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A review by archytas
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
5.0
"Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty— and vice versa. - from Lessing's 1971 introduction.
This is my second reading of Lessing's masterpiece. My mother bought me a copy of The Grass is Singing many years ago, and I followed it up with this. I found it diverting, but long-winded and thought little until Lessing's death, and given it as a present, re-read it. So I was quite unprepared for the ferocity with which I responded to the book, and the emotional roller-coaster ride in which it became.
Lessing also writes in the introduction that those who wrote to her when the book was published fitted into two main camps - women who identified with the themes of gender conflict and feminism, and "ex-red's". My responses fit into the latter category (the gender relations bear little relationship to my world, thankfully - I spent a lot of time wishing these women would tell all the men to get lost.).
The book is a fury of misery, and disappointment, and the sense of everything falling slowly apart with increasing speed. This sense of dislocation of falling apart and coming together, is mirrored in the structure of the book. Much of it, not just the notebook sections, feels like a stream-of-conciousness read, with the author desperate to get down on paper something which refuses to be pinned. The result is a novel as much about the structure of a novel as about an entire political movement falling apart, and about the pressures and transitions of changing life stages. The novel is simply about many, many different things, always moving at speed, and yet somehow circulating somehow towards some kind of truth.
At 19, this book spoke to me of the poverty of Stalinism, lessons that seemed little applicable to someone involved with the anti-Stalinist left. Twenty years later, however, Lessing's complicated relationship with the left, that dislocated sense of self and organisation, mingled respect and hatred, spoke so directly to me it occasionally moved to tears:
"We were all very tired. I don’t think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. ... Every evening we were organising meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytising. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn’t have it by temperament we had it on principle."
And it was in Lessing's description of her own "self-punishing, cynical" tone when talking about the CP, that I suddenly recognised my own voice in speaking about the left, and the underlying fear it conceals. Not a fear of betrayal as much as a fear of my own idealism, of that passionate, intoxicating courage to think you can make a difference, and the horror of realising that that armour doesn't protect you from error, from futility. Anna's paralysis in writing is also a paralysis of political activity, a fear of creating something false - untruth or political idolatry.
Many people who have never been involved in left activity will assume that "ex-Reds" you have pulled out the obvious lesson: that doing nothing is better than potentially doing harm. But Lessing captures brilliantly the frustration of the lefty who hates the complaency as much as the error. That in the end, we have to overcome the paralysis, find a new synthesis, find someway to be whole.
This turned into way more of a personal response than a review (and I didn't even get to the parts about dealing with the death of Mandela in the middle of the read). I'd apologise, but somehow I suspect Doris Lessing would approve.
This is my second reading of Lessing's masterpiece. My mother bought me a copy of The Grass is Singing many years ago, and I followed it up with this. I found it diverting, but long-winded and thought little until Lessing's death, and given it as a present, re-read it. So I was quite unprepared for the ferocity with which I responded to the book, and the emotional roller-coaster ride in which it became.
Lessing also writes in the introduction that those who wrote to her when the book was published fitted into two main camps - women who identified with the themes of gender conflict and feminism, and "ex-red's". My responses fit into the latter category (the gender relations bear little relationship to my world, thankfully - I spent a lot of time wishing these women would tell all the men to get lost.).
The book is a fury of misery, and disappointment, and the sense of everything falling slowly apart with increasing speed. This sense of dislocation of falling apart and coming together, is mirrored in the structure of the book. Much of it, not just the notebook sections, feels like a stream-of-conciousness read, with the author desperate to get down on paper something which refuses to be pinned. The result is a novel as much about the structure of a novel as about an entire political movement falling apart, and about the pressures and transitions of changing life stages. The novel is simply about many, many different things, always moving at speed, and yet somehow circulating somehow towards some kind of truth.
At 19, this book spoke to me of the poverty of Stalinism, lessons that seemed little applicable to someone involved with the anti-Stalinist left. Twenty years later, however, Lessing's complicated relationship with the left, that dislocated sense of self and organisation, mingled respect and hatred, spoke so directly to me it occasionally moved to tears:
"We were all very tired. I don’t think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. ... Every evening we were organising meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytising. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn’t have it by temperament we had it on principle."
And it was in Lessing's description of her own "self-punishing, cynical" tone when talking about the CP, that I suddenly recognised my own voice in speaking about the left, and the underlying fear it conceals. Not a fear of betrayal as much as a fear of my own idealism, of that passionate, intoxicating courage to think you can make a difference, and the horror of realising that that armour doesn't protect you from error, from futility. Anna's paralysis in writing is also a paralysis of political activity, a fear of creating something false - untruth or political idolatry.
Many people who have never been involved in left activity will assume that "ex-Reds" you have pulled out the obvious lesson: that doing nothing is better than potentially doing harm. But Lessing captures brilliantly the frustration of the lefty who hates the complaency as much as the error. That in the end, we have to overcome the paralysis, find a new synthesis, find someway to be whole.
This turned into way more of a personal response than a review (and I didn't even get to the parts about dealing with the death of Mandela in the middle of the read). I'd apologise, but somehow I suspect Doris Lessing would approve.