And the tragedy is that this intellectual responsibility, this high seriousness, is in a vacuum: it relates, not to Britain not to communist countries as they are now but to a spirit which existed in international communism years ago, before it was killed by the desperate, crazed spirit of struggle for survival to which we now give the name Stalinism.”

Howe, though a vehement anticommunist, was drawn to Anna Wulf (a lightly veiled rendering of Lessing) and her friend Molly as “voices of a baffled generation, those people who gave their youth to radicalism and ended not knowing how to live.”Īnna says it best: “There is no group of people or type of intellectual I have met outside the Party who aren’t ill-informed, frivolous, parochial, compared with certain types of intellectuals inside the Party. a novel that never stoops to verbal display and is always directed toward establishing a visible world.” He was delighted to discover a made-up universe-in this case, a universe dominated by women-that was such a realistic reflection of a certain part of the Old Left: the communist intelligentsia and their fellow travelers circa 1956, the politically charged year in which the novel is set. Writing in the New Republic, Howe praised Lessing’s abilities as a novelist: “Precise and nuanced dialogue. One of the most laudatory reviews of The Golden Notebook when it first appeared in 1963 was by this magazine’s founding editor, Irving Howe.

The Golden Notebook Jo-Ann Mort ▪ Summer 2004

Author of the golden notebook