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 Go
ncourt 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:
I was strolling down Church Street past Molly Jacobs’s house, and there in the window seat on the first floor was Anna Wulf, the lovely author of Frontiers of War. She was looking into the room. Then she laughed, so she must be in conversation, probably with Molly herself. I could not help feeling a wee bit envious of these two, one a well-regarded new author and Molly Jacobs, whose career as an actress has just taken off again with The Wings of Cupid, which is expected to run for ever. Then the milkman arrived from a side street, and Molly heard him and came to stand beside Anna Wulf in the window. The milkman looked up and greeted the two girls. They were making a charming picture. Molly saw me and waved. I mimed a plea, and she said something to Anna Wulf, who gave me a quick inspection, recognised me—we had only met that one time briefly in the theatre foyer—and in a moment a key wrapped in a silk scarf arrived beside me on the pavement. Charming bohemian ways…I went up the stairs—noticing that the harp still stood on the landing—and heard as I entered the living room, from Molly, ‘Yes, but I’m not a theoretical type; I’m simply worried about Tommy.’ Clearly, I had interrupted a discussion about the lad’s future, and I said, ‘I’ve just dropped in to pay my respects.’ Molly said, ‘The milkman’s son has won a scholarship, and he was up here yesterday, telling me about it.’ I could not prevent myself saying, ‘Molly, you should be more careful; you shouldn’t let just anybody into your house.’ It occurred to me as I spoke that I had been taking this line with her since she was a tiny girl on my knee. Now she simply grimaced and shrugged. She is not an actress for nothing, and I felt as put down as if I’d done something gauche. Then from the street came the cry, ‘Fresh country strawberries.’ Both women waved down at him to stop, and Molly ran down the stairs. I stood near Anna, watching the scene and watching Anna, who was smiling down at what she saw. Molly loudly invited the strawberry seller up to eat some of his strawberries with them, was refused, and came running up the stairs with a great bowl of strawberries, which certainly did look first class. Molly seemed put out. She said she had recently returned from Italy and it was a culture shock, having to adjust to the English class system. Anna said to Molly that she had hurt the man’s feelings. And certainly Molly has never had any idea of how her uninhibited ways can shock.
I said I wouldn’t have any strawberries; I was leaving.
‘Oh, did I ask you to have some strawberries?’ said Molly laughing. Naughty puss!
‘You’ll have to leave anyway,’ she said, ‘because Richard is coming. We’re in for a ding-dong about Tommy’s future. But do sit down until he comes.’
I sat and watched a scene right out of Bonnard, two pretty women with their white bowls of red strawberries and cream, the sun gleaming on the yellow wine, both frankly and greedily enjoying their little treat.
I was thinking that whatever other worries Molly Jacobs might have, money could not be one of them. Richard is not only Skies Unlimited, which is a household word all over the world, but a dozen other international enterprises too. The sky certainly does seem to be his limit. And he and Molly, I am glad to say, are good friends, in the civilised modern way.
The doorbell rang, and Molly threw down the scarf-wrapped key. She exchanged a smile with Anna I did not know how to read—and I have always prided myself on my psychological acumen—until she said, ‘He has always hated me doing that. He’s such a pompous man.’ But she spoke affectionately, I am sure.
I stood up to go, saying, ‘I hope you aren’t going to say I’m a pompous ass the moment my back is turned.’
But Richard had arrived. His greeting to me was perfunctory, and I could see he had eyes only for the two women. I was envying him that he could discuss his problems with two such sympathetic friends. He was dressed sportily, and Molly teased him. ‘Are you off for a day in the country?’
I left. I must confess I didn’t want to. It was such an attractive scene—that special friendship that is possible only between a man and a woman when they have been intimate, and pretty little Anna Wulf, of whom so much is expected by the literary world, and that Sunday morning scene, lazy, slow, charming.
I went off down Church Street, thinking that next Sunday I would walk by again and permit myself the claims of a very old friendship.
From The Journals of Philip Maxbury Westbourne,
Theatre critic, man of letters, columnist
Women at first certainly did not rush in to approve the book. On the contrary, some distanced themselves from it, including personal friends, on the lines of: why give away our secrets? But that women were critical then of men was surely hardly a secret. It was men who at first approved the book: Nicholas Tomalin, Edwin Muir, who sent me a message about it, and in the States, Irving Howe and then, a bit later, Hugh Leonard, and later still Robert Gottlieb, who became my editor first at Simon & Schuster, then at Knopf.
One immediate problem was that the upheavals in Michael Joseph coincided with the publication of the book: that is when the firm was sold over the heads of the people working there, though they had been promised they could refuse or agree to any sale, and half the editors resigned. My own editor did not like The Golden Notebook; he never said so, but I was told by others in the firm.
Then feminists discovered the book, in Britain, in the States, in Scandinavia, and it became the ‘Bible of the Women’s Movement’. A book that had been planned so coolly was read, I thought, hysterically. The extremest example of this was when, in Sweden, an actress came up to me: ‘I never read anything but the Blue Notebook—oh no, it belongs to me; it has nothing to do with you.’
In Germany and France the novel was not published for ten years, considered too inflammatory. When they did pluck up courage, it was a success at once and taken up by the feminists. In France it won the Prix Medici for translated novels. My editor in the French firm Albin Michel was an American, Peter Israel, and he told me that when he first read The Golden Notebook he was so enraged he threw it across the room, nearly hitting his then girlfriend. But he came to like it, and it was he who was responsible for its doing so well in France.
It was not only women who saw the novel as on one theme. While women were claiming me as their own, seeing nothing in the book but their own agendas, I was getting letters from men and from women, about the politics, so rapidly receding into history, and about madness. The sixties were on us, and the romanticising of lunacy. The theme of people ‘breaking down’ into greater understanding of themselves and their times was very much to the taste of the sixties. Just ahead were Ronnie Laing and his associates. They were supposed to have introduced the theme, discovered it, been its originators. But I wonder. In the fifties was a book by one Haimi Kaplan called The Inner World of Mental Illness. It is a wonderful book—humane, decent, balanced—using examples of mad people from earlier centuries as well as this one. I believe that a lot of people found this book, were inspired by it—but did not acknowledge it. Very often do we see this: people acknowledging every source of their inspiration but the most important one. I think the reason for this is not a reluctance to give acknowledgements where they are due, as much as that the originating impression is so strong it becomes a part of the inspired one, and it is hard to say, ‘That was the impulse, but now this is where I start.’
I also got letters from men about the sex war, appreciative ones. I have always had letters from men about The Golden Notebook. Regularly, year in, year out, I get this one: ‘I found The Golden Notebook. I have given it to my wife/girlfriend/daughter.’ Recently, a letter from Mexico: ‘I have just read The Golden Notebook. I did not know women ever talked about anything but men and babies. I have given it to my wife.’
This letter to Edward Thompson, in reply to one of his criticising The Golden Notebook from a left-wing point of view, speaks for itself:
Dear
Edward,
Many thanks for your letter—it was sweet of you to telephone and sweet of you to write.
Let’s assume it is dangerous, given our temperaments, to have this kind of argument, particularly by letter:
1. I do not understand how anyone could describe the G.N. as subjective—subjective attitudes are objectivised and related to society—or that is what I tried to do.
2. About past history with New Left Review, no, Edward, that is not an accurate description of what happened, but let’s leave it.
3. I think to say that I am something that wandered out of the bush dazzled by bright lights is perhaps an easy way out of thinking about the kind of outsider’s view someone with my kind of upbringing is bound to have about Europe.
4. No my dear Edward, I did not copy bits out of the Soviet newspapers for my imaginary reviews. Strange as it may seem, I made them up.
In fact, if I were to write an obituary about me and The Golden Notebook it would consist of me saying very tartly indeed, like a rather brisk governess, the words written in a balloon over my head: ‘Strange as it may seem, I made it up…’
Or, to put the same idea more theoretically—because the novel is dying, because we are all avid for information, believing erroneously that salvation is going to come from more knowledge about varying aspects of our fragmented world, no one, but no one, not even the literati, the people who are supposed to be interested in novels as novels, reads a book as it should be: people read The Golden Notebook as they might have done an autobiography. Marvellous. This is truly a time of journalism.
My dear Edward, that was a highly constructed book, the point of which was the relation of its parts to each other. It was a novel about the kind of intellectual and emotional attitudes produced now, that people have now, and their relation to each other.
Call that subjectivism and you confess you didn’t read the book…