I admire Martha Quest, the heroine of Doris Lessing’s five-book Children of Violence series, one of the great thinkers of Lessing’s very smart fictional world. In The Four-Gated City, the last volume in the series, Martha and her employer, Mark, a factory owner and science fiction writer, read multiple newspapers to track world events on complicated maps and charts on the walls in the study.
Lessing’s description of the maps fascinates me. It goes on for pages, but here’s an excerpt.
One wall was soon devoted to atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, large bombs, small bombs (what one committee in the States had christened “kitten bombs”) and the establishments which developed them, made them, and sold them… With black flags, on the same map, were marked the factories and laboratories which researched, made and sold materials for germ warfare, chemical warfare, and drugs used in the control and manipulation of the brain. With yellow flags, on this map, were marked areas of air, soil and water contaminated by bomb-blasts…
This was published in 1969. I can’t imagine that the maps would look much different today. And that’s very sad, isn’t it? But on the bright side… we’re still here!
In The Four-Gated City, an American character, Brandon, questions the maps on the walls of Mark’s room. “Why do you fix your room up like this? Because the way it looks to me, it’s just stating the problem.”
Mark asks him if it isn’t valuable to state the problem.
Brandon points out that protests, too, are just stating the problem, and that people seldom have the energy to take the next step. And, I must admit, that was what I thought after protests on No Kings’ Day. Great as far as they went. What next?
Before I go on, let me say that I, too, state the problem and take no action. But then I operate on a much smaller scale..
Here is the kind of problem that obsesses me. Due to city budget cuts, the local public library recently fired its last librarian.
My first impulse was to protest at a City Council meeting. As far as I’m concerned, the public library is a human right. It provides books, books, books (that’s all I care about), computers, meeting rooms, movie clubs, lectures, cooling centers in summer, and, for a while, social services for the homeless (but those were cut too.)
I expected rioting in the streets after the news of the firing. Nothing. A few letters to the editor.
It hardly seems cost-effective to fire the librarian and social worker, and leave the management to the check-out clerks, who, though they may be lovely people and avid readers, are the equivalent of supermarket cashiers. But there’s already an X on their backs. Since most patrons use auto-check, the check-out clerks are next. Bets on?
A former librarian tells me she is glad she got out in time. Her gloomy prognosis? The library schools are next.
She was a cataloguer, and I must share this funny insight. She said the the highlight of her career was “having catfights about whether to catalogue Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as science fiction or literary fiction.”
Readers of this blog know that I am a Doris Lessing fan. Not all of her books are equally brilliant, but the best are classics. I recently reread parts of The Four-Gated City, the fifth in her Children of Violence quintet, which Lessing considered a bildungsroman. And yet I find that claim very strange. It is true of the first four books in the series, which follow the life of Martha Quest from her teens to the age of 30. But the final volume is a novel of ideas that gradually abandons the semblance of a conventional narrative.
It is not, however, surprising that Martha, a former Communist, would become the subject of an experimental novel. After moving to London in the late 1940s, she takes a job as a live-in secretary-cum-editor-cum -housekeeper to Mark Coleridge, a factory owner and leftist writer of a best-selling utopian novel:
In the course of the novel, Martha and Mark analyze post-war politics, the evolution of the extended family to gird up Mark’s floundering dysfunctional nuclear family, the Laingian theory that the mentally ill are psychic, and the unity of the Aldermaston marches against nuclear disarmament.
And in the final section, Lessing one-ups the level of defiant rule-breaking by embracing science fiction in the form of describing a world-wide disaster, documented by the surviving characters in the form of letters and other papers.
Lessing is best-known for her naturalistic writing about women’s lives, and, indeed, one of the most interesting sections of of this novel is a portrait of Martha’s unhappy mother. Mrs. Quest, a widow who lives on an African farm with her son and his family, has always disliked her radical daughter. But suddenly she writes a letter to Martha announcing plans to visit her in London. Martha promptly has a nervous breakdown.
Martha knows exactly what her relationship with her mother is like. And Mrs. Quest has no conception of the changes in London: she imagines the England of her youth before World War I. And who can she possibly imagine Martha to be now? But in a way, Mrs. Quest knows the visit will be a disaster. She keeps postponing the visit.
The voyage to England is not the happy adventure Mrs. Quest had hoped for. Her disillusion and disappointment on the the cruise ship is sad, even terrifying, because Mrs. Quest’s life is rather like this voyage, and she would rather not face it. She perceives with dismay that the passengers drug themselves with food, sleep, silly games, and drinking. And this is her first glimmering of the sadness that the trip will bring.
Lessing devotes some remarkable pages to Mrs. Quest’s old age as it is revealed to her on the ship. She writes,
Mrs. Quest, an old lady among old ladies, all of them widows (for women live longer than men), sat in her deck chair, which had been placed well out of the wind. She would much rather have been in it. She had a rug over her knees, and she knitted something or other: they all knitted or sewed, and they watched others at play. When Mrs. Quest had said how much she loved a voyage, a good deal of what she loved was the games…. She always had… but had she, she wondered? Well, she had always been a good sort, of course. Now a good sort, obeying, as she always had, she played whist and bridge.
And this is the fate of a certain generation of women. Mrs. Quest goes along with the games and even pretends to have rewarding relationships with her children and grandchildren, as do the other women of her age. In reality, her family tolerates but does not love her. And Mrs. Quest wonders if this is true of any of the other old women.
Mind you, not all old women in Lessing’s books are tragic figures. In her 1995 novel, Love, Again, Sarah Durham, a vigorous woman in her sixties, is a writer and director of a small, prestigious theater. Then one days she happens to read the memoirs of a society woman, written in old age.
A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up. Once, she would never even have opened a book by an old person: nothing to do with her, she had thought.
Of course Sarah does not lead the life of an “old woman.” Over the course of a summer in France, where the theater is rehearsing a production of a new play, Sarah falls in love for the first time in years. She had forgotten the bloom and intensity of love. But iove is a challenge. Love is mortal. Love is irrelevant, Sarah thinks at the end of the summer.
In short, Sarah is an old woman of Lessing’s generation, who believed in themselves but were faced with the knowledge of a sell-by date in the eyes of others. But Lessing’s Martha Quests and Sarah Durhams have more freedom than the Mrs. Quests: let us pray in this strange age that freedom will continue.
“Oh, how hard it is to be a middle-aged woman, who has to stand in for everyone’s difficult mother, and who has to take (and return) looks from younger women examinng their futures, exactly as one u
Oh, how hard it is to be a middle-aged woman, who has to stand in for everyone’s difficult mother, and who has to take (and return) looks from younger women examining their futures, exactly as one used to do oneself… – Doris Lessing’s The Four=Gated City
I was awed when I first read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.
I had never read anything like it. There are echoes of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, particularly in Lessing’s opening section, Free Women. In Women in Love, the Brangwen sisters struggle to be free, especially in love, and are unsure whether they want to marry. Ursula successfully establishes a love relationship, but Gudrun cruelly destroys her lover.
In Lessing’s Free Women in The Golden Notebook, two women in their thirties, best friends, address similar problems in love. The heroine, Anna Wulf, a blocked writer, and her close friend, Molly, an actress, commiserate about being viewed as “free women,” independent, sexually available, but not wife material. Both are divorced, both are single mothers, both have lovers who eventually leave them. Molly is funny and bitter, Anna tries to move beyond humor and examine herself truthfully. She no longer writes novels. She writes in four notebooks: diaries, autofiction, and autobiography. But these are fragments: she must unify them. She is afraid to unify them.
Lessing is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Yet there was a dramatic period of Lessing-bashing after she died, sparked by Jenny Diski’s memoir of living with Lessing and her son as an adolescent and loathing her as an adult. Suddenly Lessing was the “bad mother” who had left two children to be raised by her husband in Africa when they divorced. This accusation seemed very sexist to me. And Lessing did take Peter, her son by a later husband, with her to London.
I am a long-time fan, of course. I especially admire the Children of Violence series (the Martha Quest books), The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor, The Summer Before the Dark, and TheDiaries of Jane Somers. But I find her later work problematic and uneven. Mind you, I liked the books at the time. She experiments with science fiction (not her forte), writes a handful of realistic novels, and two volumes of autobiography.
I recently decided to reread The Sweetest Dream (2001), one of the better novels of her late period. It is an odd book , a simplified version of her 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City.
In the Author’s Note, Lessing does not link the two novels. Instead, she both half-admits and denies that The Sweetest Dream is autobiographical.
I am not writing volume three of my autobiography because of possible hurt to vulnerable people. Which does not mean that I have novelized autobiography. There are no parallels here to actual people, except for one, a very minor character. I hope I have managed to recapture the spirit of, particularly, the Sixties, that contradictory time which, looking back and comparing it with what came later, seems surprisingly innocent. There was little of the nastiness of the Seventies, or the cold greed of the Eighties.!
Autobiographical or not, The Sweetest Dream shadows the earlier novel. In The Four-Gated City, Martha Quest leaves the Communist party and a Communist husband – whom she married so he could get papers to stay in Africa – and moves to London. She is the mother of one child, whom she left years ago to be raised by her first husband.
She loves London. She quashes her “Mattie” persona, the likable clown, and becomes a more serious version of Martha. She explores the city, converses with working-class Londoners, and has incredible sex with a squatter who is refurbishing a once-elegant house partially demolished in the war. When she runs out of money, she reluctantly takes a job as a “secretary” to Mark Coldidge, a rich factory owner, a utopian novelist, and an amateur political analyst. During the ’60s, they participate in the Aldermaston marches and other protests. They are leftists, but not communists.
The house is full of unhappy people. Martha must be the stable person, the one to hold the house together. Mark literally has a mad wife in the basement. His son, Francis, is sweet but neglected and love-starved, and his unstable nephew, Paul, is shattered by his mother’s suicide. Martha is at the center of the hive, coping with the boys, cooking dinners, and she becomes a “house mother” or an “earth mother” to their friends, some of whom come to dinner and crash for days, weeks, or months.
Frances Lennox, the heroine of The Sweetest Dream, has much in common with Martha. Frances, deserted by her irresponsible Communist husband, moves into her mother-in-law’s enormous house because she and her son are living in a squalid apartment she is barely able to afford. One son is able to go to Eton, the other to a progressive school. Frances, an actress, has to turn down roles to work as an “Agony Aunt” columnist for a newspaper, a job which pays better than acting and which she can do from home. And since she is at home, she cooks delicious, nourishing meals for her sons and their friends, who often have problems, hate their parents, and spend most of their time at the house. She is an unofficial “earth mother.”
And she learns that there are many “earth mothers” like her. When the kids travel, they stay with nurturing women and their families in France, Hungary, the U.S., Canada, everywhere. She corresponds with some of them. All lament the shoplifting, moodiness, and insatiable cravings for the latest record album or stylish haircut. The kids are unhappy, yet there has never been a richer, more privileged generation of young people. They are “screwed-up,” the children of violence, of two world wars.
The Four-Gated City is a classic, which in the last fourth rolls into a dystopian future.
But honestly? I think The Sweetest Dream is a book for our times. People are looking for entertainment, for simplicity in the presentation of ideas. This is “Doris Lessing-lite,” and yet it is a good, solid novel by a Nobel-winning author.
