A Plague of Despair

Children of Violence (Vols. I and II), by Doris Lessing. Simon and Schuster, $7.50 The Higher Animals, by H.E.F. Donahue. Viking, $4.95 Late Call, by Angus Wilson. Viking, $4.95 Doris Lessing had published five long novels, five short novels, four collections of short stories, and a book of poems before, plausibly, she bought controlling interest in a paper mill and began to whack out Children of Violence, the first six hundred pages of which are now before us—two volumes bound together, Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. We are promised three more volumes. Alas. Needless to say, the undertaking is a family history, a drab family at that. The story is drably told, in the female manner, omitting nothing. Our heroine, Martha Quest, is the daughter of a South African farmer. She grows up, goes to Johannesburg or some such place, works in an office, falls in with people even duller than she is, gets engaged, married. Volume II chews its way through the marriage.

It is, for the reader, rather like being trapped by a pathological gossip who, with the intrepidity of a machine or a maiden aunt, goes on and on, recognizing no form except that of the continuum. The ordinary, potentially active mind of Martha Quest, we make out in the mileage of ambling narration, is like a seed very deeply buried in a dry and poor soil. Somewhere, it knows, there is light. But where, by the end of the second volume, it does not know. It does know that there is some new spirit in the world that is utterly different from the smug assumptions of the colonial mind. Whether Communism (as our heroine imagines) or some nameless spirit known in Europe and reflected in books and papers, this newness of mind is but dimly intuited in the intellectual wastes of Africa, and we leave our heroine frustrated and apprehensive and hankering. For what she will find in the nine hundred pages to come, such readers as interest themselves in the intellectual growth of an English colonial in Africa, female, white, and with a well turned ankle, can haunt the bookstores for her further adventures.

GD

About the Author

Guy Davenport

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Children of Violence (Vols. I and II), by Doris Lessing. Simon and Schuster, $7.50 The Higher Animals, by H.E.F. Donahue. Viking, $4.95 Late Call, by Angus Wilson. Viking, $4.95 Doris Lessing had published five long novels, five short novels, four collections of short stories, and a book of poems before, plausibly, she bought controlling interest in a paper mill and began to whack out Children of Violence, the first six hundred pages of which are now before us—two volumes bound together, Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. We are promised three more volumes. Alas. Needless to say, the undertaking is a family history, a drab family at that. The story is drably told, in the female manner, omitting nothing. Our heroine, Martha Quest, is the daughter of a South African farmer. She grows up, goes to Johannesburg or some such place, works in an office, falls in with people even duller than she is, gets engaged, married. Volume II chews its way through the marriage.

It is, for the reader, rather like being trapped by a pathological gossip who, with the intrepidity of a machine or a maiden aunt, goes on and on, recognizing no form except that of the continuum. The ordinary, potentially active mind of Martha Quest, we make out in the mileage of ambling narration, is like a seed very deeply buried in a dry and poor soil. Somewhere, it knows, there is light. But where, by the end of the second volume, it does not know. It does know that there is some new spirit in the world that is utterly different from the smug assumptions of the colonial mind. Whether Communism (as our heroine imagines) or some nameless spirit known in Europe and reflected in books and papers, this newness of mind is but dimly intuited in the intellectual wastes of Africa, and we leave our heroine frustrated and apprehensive and hankering. For what she will find in the nine hundred pages to come, such readers as interest themselves in the intellectual growth of an English colonial in Africa, female, white, and with a well turned ankle, can haunt the bookstores for her further adventures.