The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

This theme of “breakdown,” that sometimes when people “crack up” it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions,

reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

This book was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movements already existed. It came out first ten years ago, in 1962.

I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds.

What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture.

Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel.

I’ve had half a dozen unimportant affairs. So do most of the men I know who have been married any length of time.

You’re afraid of writing what you think about life, because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself, you might be alone.”

don’t you think it’s at least possible, just possible that things can happen to us so bad that we don’t ever get over them?

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.

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.

Five lonely women going mad quietly by themselves, in spite of husband and children or rather because of them. The quality they all had: self-doubt. A guilt because they were not happy. The phrase they all used: “There must be something wrong with me.” Back in the campaign H.Q. I mentioned these women to the woman in charge for the afternoon. She said: “Yes, whenever I go canvassing, I get the heeby-jeebies. This country’s full of women going mad all by themselves.”

The theme is, naivety. From the moment Ella meets Paul and loves him, from the moment she uses the word love, there is the birth of naivety.

I know quite well that people like you and my mother are a hundred times better than he is—even though you’re such failures and in such a mess.

And the tragedy is that this intellectual responsibility, this high seriousness, is in a vacuum: it relates, not to Britain; not to communist countries as they are now; but to a spirit which existed in international communism years ago, before it was killed by the desperate, crazed spirit of struggle for survival to which we now give the name Stalinism.

suddenly I realise that what I am thinking about Michael and Jack is the nightmare about the firing party and the prisoners who exchange places.

He nods, and says: “You must do what you feel you have to do.” Then I laugh, because he has spoken out of his British upbringing, the decent nonconformist conscience.

“You never said, did you like my novel?

I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up.

the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.

“He sounds marvellous. But they can’t all be like that.” “Of course not. There’s his friend—he’s bombastic and rabble-rousing and he drinks and whores around. He’ll probably be the first Prime Minister—he has all the qualities—the common touch, you know.”

Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me.

Then, having reached that point, with the stars around me, and the little earth turning underneath me, I’d try to imagine at the same time, a drop of water, swarming with life, or a green leaf. Sometimes I could reach what I wanted, a simultaneous knowledge of vastness and of smallness.

The game.

I find myself sitting in my room, watching the sunlight on the floor, and I’m in the state that I reach after hours and hours of concentration with “the game”—a calm and delightful ecstasy, a oneness with everything, so that a flower in a vase is oneself, and the slow stretch of a muscle is the confident energy that drives the universe.

The walls of this flat close in on us. Day after day we’re alone here. I’m conscious that we are both mad.

I remember thinking it was strange that we were able to be so detachedly intelligent when we were both sick with tension and anxiety. And I thought that we were talking about political movements, the development or defeat of this socialist movement or that, whereas last night I had known, finally, that the truth for our time was war, the immanence of war.

He said: “Why do you have four notebooks?” I said: “Obviously, because it’s been necessary to split myself up, but from now on I shall be using one only.” I was interested to hear myself say this, because until then I hadn’t known it.

All of herself in one book.

“Because in a society where not one man in ten thousand begins to understand the ways in which women are second-class citizens, we have to rely for company on the men who are at least not hypocrites.”

I’ll start a new notebook, all of myself in one book.

“All American men look back and hanker after when they were in the group of young men before they had pressure on them to be successful or get married. Whenever I meet an American man, I wait for the moment when his face really lights up—it’s when he’s talking about the group of buddies.”

“You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?”

She was suddenly angry; she was shaking with anger. “None of you ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.”