Walking in the Shade (49 page)

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:

It leads the strangest life,
The Golden Notebook
.

I meet women who say, ‘I read
The Golden Notebook
in the sixties. It changed my life. My daughter read it and now my granddaughter.'

This business of a book changing one's life. That can only mean that one is ready to change and the book tips up a balance.

In Rio once, I was sitting outside my hotel on the pavement, as one may do in southern climes. Girls from the
favelas
come to sit there, sometimes all day over a single coffee or a fruit drink, because for the price of a decent dress they are out of squalor and poverty for a while—a week or so. The waiters tolerate them, turn a blind eye if—not very often—they find a customer. Too many girls, not enough customers. Two of the girls were at a near table, and one called across, ‘My friend wants to tell you something. She doesn't speak English. She loves you.' But no, what she wanted to tell me was that she loved
The Golden Notebook
. How did the book find its way into one of the worst slums in the world? I was infinitely touched, grateful.

In China the book has been printed twice, in editions of eighty thousand, small for them, with their vast population, huge for us. Both times it sold out in a couple of days, to women, for there, too, it is a woman's book. The lives of women are so hard I am glad the book is of use to them, never mind about what the book is ‘really' about.

But that is China. I do object when the feminists claim my books as their property in the States, or Britain, because another letter I get quite often says, ‘At university I didn't read you because the feminists said Keep Out. But then I read one of your books and saw that they aren't just for women.'

And so now, forty years on, this controversial book which so upset publishers and reviewers has become a kind of classic, taken for granted. The other day I was greeted by sixteen-year-olds from a London school, saying their teacher had said they must read
The Golden Notebook
. ‘We love it,' they said.

And another young woman, from Eastern Europe, when I had finished lecturing about something or other, said she and her friends were reading
The Golden Notebook
, and ‘It's fascinating, reading about all those old times.'

Sometimes I hear the book has been prescribed in history or political courses, and this pleases me, for after all, that is where I began, wanting to write a chronicle of the times. And that is where, if the book lasts at all, its value will be found. For I do think, whatever I failed at, or succeeded in, it is an honest and truthful and reliable account of how we all were at that time. It could not be written now, because a novel has to come out of some matrix of atmosphere, or feeling, or thought, and now that all seems so remote. It is hard to believe they happened, ‘all those old times'.

Now the most bizarre of
The Golden Notebook's
many lives. It became a text for deconstructionists. This book, born directly out of so much blood, sweat, and particularly tears, a little intellectual game? You have to laugh; there's nothing else to be done.

Writing
The Golden Notebook
changed me. Writing any book changes you: this has to be so, if you think about it. On the lowest level, if you are thinking hard about a subject, information and insights on that subject seem to come in from everywhere: books arrive in your life, you hear it on the radio, in conversations, and on television. This is a fact, it is true, you can rely on it—and there is no ‘scientific' explanation for it. Yet. But I am not talking about this kind of rapid information-getting. Writing that novel changed the way I thought and more fundamentally than thinking. When I began it, while I had thrown out communism, all of the mind-sets of communism remained. Now, that set of mind not only defined communists and ex-communists but had become the property of people who had never been communist or even socialist. Before the fifties had ended, I was reading leading articles in the ‘capitalist press', impeccably conservative articles but using communist jargon: concrete steps, contradictions, demos, the interpenetration of opposites, the class war, and all the rest. We were observing that continually repeating process, the ways of thinking of an excluded or even ostracised minority spreading gently up and down and around and about until they have become part of the ‘climate of opinion'.

For some decades now there has been something I call the ‘package', the accepted, fashionable package which every young person emerging from our western education has been taught to accept as the only possible one. This is less true than it was, for the ideas of later-excluded minorities are permeating it. First of all, Marxism, one of the fifty-seven varieties of Marxism, and this even when it is not recognised as Marxism. Then, the belief that human society is destined to become even better in every way, and particularly materially: more and more material prosperity is everybody's future—there will be ever more cars, refrigerators, comfort, security, an upwardly moving escalator on which everyone in the world is standing. (But this one has become less persuasive.) This is materialism, a chicken in every pot—the United States' hard-times political slogan, displacing ‘pie in the sky'. A chicken in
every
pot, everywhere—but that is as out of reach as ever. Then, the largest item in the package, philosophical materialism, the God-is-dead, Science-is-king materialism.

Anyone who does not subscribe to this last one—for it is as strong as ever—is patronised as feeble-minded and a coward. There is a sneer, implicit or overt, when someone says, ‘I do not understand people who believe in God.' They may even say, ‘Uneducated people, yes.' God to them becomes a kind of insurance policy against the terrors of eternity for those who cannot face extinction. Yet those who puff themselves up by this kind of contempt never seem to reflect that many of the people who believe in God believe in hellfire and all kinds of painful damnation, as well as in paradise. The Muslims, for instance, and certain extreme Christian sects. Surely this should be seen as courage, not cowardice? It is a stage people go through, despising the believers in God. I did. I remember my smugness and my feeling I was saying something original that had cost thought.

Necessary subclauses to this agenda were that South Africa was a wicked tyranny—true—which could only end in a bloodbath, ‘a night of the long knives': untrue. Southern Rhodesia was in the process of coming to be seen in the same light. The United States was the world's chief enemy, a tyranny much worse than the Soviet Union, which still, despite all the revelations, occupied a haloed spot in many people's minds. A contempt for our own country, Britain, so deeply felt it had not, then, been examined at all, showed itself in a steady nagging denigration of everything British. This was the other side of ‘British is best'. Taken for granted was that
real
politics went on somewhere else, because
real
politics mean unrest, violence, riots, and revolution, and Britain—then—did not go in for that kind of thing: we were peaceful, nonviolent, believed in settling matters by the vote—contemptible; and, then, did not go in for extremes of opinion. At the slightest hint of revolution, or even unrest somewhere else, as many British ‘activists' as could afford it were off to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or moments of excitement in Paris.

By the time I had finished
The Golden Notebook
I had written my way out of the package, but it was not that I came to the last sentence and shouted, ‘Eureka, I have got it at last!' I began by noticing that when I was with certain comrades and ex-comrades and even ordinarily middle-of-the-road political friends, they radiated complacency, not to say conceit, because of this ‘package'. To believe in continual upward progress, the materialist escalator, was proof of good intentions and concern for the human race; to have thrown God out of the window and to stand alone in the face of the cold universe was to be brave and indomitable. To believe in revolution meant you were courageous, particularly if, in your secret fantasies, you defied torturers and survived concentration camps.