Peace March in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament March

There is a long, long section in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City (Part Four, Chapter Four, pp. 427-466) about a famous peace march in the 1960s, organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).  The 54-mile march from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston to London took place on Easter weekends 1958-1963 (and was later revived). The famous peace sign was designed originally as a  CND logo  by Gerald Holtom.

Lessing’s description of the march is detached and moving at the same time. The heroine, Martha Quest, now middle-aged, is leftist but outgrew her political ideals years ago in Africa.  As she waits for her housemates, Mark and Lynda, under a tree, she observes the marchers, knowing that only a small core of  members of political organizations usually turn out.  She watches the good-natured protestors, mostly duffel-coated teenagers, and is touched and amused by their enthusiasm,  their cheering of some bystanders who are actually protesting their protest, whom they mistake for supporters.  Although the political climate is such that newspapers and TV are taking this seriously, she does not believe demonstrations will change things.

And she wonders why so many youths, middle-aged, and elderly people are protesting the bomb now?  Sadly, she knows they will give up politics soon.

“Who were ‘they’ this year, on this, the biggest of the Aldermaston Marches?  The phenomenon had reached its peak.  But why? Who knew?  Who knows how to chart such a curve?  It had started unexpectedly, had grown on its own logic, had reached its height, would now decline.  At the peak, this year, as at all similar peaks of political feeling, were thousands of people who had never before been near anything remotely political, and would soon drift off, to find, for one reason or another, anything remotely political rather distasteful. ‘Childish’ – that word would be revived again when it always is, at the beginning of a time of reaction.  Meanwhile the banners were those to be seen at any demonstration:  CND..Peace…Labour…Communist…Pacifist…Trade Union…Youth…Young…Jewish…German…French…Trotskyist…Anarchist..And then the theatre groups, the bands, and the dancers and the singers.”

I used to read this section as an overview of protests, shorthand for peace march experience, and so it is in a way.  Although I understood the emotions of the young and the greater detachment of older marchers, I never knew the history of Aldermaston to London.  But I finally looked up the Aldermaston Marches–I’m an American, and didn’t know the UK history.  It enhances Lessing’s novel to know the history.

I would love to read a book of first-person accounts of the peace movement in the U.S. or the UK, if there is such a book.

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Bibliobits: Doris Lessing, Frances Trollope, & R. Scott Bakker

Years ago a friend who shared my enthusiam for Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest books took a dark road for awhile.  She quit her job, unplugged her telephone, and spent a lot of time alone.  I don’t know what happened:  did she go back to her professional job?  Many of us took similar paths, because we didn’t want to do the expected thing.  Lessing’s passages about emotional reactions, resistance, and rebellion against societal expectations still make me shiver.

Lessing calls The Four-Gated City a bildungsroman, but I think it is more than that.  Her analysis of 20th-century politics, history, class, and the socialization of women is so lucid that we apply it to ourselves and feel that we are reading about ourselves.

Rereading The Four-Gated City is an extraordinary experience.  It is the culmination of Lessing’s five-book Children of Violence series, a stunning portrait of a woman in her thirties, Martha Quest, who, leaves family, friends, and the Communist party to immigrate to England from Africa.  

The Four-Gated City is not just a personal portrait, though.  It also examines post-war London torn by the Cold War, persecutions of Communist Party members, fear of the McCarthy era, terror of war, women breaking down from pressures, and more.

There is so much in this novel.  Take Martha’s relationship with her mother.

The highly competent Martha, who takes a job as a secretary-housekeeper of a writer, Mark Coldridge, breaks down when her mother writes to say she is coming to England. For years Martha has been unable to read her mother’s letters.  The letters start to arrive in batches.  She begins to read them carefully.

“A third letter.  The arrival was a few weeks off.  This letter had to be read carefully.  It began:  My darling girl, and ended, Your loving mother.  In between were pages of reproof, reproach, hatred.  Martha had always got letters like these from her mother.  For years and years–when had they started?  But she could not remember. She did not read them.  Or rather, she had learned a technique for reading them, skimming over them fast, to extract necessary facts, but insulated against pain.”

Lessing is never sentimental, and elucidates the details of Martha’s relationship with her mother so realistically that we utterly identify with Martha.

I know someone who received similar letters from her mother.

A note on a factory novel:  Frances Trollope’s Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy is the next logical factory novel for me to read after Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Mary Barton.  I’ve never yet read Frances Trollope.

Fantasy recommendation.  E. D. Kain in The Atlantic says R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy  is “perhaps the best fantasy series written in the past decade…”  Never heard of it, but I’m always interested in good fantasy novels.

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The Wabash Trace Nature Trail & What I’m Reading Now

The Wabash Trace Nature Trail

Sunny days, blue sky, no humidity.  Yesterday we drove to Western Iowa to ride the Wabash Trace Nature Trail, a 63-mile trail from Council Bluffs on the Missouri River to Blanchard in Southern Iowa, on the border of Missouri.

Located in the Loess Hills, a formation of wind-deposited soil, the Wabash Trace is one of our favorite trails.  Beautiful woods, prairie, hills, cornfields, and small towns. I only wish my snapshots could convey the beauty.

The panorama of colors under the high blue sky is exquisite.  Tall fairy-tale green corn, feathered brown prairie grass in the slanting August light, wild roses, purple clover, and other wildflowers, fresh green massive foliage.

If you get tired or hungry,  you can stop for lunch or ice cream in Mineola or Silver City.

You do have to watch out for walnuts.  We had a walnut accident a few years ago.  We were riding in the woods, wearing sunglasses, enjoying the trail in enchanting early autumn and rode over unseen walnuts:  I catapulted into the side of a bridge, almost falling into the creek, and my husband fell off his bike.

No more sunglasses on the trail.  And few walnuts yet.

What I’m Reading Now.  I am rereading Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, a book which meant a great deal to me as a young woman.   Picture us in the early ’70s rebelling against traditional female roles.   Picture us reading about the heroine of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series, Martha Quest:  a drop-out who rebels against her middle-class background on an African farm, leaves for the city , marries too young, joins the Communist party, leaves the party and her family, and ends up in postwar London where she knows no one, and for the first time in her life is independent.

So many of us loved the Martha Quest series.  Is it still read now?   Lessing won the Nobel in 2007, but people mainly talk about The Golden Notebook (also one of my favorite books).

The Four-Gated City is the last in the Children of Violence series, but can be read as a “stand-alone.”  It is an unconventional novel of  realism and social criticism, interspersed with elements of science fiction.  At the beginning of the novel, Martha, who has been drifting through London, knows she must get a traditional job.  She has felt utterly free, and has adjusted her personality to fit her nomadic circumstances:  living above the  cafe of working-class owners Joe and Iris, she is “Mattie,” a charming young woman who makes fun of herself.  But Martha knows it is damaging to be Mattie, and that she must become more serious.  She makes an appointment with a Labour Party official to find a job, but does not want the job.  She spends a few nights with her friend Jack, another nonconformist, an artist who has fixed up a bombed house and whose central activity is sex with several different women.

Martha takes a job as secretary to Mark, a writer who owns a factory and lives in a beautiful house in Bloomsbury.  He has a mentally ill wife, a damaged child, a brother accused of spying, and many problems.  He needs a woman who can care for his household and family.  Martha doesn’t want to be this woman.

It is fascinating.  The first pages seem a little dated and even a little rough, but you read on to get to the heart of the book and can’t stop reading.  Lessing is brilliant and original.

I’ll write more about this soon.

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