18
DORIS LESSING
Love...." says Anna, in
Free Women,
stating a theme - shouting
it - announcing a motif with drums and fanfares .. . or so I
imagined. Just as I believed that in a book called
The Golden Note–
book,
the inner section called the "Golden Notebook" might be pre–
sumed to be a central point, to carry the weight of the thing, to make
a statement.
But no.
Other themes went into the making of this book, which was a
crucial time for me : thoughts and themes I had been holding in my
mind for years came together.
One was that it was not possible to find a novel which described
the intellectual and moral climate of a hundred years ago, in the
middle of the last century, in Britain, in the way Tolstoy did
it
for
Russia, Stendhal for France. (At this point it is necessary to make
the obligatory disclaimers.) To read
The Red and the Black,
and
Lucien Leuwen
is to know that France as if one were living there,
to read
Anna Karenina
is
to know that Russia. But a very useful
Victorian novel never got itself written. Hardy tells us what it was
like to be poor, to have an imagination larger than the possibilities
of a very narrow time, to
be
a victim. George Eliot is good as far as
she goes. But I think the penalty she paid for being a Victorian
woman was that she had to be shown to be a good woman even
when she wasn't according to the hypocrisies of the time - there is
a great deal she does not understand because she is moral. Meredith,
that astonishingly underrated writer, is perhaps nearest. Trollope
tried the subject but lacked the scope. There isn't one novel that has
the vigor and conflict of ideas in action that
is
in a good biography
of William Morris.
Of course this attempt on my part assumed that that filter
which is a woman's way of looking at life has the same validity as
the filter which
is
a man's way .. . setting that problem aside, or
rather, not even considering it, I decided that to give the ideological
"feel" of our mid-century, it would have to be set among socialists
and Marxists, because it has been inside the various chapters of so–
cialism that the great debates of our time have gone on; the move–
ments, the wars, the revolutions, have been seen by their participants
as movements of various kinds of socialism, or Marxism, in advance,
containment, or retreat. (I think we should at least concede the
