Doris Lessing's Black Notebook
KRAMER, HILTON
WRITERS & WRITING Doris Lessing's Black Notebook By Hilton Kramer Certain works of literature summarize their .epochs. in a way that leaves them permanently fixed ill the Imagination. We return...
...Lessing's style: "And slowly, slowly, in each of us, an emotion hardens which is painful because it can never be released...
...Here, too, history and private consciousness are significantly joined, and fiction once again engages life at its exact center rather than at the periphery...
...A love affair refracts a social pyramid of sheer madness...
...Anecdote looses its innocence, for human action on any level-even the most humane-is trapped in the net of a dying and death-dealing society...
...Lessing's "black notebook" on Africa abounds in the particularities of a specific way of life...
...Julia, the heroine, is a smart, worldly daughter of a small-town doctor in the North of England, a woman who somehow-"she could not put her finger on any point in her youth when she had said to herself: 'I want to travel...
...For The Golden Notebook was not in any conventional sense a political novel at all, yet its principal themes-its anxious and unresolved feminism, its acute sense of the price which emancipation in any form (political, sexual, artistic) inevitably exacts, and its scrupulous examination of the writer's dilemma in the face of this radical moral flux-were all a reflection of that dissolution of political faith which has remained the overriding emotional and historical fact of life among intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic...
...extravagant irony and elaborate artifice...
...Lessing's complex sensibility, and ought to be borne in mind in reading her new volume of African: Stories (Simon & Schuster, 636 pp., $7.95...
...Lessing essayed, while their existence as separate chronicles, defining separate worlds, attested to the debilitating divisions which life imposed on both the novelist and the woman...
...Most of the tales collected in this very ample volume of African Stories observe a more traditional form than that of The Golden Notebook, but beneath their smooth surfaces and familiar shapes (which confirm Mrs...
...not to mention the fancier forms of pornography-all now conspire to keep history locked out of the fictional arena...
...If one singles out "Winter in July" here, it is because-quite apart from its intrinsic success as a story in itself-it encompasses so vividly the condition of rootlessness and moral inertia, of an ennui that has consumed every impulse that might violate it, which, elsewhere in this volume, is described more explicitly in its social and even political forms...
...She becomes the passive victim of the brothers' overriding devotion to each other...
...I want to be free' "finds herself an exile and a wanderer, drifting from one good job to another, first on the Continent and then in South America, and from one lover to another, only to discover that, at 28, she "had spent the years since leaving school moving from hotel to furnished flat" the world over, and was now experiencing "a tired affectionate remembrance of so many people, men and women, who had once filled her life...
...Just to have written such a novel in the '60s bespoke a courage nowhere to be found among American writers of comparable experience...
...For the four fragmentary notebooks in which Anna, the novelist-heroine of The Golden Notebook, recorded her experience-the black book on her African years, the red dealing with her political life, the yellow in which she undertakes a new novel, and the blue which is a diary of her personal affairs-were, taken together, an accurate measure of the thematic breadth which Mrs...
...Of private consciousness, whether exalted or facetious, deadly serious or highly farcical, there is certainly no shortage, but its exact collisions with history (if any) can only be inferred...
...Here, both in form and in substance, was a novel in which the post-Stalinist drift of the Left-liberal literary sensibility was anatomized with a clarity and force that took one's breath away...
...The best of them, in my view, is "Winter in July," and is not explicitly a "social" tale at all, but a brilliant portrait of a menage a trois installed in that physically spacious but otherwise fatally constricted farming country of Mrs...
...Lessing herself grew up in Southern Rhodesia, the daughter of British parents, and to that circumstance, no doubt, owes not only her subject but her special success in writing about this demoralized colonial remnant from the inside and with the kind of harsh, unforgiving intimacy-by no means devoid of sympathy or warmth-that only deep familial attachments can yield a writer of her persuasion...
...Lessing as a literary craftsman of the first order) one discovers many of the same insistent themes...
...The "delightful picture" there envisioned is not so different, really, from the hopes which Julia entertains for her marriage in "Winter in July," and both are in the end utterly shattered...
...One thinks of the fantasy enjoyed by Mrs...
...Lessing's Africa is both an historical reality, very closely observed, and something more: a vast metaphor for the death of feeling, for the atrophy of whatever emotion is required to sustain the values of liberal civilization in circumstances that permit their dissolution...
...She marries the one, and eventually becomes the mistress of the other, and it is this lonely triangular liaison which forms the substance of the story...
...Beside The Golden Notebook (whatever its flaws) the posturings of Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy-to go no further-have been ludicrous when not simply repugnant...
...One reads these African Stories with the drumroll of history in one's ears, and there is no mistaking the doom which it announces...
...The most commonplace dreams harbor monstrous and disabling guilts...
...The result is a sustained fictional vision that makes us feel the withering of emotion and the decay of individual conscience as, virtually, the crux of the colonial experience itself in all its ramifications...
...Regarding the political implications of this condition, one need only refer to the daily paper, with its frightening accounts of the catastrophe now being prepared in Rhodesia by the very class of white settlers who populate Mrs...
...The prevailing feeling of these stories may be summed up in a line from a story-"The Trinket Box"-otherwise quite uncharacteristic of Mrs...
...The golden notebook, in which Anna hopes to unite these disjunct claims on her heart and mind and sensibilities into a coherent vision, was thus a moral as well as a novelistic aspiration...
...Julia is intelligent, attractive, amusing, vaguely dismayed at her "reputation of being brilliant and cold," and utterly alone...
...The stories that comprise this volume (most of them gathered from earlier collections, but here given a thematic unity for the first time) are by no means all of one kind...
...The form of The Golden Notebook was itself a paradigm of Mrs...
...What at first seems only the inevitable extension of the freedom Julia has sought all her adult life is transformed, before her very eyes, into a subtle form of bondage...
...Within that vision the most private encounters implicate an entire system of values that is intrinsically inhuman and historically moribund...
...Lessing's Rhodesian province...
...Giles in "A Home for the Highland Cattle": "Somewhere in the back of Marina's mind has been a vision of herself and Philip living in a group of amiable people, pleasantly interested in the arts, who read the New Statesman week by week, and held that discreditable phenomena like the color bar and the black-white struggle could be solved by sufficient goodwill...
...And history revenges itself by inspiring works of non-fiction which eclipse not only a taste for the novel but the very memory of its lost grandeur...
...To be a woman in the Africa of these stories is already, it seems, to find oneself suspended between the values of that civilization and those of the barbarism that has displaced it...
...Lessing's vision represented so memorably by "Winter in July," for it would be a distortion of a considerable literary achievement to regard her African Stories as only a moral Baedeker to the fag end of empire-though they are surely that too...
...Foremost among them is the situation of women emotionally isolated, at times all but imprisoned, in a man's world, their dependence all the greater for the passion and loyalty that are denied a style of life in which to flower...
...The novel, once the most fertile of modern genres in this respect, has not lately been productive of works which encompass this complexity...
...And not only her fate...
...Lessing's stories...
...But it is just for that reason, too, that one underscores the aspect of Mrs...
...Lessing's gifts as having a range far beyond that of the familiar "feminine" sensibility, all sensitivity and nuance and fine hurt feelings, to which many of us have become inured, if not totally indifferent...
...Moreover, she has long had in hand-the earliest of the stories date from the early '50s-a subject that is a fictionist's dream: the world of British Africa in the twilight of a once glorious imperium...
...Symbolism, fantasy, and farce...
...We return to such works not only for the power and excellence of particular scenes, characters, or ideas, but because as metaphorical totalities they embody that collision of history and private consciousness which art-and only art-can preserve in all its dialectical complexity...
...The "plain and brutal fact" asserts itself: " it seemed that in some perverse way the two men were brought even closer together, for a time, by sharing the same woman.' Julia's marriage thus turns, by gradual degrees and with her own troubled complicity, into another form of the rootlessness that is her fate...
...They are no longer-or very rarely-the substance of the novel itself...
...This somber epitaph of life denied is everywhere echoed in this volume, but it stands for something more than the individual attrition of the heart-and thus clearly marks Mrs...
...She is that rare thing in fiction nowadays: a social observer of really keen powers...
...but it also invokes a continent that any modern reader can recognize as his own...
...For myself, there is only one novel of the '60s which stands out as the shining exception to all this: The Golden Notebook of Doris Lessing...
...a child's coming of age throws open a door on the moral void...
...A chance encounter takes her to Cape Town as the secretary of a businessman, and it is there that she meets Tom and Kenneth, inseparable half-brothers who are wealthy farmers on holiday from Rhodesia...
Vol. 48 • October 1965 • No. 21
