Walking in the Shade (48 page)

 

The Golden Notebook
is generally considered my best novel. Perhaps it is, but I have my own ideas. Authors are thought not to be good judges of their own work. Nearly forty years after it was written, it is still selling steadily and is often reprinted, and not only in European countries. Its history illustrates the vicissitudes a novel may experience.

People are always asking, Why did you write this novel, that novel, that story, how did it come about? But the answer is never simple. You may think about a novel for years, because you cannot find the way to do it, and then the solution may be sudden, perhaps in a dream or a series of dreams; at any rate, what has been impossible has become easy. This happened to
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
. The format, ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives', for some reason put an end to the ten years of inability.
Marriages
is the second of the series and very much the odd one out. As so often, the solution was a simple one: I used the ancient voice of the storyteller, and everything fell into place. A novel may arrive in one's mind suddenly, like
The Good Terrorist
. The genesis of
The Golden Notebook
was not lengthy, but it was complex, not only because of what went into it but because of my state at the time. I really was at a crossroads, a turning point; I was in the melting pot and ready to be remade. I knew I was—nothing unconscious about it. For one thing, I was determined my emotional life would from now on be different. For another, there was politics, the collapse of communism as a moral force. All around me, people's hearts were breaking, they were having breakdowns, they were suffering religious conversions or—very common, this—formerly hard-line communists were discovering a talent for business and making money, because an obsession with the processes of capitalism was the best of preparations for a career in commerce. The point was, I was seeing people who had put all their eggs in one basket come to grief. What had been shut out of their thinking was rushing in, sometimes in the form of madness. I had been brought up in a society that compartmentalised—white, black—and the results were already evident in the news out of Southern Africa: rigidities were breaking down into violence and war. And further back still came the voices of my parents: my father's—at least when he was still well, still himself—was nonjudgemental, humane, human, tolerant; my mother's was always ready to categorise, condemn, judge. I knew that a remarkable time in the world's affairs was ending. I knew that quite soon it would seem mad. I had learned that atmospheres and climates of opinion which seem at the time eternal may disappear overnight. My most extreme experience of this was the onset of the Cold War just after the end of World War II, when friendships were destroyed overnight and allies became enemies. For some years I had been thinking that novels I would like to read about the nineteenth century had never been written. There were books of history in plenty, but few novels. Where were the novels about the intellectual debates, the arguments, and the passions and hatreds that are so often the real story behind formal history? Where the life as it was lived in socialist circles?

I wanted to write a novel which people could read later to find out how people saw themselves, those who were communists and dreaming of a golden age—which, I must remind you, we actually believed for a short time was just ahead. How could we have believed anything so stupid? At least these lunacies should be chronicled.

I needed a framework, a form, which would express extreme compartmentalisation and then its breaking down—the experience I had lived through, was living through now. The ideologies were not only strictly political but about the way women saw themselves. It is now a conviction that the women's movement began in the sixties. Like sex. The fact is, there were many group discussions, meetings, conversations, about women in the 1940s and 1950s, in and near the communist parties, and the socialist parties too. Women were on the agenda. Women have always sat around talking about men, and those voices came out of my earliest childhood too. My memory was full of conversations about men, women, the differences between them, love, sex, marriage. New was the idea that these ancient balances had to change.

For instance, the talk in Joan Rodker's kitchen, which I mined for Molly and Anna. Joan was Molly, much altered, of course, and I, Ella. It ought not to be necessary to say that this was not a strict use of what happened, or of what was said; but such is the hunger of readers for the autobiographical that one has to repeat: no, it did not happen just like that.

Extraordinary, this need for the autobiographical. ‘No, Molly was a composite of several women I've known. Ella's situation in
The Golden Notebook
was mine, but not her character, not really.' At once—disappointment. A need for the literal, facts, the exact. Virginia Woolf truly said that of a hundred readers of a novel, only one will really care about the imaginative work a writer has put in: they want to know if the writer has ‘put herself in', and is that a portrait of Freddy or Jane?

How we do learn to treasure that hundredth reader!

But why do they always want to make characters in a novel into autobiography? How often have I seen a face fall into disappointment when I say no, such and such a character was imagined, or composed from half a dozen similar people, or transposed from another setting into this one. What we are seeing is a reluctance of the imagination. What is wanted is the real, the actual, what ‘really' happened. If I say, Yes, all those things did happen to me, then oh, the relief, the smile, the pleasure. Why is this? Once, all our storytelling was imaginative, was myth and legend and parable and fable, for that is how we told stories to and about each other. But that capacity has atrophied under the pressure from the realistic novel, at least to the extent that all the imaginative or fanciful aspects of storytelling have been shuffled off into their definite categories. There are magical realism, space fiction, science fiction, fantasy, folklore, fairy stories, horror stories, for we have compartmentalised literature as we do everything. On one side realism—the truth. On the other, in another box, imagination—fantasy. But most readers now want to think, as they read: This is
really
what happened to the author. And the author who has tried so hard to take the story out of the strictly personal, to generalise personal and private experience, sometimes feels he or she need not have bothered, might as well have set down a strict and accurate record of what happened—autobiography, in fact.

When in the realistic novel that other dimension forces its way in, because it has to come in somewhere, then often it is admitted in the shape of madness. When the voice of the first Mrs. Rochester is heard by Jane Eyre, what is evoked is much more than the sounds made by a poor crazy woman: it is all the grotesque and irrational worlds lit wildly by the fires of hell and heaven which we exclude from daytime life. At our peril. Madness in realistic literature has too much weight given to it, and that is because madness is permitted. Dreams are over important, because dreams are ‘realistic'. We all dream, after all. It would be easy to make a long list of ‘realistic' novels where the irrational appears, or is even pivotal, but is in accepted guises, such as dreams, or madness.

The Golden Notebook
was written at high pressure—pressure from within, which brings me to another murky area. Sometimes the emotional pressures that fuel a novel are very far from its subject matter. All writers understand this, but I think few readers.
The Fifth Child
was fuelled by sheer frustration and anger because it was impossible to get newspapers to write the truth about what was happening when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan: a whole generation of editors and journalists (people who had once been on the extreme fringes of opinion but, as so often happens, had become mainline opinion) still cherished a sentimental loyalty to the Soviet Union, which made it first impossible, then hard, to say one word of criticism of their beloved.
The Fifth Child
had that head of steam behind it, but that is not to say that it is ‘about' the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Golden Notebook
's fuel was feelings of loss, change: that I had been dragged to my emotional limits by Jack and then Clancy—rather, I had been dragged by
my
emotional needs, which really had nothing to do with them as individuals. I had understood my need for the wounded hero, the suffering man, and knew all that must stop. Peter, the third and last child, was growing up. Loss, departures, the ending of dramas begun long ago, the need for drawing lines—
finis
. All this dynamic energy went into
The Golden Notebook: emotional
energy, which is so much stronger than we think…and this besides having to acknowledge that what is so often called ‘intellectual' is in fact emotional. What is more violently emotional and passionate—and poisonous—than a room full of intellectuals in ideological debate?…But I slide past this dangerous area, holding my breath.

That novel had a framework made by thinking. The thought was that to divide off and compartmentalise living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young; black, white; men, women; capitalism, socialism: these great dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorisation, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common. That was the thought, which made the shape or pattern of
The Golden Notebook
. But the emotions were stronger than the thought. This is why I have always seen
The Golden Notebook
as a failure: a failure in my terms, of what I had meant. For has this book changed by an iota our tendency to think like computers set to sort everything—people, ideas, history—into boxes? No, it has not. Yet why should I have had such a hubristic thought? But I was in the grip of discovery, of revelation. I had only just seen this Truth: I was watching my own mind working like a sorting machine, and I was appalled.

The Golden Notebook
did not at once become the ‘Bible of the Women's Movement', for that is how it was described in country after country. The reviews in both Britain and the States, by women as well as men, were sour, grudging, hostile. A researcher came to see me and said she was astonished by how bad the reviews for
The Golden Notebook
had been: did I realise that? Oddly enough, yes. I was shocked and upset by those reviews, in a way which I have never allowed to happen since. First, I had been lucky till then: what I had written had on the whole been appreciated, or I had been justified by events. My first writing, about conditions in Southern Africa, had been criticised as being ‘unfair' to the whites, but that time had passed. There was a note in these reviews of
The Golden Notebook
that showed some nerve had been touched. When you see or hear it, you know that the reviewer is writing not about the book but about herself or himself. When a reviewer writes with a certain kind of sour spite, it is not ‘This novel upsets me because it made me think of my mother, my husband, my child,' but ‘This is a dreadful novel.' To understand this you have to be more experienced than I was then. And the level of the reviewing was shocking. I did not know then that in any field there are always only a few good people, and the rest are second-rate and ignorant. Not one of the reviews even noticed that
The Golden Notebook
had an interesting shape, and this at a time when critics were complaining about the conventionality of the English novel. They were so disturbed by the sex-war aspects of the novel, they did not see anything else. What has to be understood about reviewers is that they are—mostly—a very emotional lot. Their function is—surely?—to weigh, balance, think, consider, but often they merely emote.

It happened again, though less obviously, with
Love, Again
. Just as the supposed subject of
The Golden Notebook
, women and men, was all the reviewers could see, so the immediate subject of
Love, Again
, love in old age, was surprising and shocking, and the fact that the novel has a rather complicated structure was hardly noticed.

One criticism then the loudest, has since become less. It was that the men characters were so unpleasant. I could not see this. (Behind this one hears, ‘Women writers cannot write about men,' that old last-ditch defence.) Then, it was that
all
the characters are so unpleasant. At once one has to wonder: what extraordinarily wonderful people the critic must know, unlike any human being one has ever known oneself. And how flatteringly he or she must see himself, herself, not at all as others see them. Proust made a sly and funny comment on this very point. He imagines an urbane and flattering account, rather like a society editor's column but based on the Goncourt brothers' journals, of the Verdurins and their circle, which he has portrayed from the worm's-eye view. As if
Hello
magazine had decided to write
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
.

Like this, perhaps: