‘Mr Maynard, you must agree with me, it’s such a relief when you get your daughter properly married!’
And Mr Maynard replied, ‘Unfortunately I have no daughter, but if I had, it would be my first concern.’ He involuntarily frowned as he glanced at his watch, and added, ‘I must ask you to excuse me, I’m late for my next, I cannot understand what is coming over our gilded youth, I’ve never known such a year for weddings.’ He hastily flung a handful of confetti in the direction of the departing car, and hurried off on foot to the Magistrate’s Court, which was just down the road.
Halfway there, he saw the wedding car trying to turn down a side street, away from half a dozen pursuing cars. ‘The pack are on the scent,’ he murmured, as he caught sight of Binkie leaning out of the front car, his mouth open in a yell, his eyes staring excitement. The car recklessly shot across the corner of the pavement. It skidded. The following car collided with it. There was a general screeching of brakes, a smashing of glass, and yells and shrieks of all kinds. The Mathews’s car, hooting derision, sped rocking down the main road south.
Mr Maynard scrupulously averted his eyes from the accident, for he was likely to have to judge it in court—if it came to court, which he hoped they would have the sense to avoid. Really, he thought, it would be the limit if he had Binkie up in front of him on a charge of—what? He glanced over his shoulder. The cars, locked together, were surrounded by a mass of humanity, girls and boys; but they were not arguing with each other, but standing over a black man who had apparently been knocked down. ‘Damn the boy,’ said Maynard furiously, meaning his son. From behind a building, he peered out cautiously. No, the native was getting to his feet and shaking himself. And now it looked as if silver rain were falling from heaven around the man, for the wolves were flinging handfuls of money at him, slapping him on the shoulder, and assuring him he was all right, no bones broken. They were already climbing back into the undamaged cars, to resume the chase after the Mathews’s car.
Mr Maynard walked on, very shaken, very unhappy. No sense of responsibility, competely callous, thought they could do anything if they could buy themselves out of it afterwards…His thoughts turned to what was happening in Europe. His views were liberal, in the old, decent sense; he hoped there would not be war, he knew there would be. Suddenly he found himself thinking, Poor kids, let them enjoy themselves while they can—He shook himself furiously; this was a first infection from that brutal sentimentality which poisons us all in the time of war. He recognized it, and dismissed it, and walked on, more slowly. Four more weddings to get through. Well, he thought cynically, that would be four divorces for him to deal with, in due time. Five, counting the one he had just finished. Marry in haste, repent in leisure: he believed this firmly, though he had been engaged to his own wife for over a year and knew that he had disliked her for the past fifteen.
He thought, Well, Douggie’s got married, that’s a step in the right direction; more than I can hope for Binkie. He began thinking, with the wistfulness of a lonely and ageing man, of possible grandchildren; for to a man like Mr Maynard a son like Binkie is as good as having no son at all.
About the Author
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris’s mother adapted to the rough life of the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a “civilized” Edwardian life among “savages,” but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where the nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen, and it was the end of her formal education.
But like other women writers from southern Africa who did not graduate from high school, such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. “Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn’t apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn’t thinking in terms of being a writer then—I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time.” The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing’s early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, and Kipling; later she discovered D. H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth; her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris’s formative years were also spent absorbing her father’s bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of “poison.” “We are all of us made by war,” Lessing has written, “twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.”
In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, “in a fever of erotic longing.” Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.
Lessing’s life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. “There is a whole generation of women,” she has said, speaking of her mother’s era, “and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic—because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.” Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of “setting at a distance,” taking the “raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.”
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists “who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read.” Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.
Lessing’s fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual’s own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing’s courageous outspokenness, she was decl
ared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
In 1952, Lessing published Martha Quest, the first of five novels that would form her Children of Violence sequence. The other titles, published over the next seventeen years, are A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The first four books are set in an African colony called Zambesia (a composite, Lessing says, of “various white-dominated parts of Africa”) and the last in London. While many of Martha’s experiences parallel those in Lessing’s own life—including her two early marriages and her departure from Rhodesia—Lessing has emphasized that the series is a “study in the individual conscience in its relations with the collective” and any one-to-one comparisons made between her and Martha miss the writer’s larger intentions.
Taken as a whole, the novels make up a formal bildungsroman (novel of education), more than 1800 pages long, about the developing consciousness of the heroine, Martha Quest. Coming of age in the first novel, Martha bridles at the stifling institutions and conventions of the white society in colonial Africa, most particularly the unjust treatment of the native population. She leaves her childhood farm and a conventional marriage for life in the city—a life of political rebellion and sexual discovery. Finally, in the wake of World War II, Martha leaves Africa for London. While Lessing completed the series with The Four-Gated City, critics often have remarked on how different this fifth and final volume is from the other four. Moving beyond straightforward realism in the portrayal of Martha’s life, Lessing offers a powerful apocalyptic vision of the post-nuclear world, circa 2000 A.D. that presages the experimental fiction she would write in later years, including her 1999 book Mara and Dann: An Adventure.
Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century—their “climate of ethical judgement”—to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. The first three Children of Violence books helped establish her as a major radical writer, but Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962). This novel was a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.
Attacked for being “unfeminine” in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.” As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf “tries to live with the freedom of a man,” a point Lessing seems to confirm: “These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her “inner-space fiction” deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979–1983). These reflect Lessing’s interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.
Lessing’s other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbor, 1983, and If the Old Could…, 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. In the last decade of the twentieth century, Lessing has published a variety of books including The Real Thing (stories, 1992), African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (reportage, 1992), Love, Again (novel, 1996), and two superb volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997). Her most recent book is the novel Ben, In the World, a sequel to The Fifth Child, which was published in 2000.
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BOOKS BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass Is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor If the Old Could…
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
Ben, In the World
Canopus in Argos: Archives series
Re: Colonized Planet 5-Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
Children of Violence series
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
SHORT STORIES
African Stories
Volume I: This Was the Old Chief’s Country
Volume II: The Sun Between Their Feet
Stories
Volume I: To Room Nineteen
Volume II: The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (U.S.); London Observed (U.K.)
OPERA
The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight (Music by Philip Glass)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (Music by Philip Glass)
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
African Laughter
Under My Skin
Walking in the Shade
The Doris Lessing Reader
DRAMA
Each His Own Wilderness
Play with a Tiger
The Singing Door
Copyright
MARTHA QUEST. Copyright © 1952, 1964 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition October 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-199126-4
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Part One
One
Two
Three
Part Two
One
Two
Three
Part Three
One
Two
Three
Part Four
One
Two
Three
About the Author
Other Books by Doris Lessing
Copyright
About the Publisher
Doris Lessing, Martha Quest
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