118
RICHARD HOWARD
Here, for instance, was the situation at the end of her last work,
The Golden Notebook,
which took 567 pages to explore and determine it:
Women, dauntless, warm-hearted, sensitive, imaginative creatures,
in their righteous avidity for personal fulfillment and a proper spiritual
habitation, must confront the world of men (and you know what
men
are!). With the characteristic gallantry of The Sex, though, women try
to make the best of that world, but after engaging themselves, with all
the concomitant drudgery such engagement demands (the suggestion
is that it is somehow unwomanly for a woman to enjoy such things for
their own sake), in politics (Communism) , art (writing novels) and
psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis), women discover that the world of men
is a cheat and a snare for themselves and even for men, though men,
the big babies, delude themselves with the professional toys of business
and art. What's left, of course, is love. But for women the expression of
love, since they are without a religious vocation-at least Doris Lessing's
women are-has to he a sexual one. Well, that's where the trouble
starts. And the fun, at least for a while. Until it comes out (and Mrs.
Lessing makes the ma tter clear enough) that men have a good time
sexually with women in general, but women have a good time sexually
(vaginal orgasm) only with men they love. And love is a lousy aphro–
disiac for men. So the public life is a deception, the rewards of sexuality
a disgrace. It is with this bitter knowledge that
The Golden Note'book
leaves us: after long conversation, all other activity being estranged or
dismissed....
In the new book of stories, this situation is articulated a little further.
In the first piece, a "civilized" rape is executed by an egotistical failure
of a journalist ("It was then, with the tears drying on his eyelids,
which felt old and ironic, that he decided he would sleep with Barbara
Coles") upon this lovely girl-genius who is presented entirely without
ironic distance. For all its violence, the sexual intrusion is dispatched
as efficiently as any White-Goddess-worshipper could hope, and the
tone is set: subject as they are to men, women may sustain, can
survive, and must somehow transcend them.
The title story offers the second articulation, which to the thesis
Women Are Wonderful, Men Are Beasts, offers this antithesis: Women
Have Something Even Worse Than A Beast In Themselves. A "happily"
married woman whose husband is away on a long and apparently happy
trip visits her "happily" married artist friends who have had a baby late
in their marriage. The sexual tensions among the
~hree
are explored
(I refer
to
the three adults), and Our Heroine, again preternaturally
