The Golden Notebook

“But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that’s not being responsible.”

Tommy points out Anna’s hypocrisy, that she writes without acting, even keeping her thoughts from being published. Anna herself often points out this hypocrisy within the British Communist Party, that their function is to meet and to talk about problems without ever taking any definite action.

“The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness.”

Here, Anna’s literary criticism reflects not only her own dilemma as a writer—who is experiencing a reluctance to write, or a writer’s block—but also her own dilemma as a person. She has divided herself into parts, represented by the four notebooks, which is what keeps her from engaging in meaningful relationships and work. The novel conveys her journey toward unity.

“Yet that pain is like the dangerous pain of nostalgia, its first cousin and just as deadly. I’ll go on with this when I can write it straight, not in that tone.”

Anna chides herself, in the black notebook, for falling into a tone either of cynicism or of nostalgic yearning. Neither replicates the authenticity that Anna is seeking, in revisiting her past and the years before the war. This quote also refers to Anna’s experience in the communist party; there was an innocence and excitement in the possibility of effecting real change, and those feelings have dissipated in the ensuing years, as the totalitarian reality of Stalin’s Soviet Union has become known.

“And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility, of danger, the secret ugly frightening pulse of war itself, of the death that we all wanted, for each other and for ourselves.”

Again, the black notebook revisits the moment before World War II changed everything. Anna’s memories reflect the recklessness of youth, and her thoughts remind the reader of the close connection between Eros (love) and Thanatos (death). This, she believes, is the deep moral failing of her first novel, Frontiers of War; it is part of what fuels her writer’s block in the present day.

“‘The reason we don’t leave the Party is that we can’t bear to say good-bye to our ideals for a better world.’ Trite enough. And interesting because it implies he believes, and that I must, only the communist party can better the world. Yet we neither of us believe any such thing.”

Anna’s friend and comrade, John, identifies the reason why, even with all of their disillusionment with the Soviet Union and communist politics in general, they have a hard time leaving the party. As a bulwark against rising fascism and a corrective to the inequities of the capitalist economic order, communism once offered great hope for a better future. The disappointment is palpable.

“(To Julia she makes bitter jokes about Jane Austen hiding her novels under the blotting paper when people come into the room; quotes Stendhal’s dictum that any woman under fifty who writes, should do so under a pseudonym.).”

This quotation comes from The Shadow of the Third, Anna’s partially completed novel in the yellow notebook. Although it is a parenthetical aside, it gets to one of the most pertinent themes of the novel: The making of the female artist is a contentious project, fraught with socio-cultural and historical baggage.

“Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself.”

As the novel progresses, Anna continues to have small revelations like this one. She is compartmentalizing her life, as symbolized by the four separate notebooks, and she is rarely fully honest with herself—about the quality of her life, about the soundness of her choices, and about her relationships with men. It is not until she can cohere, and be fully honest, that she can return to writing and to her fully authentic self.

“It’s not just that. I’m not bracketing off the madness and the cruelty—it’s something else.”

Here, Anna is talking to Tommy about her notebooks; he has questioned why she separates certain events from others. While she cannot fully explain herself, she begins to realize that, in trying to cordon off “the madness and the cruelty,” she is also blocking genuine feelings of love and connection. To be a fully actualized person, one must confront the full range of emotions, events, and experiences that create one’s complete self.

“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 the chaos.”

This recounts Anna’s dream and her greatest fear, the reason why she keeps the notebooks separate: She falters in the face of chaos; she is trying to preserve some order in a world that seems to have dissolved into war, violence, and threat. As many notable writers before and after Lessing have also recounted, in the aftermath of world wars, a new social and political order (not to mention moral and cultural) seems to emerge; it is a time of rapid, disorienting change.

“I am unhappy because I have lost some kind of independence, some freedom; but my being ‘free’ has nothing to do with writing a novel; it had to do with my attitude towards a man, and that has proved dishonest, because I am in pieces.”

Ella is speaking of the end of her affair in The Shadow of the Third. This quote reveals that, while attitudes about sexual freedom and relationships are changing, there remain the remnants of traditional attitudes toward marriage and commitment. Anna, too, shares these feelings.

“I am ashamed of the psychological impulse that created Frontiers of War. I have decided never to write again, if that is the emotion which must feed my writing.”

Anna comes to believe that the nostalgia that fueled her first novel—along with the illicit thrill of the pre-war period—serves to perpetuate the cycle of war that has perpetuated so much destruction in the world. This is part of what keeps her mired in old patterns (affairs with unavailable men) and stuck in writer’s block. She must break through to a new way of looking at the world and her role in it.

“The dream marked a change in Anna, in her knowledge of herself. In the desert she was alone, and there was no water, and she was a long way from the springs. She woke knowing that if she was to cross the desert she must shed burdens.”

Anna recounts several of her dreams during the course of the novel. This recurring one reflects her feelings and frustrations with her writing; the well has gone dry, and she has no spring from which to draw on new inspiration. The image is also a familiar theme in post-war writing, particularly in T. S. Eliot’s famous epic poem, The Waste Land.

“A man and a woman—yes. Both at the end of their tether. Both cracking up because of a deliberate attempt to transcend their own limits. And out of the chaos, a new kind of strength.”

Recorded in the yellow notebook, this insight foreshadows the events to come, with Anna and Saul Green. It comes as the character, Ella, in The Shadow of the Third, is reflecting upon her visit with her father and his opinions about her life. It presages the golden notebook—not to mention The Golden Notebook, the novel itself.

“In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say—he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane be blocking off, by limiting themselves.”

Here, Anna is talking to Mother Sugar, her psychotherapist, but this is exactly what the problem is with her writer’s block, that she’s limiting her experience. Anna is trying to cling too tightly to order, to fend off chaos, to be open to inspiration and experience. It will take a descent into a kind of temporary “madness” with Saul Green to free her to write again.

“She had now understood that she was not in control of what she did.”

This is part of a dawning revelation—on the part of the character Anna in Free Women, as well as the person Anna who is writing the notebooks—that the enemy of creativity is too much control. This realization comes directly before she confronts Marion and Tommy about their behavior and, in behaving unreasonably, succeeds in leading them to see reason. Relinquishing control is also a way of inviting change.

“If I were asked by Mother Sugar to ‘name’ this dream, I would say it was about total sterility. And besides, since I dreamed it, I have been unable to remember how Maryrose moved her eyes, or how Paul laughed. It’s all gone.”

Anna is talking about the dream in which she saw her time at the Mashopi Hotel as a film. The dream and the loss of memory that follows it also symbolize the unreliability of memory and the dangers of nostalgia. Anna records this insight as she closes out the black notebook and all the other notebooks to follow.

“Her mind is filled with shapes of the man who will enter her life, meanwhile she ceases to paint or to write. Yet in her mind she is still ‘an artist.’”

In the final section of the yellow notebook, Anna records ideas for various short stories and novels. This one is reminiscent of Anna’s actual life: Her former lover, Michael, has always been dismissive of her work as a writer, and Anna allows herself to become caught up in the desires of her male companions rather than pursue her own dreams. However, it is clear that Anna, like the potential fictional character she outlines above, remains committed to her dream of being an artist.

“But now, writing it, and reading what I’ve written, there’s nothing there, just words on paper. I can’t communicate, even to myself when I read it back, the knowledge of destruction as a force. I was lying limp on the floor last night, feeling like a vision with 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.”

Another theme of the novel is the loss of meaning in the face of war and violence. Here, in the blue notebook, Anna reflects that the dreams she writes down lose their force when transformed into mere words. This is part of what fuels her writer’s block, her mistrust in the notion that writing confers meaning.

“I understood through waves of sickness that I was Anna Wulf, once Anna Freeman, standing at the window of an old ugly flat in London, and that behind me on the bed was Saul Green, wandering American. But I don’t know how long I was there. I came to myself like coming out of a dream, not knowing what room one is going to wake in.”

As Anna begins to lose herself in Saul’s expressions of anxiety and “madness,” she ironically begins to reclaim her authentic identity. She has lost the desire to control the chaos, to separate everything. In the process, she begins to cohere and find herself again.

“We were looking at the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, and a white flower unfolded under the blue sky in such a perfection of puffs, folds and eddying shapes that we could not move, although we knew we were menaced by it. It was unbelievably beautiful, the shape of death.”

This recounts another of Anna’s dreams and reflects the fact that Anna’s life—the entire novel itself—is haunted by visions of annihilation. At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the looming specter of nuclear war and worldwide destruction is a constant reality. Writing in the face of such possibilities seem futile, at times, to Anna (and, presumably, to Lessing herself).

“And now it was terrible, because I was faced with the burden of re-creating order out of the chaos that my life had become.”

To paraphrase Mary Shelley, in her introduction to Frankenstein, invention comes not out of nothing but out of chaos. As Anna reintegrates her authentic self, she begins to make sense of the chaos that has been created both by her divided self and by her relationship to Saul. This process of ordering chaos will eventually give rise to her novel, Free Women.

“Very well then. I can’t write that short story or any other, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me.”

This is just before Saul provides the first line to the novel that Anna will write, entitled Free Women. When he asks her who looks over her shoulders, she replies “a Chinese peasant” or “Castro’s guerilla fighters” or Algerians rising up against their imperialist occupiers—that is, activists and fighters, people who are actively fighting despotism and injustice. She feels writing is not enough.

“It was as if she, Anna, were a central point of awareness, being attacked by a million unco-ordinated facts, and the central point would disappear if she proved unable to weight and balance the facts, take them all into account.”

In her novel, Anna reproduces the same fear that she records in the notebooks. She feels inadequate, as a writer and as a person, if she is not aware of and active in the events of her time. Eventually, however, she begins to realize the value in her vision; hence, she writes the novel, though her character contents herself with a job and volunteer world.