Yesterday, aged 94, Doris Lessing died. Born in Iran and raised in Southern Rhodesia, Lessing came of age artistically and politically in postwar London. Frustrated by the isolation and backwardness of Southern Rhodesia (“that dreadful provincial country”), she emigrated to London in 1949, arriving with her son Peter, the manuscript of her first novel, and “rather less than £150.” But she also had that zeal peculiar to the early postwar decades, a passion born of the earnest belief in “the logic of history” of which she, and millions of communists like her, were to be the vehicles. In today’s Europe, where disillusionment and cynicism overwhelm politics, such iron-gilded zeal could not seem more foreign.
Many of the tribute pieces that have appeared today have rightly focused on the inspirational role of Lessing’s novel, The Golden Notebook, for female writers such as Margaret Atwood in the 1960s and 1970s. The openness and ferocious honesty with which that book dealt with a young woman’s experiences of sex, politics, work and motherhood is doubtless one of Lessing’s greatest achievements. Yet Lessing herself made clear that that book was not an argument for women’s liberation. Instead, she assumed that feminists’ arguments were self-evidently true, needing no further comment, and proceeded on that basis to live and to write. She was angry when critics were unable to see beyond the struggle for women’s liberation to the book’s other themes.
Most of all The Golden Notebook is about disillusionment, loss of innocence, what Lessing termed “breakdown.” The idea of communism, so elegantly expressed by Marx, offered a totalizing explanation for and guide to human life. For intellectuals, who love ideas, and who were searching for new ones in the wake of Christianity’s long decline, this was irresistible. But Lessing, unlike many other communist intellectuals, was interested not in ideas alone but in, as she said, “ideas in action.” She had come to London to be in the middle of events, not to theorize from a distance. But the ideas of communism were too polished, too elegant to tally with the chaos of events.
Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook in response to the crumbling of the holy grail of communism. She began writing it in 1957, the year after the Hungarians’ revolt against their Soviet-puppet government and Khruschev’s “secret” speech criticising Stalinism. These two events were pivotal for western communists, shaking their faith in Stalinist orthodoxy. After 1956, western communist party memberships atrophied. Communist ideology could neither explain nor justify the excesses of Soviet totalitarianism.
The Golden Notebook’s fragmented form tries to mirror the mindset of disillusioned ex-communists. Communism had purported to explain everything, and now it could explain nothing. Events no longer had symmetry or order or purpose. Anna Wulf, the main character, is “faced with the burden of recreating order out of the chaos that [her] life had become.”
Lessing once spoke of her pride and happiness that The Golden Notebook was being used in History syllabuses. She had aimed, she said, to write a book that gave the reader a flavour of postwar life in London, that made “one feel as if one were living there.” Probably no book offers such a vivid picture of the motivations, emotions and actions of British left-wingers in the mid-20th century.
But the book is more than a period piece. Our attitudes to politics today mirror Anna Wulf’s—and Lessing’s—disillusionment. We often bemoan how indistinguishable the main political parties have become, yet we are too weary of ideology to take seriously any real deviation from the centre ground. The Golden Notebook—and much of Lessing’s work after it—is a serious attempt to deal with this dilemma.
Despite the intellectual and moral crisis The Golden Notebook chronicled, Lessing went on to became a prolific and superhumanly versatile writer. She wrote novels, poems, libretti, plays, essays and memoirs, and turned from her early realism to science-fiction and formal experimentalism. Each of her readers will want to trace their own thread through her varied oeuvre, making their own connections between her treatments of racism, communism, sexual politics, terrorism and Sufism. For me, Lessing’s life and writing provide one of the best examples we have of someone trying always to face up to the imperfections of ideas—without giving up on them altogether.
