Introduction Where the Story Begins 1 Hall of Mirrors

NOTES Introduction Where the Story Begins 1. The New York Times obituary of Sam Jaffe, founder and head of the Jaffe Agency from 1935 to 1959, states that the agency “suffered during the McCarthy era, when many of its clients were singled out by the House Un-American Activities Committee.” “Sam Jaffe, 98, Hollywood Agent” [obituary]. 2. Sigal began writing Going Away: A Report, a Memoir before he left the United States for Europe in 1956 and completed it in London. As a result of publication delays, it did not appear in print in the United States under the Houghton Mifflin imprint until 1962, the year after his later-written book, Weekend in Dinlock, was published in London by Secker and Warburg. 3. Zone of the Interior (New York: Crowell, 1976) was first published in Britain in 2005 (Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Pomona Press, 2005). 4. In Lessing’s view, her mother let it be known virtually from her birth that she was “not wanted in the first place; that to have a girl was a disappointment that nearly did her in altogether, after that long labour; . that I was an impossibly difficult baby, and then a tire- some child, quite unlike my little brother Harry who was always so good. [M]y memories of her are all of antagonism, and fighting, and feeling shut out; of pain because the baby born two-and-a-half years after me was so much loved when I was not” (“Impertinent Daughters” 61). 1 Hall of Mirrors 1. See Introduction, p. 10, for a list of the eight books. 2. Subsequent references to the novel in this chapter and through- out the text are to the 1981 paperback edition (New York: Harper Perennial/Bantam Windstone, 1981), abbreviated as GN. 3. I am especially grateful to Clancy Sigal and to the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, for permission to quote from unpublished materials in the Clancy Sigal Archive. 4. Riva Boren Lanzmann (1926–95) was a visual artist of Polish descent whom Sigal later described as a “Communist militant” (“Going 202 Notes Away” 14). While she and Clancy Sigal were lovers, she was married to Jacques Lanzmann (1927–2006), later a literary critic, publisher, editor, journalist, scriptwriter, and lyric composer. For more about the Lanzmann family, see chapter 8 below. 5. This typescript draft (in Boxes 50.9 and 50.10, Clancy Sigal Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas) is included in folders labeled “CS writing about DL.” Subsequent references in the text will appear as “CS writing about DL” Coral typescript or “Coral typescript.” 6. Carole Klein, Lessing’s unauthorized biographer, speculates that Jane Bond is based on Anne Edwards, a friend of Sigal’s in Hollywood who “moved to London about a year after he did” and whose home “became sort of a refuge for Sigal. Edwards remembers Sigal informing her that she had been turned into a character in The Golden Notebook. Presumably he was referring to the interloping Jane Bond” (Doris Lessing 176). In her autobiography, Anne Edwards describes her friendship with Sigal, “a former Hollywood agent (and Beverly Hills neigh- bor, and coworker of my ex-husband).” She notes that Sigal “hinted that Doris was the jealous type. If so, she had no reason to be jealous of me as Clancy was a good friend, nothing more” (Leaving Home 42). 7. Sigal categorically denies my claim that Lessing’s literary method influenced his. As he objected, “IN FULL CAPS. I do NOT credit Doris as a major influence. If there was any immediate influence, it was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins and Sartre’s Roads to Freedom series. Remember, I’d first gone to Paris and hung out on the fringe of the Flore café” (e-mail to the author dated March 10, 2012, Sigal’s caps). When asked further about the influence of The Mandarins on his writing, he revised his earlier statement, elabo- rating, “‘Influences’ tricky. I’d read Mandarins but, on reflection, it didn’t make that big an impact. Friendship with Algren more important and ‘influential.’ The more important immediate influences Hemingway, Dos Passos, Irwin Shaw, radio plays put on by Welles’s Mercury Theatre of the Air, a Hungarian writer named John Pen, Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel), Salinger, certain comic strips like Terry & The Pirates and Prince Valiant for their narrative skills” (e-mail message to the author dated April 28, 2012). 8. Undated letter from Doris Lessing to Joan Rodker, headed “July” [from internal evidence: 1957], Box 2.6. Joan Rodker Archive, Harry Ransom Center. Subsequent references in the text will be abbreviated as “letter headed ‘July.’” I am grateful to Ernest Rodker and the Harry Ransom Center for permission to quote from unpublished materials. 9. Undated letter to Joan Rodker, headed “Friday” [from internal evidence: summer 1958], Box 2.6. Joan Rodker Archive, Harry Ransom Center. Subsequent references in the text will be abbreviated as “letter headed ‘Friday.’” Notes 203 10. Undated letter to Joan Rodker headed “Sunday” [from internal evidence, 1958], Rodker Archive, HRC. 11. Letter to Joan Rodker dated December 4 [postmarked 1957], Rodker Archive, HRC. 12. Concerning Saul’s description of Anna as “two women,” Claire Sprague observes that “Molly is revealed as a part of Anna that has been temporarily given a separate, objective existence” (Rereading Doris Lessing 61). In this context, Beth A. Boehm contends that readers are invited to read the novel in mutually exclusive ways, as “real- istic” and as metafiction: “Suddenly Molly’s existence as a character in some fictional ‘real’ world—the world we believed was being cre- ated by ‘Free Women’—is challenged; we must ask if she is merely a projection of Anna’s split personality, and if she is, we then must ask what her appearance in the blue and red notebooks, the most ‘factual’ of the notebooks, tells us about the ontological relationship of those texts to some fictional ‘real’ world.”(“Reeducating Readers” 92–3). 13. FLN is the acronym for the Algerian National Liberation Front—in French, the Front de Libération Nationale—the revolutionary group that fought against France in the Algerian War of Independence during the 1950s. Web. 14. Over many years of critical analysis of The Golden Notebook, numerous scholars, including myself, have pondered the problematic fictional status of the character Saul Green. See my earlier analysis of Saul’s ontological status as a character in The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing 102–7. See also Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story, esp. 55–102; and Suzette Henke, “Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook” 159–87. 2 Truth Values and Mining Claims 1. As Beth A. Boehm observes, “Lessing bitterly complained about the many misreadings produced by critics of her novel and about the fact that no one noticed that her major aim was indeed metafictional, although she does not, of course, use that word” (“Reeducating Readers” 89). An early scholar of the novel, John Carey, concurs with Lessing’s objection, observing that “[m]any of the early reviewers of The Golden Notebook treated it as important chiefly as disguised autobiography or as a statement of principle rather than as a novel.” Carey cites half a dozen reviews that reflect this bias (“Art and Reality in The Golden Notebook” 439–40, n5). In a letter to Paul Schlueter, Lessing further objected that readers failed to read her fiction “in the right way. The right way to read a novel is as if its [sic] a thing by itself, with its own laws, with due attention to its shape, not with reference back to possible autobiographical incidents” (Letter dated July 24, 1965, qtd. in Schlueter 80–1). Schlueter proposes that readers regard 204 Notes The Golden Notebook less as an autobiographical or confessional novel than as “a highly detailed examination of the forces which have gone into the complicated life of a real person who has some parallel char- acteristics with her fictional protagonist” (81). 2. The same phrase, “Anything processed by memory is fiction,” was also stated by Wright Morris in a lecture at Princeton University on December 2, 1971, cited by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory 205. 3. Susan Watkins observes that Lessing experimented with these constraints elsewhere in her fiction. In the pseudonymous Diaries of Jane Somers, the diary that the protagonist Jane Somers keeps “demonstrate[s] the ‘fictive’ or ‘self-conscious’ artfulness of life-writing (rather than its transparent reflection of reality) . in order to ques- tion how we define realism in literature and highlight its inevitable exclusions” (“The ‘Jane Somers’ Hoax” 84). 4. See Draine’s full analysis of Rhys’s Quartet in relation to the facts of her relationship with Ford and to his novel, The Good Soldier (Draine 318–37). See also Latham 160–1. 5. I am grateful to Ernest Rodker, executor, and the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, for permission to quote from the Joan Rodker Archive. 6. Doris Lessing’s brother, Harry Tayler, apparently objected to her transformation into fiction of factual events and biographical details from their earlier years. According to Dee Seligman, who inter- viewed Tayler during her trip to Southern Rhodesia in 1973, he found Lessing’s “The Story of Two Dogs” “very much distorted.” Seligman speculated that Tayler’s “displeasure with his sister’s work apparently stemmed more from personal disapproval of her use of autobiographical material than from any literary criticism” (“Four-faced Novelist” 6). “The Story of Two Dogs”—the final story in Lessing’s collected African Stories—focuses on the 14-year-old first-person narrator who traces a series of events involving her brother, herself, and the family’s two dogs (African Stories 616–36).

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