The Kit of the black notebook is reflective, pensive and reads more than he probably should. Yet this is the Kit that dominates, which hunger over useless knowledge stored in the pages of books, and to devour these as a drug addict would in a heartbeat devour a line of coke. The Kit of the red notebook is a lover, not only of his lover, but of humanity and of this world. This is the type of Kit who would tear up over cat videos, help strangers in the street and drop everything to run a school in Cambodia. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen this Kit for quite some time. The Kit of the green notebook is reserved, calculative to the point that it makes him cowardly. Self-preservation is key, and everything else can go to fuck. The Kit of the blue notebook is a cunt.
I’m sure there are plenty of other Kits out there in a variety of other notebooks, but they may be a little too trivial, insignificant, or buried deep. We’re all different versions of ourselves co-existing day to day, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in tandem. The golden notebook is the bind, perhaps the balancer. In a book entitled “The Golden Notebook”, the golden notebook itself takes a little over one-tenth of the novel. The rest of the notebooks — black, red, yellow and blue, as well as the story which encapsulates the notebook, “Free Women”, predominate.
The colourful tapestry of Anna Wulf
The owner of the notebooks is Anna Wulf, a London resident, a professional author (albeit of only one book), a former red (hence the red notebook), a single woman, friend, a migrant from Africa. If you’ve read anything about Doris Lessing, you wouldn’t win any gold medals to observe that she shares the same traits as Anna Wulf, that The Golden Notebook is semi-autobiographical, that fact and fiction would likely to have interfered with each other. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much on the parallels between the two, but we know it’s there. It matters not anyhow.
The black notebook is the writer Anna, much entwined with her experiences in Africa, which resulted in her one and only book propelling her to success. The red notebook Anna is the communist and her disillusionment working with the party and witnessing first-hand the deterioration of the communist ideals. The yellow notebook is a new novel which meanders around her personal relationship, which seems to be getting nowhere, substituting the characters in her life and imposing other names to them, though the experiences here may be more lucid than what she writes in the blue notebook, her personal diary. It is noteworthy that much of the blue notebook is her experiences with psychoanalysis.
The notebooks are framed around her experiences with her friend Molly and her son, Tommy, which divides the sequences of the notebooks in to sections called Free Women. Divorced, with Richard, the ex-husband bludgeoning her to convince Tommy to jump into his line of work, the tension in the broken family is high and Anna is stuck in the periphery to offer support for Molly and Tommy. On top of all this, Richard’s second wife Marion is also attached to Tommy to the point that she is dependent on him more than her own children. This only accumulates the stress on Tommy who seeks advice from Anna, but who might not have led him to the right direction after he accidentally perused through Anna’s notebooks.
The tangling threads of the notebooks
The book (or books) is unique in its form, which serves it purpose to muddle fact and fiction, one identity to another, different part of the selves from each other and ultimately, the need for cohesion. The notebooks themselves flow from one to the other within the same page: red coming after black, followed by yellow, followed by blue before going back to the spine of “Free Women”. If you mix the colours of the four notebooks together, you’d probably get a sickly brown colour instead of gold, but somehow the end product of the four preceding notebook results in gold.
As a colour symbolism, I find this ambiguous. The golden notebook is the recognition that Anna no longer needs to compartmentalise her identity, it is after all exhausting to keep up four different notebooks and thus, four different selves. The conscious act of writing the golden notebook is the act of winning back the Self. However, in the end Molly gives away the golden notebook to her American lover and tenant, Saul.
Her gift of the golden notebook to a dead-end lover she kicked out of her own home wasn’t necessarily a voluntary act. Though Anna would have liked to have found cohesion, did she throw that in a heartbeat? The content of the golden notebook can be mistaken for any of the other notebooks (save perhaps for the yellow notebook) which makes us wonder, if anything, whether she needed the four preceding notebooks in the first place. But the golden notebook served her purpose to overcome her writer’s block, which is what ultimately the book is for. Was Lessing stuck in a mean writer’s block and consequently wrote one of the most personal and beautifully written book of the twentieth century? Once again, that answer matters not.
The entanglements of the notebook is beautiful. Yes, the book is a mess, like your ten-year old sister’s omelette, but there are good bits and pieces of mushrooms here and there which make all the flavour. There are lines to be savoured, memorised. Here are some lines of many many many that I underlined:
On the ephemeral nature of relationships:
I remember feeling the intimate pressure of his arm in the small of my back, and thinking that, living in a group as we did, these quick flares of attraction could flare and die in a moment, leaving behind them tenderness, unfulfilled curiosity, a slightly wry and not unpleasant pain of loss; and I thought that perhaps it was above all the tender pain of unfulfilled possibilities that bound us.
On the elusiveness of memory:
But I can’t remember, it’s all gone. And I get exasperated, trying to remember- it’s like wrestling with an obstinate other-self who insists on its own kind of privacy. Yet it’s all there in my brain if only I could get at it. I am appalled at how much I didn’t notice, living inside the subjective highly-coloured mist. How do I know that what I ‘remember’ was what was important? What I remember was chosen by Anna, of twenty years ago. I don’t what this Anna of now would choose.
On our previous self:
Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.
It is not a feminist text (as Lessing herself stated), but that is not to say that it cannot be used as feminist fuel. It is also a deep meditation of societal expectations and breaking away with it as best you can. It is full of ideas about sex that some can mistake it to be the centrepiece of the novel. But sex is only a part of the bigger machinery of relationships.
Too many people are hung up on what the book is supposed to be about to the point that in the preface, Lessing mentioned that she receives letters and letters of readers telling her what the book is about for them, their scope narrowed that they can’t see anything else — the sex war, the male oppression of females, the communist ideals. For Lessing it is an “instructive” experience, that the same book can be viewed in multiple lenses by multitudes of readers. For Lessing, the enthusiasm of reading, the excitement of the text, is the essence, and trumps the need for analysis. I tend to agree, but I still to read anything and everything I can get my hands on, and hypocritically, write about it.
For me, I can’t laser point on any one thing, but what stood out the most is one’s assertion of identity. Much like Anaïs Nin’s layered woman in The Spy in the House of Love, Lessing’s Wulf struggles to find a dominant voice, the most fitting perspective as each notebook represents. The golden notebook is that assertion. The variety of voices from the four notebooks are actually the problem in the purpose of her life — as no voice can take the lead, her plaguing writer’s block continues. The golden notebook is not a perfect assertion by any means, but it is a start which allows to complete her next book.
What we don’t know is whether Anna Wulf will settle for this cohesion that she attained with the utmost difficulty. Or whether at some point she will need to compartmentalise herself again to different notebooks. But this is speculation and does not matter. The book, like the many notebooks of Anna Wulf mean many things to me, some that I would keep for a while, some that I have already forgotten. But it a book for me to revisit; if not for rereading it as a whole, to revisit the passages I underlined, of which I’ll drop another to conclude:
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
P.S. The Guardian’s article on other writer’s perspective on The Golden Notebook is an enlightening read for this text that keeps on giving.
