versa. Instead, they discover that the only adequate
response to the reality of life in the twentieth century is to attempt to hold
singularity and proliferation together in one’s comprehension of the world,
to—as Anna tries to do in “the game”—achieve “a simultaneous knowledge
of vastness and of smallness” (GN 524). Regardless of the novel’s emphasis
on catastrophe and its cynicism about a lasting and redemptive emancipation
or salvation, when Anna emerges from the interior Golden Notebook she has
found a way to write again, and she has returned from the abyss of mad-
ness. Neither modernism nor postmodernism as literary periods can account
for that return without evacuating the text of its final insistence on life over
death, its final insistence on writing over not-writing. Finally, Anna Wulf
achieves unified subjectivity, writing subjectivity, as well as an acceptance of
the chaos of twentieth-century life. Her subsequent dream sequences serve
further to emphasize this point.
This becomes clear as readers turn to Anna’s next category of dreams,
which she calls “the flying dream.” Anna understands the essential emotions
of these dreams as “joy, joy in light, free movement,” and they take her
around the world, allowing her to experience subject positions ranging from
that of an Algerian soldier to that of a Chinese peasant (GN 574). As Anna
flies and becomes one with the peasant woman in China in the final ver-
sion of this dream, she experiences intense joy, “the joy of freedom,” but
she cannot sustain this joy or give herself over to it, allowing herself truly
to dissociate from her own subject position and to embody the subjectivity
of the Chinese peasant woman. The narrative describes Anna’s terror at los-
ing herself in the dream, a terror that drives her back into her own body,
divorces her from the freedom that the dream originally signifies, and takes
away her ability to fly: “I could not fly, I could not leave the plain where the
peasants worked, and fear of being trapped there woke me. I woke into the
late afternoon, the room full of dark, the traffic roaring up from the street
below. I woke a person who had been changed by the experience of being
other people. I did not care about Anna, I did not like being her. It was
with a weary sense of duty I became Anna, like putting on a soiled dress”
(GN 575).
The flying dreams, like the dreams about joy in spite/destruction, disrupt
the binary oppositions between creativity and destruction, freedom and ter-
ror, through which people typically understand the “real” world. Breaking
down these oppositions on the one hand allows Anna to experience identities
not her own—to inhabit identities that are alien to her own life history or
understanding—but which nonetheless are “real” identities that inflect her
political and ideological commitments. If one thing that Anna seeks is to rep-
resent a real world that is not contained by her own subjectivity, the flying
dreams promise an imaginative site through which she might expand what
constitutes her reality. Nevertheless, on the other hand Anna’s subjectivity is
always already constituted through the oppositions of Western metaphysics,
so a project of doing away with those oppositions is, by necessity, makeshift in
nature. In her dreams, Anna can periodically attain a vision that exceeds the
bounds of conventional binaries but ultimately she will always be brought
back down to earth, terrified back into her own identity, “like putting on
a soiled dress.” For Anna, there is no “outside” to which to escape, but
rather only negotiation of the various identities and subject positions available
within her contemporary world. There is no liberation.
This foreclosure of the possibility for permanent or unequivocal liberation
connects directly to Anna’s lack of faith in language to represent reality or
to have a concrete influence on the material conditions of subjects living in
the world. This development becomes most clear in a conversation between
Mrs. Marks and Anna in the blue notebook 3:
“Or are you saying that some books are for a minority of people?”
“My dear Mrs. Marks, you know quite well it would be against my principles
to admit any such idea, even if I had it.”
“Very well then, if you had it, tell me why some books are for the minority.”
I thought, and then said: “It’s a question of form.”
“Form? What about the content of yours? I understood that you people insisted
on separating form and content?”
“My people may separate them, I don’t. At least, not till this moment. But
now I’ll say it’s a question of form. People don’t mind immoral messages. They
don’t mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex’s
sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And
they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is
love. What they can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t stand
formlessness.”
(GN 454, emphasis in original)
This interchange is worth quoting at length, first, because it refuses the oppo-
sition between form and content in making aesthetic determinations and,
second, because it refuses to valorize one worldview—whether positive or
negative—over another. Instead, Anna’s responses to Mrs. Marks expose her
cynicism about the power of writing to do work in the world, mainly because
of the public’s lack of interest in the morality of what they read. The ethical
turn in aesthetics, which approximates “the message [being] wrapped up a
little,” reduces art and politics to a false equivalency and falsely asserts the
“purity” of each, a “purity” in which Mrs. Marks seems to believe throughout
the novel.
As Rancière asserts, however, and as seems to be what Anna Wulf seeks
in The Golden Notebook, “Breaking with today’s ethical configuration, and
returning the inventions of politics and art to their difference, entails reject-
ing the fantasy of their purity, giving back to these inventions their status as
cuts that are always ambiguous, precarious, litigious. This necessarily entails
divorcing them from every theology of time, from every thought of a pri-
mordial trauma or a salvation to come” (132). Rancière’s comments prove
crucial not only to revising our critical approaches to Lessing’s The Golden
Notebook—allowing us to resituate this pivotal novel in a canon not of
twentieth-century literature, broadly conceived—but also to the very act of
understanding The Golden Notebook’s “own comment, a wordless statement
[that] talk[s] through the way it was shaped” (GN xix). By revising the way
that we conceive not only historical time but the literary time in which The
Golden Notebook exists, by moving beyond debates about whether the narra-
tive is modernist or postmodernist, it becomes possible to bring our readings
of this novel into the twenty-first century.
Of course, these ideas and emotions reflect Anna’s attraction to and ulti-
mate dissatisfaction with communism as a political antidote to oppression
and capitalism, which she details in the red notebook. In her dreams, however,
Anna discovers that the proposition of the red notebook—that communism
will either be her salvation or it will fail her—is a dishonest proposition.
Anna’s dreams reveal that the absolutes that govern the red notebook, much
like the authorial choices that govern the yellow notebook, exist only as
convenient fictions. This fact is underscored by the next set of dreams,
concerning which Anna reflects,
I was playing roles, one after another, against Saul, who was playing roles. It was
like being in a play, whose words kept changing, as if a playwright had written
the same play again and again, but slightly different each time. We played
against each other every man-woman role imaginable. As each cycle of the
dream came to an end, I said: “Well, I’ve experienced that, have I, well it was
time that I did.” It was like living a hundred lives. I was astonished at how
many of the female roles I have not played in life, have refused to play, or were
not offered to me. Even in my sleep I knew I was being condemned to play
them now because I had refused them in life.
(GN 576)
The cycle of role-playing dreams enacts on a personal level the role-

playing that characterizes the flying dreams. As Magali Cornier Michael
writes, “Anna’s dreams emphasize that she fills a variety of subject positions”
(89). In her dreams, Anna finds the ability to inhabit not only a range of
political subjectivities—the Algerian soldier, the Chinese peasant—but also a
range of personal subjectivities, female roles that she “was being condemned
to play” because she had “refused them in life.” Taken from this perspective,
Anna finds in her dreams not feminist autonomy or postmodern fragmen-
tation of identity but rather a performative subjectivity through which to
constitute the self. This performativity anticipates the dream sequences in
the interior Golden Notebook.
The first dream in the Golden Notebook is the tiger dream, in which, as in
her previous dreams, Anna dreams lucidly: “I was myself, yet knowing what
I thought and dreamed, so there was a personality apart from the Anna who
lay asleep, yet who that person is I do not know. It was a person concerned to
prevent the disintegration of Anna” (GN 586). As a split subject in the tiger
dream, the Anna who dreams is given direction by a part of Anna’s conscious-
ness that seeks to protect her, first from drowning and then from beasts that
threaten her. But then, dreaming-Anna realizes that she will not drown and
she is not in danger from the monsters: “Then, through the deafening water,
I heard the voice say: ‘Fight. Fight.’ I saw that the water was not deep at all,
but only a thin sour layer of water at the bottom of a filthy cage. Above me,
over the top of the cage, sprawled the tiger. The voice said: ‘Anna, you know
how to fly. Fly’ ” (GN 587). This dream, building on the previous dream
sequences, emphasizes Anna’s need to inhabit new subject positions, to fight
for her sanity, and to fly, to use her power to find freedom from the terrors
that surround her. Additionally, however, it draws upon images that evoke
her past in Africa and insists that Anna identify herself as an animal trapped
in a cage: she must fight in order to fly to freedom, however provisional that
freedom might be. She must not disintegrate; rather, as an integrated whole,
she must fight for her survival.
In Anna’s dreams with the projectionist, the consciousness that protects
her in the tiger dream returns and Anna once again dreams lucidly. The
consciousness tells her
that instead of doing what I always do, making up stories about life, so as not to
look at it straight, I should go back and look at scenes from my life. This look-
ing back had a remarkable quality about it, like a shepherd counting sheep, or
the rehearsal for a play, a quality of checking up, touching for reassurance . . . .
But now, asleep, it was not making past events harmless, by naming them, but
making sure they were still there. Yet I know that having made sure they were
still there, I would have to “name” them in a different way, and that was why
the controlling personality was forcing me back.
(588, emphasis in original)
This passage offers a metacritical account for how readers should evaluate the
projectionist dreams, indicating both the need to account for events in the
novel to this point and the need to rename those events and to situate them
from a new perspective once we have the information that the interior Golden
Notebook provides. On the one hand, the narrative emphasizes the crucial
import of understanding what “really” happened, as opposed to “making up
stories”; on the other hand, it also emphasizes the role of interpretation in
naming and understanding events. As Anna’s projectionist dreams recur, she
realizes that she has been the director of these “films” of her life; she further
realizes that the emphasis that she has placed on certain events in her inter-
pretations does not necessarily reflect any intrinsic “truth” to what occurred
or what “really” held meaning in those events (GN 590–91, 605).
Significantly, Anna understands the projectionist dreams as visual render-
ings of her experiences rather than linguistic renderings, or “stories.” As she
reviews the events of her life as projected in her dreams, she gains a new
perspective on those events, which radically contrasts with her experience

of rereading her notebooks: “I hadn’t read them through since I first began
to keep them. I was disturbed by reading them . . . . Matching what I had
written with what I remembered it all seemed false. And this—the untruth-
fulness of what I had written was because of something that I had not
thought of before—my sterility. The deepening note of criticism, of defen-
siveness, of dislike” (GN 455). Ultimately, Anna experiences a problem of
translation. Mimetic representation in language seems impossible: “Words
mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which
experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk,
and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that
has slipped its connection with the film” (GN 456, emphasis in original).
Narrative has become impossible for her; form becomes disconnected from
content.
By contrast, in the final installment of the projectionist dream, the pro-
jectionist asks whether Anna now understands what she has watched; then
the film starts again, silently, going “very fast . . . like a dream,” and “the
film was now beyond my experience, beyond Ella’s, beyond the notebooks,
because there was a fusion; and instead of seeing separate scenes, people,
faces, movements, glances, they were all together” (GN 606). In exceeding
Anna’s conscious experiences, this final version of the dream reveals the ways
in which Anna’s attempts to organize and represent her life in fiction and
in the notebooks never had a chance of succeeding as anything other than
artifacts of her imagination. Indeed, as Henstra explains, the projectionist
dream
dramatizes the violence involved in the writer’s project on two major levels.
First, its insistence on Anna as “projectionist” who simultaneously directs and
selects events as they flick past her on the screen of her dream/memory dissects
the mechanisms by which life is subdued into fictional “material.” . . . Second,
an acting-out of the writer’s “license” occurs on a metanarrative level too, in
that the golden notebook interrupts and abrogates what is previously estab-
lished in the novel. It disorients readers who might have only just succeeded in
“getting straight” all the plots and characters of the various notebooks.
(Henstra 14–15)
Henstra’s comments usefully connect Anna’s project as a writer/reader of her

own experience to the project that readers of The Golden Notebook must per-
form as they engage with Lessing’s narrative. Further, Henstra does not insist
on the modernism or postmodernism of the novel in her analysis: rather,
she is interested in the contingencies of meaning that performative narration
produces and the ways in which such contingencies productively prohibit us
from “getting straight” what we read, while, at the same time, an ultimate
reintegration is emphasized.
The final version of the dream emphasizes this point by then slowing down
the film and incorporating the dream sequences that preceded the projection-
ist dream, “experiences” in themselves even as they were dreams: “The film
became immensely slow again, it became a series of moments where a peas-
ant’s hand bent to drop seed into earth, or a rock stood glistening while water
slowly wore it down, or a man stood on a dry hillside in the moonlight, stood
eternally, his rifle ready on his arm. Or a woman lay awake in darkness, say-
ing No, I won’t kill myself, I won’t, I won’t” (GN 606). This slow motion
reexperiencing of the earlier dreams positions Anna as herself a character in a
dream, refusing death in favor of life. Only once Anna has relived the events
of not only her physical life but also her dream life does the projectionist
leave and does Anna have the power to switch off the projector. Ultimately,
Anna concludes, at the dream’s end, “And the reason why I have only given
my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t
accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance
that is bigger than anything” (GN 606). This recognition signals the moment
at which Anna chooses to go on living; moreover, it signals the necessity of
rejecting injustice and cruelty, even if she believes that injustice and cruelty
are “at the root of life” (GN 606).
Taken together, Anna’s dream sequences near The Golden Notebook’s end
force a revision of the way that we as critics have accounted for the struc-
ture and contents not only of the interior Golden Notebook but also of the
novel that shares that notebook’s title. As Angela Hague explains, “Through-
out her fiction, Lessing’s characters use their dreams to understand their past
and present and, increasingly in her later fiction, to intuit the future” (279).
If this is the case, it makes sense that Lessing herself was disappointed, as
she expresses in her 1971 Preface to the novel, that critics failed to recognize
the centrality of the interior Golden Notebook to understanding the novel
as a whole (GN xv). Nevertheless, in the more than forty years since Lessing
wrote that Preface, critics have often continued to talk around that interior
Golden Notebook and the concepts that it explores. As Michael summarizes,
critics have historically argued that Anna “becomes whole and integrated in
the traditional sense” in the Golden Notebook; however, she offers an alter-
native reading, claiming that “Anna does not synthesize her various selves
but rather accepts multiplicity as a function of Being itself. While Anna
achieves some kind of balance, it is a new kind of balance that defies con-
ventional notions of wholeness, and the binary logic on which they depend,
and instead embraces multiplicity” (90, emphasis in original). These oppos-
ing readings split along the modernism/postmodernism divide, in ways which
aren’t particularly illuminating and which don’t particularly respond to the

challenge that Lessing issues in her Preface—that this final notebook delivers
the novel’s central thesis. Further, they address the interior Golden Notebook
as a whole but fail to examine in depth the dreams that propel the novel to
its close.
According to Henstra,
The notebooks compress and suspend narrative time, as the events in Anna’s
life are redoubled, split, dreamt, “fictionalized” (as Ella’s), interrupted by heavy
black lines, and re-lived differently (as in the revisions from the Golden Note-
book to “Free Women 5”). Past and future bleed into present in the novel, so
that the reader experiences crisis and paralysis at once. The volubility and vast-
ness of the narrative imply that there is always another version of events left
outstanding and never a final or finished story. (20)
Each dream sequence rehearses the themes and emotions of various note-
books, and, by rehearsing them out of order, each dream sequence under-
scores the imperative for readers to interrogate the emphasis that they have
assigned to various elements in this novel’s plot and characterization. Further,
in the way that these dream sequences stretch and compress time, geography,
and identity, they suggest that critical models that slot The Golden Note-
book in terms of its adherence to or deviation from rubrics for modernist
or postmodernist literature fail to account for the scope of Lessing’s project.
In “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fic-
tion,” Nick Bentley argues that not only is The Golden Notebook “a turning
point, or break in Lessing’s developmental experimentation with fictional
form, in which her views on the ideological implications of fiction undergo
at first a crisis, and then a reformation into a new style of writing,” but also
it stands alone in Lessing’s oeuvre as a critical experiment, “a more radi-
cally experimental novel than what comes before or after it” (44). Perhaps
by reckoning with this novel as a critical, as well as a fictional, achievement,
readers can use The Golden Notebook as a map for situating both the formal
developments and the innovations in content in a canon of twentieth-century
literature. Perhaps The Golden Notebook instead provides readers with alter-
nate criteria for understanding literature of the twentieth century as part of
a canon that stretches from the beginning of the twentieth century up to
the twenty-first century, with modernism and postmodernism operating as
significant movements within that broader literary period.
In her famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf dis-
cusses literature of the early part of the twentieth century and argues that “on
or about December 1910 human character changed,” producing a shift in all
human relations, “those between masters and servants, husbands and wives,
parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same
time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” (4–5). Woolf ’s
comments have long been marshaled in support of theories of modernism
that see its key characteristic as its radical difference from all that came before
it or follow it. The sensibility of Woolf ’s claims, however, seems quite com-
patible with Anna Wulf ’s rejection of Mother Sugar’s insistence on continuity
with the past. Anna asserts, “I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified
by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that peo-
ple felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in
the world” (GN 452). Like Virginia Woolf, Anna Wulf sees something dis-
tinct about twentieth-century life, and that distinction extends to every aspect
of life, including the writing of literature. Further, this sensibility extends to
authors who follow Lessing, for, as Zadie Smith writes in her recent novel,
NW, “[a]t some point we became aware of being ‘modern,’ of changing fast.
Of coming just after now” (305).
It seems that not much has changed since Woolf published her essay in
1924, in terms of how people perceive the speed of life after 1900. Neverthe-
less, the common way that we cut the twentieth century in half, insisting on
a definitive break between modernism and postmodernism as distinct peri-
ods, obscures that continuity. Returning to The Golden Notebook more than
fifty years after its publication, we can recognize the ways in which Lessing’s
novel bridges the concerns of the first and second halves of the twentieth cen-
tury, interrogates the ethical turn in aesthetics, and challenges typical criteria
for inclusion in the literary canon. As is visible from our twenty-first-century
perspective, The Golden Notebook dreams a twentieth century that is at once
continuous and multivocal and that imagines literature as having a deep con-
nection to the real world it represents. For this reason, The Golden Notebook
emerges as a pivotal twentieth-century text that forces readers to reevaluate
the canons of modernism and postmodernism and to renegotiate the terms
through which we identify twentieth-century canonical works.
Notes
1. For discussions of the distinction between the potential for literature to make
meaning in modernism vs. postmodernism, see Richard Bradford’s The Novel
Now: Contemporary British Fiction (Malden, MA: Blackwell P, 2007), Astradur
Eysteinsson’s The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), and Jean-
Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1984).
2. For discussions of the formal experiments of modernism and postmodernism, see
Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), Fredric
Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 1991), and Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.
3. Virgina Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927 (San Diego: Harvest, 1981). For further
consideration of the connections between Lessing and Woolf, see Ruth Saxton
and Jean Tobin’s collection Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1994) and my own “ ‘Anon,’ ‘Free Women,’ and the Pleasures
of Impersonality” in Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times, ed. Debrah Raschke,
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010)
32–57.
4. See also Andrzej Gasiorek’s Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London:
Arnold, 1995) 82–96.
5. In my article, “Freedom as Effacement in The Golden Notebook: Theorizing
Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Authority,” Journal of Modern Literature 29.3 (2006):
39–56, I gesture toward my claims here, though I do not ultimately challenge the
viability of modernism and postmodernism as distinct periods of literature in the
twentieth century.
6. In suggesting this pathway forward, I build on the call to action that Susan Watkins
issues in “ ‘Grande Dame’ or ‘New Woman’: Doris Lessing and the Palimpsest,”
for scholars to “ ‘revise’ the rather ambivalent image of Lessing as the revered but
somewhat irrelevant ‘grande dame’ of the twentieth century and overlay it with
one of Lessing as a ‘new woman’ writer, whose work looks forward into the twenty-
first” (259).
7. Many critics have analyzed the dream sequences in The Golden Notebook, most
frequently emphasizing psychoanalytic interpretations, issues of authority in nar-
ration, and parody. For example, see Lois A. Marchino’s “The Search for Self
in the Novels of Doris Lessing,” Commonwealth Novel 4.2 (Summer 1972):
252–61; Carol Franko’s “Authority, Truth-Telling, and Parody: Doris Lessing and
‘the Book,’ ” Papers on Language and Literature 31.3 (Summer 1995): 255–85;
and Caryn Fuoroli’s “Doris Lessing’s ‘Game’: Referential Language and Fictional
Form,” Twentieth Century Literature 27.2 (1981): 146–65. My analysis differs in
that I approach these dream sequences as sites within which the novel exposes
the relationship between representation and reality, illustrating the ethical turn in
aesthetics for which the shift from modernism to postmodernism fails to account.
8. Fuoroli argues that Anna “has used the naming process as a way of knowing. Yet,
it is also a way of avoiding the chaos of the experience which the dream represents”
(153). I believe that the paradox of the name that Anna chooses instead signifies
the narrative disruption of the binary oppositions that govern Western metaphysics
and, more specifically, aesthetic theory.
Works Cited
Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Malden, MA:
Blackwell P, 2007. Print.
Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Print.
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.
Fishburn, Katherine. “Wor(l)ds within Words: Doris Lessing as Meta-Fictionist
and Meta-Physician.” Studies in the Novel 20.2 (1988): 186–205. Web. 22 July
2013.
Franko, Carol. “Authority, Truth-Telling, and Parody: Doris Lessing and ‘the
Book.’ ” Papers on Language and Literature 31.3 (Summer 1995): 255–85. Web.
22 July 2013.
Fuoroli, Caryn. “Doris Lessing’s ‘Game’: Referential Language and Fictional Form.”
Twentieth Century Literature 27.2 (1981): 146–65. Web. 22 July 2013.
Gasiorek, Andrzej. Post-war British Fiction: Realism and After. London: Arnold, 1995.
Print.
——. “ ‘A Renewed Sense of Difficulty?’ E. M. Forster, Iris Murdoch, and Zadie Smith
on Ethics and Form.” The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Con-
temporary Fiction. Ed. David James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 170–86.
Print.
Hague, Angela. Fiction, Intuition, and Creativity: Studies in Brontë, James, Woolf, and
Lessing. Washington, DC: Catholic UP of America, 2003. Print.
Heffernan, Teresa. Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the
Twentieth-Century Novel. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2008. Print.
Henstra, Sarah. “Nuclear Cassandra: Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Note-
book.” Papers on Language and Literature 43.1 (Winter 2007): 3–23. Web.
22 July 2013.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 1991. Print.
Krouse, Tonya. “ ‘Anon,’ ‘Free Women,’ and the Pleasures of Impersonality.” Doris
Lessing: Interrogating the Times. Ed. Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis,
and Sandra Singer. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010. 32–57. Print.
——. “Freedom as Effacement in The Golden Notebook: Theorizing Pleasure,
Subjectivity, and Authority.” Journal of Modern Literature 29.3 (2006): 39–56.
Print.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Print.
Marchino, Lois A. “The Search for Self in the Novels of Doris Lessing.” Common-
wealth Novel 4.2 (Summer 1972): 252–61. Web. 22 July 2013.
Michael, Magali Cornier. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War
II Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Print.
Porter, Dennis. “Realism and Failure in The Golden Notebook.” Modern Language
Quarterly 35.1 (Mar. 1974): 56–65. Web. 22 July 2013.
Rancière, Jacques. “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics.” Aesthetics and Its
Discontents. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. 109–32. Print.
Rapping, Elayne Antler. “Unfree Women: Feminism in Doris Lessing’s Novels.”
Women’s Studies 3 (1975): 29–44. Web. 22 July 2013.
Saxton, Ruth, and Jean Tobin, ed. Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold. New York:
St. Martin’s, 1994. Print.
Smith, Zadie. NW. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.
Watkins, Susan. “ ‘Grande Dame’ or ‘New Woman’: Doris Lessing and the Palimp-
sest.” Literature Interpretation Theory 17 (2006): 243–62. Web. 22 July 2013.
Wilson, Elizabeth. “Yesterday’s Heroines: On Rereading Lessing and de Beauvoir.”
Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing. Ed. Jenny Taylor.
Boston: Routledge, 1982. 57–74. Print.
Wood, James. “Human, All Too Inhuman.” The New Republic Online. 30 Aug. 2001.
Web. 13 June 2013.
Woolf, Virginia. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth, 1924. Print.
——. To the Lighthouse. 1927. San Diego: Harvest, 1981. Print.
CHAPTER 7
“So Why Write Novels?”

The Golden Notebook, Mikhail Bakhtin,
and the Politics of Authorship
Sophia Barnes
M
ore than fifty years on from the first publication of Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook, we have reached a juncture from which we
can not only survey the history but also consider the future of
the novel’s reception. This chapter suggests that the novel’s enduring critical
importance proceeds not so much from the way in which it speaks to a par-
ticular political or social phenomenon, though that has been the subject of a
great deal of illuminating scholarship, but from its metacritical commentary
on the function of authorship per se and its relationship to readerly interpre-
tation. In the final paragraph of her 1971 Preface to The Golden Notebook,
Doris Lessing suggests that the novel “is alive and potent and fructifying and
able to promote discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not
understood” (GN xx, emphasis in original). How do we as readers of Lessing
keep faith with her resistance to codification and also perform our hermeneu-
tic task? The Golden Notebook is a novel that sits in a problematic relation
to generic definitions; it alternately inhabits and interrogates, underwrites
and undermines, the conventions of the novel form and the expectations
of a possible readership. The novel’s critical significance stems not simply
from the subversion or overturning of existing forms in favor of new ones.
Rather, as Nick Bentley suggests in his reading of the novel as “critical fic-
tion,” Lessing has produced a text whose subject is the constant reformulation
of literary form itself, a text that has consequently been able to remain in
a productively antagonistic relationship with a succession of critical modes
(Bentley).
136 ● Sophia Barnes
The weight of this chapter’s consideration of Lessing’s novel alongside

Mikhail Bakhtin’s narratology rests on the conviction that his diverse theo-
retical work on novelistic discourse and aesthetic activity is premised on a
logic of interpenetration and exchange. His insistence on the importance of
an integrated critical method links his theory of dialogism and heteroglos-
sia in “Discourse in the Novel” (published in The Dialogic Imagination) with
the architectonics of aesthetic activity laid out in the essay and supplement,
which comprise Art and Answerability.1 Occasionally impenetrable, not infre-
quently self-contradictory, Bakhtin is nonetheless wholly committed to the
rebuttal of reading strategies that divide the ideological from the formal.
Lessing’s novel is shaped by that same principle of integration that under-
pins Bakhtin’s critical framework for reading novelistic prose, as it is set out
in these two key sources. If we read The Golden Notebook as polyphonic, we
can reinvigorate the terms of existing debate regarding Lessing’s simultane-
ous employment and subversion of novelistic conventions,2 foregrounding
the interplay between convention and subversion as the source of the novel’s
innovation.
To read The Golden Notebook with reference to Bakhtin’s narrative the-
ory is not in itself to break new ground. Claire Sprague has paired Lessing’s
novel with Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway to consider the Bakhtinian echoes
of what she terms their “multipersonal” mode (“Multipersonal and Dialogic
Modes”).3 Bakhtin’s dialogism is a principle of the operation of discourse,
while polyphony is an aesthetic structuring principle of dialogic discourse in
the novel; accordingly, we might speak of Lessing as writing in a dialogic
mode and of her novel as polyphonic. The relationship between Bakhtin’s
concept of polyphony and Lessing’s structural and thematic experimentation
in The Golden Notebook is, of course, far from straightforward. There is no
evidence at hand that Doris Lessing ever encountered the work of Mikhail
Bakhtin, and my reading of them in concert does not rest on any kind
of direct correlation or pattern of influence; nor do I suggest that we read
Lessing’s novel through the lens of Bakhtin’s narratology in any straightfor-
ward way. However, I do argue that we can consider Lessing’s literary practice
as in part exemplar, in part development and improvement of, even in part
productive departure from, Bakhtin’s dialogic model of discourse and reader-
ship. This chapter’s primary intention is to lay the foundation for a broader
consideration of the ways in which Lessing, like Bakhtin, grapples with “our
limited ways of mirroring—and improving—our lives” (Booth xxv).
Lessing and Bakhtin are both to some degree the inheritors of a Marxist
theoretical tradition; the work of each bears out an ambivalent and compli-
cated relationship to Marxism as theory and as political system. In Bakhtin’s
case, the ambivalence stemmed in large part from the lived reality of Soviet
Mikhail Bakhtin and the Politics of Authorship ● 137
Communism; in Lessing’s case, the progress of her involvement in and disil-

lusionment with radical Marxist activism is explored at length through her
fiction, particularly in The Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence
series. The substrate of this ideological inheritance is a shared resistance to
reductive categories of interpretation. When Marxism is imposed on the lit-
erary text in order to yield a “correct” reading of the kind Anna Wulf both
despairs of and mocks, it functions as precisely such a reductive category, and
as such I do not suggest that the resistance identified here is itself Marxist.
On the contrary, it is Lessing and Bakhtin’s shared consciousness of, and
relative degrees of divergence from, Marxism that informs their respectively
creative and critical practice in equal measure. The inheritance of a tradition
of radical critique inheres in the way in which each turns that very mode of
critique upon the tradition that spawned it.
The equivocal legacy of Marxism for both Bakhtin and Lessing is that
integrative consciousness that is manifested in Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic
discourse and in the doubled narrative structure and multilayered authorship
of The Golden Notebook. Lessing has observed in the Preface that, among
what she regarded as the early misreadings of her novel, the most edifying
of the responses she received were from Marxist critics, who were at least
able “to look at things as a whole and in relation to each other” (GN xix).
Lessing’s historical and cultural relationship to Marxism is markedly different
from that of Bakhtin, who, although partly contemporaneous with Lessing,
was writing from behind the Iron Curtain. Alice Ridout employs the phrase
“post-Communist” to speak of Lessing’s ideological position, comparing the
valence of the prefix to its function in postmodernism (Ridout, “ ‘What is
the Function of the Storyteller?’ ” 80). There it implies both a continuation
and a rejection of that to which it is affixed, and in this sense Bakhtin too
can be considered “post-Communist,” despite his status as a Soviet citizen:
disillusioned with Marxism in theory and practice yet nonetheless sharing
that ability to “look at things as a whole and in relation to each other,”
which Lessing prizes. It is precisely the vision of a wholeness constituted by
multiplicity, contradiction, and even fragmentation that drives Anna Wulf ’s
breaking-down and enables her breaking-through in the internal Golden
Notebook. When John Sturrock observed that Bakhtin “was no orthodox
Marxist, but he was no orthodox anti-Marxist either. He simply thought that
the more ideas and beliefs there were about, the fuller and saner life became”
(13); he might just as well have been describing the ethic of Lessing’s author-
ship. Here Sturrock’s summation expresses the same understanding that ideas
and beliefs are dialogic and mutable that is fundamental to the philosophical,
political, psychological, and creative journey Anna undergoes in The Golden
Notebook.
Doris Lessing’s Preface to The Golden Notebook contains the author’s insis-
tence that her “major aim” in writing the novel was “to shape a book which
would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way
it was shaped” (GN xiii). For Bakhtin, the statement—or “truth”—of a text
is always wordless: “Truth is restored by reducing the lie to an absurdity, but
truth itself does not seek words; she is afraid to entangle herself in the word,
to soil herself in verbal pathos” (DI 309). Truth, for Bakhtin, is generated
by the dialogic relationship of one utterance to another, and as such it is
temporary and contingent, giving way to new grounds for dialogic exchange
immediately as it is reached. If two utterances can be placed in opposition to
one another, it does not follow that one must be truthful and the other false;
on the contrary, the truth-value of either utterance is found in the multiplic-
ity that dialogue generates. The foundational ethic of Bakhtin’s body of work
is his critique of ideological centralization as a denial of the organic char-
acter of social heteroglossia. Unitary language is by its very nature a move
away from truth, necessitating, as it does, a shutting-down of alternatives.
Bakhtin regards the polyphonic novel—in which the author does not trans-
form the consciousnesses of his or her characters into objects, but recognizes
them as “just as infinite and open-ended” as his or her own (PDP 68)—as
the exemplar of the form’s capacities. As Claire Sprague has observed, The
Golden Notebook “perfectly celebrates what Bakhtin describes and Auerbach
assumes is the novel’s essential nature—its eternally upstart ability to catch
the multiple, heteroglot, polyglot nature of life as no other form has ever
done” (“Multipersonal and Dialogic Modes” 6).
Bakhtin and Lessing share an intellectual resistance to ideological rigid-
ity and to unitary modes of thinking, in favor of a generative and fruitful
logic of interaction and exchange. In the opening paragraph of “Discourse
in the Novel,” Bakhtin states unequivocally that the “principal idea” of his
essay “is that the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce
between an abstract ‘formal’ approach and an equally abstract ‘ideological’
approach” (DI 259). Form and content must be integrated in criticism as
they are in the aesthetic object, the divide between them collapsed rather
than reinforced. Lessing incorporates a series of different textual performances
into The Golden Notebook, from the explicitly parodic to the banal, and it
is the integration of these subtexts and the competing ideas of authorship
and readership they generate that constitute the text’s shape. This trope of
integration informs the “wordless statement” of which Lessing speaks in her
Preface—her claim that “the essence of the book, the organization of it, every-
thing in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off,
must not compartmentalize” (GN xiv). I would argue that this sentiment
underpins her entire oeuvre, which, in all its variety and encompassing its
internal contradictions, is premised on a fundamentally inclusive logic: a logic

that “insists on a construction of reality that rejects nothing, limits nothing”
(Kaplan and Rose 3). In the case of The Golden Notebook, this inclusive logic
is embodied in the gradual breaking-down of a highly contrived structure, the
eventual triumph of formlessness over division, and the loss of that control
afforded by compartmentalization. In the novel, Anna Wulf comes to under-
stand that what many people call unity is merely the illusion of wholeness
produced and shored up by the reduction of oneself to one part of that self,
and by the repression of internal chaos. The internal Golden Notebook’s con-
frontation with, and dissolution of, division gestures toward a new conception
of unity—one capable of containing fragmentation. This unity offers us the
prospect of reformulating Anna’s “Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good. Bad.
Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love.” (GN 43) as an inclusive litany
rather than a series of apparently simple (and false) binaries. Any promise of
narrative resolution is subverted by the novel’s paradoxical conclusion; the
logical next step from fragmentation, it seems, is not resolution but possibil-
ity. This rhetorical and structural openness enables the novel to remain a rich
provocation to critical readership more than fifty years on.
The relationship between author and reader as it is formulated in Bakhtin’s
theory of aesthetic activity is inherently anti-ideological and collaborative.
His ideal of the polyphonic novel foregrounds proliferation, not reduction:
the proliferation of voices, of subjectivities, of fictionalities. In The Golden
Notebook, parody functions as a tool for generating such openness and multi-
plicity by exposing the false premise of narrative stability and the sanctity of
conventional modes. The common object of Anna’s employment of parody is
the construction of or adherence to a given style of expression or representa-
tion. Whether it is the hagiographic tone with which Comrade Ted recounts
his visit to the Soviet motherland, the unthreatening colonial romance that
Anna is encouraged to produce from the text that was Frontiers of War, or
the “romantic tough school of writing” that she tries on for size in the yellow
notebook (GN 515), each amounts to the closing down of heteroglossia—the
reification of type of which Anna is deeply suspicious. For Lessing, parody is
a tool with which to “reduce the lie to an absurdity,” as Bakhtin phrases it.
By incorporating Anna Wulf ’s textual parodies, and her sense of the failure
of these parodies in a sociohistorical context in which they cannot be recog-
nized for what they are, Lessing is able to produce (in the shape of a novel)
her “wordless statement” regarding what can and cannot be said by the text.
Mark Jones observes in his reading of “Bakhtinian parody” in Wordsworth’s
poetry that “In Bakhtin’s conception, parody is not a genre but a degree
of dialogism and . . . functions . . . as a challenge to critical discernment and
authoritative interpretive practice. To put this differently, the critical object
of Bakhtinian parody is less another text than it is the possibility of interpre-

tation” (Jones 57). This idea of parody as hermeneutic challenge enables us to
see the fluid relationship of parody to convention within the multiplied nar-
rative of The Golden Notebook as a metacritical commentary in its own right.
As Alice Ridout suggests, “the very possibility of narration and of truth” is at
stake in Lessing’s novel (Contemporary Women Writers 57).
The Golden Notebook traces a crucial shift in Anna Wulf ’s ethical struggle
with authorship, from the explicit writing of real-world politics to a far more
theoretically complex engagement with the politics of writing fiction and the
bounds of authorial control. This shift signifies Lessing’s interest in the very
idea of fiction as a category, the viability and value of realism, the ideolog-
ical matrix of language, and the implication of the author in the reception
of her or his work. Friederike Eigler suggests in her study of Bakhtin’s util-
ity to feminist criticism that “Bakhtin calls for an approach to literature that
stresses and explores differences (‘multiple voices’) and challenges readings
that harmonize differences or reduce the text to a single (‘monologic’) mean-
ing” (Eigler 191). The Golden Notebook is a text that by its very structure
forecloses monologic meaning and presents an unapologetic critical challenge
to its reader; indeed, scholarship on the novel is rich with interpretations of
and responses to this challenge. I am in accord with Alice Ridout when she
suggests that what The Golden Notebook rewards is a “resisting reader,” a con-
cept borrowed and adapted from Judith Fetterley, who used it to characterize
the feminist critic determined to “change literary criticism from a closed con-
versation to an active dialogue” by rereading classic, male-authored texts in
a revisionary way (Fetterley xxii). Ridout posits Tommy Portmain as Anna
Wulf ’s “resisting reader,” because he challenges Anna’s right to prescribe (and
indeed proscribe) the readership of her own writing. Readers of The Golden
Notebook might likewise resist Lessing’s analogous attempt in the Preface to
“decide what’s important and what isn’t” (Ridout 66).4 The novel remains
perpetually relevant and hermeneutically vital precisely because it advocates
and embodies a spirit and a strategy of radical critique that must be turned
ever inward to consider its own foundations.
The Golden Notebook is a carefully woven and highly structured tapestry of
(sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly) differentiated text types, and the cor-
relative of this stylistic multiplicity is the novel’s layering of authorship. What
are the implications of this layering for an understanding of authorial author-
ity? Moreover, what are the implications of such an understanding for how
we engage in readership of the novel? Lessing’s role as a woman author is
one that has been famously contentious throughout the history of her crit-
ical and popular reception. Questions of responsibility, commitment, and
agency are ever-present and profoundly fraught as they pertain to Anna
Wulf ’s perception of herself as an author. While these questions foreground

the category of gender in authorship, they also place it in a broader considera-
tion of the contestable politics of authority in fiction. Anna in her incarnation
as reader functions as the novel’s most overt commentary on the compulsion
to fiction-making that accompanies any act of writing. Aside from her role as
reader of the texts of others, Anna is her own audience: revisiting and often
revising her experience first through writing and then through the figura-
tive rewriting that her retrospective erasures (with figurative cancelling lines
scoring out whole entries) constitute.
The multiplication of authorship through the proliferation of narrative
strands affects the way that authority functions in The Golden Notebook.
Notwithstanding the problematic theoretical status of the very category of
authorship,5 if the relative fictional value of a competing pair (or even series)
of authors cannot be determined, then how can we begin to speak about the
also-relative authenticity of the authored text(s)? In her 1997 reading of the
novel, Beth A. Boehm offers a brief overview of Lessing scholarship on this
question, from Gayle Greene’s and Joanne Frye’s confident assertions that
Anna Wulf is the author and editor of The Golden Notebook in its entirety
to Patrocinio P. Schweickart’s belief that there are two Annas: the Anna of
Free Women who does not resume writing and the Anna of the notebooks
who writes Free Women. According to Boehm, “both sets of critics make the
text more intelligible and less complicated than it truly is, just as Anna’s com-
partmentalization seeks to make her life more coherent and less complicated
than it is” (Boehm 94). Indeed, it is the compulsion to identify an authentic
author-Anna that Lessing’s text intends to undermine. As Boehm suggests,
the “unknowability of the relation of the real to the fictional” is crucial to the
scope of the novel’s metafictional task (Boehm 95). I would argue that this
“unknowability” is at the crux of that “wordless statement” that Lessing wishes
her text to make. In The Golden Notebook, Lessing not only foregrounds the
question of how we understand the category of the fictional; she demonstrates
that in fact the compulsion to categorization per se is of limited value.6 The
very act of observation, and of remembering, is an act of narrative-making,
and Lessing’s multifaceted metafiction enfolds the reader into the hermeneu-
tic of the text at a foundational level. The Golden Notebook preempts and
incorporates any number of possible readings by virtue of its wholesale defer-
ral of resolution, in which the boundaries of multiple levels of authorship and
the relative value of competing fictionalities are left productively unclear.
What is at stake in reading Doris Lessing alongside Bakhtin’s dialogism
is a strategy of breaking down false and unproductive binaries—a strategy
that enables us to retain oppositions within a critical dialogue in our schol-
arship on The Golden Notebook. Of Bakhtin’s treatment of textual binaries
such as “author/hero, space/time, self/other,” Michael Holquist observes,

“What counts is the simultaneity that makes it logical to treat these concepts
together . . . . The point is that Bakhtin honors both things and the relations
between them—one cannot be understood without the other. The resulting
simultaneity is not a private either/or, but an inclusive also/and ” (“Introduc-
tion,” Bakhtin, Art and Answerability xxiii, emphasis in original). Here we
have not only an elegant formulation of that logic of simultaneity on which
Bakhtin’s understanding of aesthetic activity is premised but also a powerful
reiteration of the ethic of the “and, and, and” with which Lessing has charac-
terized her own role as author (Kaplan and Rose 3). In The Golden Notebook,
Lessing offers an alternative to the kind of reductive self-definition offered
by a protective illusion of unity, positing instead a conception of the whole
as that which admits division and impasse. This inclusive vision coheres pro-
ductively with Bakhtin’s dialogic understanding of discourse, which we might
characterize as a manifestation in language of that relationship between sub-
ject and world by which apprehension is constituted. It can admit exchange,
rejoinder and contradiction just as the unity that Lessing identifies in the
Preface as the triumphant theme of her novel admits chaos and fragmenta-
tion (GN xi). Bakhtin tells us that “To be means to communicate dialogically.
When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, can-
not and must not come to an end” (DI 252). Anna Wulf ’s own writing plays
its part in the collective dialogue even as she considers it a dead end, refusing
to publish it, at least partly because she has lost faith in its ability to act on the
world and cannot determine the way in which it will be read. Yet, as Bakhtin
intimates, even these dead ends are part of the dialogue, and they will in fact
prove to be crucial to Anna’s journey through madness to renewed creativity
in the internal Golden Notebook.
Bakhtin’s theory of aesthetic activity is at its root a study of the relation-
ship of part to whole. The aesthetic whole as the sum of its parts and in its
relationship to those parts is the product of consummation; in other words,
it is the product of subjective contemplation of the aesthetic object. Bakhtin’s
model of aesthetic consummation “completes cognitive and ethical aspects of
an object by placing those aspects into relation with the individual human
subject, the acting consciousness” (Bernard-Donals 178). It is in this sense
that the text is hermeneutically vital, and the act of reading one of alchemy:
if the consummation of the text is “almost literally in the eye of the beholder”
(Holquist, “Introduction” x), then the act of reading has the potential to
constantly and productively reinscribe the text. Bakhtin’s conception of the
aesthetic whole not as a finished system but rather as a generative coming
together of parts implies that the task of analysis is to understand the con-
stitution of this whole: the composition of these parts and their temporally
contingent, mutually defining relationship to one another. If the relationship

between material, content, and form is realized through contemplation, then
the production of meaning in the text is a dynamic and interactive process.
While the words on the page of the novel will remain the same, its content is
not ideologically fixed; as Bakhtin insists, the relationship of that content to
form is realized through readership, whose context is constantly changing.
Anna Wulf, of course, refuses to publish her work to be read; refuses,
according to Tommy Portmain, to discharge that same “moral responsibility”
from which she accuses fellow socialists of retreating (GN 38). For Tommy
the author is a truth-teller with a social and political function (he is the child
of Molly and Anna’s influence, after all), and Anna is unable to live up to
this image because she has at least temporarily lost faith in the function of
literature-as-truth-telling. If one cannot tell “truth” when one’s tools are so
inadequate and one’s material so overwhelming then one must not speak
at all, and in this sense Anna’s writer’s block stems from a Wittgensteinian
“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wittgenstein 189).
Yet I would argue that Bakhtin’s model of aesthetic activity offers a way out
of this silence because it insists upon all writing, and all readership, as part
of an ongoing and elemental dialogue. To decline to publish is to preempt
the failure of creative agency by refusing to exercise it in the public domain,
yet Anna nonetheless cannot stop herself from exercising that agency, in the
private arena of the notebooks. If we recall Bakhtin’s insistence that dialogue
cannot and must not end, we might say that in The Golden Notebook the
cessation of writing altogether is akin to the cessation of life.
Lessing’s body of work more generally bears out what Roberta Rubenstein
has characterized as a “dialectical imagination,” one in which that loaded
term might be understood—as Claire Sprague suggests—to refer to “the
conflict between opposites, a conflict that can involve interaction as well
as polarity” (Rubenstein 166; Sprague, Rereading Doris Lessing 2). This
interaction recalls that concept of simultaneity that Michael Holquist has
emphasized: like Bakhtin, Lessing values the relationship between apparently
opposing categories. Reading The Golden Notebook in the context of Hegelian
dialectics, Soo Kim argues that Lessing’s novel “challenges definitional catego-
rizations . . . as it causes a multifarious group of individuals and heterogeneous
writings to collide with each other in dialectic to produce a better understand-
ing of all” (Kim 18). Kim’s employment of the image of collision is suggestive,
bringing to mind, as it does, not reconciliation or resolution but a kind
of positive shattering, in which none of these individuals or writings either
disappears or triumphs; instead, they are brought together in a moment of
simultaneity that engenders comprehension. At first glance, Bakhtin’s equiv-
ocal if not openly hostile attitude to dialectical materialism might seem to
foreclose the possibility of coherence between dialectics and a dialogic model

of discourse. The relationship between these apparently antagonistic modes
is reappraised, however, by Michael Gardiner, who posits phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “open dialectic” as a mode of inquiry and under-
standing that can not only incorporate but in fact necessitates a dialogic
comprehension of discourse and perception (128).7 For Merleau-Ponty, as
Gardiner suggests, “negative and positive, thesis and antithesis, represent a
tangled skein; they cannot be separated arbitrarily into binary oppositions
that will inevitably resolve themselves into a new, finished system” (Gardiner
136). It is precisely the notion of a “finished system” that is undermined
by the openness of The Golden Notebook, by its repeated subversion of
formal conventions and even by its deliberately inadequate ending, which
acts to send the reader right back to the beginning of the novel with any
preconceptions regarding the structural hierarchy of the narrative laid waste.
The Golden Notebook itself can be seen as the third moment in a dialectical
model of meaning-making, as it is regarded by Patrocinio P. Schweickart in
her 1985 essay on the novel’s “wordless statement.” For Schweickart, the book
is an invitation to creation in precisely the manner illuminated by Bakhtin’s
model of aesthetic activity: the reader of The Golden Notebook is a kind of
co-author with Lessing, whose text is capable of producing multiple and
frequently competing readings. Schweickart suggests that
We can see the novel as a composite of several stories, one about love and
sex, another about politics, a third about madness, and so on. Or we can
impose upon it the conventional wholeness of a plot summary or a thematic
structure. But by arranging the text so as to obstruct these “natural” readings,
Lessing offers us an opportunity (which we are free to decline) to reconsider
our customary reading strategies.
(Schweickart 267)
We might read The Golden Notebook, then, as both narrative and critical
commentary on narrative, not least because it enacts a series of modes of
representation and allows the reader to experience the inadequacy, even the
collapse, of these modes first-hand. As Soo Kim observes, the text is a constant
back-and-forth of successes and failures, including literary ones: “Yet these
disappointing reversals do not nullify experiences. These ‘failed’ attempts . . . ,
though painful in themselves, result in revisions of boundaries and take
humans one-step closer to the absolute” (Kim 17). Anna Wulf ’s employment
and critique of several different types of text generate a dialectical breaking-
down of binary oppositions and of the structures of compartmentalization
that underlie them. Schweickart suggests that The Golden Notebook can be
read “in terms of certain key themes—form versus formlessness, order versus
chaos, fragmentation versus wholeness, fiction versus reality, individual versus

society, and so on” (264). I contend that we can conceive of these thematic
binaries as in fact the constituent parts of one theme: the “versus” linking
each element of a pair is itself the key focus of a novel about the dynamic of
interrelation.
The idea of an integrated whole that incorporates and accounts for divi-
sion is a guiding thematic concern and a foundational structuring principle
of The Golden Notebook. The fragmentation upon which the novel is shaped
proceeds from the inexorable and necessary collapse of those patterns of com-
partmentalization, which are intended to maintain sanity by blocking off or
obscuring internal contradiction. Throughout the novel, Anna Wulf grad-
ually allows these divisions to break down and submits to an encroaching
chaos, from which issues the possibility of self-knowledge—limited and con-
tingent as authentic self-knowledge may be. Analogously, the encounter of
separate elements (of author, text, and reader, of word and answering word)
is for Bakhtin a generative one, in which each element is remade through
the process of exchange that consummation catalyzes. As David Shepherd
observes in his essay “Bakhtin and the Reader,” “The seemingly fixed posi-
tions of text and reader . . . cannot come through the dialogic encounter
unchanged because they do not pre-exist it” (Shepherd 145). Meaning—or
“truth”—can never be fixed, or located within the closed structure that is
the unread text, requiring the context of readership in order to be realized.
Anna attempts to proscribe the parameters of readership of her own writ-
ing, not only by refusing to publish but also by ultimately striking out much
of that which she has already written. Just as it defers narrative resolution,
The Golden Notebook places “realization,” in Bakhtin’s terms, beyond its own
bounds, leaving the potential for integration which Anna’s breaking-through
promises to the imagination of the “resisting reader.” As Roberta Rubenstein
suggests in her reading of The Four-Gated City as the culmination of the Chil-
dren of Violence series, the internal Golden Notebook performs the analogous
role within The Golden Notebook proper, of “encompassing, reconciling, and
transforming the spectrum of ideas that lead up to it—like the white light
that results from the fusion of the colors of the spectrum” (Rubenstein 126).
In this sense, the significance of the titular notebook stems from its struc-
tural function as the site of a final stage of fragmentation, a product of the
cumulative failure of everything that came before it.
The Golden Notebook is not only “a novel about the impossibility of writ-
ing a novel” (Schweickart 275), but also a novel about the very idea of literary
representation and the germinal act of turning life into narrative. Anna both
performs and comments on the process of fiction-making, from the minutiae
of apparently nonfictional observation, through the conscious manipulation
of experience into fictional prose, to the interrogation and collapse of any

neat division between the fictional and the real. Anna repeatedly addresses
the inadequacy of language to representation, its inefficacy in the face of “an
experience for which there were no words” (GN 622). For Bakhtin, the bag-
gage by which language is always irrevocably burdened, its meaning inscribed
by myriad possible responding utterances, is also what enables it to be both
the object and the subject of language. A “language” (or mode of utterance)
can represent another language—for instance, the language of the protago-
nist or narrator—and allow its full intentionality without merging with that
language. It is this function that, for Bakhtin, is the unique remit of the novel
form, and to which he refers when he notes “the ability of the language being
represented simultaneously to serve as an object of representation while con-
tinuing to be able to speak to itself ” (DI 358). It is in precisely this way that
Lessing can have Anna Wulf focalize a meditation on the impossibility of
using language to encapsulate her interior experience, and, by including that
very meditation, paradoxically succeed in encapsulating more than Anna’s
words in themselves could convey. By telling the reader in Anna’s language
that this language is inadequate, Lessing is signaling (if not depicting) another
order of experience beyond language. In prompting the reader to consider
what of his or her own interior life is similarly beyond words, she moves
that much closer to an evocation of the experience that Anna cannot articu-
late, producing an empathetic reflection of “un-speakable” experience in the
reading subject.
What does it mean to depict experience in language, let alone that which
is, in Anna’s summation, beyond words? The idea of mimesis has been the
subject of a wealth of theoretical considerations, not least in the context of
a postmodernist challenge to the mimetic aspirations of the realist tradition
in literature. Lessing’s attitude toward and employment of the conventions of
novelistic realism is far from straightforward. As Molly Hite has suggested,
Lessing’s “attack on mimesis” in The Golden Notebook, such as it is, “has
mimetic grounds, in that she dismissed the means of representation inher-
ing in realist conventions as not representative enough” (Hite 484, emphasis
in original). Lessing’s disillusionment with mimesis per se stems less from a
rejection of the mimetic function of literature than from a loss of faith in
the representative capacities of mimetic conventions. Bakhtin offers a refor-
mulation of the category of mimesis when he posits discourse itself as the
subject of representation; as Brian McHale argues, “what the novel mimes,
according to Bakhtin, is social discourses, the vehicles of human social experi-
ence” (McHale 165). Bakhtin acknowledges in “Discourse in the Novel” that
there is nothing new in the struggle between literature’s limitations and its
possibilities; each successive critical paradigm has merely advanced its own
particular incarnation of the form’s continuing task. In The Golden Note-

book, Lessing has taken up the thread of an interrogation into the nature and
the parameters of literature’s representative function. Her novel has sustained
such a long history of competing receptions precisely because it is about the
process of creation and reception, of authoring and (mis)reading; it is a fic-
tion about the activity of fiction-making as a self-perpetuating and, at least
for Anna Wulf, inescapable process.
The Golden Notebook multiplies readership as well as authorship, not least
through Anna’s intermittently dismayed rereading of her own writing. Pro-
ducers and editors seeking to adapt Frontiers of War willfully misread that
text, just as more than one journal editor fails to recognize parody in Anna’s
and James Schaffer’s submissions. The American Milt in Free Women sum-
marily dismisses Anna’s notebooks as a failed attempt to “cage the truth” (GN
629, emphasis in original), while in the internal Golden Notebook Anna and
Saul read one another’s diaries, engendering a mutual self-consciousness so
pervasive that they begin to write for each other. The Golden Notebook is not
only about the possibility but also the value of writing a novel when the
notion of a “correct” reading has been so thoroughly undermined. Despite
Anna’s repeated expressions of skepticism about the possibility of encapsu-
lating experience in language, let alone doing so in a way that would satisfy
her sense of what a novel should be, she nonetheless reiterates a belief in
the social, political, and philosophical function of literature. She would not
be afraid of irresponsible authorship (as she intimates in her conversations
with Tommy Portmain) if she did not retain some degree of faith in its
power, and in this sense The Golden Notebook is a “critical fiction” (Bentley)
deeply concerned with the political value of its own medium. Anna’s (and
Lessing’s) concerns regarding the inadequacies of language constitute a strug-
gle with those inadequacies rather than a disavowal of the political importance
of writing fiction. As Lessing muses in her Preface, “So why write nov-
els? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if . . . ” (GN xiv,
emphasis in original). This “as if ” is at the root of Lessing’s own enduring
investment in authorship as intervention, its potential to stake a claim and
forge a dynamic of exchange. Her commitment to the production of liter-
ature despite what she acknowledges to be its problematic status affirms a
belief in authorial responsibility that critics like Nick Bentley have elucidated
and that I have elsewhere considered in the context of Bentley’s category of
the “radical instability of a postmodern literature of exhaustion” (Bentley 56;
Barnes).
Many early readings of The Golden Notebook—even when
complimentary—concentrated on one thematic strand of what was a
structurally and ideologically complex novel to the neglect of that complexity
and, as such, arguably failed to grasp Lessing’s aesthetic and political project in
writing the novel.8 While the shortcomings of these initial responses are now
widely recognized in Lessing scholarship, the tendency to speak of Lessing in
ideologically loaded terms still prevails in popular literary discourse, leading
commentators to perpetuate what Bakhtin decries as the divorce between a
formal and an ideological approach.9 As Bakhtin reminds us, textual mean-
ing cannot be illuminated by singling out one part of what is at its root a
relationship of exchange. Lessing’s 1993 Introduction to a reissued edition of
The Golden Notebook testified to the novel’s alluvial quality, then some thirty
years after its first publication. Readers from China, Brazil, and the former
Yugoslavia had written to Lessing to reiterate its enduring capacity to be read
in myriad different ways: a novel about “all those old politics” for one, or “my
life as a woman” for another (Time Bites 139). Now, more than fifty years
since the novel’s publication and well into a fourth generation of readership,
we can situate Lessing’s authorship of The Golden Notebook in a global histor-
ical context—one in which the partly contemporaneous writings of Mikhail
Bakhtin have been assimilated into anglophone scholarship. My intention in
considering Lessing’s novel alongside Bakhtin’s theory of aesthetic activity and
his dialogic model of discourse is not to uphold or to rebut a particular read-
ing to which Lessing’s novel has been subjected. It is rather to put forward the
case that we can reformulate the debate on competing interpretations of The
Golden Notebook by reconsidering the terms of our critical practice. The mul-
tiplicity of persuasive readings that consider Lessing’s novel through a range
of ideological, generic, and formal lenses are the rich ground for a critical dia-
logue that considers all such readings as being anticipated by, or even shaped
by, the text itself.
Notes
1. Bakhtin’s oeuvre is immensely varied and broad in scope, encompassing inconsis-
tency and even contradiction. Alongside dialogism and polyphony, he developed
key concepts such as the carnivalesque (in his study of Rabelais in Rabelais and
His World ) and the chronotope (the subject of his essay “Forms of Time and of
the Chronotope in the Novel,” published in The Dialogic Imagination). In this
chapter, I focus specifically on the elucidation of dialogism in novelistic prose in
“Discourse in the Novel” and the key precepts of interpretive activity laid out in
the supplement to “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” entitled “The Problem
of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art,” published in Art and Answerability.
These two sources, taken together, underwrite that foundationally integrative and
open hermeneutic consciousness, which I attribute to Bakhtin and see reflected in
Lessing’s novel.
2. For an astute overview of the terms of this debate, see Alice Ridout’s study of The
Golden Notebook as parody in her Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From
Irony to Nostalgia.
3. Similarly, Roxanne Fand considers the dialogic construction of subjectivity in
Lessing’s, Woolf ’s, and Margaret Atwood’s work in The Dialogic Self: Reconstructing
Subjectivity in Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood.
4. More recently, Earl G. Ingersoll has offered a complicating figure of the male resist-
ing reader of Lessing in an academy where female PhDs in English now outnumber
their male counterparts (Ingersoll 13).
5. In The Death and Return of the Author, Sean Burke reappraises the Barthesian
proclamation of the author’s death and considers how we might reformulate
our understanding of authorial authority after the theoretical moment of the
Barthes–Foucault–Derrida triumvirate.
6. Between the first publication of The Golden Notebook in 1962 and the addition
of the Preface in 1971, Lessing encountered the Sufi teachings of Idries Shah,
which offered her a fruitful counterpoint to the ordering logic of much Western
philosophical thought.
7. Gardiner quotes at length from Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of dialectics in his
Adventures in the Dialectic and The Visible and the Invisible.
8. John Carey, in his 1973 essay on the novel, incorporates a brief survey of mainly
nonacademic literary responses to The Golden Notebook in the decade following its
publication, noting that:
Many of the early reviewers of The Golden Notebook treated it as impor-

tant chiefly as disguised autobiography or as a statement of principle
rather than as a novel. See, for example, Kathleen Nott in Time and
Tide, 43 (April 26, 1962), 33. Robert Taubman, in New Statesman,
63 (April 20, 1962), 569, says it is a “document” and not a “creative
experiment.” In a favorable review in The New Republic, Irving Howe
asserts that Lessing is primarily interested in “personal relationships” and
points out the autobiographical elements. Some reviewers did notice the
basic connection between the notebooks and the “Free Women” sections,
notably John Bowen in Punch, 242 (May 9, 1962), 733 (though Bowen
also emphasizes autobiography). The reviewer for the Times Literary Sup-
plement (April 27, 1962), 280, found this connection only confusing.
Many reviews, notably Patrick Cruttwell, who savagely attacked the novel
in The Hudson Review, 15 (Winter 1962–63), 595–98, interpreted it as a
totally pessimistic and sex-saturated critique of life. (439–40)
9. Reportage on Lessing’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 reiterated

the popular perception of The Golden Notebook as a feminist classic. Tom Payne,
in the UK newspaper The Telegraph, wrote that the novel “was hailed as one of the
great works in 20th-century feminist fiction, even as the book was examining what
feminist fiction was.” Likewise, The Guardian’s “Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize”
referred to the novel as Lessing’s “postmodern feminist masterpiece,” while Motoko
Rich and Sarah Lyall suggested in the New York Times that “Ms. Lessing’s strongest
legacy may be that she inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough
novel.” These responses bear out what Virginia Tiger characterizes as the desire
to “fix” Lessing’s reputation in narrowly ideological or generic terms: “She was a
feminist; she was an anti-feminist. She was a Marxist; she was an anti-Marxist. She
was a social realist; loathing realism, she was an apocalyptic fabulist” (“The ‘Fixing’
of Doris Lessing” 93).
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed.
Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth
Brostrom. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990. Print.
——. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Print.
——. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 1984. Print.
——. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1984. Print.
Barnes, Sophia. “Stating the Problem: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and the
Possibility of Representation.” Doris Lessing Studies 29.2 (2010): 20–24. Print.
Bernard-Donals, Michael. “Mikhail Bahktin: Between Phenomenology and
Marxism.” College English 56.2 (1994): 170–88. Print.
Notebook.” Narrative 5.1 (1997): 88–98. Print.
Booth, Wayne C. Introduction. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. By Mikhail
Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1984. xxii–xxvii. Print.
Burke, Sean. The Death and Return of the Author. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Print.
Carey, John L. “Art and Reality in The Golden Notebook.” Contemporary Literature
14.4 (1973): 437–56. Print.
“Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize.” The Guardian. 11 Oct. 2007. Web. 23 Feb. 2011.
Eigler, Friederike. “Feminist Criticism and Bakhtin’s Dialogic Principle: Making the
Transition from Theory to Textual Analysis.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist
Studies in German Literature and Culture 11 (1995): 189–203. Print.
Fand, Roxanne J. The Dialogic Self: Reconstructing Subjectivity in Woolf, Lessing, and
Atwood. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP, 1999. Print.
Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.
Gardiner, Michael. “ ‘A Very Understandable Horror of Dialectics’: Bakhtin and

Marxist Phenomenology.” Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social
Theory. Ed. Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov. Oxford: Palgrave, 2000. 119–41.
Print.
Hite, Molly. “(En)Gendering Metafiction: Doris Lessing’s Rehearsals for The Golden
Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 34.3 (2009): 481–500. Print.
Ingersoll, Earl G. “Dystopia/Utopia in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos Novel, The
Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five.” Doris Lessing Studies 29.2 (2011):
9–14. Print.
Jones, Mark. “Parody and Its Containments: The Case of Wordsworth.” Representa-
tions 54 (1996): 57–79. Print.
Kaplan, Cora, and Ellen Cronan Rose, ed. Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival.
Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1988. Print.
Kim, Soo. “ ‘But Let’s Preserve the Forms’: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
(1962) as a Hegelian Modernist Novel.” Doris Lessing Studies 26.2 (2007): 14–20.
Print.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Print.
——. Time Bites: Views and Reviews. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Print.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Adventures of the Dialectic. Trans. Joseph Bien. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UP, 1973. Print.
——. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969. Print.
Payne, Tom. “Doris Lessing Is the Ideal Nobel Prize Winner.” Telegraph.co.uk. Web.
23 May 2011.
Rich, Motoko, and Sarah Lyall. “Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature.” The
New York Times 11 Oct. 2007. Web. 21 May 2011.
London: Continuum, 2011. Print.
——. “ ‘What is the Function of the Storyteller?’: The Relationship between Why and
How Lessing Writes.” Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times. Ed. Debrah Raschke,
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP,
2010. 77–91. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of
Consciousness. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. Print.
Schweickart, Patrocinio P. “Reading a Wordless Statement: The Structure of Doris
Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 31.2 (1985): 263–79.
Print.
Shepherd, David. “Bakhtin and the Reader.” Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. Ed. Ken
Hirschkop and David Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. 136–54.
Print.
Sprague, Claire. “Multipersonal and Dialogic Modes in Mrs. Dalloway and The Golden
Notebook.” Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold. Ed. Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 3–15. Print.
——. Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Print.
Sturrock, John. “Jamboree.” London Review of Books. 20 Feb. 1986: 13–14. Web. 12
Sept. 2011.
Tiger, Virginia. “The Nobel Prize: The ‘Fixing’ of Doris Lessing.” Études Britanniques
Contemporaines: Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines 36 (2009):
93–101. Print.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C. W. Ogden. 1922.
New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
CHAPTER 8
Rereading The Golden Notebook

After Chick Lit
Alice Ridout
T
“ he Golden Notebook, first published in 1962, has had 50 years of
an up-and-down life after a difficult birth,” Doris Lessing informs
us in the short piece aptly titled “Guarded Welcome” at the end
of the 2008 HarperPerennial Modern Classics edition of The Golden Note-
book (“P.S.” 11). Other books and genres have also had “up-and-down” lives
over the past fifty years and, since the publication of The Golden Notebook,
one of the most culturally influential and financially successful phenomena
to erupt onto the literary scene has been “chick lit.” The Golden Notebook
was in many ways an enabling text for chick lit. However, Lessing’s discom-
fort with identifying The Golden Notebook as a woman-centered or feminist
text is an important contrast to the tendency in chick lit to celebrate being
written by women, for women, about women. To quote her famous 1971
Preface, “this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation” because its
“central theme” was “ ‘breakdown’ ” not “the sex war” (The Golden Notebook
xiii) and she describes those female readers who “claimed” it “as a useful
weapon in the sex war” (xii) as having put her in a “false position” (xiii).
To elucidate what is at stake in these two different attitudes to “women’s
writing”—chick lit’s embrace and Lessing’s resistance—I will turn at the end
of my chapter to Toril Moi’s 2009 article, “ ‘I Am Not a Woman Writer’:
About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today.” I share with Suzanne
Ferriss and Mallory Young a belief that “Chick lit’s astounding popularity as
a cultural phenomenon calls for a more considered response” and that “a
serious consideration of chick lit brings into focus many of the issues facing
contemporary women and contemporary culture—issues of identity, of race
and class, of femininity and feminism, of consumerism and self-image” (2–3).
154 ● Alice Ridout
Placing chick lit comparatively alongside The Golden Notebook historicizes

these contemporary issues.
In their introduction to Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, Ferriss and
Young offer a brief history that identifies Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary
(1996) as the “single urtext” of the genre (4). Thus the genre of “chick lit”
could be said to have turned sixteen years old in 2012 compared to The
Golden Notebook’s fifty. Fielding’s originary chick lit text does reach right back
to Jane Austen and has “spawned,” Ferriss and Young suggest, “the genre of
chick lit” that has undergone “various metamorphoses” (7) since Bridget Jones’s
Diary, crossing “the divides of generation, ethnicity, nationality, and even gen-
der” (5). The extensive variety of chick lit published in the early twenty-first
century since Bridget Jones’s Diary—the decade some cultural commentators
have termed “the naughties”—is worthy of attention. However, this chapter
refers particularly to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary as an exemplar of
what has subsequently been labeled “chick lit.”
Doris Lessing’s own attitude to the phenomenon of chick lit has been
contradictory. In her introduction to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
she calls Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary a “witty book” (xxvii) and reads
it as recent confirmation of “the fact that most women still yearn for the
real, the perfect, the whole lover, their lost twin halves” (xxvi), a “fact” that
Lessing accepts rather than criticizes. By contrast, in the introduction to her
Chick Lit and Postfeminism, Stephanie Harzewski quotes Lessing as having
called chick lit “instantly forgettable” (2) in a radio discussion with Beryl
Bainbridge. In the introduction to their book, Ferriss and Young also cite the
same radio discussion:
In Britain venerated novelists such as Beryl Bainbridge and Doris Lessing have
weighed in against the “chickerati.” Bainbridge described chick lit as “a froth
sort of thing” that “just wastes time.” Lessing added, “It would be better, per-
haps, if [female novelists] wrote books about their lives as they really saw them,
and not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight.” (1–2)
This question of the truth-telling potential of fiction and autobiography

is one that has fascinated Lessing, who admitted in the first volume of her
own autobiography, Under My Skin, that fiction “makes a better job of the
truth” (314). The film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary draws even more
attention than the novel to the contradictory nature of the diary’s status as
“truth,” opening with Bridget’s claim that she keeps a diary in order to “tell
the truth about Bridget Jones” but concluding with her telling Mark Darcy
that “everyone knows diaries are just full of crap.” Indeed, there has been
considerable controversy about whether Bridget Jones’s Diary does or does not
Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit ● 155
depict life as Fielding “really [sees] it.” Quoting Robert Yates’s comment in
The Observer—“The writer has been largely forgotten. Or rather the writer
and character have elided”—Imelda Whelehan goes on to point out that
“The same could be said of the reader and the character. Although the narra-
tive tone sets an ironic distance between character and reader, for many, the
attraction seems to be the lack of distance between the fiction and their own
experience” (Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary 55). In interviews, Field-
ing has always insisted on the ironic distance between herself and Bridget
despite the many parallels between her own life and that of her character.
Roberta Rubenstein’s chapter in this volume offers an intriguing critique of
Lessing’s own claims that The Golden Notebook was not autobiographical.
Thus, Lessing’s call for “books about their lives as they really saw them” is
rather a complex and contradictory request; it is not clear whether Bridget
Jones’s Diary fulfills it or not.
Reading The Golden Notebook in relation to chick lit results in contra-
dictions similar to those identifiable in Lessing’s comments about the genre.
On the one hand, several elements of The Golden Notebook can be read as pro-
totypical of chick lit; this chapter focuses predominantly on these elements.
On the other hand, the differences between The Golden Notebook and chick
lit are telling. These differences provide an illuminating context for Lessing’s
metafictional discussions of the function of the novel and of writing in The
Golden Notebook. This chapter is not an exhaustive catalog of the similari-
ties and differences between The Golden Notebook and Bridget Jones’s Diary;
instead, it focuses on particularly significant resemblances and divergences.
“The two women were alone in the London flat” (3). Thus reads the
famous opening line of The Golden Notebook, which, we learn near the end
of the novel, was given to Anna by her lover, Saul Green. This opening line
draws attention to a key similarity between The Golden Notebook and chick
lit. Both focus on single women gaining mutual support from each other
in a challenging urban environment. The direct way in which Lessing talks
about women’s embodied experiences—“the first tampax in world literature”
(279–80) as Rachel Blau DuPlessis so famously pointed out—is another hall-
mark of chick lit. Indeed, in her 1971 Preface, Lessing explains, “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” (xiii). This is mirrored in the “strident
evening[s]” Bridget shares with her friends in Bridget Jones’s Diary, one of
which is interrupted by her boyfriend, Daniel Cleaver. He brings Bridget and
her friends boxes of chocolates and offers to drive her friends home, leaving
Bridget “feeling a bewildering mixture of smugness and pride over my perfect
new boyfriend whom the girls clearly wished to have a go at shagging, and
furious with the normally disgusting sexist drunk for ruining our feminist
ranting by freakishly pretending to be the perfect man” (128). Daniel’s arrival
brings about a swift conclusion to the women’s talk, which is affectionately
recorded in Bridget’s diary account of the evening.1
The Golden Notebook also includes two other popular elements of chick
lit: Anna Wulf is unmarried and has the obligatory gay friends.2 For
Stephanie Harzewski, these last two elements of chick lit are so noteworthy
as to demand a reconsideration of Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory
heterosexuality” in relation to chick lit. Harzewski argues that in chick
lit “compulsory heterosexuality” is replaced by “compulsory style” in a
“new stage of straight relations—post-compulsory heterosexuality—in which
women are less gullible toward romantic myths and often remain celibate”
and “[j]udgments about sexual orientation are frequently image appraisals
rather than political issues” (11). Harzewski’s theory of “compulsory style”
is clearly indebted to Judith Butler’s emphasis on the importance of per-
formance to the production of gender.3 It is revealing to place Harzewski’s
reading of what she terms the “late heterosexuality” or “post-compulsory
heterosexuality” of chick lit alongside Judith Kegan Gardiner’s reading of
Lessing’s depiction in The Golden Notebook of the homosexual characters, Ivor
and Ronnie. In her 2006 essay, “Historicizing Homophobia in The Golden
Notebook and ‘The Day Stalin Died,’ ” Gardiner acknowledges that the “por-
traits of Ivor and Ronnie set in the 1950s read as crudely stereotyped, dated,
and prejudiced” to a contemporary reader. She diagnoses Anna’s reaction to
these gay men as “effeminophobia” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term), argu-
ing that it “reveal[s] the grounding of her postwar heterosexual passions in
a historicized misogyny that condemned the feminine in both women and
men” (16). Harzewski reads Bridget Jones’s world as not only “postfeminist”
but also post-heterosexual, whereas Gardiner’s reading of The Golden Note-
book tries to make sense of Lessing’s negative portrayal of gay characters by
drawing attention to the still strongly patriarchal nature of society prior to
second-wave feminism.
It is significant that Gardiner’s title identifies her reading of The Golden
Notebook as a “historicizing” one because it is historicity, particularly with
regard to sexual politics, that reading The Golden Notebook after and through
chick lit illuminates. An important similarity between The Golden Notebook
and Bridget Jones’s Diary is that both can be positioned outside the moment
of feminism by being respectively too early and too late. Lessing argues in
her Preface to The Golden Notebook that it cannot be read as a feminist novel
because it pre-dated feminism: “This book was written as if the attitudes
that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movement 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” (xiv). Lessing’s comment calls implicitly for a new historicist approach
to her novel by encouraging readers to attend to the timing of the novel itself,
as well as their own situatedness. Bridget similarly often writes “as if ” she is
a feminist. However, feminism remains unavailable to her, despite her ges-
tures toward it, because it is too disruptive of her desire for romance and
marriage. “After all, there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident
feminism” (20), she informs us in the diary entry for Wednesday, 4 January.
A significant number of feminist cultural critics have argued that we are in a
“post-feminist” moment, by which they mean that feminism has been a vic-
tim of backlash and is widely viewed as no longer relevant.4 The untimeliness
of The Golden Notebook and Bridget Jones’s Diary has been unsettling for femi-
nist readers, who can neither wholeheartedly claim these novels for their cause
nor dismiss them entirely—a “false position,” indeed, as Lessing suggests in
her 1971 Preface (xiii).5
Harzewski’s claim that in chick lit “compulsory style” replaces “compul-
sory heterosexuality” echoes Angela McRobbie’s notion of the “post-feminist
masquerade” in The Aftermath of Feminism. McRobbie suggests that “the
global fashion-beauty complex charges itself with the business of ensur-
ing that appropriate gender relations are guaranteed” (61) and that “it
becomes increasingly difficult to function as a female subject without sub-
jecting oneself to those technologies of self that are constitutive of the
spectacularly feminine” (60). This is evident in Anna Wulf ’s diary entry
for 17 September 1954, when she reveals her preparations for the evening
meal that Michael fails to attend. She describes hurrying to “wash again
and dress,” choosing a “black and white wool dress with a small white col-
lar, because Michael likes it, and there mightn’t be time to change before
this evening” (323). Noticing that her “stockings are slightly splashed” from
the rainy trip to work by bus, Anna thinks to herself, “I must remem-
ber to change them tonight; Michael notices this sort of detail” (324).
Suddenly realizing that her period has started, Anna worries about the “essen-
tially stale smell of menstrual blood” that may be “emanating” from her
(325). She polices herself to ensure this is not the case, making “a mental
note that as soon as [she] get[s] to the office [she] must go to the wash-
room to make sure there is no smell” (326). The reader understands the
private irony when her colleague John Butte tells her, “You smell lovely,
Anna” (328).
In The Summer Before the Dark (1973), there is a scene in which Kate
Brown experiences an epiphany regarding the “masquerade” of femininity as
she pauses next to some workmen during a walk down the street:
Men were working, too, at ground level . . . . Kate realized that she was standing
still, staring; had been for some minutes. The men took no notice of her.
The fact that they didn’t suddenly made her angry. She walked away out
of sight, and there, took off her jacket—Maureen’s—showing her fitting dark
dress. She tied her hair dramatically with a scarf. Then she strolled back in
front of the workmen, hips conscious of themselves. A storm of whistles, calls,
invitations. Out of sight the other way, she made her small transformation and
walked again; the men glanced at her, did not see her. She was trembling with
rage: it was a rage, it seemed to her, that she had been suppressing for a lifetime.
(213–14)
The development in Lessing’s feminist consciousness from her portrayal of

Anna Wulf in 1962 to this description of Kate Brown’s “masquerade” in 1973
is remarkable. Instead of accepting the male policing of her performance of
femininity, as Anna does in choosing her dress and changing her stockings,
Kate rages against her lifelong performance.
Bridget Jones’s Diary displays a similar awareness of femininity as a “mas-
querade.” The scene depicting Bridget Jones’s preparations for the book
launch in the 2001 film adaptation has become iconic, not least for the infa-
mous big “scary stomach-holding-in panties.” This scene visually adapts the
entry for Sunday, 15 January, from Fielding’s novel:
6 p.m. Completely exhausted by entire day of date-preparation. Being a

woman is worse than being a farmer—there is so much harvesting and crop
spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked,
feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eye-
lashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. The
whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few
days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be
like if left to revert to nature—with a full beard and handlebar moustache on
each shin, Dennis Healey eyebrows, face a graveyard of dead skin cells, spots
erupting, long curly fingernails like Struwelpeter, blind as bat and stupid runt
of species as no contact lenses, flabby body flobbering around. Ugh, ugh. Is it
any wonder girls have no confidence? (30)6
Fielding’s use of the phrase “whole performance” is pertinent here. The oner-
ous nature of “compulsory style” is evident in the cumbersome list of activities
Bridget has to perform to prepare for her date. A backlash against feminism
is achieved by appropriating feminist language (especially regarding female
self-determination and self-expression). Like the diary, this date-preparation

seems to offer Bridget a degree of control over her life and body. The fan-
tasy of letting her body “revert to nature” emphasizes the ideas of excess and
lack of control. However, Fielding’s irony leaves the reader skeptical. While
“yearn[ing] for the real, the perfect, the whole lover, their lost twin halves,”
as Lessing puts it (qtd. above, introduction to Lady Chatterley’s Lover xxvi),
chick lit heroines also “regularly express anger, outrage and frustration in
their diaries that they have, once again, to make themselves submissive in
order to appeal to men” (McRobbie 68). McRobbie’s list of female emotions
uncannily echoes Lessing’s own comment about The Golden Notebook in her
1971 Preface: “It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility,
resentment. It put them into print” (xiii).
Although Anna Wulf does not experience the same degree of rage over
the requirement to perform femininity as we see Kate Brown suffering,
she is aware of her growing resentment. In that same diary entry for
17th September, 1954, Anna directly discusses all of these female emotions
that McRobbie and Lessing identify. She is describing her animosity when
Michael wants to have sex with her just as her daughter is waking next door:
But the anger is not related to him. Long ago, in the course of the sessions
with Mother Sugar, I learned that the resentment, the anger, is impersonal.
It is the disease of women in our time. . . . The woman’s emotion: resentment
against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it
is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky ones like me—fight it. It is
a tiring fight. Michael takes me from behind, half asleep, fierce and close. He
is taking me impersonally, and so I do not respond as I do when he is loving
Anna. (318–19)
The intense privacy and intimacy of Michael and Anna’s physical relations
in bed together—a description that would have had even greater impact fifty
years ago, before chick lit (among other texts) had made such an explicit
description of sex commonplace—belies Anna’s claim that she is “lucky” to
know that these emotions are impersonal. This explicit description of Anna’s
sex life as a single woman is echoed in Fielding’s depiction of Bridget Jones’s
relationships with men, as is her “illegible rage” (McRobbie 96). For example,
when Daniel invites Bridget to Prague and then withdraws the invitation on
the way to lunch without explaining why, Bridget tells him “furiously,” “I’m
fed up with you . . . . I told you quite specifically the first time you tried to
undo my skirt that I am not into emotional fuckwittage. It was very bad
to carry on flirting, sleep with me then not even follow it up with a phone
call, and try to pretend the whole thing never happened” (76). Daniel does,
indeed, find Bridget’s rage “illegible.” This is because she finds her own rage
nearly unspeakable. Her rage is partly caused by her romantic feelings for
him, which she deems impossible to reveal to him. He stares at her and then
simply walks into the pub. At 5 a.m. the next morning, Bridget writes a
short entry in her diary that reflects what she could not say to him directly:
“Oh God, am so unhappy about Daniel. I love him” (77). Thus, both of these
accounts of single women in London ask a similarly challenging question of
feminism’s project: “ ‘What’s the use of us being free if [men] aren’t?’ ” (The
Golden Notebook 438–39).
Rage is evident in the very opening scene of The Golden Notebook, in which
Molly and Anna catch up after Molly has been away for a year. In Molly’s
absence, Anna has noticed that “for a lot of people you and I are practi-
cally interchangeable” and is trying to make sense of this given that the two
women are “so different in every way.” Molly suggests that it is “because we
both live the same kind of life—not getting married and so on. That’s all
they see.” Anna’s reply expresses rage: “ ‘Free women,’ said Anna, wryly. She
added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutin-
ising glance from her friend: ‘They still define us in terms of relationships
with men, even the best of them’ ” (4). It is significant that both Anna’s
expression of rage to Molly and Bridget’s angry speech to Daniel result in
their being inspected by their addressees. Molly gives her friend “quick scru-
tinising glance[s]” and Daniel stares critically at Bridget after her outburst
before walking away from her. As I will explain later, the way in which this
rage prompts close attention being paid to both women can be related to a
post-Foucauldian understanding of surveillance. In McRobbie’s theory of the
“post-feminist masquerade,” young women are encouraged to perform this
surveillance for themselves, as both Anna Wulf and Bridget Jones do in these
two novels.
The Golden Notebook also includes a common plot element of chick lit:
the protagonist experiences a relationship crisis that coincides with a crisis at
work. This is an important element in the plot of Bridget Jones’s Diary, where
Bridget’s relationship with Daniel Cleaver causes all kinds of work crises for
her until she finally leaves her job without giving due notice because of his
engagement to another woman. In The Golden Notebook, the crisis day is
written out in careful detail under the date 17th September, 1954. On this
day, Anna leaves the Communist Party and, therefore, also her job with the
Party as editor and realizes that Michael will not be coming to have dinner
with her because he is ending their affair. The detailed account of the day
is “scored through—cancelled out and scribbled underneath: No, it didn’t
come off. A failure as usual” (351). This idea that a diary entry could be
considered a failure raises troubling questions about the function of Anna’s
diary. For most diarists, a diary is a straightforward private record of daily
events. However, it is clear from Anna’s assessment of this entry as a “failure”

that she has a particular aesthetic goal or an ideal representation in mind
when she attempts this detailed, almost stream-of-consciousness style diary
entry. In its place is a short neat entry under the date 15th September, 1954,7
which is written in a neutral, informal style with the sort of self-instruction
that Bridget Jones so often includes in her diary:
A normal day. During the course of a discussion with John Butte and Jack
decided to leave the Party. I must now be careful not to start hating the Party
in the way we do hate stages of our life we have out-grown. Noted signs of it
already: moments of disliking Jack which were quite irrational. Janet as usual,
no problems. . . . I realised that Michael had finally decided to break it off.
I must pull myself together. (352)
The juxtaposition of this entry, which is so dismissive of Anna’s losses on this

day, with the closing sentence of the affective and detailed account above—
which reads, “Then I sleep, but before I am even asleep I can hear myself
crying, the sleep-crying, this time all pain, no enjoyment in it at all” (351)—
highlights the level of denial in Anna’s reaction to her loss. Indeed, it could be
argued that it is these losses that Anna is working through during her intense
relationship with Saul/Milt at the end of the novel. This later relationship
develops unexpectedly rapidly as the two lovers play out a range of predeter-
mined gender roles in relation to each other. By contrast, the feelings of loss
over Michael/Paul seem repressed.8 As I noted earlier, Anna’s self-instructions
with regard to her significant losses—“I must now be careful not to start hat-
ing the Party in the way we do hate stages of our life we have out-grown” and
“I must pull myself together”—are remarkably similar to Bridget Jones’s in
Fielding’s novel. Compare Anna’s “I must pull myself together” in response to
realizing that her lover is leaving her with Bridget’s “Right. Determined to be
v. positive about everything” (189) just after her lover, Daniel, has announced
his engagement to an American colleague. Despite the comic tone of Bridget
Jones’s Diary, even in this novel the challenges and potential emotional pain
of negotiating the workplace and relationships as a single woman in London
are presented as serious and significant.
This focus on the style of Anna’s diary entry brings me to a final similarity
between The Golden Notebook and chick lit: the authors’ use of the fictional
diary genre itself. The diary has a long tradition of being read as a femi-
nine genre. It creates a strong sense of intimacy between writer and reader
and is particularly appropriate for describing domestic and private issues.
As Whelehan has suggested of Bridget Jones’s Diary, “The confessional tone
draws readers in, so that our relationship with Bridget is one of complicity”
and the novel “depends on that sense of a shared female discourse” (The Fem-
inist Bestseller 180). The diary has also been traditionally read as offering
women a rare opportunity for self-expression in text. However, following the
work of Michel Foucault, as Leigh Gilmore explains, theorists of autobiog-
raphy have become increasingly suspicious of the self-monitoring power of
autobiographical writing. Through the figure of the Panopticon, Foucault
demonstrates how “the development of a self capable of scrutinizing its
actions is an ambivalent legacy of the Enlightenment for it describes not only
the rational self formed through self-regulation but also the prisoner who,
through subjection to surveillance, learns to monitor himself ” (Gilmore 20).
Autobiography is the exemplary genre of this “ambivalent legacy”:
The self who reflects on his or her life is not wholly unlike the self bound to
confess or the self in prison, if one imagines self-representation as a kind of self-
monitoring. . . . In the cultivation of an autobiographical conscience, one learns
to be, and even strives for a sense of being, overseen. Thus autobiography can be
viewed as discipline, a self-study in surveillance. The prevalence of surveillance
not only characterizes a relation between the self and others but becomes, as it
is internalized, a property of the self as self-reflexivity or conscience. (20)
Considered in this post-Foucauldian context, Bridget Jones’s New Year’s res-

olution that she “will not” “[b]ehave sluttishly around the house, but instead
imagine others are watching” (2) acquires problematic and disquieting impli-
cations. Similarly, her “[r]esolve to begin [a] self-improvement programme
with time-and-motion study” (91) is yet another means by which she watches
and polices herself.
In a gendered version of Gilmore’s more suspicious reading of the diary
genre, McRobbie views the diary as another technology for imposing the
terms of what she calls “the new sexual contract.” The fashion-beauty
complex’s insistence on the performance of the sort of “post-feminist mas-
querade” evident in the exhausting date-preparations that Bridget complains
are “worse than being a farmer” is the means by which the radical potential
of Butler’s emphasis on the performative nature of gender is closed down.
Bridget Jones’s diary, with its New Year’s resolutions, advice from friends
and self-help books, time-and-motion studies, records of body weight, tal-
lies of cigarettes smoked and alcohol consumed, is part of “a new regime of
self-perfectability” (McRobbie 63). Anna Wulf ’s self-policing in The Golden
Notebook is markedly less focused on fashion and beauty than Bridget’s. How-
ever, Anna does police her writing, political attitudes, and emotional reactions
to situations with a constant vigilance. Thus, reading these novels alongside
each other from a post-Foucauldian position enables us to see clearly how the
fictional diary functions as “discipline” in both of them.
Despite this significant range of similarities, the differences between The

Golden Notebook and Bridget Jones’s Diary are telling. One key difference is
Lessing’s anti- or post-colonial critique, in contrast to chick lit’s notoriety for
celebrating Western women’s propensity to consume. Western women’s eco-
nomic independence is as much a result of globalization and cheap overseas
labor—the direct descendants of colonialism—as it is of feminism’s achieve-
ments for Western women in the workplace. This difference is related to the
negative attitude to the urban landscape evident throughout The Golden Note-
book in contrast with the tendency in chick lit to celebrate the urban. Sex and
the City’s celebration of New York is the most famous example, but the film
adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary also celebrates city life, particularly in the
final comedic romantic scene of Bridget’s first kiss with Mark Darcy. We see
Bridget chase Mark in her underwear through almost empty London streets
featuring only a few traditional London cabs in an idealized snowfall.
By contrast, in the yellow notebook’s draft of a novel entitled The Shadow
of the Third, in which Anna fictionalizes herself as the character Ella, she
describes getting to the party at which she will meet her future lover:
She would walk the mile to the house, and face what she hated. Ahead of
her the street of grey mean little houses crawled endlessly. . . . For miles in all
directions, this ugliness, this meanness. This was London—endless streets of
such houses. It was hard to bear, the sheer physical weight of the knowledge
because—where was the force that could shift the ugliness? (167)
London is offset against the beauty of the Rhodesian veld described in the
black notebook. Susan Watkins focuses on these black notebook sections in
her reading of the “melancholy cosmopolitanism” of The Golden Notebook.
She argues that Anna and her friends’ “attraction to Mashopi suggests that
one significant loss for the group is a straightforward relation to English cul-
ture and identity, which they can no longer believe in yet hanker after in a
self-conscious manner.” However, their access to “romanticised ideas of Africa
is equally partial” because they know “that their position in relation to the
country is a consequence of British imperialism.” Therefore, “Anna is unable
to luxuriate in her love of the African landscape without questioning her right
to do so” (61). This postcolonial awareness of London’s position in geopol-
itics, so central to The Golden Notebook, is noticeably absent from Bridget
Jones’s Diary.
It is also important to acknowledge that chick lit tends to embrace and
celebrate its status as women-centered literature, whereas Lessing has strongly
resisted being identified as a woman writer who writes for women. Indeed,
on several occasions, Lessing has said things that are very similar to Simone
de Beauvoir’s famous statement, “I am not a woman writer.” In her 2009

article published in Eurozine, Toril Moi invokes that statement to tease out
the double bind or “false position,” as Lessing put it in her Preface, that leads
women writers to say, “I am not a woman writer.” “Why are some women
writers reluctant to acknowledge that they are women writers?” asks Moi in
this essay. Moi returns us to de Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy, remarking,
At the beginning of The Second Sex, Beauvoir [sic] shows that in a sexist society,
man is the universal and woman is the particular; he is the One, she is the
Other. This is Beauvoir’s definition of sexism, and it underpins everything she
writes in The Second Sex. This analysis is so simple that it is easy to overlook
how brilliant it actually is, and how much work it will still do for us.
Moi shows us why identifying as a woman writer was perceived as poten-

tially limiting and threatening to writers like de Beauvoir and Lessing: being
a “woman writer” implies that one’s writing is particular and not universal.
The irony of this, of course, is that feminist and postcolonial scholarship
since de Beauvoir has convincingly undermined the very possibility of the
patriarchal myth of universality. What we need to attend to, Moi argues,
is the specific context—the “speech act”—of this statement, “I am not a
woman writer,” because “it is never a general claim, never a philosophi-
cal maxim.” Rather, Moi identifies this statement as “always in response to
a provocation, usually to someone who has tried to use her sex or gender
against her. Such statements, in short, are a specific kind of defensive speech
act: when we hear such words, therefore, we should look for the provocation”
(emphasis in original). Again, reading The Golden Notebook through chick lit
allows for the historicizing of Lessing’s rejection of the feminist label for her
novel.
Like Lessing’s own circular novel, to conclude I return to Lessing’s dismis-
sive comment about chick lit quoted at the start of this chapter—that it is
“instantly forgettable.” The relationship between journalism and chick lit is
firmly established in the two widely accepted urtexts of chick lit; both Bridget
Jones’s Diary and Sex in the City originated in newspaper columns, with Helen
Fielding writing for The Independent and Candace Bushnell for the New York
Observer. Their journalistic texts—indeed, Sex and the City is not unified
enough to qualify for the generic designation of “novel”—are perfect exam-
ples of what Anna perceives the novel’s function is becoming, as opposed to
her vision of what she believes the novel’s function ought to be:
the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost

of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t
know . . . . One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel
should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy. I find that I read
with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. . . .
Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me:
a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create
order, to create a new way of looking at life.
(58–59, emphasis in original)
This passage speaks to the crux of the difference between The Golden
Notebook and chick lit. Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell seem happy
to write the “novel-report” as Lessing calls it. The idea that these two authors
report the existence of young single women in urban centers is evident in
both authors’ development of a new vocabulary that implies an ironic social
anthropology: think of Fielding’s famous “Singletons” and “Smug Marrieds”
and Bushnell’s “Toxic Bachelors,” “Psycho Moms,” and “Modelizers” as
examples. Where chick lit seems to embrace its ephemeral and specifically
gendered nature (and, frequently, also the comic), what Lessing depicts Anna
trying to achieve in her different writing experiments in The Golden Notebook
is “art” (59). It is not clear from either the circular structure of The Golden
Notebook itself or from Lessing’s comments in her 1993 Introduction to The
Golden Notebook whether she believes she or Anna achieves “art.” In a deeply
unsettling irony, Lessing claims to be pleased to hear that the novel is being
assigned in history and politics classes in schools and universities. She goes on
to say that she “think[s] The Golden Notebook is a useful testament to its time,
particularly now that communism is dead or dying everywhere, or chang-
ing its nature. Nothing seems more improbable than what people believed
when this belief had gone with the wind” (viii). This description of The
Golden Notebook as a “testament to its time” assigns to it the same function
of reportage that Anna rejects in the novel itself. The contrast between the
literary ambition of Lessing’s Anna and Fielding’s Bridget raises the debates
regarding literary value that characterize the culture wars between 1962 and
1996, the publication dates of these two novels. Given Lessing’s 1993 com-
ments, it is problematic to align The Golden Notebook with “art” and juxtapose
it against the journalism of Bridget Jones’s Diary. There are significant differ-
ences in literary merit between these two novels but the culture wars since
1962 have rendered it much more difficult to articulate those differences,
and they have most certainly undermined the confidence with which anyone
might make “objective” or “universal” claims about them. Yet again, reading
The Golden Notebook through chick lit draws attention to its historical con-
text. As Nick Bentley has argued, “To fully understand Lessing’s engagement
with the ideology of literary forms as explored in The Golden Notebook it is
necessary to discuss some of the debates circulating during the period it was
produced” (45). Even Anna’s desire to create “art”—with its universalizing
impulse—is context-specific.
Although Harzewski and Ferriss and Young position Lessing in opposition
to chick lit by quoting only her derogatory comments on the genre, there
are enough significant similarities between The Golden Notebook and Bridget
Jones’s Diary to read The Golden Notebook as an enabling text for chick lit.
Whelehan’s description in The Feminist Bestseller of the relationship between
American seventies feminist fiction and British chick lit since the nineties is
equally applicable to the relationship between The Golden Notebook and chick
lit. Despite immediately apparent differences—“where feminist fiction takes
its heroines out of marriage into singledom, chick lit moves in the oppo-
site direction”—both these subgenres of fiction “created a small quake in
publishing history”:
It is well known that early editions of The Women’s Room were flagged, ‘this
book changes lives’, and that this not only became a deft piece of niche market-
ing, but also seemed to reflect the experiences of many of its readers, prompted
to view their own domestic lives afresh. For thousands of women the experi-
ence of reading Bridget Jones’s Diary might not have been life-changing, but it
facilitated a shift in the way contemporary young women’s lives were discussed
and described. (4)
The Golden Notebook was similarly paradigm-shifting and, as the personal

essays at the end of this volume attest, also “life-changing.” Looking back
on Lessing’s groundbreaking novel from the vantage point of half a century,
we can see more clearly its relationship to the explosion of chick lit onto
the literary scene in the mid-nineties. Both The Golden Notebook and Bridget
Jones’s Diary radically changed how “young women’s lives were discussed and
described.” It is important, however, to attend to the significant differences
between Lessing’s novel and chick lit. These differences raise questions that
defy easy or complete answers about the function of literature, the enduring
or ephemeral nature of a novel, the differences between literature and jour-
nalism, the politics of the diary genre, the relationship between gender and
genre, and the concept of the “woman writer” that are central both to The
Golden Notebook itself and to our understanding of the role of chick lit in
contemporary culture.
Notes
1. In adapting Bridget Jones’s Diary to the screen, arguably Sharon Maguire also
adapted it from chick lit into “rom com” (romantic comedy). She notes in her
commentary on the DVD that she shares many viewers’ regret that there was not
as much of Bridget’s friends as there is in Fielding’s novel.
2. These are Jimmy McGrath in the Mashopi sections of the novel and her lodger,
Ivor, who transforms from “the almost unknown young man who lived in the
upper room” into “Janet’s friend” during Tommy’s time in hospital (374).
3. “As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an
‘act’ . . . ” (Butler 146).
4. The most famous example is, of course, Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared
War Against Women (1992) that features in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Bridget claims to
Mark Darcy that she is currently reading it when she is actually halfway through
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, the popular relationship self-help
book by John Gray also published in 1992 (14). Diane Negra states that her book
What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2009) “is
about a popular culture that has just about forgotten feminism despite constant,
generally negative invocations of (often anonymous) feminists” (2). This argu-
ment echoes McRobbie’s claim that feminism has become “an object of loss and
melancholia” for contemporary young women (94).
5. Imelda Whelehan’s reconsideration of Bridget Jones’s Diary in The Feminist
Bestseller, following her initial reading in Overloaded: Popular Culture and the
Future of Feminism, is a case in point. In Overloaded, she places Bridget Jones’s
Diary in the context of popular culture’s “retro-sexism,” a nostalgia for the bat-
tle of the sexes. In The Feminist Bestseller, she reads it in the context of seventies
feminist bestsellers. She argues:“The form of the diary suggested a link to the writ-
ing of the 1970s which often used, if not always the diary, a confessional form of
expression, and this form of narrative intimacy better communicated the themes
and issues at the forefront of women’s lives in both the 1970s and 1990s. This
book is therefore founded on the contention that both feminist bestsellers of the
1970s and the bestselling genre loosely known as chick lit are in dialogue with
feminism” (5).
6. The echo here of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is noteworthy. In Surfacing, the
protagonist does “revert to nature” and imagines how others would perceive her in
this state: “They would never believe it’s only a natural woman, state of nature, they
think of that as a tanned body on a beach with washed hair waving like scarves;
not this, face dirt-caked and streaked, skin grimed and scabby, hair like a frayed
bathmat stuck with leaves and twigs. A new kind of centrefold” (184).
7. This is an interesting inconsistency regarding the dates of these two entries as it is
clear that the entry under the heading “15th September, 1954” is referring to the
same day as the entry above labelled “17th September, 1954.” It is quite possible
that this inconsistency is simply an error. However, it draws attention to how nar-
rative versions of the same day can be so different as to seem like they are different
days. It also implies the repression of the version presented under the date 17th
September, 1954. By crossing the day out in her diary, it is as if Anna erases it
from her life.
8. Roberta Rubenstein’s chapter in this volume offers an explanation from outside the
text for the rapid development of the intense relationship between Saul and Anna.
My reading here focuses on the depiction within the novel of Anna’s reactions to
her relationships.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. London: Virago, 1972. Print.
Bridget Jones’s Diary. Screenplay by Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies, and Richard
Curtis. Dir. Sharon Maguire. Perf. Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, and Colin Firth.
Miramax and Universal, 2001. DVD.
Bushnell, Candace. Sex and the City. 1996. New York: Grand Central Publishing,
2008. Print.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990. Print.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “For the Etruscans.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays
on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1986.
271–91. Print.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. London: Vintage-
Random House, 1992. Print.
Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young, ed. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction.
New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador-Macmillan, 1996. Print.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Historicizing Homophobia in The Golden Notebook and
‘The Day Stalin Died.’ ” Doris Lessing Studies 25.2 (Winter 2006): 14–18.
Print.
Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 2001. Print.
Gray, John. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: A Practical Guide for Improv-
ing Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships. New York:
Harzewski, Stephanie. Chicklit and Postfeminism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P,
2011. Print.
——. Introduction. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. By D. H. Lawrence. 1928. London:
Penguin, 2006. Print.
——. “P.S.: Insights, Interviews and More . . . ” The Golden Notebook. 1962.
New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2008. P.S. 1–24. Print.
——. The Summer Before the Dark. London: Jonathan Cape & The Book Club, 1973.
Print.
——. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. New York:
McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change.
London: Sage, 2009. Print.
Moi, Toril. “ ‘I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist
Theory Today.” Eurozine. 2009. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-06-12-
moi-en.html. Web. 2 Feb 2015.
Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism.
London: Routledge, 2009. Print.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” 1980.
Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi.
New York: Norton, 1993. 203–24. Print.
Watkins, Susan. Doris Lessing. Contemporary World Writers Series. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2010. Print.
Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005.
Print.
——. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum,
2002. Print.
——. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: The Women’s
Press, 2000. Print.
PART III
“Timing Is All”: Personal Reminiscences

CHAPTER 9
The Golden Notebook, Serendipity,

and Me
Paul Schlueter
W
hen I started doctoral study at Southern Illinois University
in 1963 to work with Harry T. Moore, prolific critic and
D. H. Lawrence biographer, I knew nothing of The Golden Note-
book—or, for that matter, any of Doris Lessing’s work—except for having
read a couple of enthusiastic reviews the previous year, notably the semi-
nal pieces by Irving Howe in The New Republic and Florence Howe in The
Nation.1 The course I took with Moore in the spring of 1964 introduced me
to other authors I hadn’t read previously, including Anthony Powell, C. P.
Snow, Lawrence Durrell, and Alan Sillitoe, whose names at the time were
hardly household words. Indeed, when Moore called his course “The Con-
temporary British Novel,” he really meant “contemporary,” for he focused on
several books, including Lessing’s, that had appeared within just the previous
couple of years. It is difficult at this distance from that first reading of Lessing’s
novel to recall how overwhelming an effect it had on me, as well as on others
in the course. But as I reflect on how much my experience with The Golden
Notebook in Moore’s class affected me—and on the relationship Lessing and I
have had for nearly fifty years—I realize how important serendipity has been
for me both professionally and personally.
To be sure, the book that is now considered Lessing’s masterwork imme-
diately attracted my attention: it had an unusual structure, and related to that
structure was its unusual typography. I had worked in printing intermittently
since high school in the forties and at one time operated a small letterpress
shop in my home, so I had a particular interest in typography. One of the
features I noticed about the book when I first read it in 1964 was the quaint,
174 ● Paul Schlueter
florid eighteenth-century typeface (Bell) used for the Free Women sections
and the more contemporary, ubiquitous typeface (Times) used for the vari-
ous notebooks in the novel’s first British clothbound edition (Michael Joseph,
1962) and its American clones, the clothbound Simon and Schuster edition
(1962) and the McGraw-Hill paperback (1964) used in Moore’s class. The
full import of this stylistic touch didn’t occur to me till I read the entire novel
the first time and saw what Lessing was trying to do, namely present the
events in Free Women, what Lessing has called a “short, formal novel” (Inter-
view with Rubens 32), as a separate narrative in contrast to the subsequent
notebook portions. The absence of Lessing’s distinctive typographic effect in
all subsequent editions of the novel thus clearly and unfortunately somewhat
negates her intent.
I was so intrigued by this aspect of the book, given what might have been
mere authorial affectation, that I immediately read it a second time, this time
all the Free Women sections in a row, then the same with the black note-
book sections, and so on. I knew then that the structure of the book was
no accident of typesetting. The book still made thematic sense, but now its
structural intent was clearer, to the point that I realized that the book’s the-
matic point was inextricably tied in with its structure as much as, say, the
significance of experimental style in Joyce’s Ulysses is necessarily integral to
that novel’s meaning. It’s difficult now, in an age when experimentation in
fiction hardly seems to warrant much comment, to realize how unusual and
powerful Lessing’s structural experimentation in this novel was a half century
ago. I heard frequently back then, even from others in Moore’s doctoral-level
class, that the book was confusing and “made no sense,” that it was needlessly
self-conscious and “experimental,” and that it would have been better had it
focused on a single sequence of events in Anna Wulf ’s life.
But no one else in the class seemed to have noticed Lessing’s typographical
format or imputed any significance to it. It wasn’t until somewhat later, when
I queried Lessing about this detail in a letter (June 1965), that she explained
that she had intended the “old-fashioned print, with rather flowery chapter
headings, to suggest that this kind of novel is old-fashioned” (24 July 1965),
a point she had amplified in an early interview, after noting that her novel’s
“meaning is in the shape”:
I wanted to write a short formal novel which would enclose the rest in order to
suggest what I think a great many writers feel about the formal novel; namely,
that it’s not doing its job any more . . . . [H]ow ridiculous the formal novel is
when it can’t say a damned thing . . . so I put in the short formal novel and
all this.
(Rubens 32, Lessing’s emphasis)
The Golden Notebook, Serendipity, and Me ● 175
The “all this,” of course, is Lessing’s having “split up the rest into four parts
to express a split person . . . : ‘If I had used a conventional style, the old-
fashioned novel, . . . I would not have been able to [play] with time, memory,
and the balancing of people’ ” (Rubens 32). For, as she said elsewhere, she
had been thinking on one hand about the “kind of a block” that impedes
“artistic sensibility” while simultaneously working on another project that
considered “various literary styles, in such a way that the shape of the book”
would say what she wanted to say about alienation. “[S]uddenly,” she said, she
“understood [that] they were not two books but one. . . . I understood that the
shape of this book should be enclosed and claustrophobic—so narcissistic that
the subject matter must break through the form . . . to break certain forms of
consciousness and go beyond them” (The Golden Notebook [London: Michael
Joseph, 1962], dust jacket).
After two readings of the novel in which I better understood and admired
Lessing’s fictional balancing act, I realized that The Golden Notebook was a
masterwork, one that was immediately impressive on a structural level and,
as would soon be attested by many of its initial readers, provided a coruscating
analysis of gender relationships and probing forays into complicated psycho-
logical states of mind, even as it insisted on itself as a catalyst for change. I had
been seeking a topic for my dissertation and Lessing seemed an eminently
desirable choice: at the time, no dissertations on her work had appeared and,
in fact, the mere handful of critical essays that had been published meant that
there was surely room for more commentary on Lessing.
And this is where serendipity again entered into my relationship with
Lessing and her writings. When I started at SIU, I knew Harry Moore pri-
marily because of his voluminous work on D. H. Lawrence and he, it turned
out, knew my work, such as it was, from having read my many book reviews
in the Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and
the Denver Post. Moore introduced me to the staff at the university press,
where I read a few manuscripts, and invited me to prepare an essay on Mary
McCarthy for a volume he was editing on the contemporary American novel
(Schlueter, “Dissections”). The essay launched my scholarly career.
Satisfied with the McCarthy essay and encouraged by my work in his
class, as well as by my enthusiasm for The Golden Notebook, Moore asked
me to write an essay on Lessing for a book on the contemporary British novel
(Schlueter, “Free Woman’s Commitment”) that paralleled the American vol-
ume. But this time there was a catch. He explained that the scholar who had
been commissioned to write the Lessing essay had died, that no manuscript
was found in his papers, and that the book, except for the Lessing essay, was
ready to go to press! I agreed to write the piece, of course, even though it
had to be submitted to the printer in exactly two weeks. So, in less than two
weeks, I read everything Lessing had published in book form up to that point
(a mere six novels, four volumes of stories and short novels, two volumes of
reportage, and several plays), wrote the essay to fit the required length as part
of an otherwise-completed manuscript that was ready for the printer, and
submitted it to the press, bypassing the volume’s editor, who never saw it till
he received a copy of the published book. When the essay appeared, it became
one of that first handful of academic essays on Lessing’s work. By that time,
I had not only begun work on the dissertation that was to become The Novels
of Doris Lessing but had also decided to make Lessing studies the centerpiece
of my professional life.
By 1968, the year I received my doctorate, the Lessing industry was in full
bloom, with some twenty dissertations in various stages of completion. I had
personally written to Lessing a number of times, with questions that were
undoubtedly naïve and at times impertinent, but they served to establish an
epistolary relationship with her that led to more serendipity. Lessing began
telling scholars who wrote to her to contact me, since I was an “excellent
source of information” and “an expert on everything she [had] written”; I’d be
able to tell them “where to find everything,” she averred. In large part because
of her referrals, I began receiving letters from both graduate students and
established scholars. Over the years, these came from the United States, the
United Kingdom, Iran, Italy, Germany (both West and East), Australia, and
other countries. I answered every letter, providing bibliographic suggestions,
information about other correspondents also at work on Lessing, and com-
mentary on practical and interpretive matters. The publication of my book on
Lessing’s novels—the first aside from one early Twayne volume (Brewster)—
also prompted a great many unsolicited queries from other scholars, again
primarily about The Golden Notebook.
This groundswell of interest in Lessing helped fill the critical vacuum that
had existed when I first set foot in Harry Moore’s class. Yet it was obvious
that the profession needed more opportunities for scholars to share opin-
ions about and interpretations of her writing. Though I had given a paper
on The Golden Notebook at the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Let-
ters in 1968 (Schlueter, “Commitment”), nothing on Lessing, as I recall, had
been presented previous to that year at the Modern Language Association’s
(MLA) annual conventions. Hence I proposed that a Lessing seminar be on
the program at the 1971 MLA Convention and was pleased to chair that very
first session. Even more exciting was the response, which was overwhelm-
ing. There were far more people interested in attending than were permitted
by the program’s guidelines, which limited participation to thirty-five, all by
prearrangement. Each successive seminar had several speakers, whose enthu-
siasm suggested they had only recently discovered Lessing. Not surprisingly,
many of the papers presented in those early years were on The Golden Note-
book. That first seminar, as well as those that followed (through 1978), led
to the establishment of the Doris Lessing Society, its formal affiliation with
the MLA as an allied organization, and its current sponsorship of programs
at every MLA Convention.
Correspondence with other Lessing scholars invariably included queries
about locating various hard-to-find essays and reviews that she had published.
I had accumulated many of these in my files by this time, and Lessing had
graciously sent me copies of others when I asked about them. Some of these
correspondents suggested that I put together a volume of these pieces, and a
university press actually initiated interest, though the firm of Alfred A. Knopf
had exclusive rights at the time. When I mentioned this idea to Lessing early
in 1973, she was moderately supportive, no doubt in part as a way of not
having to supply such items herself.
Nothing occurred regarding the project, however, until we finally had an
opportunity to meet. Since I was living in Europe in 1973 as visiting pro-
fessor of English at the University of Hamburg, I arranged to meet Lessing
at a London coffee shop. We talked of many things, including the project.
Remarkably, Lessing was now enthusiastic about such a collection; she said
she would approve publication with Knopf and provide copies of some of the
more obscure pieces that weren’t readily available in the United States. When
I suggested that I write an analytical introduction to the pieces, she said, and
repeated in a letter, “About this introduction, I suggest it would be better if
it were confined to notes about pieces, the circumstances, dates and places
and so forth” (9 October 1973). She also proposed that I receive 25 percent
of the book’s royalties, but by the time I returned to the United States a few
weeks later and visited Knopf, she had changed this to 50 percent. The book,
A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, was published internation-
ally, with editions in England and Germany as well as in the United States;
though far less significant than novels such as The Golden Notebook, it remains
the only published book, and one of the very few projects in any form, on
which Lessing ever collaborated with another person.2
The Golden Notebook has affected countless readers, including myself, as
a catalyst for personal change, and it has had a therapeutic value Lessing
surely never envisioned. During the turbulent sixties, the novel had a special
appeal, speaking directly and forcefully to those of us whose lives were in tur-
moil. I saw this in the letters I’d received, in which the writers not only asked
for guidance on Lessing’s work but also described the impact, emotionally
and experientially, of their reading of The Golden Notebook. Not surprisingly,
many early Lessing scholars had somewhat complicated lives and relation-
ships, and The Golden Notebook spoke to each of us (for I include myself ) as
nothing previously published had done. I heard repeatedly from these early
Lessing readers, mostly women, about how the book served as a catalyst for
change in their lives. Several spoke of their fascination with Anna Wulf, one
of the most self-consciously critical women they’d encountered in fiction or
in life. It was hard not to recall Mother Sugar’s questions to Anna when she
claimed she was “living the kind of life women never lived before”:
In what way are you different? Are you saying there haven’t been artist-women
before? There haven’t been women who were independent? There haven’t been
women who insisted on sexual freedom? I tell you, there are a great line of
women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out
and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
(The Golden Notebook 403–04)
A glance at these early, sometimes disturbing, letters confirms some of the

ways in which Lessing’s novel offered its readers validation and commonality
in making difficult personal decisions. One woman told of leaving her fam-
ily and joining a commune after reading the novel; another told of a series
of unhappy heterosexual relationships that ended only when she discovered
her true sexuality as a lesbian; another desperately longed for a young grad
student in her department but someone else in the department got her first;
others found that they could no longer believe in conventional, previously
unexamined truths offered by sexual customs, moral dictates, and political
ideologies. It would be difficult if not impossible to try to explain why so
many disparate people found this one novel to be so influential except to say
that each of us felt that Lessing was speaking personally and powerfully to us
individually.
Divorces were a recurring subject in the correspondence, and at least one
book on divorce resulted from these contacts. As my own crumbling first mar-
riage limped along till 1971, I discovered insights in The Golden Notebook that
helped me see my own experience and choices in perspective. Others, with
similarly complicated personal crises, found the book equally powerful in its
emotional and intellectual demands and were able to apply Lessing’s percep-
tions to their own lives. Intentionally or not, Lessing had become a kind
of advice writer, and some of those responding to her novel went through
challenges to their commitments—political, religious, ethical, moral, sexual,
racial, romantic—similar to those that Lessing’s characters had. In a word,
we all understood Anna Wulf ’s statement about seeing “all of myself in one
book” (519).
Over the years, I discovered, through teaching the novel to students at
academic levels ranging from undergraduates to graduate students and at
different kinds of academic institutions in the United States and Germany,

that the effect of The Golden Notebook on students has remained remark-
able. One American student’s comments from that first decade stand out as
especially powerful:
For the first time in my life, I have read something that crystallizes the very
emotions I have begun to feel . . . . After years of wallowing through Super-
Penises and Frozen Vaginas, all in the futile search for words and phrases that
express how I really feel, I think I have finally found a book that lets the world
know what it is to be a woman in these chaotic times. It is damned hard being
female now: the sexual revolution clashing with the still-remaining Victorian
ethic, the male population running scared, covering their crotches, afraid we
will ultimately rob them of their manhood . . . . [T]his book has definitely led
me . . . to an awakening of what it is to be a person and a woman, and I am
very grateful that you encouraged me to read it.
As Lessing scholarship matured, the writer found herself being claimed

by many “isms”—“feminism,” “communism,” “Jungianism,” “Sufism”—
involving differing convictions and perspectives, all of which tended to be
mutually exclusive. But no single interpretation of the book has satisfied all
readers, even those who for years have placed it high in their personal pan-
theons of the most important works of fiction they have read. Undoubtedly,
the tantalizing endurance of narrative and characters has led so many to con-
tinue reading and analyzing Lessing’s work years after their first experience
with it.
Following our first appointment in the coffee shop in 1973, Lessing and
I met many times and became friends. During my visits to her various homes,
at lunches during stays in London, and in lobbies following public events,
we had occasions to discuss her life, her work, and her lasting literary influ-
ence. I attribute all of these opportunities for encounters with her and with
her readers to my good fortune in registering for Harry Moore’s contempo-
rary British novel course back in 1964. For that occasion led to the series of
serendipitous events that have made my scholarly life so rewarding.
Though there will be no more novels from the manual typewriter that
served Lessing for so many years, I feel privileged to have been part of the
first generation of Lessing readers and to have known her friendship. I hope
that this account of my own acts of discovery—and serendipity—will explain
why The Golden Notebook had such immediate power upon its publica-
tion more than a half century ago, why it has remained on my short
list of the most enduring novels I have ever read, and why it continually
deserves to be counted among the most important novels of the twentieth
century.
Notes
1. Besides Irving Howe, these other early Lessing scholars included James Gindin,
Frederick P. W. McDowell, Frederick R. Karl, Florence Howe, Thomas Wiseman,
Robert Taubman, and Bernard Bergonzi.
2. Lessing collaborated with the composer Philip Glass on the libretti for his operas
based on two of her Canopus in Argos novels: The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8 (Glass opera with Lessing’s libretto, 1986) and The Marriages Between
Zones Three, Four, and Five (Glass opera with Lessing’s libretto, 1997).
Works Cited
Brewster, Dorothy. Doris Lessing. New York: Twayne, 1965. Print.
Howe, Irving. “Neither Compromise Nor Happiness.” The New Republic 15
Dec. 1962: 17–20. Print.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. London: Michael Joseph, 1962, and New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1962. Print.
——. Letter to Paul Schlueter. 24 July 1965. TS.
——. Letter to Paul Schlueter. 9 Oct. 1973. TS.
——. A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Ed. Paul Schlueter. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1974; New York: Vintage ed., 1975; (British ed.) London:
Flamingo, 1994; (German eds.) Mit leiser, persönlicher Stimme: Essays (Frankfurt
am Main: S. Fischer, 1989, 1991). Print.
Rubens, Robert. “Footnote to The Golden Notebook” (Interview with Doris Lessing).
Queen 21 Aug. 1962: 30–32. Print.
Schlueter, Paul. “The Dissections of Mary McCarthy.” Contemporary American Nov-
elists. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964. 54–64.
Print.
——. “Doris Lessing: The Free Woman’s Commitment.” Contemporary British Nov-
elists. Ed. Charles Shapiro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1965. 48–61.
Print.
——. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: Commitment to Writing as Therapy.”
Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters. 22 Mar. 1968. Address.
——. Letter to Doris Lessing. c. June 1965. TS.
——. The Novels of Doris Lessing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973. Print.
CHAPTER 10
I Remember Doris Lessing

and Her Illimitable Novel
Jonah Raskin
W
riting about The Golden Notebook (1962) feels, more often than
not, like venturing into sacred territory reserved for members of a
global priesthood. To borrow a cliché: Fools rush in where angels
fear to tread. For fifty years, Lessing’s best-known work of fiction has been the
subject of essays, lectures, and even sermons, including my own, and I wonder
now about the wisdom of resurrecting yet again an intensely analyzed classic
of twentieth-century British fiction. I know that I’ve often treated The Golden
Notebook as a Bible of sorts myself, beginning in 1968 when I first assigned it
to undergraduates at the State University of New York where I taught in the
English Department and where, in 1969, I met Doris Lessing herself, who
was on the cusp of her fiftieth birthday.
She had also just passed a literary milestone: the completion of the
last novel in the five-part Children of Violence series—The Four-Gated City
(1969)—and she was already reinventing herself and writing a new kind of
fiction that would be published as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971),
The Summer Before the Dark (1973), and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974),
all of which struck me as weird when I first read them. I would have been
happy to go on reading more novels in the manner of The Golden Notebook,
and, while I read all of Lessing’s fiction and nonfiction in the seventies, eight-
ies, nineties, and then in the twenty-first century, I always came back to The
Golden Notebook. Year after year, decade after decade, it was the text that,
more than any other, bound me to the author herself. It was certainly the
book that we talked about more than any other in the spring of 1969 when
I conducted a daylong interview with Lessing that took place in bed in a
182 ● Jonah Raskin
Long Island farmhouse and that was published in The New American Review
in 1970 and reprinted in A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews
(1974), edited by the venerable Lessing critic Paul Schlueter. We cuddled and
sprawled across the comforter, both fully dressed, me firing questions, Doris
giving answers, the tape recorder turning. That time in bed together created
a sense of intimacy that lasted for decades. Neither of us said, “Oh look, we’re
in bed together,” but I was certainly aware that it created a mood, and an
ambiance that I relished. I think Doris enjoyed it, too.
She and I certainly mined the format of the interview for all it was worth.
I conducted two subsequent phone interviews with her, one of them pub-
lished in the Santa Rosa, California, Press Democrat on May 5, 1996, and
the other in the same newspaper on February 15, 2004. A long face-to-face
interview appeared in The Progressive in June 1999 and online, as well, at
http://www.dorislessing.org/interviews.html. The last long conversation that
I had with Doris wasn’t meant to be an interview or to be published. It began
informally; Doris was so articulate and so outspoken that I grabbed a pen and
a sheet of paper and began to take notes, scribbling as fast as I could. I felt
a sense of guilty pleasure and couldn’t stop. We were sitting in her London
kitchen drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits. Doris’s cats were roaming
about and meowing under the table. “I see you’re interviewing me again,”
Doris said. She went on talking and I went on taking notes. That conversa-
tion was published in the Redwood Coast Review in the Winter 2008 issue.
We could have stopped; we chose not to. Now that I’ve started to write about
Doris and The Golden Notebook here, I can’t stop, either. I have to go on for
my own sake, for my own sanity.
From the summer of 1970 until the summer of 2007, I visited Doris,
as I called her from day one, at her many different flats in London—for
years she moved far more frequently than I did. I never took photos, but
I kept detailed notes that are now stashed away in my own personal Lessing
archive and that I refer to in this chapter. Occasionally, Doris and I went
by taxi to a café, bookstore, or literary event. I also saw her when she came
to New York and to northern California, too, where I settled in the mid-
seventies, and which reminded her, she said, during a road trip that we took
together, of the landscape of Southern Rhodesia. Something—a place, a per-
son, or an event—almost always triggered a memory, and, as she observed,
memory often turned a not so funny incident into comedy.
Over lunch at Max’s Kansas City in May 1969 in New York, she explained
in a bemused sort of way that an editor at a publishing company had taken
her to a restaurant where the waitresses were topless. She had been looking
at women’s breasts her whole life, she told me, and didn’t understand why
the editor (male, not surprisingly) felt she should see them in a restaurant.
I Remember Doris Lessing and Her Illimitable Novel ● 183
I didn’t have a topless story to tell, but I shared with Doris a dream in which
I had explored the hidden rooms of the house in which I’d grown up. I loved
the dreams in The Golden Notebook and suspected that Doris would find
mine intriguing. Indeed, she did. In dreams, she suggested, houses were often
emblematic of the self; my dream could very well be about my own journey
into my self. After that first session in the fundamentals of dream analysis,
I went on sharing dreams with Doris. Indeed, there was no one to whom
I would have preferred to tell them and to listen to her interpretations. Her
own dreams, she explained to me, provided her with valuable information
about herself and about the unseen perils that she faced.
Little by little and then suddenly and all at once, Lessing loomed very
large in my world and The Golden Notebook, the once towering novel, grew
smaller and smaller. It was a strange and wonderful experience. I’ve never
known anything like it. The famous author rose up in the same place her
novel once occupied in my scheme of things. Now that I’ve chosen to go
back to the text itself and to see it clearly, I feel I have to peel away layer upon
layer of memory, as an archaeologist might remove layers of earth to reach
a site and its artifacts. On almost every page of The Golden Notebook, I hear
Lessing’s own inimitable voice that makes me think of the kopjes (hills) and
vleis (valleys) in her novels and stories set in Southern Rhodesia and the hills
and trees of Hampstead Heath and the stations on the London underground
that appear in her English fiction. Behind every chapter, I see an unorthodox
gray-haired grandmother and heretical, ironical godmother who warned me
to be wary of revolutionary romanticism—my own and others’—the pitfalls
of which she knew from the inside out and from her own days as a Lefty.
From the start, politics and language linked us and divided us: the
language of presidents and dictators, crowds in the streets, and orators intox-
icated by their own inflammatory rhetoric. In 1969 and 1970, I was caught
up in the revolutionary romanticism of the era, though I didn’t realize it until
Doris pointed it out to me. I thought that I chose the words I used; in fact,
they chose me, as Doris also pointed out. My instinct now is to give her credit
for much of my own education. She surely taught me more than I know
that I know: things about manners and morals, and mutual respect and self-
delusion. You might say she helped to prod and provoke my own awakening
to myself. So, writing about Doris is an exercise in drafting her biography and
crafting my autobiography. It brings up facts as well as feelings that can be
awfully messy. I don’t remember Doris without remembering my own sad-
ness, joy, elation, admiration, and love, too. For years both of us ended letters
with the word “love” followed by a signature. Then she stopped. I didn’t.
After her novel love, again was published in 1995, we talked on the phone
about love. In May 1995, Doris told me, “Age has nothing to do with falling
in love. It can happen at any time in one’s life.” When I asked if writing love,
again, which I had reviewed for the Santa Rosa, California, Press Democrat,
had enabled her to explore her own experiences, she said, more than a tad
peeved, “It’s not true confessions. It’s a novel.” She added, “Listen, I don’t feel
that the writer should have to point out what her own book means. That’s
your job. You’re the reviewer.” Then, she turned the interview around and
fired questions at me. “Do you like the book?” she asked. “Do you think it’s
good?” When I told her, “I love it,” she relaxed and said, “I’m sorry if I’ve
been less than the perfect interviewee. I’ve been sick. I’m going back to bed.”
She was always candid.
During one of our last phone conversations, in May 2007, when I invited
her to go with me by train to a conference about her and her work in Leeds,
England, she asked if I wasn’t being rather ridiculous to carry on so. Didn’t
I think it was time to stop? Well, no, I didn’t. Here I am still writing about her,
still sifting through the sepia-tinted images of Lessing in my own head and
still replaying our conversations about all kinds of topics: prophecy, movies,
TV (we both liked Sunday night drama on the BBC), parents (mine and
hers), communism, the Cold War, male and female sexuality, Clancy Sigal,
Bill Clinton (why did Americans make such a fuss about him? she wanted
to know), London weather (too hot, too wet, too cold, or too dry), cli-
mate change, opera (she enjoyed working with the composer Philip Glass),
Afghanistan (which she visited), obscure novelists such as B. Traven, and not
so obscure poets such as Allen Ginsberg, pseudonyms (which we both used),
the joys of living without a partner, and, of course, writing itself. I can’t leave
out writing.
Did getting older affect the way she wrote, I asked not long after her
eighty-fourth birthday and following the publication of The Grandmoth-
ers (2004), a collection of her short fiction? “Absolutely not!” she said on
February 4, 2004, on the phone, long distance from London, England, to
my house in California. “Getting older has made no difference at all. Writing
is what I do. It’s who I am. I can’t imagine not writing.” She added, “I have
never been disciplined if disciplined means routines and schedules. I always
have to find the time to write because there are other priorities. Right now
I am taking care of my son Peter who has been ill. I work around everything
else I have to do.”
If I wanted to write, Lessing explained soon after we met, I would have
to cultivate a sense of irony, and, if I wanted to write about others, I had
to write honestly about myself. I had to throw away manuscripts and at the
same time store memories deep in the labyrinths of my own brain. She had
discarded one of her novels, she explained, a book about a communist and
a fascist who share the same prison cell and who argue about ideology and
politics day and night. Remember, young man, remember, she advised. For
a long time, she told me what to do, and scolded me if I didn’t do it. Then,
she grew more accepting and much freer with praise. For a while, I couldn’t
do anything right. Later, I couldn’t do anything wrong—almost. The older
she grew, the kinder she became, at least with me. She relaxed more, became
even more trusting and open, and always tried to bring her son Peter and me
together when I visited her. “He never cut his apron strings,” she said of him.
She never cut hers, either. Soon after he died, she died. While he was alive,
she couldn’t leave this world.
Memory itself animated our conversations: the way it suddenly exploded
or fizzled and why. We talked about our own memories of one another and of
the past that we shared. As the seventies moved into the eighties and nineties,
and then as the twentieth century moved into the twenty-first century, we
talked increasingly about what we remembered and didn’t remember. In part,
we played a kind of ongoing game to see who remembered what and if we
remembered the same things. Mostly we did. The only rule was to remember
as honestly as possible, which meant not tweaking the past and not trying
to sensationalize or glamorize it. If I mistrusted a memory I’d dredge it up
anyway to try to verify it.
I recall a conversation at Doris’s flat in London in July 2007 that I began
by asking, “Do you remember your first visit to the States?” followed by
“Can you recall the time I came to visit the day you happened to receive
the first copy of The Memoirs of a Survivor that had just been published?”
She was eight-seven then—almost eighty-eight—and her mind was still very
sharp. She not only remembered what I remembered; she remembered what
I had forgotten. Moreover, once she salvaged a scrap from the past, it would
lead her to a field of memories that came back to her piece-by-piece, or like
a kind of optical explosion that she’d share with me. Any time I disclosed
something, she would disclose something, though her disclosures were often
unpredictable. On April 7, 1999, at her flat, when I said that I enjoyed Mara
and Dann, she said, “Well, I really adored my baby brother, Harry. Later on
we had nothing in common.” Doris could be very private and then not pri-
vate at all; she had her own notions about privacy and went so far as to tell
me on July 3, 2007, “Everything is private. We’re alone with our own feelings
and experiences.”
Listening to Doris, as well as noticing the expressions on her face, I had
the sense that I was watching her memory at work. If memory has wheels that
turn, I saw hers turn, return, and turn again. Over the years, and as she aged,
I did not observe a significant loss of memory, though Lessing didn’t always
remember someone’s name. “The names don’t really matter anymore,” she
said to me on April 7, 1999. “They’re unimportant.” And then she was cross
with herself for not remembering. She had trained herself to remember and
went on diligently, actively remembering all the time that I knew her. It was
in the eighties, I think, that she told me that to keep her mind razor sharp
she had been studying Russian—a new language for her—and that studying
Russian had helped her to keep her mind focused and intact. Memorizing
Russian nouns and verbs prevented her own memory from falling apart and
cracking up—a process that she seemed to dread. To stay fit mentally and
physically, too, was a primary goal. For most of her life, she’d been physically
active and athletic and she worked to stay fit. She wanted to be in control of
her mind and not let it control her. I remember that when I told her of my
own personal experiments with marijuana and LSD, she said that she could
do the same things in her head without drugs, such as mescaline, that she did
with them. I followed her suggestion and found that my mind could make
the same kinds of connections and leaps unaided by chemical substances that
it made with them.
She was proud of her physical stamina and her mental strength, both of
which enabled her to go on writing for more than fifty years. During that
time, she produced more than sixty books, won the Nobel Prize for Litera-
ture, reinvented herself again and again, wrote adventure stories, short stories,
journalism, and works for the theater. Her athletic memory—that’s how I pic-
ture it—enabled her to dredge up the past and to write The Golden Notebook,
an imperfect but brilliant talismanic novel that focuses on the present, specifi-
cally on that traumatic year, 1956, and that also goes back in time to Southern
Rhodesia in the forties. I think of The Golden Notebook as a collection of bits
and pieces: a recollection of disparate memories assembled by a master of
memory who knows she’s a master and boasts about it, too.
In The Golden Notebook, Saul Green tells Anna Wulf, “you remember
everything, you probably remember everything I’ve ever said,” and Anna
replies, “Yes, I do remember everything” (510). Decades later, I would say
much the same thing to Lessing that Saul says to Anna, though not in the
same tone of voice and not with his perspective, either, especially not when
he says, “The truth is, I resent you for having written a book which was a suc-
cess” (526). Ouch! It would have been absurd for me to be resentful of Doris.
There was no way I could ever catch up with her and I never felt that I was
competing with her. I played the part of the acolyte—though I did introduce
her to my sixties and kept her informed of the antics of iconic figures such as
Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, and Abbie Hoffman, all of whom I knew
and whom she found intriguing, if not absurd.
Remembering every thing, and not just some things, matters to Anna
Wulf. What’s at stake is her sanity. Remembering also mattered to the Doris
Lessing I knew, and, while remembering is not the same as imagining and
thinking—two other primary mental exercises in The Golden Notebook—they

are closely related if not inextricably entwined. Dreaming and remembering
dreams is part of the equation, too. For Anna and for Lessing, remember-
ing is a variety of thinking and both thinking and remembering are essential
for the process of writing and the art of storytelling. Listening attentively
to others and to ourselves also helps, Lessing insisted. In The Golden Note-
book, remembering is a ritual that honors the past, preserves history, and
pays homage to both human resilience and fragility, provided sentimental-
ity doesn’t distort the picture. For Lessing, the process of remembering the
past, then sorting it out, and recording her memories was the best way—
the only way, really—that she knew how to tell the truth, though she turned
increasingly to prophecy to communicate the ongoing ecological and psycho-
logical crises she saw everywhere around her. Memory morphed into a kind
of divination and future worlds mimicked dead and dying civilizations.
In Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, Lessing says emphat-
ically that when a writer has to choose between fiction and nonfiction to tell
the truth, “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job” (314). Lessing offers
that telling observation at the end of a long section, in which she writes about
her experiences in Southern Rhodesia in the forties: “This period, when the
Cambridge RAF were with us, a time with its own flavour and taste, went
to make up the Mashopi parts of The Golden Notebook, which I have just
re-read” (314). The part about rereading is quintessential to Lessing. Reread-
ing, rethinking, remembering, and rewriting are activities that define her,
and Anna Wulf, too, in The Golden Notebook. At the end of the first seg-
ment of the black notebook, Anna writes, “I read this over today,” and adds,
as Lessing herself probably thought to herself, “it’s full of nostalgia, every
word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being
‘objective’ ” (150).
In the section of Under My Skin in which Lessing writes about the
Mashopi parts of The Golden Notebook, she also provides essential informa-
tion to the reader about the individual volumes in the Children of Violence
series. “The manners and mores of the time” are all presented in Martha
Quest, she explains, adding, “it is ‘true’, well more or less” (201). What’s more
and what’s less true, she doesn’t divulge, and so even as Lessing reveals she
conceals, or at least chooses not to tell. It’s humanly impossible to reveal all;
memory has blind spots; the past has secrets. On the subject of the authen-
ticity of Martha Quest, Lessing explains that “the atmosphere yes, taste and
texture and flavour” of the novel are all “true,” and that “sometimes several
people have been put together to make one, and of course the story has been
tidied up” (201–02). She adds that real life is “a sprawl of incidents” while
“every novel is a story” (202). It has order: a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Perhaps the crucial piece of information about her own writing process
that she reveals in Under My Skin has to do with what she calls “distance”
(397). Without it, Lessing explains, the writer cannot take “the raw, the indi-
vidual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general” where
it becomes of value to “the people who read the results of this process” (397).
By its very nature, memory creates a sense of distance. It requires looking back
and bringing forward. Lessing’s comments about “the realm of the general”
and about the “value” of the work to readers suggest to me how traditional
she was as a writer. She looked back to Dickens, Tolstoy, and the women nov-
elists in the age of Napoleon and Victoria. At the same time, she declared her
independence from them. In The Golden Notebook, she experimented with
fragments, with novels within the novel itself, and with the fictional device, if
I can call it that, of Anna’s four notebooks, all different colors, that she looks
at “as if she were a general on the top of a mountain, watching her armies
deploy in the valley below” (68). There’s an image right out of Tolstoy’s War
and Peace.
Lessing’s work belongs to a long tradition of moral fiction that goes back
to nineteenth-century Russian and English literature. Like Jane Austen and
George Eliot, she wanted to be a teller of truths and to create works with
“value”; her obligation was to the reader, even as her loyalty was to herself.
In the black notebook, Anna Wulf recaptures a specific time and a place—
Southern Rhodesia in the forties, when the whole world was at war and its
ripples were felt even in colonial Africa. By looking at life on the edge of
empire, Anna hopes to illuminate life at its heart. By adding her own reflec-
tions about memory and about remembering, she creates a sense of distance
and, paradoxically, at the same time develops a sense of intimacy. I feel up
close to the characters and I’m at a remove from them, too. Anna brings the
reader—I’m thinking about myself, here—into the depths of her own state
of mind and, by doing so, becomes credible as a storyteller, a witness to his-
tory, and the author of the novel within the novel that she calls Frontiers
of War—which might be described as a Hollywood version of The Golden
Notebook.
To a skeptical reader, Anna offers a series of disclosures that seem to be
meant to allay doubts and distrust. She and Lessing, too, both understand
that her audience might well wonder how it is that Anna remembers so clearly
events that took place in a distant country on a distant continent and in a
decade that’s fast receding in memory. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t present
herself as a writer with a perfect memory who recalls effortlessly. She’s too
savvy about the shifting sands of the human mind to make that claim. Fur-
thermore, Anna’s comments about memory and remembering aren’t simply
narrative devices; they’re explorations of the mind itself and of the drama that
takes place in the realm of consciousness that Lessing explores relentlessly in

The Golden Notebook.
Wisely, Anna portrays herself as a flawed narrator and an imperfect mem-
oirist who has to wrestle with the past, resurrect memories with all the
strength she can muster, and then write them down in her notebooks before
they evaporate into thin air. She’s a rescue artist who salvages fleeting experi-
ences. In the black notebook, Anna describes her own writing as a process that
begins with looking back; it seems as though she almost turns her head and
gazes into a distant place, or perhaps into a remote part of her own head. She
explains that remembering is an active process and that memories themselves
are created, recreated, erased, and recorded. There’s no automatic deposit and
no automatic accumulation of interest in her memory bank. Moreover, Anna
explains that the memory of an event or a person is not the same thing as the
event itself or the person herself. The memory of a moment is akin to “a look,
a gesture, in a painting or a film,” Anna says (115). Shapely and aesthetically
pleasing, it’s similar to a work of art.
Anna says that she often starts the writing process with the merest of
recollections—“the smell of the dust and the moonlight” or a character
“handing a glass of wine” (115). She holds on to her flickering recollections
as though they’re physical entities. The verb she uses to describe the act of
remembering is “cling” (115). She has to “cling” to a facial expression or a
physical gesture. Then, too, she knows that memories are usually isolated
pictures that don’t convey the whole story and only represent a small part
of “the complexities behind them” (115). Clinging is the essential starting
point; everything else emerges from it. Clinging to the past keeps her from
going mad. “If I did not,” she explains, “I’d never be able to set a word down
on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern
city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on
my skin” (115).
For Anna, remembering is a matter of recollecting not simply ideas and
events but also feelings, sensations, and voices. Intention matters and so does
energy. Anna consciously manufactures the “emotional energy inside” that she
needs in order to “create in memory some human being I’ve known” (115).
For her, there’s nothing passive about the process of recollection. Later, in
the same section of The Golden Notebook, she comes back to the topic of
memory and the act of remembering, this time with a sense of frustration.
She realizes that she remembers separate, often superficial, incidents that are
the products of what she calls “lazy memory” (137). To explain the workings
of “lazy memory,” she uses the metaphor of “beads on a string.” There are “big
glittering” beads, followed by “small unimportant ones, then another brilliant
one to end” (137). Thinking slowly and with precision now, she concludes
that there must have been other beads—and other incidents—that have fallen
by the wayside. “I can’t remember, it’s all gone,” she exclaims (137). You can
almost see her throwing up her hands in despair. “I get exasperated, trying to
remember—it’s like wrestling with an obstinate other-self who insists on its
own kind of privacy,” Anna adds (137).
Indeed, the more Anna thinks about memory the more complex she real-
izes it is. “How do I know that what I remember was what was important?”
she wonders (137). Her answer: “What I remember was chosen by Anna,
of twenty years ago” (137), to which she adds, “I don’t know what this
Anna of now would choose” (137). Her memories, she knows, are often
memories of memories that were deliberately selected by the conscious and
unconscious mind of the “other-self ” who lived in a distant time and a remote
place. Real memory, unfaded and unadulterated memory, is still there, Anna
insists, somewhere “in my brain if only I could get at it” (137). But it keeps
receding, keeps fading away. When she finally remembers a fleeting person,
a fugitive sensation, and a flickering physical attraction, it’s much more valu-
able than it otherwise would have been had she presented herself as a person
with an infallible memory who doesn’t have to struggle to dredge up the past.
When Anna tells Saul Green that she does in fact remember everything,
she might be boasting, but she’s also standing up for herself and not let-
ting him boss her or bully her around emotionally and intellectually. In their
verbal sparring—the whole relationship seems as much linguistic as it is
sexual—he begs to be defeated rhetorically and she doesn’t disappoint him.
Touché, Anna Wulf.
In The Golden Notebook, memories lurk almost everywhere, ready to
pounce or to surface. At one point, a popular song that Anna hears in London
in the fifties triggers a memory of Southern Rhodesia in the forties. A spe-
cific geographical location can recreate an alienated sense of dislocation and a
song can conjure up a moment. I remember listening to popular music with
Lessing at her flat and then listening to her talk about the memories that the
music triggered. Music was dangerous; it got under her skin, under our skins,
she noted, thinking of songs by Cole Porter and Irving Berlin while I thought
of Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
Memories of the zeitgeist were often harder to come by than memories of
a specific event, or a person, but they were more important and more valu-
able for Lessing. One couldn’t write a novel, she told me repeatedly, without
creating the mood, manners, and mores of a time and place. In a novel such
as The Golden Notebook, the zeitgeist was all-important. For Anna Wulf and,
I think, for Lessing, too, memories are also therapeutic. If they have the power
to wound, they can also heal. The very act of looking back and remember-
ing enables Anna to see herself and to understand herself. It’s the process of
writing and awakening to consciousness that teaches her about herself and
her relationship to others. “I don’t think I really saw people then, except as
appendages to my needs,” Anna says when she remembers herself and her
circle of friends in Rhodesia in the forties (124). She adds, “It’s only now,
looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit
haze” (124).
The Anna who talks about the brilliantly lit haze is a mirror image of the
Doris Lessing I knew. What Anna says about looking back and understand-
ing, Lessing said to me almost word for word. I remember that she told me
that I would probably only understand the sixties when I could look back at
the era. Only from a distance would it take on a shape and a pattern. Living
in it, I was a part of it, she explained, and could not discern it. I was too close
to it and to myself. I needed that essential element: distance. In those days
as a journalist and as a reporter I felt that it was my job to see the shape and
the pattern of the present in the present and not have to wait until a future
date to nail it. With time, of course, comes a deeper understanding. Over the
course of the past year or so as I have reread The Golden Notebook, I have
come to appreciate more deeply than ever before the place of memory in the
novel. Lessing herself seems a tad smaller than she once was in the precincts
of my own head and The Golden Notebook seems larger again. I like the read-
justment. Still, there’s nothing that can replace that first experience of reading
Lessing’s novel in 1968 when I was twenty-six and when everything did seem
to me to be cracking up: my marriage, my teaching career, the whole world as
I had known it. And the cracking up seemed essential for something new to
be born, though, like Lessing, I wasn’t sure it would be wonderful. It might
also be terrible.
In May 1969, we spent days together, though now I can only remember
a few isolated moments, a few beads on a string here and there: walking—or
sauntering—across the campus at Stony Brook; the interview we conducted
on the second floor of the old farmhouse near the town of Saint James; the
autographed copies of Idries Shah’s work that she gave me; and, going back a
tad further, to the first time I saw her in the corridor of the English Depart-
ment, her hair at the back of her head in a neat bun. I remember thinking
that she wasn’t as tall or as imposing as I had expected her to be. I remember
almost nothing of Lessing’s visit to the class in which the students were read-
ing The Golden Notebook and were in absolute awe of her. What they couldn’t
fathom was that she hadn’t graduated from college. She hadn’t gone to college
at all, they learned from Lessing herself, and yet she had written the big novel
they were required to read and that seemed over their heads. They were only
teenagers, after all.
Although Doris died in November 2013, I can still picture her in her
flat in North London. My memory is working overtime and I see the long
stairway to the second floor, the cats in the kitchen, the cups of tea, the
chocolate biscuits, the newspapers on the floor, her son Peter watching TV in
the living room, and the flowers in the garden. For me, as for Anna Wulf and
for Lessing, memories are like paintings and films; something in the mind
seems to arrange and rearrange them aesthetically. I know, too, that I have a
sense of nostalgia and nostalgia troubles me. I hate to be sentimental and yet
there it is: the ocean of sentimentality that she warned me about and that she
knew from her own experience. At least I’m conscious of it.
I recall Doris at her flat in London at Christmas in 1973, wearing an
apron and cooking tarragon chicken with roasted carrots and steamed broc-
coli. These days, I don’t smell tarragon without also remembering that meal at
her cozy flat. I remember, too, that when I was washing up in the kitchen and
about to toss out the liquid at the bottom of the pan she used for the broc-
coli, she stopped me. “Wait,” she said. “I want to save it and use it as stock to
make soup.” That memory matters to me as much as my memories of Doris
discussing the work of the novelist Anna Kavan in a London bookstore, or
another of helping Doris select which short stories from London Observed she
would read to an audience in California. I suggested humorous stories; Doris
rejected that idea. As she wisely explained, once members of the audience
started to laugh they wouldn’t stop laughing even when the story wasn’t at all
humorous.
I think that as she got older she became less judgmental of others and
herself, too. In 1969 and 1970 she was often too hot, spoke her mind too
quickly, and hurt the feelings of others. At times she seemed to expect me
to be as wise about human beings as she was. When I wasn’t she became
impatient with me. This happened when a mutual friend tried to commit
suicide and ended up in the hospital. Doris had seen it coming. I hadn’t.
Why couldn’t I hurry along and acquire wisdom, she wanted to know. She
could be as impatient with humanity itself as with individuals. And yet I also
remember that she would sit quietly and observe, taking in everything and
everyone as though it all might be useful in a novel. In New York, I introduced
her to my friends who wrote for newspapers and magazines and marched and
protested in the streets. We reminded her, she said, of her circle of friends in
Southern Rhodesia in the forties. That was Doris at one of her most maternal
moments.
She and I spoke on the phone after 9/11 and again soon after she won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. She was happy that the judges had finally
recognized her work and I was happy, too, and relieved. For years, I was afraid
that Doris would be overlooked. The Nobel Prize judges for literature were
more astute than I thought.
The last time I saw Doris, in London in 2007, I brought a paperback copy
of The Golden Notebook with me and asked her to autograph it. “Jonah—with
all good wishes Doris Lessing 3rd July 07,” she wrote. She handed it to me
and said, “It’s really a remarkable book, isn’t it?” And when I nodded in agree-
ment, she added, “Sometimes now it’s hard for me to remember what it was
like to write it.” Still, The Golden Notebook tells readers what it was like for
Lessing to write it. After all these years, what I value most about the novel
is that the author presents a gallery of self-portraits of the artist as a white
African, a disillusioned Red and an exile in cold, cold England.
For a time, it was fashionable in literary circles to say that Lessing’s true
work of genius wasn’t The Golden Notebook but The Fifth Child, her short
1988 novel about the terrors and horrors of childhood and English family life
during the Margaret Thatcher era. While The Fifth Child has its weird plea-
sures, I don’t think it will replace the 1962 novel in which Lessing recreated
herself as a postmodern, free woman and brought herself to the attention of
the world. The Golden Notebook captures a pivotal moment in time when the
world seemed to be coming apart and when the best and the brightest seemed
to be going mad—a time not unlike our own in the twenty-first century.
Works Cited
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: HarperPerennial, 2007. Print.
——. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. 1994. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1995. Print.
CHAPTER 11
Timing Is All:
The Golden Notebook Then and Now
Florence Howe
F
ifty-plus years ago, in 1963, I read The Golden Notebook and two years
later decided to add it to my freshman writing course. By then, I had
become The Nation’ s reviewer for Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence
series. In 1966, I spent a long afternoon with Lessing at her home. Our
conversation, mostly tape-recorded, has been used by innumerable doctoral
candidates, and in part has also been published. Since then, I corresponded
with Doris, saw her twice more, and sent her copies of all the African books
published by The Feminist Press during my tenure as founding director
(1970–2000) and as publisher (2006–2008). As I will explain, the three
long essay-reviews I wrote about the five volumes of Children of Violence
are indirectly connected to the way in which The Feminist Press came to
be—in 1970.
Perhaps another introductory note is warranted, this one about age and
milieu. Though I am exactly ten years younger than Doris Lessing, in the
sixties, I was at home ideologically in her generation rather than with the
“radical feminists,” ten years younger than I. Further, I did not read Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique when it was published in 1963, a year after
The Golden Notebook. Nor was I an early member of NOW, the National
Organization of Women. I was probably unaware of that kind of organiz-
ing, and, in Baltimore, felt little if any feminist activism until very late in the
decade. In short, fifty years ago, while many of the world’s women were ready
for feminism, Doris Lessing and I were not. To begin with, in the early-
to mid-sixties, I did not regard The Golden Notebook as a feminist book.
196 ● Florence Howe
And if I must do so now, I must describe not only its strengths but also its
weaknesses, omissions, and limitations. Still, if it is judged a feminist book,
it is certainly groundbreaking, published one year before Betty Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique.
Then: The Sixties Teacher Is Affected by the

Civil Rights Movement
Fifty-plus years ago, in 1963, I was in my third year as a junior faculty
member at Goucher College, an expensive women’s institution in Baltimore.
I taught freshman English, sophomore survey, and advanced courses in
eighteenth- and twentieth-century British (male) literature. Almost half of
my job consisted in improving the writing of entering freshmen, all of whom
were reasonably literate, could spell and punctuate, and knew how to write
orderly paragraphs that reached a conclusion. But for the most part, they had
nothing to say of interest even to each other. I blush to add that I was not
critical about this state of things.
In 1963, the year I first read The Golden Notebook, a handful of activist
Goucher students accidentally enticed me into joining them at demonstra-
tions aimed at the color line dominant in Baltimore’s culture. I then became
the faculty person assigned by the college’s president to see the students safely
out of demonstrations or jails, should they be arrested. Within a year, I
had decided to participate in a huge activist project called Mississippi Free-
dom Summer of 1964. Several thousand Northern volunteers, mostly college
students and a few faculty members, would travel to Mississippi to work
either in voter registration or in Freedom Schools. In June of that year, the
murders of two white Northerners and one black Southerner did not dis-
suade others from moving south and participating. For the month of August,
I was assigned to organize a Freedom School in the basement of a church in
Jackson, Mississippi.
For Northern participants like me, the experience was an immersion in
racism unlike even the color-line culture of Baltimore, since the Klan was
visible and FBI enforcement was either nonexistent or dangerous to all par-
ticipants. As a young faculty person, senior by perhaps fifteen years to most of
the student volunteers, I brought with me the culture of academe, in which
a professor lectured standing up at a podium or walking around a classroom.
Of what use was that culture in this setting and among one hundred ele-
mentary and secondary school students who jammed onto the dirt-packed
floor of the Greater Blair Street Church basement? Fortunately, the organiz-
ers of Mississippi Freedom Summer, some of them also college professors,
Timing Is All: The Golden Notebook Then and Now ● 197
had anticipated the problem by producing an instruction manual written by

Charlie Cobb. I was never to stand; I was to sit in a circle with students.
I was never to lecture, but rather, I was to ask open questions I myself could
not answer. No one, not even the teacher, knew the answers to open ques-
tions; thus such questions could provoke responses—of experience, fact, or
opinion—and enable discussion. And the main point was discussion. Free-
dom Schools were not to repeat the rigid model of Mississippi schools but
rather to enable young students to consider rationally the color line that
controlled their lives.
As if to guarantee the theory, the assigned curriculum began with plumb-
ing. In response to the first question—“What do white bathrooms look like
in Mississippi?”—the hands of a dozen thirteen-year-olds seated around me
shot up. To my amazement, everyone wanted to respond, and for more
than twenty minutes I heard detailed descriptions of such bathroom fea-
tures as toilets, tubs, sinks, tiles, furniture, towels, curtains, rugs. The next
question—“What do black bathrooms in Mississippi look like?”—garnered
few responses. Two students raised their hands in some embarrassment
and spoke, in very low voices, some version of “none” or “outhouse.” The
third question was “Why? Why were the bathrooms for these two groups
of people so different?” No one attempted to answer this question and
I could not read the shuttered faces. Though I knew I had to send the
group onto the next class, I, the ignorant Northerner, had my own ques-
tion. I couldn’t resist asking, “How is it that all of you could describe so
many white bathrooms?” I was embarrassed, but I was also not expecting the
responses I got. A few hands went up, and the facial expressions were kind,
the soft voices barely audible: “I helps my mother when she clean houses,”
one young girl said, and all nodded, while one young boy added, “I helps
with heavy work.” On the first day, I knew I had learned more than the
students.
About midway through the month, a group of teenage girls were working
with me on a Blair Street newspaper we would publish at the end of the
month. I needed to leave the church for a few minutes to get a bottle of
milk that would serve as late breakfast and early lunch, and so I divided them
into small groups and proposed that they write poems perhaps like the small
ones we had been reading by William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and
Langston Hughes.
On my return, five students presented poems they had written. Amid
misspelled words and without punctuation, they were either sharply drawn
portraits of life in a race-ruled state or visions of hope and change. The most
thrilling I will reproduce here, since its writer, sixteen-year-old Alice Jackson,
came north with me as my daughter a year later, finished high school in

Baltimore, attended Lake Forest College in Chicago, and a decade later went
to law school in California. Here is the poem:
I want to walk the streets of a town,

Turn into any restaurant and sit down,
And be served the food of my choice,
And not be met by a hostile voice.
I want to live in the best hotel for a week.
Or go for a swim at a public beach.
I want to go to the best university
And not be met with violence or uncertainty.
I want the things my ancestors
Thought we’d never have.
They are mine as a Negro, an American.
I shall have them or be dead.1
On that hot day in the church basement, I could hardly believe my ears
and had to see the misspelled scribbles on the scraps of paper. How could
these young students, none of whom could spell or punctuate, whose gram-
mar was shaky, turn their thoughts and feelings into powerful expression?
How could they leap into linguistic energy, stimulated only by a few weeks of
Mississippi Freedom School and a few scraps of poems they had never seen
before? Had days of discussion about black and white lives in Mississippi
served as catalyst? Were such discussions galvanizing? Could they trigger cre-
ativity? Were there other triggers? These questions nagged me as I returned
to my Northern classroom and the privileged white female students I was to
teach.
With Alice’s poem in particular resounding in my head, I arranged my
classroom chairs in a circle as I began to teach freshman composition stu-
dents in the fall of 1964, making sure I was asking open questions about
the books they were reading. Still, I could not imagine a subject for these
white, privileged female students, though I knew it wasn’t racism. It took
more than a year of experimenting with several topics in different compo-
sition classes before I knew that the subject for these women students had
to be their identity as females. I got to this idea through a literary discus-
sion of Sons and Lovers that moved on to a discussion of families’ differential
treatments of brothers and sisters. And here I must add, to make the con-
text clear, that if you had asked me, during almost all the years of the
sixties, whether I was a feminist, I would have said “certainly not.” Indeed, in
Mississippi, I had told young black and white women, objecting to the ways
in which they were excluded from decision-making by male colleagues in the
freedom movement, and refusing to sweep floors or make coffee, to “grow

up.” I had said again and again that ending racism was far more important
than advancing the status of women.
By 1965, I was searching for novels by women about being female, though
I continued to include Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence as an opening book
and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as a closing book. And inevitably, I might
as well note, the composition students preferred these books by men to the
small, shifting galaxy of paperbacks I could find by women writers. (Remem-
ber that even books by Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf were not available
then in paperback.) Further, until 1969, my course was the most unpopular
freshman English course on campus. My students thought all women writ-
ers were second rate at best, and associated them with such magazines as the
Ladies Home Journal. When asked, my students expressed their ardent dislike
of The Group, for example, and anything else by Mary McCarthy I assigned.
I was, I should add, not interested in persuading them to “like” these books.
I was interested in their being able to express their thoughts in reasoned and
passionate prose, and perhaps with some reference to their own pasts and
futures.
When I found that my students’ favorite novel by a woman was Kate
Chopin’s The Awakening, and that they saw the heroine’s suicide as a “happy
ending,” I decided to add The Golden Notebook as a possible antidote. Was
I successful? We spent several weeks on the novel, and we met four days
a week, but perhaps only a few students read all of it, since I never tested
students on their reading. Some students, intrigued, also read volumes of
Lessing’s short stories.
One of my former students, now a poet, told me recently that she still
remembers her shocked reaction to a writer who published sentences about
menstrual blood on women’s skirts and about using tampons. I valued The
Golden Notebook because it was the first novel I had ever read (by a man or
a woman) that did not end with the female hero either marrying or dying,
or both marrying and dying. If that made The Golden Notebook a “feminist”
novel, I never labeled it as such. Through the sixties, probably all the way to
1969, I would have eschewed the label and refused the word “feminist.”
Still, notes written in the back of my teaching copy of The Golden Notebook
and also on yellow pads I took into the classroom suggest that I noted what
Mother Sugar calls “the housewife’s disease” and what Anna Wulf identifies as
“[a]n unfairness” (285). She is writing about a man’s escape from domesticity
each morning as he goes off to work versus a woman’s life in domesticity,
though she may have a manuscript awaiting her attention: “The woman’s
emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky
ones who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky
ones like me—fight it. It is a tiring fight” (285).
I’m sure the word “unfair” struck me, since that was my mantra to my
working mother when I was assigned as a ten-year-old to the daily housework
and to the care of my younger brother, who was allowed to drop his dirty
clothes on the floor, in imitation of our working-class father. Still, I did not
move from this text to where Sons and Lovers would take me, perhaps because
Lessing’s Anna Wulf moves from the idea of “unfairness” to the actual pleasure
she enjoys as she leaves Michael to give Janet her breakfast in bed. She sits
there smoking while the child eats. It’s a great moment in the novel that
continues to hold up for me. And what it says to me, ergo, is that while
there are perfect moments in relationships between men and women, there
are none more sustaining than those between mothers and children. Earlier
Anna has told Mother Sugar that the relationship with her daughter is the
only one that matters to her (202). All of this mattered to me, since I dearly
wanted the children I couldn’t seem to conceive, but I doubt that any of it
touched the eighteen-year-olds in my classroom.
Then: The Sixties Reviewer

In 1965, The Nation asked me to review the first two volumes in the Children
of Violence series, Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954; both
volumes reprinted in 1964); in 1966, I reviewed the third and fourth vol-
umes, A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and Landlocked (1965; both volumes
reprinted in 1966); and in 1969, I reviewed The Four-Gated City, the fifth
and final volume of the series, during the year it was published. These were
lengthy essay-reviews, and in each of them I referenced The Golden Notebook,
although in none of them did I attempt to place Doris Lessing as a “femi-
nist.” Indeed, as I have said, I was not one myself. And when, in the summer
of 1966, I spent a long afternoon in Doris’s London kitchen, eating from her
huge kettle of soup and talking with her, in part, about The Golden Note-
book, I too did not want to talk about feminism. When she said she wrote
from a woman’s “viewpoint . . . because I am one,” that seemed reasonable to
me and I didn’t think about other women and other viewpoints. When she
said that women were “still fighting battles to get free, and rightly,” I silently
agreed and had nothing to add. And when she insisted that what she had
cared about was the “book’s form,” which she thought critics were ignoring,
I could have assured her that that was also what interested me—that, and
Africa.
Several times through the day, we turned off the recorder to share sensitive
information. I talked about the behavior of FBI and other law enforcement
agents in Mississippi I had observed, for example, and she told me about her
knowledge of Russian activities with regard to guns and ammunition supplies
in Africa. In fact, throughout that interview, I was more interested in ques-
tions of racial freedom and the political rights of organized protest, as taken
up in Anna Wulf ’s black and red notebooks, than I was in the repetitions of
frustrated love affairs in the Free Women sections as well as in the yellow and
blue notebooks.
Possibly, I am ready to admit today, I did not understand clearly enough
what Lessing has called “the frustration of a novelist seeking ‘truth’ ” and not
finding it in the creation of fiction. Perhaps that is why she wrote the same
story over and over again in The Golden Notebook, each time perhaps getting
closer to getting it right. In my second review of Children of Violence, pub-
lished in 1966, I name the subject of The Golden Notebook as “the torment
inside Anna Wulf ’s head and heart,” and I note that “Anna’s consciousness
dominates the book.” Is it a “feminist” consciousness? In my 1965 review, I
note the ironies of the “Free Women” in The Golden Notebook, who may be
“ ‘free’ of marriage, but are still bound to men, whether current or ex-lovers
or ex-husbands in the flesh or in memories of the flesh.” I note also that “as
heterosexual women they are sexually dependent on men.” And I conclude
that “Finally, free comes to mean divided. The free woman divided . . . suffers
most from a feeling of failure.”
In 1969, I wrote an essay-review for The Nation on The Four-Gated City,
in which I note “the felicitous form of The Golden Notebook” as “ordered
chaos made possible by the creation of a single novelist/political/heroine who
keeps a set of four notebooks.” “That compendious work,” I conclude, “now
seems self-contained.” And I then cite Lessing’s view of the intellectual’s func-
tion: “to be a teacher of the humane principles—freedom, nonviolence . . . a
struggle with human stupidity” (“Narrative, History, and Prophecy” 116).
In short, reviewing all I wrote about Lessing, and even my teaching notes for
the composition classes I taught, as well as pages of notes and text for essays
I never published, all convince me that Lessing’s “feminism” through the six-
ties was never high and sometimes never even present in my consciousness
about The Golden Notebook.
Founding The Feminist Press in 1970

In response to those early reviews of Doris Lessing that I wrote for The Nation,
three university presses wrote to me in the spring of 1970, asking whether
I’d be interested in writing a Lessing biography. I answered each of them
in the same manner: She’s only at early mid-career, I responded, and so it’s
too soon to write her biography. But I have another project in mind that I’d
like to describe to you and that I believe she’d be a part of. And so I visited
each of these presses and presented to them my idea of one hundred small
books written by writers like Lessing who, I thought, would write about Olive
Schreiner (as Denise Levertov might write about Amy Lowell). Each of the
editors said that the idea was wonderful, but each of their financial persons
said, “There’s no money in it,” and I was dismissed. I tried the same idea
at the New York Review of Books, where Robert Silver, to his credit, thought
the idea attractive, but his financial person uttered the same five words I had
heard before: “There’s no money in it.”
Briefly, the idea for such a series had come from the questions students
in my eighteenth-century literature class had asked in 1969, the first year
on campus in which “girls” wanted to be called “women,” and my freshman
composition course on women writers leaped from last place in popularity
to first. These students wanted to know whether someone else had typed my
syllabus and had inadvertently omitted women writers. I had to admit that I
had typed my own syllabus and that I knew no women writers of that period.
They were shocked and I was shocked. I went to the library and found the
librarians as ignorant as I was. They showed me two series of small biogra-
phies, but they were all of male writers. And so, for that reason and other even
more complex reasons, I grasped onto the idea of such a series for women
writers, though I must be clear here that I still had no idea that some women
writers had been, through centuries, “lost” accidentally or deliberately. That
idea was more than a year away and needed the vision of Tillie Olsen.
By June, I had in hand the idea of publishing small books about women as
a “movement” group until “regular” publishers would see the light and take
over. Hence, I met with some twenty-five members of Baltimore Women’s
Liberation and asked them to join me in working on a project I was now
calling The Feminist Press that would publish one hundred biographies of
significant women in history and literature. The name and the use of the
term “feminist” came from my ex-husband and from my own perception that
the formal meaning of the word “feminist” was gender-inclusive. Its formal
meaning signified a person—female or male—working on behalf of women’s
equality.
The Baltimore group heard me out and declared the idea worthy, but all
said they were too busy working on a new feminist magazine to join me.
I left the meeting disheartened enough to forget the idea. Indeed, I worked
on quite another project that summer that resulted in No More Masks! (1973),
the first anthology of women poets to appear in the United States since the
twenties.
But when I returned from Cape Cod early in September of that year, I
found in my mailbox at the curb—usually a receptacle for advertisements—
some one hundred letters, some of which included small bills or larger
checks made out to The Feminist Press. From their contents, I deduced
that Baltimore Women’s Liberation had issued—through a newsletter—a call
for contributions and manuscripts for the newly established Feminist Press,
which included the address of my home, if not my name, and which said
we would be publishing brief biographies of important women and children’s
books, which I had never mentioned. Thus, it is possible to see those three
essay-reviews of Doris Lessing in The Nation as one of the important parts
of my life at the end of the sixties, leading to the founding of The Feminist
Press now at the close of its forty-fifth year.
I want to acknowledge here that Doris Lessing knew of our work, had
copies of many of our books, and in 1997 wrote a generous blurb for The
Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute. In 2001, she also allowed the
Southern African Regional group of the Women Writing Africa project to
choose for their volume a story she had never before allowed collectors to
republish. “The Case of the Foolish Minister” by Doris M. Wisdom appeared
in 1943 in Rafters, a periodical of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) in South-
ern Rhodesia. It reads as Swiftian satire targeting politics aimed to control the
wealth—here in the form of salt—for the British nationalists. At the time,
Lessing was involved with the small Marxist group she described so vividly in
Landlocked, one of the novels in the Children of Violence series. When I saw
her last, in the first decade of the new century, she told me warmly about how
much she appreciated The Feminist Press’s publishing of the Women Writing
Africa series, many volumes of which had been sent to her.
Feminism Then and Now:

Is The Golden Notebook a Feminist Book?
I reread The Golden Notebook several times through the sixties, especially since
I was using it in my composition classrooms. In the late nineties, I read
it during a year of rereading all of Lessing in chronological order, just for
fun. On that occasion, I remember feeling more engaged by such volumes as
In Pursuit of the English (1961) and The Sweetest Dream (2001), which were
new to me. This time, and for the first time, I have read the novel think-
ing about whether one can claim The Golden Notebook as a “feminist” book,
although I’m not totally convinced that the claim matters a great deal. But
since I have been connected for forty-five years with a feminist press that
has published more than four hundred books, and since my own views have
shifted through that time, I believe the question is worthy of some explo-
ration, though my own ambivalence may still slip through my prose, at least
in part because of my own nonideological bent.
My early perspective on anything one could call feminism had to do with
why privileged white women, who had written in their application letters
that they wanted to be doctors or lawyers, for example, only a few months
later in my composition class wrote essays claiming that they wanted to be
wives of doctors or lawyers. A survey I had done in 1969 for the Modern
Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women revealed similar
findings. While women were eighty percent of the majors in English and
foreign languages, they were but twenty percent of the doctoral students in
those fields. No, it was not a question of direct discrimination, since women
chose not to apply. Other studies by sociologists revealed similar patterns.
Why did women choose the helper’s life? I began by theorizing that the key
element was the curriculum: if women were absent from history and sociology
as they were then being taught, and if women writers were absent as well, what
could women know about their lives in the past and their own possibilities in
the present and future?
Hence, The Feminist Press began by publishing several brief biographies
of notable women—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Constance Markeviecz—as well as children’s books about girls as doctors or
mail-deliverers. But within a few months, Tillie Olsen shifted our course and
gave us another perspective so that its most important work became and has
been the recovery or rediscovery of “lost” women writers. And perhaps, there-
fore, the place to begin is with the first “reprint” published by The Feminist
Press, a novella that appeared anonymously in the Atlantic in 1861, written
by a thirty-year-old woman living in what would today be Wheeling, West
Virginia. Tillie Olsen, who had found Life in the Iron Mills in an Omaha
junkshop when she was a teenager, wrote to me in 1971 that until that
moment she had not known that its author was a woman named Rebecca
Harding Davis and she urged us to publish it.
When I read that novella, I remember thinking that if this had been “lost,”
there must be many more to be found, and Tillie assured me that she had a
list. Life in the Iron Mills is the story of a young man, a Welsh immigrant who
could perhaps have been an artist, for he uses korl, leftover slag, to construct a
huge and, to the factory owner, frightening sculpture of a woman. The story
is tragic, its realism—which Olsen calls the result of “trespass vision”—one
might associate with writers like Zola at the end of the nineteenth century.
Rebecca Harding Davis was totally famous in her day, then absolutely for-
gotten after her death early in the twentieth century. She was, among other
things, opposed to suffrage. Is her book a feminist book?
Interestingly to me today, the question was never debated by those of

us who were founding the fledgling organization, in part because we were
not ideologues but chiefly because, once we read the story and realized its
literary brilliance, once we understood that it was only the first of per-
haps thousands of pieces—worldwide—that had also disappeared, and once
we connected that disappearance of women writers with the condition of
women’s lives, especially with the lack of women students’ ambitions to go
to graduate school, to become professors or writers, well, the question of
feminist ideology became irrelevant.
In Life in the Iron Mills, a woman narrator in the guise of a Quaker
understands the sorrows of humankind—male or female—which reminds me
immediately of Anna Wulf, who is that kind of character, who sees herself as
part of a group whose life’s work is to push a huge rock up a mountain, watch
it descend, and push it up again. So yes, Anna Wulf is, in this broad sense of
understanding the sorrows of the world and fighting to do what she can to
ameliorate intolerance and ignorance, eviscerate hatred, exude kindness and
empathy, a feminist.
But Anna Wulf ’s feminism is limited to her heterosexuality and perhaps
by it as well, for she “needs” a man. She is also fearful of or negative to homo-
sexuality, at least as practiced by the man she allows for a time to rent a room
in her apartment. And though she is very clear about the “correct” commu-
nist line on sexism and women’s rights, she is not likely to spend her time on
such issues as birth control, abortion, equal pay, or women’s equal access to
education, athletics, and specific fields of endeavor. One needs to remem-
ber that, even in the sixties and seventies, there were quotas for women’s
admission to medical and law schools. So yes, this is a feminist book, but
it has its limitations as one. Perhaps it is “best” on the subject we now call
“single moms,” though here the story is muddled with the left-wing pol-
itics and the temporary pairing of mothers with men passing through for
four days, four weeks, or four years. When I say “best,” I mean that Anna
is a caring mother who understands that the act of caring does as much for
her as it does for Janet, her daughter, that both of them need order in their
lives.
Another passage I know I discussed with students in the nineteen-sixties
comes late in the book, and is spoken by a male voice, suggesting perhaps the
limits of Lessing’s feminism. This is the passage about people on the Left as
“the boulder-pushers”:
They know we will go on pushing the boulder up the lower slopes of an

immensely high mountain, while they stand on the top of the mountain,
already free. All our lives, you and I, we will use all our energies, all our talents,
into pushing that boulder another inch up the mountain. And they rely on us
and they are right; and that’s why we are not useless after all. (529)
Certainly, this is the kind of passage Doris was talking about when she said,
in that first interview with me, that the ideas in the novel are “left” ideas
from the French Revolution. They have “to do with freedom,” and they have
now been “absorbed into the fabric of how we live.” She objected to people
getting “emotional”—she meant about “feminism” in The Golden Notebook,
especially people who “didn’t bother to see . . . how it was shaped.”
I am embarrassed to report that there is one very important passage I seem
not to have noticed in the sixties, also given to a man. Paul has just read
Ella’s novel and “says with great seriousness”: “My dear Ella, don’t you know
what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese
revolution—they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against
men” (184). I don’t want to excuse myself by noting that this is Lessing writ-
ing comedy, which it is. But at the same time, if we look back to the middle
of the twentieth century, if we look back over the last fifty years, we know
that Doris Lessing, in the voice of a male character, was describing the great-
est international movement of that time and ours still. It was that vision,
Marilyn French once told me early in this new century, that made her feel
certain that Doris Lessing would one day be awarded the Nobel Prize.
In my recent rereading of The Golden Notebook, two other passages caught
my attention. Ella says to Julia, “My dear Julia, we’ve chosen to be free
women, and this is the price we pay, that’s all.” Julia’s response anticipates an
essential aspect still of the current women’s movements, especially in urban,
industrialized countries and settings: “What’s the use of us being free if they
aren’t? I swear to God, that every one of them, even the best of them, have the
old idea of good women and bad women” (392). Today, feminists understand
that changing the culture so that women can enter the male world of work
or sports or lifestyle in general changes little unless men’s lives change as well.
For women still have the responsibility for housework and child care, often
still earn less than men, and often still feel less important.
Still in the same conversation, Ella responds, “And what about us? Free,
we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they
don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him.
What’s free about that?” (392). When I read this passage in the Sixties, I prob-
ably nodded my head in approval and understanding, for it described my
own experience of love and sexuality. And I expect I saw the conversation
as a women’s ordinary griping session. Certainly, the women were not only
heterosexual; their views were limited to all the cultural norms heterosex-
ual women of my generation, whatever their class origins, were reared on.
It never occurred to me that there were politics to be located in and around

these sentences. I did not then hear under the affirmation a challenge to male
power.
Perhaps most clearly expressive of male sexual power is the description of
George Hounslow in Anna’s black notebook:
He was a sensualist of course. I mean, a real sensualist, not a man who played
the role of one, as so many do, for one reason or another. He was a man who
really, very much, needed women. I say this because there aren’t many men
left who do. I mean civilized men, the affectionate non-sexual men of our
civilisation. George needed a woman to submit to him, he needed a woman to
be under his spell physically. And men can no longer dominate women in this
way without feeling guilty about it. Or very few of them. When George looked
at a woman he was imagining her as she would be when he had fucked her into
insensibility. And he was afraid it would show in his eyes. I did not understand
this then, I did not understand why I got confused when he looked at me. But
I’ve met a few men like him since, all with the same clumsy impatient humility,
and with the same hidden arrogant power. (111)
As portrayed, this man is capable of loving many women, even crossing

the color line, which ultimately causes severe harm not only to the African
woman he has loved but to her whole family’s way of life. Attracted by his
power, Anna does not succumb but fights it.
Nonetheless, if one expects a feminist book to challenge male power, then
The Golden Notebook is not a feminist book. Another way to think about the
question is to say that Lessing documents aspects of the sexual views of het-
erosexual left-wing women at the beginning of the sixties. Unlike Friedan’s
portrait of middle-class married women with working husbands and several
children, living in unease in suburban areas of privilege, Lessing focuses on
privileged professional women who lead lives as single moms and with long-
standing close female friendships for support, rather than long-term male
relationships. They need men—that’s the simplest way of putting it. But they
can also live without them. It is fair to note as well that Anna Wulf does recog-
nize, through her work for the Communist Party, the unease and unhappiness
of suburban women.
Ultimately, however, just as I want to claim that The Golden Notebook is
not a book about feminism, and that feminism is not central to its organi-
zation or credo, I turn a few pages and there is this scene between Saul and
Anna near the end of the book: “He said, in his own voice: ‘Anna, for God’s
sake, don’t look like that,’ but then a hesitation, and back came the madman,
for now it was not only I I I I, but I against women. Women the jailors, the
consciences, the voice of society, and he was directing a pure stream of hatred
against me, for being a woman” (539). The novel ends, as I wrote long ago,
neither happily nor unhappily. The “free women” are not only divided from
each other but also split within, acknowledging lives in conflict and contra-
diction rather than wholeness and simplicity. The boulder-pushers, perhaps
Doris Lessing among them on the front lines, are the real heroes, whether or
not one wants to call them feminists.
Note
1. Poem by Alice Jackson-Wright, quoted with her permission.
Works Cited
Howe, Florence. “A Conversation with Doris Lessing (1966).” Contemporary Litera-
ture 14.4 (Autumn 1973): 418–36. Rpt. in Doris Lessing: Critical Studies. Ed. Annis
Pratt and L. S. Dembo. Madison, U of Wisconsin P, 1974. 1–19 and in A Small
Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, by Doris Lessing. Ed. Paul Schlueter.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 77–82. Print.
——. “Doris Lessing: Child of Violence.” The Nation 13 June 1966: 716–18. Print.
——. “Doris Lessing’s Free Women.” The Nation 11 Jan. 1965: 34–37. Print.
——. “Narrative, History, and Prophecy” [on Doris Lessing]. The Nation 11
Aug. 1969: 116–18. Print.
——. “Talk with Doris Lessing: Excerpts from an Interview.” The Nation 6
Mar. 1967: 311–13. Print.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: McGraw-Hill [first paperback
edition], 1963. Print.
CHAPTER 12
The Golden Notebook: First Impact

and Revisionary Reading
Gillian Beer
T
wo big things happened to me in 1962: I got married and I read
The Golden Notebook. I can’t now quite remember which happened
first but they certainly flow together in my memory and even seem
inseparable now. Doris Lessing says in her 1971 Preface to the book that
it “was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation” and points out that “it
described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment” (9).
But that was of course one of the ways in which it liberated: as Lessing
notes, it put into print much that had never been heard outside private gos-
sip between women. What made it extraordinary was that it was not a book
solely about female experience; it was seamed through with the understand-
ing that politics is fundamental, that individuals whether male or female
are coursed through by the shared hopes and fears of their lived histor-
ical moment—but also that they live that moment differently from each
other.
The Golden Notebook is enormous in length and scope, covering more than
a decade and ranging across experience in southern Africa and in Britain
with insights into the United States as well. Yet page by page it is light to
read, energized by dialogue, layered with mordant and witty narrative asides,
implicating the reader fully in the lives of the characters so that we begin to
be exasperated, stricken, delighted, appalled, almost on the scale of the char-
acters’ own emotions. One thing it brought home to me is that there is no
necessary distance between passion and analysis. Both occur together. I knew
this inwardly but had never seen it acknowledged so openly. That was a relief
210 ● Gillian Beer
to a young woman discovering what it means to be an intellectual and it

authenticated much that I had only furtively felt.
The book is stupendously complex in design and also innovative in its
detail. I remember being profoundly impressed with the section in which
Anna Wulf decides to record fully all that happens on a single day and
gradually realizes how writing it down is also shaping the day, giving her
a dreaded foresight into what its outcome will be. It is a day on which
her period arrives and I was puzzled, as I still am, by the vehemence with
which she feels distaste for her body and its flow of menstrual blood. Read-
ing the book again this time, I was appalled by the opening scene in which
the two women tease and humiliate with a Lawrentian condescension the
young man selling strawberries. So the book doesn’t invite the reader simply
to acquiesce in the experience and judgment of the women characters. That’s
part of its energy and freedom: we tussle with what’s happening, shy away,
reimmerse. The relationships described encompass hostility, treachery, disso-
lution, as well as delight and compassion. The book is never triumphalist.
It shows what it costs to be free. It finds a language that can speak about
love and politics and friendship and resentment without sinking any one of
them. Its power when it first appeared can be gauged from this example:
I lent one of my friends The Golden Notebook. She was having a difficult
time. Soon I had a phone call from her then-husband, furious because as
he said THAT BOOK had ruined his marriage and it was my fault for
lending it to her. She had found her voice. She and I are still, glory be,
friends.
This is a book that tells stories well. It encompasses different genera-
tions, different genders (though Anna’s reactions to what she thinks of as
not “real men”—gay men—seem bizarre now), and different social and ide-
ological groups. The book imagines a future that didn’t quite come about.
Marxism here is central, with all its difficulties, and the future can’t be
imagined without it. Anna is for a long time on the brink of leaving the
Communist Party and at last does so. But the Party remains powerful here
in a way that it no longer is in Britain. Similarly, the force of psychoanal-
ysis is no longer a controlling focus although it has probably entered more
fully into many people’s self-assessment than was the case fifty years ago.
So The Golden Notebook has become a rather different book from what it
was in 1962. In some ways, it was so prescient that it seems at times posi-
tively humdrum. It shaped paths for sensibility and for feminism that have
become taken for granted. But its dialogues, its ribald satire, its truculence
and panache, its skepticism and adherence, all hearten and enlighten me now
just as much as they did when it said so much that had seemed unsayable
in 1962.
The Golden Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading ● 211
Note
This chapter first appeared as “Gillian Beer on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.”
Women: A Cultural Review 21.1 (2010): 26–27. Print.
Works Cited
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: Panther, 1985. Print.
Index
Note: Locators followed by the letter ‘n’ refer to notes.
Africa Austen, Jane, 154, 188

African Laughter, 14–15, 25–6 autobiography, 3, 5–6, 14, 70n3,
and the black notebook (The Golden 162, 183
Notebook), 3, 14–27, 48 disguised, 99–112, 149n8, 155
Central African Federation (CAF), Under My Skin (Lessing), 13–14,
27n5 154, 187–8
and colour bar, 15, 17–23, 61 Walking in the Shade (Lessing), 33,
and communism, 61 70n5, 77–9, 85, 90–1n4
Lessing as an African writer, 13–15
Lessing’s legacy for Zimbabwean
Bainbridge, Beryl, 154
women writers, 25–7
and reviews of The Golden Notebook, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 6, 136–46, 148
3, 14–19 Ballard, J. G., 35
South Africa, 20, 23, 25, 28n10 Barnes, Sophia, 1–2, 6, 135–50
Southern Rhodesia, 2–3, 13–15, Barthelme, Donald, 35
20–6, 27n5, 28n12, 70n5, Beauvoir, Simone de, 163–4
78–83, 87, 163, 182–92, 203 Beer, Gillian, 3, 7–9, 209–10
Zimbabwe, 2–4, 13–16, 20–2, 25–7, Benjamin, Walter, 71n8
27n2–4, 28n7 Bentley, Nick, 20, 48–9, 56, 70n1, 79,
Agee, James, 35 87, 130, 135, 147, 165–6
Amin, Samir, 71n10 Bergonzi, Bernard, 180n1
Amis, Martin, 34–5 Bernard-Donals, Michael, 142
Andrews, Geoff, 64 Bertelsen, Eve, 14–15, 20, 22, 27n4
Angry Young Men, 2, 5, 73, Black, Lawrence, 61–2
75–7, 85 Blackburn, Robin, 74–5
antinuclear activism, see Boehm, Beth A., 93–4n22,
nuclear weapons and 113n11, 141
antinuclear activism book reviews and book reviewing, 28n8,
Asimov, Isaac, 35 75, 78–9, 184
Athill, Diana, 14, 17 Florence Howe’s reviews (The
Atwood, Margaret, 149n3 Nation), 8, 173, 195,
Surfacing, 167n6 200–1, 203
214 ● Index
book reviews and book communism

reviewing—continued Communist Party of Great Britain
of The Golden Notebook, 3, 14–19, (CPGB), 5, 43, 49, 57–64,
27, 149n8, 173 70–1n6, 74, 77–9, 81–2
Irving Howe’s review (The New in The Golden Notebook, 4–5, 43,
Republic), 17, 149n8, 173 49–50, 55, 57–69, 91–2n11,
Boone, Joseph, 20, 23, 28n11 126, 160, 205, 207, 210
Booth, Wayne, 136 Lessing and, 4–5, 33, 43, 55, 59,
Bradbury, Ray, 35 62–3, 70n2–3, 71n7, 75, 77,
Brecht, Bertolt, 70n1 87, 89, 99, 116, 136–7, 150,
Britain, see Great Britain 203, 210
British New Left, 2, 5, 73–9, 90n2 and “post-Communist,” 137
Brockes, Emma, 16–17 and Southern Rhodesia, 15, 87
Brookner, Anita, 17–18 see also socialism
Buck, Pearl S., 35 Coover, Robert, 35
Buck-Morss, Susan, 64–5, 67, 69, 71n8 Cordle, Daniel, 37, 50n4, 50n7
Bulawayo, NoViolet, 25, 28n15 cummings, e. e., 197
We Need New Names, 26
Burke, Sean, 149n5 Dangarembga, Tsitsi: Nervous
Burroughs, William S., 38 Conditions, 26, 28n7
Bushnell, Candace: Sex and the City, Davis, Rebecca Harding: Life in the Iron
163–5 Mills, 204
Butler, Judith, 156, 162, 167n3 Daymond, Margaret, 20, 23, 25
de Beauvoir, Simone, see Beauvoir,
Simone de
Cairnie, Julie, 2–4, 6, 13–27 De Mul, Sarah, 20
Carey, John, 149n8 Delaney, Shelagh, 87, 91n10, 92n15,
Chaloupka, William, 39–40 92–3n17
chick lit, 2, 6–7, 153–66, 166–7n1, Taste of Honey, A, 5, 74, 82–5, 92n16,
167n5 93n21
Chigumadzi, Panashe, 25 DeLillo, Don, 35
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening, 199 Derrida, Jacques, 35–6, 51n16, 149n5
Ciabattari, Jane, 28n8 deterrence, nuclear, 3–4, 36, 40–2, 44–8
civil rights movement, 8, 196–200 diaries
Clarke, Arthur C., 35 Anna Wulf ’s diary (The Golden
Clowes, Jonathan, 17 Notebook), 5, 42, 90, 100, 147,
Cold War 157, 159–62, 167n7
and American nuclear criticism, and Bridget Jones’s Diary, 154–66,
34–8, 50n4 167n5
British experience, 38–40, 48–9 Clancy Sigal’s diary, 2, 5–6,
and globalization, 2, 5, 59, 67–9, 102–8, 111
71n10 Saul Green’s diary (The Golden
post-Cold War geopolitics, 56, 64–9 Notebook), 5, 102, 104–6, 147
and postmodernism, 34–9, 50n11 Dick, Philip K., 35
see also Soviet Union Dickens, Charles, 188
Collins, Cornelius, 2, 4–6, 55–70 Doris Lessing Society, 177
Index ● 215
Drabble, Margaret: The Millstone, second-wave, 3, 5, 79, 86–9,

93n18 92n12, 156
dreams and dreaming, 49, 55–69, Feminist Press, The, 8, 195, 201–5
120–31, 132n7–8, 183, 187 Ferguson, Frances, 35, 51n19
and aesthetics, 6 Ferriss, Suzanne, 153–4, 166
Anna’s dream of Soviet Union, Fetterley, Judith, 140
57–9, 63 Fielding, Helen: Bridget Jones’s Diary, 6,
Anna’s dream of TV film, 18–19, 24 154–5, 158–61, 164–5, 166–7n1
Anna’s flying dreams, 123–7 film adaptation, 154, 158, 163,
Anna’s joy in spite/destruction 166–7n1
dreams, 121–3 Fishburn, Katherine, 116
Anna’s projectionist dreams, 127–9 Foucault, Michel, 7, 79, 149n5,
Anna’s role-playing dreams, 126 160, 162
and Anna’s subject formation, 42–6 Fowles, John: Daniel Martin, 48
Anna’s tiger dream, 126–7 Frank, Pat, 35
dreamworld of The Golden Notebook, Fraser, Marian Botsford, 17
4–5, 64–9 French, Marilyn, 206
the “great dream” of socialist Freudian theory, 63
revolution, 49, 60, 120–1 dreams, 56
psychoanalytic theory of, 56, 132n7 homosexuality, 79, 88
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 155 Friedan, Betty: The Feminine Mystique,
Durrell, Lawrence, 173 195–6, 207
Frye, Joanne, 141
effeminophobia (Sedgwick), 81, 85, 156 Fuller, Alexandra, 15, 25–6
Eigler, Friederike, 140 Fuoroli, Caryn, 115, 132n8
Eliot, George, 188
Ellison, Ralph, 38
Invisible Man, 199 Gappah, Petina: “Miss McConkey of
Bridgewater Close,” 26
Faludi, Susan, 167n4 Gardiner, Judith Kegan, 81–2, 156
Fand, Roxanne, 149n3 Gardiner, Michael, 144, 149n7
Fanon, Frantz, 23 Gasiorek, Andrzej, 118
feminism gender, 82, 87, 175, 210
and Africa, 20, 25 and Africa, 14–15, 25
backlash to, 157–9, 167n4 and authorship, 140–1
and chick lit, 153–66, 167n5 and class, 73–5, 78, 83–4, 87
feminist readers, 8, 17, 20, 140 and generational issues, 79–85
and gender, 202 and genre, 156–7, 161–2, 165–6
and The Golden Notebook, 8, 20, and homophobia, 81–2
73–5, 79–89, 126, 149–50n9, performative nature of, 80–3, 126,
153, 156–7, 195–208 156–62, 167n3
Lessing and, 20, 73–8, 85–8, and physical ailments, 74–5
149–50n9, 153, 158, 164 and race, 8, 14–20, 25–7, 142–6
and listening, 23 and reproduction, 85–6, 93n18
and post-feminist movement, 156–7, roles, 75, 79–85
160, 162 see also feminism; sexuality
216 ● Index
geopolitics, 3–4, 55–9, 64–7, 163 Jackson, Tony, 36

see also Cold War Jackson-Wright, Alice, 197–8
Gide, André, 60–1 Jameson, Fredric, 38, 49, 51n14,
Gilmore, Leigh, 162 51n26
Gindin, James, 180n1 Joannou, Maroula, 78
Glass, Philip, 180n2, 184 Jones, Mark, 139–40
globalization, 2, 5, 59, 67–9, Jones, Mervyn: Chances, 61
71n10, 163 Joyce, James, 118
Grant, Matthew, 39 Ulysses, 174
Grausam, Daniel, 36–7 Jungian theory, 179
Great Britain archetypes, 42, 46
British Labour Party, 5, 74, 77 dreams, 56
British New Left, 2, 5, 73–9, 90n2
Communist Party of Great Britain Kahn, Herman, 45
(CPGB), 5, 43, 49, 57–64, Kaplan, Cora, 139, 142
70–1n6, 74, 77–9, 81–2 Karl, Frederick R., 180n1
Greene, Gayle, 71n7, 141 Kim, Soo, 143–4
Klein, Richard, 35, 50n4
Hague, Angela, 129 Kristeva, Julia, 38
Hall, Stuart, 78 Krouse, Tonya, 2, 6, 48–9, 115–31
Hanman, Natalie, 17
Harzewski, Stephanie, 154, Laing, R. D., 74, 90, 111
156–7, 166 Laski, Marghanita: The Offshore
Hase, Janet, 78 Island, 40
Hawkes, John, 38 Latham, Sean, 112n5
Head, Dominic, 48 Lawrence, D. H., 173, 175
Heffernan, Teresa, 119 Lessing’s introduction to Lady
Henriksen, Margot, 36 Chatterley’s Lover, 154, 158
Henstra, Sarah, 37–8, 49, 50n11, 71n9, Sons and Lovers, 198–200
121, 128, 130 Leigh, Mike: Secrets and Lies, 92–3n17
Hersey, John, 38 Lessing, Doris
Hite, Molly, 37, 42, 46–7, 51n21, 70n1, antinuclear activism of, 2, 4, 33–50,
71n9, 146 77–8, 91n10
Hoban, Russell: Riddley Walker, 48 and authorship, 135–48
Homecraft Movements, 25 and character of Anna Wulf, 16–21,
Howe, Florence, 2, 7–8, 180n1, 70n3, 186–7
195–208 on country club, 27n4
Howe, Irving, 17, 149n8, 173, 180n1 death of, 2, 191
Hu, Jane, 16 on distance in the writing
Hugh-Jones, Siriol, 16 process, 188
Hughes, Everett, 90n2 and feminism, 20, 73–8, 85–8,
Hughes, Langston, 197 149–50n9, 153, 158, 164
Hungary, 64, 71n7, 74, 90–1n4 influence of, 6–9, 25–7, 116, 153,
Hunter, Eva, 28n10 173–9, 181–93, 195–208,
209–10
Ingersoll, Earl G., 149n4 on informed reading, 1
Index ● 217
and Marxism/communism, 4–5, 33, Free Women, 5, 66, 68, 71n9, 82,
43, 55, 59, 62–3, 70n2–3, 86, 89, 109–10, 130
71n7, 75, 77, 87, 89, 99, 116, interior Golden Notebook, 109, 117,
136–7, 150, 203, 210 120–1, 123, 126–30
on McCarthyism, 91–2n11 Lessing’s 1971 Preface, 2, 3, 9,
and memory, 185–91 51n16, 86–9, 92n24, 101, 108,
and moral fiction, 188 115, 129–30, 135–7, 147,
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 25–6, 153–9, 164, 209
27n2, 34, 50n3 Lessing’s 1993 Introduction, 87,
Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to, 94n24, 116, 148, 165
16, 87, 149–50n9, 186, and the literary canon, 6, 115–31
192, 206 and memory, 128, 183, 189–90
and readings of The Golden Notebook, narrating voices in, 47, 80–2, 86,
3, 14, 19–20 109, 189
relationship with Clancy Sigal, 5–6, and the nuclear question, 34, 37–8,
99, 101–8, 110–12 42–8
scholarship and scholars, 2–3, 6–7, and realism, 20, 48, 56, 70n1, 73–90,
14–15, 34–5, 113n7, 115, 93n21, 115–22, 140, 146, 150
140–1, 148, 175–9 red notebook, 49, 57, 60–2, 67, 100,
113n11, 117, 126, 201
son of (John), 26
reviews and reflections, 16–19, 149n8
and theme and structure in The
as roman à clef, 5–6, 99–112, 112n5
Golden Notebook, 19–20
typography, 7, 173–4
on writing The Golden Notebook, 101,
yellow notebook, 47, 49, 58, 74, 76,
112n6, 174–5, 193
91n7, 100–9, 117, 126, 139,
Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook
163, 201
and Bakhtin’s narrative theory, Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook,
135–48 character of Anna Wulf
black notebook, 14–16, 18–27, and Africa, 14–27, 163, 188–91
27n5, 48, 67, 78, 81–3, 87, and the British New Left, 73–9
100, 117, 163, 174, 187–9, 207 and communism, 42–9, 56–69,
blue notebook, 14, 42–3, 49, 58, 70n3, 70–1n6, 71n8, 74,
64–5, 89–90, 100–9, 113n11, 87–8, 160
117, 120–2, 124, 201 “cracking up” of, 20, 46–8
blueprints in, 65–7 dreams of, 18–19, 24, 42–6, 55–69,
and British New Left, 2, 5, 74–9 123–31, 132n7
and chick lit, 2, 6–7, 153–66 and feminism, 199–201, 205–7
as critical fiction, 70n1, 79, 93n21, Frontiers of War by, 1, 3, 16–19, 21,
130, 135, 147 23, 86, 100, 139, 147, 188
dreams and dreaming in, 4–6, 18–19, independence of, 73, 89, 178, 188
24, 42–6, 49, 55–69, 120–31, Lessing and, 16–21, 70n3, 102,
132n7–8, 183 186–7
and feminism, 195–208 and memory, 186–92
Free Women, 14, 55, 68–9, 88–90, newspaper clippings of, 4, 19, 42, 55,
94n26, 100, 141, 147, 174, 201 67–9
Free Women, 1, 89, 117, 120 and nuclear threat, 42–9
218 ● Index
Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook, Tommy Portmain, 69, 86, 140, 143,
character of Anna Wulf—continued 147, 167n2
reading of Saul Green’s journal, 5–6, Willi Rodde, 21–3, 87
104–6 Lessing, Doris, works of
reviews written by, 16, 18 African Laughter, 14–15, 25
and sexuality, 21–7, 79–90, 93n19, Briefing for a Descent into Hell,
102–10, 156–62 59, 181
subject formation of, 42–8 Canopus in Argos series, 37, 180n2
as writer, 100–12, 117–31, 139–47, Children of Violence series, 8, 14, 56,
161–6, 187–90, 210 69, 99, 137, 145, 181, 187,
Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook, 195, 200–1, 203
characters Each His Own Wilderness, 76
Anna Wulf, see Lessing, Doris: The Fifth Child, The, 193
Golden Notebook, character of Four-Gated City, The [Children of
Anna Wulf Violence, vol. 5], 33, 37, 50, 59,
Ella, 47, 70n4, 74–5, 79, 88, 111, 69, 71n9, 145, 181, 200–1
128, 130, 163, 206 Golden Notebook, The, see Lessing,
George Hounslow, 21–3, 83, 207 Doris: The Golden Notebook
Ivor, 79–83, 85, 93n21, 156, Grandmothers, The, 184
167n2 Grass Is Singing, The, 13–14, 25,
56, 83
Jackson, 21–3, 25, 81–3
“Guarded Welcome,” 2, 14–17,
Janet, 83, 85–6, 200, 205
19–20, 153
Marie, 16, 21–23, 25, 83
In Pursuit of the English, 203
Marion Portmain, 82, 92n14 introduction to Lady Chatterley’s
Michael (Anna Wulf ’s lover), 58–61, Lover, 154, 158
67, 88, 103, 105, 157, Landlocked [Children of Violence, vol.
159–61, 200 4], 99, 200, 203
Milt, 66, 69, 78, 110, 147, 161 love, again, 183–4
Molly, 48–9, 56, 58–60, 62, 66, 73, Mara and Dann, 185
79, 82, 86, 88–90, 92n14, Martha Quest [Children of Violence,
113n11, 119–20, 143, 160 vol. 1], 187, 200
Mother Sugar (Mrs. Marks), 42–6, Memoirs of a Survivor, The, 71n11,
56, 63, 122, 124–5, 131, 159, 181, 185
178, 199–200 Play with a Tiger, 76–7, 81, 85,
Mrs. Boothby, 21–2, 81–2 91n8, 93n19, 93n21
Nelson, 65–6 Proper Marriage, A [Children of
Paul Blackenhurst, 21–2, 24 Violence, vol. 2], 200
Paul Tanner, 73–5, 161, 206 Ripple from the Storm, A [Children of
Richard Portmain, 66–7, 69, 86, 89, Violence, vol. 3], 99, 200
92n14 Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews,
Ronnie, 80–3, 85, 93n21, 156 Interviews, A, 177, 182
Saul Green, 66–8, 78, 89–90, 91n7, Summer Before the Dark, The, 59,
93n19, 94n25, 100–12, 113n7, 158, 181
113n11, 121–2, 147, 155, 161, Sweetest Dream, The, 203
186, 207 Under My Skin, 13–14, 154, 187–8
Index ● 219
Walking in the Shade, 33, 70n5, Nadel, Alan, 35–6, 41

77–9, 85, 90–1n4 National Organization of Women
see also Wisdom, Doris M.: “The (NOW), 195
Case of the Foolish Minister” Negra, Diane, 167n4
Levertov, Denise, 202 New Left Review, 75, 77–9
Levy, Haimi, 77 New Reasoner, The, 78
Lifton, Robert Jay, 40–2, 44 nuclear weapons and antinuclear
Livingston, David: Missionary activism
Travels, 13 Aldermaston Marches, 4, 33, 78,
Lopez, Alfred, 19 91n10
Lowell, Amy, 202 American nuclear criticism, 4, 34–7,
Lowell, Robert, 35, 38 50n4
Lukács, Georg, 79, 87 British nuclear culture, 38, 48–50
Lyotard, Jean-François, 49, 51n26 British nuclear policy, 39–42
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Macaulay, Rose: The World My (CND), 33, 77
Wilderness, 48 civil defense, 33–4, 39, 48
Macleod, Alison: The Death of Uncle Joe, and The Golden Notebook, 34, 37–8,
60–2 42–8
Maguire, Sharon, 166–7n1 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings,
Marechera, Dambudzo, 27n3 39–40, 49
Marxism, see communism Lessing and, 4, 33–4, 49–50
McCarthy, Mary, 175 Mutually Assured Destruction
Group, The, 199 doctrine, 40
McCarthyism, 78, 82, 91–2n11 nuclear deterrence, 3–4, 36, 40–2,
44–8
McCulloch, Jock, 28n12
McDowell, Frederick P. W., 180n1 O’Brien, Anthony, 27
McHale, Brian, 146 Olsen, Tillie, 35, 202, 204
McRobbie, Angela, 157, 159–60, 162, Osborne, John, 5, 77, 81–2, 85, 87,
167n4 93n2
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 144, 149n7 Look Back in Anger, 5, 74–6, 82, 85,
Michael, Magali Cornier, 120, 122, 91n6
126, 129
Mills, C. Wright, 74, 78, 90n2 Pedretti, Mark, 2, 4–6, 33–50
mimesis, 146 Plath, Sylvia, 35, 38
miscegenation, 20, 23, 83–4 polyphony (Bakhtin), 6, 136, 138–9,
see also race: cross-race sexuality 148n1
Mississippi Freedom Summer, 196–200 Porter, Dennis, 116
modernism, 51n14, 115–31 postmodernism, 88, 137
see also postmodernism and genre/canon, 6, 34, 115–31
Moi, Toril, 93n21, 153, 164 and nuclear threat, 2, 4, 34–9, 48–9,
Moore, Harry T., 173–6, 179 50n11, 51n14
Muchemwa, Kizito, 22 see also modernism
Muponde, Robert, 22 poststructuralism, 35–6
Murdoch, Iris, 16, 118 Powell, Anthony, 173
Mushakavanhu, Tinashe, 28n15 Powers, Richard, 35
220 ● Index
psychoanalysis sexual fidelity, 102–3, 105–6

Freudian theory, 56, 63, 79, 88 sexuality, 5, 15, 21–4, 62
in The Golden Notebook, 14, 63–5, 80 bisexuality, 81
Jungian theory, 42, 45, 56, 179 effeminophobia, 81, 85, 156
readers and critical interpretations, heterosexuality, 76, 88, 93n21,
132n7, 210 156–7, 178, 201, 205–7
Pynchon, Thomas, 35 homophobia, 3, 20, 79–84,
Gravity’s Rainbow, 38 90, 205
homosexuality, 5, 22, 74, 79–90,
Quayson, Ato, 92n12 92n12, 92n14, 93n19, 93n21,
156, 178, 205
race rape fantasies, 16, 24
color line, 196–7, 207 Shepherd, David, 145
colour bar, 15, 17–23, 61 Shute, Nevil, 35–6
cross-racial sexuality, 16, 20, 23–4, Siebers, Tobin, 36
81, 83–4 Sigal, Clancy, 2, 5–6, 99, 101–8,
and gender, 8, 14–20, 25–7, 142–6 110–12, 184
see also Africa Sillitoe, Alan, 173
Rancière, Jacques, 119–20, 123, 125 Silver, Robert, 202
rape fantasies, 16, 24 Singer, Sandra, 5–6, 73–90
Rapping, Elayne Antler, 115 Smith, Zadie
Raskin, Jonah, 2, 7–8, 181–93 NW, 131
realism, 5, 17, 20, 48, 56, 70n1, 73–90, White Teeth, 118
115–22, 140, 146, 150, 204 Snow, C. P., 173
Rhodesia, see Africa socialism
Rich, Adrienne, 156 in The Golden Notebook, 61–2, 79,
Ridout, Alice, 2, 6–7, 27n6, 70n1–2, 120–1, 143
88, 113n12, 137, 140, 153–66 Lessing and, 4, 75, 99
Rose, Ellen Cronan, 139, 142 Stalinism, 14, 58, 60, 62–3, 78
Rubens, Robert, 174–5 see also communism
Rubenstein, Roberta, 2, 5–6, 17, Southern Rhodesia, 2–3, 13–15, 20–6,
63, 99–112, 143, 145, 155, 27n5, 28n12, 70n5, 78–83, 87,
167n8 163, 182–92, 203
Ruston, Roger, 40 Soviet Union, 5, 18–19, 38, 40, 42, 57,
59–60, 63–4, 136–7, 139
Samuel, Raphael, 64 Spark, Muriel, 16
Saville, John, 77 Sprague, Claire, 48, 56, 71n9, 136,
Schlueter, Paul, 2, 7–8, 94n26, 138, 143
173–9, 182 Stern, Frederick C., 91–2n11
Schreiner, Olive, 202 Sturrock, John, 137
Schwarzkopf, Margarete von, 15 Swingler, Randall, 77
Schweickart, Patrocinio P., 141,
144–5 Taubman, Robert, 180n1
Schwenger, Peter, 35 third culture theory, 27n6
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 81, 156 Thompson, Dorothy, 78
see also effeminophobia Thompson, Edward, 77–9, 84
Index ● 221
Tiger, Virginia, 149–50n9 Wiseman, Thomas, 180n1

Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace, 188 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 143
Wood, James, 118
Vera, Yvonne: Nehanda, 26, 28n15 Woolf, Virginia, 118–19, 149n3, 199
Vonnegut, Kurt, 35 “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 75,
90n3, 130–1
Wallace, David Foster: Infinite Jest, 38 Mrs. Dalloway, 136
Warsett, Gili, 27–8n7 Room of One’s Own, A, 89, 112
Wästberg, Per, 34 To the Lighthouse, 117
Watkins, Susan, 28n9, 70n1, Wordsworth, William, 139
132n6, 163 Wouk, Herman, 35
Wharton, Edith, 199 writer’s block, 47, 74, 90, 100, 105,
Whelehan, Imelda, 155, 161–2, 109, 111, 117, 143
166, 167n5 Wrong, Dennis H., 90n2
Williams, Raymond, 5, 84–5, 87
Williams, William Carlos, 197 Yates, Robert, 155
Wilson, Angus: The Old Men at the Young, Mallory, 153–4, 166
Zoo, 48
Wilson, Elizabeth, 115 Zimbabwe, 2–4, 13–16, 20–2, 25–7,
Wilson, Sharon, 20 27n2–4, 28n7
Wisdom, Doris M.: “The Case of the Zimmerman, Bonnie, 88–90
Foolish Minister,” 203 Zola, Émile, 82, 204

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty (PDFDrive)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty (PDFDrive)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Doris Lessing’s

The Golden Notebook

All rights reserved.

First published in 2015 by

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Lessing, Doris, 1919–2013. Golden notebook. I. Ridout, Alice,

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Integra Software Services

First edition: May 2015

Part I Politics and Geopolitics

1 “Across the Frontiers”: Reading Africa in The Golden

2 Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence 33

3 “Through That Gap the Future Might Pour”: Dreaming the

4 Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism in The Golden

Part II Autobiographical, Aesthetic, and Theoretical

5 The Golden Notebook, Disguised Autobiography, and Roman

6 Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Positioning

7 “So Why Write Novels?” The Golden Notebook, Mikhail

8 Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit 153

Part III “Timing Is All”: Personal Reminiscences

9 The Golden Notebook, Serendipity, and Me 173

10 I Remember Doris Lessing and Her Illimitable Novel 181

11 Timing Is All: The Golden Notebook Then and Now 195

12 The Golden Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading 209

Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of

Julie Cairnie is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre

Cornelius Collins teaches in the English Department at Fordham University

Her recent publications include a memoir, A Life in Motion (2011), and a

Tonya Krouse is Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University,

Mark Pedretti is the Director of the Writing Center at Claremont Graduate

Jonah Raskin, Professor Emeritus at Sonoma State University, is the author

Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film at

Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American University in

Paul Schlueter (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University) is the author, editor,

Sandra Singer is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre

Lessing’s insistence on the potential posed by the ten-year anniversary of

Following Lessing’s 1971 Preface, things would continue to “change . . .

novel. Instead of following the trend to focus on the relationships between

Politics and Geopolitics

“Across the Frontiers”1:

Reviews and Reﬂections

[E]ach grew up in southern Africa, moved to London as a divorced mother of

Brookner’s 1982 review, brieﬂy acknowledge the text’s treatment of Africa

Whiteness Alfred Lopez argues, “Self-reﬂexive moments are not offensive in

Reading the Black Notebook

is about fragmentation and madness, and that the experimental structure

in Europe and North America. Anna’s understanding of black women’s lives

erotics of identiﬁcation: two rape fantasies. Scattered throughout The Golden

Conclusion: The Legacy of The Golden Notebook for

she acknowledges the dearth of books in Zimbabwean schools; and posthu-

white and black women’s relationships in Southern Rhodesia—in order to

——. “The Golden Notebook: The African Background.” Approaches to Teaching

Doris Lessing and the Madness

Although she remained consistently engaged in antinuclear politics, Lessing

Postmodernism and National Narratives of the Atomic Age

the issues of representation raised by nuclear contexts can be seen

Cordle’s pronouncement is a succinct statement of the assumption that

This postmodern/“post-nuclear” alignment12 certainly has much to rec-

British Nuclear Policy and the Psychology of Deterrence

Years before the United States’ doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction,

[Italian physicist Emilio Segrè said,] “Two magnitudes are complementary