The Golden Notebook #1: Artists Talking
The Golden Notebook, First Impressions
Daunting Classic: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Progress: 7 Days, 60 Pages
From the get go, it’s clear that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is going to prove a much different kind of daunting classic than we read earlier this year at Dear Head of Mine. For one, Lessing has already lapped Melville’s Moby-Dick in use of dialogue in its first chapter alone. The Golden Notebook opens with fifty or so pages of conversation between two divorced artists, Molly and Anna, Molly’s ex-husband, and Molly’s twenty-year-old child. I wouldn’t call this a typical opening of a novel by a longshot, but it’s at least in a style that’s much more readable for the modern eye (if you put aside a few of the intellectual political references from 1960s Europe).
In this fifty-page discussion, which is ostensibly about the future of Molly’s child, we cleverly get all the context we need for novel’s framing. Molly’s ex-husband is an upper-class Englishman and wants his son to take the traditional route into business—which boils down to his timeless question of: “‘What are you going to live on?’”. In contrast, Molly and Anna are two single mothers, disillusioned-leftist artists who live independently and take the more modern parenting position that their kids should decide what to do that makes them happy with their parent’s support but without their steering them in one direction or another.
Also recognizable to the modern reader is Molly and Anna’s archetypal female friendship, from literary novels like Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend to countless upmarket and commercial novels, where the women are both slight competitors and compatriots, two sides of the same coin. We are told that Molly and Anna are similar but that Molly is a beautiful and bold actress whereas Anna is an intelligent and reserved writer (“A quarrel would lay Anna low for days, whereas Molly thrived on them”). There’s no way to know yet if this classic kind of soft rivalry will play a large role in the novel sixty pages in, and there are many flashing signs that The Golden Notebook is about to get much denser and more experimental.
With the setup concluded we turn to the novel within the novel (the Krauss), and delve into one of Anna’s four writing notebooks (black, red, yellow, and blue) as she ponders what to do next (she is the author of one novel, a bestseller, but money is running out). The first notebook, the black notebook, contains lists, journals, and even sketches of Anna’s fiction. Doing the old spot check, we can see a more classic 20th century literature, daunting, page-without-a-paragraph-break ahead of us as we get into this meta form— goodbye dialogue, hello description.
A taste of what’s ahead, where did all the dialogue go?
My favorite passage so far, which should give you an idea of the novel, comes from Thomas, Molly’s child, who summarizes why he would rather struggle like Molly and Anna as artists rather than make money and join high society like his father:
“‘The thing about mother and Anna is this; one doesn’t say Anna Wulf the writer, or Molly Jacobs the actress—or only if you don’t know them. They aren’t—what I mean is—they aren’t what they do; but if I start working with you then I’ll be what I do. Don’t you see that?’” (pg. 36)
Bonus: Doris Lessing Could Care Less about Your Nobel
I don’t know much about Doris Lessing, and try intentionally to look up very little about an author before I read their books, but randomly I saw another writer post Lessing’s Nobel prize “acceptance speech”, in which Lessing is cornered on the streets of London and informed of her win by reporters. After the reporter mansplains the importance of winning the Nobel prize and how it’s a recognition of a life’s work rather than a “horse race” like other awards, Lessing, who has been a published writer for 57 years at that point, responds by saying: “Well there you are, you said it all for me, congratulations.” It’s going to be hard to read the rest of this novel without a positive bias after seeing that.