Since things are so rarely as we imagined them to be, why are we in a continual state of surprise? The road to the picnic spot flooded, the car that won’t start, the milk gone bad, the sweater shrunk in the wash; he loves me, he loves me not. Things are not as they seem, on Shady Lane. A charismatic leader turns out to be a mad king. The surprise may prove a happy one, but with the exception of the marriage plot, it’s not usually the stuff of literature.
On my desk, amid newspapers, galleys, and an electric bill is a wooden matryoshka doll. The doll wears a traditional brightly painted dress, the sort once worn by women in the Russian countryside. It separates in the middle and hides within it five incrementally smaller, identical dolls, one inside another. Each doll but the last is a compartment for its little sister. My first matryoshka doll was given to me by my Russian grandmother. In turn, I gave matryoshka dolls to my daughters. Once apart, they were strangely hard to reassemble. Separately, they were pressed into service in various dollhouse tableaux. One, I remember, was tied to a pipe cleaner and for years flew off a gable like an angel or a suicide. For a time, a stray tiniest doll served as the Christ Child in a makeshift crèche. Whatever perils awaited, the dolls in their painted pinafores—adventurers and flâneurs—preferred the wide world to being packed up tight. The doll on my desk is a little bigger than an ordinary one, perhaps eight inches tall.
In September, the month I found the doll among my papers, I began rereading Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, which had been important to me years ago and had remained in my mind as a talisman or touchstone, for reasons that were obscure to me. Like the dolls, the book encapsulates a series of stories, one inside the other. The primary story is a short, conventional novel called Free Women set in the late Fifties in London. It concerns Anna Wulf and her friend Molly, each of whom is divorced, raising children alone, and disillusioned by her years of involvement with the Communist Party. Anna is a writer living off the proceeds of her first novel, Frontiers of War, which became an unexpected success and which she has since come to regard with something close to shame. Free Women is in turn broken into five sections interleaved with entries from four color-coded notebooks Anna keeps in a drawer of the trestle table in her flat. These notebooks are divided by color because, as Lessing says in her 1971 introduction, Anna has had “to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness—of breakdown.” The black notebook, written in lyrical sentences, is about Anna’s experiences in Rhodesia during the war and the novel she made from them. The red notebook, written in flatter, grayer prose, is about her time in the British Communist Party and her ultimate disenchantment with it. The yellow notebook contains a novel Anna is drafting, The Shadow of the Third, in which a woman called Ella has a love affair that closely resembles one Anna herself is having. The blue notebook is a diary.
In 2012, the Guardian asked a number of women writers to comment on the book for its fiftieth anniversary. Margaret Drabble, then seventy-two, recalled it as a work of “blistering honesty,” but remembers that she was troubled by Lessing’s extolling “a real man” and what seemed concomitant homophobia, as well as her ranking of the vaginal orgasm over the clitoral orgasm.
I remember finding this concept of a “real man” very worrying at the time, and I still do. . . . Throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing. It’s almost like being in a Kerouac novel. And yet it seemed liberating at the time.
I’d last read The Golden Notebook fifty years ago, when I was sixteen. Like many bookish people, I had done my deepest reading before I turned twenty, in a kind of swoon. For a long time, when people asked me about my childhood, I said it was a house of books, and while that is not entirely true, it is true enough: books were at once what happened to me and a refuge from what did. I wanted to see why the book continued to call to me, what I might have learned from Lessing then, and whether those lessons were helpful now. When I wrote to my friend N. to ask her if indeed we had read The Golden Notebook together in high school, she wrote back to say yes, but like other books we’d taken on, it had been above her reading level.
She was wiser than I. What stayed with me? Certain images: Anna and her friend Molly eating strawberries from blue bowls; swans; the book’s first sentence (“The two women were alone in the London flat”). And Anna’s four notebooks, packed up tight inside the novel: black, red, yellow, and blue. As I read, I realized that I had returned to The Golden Notebook because I remembered it as a book whose topic, among others, was how to compartmentalize: how to pack things up and put them away, how to make order out of chaos. As I went about my daily rounds—teaching, meeting a friend, picking up clothes from the dry cleaner—the daily churn of national and international news, almost all bad, was hard to put aside. Like Anna, I hoped that if I could sort things out and set them spinning (at the moment, I thought of myself as that tiny wooden doll, skydiving off the gable), I could also take a holiday from the complications of the heart—my own and others’. And I was curious whether the book held up. Thirteen years after the Guardian survey, I asked several women of different generations, some of whom had read the book before, whether they would read it along with me. Over the decades, the book has been the nexus of discussions among women—formal and informal—about work, about desire, about choices, and this seemed a way to honor that history and see, at least among the small group of my acquaintances, where we were now. One potential reader was my youngest daughter, in her mid-twenties, a hostage to reason, and who—echoing Diana Athill—flung the book down after reading fifty or sixty pages and said, “Communism is bad. And?” Another friend sent me a photo of the thick paperback on its side and wrote, “Nope.”
As I read the book myself, it turned out that I had missed some of its central lessons and imagined others. In retrospect, it’s surprising that I could have made heads or tails of it.
Free Women maps Molly’s and Anna’s relationships with their lovers and ex-husbands; their children; the Communist Party; and each other. Anna and her young daughter Janet share a flat with a young man. Molly, who is divorced from Richard, a businessman, lives with her adolescent son, Tommy. Anna is troubled by her breakup with a married man named Michael; in the yellow notebook, Anna writes a novel in which Ella, a woman very much like her, details the fraying cord of an affair she is having with a married man called Paul. The story of Anna and Michael is integral to the story of Ella and Paul: it lives within it and directs the action, although she finds that the conventions of the novel—framing, plot, resolution—elude her. Both stories are fiction (or, at least, fictionalized) and fall under the rubric of what Elizabeth Hardwick called Lessing’s “dour, hurt love-plots.” Lessing has said that she intended the title Free Women ironically. When I was sixteen, the shadow life of irony had not yet stained the lintel; I would not have known what she meant.
Instead, it was the intensity of Anna and Molly’s friendship that drew me in. At sixteen, N. was the person to whom I was closest. We hankered after boys; we dismayed our mothers; we heatedly discussed issues of the day we knew little about. Every afternoon found me at her house until it was time to ride my bicycle home for supper. No cell phones, no checking in. Neither of our mothers worked: like Anna and Molly, they had come of age in the late Forties, but unlike them, our mothers had marched lockstep into marriage, having children, and minding a house. We did not think of them as “working” at home, nor did we give a thought to whether they were free or unfree. That they were preoccupied with their own concerns did not occur to us either—it did later—and though we felt the lack of it, we were spared their scrutiny. Until then, friendships between girls and women barely figured in the books we had read. There was Little Women (we wept over Beth), but the characters were sisters, and clearly the plot was about whether Jo would marry Laurie. Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas are friends, but that friendship, too, revolves around marriage. Tess and Hester have no friends. N. and I grew up, went to the same university, and began to read different books. She married the man she met at eighteen or nineteen and stayed the course. I was less of a sticker.
Black, red, yellow, blue. The two women, Anna and Molly, eating strawberries. The blue bowls. The first sentence—“The two women were alone in the London flat”—taught me the difference between the definite and indefinite articles, a lesson in how grammar predicates and sorts value: What is important, what is less so? How difficult it is to figure that out! But the definite article lives inside the indefinite article: a tree becomes the tree; a girl becomes the girl. Why not? Two women were alone in a London flat. In the first instance, the definite article tells us that Anna and Molly are not any two women but the two women. We also know that the “flat” (an exotic word to me) and the setting, London, will be important. We learn that the flat is variously inhabited, but for the moment, they are alone. In the opening pages, Molly, an extrovert to Anna’s introvert, has bought strawberries from a fruit hawker. In the intervening half century before I read the book again, I was certain that Anna and Molly eat those strawberries from blue bowls. The idea of the voluptuous, prickly red strawberries against the cobalt blue held me fast: there was a compartment in my mind, a little cupboard, for those blue bowls, an example of how we can carry inside us a series of imagined worlds. I decided at sixteen that when I ate my own strawberries, it would be from my own blue bowls, and when, years later, I acquired my own kitchen, I bought blue bowls of different sizes.
J. M. Coetzee has written about Lessing—who often spoke of her reverence for philosophical novels such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain—that she acknowledged her central problem, which was that the form of the nineteenth-century novel was exhausted.
The year of the publication of The Golden Notebook, 1962: On January 7, a bomb went off above Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment on the Rue Bonaparte in Paris, placed there in protest of his support for Algerian independence. Five days later, the United States began Operation Chopper, the first major escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, transporting South Vietnamese to fight the Vietcong on the outskirts of Saigon. On February 10, the first Cold War spy exchange between East Germany and West Berlin occurred on the Glienicke Bridge: the American pilot Francis Gary Powers was exchanged for the Soviet agent Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in 1957. In February, John Glenn became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the earth. In May, Sex and the Single Girl, by Helen Gurley Brown, was published and became an immediate bestseller. On June 1, Adolf Eichmann, following his conviction the previous December on fifteen counts, including crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people, was executed by hanging in Ramla Prison in Israel. Two weeks later, the film Lolita was released. In July, the Rolling Stones performed their first set at the Marquee Club on Oxford Street. Later that month, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Albany, Georgia. On August 5, Nelson Mandela was arrested in South Africa for inciting workers to strike, and Marilyn Monroe was found dead at her home in Brentwood, California. The Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 14. Four days later, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of DNA’s double helix. On November 6, as part of Czechoslovakia’s de-Stalinization, the demolition of a fifty-feet-high granite statue of Joseph Stalin, erected in Prague in 1955, was complete.
Doris Lessing, née Tayler, was born in Persia in 1919. Her mother, Emily, had been an army nurse. Her father, Alfred, lost a leg in the war. They met in a convalescent ward. On her marriage, Emily gave up a promising career as a hospital matron. She had been brought up without affection by a stepmother and transferred this lack to her first child, Doris, keeping her on a strict feeding schedule and never picking her up when she cried. When Doris’s brother, Harry, was born, Emily doted on him. The family moved to Southern Rhodesia when Doris was six. Her mother brought along a trunk of dresses and silverware, but life on the farm did not afford a scope for luxury. Albert had no farming experience. Money was tight. But for the Tayler children, Lessing later recalled, life in the bush was a dappled, buzzing wonderland. At first, they were taught at home, and Lessing would admit that her mother was a gifted teacher. At seven, she was sent to a dismal convent boarding school and then to an all-girls high school where she received weekly letters from her mother bemoaning the cost of her piano lessons. Doris excelled at her classes, and friends and family called her Tigger, after A. A. Milne’s cheerful character. She left school at fourteen.
As a teenager she read Dickens, Tolstoy, and D. H. Lawrence, whose novels about class, sex, and politics made an impression. At fifteen, tired of battling her mother, she shut the front door behind her, and found work as a nanny. She seduced her employer’s brother-in-law, writing that she “spent the first part of every night fighting the virginity of my placid suitor … in a fever of erotic longing.” She worked as a telephone operator. By eighteen, she had published two short stories in magazines. The next year, she married a civil servant, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children in quick succession, John and Jean.
She became involved with a group of Communists in Salisbury, and met Gottfried Lessing, a Jewish refugee who had fled Germany. In 1946, after leaving Wisdom and marrying Lessing, a third child, Peter, was born.
Three years later, Doris left Southern Rhodesia on a ship bound for London, taking with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and two-year-old Peter. From then on, she saw her two older children only intermittently, but Peter lived with his mother, and later next door to her, for the rest of his life. The writer Jenny Diski, who was an acquaintance of Peter’s at school, and for whom Lessing became a kind of foster mother, wrote that between the adjoining houses,
[an] interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in.
According to Diski, at Lessing’s funeral, Jean said that she was glad that Lessing had abandoned them; if she had not, she would not have been able to have a life of her own.
“There is no doubt,” wrote Lessing, that “fiction makes a better job of the truth.” She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. The Swedish Academy called her an “epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” In their citation, the judges noted that
the burgeoning feminist movement saw [The Golden Notebook] as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship.
By then, Lessing’s oeuvre included some two dozen novels, among them the early Children of Violence quintet; her science-fiction opus, Canopus in Argos; many short-story collections; two opera libretti, with music composed by Philip Glass; a poetry collection; several works of autobiography and memoir; and one graphic novel. On learning from an American reporter that she had received the Nobel Prize (she was exiting a taxi with Peter, who was holding an artichoke—they had been grocery shopping), she said, “Oh, Christ,” and then, to the reporter, “I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks.”
Anna Wulf is a slight woman with a pointed face. Anna’s experiences in Rhodesia, which she carries within her and records in the black notebook, inform her feelings about the transactions between men and women and about subjugation and power. Her partner, Willi, was a withdrawn, judgmental, and pedantic tyrant. Anna is soigné but slightly disheveled, a mien she cultivates. It pleases her that both men and women notice her. During her menstrual periods, she worries she is emitting bad smells and washes frequently. Anna is in a long relationship with Michael, a married man. She is particular about food and a good cook. One evening, midway through the novel, she cooks her daughter Janet a supper of creamed spinach with baked eggs and at the same time prepares an elaborate dinner for Michael—veal birds with mushrooms, the pulp of baked apples sieved with cream. Anna knows that Molly does not think Michael will arrive. In response, Anna decides to leave the Communist Party.
This interchange—attack and parry—is pure Lessing, who was perpetually interested in the exsanguinations and reassertions of power. Power is Anna’s subject. When I was sixteen, because my father was often tyrannical, I knew about power, but did not know yet that it was not my very own basket of contrition and blame; it was, rather, the way of the world. Anna, waiting for Michael as heartbreak seeps into the room, still hopeful he may yet arrive, defends her dignity (to herself and to Molly) by asserting agency: Michael may be leaving her, but she will leave the party. Molly then tells her she is concerned about Tommy’s current girlfriend; she believes he falls for girls who won’t like her, and he uses them as alter egos to express his own disapproval of her. Out loud, Anna disagrees, although she doesn’t, really—she believes that Tommy does indeed do this. She says to herself, “I am being tactful over Tommy, the way she is tactful about Michael’s leaving me: we shield each other.” Anna goes to sleep, distraught and exhausted. Often, talking about men, children, shopping, or politics, Molly will say, “Isn’t it odd, Anna?”
In Free Women, Anna’s daughter, Janet, to whom she is attached with mollusklike intensity (the predicament of the single mother, who cannot for an instant avoid thinking of the child), rebels against her mother’s bohemian life and begs to attend a conventional girls’ boarding school. Molly’s son, Tommy, to whom Anna is devoted, camps out in his room and is truculent when he emerges. To Tommy, Anna and Molly are twittering encumbrances, idiotic in their insistence on good works and the good of man, their endless remorseful hedgings about the Communist Party. His father, Richard, a plutocrat who offers him a job at his company, is equally distressing.
In the second installment of Free Women, Tommy comes to talk to Anna. When he rifles through the notebooks, her skin crawls, but she doesn’t protest. (A theme of the novel: women trying not to upset men.) Later, when he returns home, he goes to his room and puts a bullet through his head. He doesn’t die but blinds himself. What did he see in the notebooks that was so unbearable to him? I had remembered the blue bowls and the swans but forgotten this episode.
Virginia Woolf wrote, “A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her own life.” But did she write it? No. Instead, in an essay, “The Leaning Tower,” she wrote, “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.” In her later years, Lessing distanced herself from the feminist movement and disavowed The Golden Notebook’s reputation as a feminist manifesto. Some women, according to Lessing, were outraged: the conversations that women have with one another, at the sandbox, in the kitchen late at night, were private, not laundry hung out on the line for anyone to read! These were voices—complaining, confiding, exasperated, distressed—that had not been heard before, as if the novel were a speaking tube cued to an underground rumble. An analogue is Grace Paley’s stories in The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1959, which broadcast domestic dispatches from Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. But Faith, Paley’s character, is fiercer, less abject than Anna, advocating for peace and goodwill.
In a 1990 essay, “Unwritten Novels,” Lessing imagines novels that she’d like to read: an account of Marx’s domestic household, another of the lives and loves of the Chartists in London. How strange, she noted, that you could read widely in twentieth-century literature and never suspect that it is trade that “makes the world go round.” But in The Golden Notebook, trade barely makes an appearance, except as an occasion for scorn. (What is it, exactly, that Richard does in the City?) Rather, the pivotal transactions, graphed like the peaks and valleys of a volatile stock index, are the relations between men and women. Net values are assessed and futures traded; each start-up love affair in the book collapses as jury-rigged contraptions do. And the conversations between Anna and Molly, Ella and Julia (Ella’s friend and a counterpart of Molly), as well as the stammering and declaiming when Anna talks to herself, are almost always about men. The book can be read as an instruction manual for women who settle for very little and convince themselves that is what they want. The most successful heterosexual relationship, in the Rhodesia section, is an incestuous love affair between Maryrose, a young woman in Anna’s wartime circle, and her brother, who is killed in North Africa.
I finished The Golden Notebook in a series of hospital rooms, at the bedside of a friend. The hospital seemed a proper setting—the big questions loom, but the humdrum engenders a mad fixity on small things: a beeping noise, a long wait for an orderly. As I read, the sentences swimming up under the lights, I waited for the golden notebook to appear, which I imagined as a gleaming astral loom on which Anna would finally weave the strands of her life together. Toward the end of the book, Anna finds the golden notebook in a stationer’s shop. When Saul, an American writer and lodger-cum-lover (based on the American writer Clancy Sigal, with whom Lessing had an affair), sees the lovely notebook, he wants it for himself. He badgers her. She relents and gives it to him. I thought, She gives it to him?
At first, though, she doesn’t:
Saul came into my room, prowling around and around, restless, and he saw the new notebook, and pounced on it. “Oh this is pretty,” he said. “What is it for?”
“I don’t know yet.’
“Then I want it,” he said. I nearly said: “All right, have it,” watching in myself a need to give spouting like water from a whale.
… I said: “No, you can’t have it.” It cost me a great deal to say it—I even stammered. He took the book up and said, laughing: “Gimme, gimme, gimme.” I said: “No.”
Later, when Saul returns from a walk, he tells her that she must write down the story she has just begun to tell him.
When she balks, he writes the first sentence: “The two women were alone in the London flat.” An ouroboros, a book that bites its own tail—so, this, after all, is the book we are now reading, and the first sentence, on which I set such store, is written by Saul! Anna then fetches the golden notebook and in it writes the first sentence of Saul’s new novel. “On a dry hillside in Algeria, the soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle.” (Later, the narrator remarks drily, the novel was published and did rather well.)
What is the story that Anna told Saul?
A short story: or a short novel: comic and ironic: A woman, appalled by her capacity for surrendering herself to a man, determines to free herself. She determinedly takes two lovers, sleeping with them on alternate nights—the moment of freedom being when she would be able to say to herself that she has enjoyed them both equally. . . . Nevertheless . . . she is in despair that she is as “unfree” as ever.
Like Frodo’s gold ring or Prince Amerigo’s golden bowl, the golden notebook is an impossibility. Anna gives it away.
At sixteen, books are blueprints. What blueprint was I reading? Anna says, midway through the novel: “I came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to turn it into a short story. It struck me that my doing this—turning everything into fiction—must be an evasion.” The other day, I was interviewed for a podcast by an editor in London, who asked me to speak about older women as protagonists in fiction. It took a moment for me to understand that he was asking me to comment because I was an older woman. I had just published a novel about a woman in her fifties, separated from her husband, who enters into an affair with a man who is involved with not one but two other women, which leads to behavior of which she is ashamed. Like Anna, Caroline, the protagonist of my novel, settles for very little. What was it that The Golden Notebook taught me? At thirty-four, Anna’s age, I earned my scant living as a writer; I was divorced; I had a child and was also caring for the children that would become my stepchildren. Later, I had another child, and later I parted from her father too. When I first read the book at sixteen, all that was ahead of me and, like a figurine inside the matryoshka doll, the novel incubated inside me. But had I read the book for the first time once I’d had a child, and then children, I would not have forgotten Tommy’s suicide attempt after reading Anna’s notebooks: that fear and attendant self-excoriation—that my life as a writer took me from my children—had begun to haunt me.
Near the end of the novel, the reader finds Anna living inside a kaleidoscope of catastrophe. Janet is at boarding school and the usual domestic routine—breakfast, school uniform, drop-off, pickup, playdate, supper, homework, bath, bed—has been blown to bits. Anna is at a loss. (When my own children were small, there were times when I thought that if it wasn’t for that routine, I wasn’t sure I would get out of bed in the morning.) Her blue notebook is no longer a diary. Instead, Anna has taken to pasting newspaper clippings on the blank pages:
Oct. 17, 51
moslem world flares. More troops for Suez. Express.
29th Dec., 51
There are signs that McCarthy and his friends may at last have gone too far in the United States. Statesman.
The notebook fills up. Anna begins to tape the headlines on the walls of the flat. Sixty years ago, Lessing had predicted the future, for what is doomscrolling but living in a room papered with headlines? Milt, Saul’s alter ego, takes down the clippings. He says to Anna, “Well, that’s fixed. Another soul for sanity.”
My readers were a group of five; we met at my house in New York. It was a cold December evening, and the Christmas lights reflected in the dining room’s long windows looked like candle flames. The women were aged thirty to seventy; in various combinations, we had been talking for decades about love and work, about how some things do not turn out but other things do, about enormous changes and smaller ones. It’s how we make sense of our lives, that talk, reading our lives out loud. Did Anna’s dilemmas speak to us now? How odd, I thought, like Molly—as most of us were a good deal older than Anna and Molly—that central to the conversation around the table were the questions: What is desire? What is fidelity? And how do they structure a life?
Still? I thought. Aren’t those questions settled by now? The conversation settled on the Free Women sections and Anna’s blue notebook: the diary. The men in the novel were dismissed as ridiculous, impossible. Were the few single men impossible because they chose to remain free themselves, a choice that Anna and Molly avow? Almost all of Anna-Ella’s lovers are married. Were these men impossible because they refused to leave their wives? A curiosity of The Golden Notebook is that the wronged wives exert only a faceless gravitational pull: a phantom chorus of woe Anna discounts or cannot hear. The exception is the sodden Marion, whom Richard, Tommy’s father, leaves for a still younger secretary. As with Maryrose’s halcyon incestuous relationship with her brother in the black notebook, when Tommy, now blind, takes up with Marion, his former stepmother, it is as if Lessing is underscoring the implausibility of conventional relationships. And then, in the final pages, the marriage plot turns up after all, like the Hierophant card in the tarot deck. Molly suddenly announces that she is marrying a man she describes as “a progressive businessman.” “Oh he’s got money?” Anna asks. “Quantities,” says Molly, “and a house in Hampstead.” She turns her back to Anna as she says this. As Molly often says to Anna: Isn’t it odd?
The talk circled the table. “I think Anna feels guilty that her novel was so successful,” said Danielle. “ ‘The novel is a loose, baggy monster,’ ” said Rebecca. “Who said that?” “Henry James,” said Katherine. “Henry James, he should know!” said Rebecca. Katherine added: “Reading, I thought, My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with a relationship with a man. The angel in the house was not foreign to me.” Rose (my middle daughter, who had joined us at the table), said, “Women are beholden to their responsibilities.” Sophie said, “It doesn’t feel foreign. It feels deeply psychological. It feels outdated in some ways—waiting for a man, for the end of the affair.” Laughter, from the older women, at the notion that this is outdated.
“She seems to need to have these affairs in order to write about them,” said Danielle. “You have the disorder of so many lives.” Rebecca said, “I’m so much more interested in Anna and Molly’s relationship than in her relationships with men!” The two women have a friendship: Molly-Julia says to Anna-Ella, “ ‘Go out, I’ll keep an ear out for the child.’ ” “She’s trying to be a mother at the same time,” said Sophie. “There’s a lot of emotional honesty to Anna.”
A recurring question was how we balance these impulses: eros and domesticity. “But are one’s deepest emotions defined by men?” asked Rose. “It’s the Lily Briscoe question,” said Katherine. “You feel the immensity of Lessing’s mind, but you think, Do we want to live like that?” “Some women reassert that freedom when the kids go off to college,” said Rebecca. (More general laughter.) Sophie said, “The book is so full of nostalgia, but how does the person Anna is now relate to her previous lives? She’s so intelligent, but she has contempt for herself.” Danielle mentioned a scene in which Anna tells her psychiatrist, whom she sometimes calls “Mother Sugar,” about a dream in which she is holding a small casket that contains a tiny grinning crocodile. When she looks at her reflection, she smiles, and sees the crocodile’s face. “It’s one of the few sections of the book that read as self-consciously ‘literary,’ ” she said. “She’s terrified of sentimentality, but why?”
To me (I said some of this) The Golden Notebook turned out to be other than the book I’d read in the demesne of childhood. When I first came across it, I had almost no carnal knowledge, nor did I know about the spells we cast on ourselves and others. The constellation of my own family was for me entirely separate from the galaxy of streets and school, as was the third, barely legible satellite that I inhabited alone: spinning stories. In 1982, on the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication, the novelist Anita Brookner wrote:
The Golden Notebook … seems to belong to an immensely confusing period, weighed down by the anxieties of a decade that now seems remote, incomprehensible to those for whom the Sixties signify permissiveness, euphoria, liberty, and pleasure. It reminds us … that the Sixties inherited the dilemmas of the Fifties, surely the dreariest decade this century, and made an all too conscious attempt to bury them…. [It] had to do with the paradox of the thinking woman’s attitude to love and expectation in her personal life.
On winter Saturdays, N. and I went around and around at the local skating rink. We knew—we barely needed to discuss it—that we would not become our mothers, but it was a harder feat to achieve than we could have anticipated, the psyche’s attempt at a double axel. In high school, with only a hazy idea of what it was about, I fell in love with the sheer expressiveness of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which was given to me to read by N.’s older brother. Here was a way to inhabit the dark enfilades and flood them at least intermittently with light. In The Golden Notebook, Anna and Molly live full tilt, or so I thought. I wanted to hurl myself into what looked to me like life.
“But do we want to live there, exactly?” asked my friend Katherine. Anna, unhappily in love, writes a story in a yellow notebook about unhappy Ella, who is also writing a novel, and in a black notebook she writes a story about another Anna, in Rhodesia, involved with an excruciating, extinguishing man who resembles Gottfried Lessing. In a blue notebook, she writes a diary, and crouched inside the book is small Doris, who is never fed properly, and the story of an adolescent son who cannot separate from his mother and who tries to kill himself. There, if I look closely, is an even smaller wooden doll, the girl I was, reading late at night, who, in short time, to make order of the toppling world around and inside her, would need to fashion a tent against the elements. “In the end,” said Rebecca, “it’s a book about a writer.”
Another Nobel Prize winner of Lessing’s generation, the poet Wisława Szymborska, wrote in “In Praise of My Sister”:
She takes after her mother, who didn’t write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn’t write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister’s roof
That I do not feel safe under almost any roof is another story, but it is not one unknown to most writers. The Golden Notebook is a bildungsroman about a bildungsroman. You cannot tell the truth about others, Woolf said, if you do not tell it about yourself. Lessing was impatient about drawn lines between the contiguous counties of fiction and non-fiction. If I was telling the truth, I’d say: I finished The Golden Notebook in a series of emergency rooms, in a country that has itself become an emergency room, beside the bedside of a friend whom I came to love because we’d both loved the same man, now dead. Or I could say I read it on the red-eye from New York to London, where I planned to visit two men I was seeing, unbeknownst to each other, and to choose between them. Or I could say I read it on the train to Johannesburg or to Brussels, or to Rome, taking my children to see their father. Because I’m a writer, who knows whether I am making all or none of it up, or what I am leaving out. I had remembered Anna and Molly and the swans. I had fixed in my mind that Anna and Molly eat strawberries from blue bowls in the first chapter of the novel, but although I searched for them, there is no mention of blue bowls in these pages at all. Nevertheless, the prototypes of those blue bowls now on my kitchen shelves are the bowls I imagined; a break in the fourth wall, like the plaque to Quentin Compson on the Anderson Bridge. A recollection I had embroidered, or made up from whole cloth, like so many others.
And the swans? In the yellow notebook, Paul tells Ella about a lecture at the hospital, delivered by a male researcher who has concluded that female swans do not have orgasms. What is that? wondered my sixteen-year-old self. During the lecture, the female physicians walk out. When he later asks a colleague why, she says, “But my dear Paul, women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex.”
But what no one tells you is that it is a difficult thing to know how one feels. In The Golden Notebook, Anna’s experiences in Rhodesia mirror Lessing’s own childhood, refracted in the bezel of memory; Anna and Michael hold within them the embryo of Ella and Paul, as each of our own liaisons carries within it the memory of another, as the matryoshka doll holds within it a tinier twin. How do we keep things straight? How do we think about one thing without tripping over another? Recently, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, I saw a tiny kangaroo with a baby in its pouch, nibbling at the same tuft of grass as his mother, and now the kangaroo is lodged beside the image of the wooden doll in her red floral pinafore held by a pipe cleaner flying off a gable of the dollhouse, paired in space and time as I reach for my phone and scroll through today’s terrible news. Now and again, in the limbic space of the page, we meet a character who is like ourselves, or someone whom we might be one day. A book makes itself at home in us as we make ourselves at home in a house of books, adding gables and dormers as we read. Perhaps The Golden Notebook cycled back, phosphorescent after fifty years, covered with barnacles, because I had read the message in the bottle after all, written in black ink and in a firm hand: the novel wasn’t about the feasibility of compartmentalization, but rather the opposite.