Landlocked (38 page)
Authors: Doris Lessing
‘Well, of course,’ said Marjorie, with a sort of friendly gruffness. But this remark, for some reason, caused general ill-feeling. Eyes met again, and even the chairwoman seemed upset. It was clear that afterwards people would ask each other: ‘Who told
her
our affairs—there must be a traitor in our midst.’
‘I suggest someone sums up—the world situation I mean,’ said the Indian teacher.
‘That is just what I was doing,’ said the impassioned orator huffily. ‘Or rather, what I was working up to,’ he went on, recovering good humour as people affectionately laughed at him. He drew notes towards him and began to speak. It was ‘an analysis of the situation’. Not a patch on Anton in his hey-day, Martha found herself thinking.
The problem for discussion tonight was: what effect
would the newly created Communist China make on the world scene?
It turned out, after some hours, that there was complete unanimity about this.
Who would have foreseen it? Everyone spoke, including ‘the old guard’ they disagreed, they raised their voices, were riven with dissension, agreed to differ, might have gone on till morning, if the chairman, or chairwoman, had not said: ‘I’m going to put it to you: in fact, everyone’s saying the same thing.’ They all looked at each other again: not really friendly, this look, for they didn’t want to be like each other, to be similar, although the violence of their discussion had, in fact, caused an underlying good feeling. But they saw it: they had, in fact, been saying, though of course in very different ways, the same thing. They laughed, all together. The laugh made them one.
It was the laugh heard always when a group of people are in agreement but—and this is the point, when they are in agreement against an outside majority. It is the laugh of a minority in the right, the intelligent, forward-looking, informed minority, holding difficult or even dangerous opinions against great odds. It is the self-flattering, comforting, warming laugh heard—but how many times, in how many different settings had Martha heard it! And how many times and in what circumstances would she hear it again?
The good humour was now so great that it was easy for the Turgenev girl to suggest that Jasmine should sum up. Besides, she was a visitor from the Communist Party in the South (though of course it was no longer in existence, it had dissolved itself) and while the people in this room could on no account be considered communists, there was a sense in which she might, perhaps, be considered a fraternal delegate.
Laughter, and even the impassioned orator nodded.
Jasmine summed up:
‘It was unlucky for the world that the first socialist country had chanced to be Russia, because that country’s backwardness had branded socialism itself with a barbarousness that had nothing to do with socialism. China,
being an ancient country of deep and imperturbable civilization—much more civilized than we are!—’ cries of hear, hear, all round the room—‘would restore to communism moderation, calm, sense, humanity, humour, tolerance, etc.
‘The Soviet Union, realizing in the true spirit of communist self-criticism that she was not as fitted for the task of world leadership as this new, unspotted exemplar with her ancient civilization, would stand aside and allow China to lead the world towards full communism.
‘America, having sunk so many billions into trying to prevent the Chinese communists from coming to power, would probably continue fomenting civil war, there would be another epoch of civil wars, famines, etc., etc., but after all, this year, 1949, would be remembered in the world’s calendar as the first of the new epoch of benevolent socialism.’ And so on, of course, but this was the gist of it.
For a moment, when Jasmine had finished, there was confidence, elation, general good feeling. If the three guests had not been familiar with such situations, they might have believed the meeting was over, it now being after midnight. But they recognized the atmosphere of ‘closed meeting’ and they got up, one after another, to say goodnight.
Marjorie was obviously longing to be asked to stay; but while the three were no longer considered enemies, or perhaps even spies, they certainly weren’t accepted either. Marjorie would have to wait until Jasmine and Martha left, and she the only member of the ‘old guard’ in the town. She would finally be asked to join on the basis that she was quite a good soul, and useful for running around and doing donkey work, even if theoretically she was quite hopeless, poor thing. ‘But of course, she’ll have to work her passage.’
Formal thanks for being invited at all were offered and accepted, and the three went down the dark stairs.
They stood together on the pavement. They realized that while they had sat arguing in the stuffy, bright, little room, the skies had been swept by storms and by rain: it must be raining somewhere outside the city, for gusts of soft, damp air came to their faces with a smell of freshly wetted leaves.
Jasmine said: ‘Well, they’re a nice lot, really. If only they
weren’t so unbalanced about everything. But they’ll settle down.’
Marjorie said: ‘Oh, I’m so pleased they are starting. It doesn’t make one feel so bad about our failing. And if only they’ll learn some lessons from our mistakes…’ she gave a little laugh which was half a sob. ‘I’ve really got to stop being so emotional about everything. Colin says it is driving him mad, and I don’t blame him. But of course, he’s never emotional about anything. Shall I see you before you go to England, Matty?’
‘I suppose I should have a party—but who to invite?’
‘Yes, who’s left? Oh, isn’t it awful, when you think…’
‘Never mind, the young are on the march,’ said Jasmine. Martha laughed, but Marjorie said: ‘Oh, don’t, don’t joke—it’s all right for you, but I’ve got to stay here.’
She ran off to find her car: Colin was waiting for her to come home; he was sitting up—one of the children was feverish.
Martha and Jasmine walked up the empty street under the deep glitter of the stars.
Jasmine said: ‘Poor Marjorie, what a fate. We’re lucky, we’re getting out.’
‘Are you really going to stay in Johannesburg?’
‘I like the nasty hole. And besides, with the Nats in, one feels as if one really can do something—I mean, it’s so terrible, it can’t last. I reckon we’ll have socialism in five years at the latest…well, so long, Matty. Be seeing you somewhere, sometime.’
She went off by herself down the street. At the corner she turned to wave: ‘Barricades!’ she said, almost formally, as she might have said, good night, or how are you? Then she vanished from sight.
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 hap
pened 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 declared 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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