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Doris Lessing |
The Golden Notebook ‘was no feminist novel’
IT was while canvassing in a block of flats in Crowndale Road, St Pancras – probably for the Communist party newspaper, the Morning Star – that Doris Lessing decided to write The Golden Notebook, long hailed as the Bible for the feminist movement.
But that is not what she intended. The iconic novel was based on the Communist world cracking up. And it did so partly by painting a picture of young women living in London in the 1950s.
The Nobel Prize-winning author, who will be 90 in October, rejects that the novel was a deliberate attempt to break down doors for women, though it did expose the how women suffered in the eternal clash with men.
Interviewed on Monday at her home in West Hampstead for Radio 4’s Women’s Hour programme, Doris said The Golden Notebook was published in 1962 at a time when everyone in the Communist Party was “left in a total tizzy” by Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th party congress. “Everybody, that’s the comrades, was extremely upset because news was coming through finally about how awful the Soviet Union was,” said Doris.
“You’ve got no idea what it was like. Everybody I rang up was either having a nervous breakdown or talking to God or becoming their opposite in every way.”
Her novel was labelled as being about the sex war. “Because that wasn’t why I wrote it,” she explained. The Golden Notebook is about the cracking up.
So where did those images of bored and desperate women living behind closed doors come from?
“They came from me going out and canvassing and meeting people. It happened I was canvassing and I can’t remember, typically, what I was canvassing for. There was a great block of flats in Crowndale Road. What I found as doors opened was that every woman said, ‘Don’t talk to me, come and talk to my husband, he’ll be back at six’. And then they would tell me what ghastly lives they led. That was the inspiration for the novel.”
“I was much more interested in the general cracking up. What was actually cracking up was the Left. I wasn’t really thinking that the world was cracking up but everything around me was. The party was a kind of bedrock for a time. “And everything had come to grief. For what had happened was, for some people, who were educated in the Young Communist League, like a stab in the heart...
“Khrushchev went just so far but if you are a member of the Communist Party it is really a religion, all the same feelings as if it were a religion. Then to be told Communism is corrupt and bad it was a terrible thing. These people had breakdowns, they committed suicide.”
GERALD ISAAMAN |
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