Literary Half-Lives

Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef

R. Rubenstein

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137413659
• eBook ISBN: 9781137413666
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While Doris Lessing was composing The Golden Notebook, she was intimately involved with Clancy Sigal and their relationship influenced the literary methods of both writers. Focusing on literary transformations, Rubenstein offers compelling insights into the ethical implications of disguised autobiography and roman à clef.

CHAPTER 1

HALL OF MIRRORS

“I’m going to London tomorrow.” Clancy Sigal (“Going Away” Journal, May 15, 1957)

“An American ‘ex-red’ comes to London. No money, no friends.” Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)

“Ex-Hollywood Red. Comes to London. No money, no friends.” Clancy Sigal (unpublished writing about Doris Lessing)

Preliminaries

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook has not traditionally been regarded as a roman à clef, in part because it has not been viewed as a “novel with a key.” At various points, the narrative draws on transformed autobiographical experiences of its author that are not included in this analysis. To understand the disguised autobiographical aspects of portions of the novel that draw directly and at times quite transparently on the vexed intimate relationship between Lessing and Clancy Sigal, it is useful to know several facts: first, Sigal arrived at Lessing’s London flat in May, 1957, penniless and seeking to rent the room that was available in her large two-story flat. Soon afterward, the two became involved in a complex intimate liaison that lasted for four years. By the time their lives converged, both had already adopted the technique of “mining” their actual experiences for their fiction. By 1957, Lessing was well along in her writing career, with four novels, three volumes of short fiction, and a memoir to her credit.¹ Sigal was an aspiring but not yet published writer by that date, although he had drafted enough of a first novel to have received a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship to support its completion. The strongly autobiographical first-person narrative, Going Away, completed while he was living with Lessing and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, traces the literal and interior journeys of an unnamed narrator, who strongly resembles Sigal himself, as he drives his battered 1940 Pontiac sedan across the country from California to New York. At the end of his sojourn, as he departs on a ship bound for Europe, he wonders whether he can write the book “that was to be the sum and total of all that I knew of myself and the worlds in which I had grown up” (Going Away 511).

A significant part of the period during which Doris Lessing composed The Golden Notebook coincided with the critical first year of her relationship with Clancy Sigal, who began to live with her in the intimate sense soon after he moved into her flat as a lodger in May 1957. As Lessing acknowledges in her autobiography, she was “deep” in the novel in 1957 and 1958 (Walking in the Shade 261); she explained to an interviewer that she wrote the novel in one year, presumably the period straddling 1957–8 (“Breaking down These Forms” 115). Considerably more than traces of Sigal and their complicated relationship made their way into the novel in progress. Of additional significance for the matter of the disguised autobiographical and roman à clef elements of Lessing’s and Sigal’s literary works, both writers kept private journals and diaries. Lessing’s diaries are not available for scholarly scrutiny. As she explained, “I have kept diaries, of course, but they can’t be read for quite a long time” (Interview with Jonah Raskin). However, her fictionalized persona, Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, is an inveterate journal-writer who divides her experiences among four color-labeled notebooks. Sigal recorded his thoughts and experiences in handwritten journals, the raw material upon which he initially drew extensively to compose versions of his experiences that were disguised, to a greater or lesser degree, for sketches, stories, plays, and novels, both published and unpublished. His maintenance of a private written record of his personal life is important for understanding two decisive developments that occurred quite early in the relationship between Lessing and Sigal.

Doris Lessing/Anna Wulf—I

The Golden Notebook is structured as a series of repeating segments of four different notebooks plus the singular inner golden notebook. Together, they track and reflect Anna Wulf’s cumulative emotional and intellectual self-division: her struggle to examine her aesthetic premises and political disillusionments, to stave off emotional pain, to resist (but also to embrace) psychological breakdown, and to resolve her writer’s block. Interspersed between each cycle of notebooks are installments of what Lessing later termed a “conventional novel” titled Free Women. As she explained, the “envelope” for the notebooks is “an absolutely whole conventional novel, and the rest of the book is the material that went into making it” (“A Talk with Doris Lessing” 81). Moreover, as first-time readers discover only quite late in the novel, Anna Wulf is the author not only of the notebooks but also of Free Women. Aesthetically, the cycles of notebook portions, interrupted by segments of Free Women, create the novel’s structural organization. The four color-labeled notebooks span the years from 1950 to 1956, with several exceptions that encompass earlier dates. The final three notebook segments in the narrative—concluding installments of the yellow and blue notebooks and a newly introduced golden notebook that appears for the first and only time late in the novel—are undated and focus on events that, as can later be determined by internal evidence, were written by Anna Wulf sometime between September 1956 and the summer of 1957. These three notebook segments, in particular, convey the sense that events are happening virtually as Anna records them; the character named Saul Green, who is first introduced by name in the final segment of the blue notebook, figures centrally in these three notebooks.

The Golden Notebook pivots on a narrative irony: the same Anna Wulf who struggles relentlessly to close the gap between language and experience and who protests that she is unable to write another novel following Frontiers of War nonetheless writes—indeed writes compulsively and prolifically—in the notebooks that reflect her emotional and intellectual divisions. The black notebook, which appears first in each repeating sequence, focuses on Anna’s career as a writer. It also features extended flashbacks to events of her young adulthood in Southern Rhodesia, the acknowledged raw material that went into her first and only novel. The second notebook in each cycle of the series, the red notebook, focuses on Anna’s political life, including her conflicted feelings about joining and later leaving the British Communist Party. At several points, in place of journal entries, the black and red notebooks are “taken over by newspaper cuttings” concerning political events in “Europe, the Soviet Union, China, the United States” (The Golden Notebook 492²). By 1956 and 1957, respectively, Anna ends the black and red notebooks with bracketed statements describing “a double black line across the page, marking the end of the notebook” (492, 497). These marks, which are not visually reproduced in the text, signify, as Lessing explains elsewhere, “the need for drawing lines—finis”—demarcations that mark the end point for certain kinds of experiences (Walking 338, Lessing’s italics). The third notebook in the sequence, the yellow notebook, focuses on Anna Wulf’s unsatisfying relationships with men. By projecting her experiences into a thinly fictionalized character named Ella, protagonist of a novel in progress titled The Shadow of the Third, Anna examines the dynamics of her intimate experiences, including her emotional, sexual, and intellectual responses. In the fourth notebook in the series, the blue notebook, she records her experiences in diary form, endeavoring to articulate them “truthfully,” presumably without embellishment or aesthetic shaping.

The final installment of the yellow notebook consists of 19 brief sketches or synopses, nearly all of which describe seeds for possible stories or short novels that Anna Wulf might write, based on a complex intimate relationship between a man and a woman. In turn, the sketches suggest troubling aspects of the relationship between Doris Lessing and her American lodger and lover, Clancy Sigal, which began and continued while she was composing The Golden Notebook. The first sketch describes “A woman, starved for love [who] meets a man rather younger than herself, younger perhaps in emotional experience than in years; or perhaps in the depth of his emotional experience. She deludes herself about the nature of the man; for him another love affair merely” (GN 497). Sketch 8 describes a kind of emotional parasitism that infects an independent woman artist—“painter, writer, doesn’t matter which”—who lives alone but whose “whole life is oriented around an absent man for whom she is waiting. Her flat too big, for instance.” Waiting for this man to arrive, she ceases to paint or write, while continuing to regard herself as an artist. Finally, “a man enters her life, some kind of artist, but one who has not yet crystallised as one.” However, the intersection of love and aesthetic creativity proves to be destructive rather than productive for the woman but not for the man: “[h]er personality as ‘an artist’ goes into his, he feeds off it, works from it, as if she were a dynamo that fed energy into him. Finally he emerges, a real artist fulfilled; the artist in her dead. The moment when she is no longer an artist, he leaves her, he needs the woman who has this quality so that he can create” (GN 500). These sketches suggest the ways in which Doris Lessing gave fictional form to her own artistic and emotional anxieties as her complicated relationship with Clancy Sigal unfolded.

One anxiety in particular was triggered by the matter of sexual fidelity, as is expressed by Anna in yellow notebook sketches 6, 7, and 12. The first describes “[a] man and a woman, in a love affair. She, for hunger of love, he for refuge” (GN 499). Just before an intimate sexual moment between them, they reach an awkward impasse: the man only desires her when she refuses him. She accuses him of having recently been with another woman. Initially, he admits as much—“How did you know?”—but then denies it, attributing the complaint to her imagination. Eventually, he concedes that her assumption is correct but that he “didn’t think it would matter. You have to understand, I don’t take it seriously.” The sketch concludes, “This last remark makes her feel diminished and destroyed, as if she does not exist as a woman” (500). In a variation of this scene, sketch 12 describes a man who unconsciously wants his unfaithfulness to be discovered as a way to assert his sexual and emotional independence. He needs to be able to say to his wife, “I’m not going to belong to you” (502). Sketch 7 describes a man who “happens to land in the house of a woman whom he likes and whom he needs.” Soon he realizes that “his need for temporary refuge has trapped him into what he most dreads: a woman saying, I love you.” He terminates the relationship, writing in his diary, “Left London. Anna reproachful. She hated me. Well, so be it. And another entry, months later, which could read either: Anna married, good. Or: Anna committed suicide. Pity, a nice woman” (GN 500).

Clancy Sigal/Saul Green—I

In what might initially seem the most transparent of Doris Lessing’s fictionalized references to Clancy Sigal in The Golden Notebook, sketch 9 in the yellow notebook—Anna Wulf’s idea for “a short novel”—begins, “An American ‘ex-red’ comes to London. No money, no friends. Black-listed in the film and television worlds” (GN 501). After seven months in Paris in late 1956 and early 1957, Clancy Sigal—an American “ex-red” who was “black-listed in the film and television worlds” during the McCarthy era—arrived in London in May 1957, at the age of 30 with little money, few friends, and no place to stay. At the time, Doris Lessing’s good friend, Joan Rodker—whose name was apparently given to Sigal by political friends—recommended that he contact Lessing, whom Rodker knew had a room to let in her large two-story maisonette on Warwick Street. In her autobiography, Lessing, without identifying Rodker by name, recalls that “[s]omeone had telephoned to say that this American was in town, he needed a place to stay, could I let him a room. I said my career as a landlady had not encouraged me to try again” (Walking 167).

According to Clancy Sigal’s journal and several thinly fictionalized drafts that focus on the initial encounter and first phase of his relationship with Doris Lessing, they first met on May 19, 1957. Apparently—and rather surprisingly—Sigal did not record that meeting in his journal, although on his last day in France, several days before that fateful day, he did write, “I’m going to London tomorrow” (“Going Away” Journal, May 15, 1957³). At some point, he began to draw on the details of their first encounter for his early and thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of the unfolding of their intimate relationship. Some of that material was incorporated into early unpublished typescripts, most pertinently a 14-page typescript fragment titled “The Sexual History of Jake Blue” and a longer untitled and unfinished multi-chapter typescript that apparently takes up his disguised autobiography where his novel/memoir, Going Away, leaves off: Sigal’s departure from the United States in the fall of 1956 and his seven months’ residence in Paris in 1956–57, including his love affair with a married woman, Riva Boren Lanzmann.⁴ The heavily edited “Jake Blue” typescript thinly fictionalizes the single day and evening in May 1957 that initiated Clancy Sigal’s relationship with Doris Lessing; two chapters of the longer untitled typescript not only encompass that day but extend into the succeeding days and early months of the relationship. In both versions, Sigal created fictional stand-ins for Lessing (Coral Brand) and himself—Jake Blue and the unnamed narrator of the longer typescript—and lightly disguised a number of details based on their first encounter.

Chapters Four and Five of the untitled longer typescript are headed with the address, “58 Warwick Road”—the actual address of Doris Lessing’s London flat—which Sigal apparently later crossed out, inserting in longhand the fictitious surname and address, “Brand, 2 Tregunter Rd.”; the chapters are further subdivided with headings of dates during the summer and fall of 1957.⁵ The pages contain virtually no editorial corrections except for one especially significant change: the name Doris is deleted throughout, apart from several instances that Sigal apparently overlooked. Over the white-out, Sigal printed in longhand block letters his fictional name for Doris Lessing, Coral Brand; for Lessing’s son, Peter, he substituted the name David in longhand throughout (“CS writing about DL,” Coral typescript). Portions of these chapters overlap with events recounted in the shorter typescript, “The Sexual History of Jake Blue.”

In both typescripts, Sigal, rather than composing overt autobiography or memoir, began to disguise and transform the particulars of his early days with Lessing. The title of the shorter piece, “The Sexual History of Jake Blue,” obviously plays directly on the name of Saul Green, a major character in The Golden Notebook. Significantly, the shorter typescript opens with Jake Blue’s statement, “Now it’s my turn” (“The Sexual History of Jake Blue” 1)—Sigal’s intention to tell his side of the story of their complicated love affair. The two chapters of the longer Coral typescript seem more polished than the “Jake Blue” piece. In them, Sigal’s narrative persona not only describes but also reflects on certain events and ponders behaviors on both his and Lessing’s part that decisively shaped the course of their relationship. Though it is not possible to date or establish the sequence of the two overlapping typescripts, one may speculate that “The Sexual History of Jake Blue” and the Coral chapters of the longer lightly disguised autobiographical typescript—both narrated in the first-person point of view—were drafted fairly close in time to each other, either just before or soon after Sigal and Lessing separated early in 1960, with the incomplete “Jake Blue” sketch drafted before the Coral chapters that exist as part of a longer semi-autobiographical manuscript. In both versions, the day of the initial encounter between Sigal and Lessing in May 1957 is recounted in extensive detail.

“The Sexual History of Jake Blue” draws on a number of details from the personal histories of both Clancy Sigal and Doris Lessing. Jake Blue arrives in London following half a year in Paris that included a love affair with a French woman—impaired, he jests, by his admittedly imperfect French. On the very evening of the day he takes the room in Coral Brand’s flat, their relationship begins to unfold. He and Coral exchange biographical information, describing their respective Leftist political involvements and Coral’s—but, significantly, not Jake’s—intimate history. Thinly fictionalizing details from Lessing’s life, Sigal describes Coral’s youth and early adulthood in Southern Rhodesia. Unlike Lessing’s real father, whose serious injury during World War I resulted in the amputation of one of his legs and who later settled in Southern Rhodesia, Coral Brand’s father was gassed during the war and later settled in South Africa. Coral married a “Bloomfontein tobacco planter” who enlisted in the Royal Air Force [RAF] soon after she gave birth to their son and who was stationed in Egypt for training (“Jake Blue” 9).

Concerning Lessing’s own fictionalization of some of the same details of her young adult life in Southern Rhodesia, Anna Wulf explains in the first (black) notebook of The Golden Notebook that she was briefly married to a Southern Rhodesian tobacco farmer named Steven; she left the marriage because she “could never stand the life” (GN 65) and became a secretary in Salisbury. In Sigal’s rendering, the dissatisfied Coral left her first marriage and began to work in a Johannesburg department store. There, she became involved with its manager, a “German-Jewish refugee, a Communist playwright and friend of Brecht” (“Jake Blue” 9), who not only was married but, as it later emerged, was a spy for British intelligence concerning South Africa. When Otto Vogel’s wife discovered his affair with Coral Brand, she filed for divorce; because of Otto’s prominence in the community, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Where the Story Begins
• 1   Hall of Mirrors
• 2   Truth Values and Mining Claims
• 3   Plays and Power Plays
• 4   Will the Real Saul Green Please Stand Up?
• 5   A Rose by Any Other Name
• 6   Life in the Interior Zone
• 7   Poetic License and Poetic Justice
• 8   Variations on a Theme
• 9   Of Parent and Child
• Conclusion   His, Hers, Theirs
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index