Useful quotes from Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing


Collected by Terence Rajivan Edward; only the first seven chapters; apologies for typing errors.


Chapter 1
And then it was that someone used the phrase 'poor whites'. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. 'Poor whites' were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites. (10-11)


People did ask, cursorily, why the murderer had given himself up. There was not much chance of escape. But he did have a sporting chance. He could have run to the hills and hidden for a while. Or he could have slipped over the border to Portuguese territory. Then the District Native Commissioner, at a sundowner party, said that it was perfectly understandable. If one knew anything about the history of the country, or had read any of the memoirs or letters of the old missionaries and explorers, one would have come across accounts of the society Lobengula ruled. The laws were strict: everyone knew what they could or could not do. If someone did an unforgivable thing, like touching one of the King's women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment, which was likely to be impalement over an ant-heap on a stake, or something equally unpleasant. 'I have done wrong, and I know it,' he might say, 'therefore let me be punished.' Well, it was tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. (12-13)


He farmed as if he were turning the handle of a machine which would produce pound notes at the other end. (14)


He had a rooted contempt for soft-faced, soft-voice Englishmen, combined with a fascination for their manner and breeding. His own sons, now grown up, were gentlemen. He had spent plenty of money to make them so; but he despised them for it. At the same time he was proud of them. (15)


That look of almost soft appeal irritated Charlie, coming from a man, but it pleased him too: he was pleased the youth deferred to him. He knew the type so well. So many of them came from England to learn farming. They were usually ex-public school, very English, but extremely adaptable. From Charlie's point of view, the adaptability redeemed them. (17)


When old settlers say, 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying, in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out: we don't want you.' Most of the young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard, of course, becoming as bad oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as 'bad'. And anyway, what had one's ideas amounted to? Abstract ideas about decency and good will, that was all: merely abstract ideas. When it came to the point, one never had contact with  natives, except in the master-servant relationship. One never knew them in their own lives, as human beings. A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sun-drenched country they had come to; they had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburnt limbs and toughened bodies. (18)


'Needs a man to deal with niggers,' said Charlie. 'Niggers don't understand women giving them orders. They keep their own women in their right place.' [23]


Chapter 2
If one was looking for a symbol to express South Africa, the South Africa that was created by financiers and mine magnates, the South Africa which the old missionaries and explorers who charted the Dark Continent would be horrified to see, one would find it in the store. The store is everywhere. Drive ten miles from one and you come on the next; poke your head out of the railway carriage, and there it is; every mine has its store, and many farms.
        It is always a low single-storeyed building, divided into segments like a strip of chocolate, with grocery, butchery and bottle-store under one corrugated iron roof... Behind the counter is a Greek, or a Jew, or an Indian. Sometimes the children of this man, who is invariably hated by the whole district as a profiteer and an alien, are playing among the vegetables because the living quarters are just behind the shop.
        For thousands of people up and down Southern Africa the store is the background to their childhood. So many things centred round it. It brings back, for instance, memories of those nights when the car, after driving endlessly through a chilly, dusty darkness, stopped unexpectedly in front of a square of light where men lounged with glasses in their hands, and one was carried out into the brilliantly-lit bar for a sip of searing liquid 'to keep the fever away'. Or it might be the place where one drove twice a week to collect mail, and to see all the farmers from miles around buying their groceries, and reading letters from Home with one leg propped on the running-board of the car... [32]


For Mary, the word 'Home', spoken nostalgically, meant England. It meant 'England' because of those mail-days, when she slipped up to the store to watch the cars come in, and drive away again laden with stores and letters and magazines from overseas. [32]


'Class' is not a South African word; and its equivalent, 'race', meant to her the office boy in the firm where she worked, other women's servants, and the amorphous mass of natives in the streets, whom she hardly noticed. [35]


Her life was really rather extraordinary: the conditions which produced it are passing now, and when the change is complete, women will look back on them as on a vanished Golden Age. [37]


Mary liked other people's children but shuddered at the thought of having any of her own. She felt sentimental at weddings, but she had a profound distaste for sex; there had been little privacy in her own home and there were things she did not care to remember; she had taken good care to forget them years ago. [39]


And for the first time in her life she was feeling uncomfortable with men. A small core of contempt for them, of which she was quite unconscious, and which had protected her from sex as surely as if she had been truly hideous, had melted, and she had lost her poise. And she began looking around for someone to marry. [41-42]


It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be able to create another to enable him to go on living? Mary's idea of herself was destroyed and she was not fitted to recreate herself. She could not exist without that impersonal, casual friendship from other people; and now it seemed to her there was pity in the way they looked at her, and a little impatience, too, as if she were really rather a futile woman after all. She felt as she had never done before; she was hollow inside, empty, and into this emptiness would sweep from nowhere a vast panic, as if there were nothing in the world she could grasp hold of. And she was afraid to meet people, afraid, above all, of men. [43-44]


Dick Turner disliked the town. When he drove in from the veld he knew so well, through those ugly scattered suburbs that looked as if they had come out of housing catalogues; ugly little houses stuck anyhow over the veld, that had no relationship with the hard brown African soil and the arching blue sky, cosy little houses meant for cosy little countries - and then on into the business part of town with the shops full of fashions for smart women and extravagant imported food, he felt ill at ease and uncomfortable and murderous.
        He suffered from claustrophobia. He wanted to run away - either to run away or to smash the place up. So he always escaped as soon as possible back to his farm, where he felt at home.
        But there are thousands of people in Africa who could be lifted bodily out of their suburb and put into a town the other side of the world and hardly notice the difference. The suburb is as invincible and fatal as factories, and even beautiful South Africa, whose soil looks outraged by those pretty little suburbs creeping over it like a disease, cannot escape. When Dick Turner saw them, and thought of the way people lived in them, and the way the cautious suburban mind was ruining his country, he wanted to swear and to smash and to murder. He could not bear it. He had lost the habit of word-spinning, living the life he did, out on the soil all day. But the feeling was the strongest he knew. [45]


And above all, he loathed the cinema. When he found himself inside the picture-house on this occasion, he wondered what had possessed him that he had agreed to come. He could not keep his eyes on the screen. The long-limbed, smooth-faced women bored him; the story seemed meaningless. And it was hot and stuffy. After a while he ignored the screen altogether, and looked round the audience. In front of him, around him, behind him, rows and rows of people staring and leaning away from each other up at the screen - hundreds of people flown out of their bodies and living in the lives of those stupid people posturing there. It made him feel uneasy. [45-46]


He worked as only a man possessed by a vision can work, from six in the morning till seven at night, taking his meals on the lands, his whole being concentrated on the farm.. [46]


If she went away for a holiday she might miss Dick. Yet what was Dick to her really? Nothing. She hardly knew him. He was a spare, sunburnt, slow-voiced, deep-eyed young man who had come into her life like an accident, and that was all she could say about him. And yet, she would have said it was for his sake she was making herself ill. All her restlessness, her vague feelings of inadequacy, centred on him, and when she asked herself, in chilly dismay, why it should be he, rather than any of the other men she knew, there was no satisfactory reply. [49]


Chapter 3
Poverty, which Dick had warned her of with a scrupulous humility, was another abstraction, nothing to do with her pinched childhood. She saw it as a rather exhilarating fight against the odds. [52]


The cupboards were petrol boxes painted and covered with curtains of flowered stuff. There was no door between this room and the next, but a heavy curtain of sacking hung there, which had been embroidered all over in red and black wool by Charlie Slatter's wife, on the next farm. And so on; she heard the history of each thing, and saw that what seemed so pathetic and frail to her represented to him victories over discomfort; and she began to feel, slowly,  that  it was not in this house that she was sitting, with her husband, but back with her mother, watching her endlessly contrive and patch and mend... [54]
 
It was a proper old-fashioned bed, high and massive: that was his idea of marriage. He had bought it at a sale, feeling, as he put down the money, that he was capturing happiness itself. [55]


Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything to complain of. Mary did not have to learn this, because it was natural to her, and because she had expected nothing in the first place - at any rate, not from this man, who was flesh and blood, and therefore rather ridiculous - not the creature of her imagination whom she endowed with hands and lips but left bodiless. [55]


There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well-matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way that the pattern of their lives demands. [56]


Chapter 4
She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother's servants she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the 'native problem' meant for her other women's complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone, and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her. [59]


Chapter 5
"Why should I accept a lie?" said Mary. "Why should I? Why can't he say straight out that he doesn't like working for me, instead of lying about his kraal?"
        Dick shrugged, looking at her with impatience; he could not understand her unreasonable insistence: he knew how to get along with natives; dealing with them was a sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying game in which both sides followed certain unwritten rules.
        'You would be angry if he did say so,' he remarked ruefully, but with affection still; he could not take her seriously, she seemed to him a child when she behaved like this, And he was genuinely grieved that this old native, who had worked for him all these years, was going now. [65]


Mary watched the farewell scene, that took place on the back steps, from the doorway. She was filled with wonder, and even repulsion. Dick was really sorry to see the end of this nigger! She could not understand any white person feeling anything personal about a native; it made Dick seem really horrible to her. [65]


The next boy was quite different. He had years of experience working for white women who treated him as if he were a machine; and he had learned to present a blank, neutral surface, and to answer in a soft neutral voice. He replied gently, to everything she said, 'Yes, missus; yes, missus,' not looking at her. It made her angry that he would never meet her eyes. She did not know it was part of the native code of politeness not to look a superior in the face; she thought it was merely evidence of their shifty and dishonest nature. [68]


'Where is the boy?' he asked, surprised to find her doing his work.
        'Cleaning the bath,' she said shortly, snapping out the words angrily.
        'Why now?'
        'It's dirty,' she said.
        Dick went into the bathroom, from where he could hear the sluish, sluish of a scrubbing brush, and found the native bent over the bath, rubbing away, but making little impression. He returned to the kitchen.
        'Why start him on it now?' he asked. 'It's been like that for years. A zinc bath goes like that. It's not dirt, Mary, not really. It changes colour.' [73]


She had forgotten about his food, She never thought of natives as people who had to eat or sleep: they were either there, or they were not, and what their lives were when they were out of sight she never paused to think. She nodded, feeling guilty. Then she smothered her guilt, thinking, 'It's his fault for not keeping it properly clean in the first place.' [74]


Whenever two or three farmers were gathered together, it is decreed that they should discuss nothing but the shortcomings and deficiencies of their natives. They talk about their labourers with a persistent irritation sounding in their voices: individual natives they might like, but as a genus, they loathe them to the point of neurosis. They never cease complaining about their unhappy lot, having to deal with natives who are so exasperatingly indifferent to the welfare of the white man, working only to please themselves. They had no idea of the dignity of labour, no idea of improving themselves by hard work. [76]


He wanted to leave: he was needed by his family in the kraal. Mary immediately lost her temper; her irritation found a permissible outlet in this exasperating native. Dick simply pulled her back, as if she were a thing of no account, and went out to the kitchen with the native. She heard the boy complain that he had been working since five o'clock that morning with no food at all, because he was only in the compound a few moments before he had been summoned back by the gong. He could not work like that; his child in his kraal was ill; he wanted to go at once. Dick replied, ignoring the unwritten rules for once, that the new missus did not know much about running a house yet, and that she would learn and that it would not happen again. Speaking like this to a native, appealing to him, was contrary to Dick's ideas of relationship between white and black, but he was furious with Mary for her lack of consideration and tact. 
        Mary was quite stupefied with rage. How dare he take the native's part against her! [78]


'Listen to me,' said Dick curtly. 'I work hard enough, don't I? All day I am down on the lands with these lazy black savages, fighting to get some work out of them. You know that. I won't come back home to this damned fight, fight, fight in the house. Do you understand? I will not have it. And you should learn sense. If you want to get work out of them you have to know how to manage them. You shouldn't expect too much. They are nothing but savages after all.' Thus Dick, who had never stopped to reflect that these same savages had cooked for him better than his wife did, had run his house, had given him a comfortable existence, as far as his pinched life could be comfortable, for years. [78]


Chapter 6
For a good month Dick was oblivious, gone into a beautiful dream of rich honeycombs and heavy dark clusters of fruitful bees. He built twenty beehives himself; and planted an acre of a special kind of grass near the bee-allotment... But not a bee went near his hives; perhaps because they were African bees, and did not like hives made after an English pattern. Who knows? Dick certainly did not. At last a swarm settled in a hive. But one cannot make two hundred a year from one swarm of bees. Then Dick got himself badly stung, and it seemed as if the poison drove the obsession from his system. Mary, amazed and even angry, saw that the brooding abstraction had gone from his face, for he had spent weeks of time and quite a lot of money. Yet, from one day to the next, he lost his interest in bees. (87-88)


The women who marry men like Dick learn sooner or later that there are two things they can do: they can drive themselves mad, tear themselves to pieces in storms of futile anger and rebellion; or they can hold themselves tight and go bitter. Mary, with the memory of her own mother recurring more and more frequently, like an older sardonic double of herself walking beside her, followed the course her upbringing made inevitable. To rage at Dick seemed to her a failure in pride... (90)


At this point, unable to control herself and hating herself for it, Mary lost her temper - lost it finally and destructively. Even as she raged against him, her feeling was of cold self-condemnation  because she was giving him the satisfaction of seeing her thus. (91-92)


If she disliked native men, she loathed the women. She hated the exposed fleshiness of them, their soft brown bodies and soft bashful faces that were also insolent and inquisitive. She could not bear to see them sitting there on the grass, their legs tucked under them in that traditional timeless pose, as peaceful and uncaring as if it did not matter whether the store was opened, or whether it remained shut all day and they would have to return tomorrow. Above all, she hated the way they suckled their babies, with their breasts hanging down for everyone to see; there was something in their calm satisfied maternity that made her blood boil. 'Their babies hanging on to them like leaches,' she said to herself shuddering, for she thought with horror of a suckling child. The idea of a child's lips on her breasts made her feel quite sick; at the thought of it she would involuntarily clasp her hands over her breasts, as if protecting them from a violation. And since so many white women are like her, turning with relief to the bottle, she was in good company, and did not think of herself, but rather of these black women, as strange; they were alien and primitive creatures with ugly desires she could not bear to think about. (94-95)


None of the girls working there knew her. The furniture had been changed; the desk where she had sat was moved, and it seemed outrageous that her things should have been tampered with... She felt, again, outraged; for all that time she had worked here, it had been part of herself this office, and now he would not take her back. (100)


Chapter 7
Her attitude towards Dick, always contemptuous, was now bitter and angry. It was not a question of bad luck, it was simply incompetence. She had been wrong in thinking that those outbursts of wishful thinking over turkeys, pigs, etc., had been a kind of escape from the discipline of his work on the farm. He was all of a piece, everything he did showed the same traits. Everywhere she found things begun and left half-finished. (117)


Reference
Lessing, D. 2007 (1950). The Grass is Singing. London: Harper Perennial.