The Golden Notebook: A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist Portraying an Artist

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is the perfect companion piece to Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  They were both published in 1962, and both are concerned with madness in the modern world and the role that sexual relations play in the growth of that madness.  But where Kesey’s novel traffics in the easy and common notion that modern men suffer from feminine influences that unman them, Lessing goes after the whole twisted knot that lies at the heart of men and women.  Moreover, she puts the pressures of sexes in context by simultaneously addressing the political world faced by men and women in the late 1950s.  In addition to sex and politics, above and through both of those things, Lessing is saying something about art and fiction and the role the human imagination plays in making us and our world whole.  Lessing’s attempt to get at the capital-t Truth of the matter takes her into the messiness of life as we live it, and that messiness is startlingly well presented,  beautifully and painfully laid out.

The basic structure of the novel is to give us a stand-alone narrative called Free Women in five parts.  At the end of each section, we read from the notebooks of the main character, Anna Wulf.  She keeps four separate notebooks in an attempt to compartmentalize all the areas of her life.  The black notebook attempts to focus on the business of writing, concentrating primarily on her experiences in Africa in her twenties that formed the basis for the now-famous novel she published in 1952.  The red notebook details her experiences in the Communist Party in England, laying out her inner turmoil and struggles with the party.  The yellow notebook is a place for her to fictionalize events in her life and note story possibilities.  The blue notebook is set up as a traditional diary.  So as the story of Free Women unfolds, we read in the notebooks all the history and concerns that lie beneath the narrative we are reading.  In the penultimate section of The Golden Notebook, Anna puts aside her four notebooks in an effort to bring all the disparate parts of her life, the parts that she consciously tried to make disparate, together.  She has a new notebook, a golden one, in which she writes about everything at once, bringing all the threads of the story to a climax, which is then resolved in the final section of Free Women.  It is a beautiful and innovative way to tell a story, but it is not just for the sake of novelty.  The structure is itself integral to what Lessing is saying with her book.

In the second paragraph of the novel, Anna tells her friend Molly that “the point is, as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up.”  With that, Lessing lays out her main theme, which is not only the state of the world during the political tensions of the cold war but the state of Anna’s individual psyche.  Trying to keep her thoughts and the parts of her inner life separate from each other (as emblematized in her notebooks), Anna is feeling the strain as though she is intellectually and spiritually being drawn and quartered.  Her goal in the keeping the notebooks is three-fold.  First, she wants to get at the capital-t Truth of life.  She wants to find some way of representing life as lived that does not then make that real experience false in the retelling.  How can language, which is always representative and both filled with meaning and utterly devoid of meaning, capture reality?  Second, she wants to understand herself and the times she lives in, and she hopes that by writing everything down in its appropriate place, she might be able to come back to the notebooks and see the landscape of her life laid out like the roads and fields of the country as seen from an airplane tens of thousands of feet above.  She wants to find the patterns of her life to make sense of what she is experiencing.  Finally, and this is related to the first goal, Anna, unconsciously, is trying to find her way out of the writer’s block that has plagued her since her first novel became famous.

The Golden Notebook is very much a philosophical novel.  Through it, Lessing meditates on life in London in the 1950s, mining every aspect of human relations and personal struggles that she can.  Lessing discusses sex, romance, self-delusion, and psychological impulses, leaving nothing of Anna’s inner life untouched.  Lessing’s writing is amazing.  She has such clarity of vision and such preciseness of language, that she is able to untwist all the tangled ends of any situation and lay them out for us to see whole before letting them coil back into each other and regain their natural knotted existence.  Complex issues are made clear without ever being simplified.  It is no wonder the novel shocked the world by laying out the inner workings of Anna’s mind and laying bare the systemic sexism in the modern world and the secondhand status of women.  Her portrayal of politics is every bit as insightful and uncompromising.   In the wonderful forwards to the 2008 edition that I have, Lessing notes that her book was talked about more than it was read.  Moreover, those that read it reduced the book into one of two things: a book about feminism or a book about politics.  Because the book is so large and casts such a wide net, readers responded to and focused on the part that resonated with them most, ignoring the other parts.  Ironically, this mirrors Anna’s struggles through her notebooks as she segregates out the different issues of her life.  Anna’s fate when she compartmentalizes herself is a slow disintegration into madness, and the only way she can come out the other side is by bringing everything together in a messy heap and being everything she is.

The thing that she makes no mention of in her forward, and the thing that does not seem to have been discussed much at the time or its release (though scholars may have made much of it since—admittedly, I have done no research)  is the role of art and fiction that is, for me, both the heart that feeds the novel and the skin that holds it all together.

The main arch of the narrative is Anna overcoming her writers block.  Through the novel, it becomes apparent that Anna’s block is the result of feeling convinced that she cannot write anything truly important, and to write unimportant things in such dreadful times is offensive and a waste.  Her political beliefs dictate that she use her talents to help the causes she believes in, even as her belief and hope go into freefall.  Unwilling to write but incapable of not writing, Anna turns to her notebooks.  In those notebooks, she again and again recasts the events of her life into parallel narratives creating an Escher-like layering of artists and events.  Here we have Lessing the author writing a story about Anna the author who in turn has written about Ella the author who is working on a book of her own.  Individual facts may change, a daughter may become a son, names and particulars of personality shift—but through it all we have the telling and retelling of the same set of events.  In fact, the big twist in the novel (and this is a big SPOILER, so steer clear if you don’t want to know) is that in the golden notebook itself, we learn that the book Anna writes after breaking through her block, is Free Women.  That may not sound like a big revelation, but to me it was story-shattering.  Here, I thought that the Anna with the notebooks was the Ann of Free Women, that the notebooks revealed the back story of the novel.  But after reading the golden notebook, Free Women and the notebook switched places, making the notebooks the actual story and Free Women the subordinate tale.  Free Women went from being the factual world told by Lessing to the fictional world told by Anna.  The Golden Notebook is the equivalent of a narrative Moebius strip in which the two sides are revealed to be the one and only side.  To make another analogy, it is like a three-dimensional box drawn on a two-dimensional surface where first one facet and then the next is interpreted by your eye as being in front of the other.

It is, I believe, Anna’s visiting and revisiting of her own situation that eventually helps her unify all the parts of her life.  And it is only when this decompartmentalizing occurs that Anna can save herself from the brink of madness and write her next novel.  In all the craziness, it is art and the artist’s unflinching examining and re-imagining that allows progress and understanding to be made.

The Golden Notebook is an epic tale told in a limited scope.  It is beautifully written and impressive in its thinking.  When this reading list is completed, I will be seeking more novels by Lessing , and given how prolific she was, that shouldn’t be a problem.