Where do I begin? Where do I end? Why do I write?
There is too much: Too much Brecht, too much book, too many reasons and meanings. I can line these words up, but the meaning slips away. I'm just nailing jello to the wall.
The Golden Notebook, at least, is solid. There's far too much there - but I can tell you the basic structure, and what it crystallized in me.
Doris Lessing is a brilliant writer, and this is an ambitious novel, pulsing with life. Both Lessing and The Golden Notebook are vast, and contain multitudes.
The heroine is a writer, Anna Wulf, living in London at the end of the '50s. She has written one successful novel, and is trying to find another. But she is stuck, and she is in pieces. All her truth cannot fit in one vessel, so she is writing four notebooks in parallel.
Anna has a black notebook, for memories of Africa, from growing up there. She has a red notebook, where she charts her political life, and her growing disillusionment with the Communist Party. She has a yellow notebook, where she revisits and rewrites an affair that broke her heart. And she has a blue notebook, where she records her present day experience, feelings and dreams. Anna and her journals express various sides of Doris Lessing.
Anna Wulf is in pieces, and she is stuck, and events are closing in upon her. Obstacles get in her way and, one by one, her journals each run dry, with a heavy black line across the page. Yet she finds the courage to live through her crises. By the end of the book, she opens a golden notebook, where all of these separate truths can be woven together into one whole, large enough to express all of Anna.
There's much more to The Golden Notebook: all these slices of life, a ton of feminist wisdom, a lot of post-modern play. But this idea, that writing can bring together all the threads of our being, and make one strong cable out of them, is what most affected me.
This cable, uniting all these threads - this radiant notebook, shaping a million scribbled words into larger meanings and themes - was the answer to questions I was living, but never thought to ask. Where do I begin? Where do I end? Who is Brecht?
I was a freshman in college when I read The Golden Notebook. I had already lived in seven different countries and more than forty villages, towns and cities. That adds up to a lot of adventures, a lot of experience, a whole lot of jello. But I'll see if I can catch a few spoonfuls for you to taste.
I'm the last of my Mom's eight children. Papa was a math professor. I was born in New Orleans, while Papa was on sabbatical at Tulane. Then came Seattle. Then Montreal. By the time I can remember, we were in Cleveland Heights. My parents separated - Papa went to SUNY at Buffalo, but would visit some weekends. Then I was a token gentile in a Jewish school (learned some Hebrew, wore a small hat, ate interesting foods, sang songs).
They paid professors well in those days. Well, Papa was driven, published and published. Comfortable upper-middle class life, so far. When I was eight, parents divorced. Mom moved with us three youngest to Florence. Yowza. Papa was always a game player, and sometimes a pig. Over the years, he grew less dependable with alimony - checks would come late, or small, until he got his way. Mostly, we just fluctuated between upper- and lower-middle class.
Papa wanted his kids to be strong, Mom wanted us to be good. But they agreed we needed to be bright. So we moved to England, and went through nine years of boarding school. There were two blessings there. First, the education: six years of French and Latin; some German, Russian and ancient Greek; two years of calculus; Soccer, Rugby and Cricket; learning a bit about being a gentleman (which I sorely needed). The second blessing was the stability. My vagabond adolescence would have scarred me much worse, if I hadn't had the same buildings, playing fields, teachers and friends to return to after my scattered vacations.
Mom got together with a Peter Pan type, who looked (and drank) rather like Captain Morgan, and it was seven years before they settled in one place. We lived in London, Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, Bristol, Cornish fishing villages, a house in the Scottish countryside, Brittany, Perpignan, and a peasant's cottage, with no running water or electricity. But it had sunsets with more colors than crayola could dream of, and five acres with olives, almonds and figs, and was half a mile from the gorgeous beaches of the Algarve.
I guess I'm a resilient kind of tumbleweed. I was never one for putting down roots, and I was always happiest and most excited in the first few months of some new endeavor or infatuation. Nowadays, finally, way behind schedule, I'm maturing. I've learned the hard way that intelligence is only half the answer: You also need the focus of a longer, stronger attention span. Intelligence is just your potential - smartness is what you can actually build with it.
But all through college, I remained a tumbleweed. I started in computer science, then switched to literature, then to political science, and finally was most invested in acting Shakespeare. Amongst all that I managed to be president of my dorm, a stringer for the New York Times, had a hell of a social life, tried some very interesting drugs, and spent a year at Wellesley.
In my first acting class, the teacher made us keep a journal. It was an interesting exercise, and there was something calming and cathartic about drawing meaning out of all that brownian motion. So, on and off, I kept writing journals.
It took me seven years to graduate, with two degrees. I should have finished earlier. The outside world wanted choices and commitments, and I didn't. College was so full of freedom, new doors to open, everyone buzzing with the thrill of discovery. I'm very lucky that I ended up at MIT, where people put 111% into everything they do.
When I graduated, I was planning to become an actor. Of all the things I'd tried, it was about the most fulfilling. If you get to star in a well-produced Shakespeare play, it demands everything in your heart, your mind, and your body, just to get to the final curtain. Catharsis on eight cylinders. But I can't say I knew who I was, or where I was headed. Outside of acting, I just knew that I had a lot of interesting pieces in me, but they didn't always add up to a whole.
I took an acting class the year before I graduated, from a very wise soul. He was so comfortable to be with, so sensitive, so balanced. He'd also directed a couple of plays I'd been in. When the class finished, he met the students individually, and gave us each one piece of feedback. He told me that I needed to find my inner arrow. I was always busy, juggling competing activities, balancing them against each other. So I had all these arrows poking into me. But I lacked my own sure sense of direction. It was probably the truest, deepest advice I ever got.
After graduating , I went back to Canterbury, where I'd gone to boarding school. I went back to where I once belonged. There was a priest I'd known since I was nine - he and his wife had been at my prep school, and had been like an uncle and aunt to me. Now he was a canon of the cathedral. I lodged with him and his wife in a magnificent house, with a garden rolled flat for croquet, a vast oak spread above it, and the forty-foot high wall of Canterbury, which had kept the Vikings out, along the edge of their garden.
Here, finally, is where The Golden Notebook returns. I went searching for all the threads of me, so I could weave them together. I walked back through my past, trying to remember all the things I'd forgotten. How do you look for things, when you don't know what they look like? I interrogated myself from all angles. When had I been happiest, when most in love, when most embarrassed? When was I coldest, when hungriest, when proudest? Who had I loved, who lost, who learned from?
It's a revealing kind of hide-and-seek, stretching your lateral thinking. You brainstorm every quality or quiddity you can imagine, and then aim for a kind of lucid reminiscing, where you relax enough to let memories awaken into your consciousness. I turned out to be sitting on several basements-full of antiques. Because I had lived in so many houses and apartments, my whole history was parceled out into a couple hundred rooms. I would picture walking into our dining room from Bristol, and objects and events I hadn't thought of in years would occur to me. So I wandered through the mansions of memory, and the found the flotsam of lives lost strewn across the floorboards.
Being a tumbleweed, I wrote and wrote, and never got around to editing. Between my college journals and my Canterbury excavations, I have more than 2000 pages of pressed, dried Brecht. Which I haven't looked at in years. Now I want to do the whole thing again, in a more organized manner. And then go back to the first version, and see what my tumbleweed self found, two decades ago, rolling over the same ground. So I can combine the two into a larger whole.
What really matters here is the journey. The Golden Notebook turned me on to writing, and started a journey of discovery: Mapping out the several parts of me, and exploring outwards into all of humanity, and the lands we live in, and all the stars of our imagination.
We each have to find our own inner arrow - what it is that makes you feel most alive - and then keep riding it. Reading, learning, loving, working, adventure and creation: There are so many ways to be more. For me, these days, writing is the greenest shoot. Writing pulls the threads of me together, and aims the whole cable towards heaven. Writing is the place where I am most being born.