The Golden Notebook
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2018
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How self-revealing and frank should a writer be? Lara Feigel, David Aaronovitch, Melissa Benn and Xiaolu Guo join Matthew Sweet to look at the life of Doris Lessing and her 1962 novel in which she explores difficult love, life, war, politics and dreams.
Inspired by her re-reading of Doris Lessing, Lara Feigel has written a revealing book which is part memoir part biography called "Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing".
Melissa Benn's books include Mother and Child, One of Us and School Wars
David Aaronovitch is the author of Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists and a former winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism.
Xiaolu Guo has written a memoir Once Upon a Time in the East, and novels including UFO in Her Eyes, and Lovers In the Age of Indifference.
Producer: Fiona McLean
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Hello, I'm Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:33.5 | Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. |
| 0:42.8 | If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:48.3 | And while you're there, please rate and review us. It'll help other people find us. |
| 0:52.7 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:57.7 | The point is, everything's cracking up. |
| 1:01.1 | We're told that at the start of The Golden Notebook, a novel that seems built to speed the |
| 1:06.2 | cracking up process, a novel of house brick-like window-smashing heft. What kind of everything? Well, |
| 1:13.5 | women, men, the family, marriage, communism, colonialism, the narrator and the novel itself. |
| 1:20.3 | We are, said its author, the Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, living in the middle of a whirlwind. |
| 1:26.1 | So here's the damage report from its first publication |
| 1:29.3 | in 1962. The heroine Anna Wolf, formerly Anna Freeman, is a divorced writer living in a shared |
| 1:36.3 | flat in London and is wondering when the money will run out. In her flat she keeps four notebooks. |
| 1:42.3 | A black notebook records her experiences in Africa. |
| 1:45.0 | A red notebook is for politics and treats her relationship with the British Communist Party, |
| 1:50.0 | rocked by the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the publication of Khrushchev's secret speech. |
| 1:56.0 | The yellow notebook, she says, is where she makes stories out of my experience. The blue notebook tries to be a diary. |
| 2:03.8 | It's here that she describes the progress of her relationship with an American lover, Saul Green, |
| 2:09.5 | and the moments when she seems to slip into madness. I've made that sound simple, but it's not |
... |
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