On February 14, Burton reported that an offer had been cabled and “the following extremely unsatisfactory reply” had been received: “LESSING DOES NOT WANT TO BE PUBLISHED BY KNOPF”. Nearly two weeks later, however, the situation changed. Robert Shaplen at Knopf: “Here is what Juliet O’Hea writes concerning a talk she had with DL about the book: ‘I have had a further talk with her and she would be willing to do all the Knopf revisions with the exception of putting in the rape which she feels would be quite wrong.'”Ĭlancy Sigal and Doris Lessing, ca. On February 3, 1950, Naomi Burton wrote to Mrs. It seemed at first as though Lessing had agreed to the majority of Knopf’s suggestions. We are not asking this for any reasons of sensationalism, but simply because it seems to us the logical, and indeed, inevitable, climax to the story. Moses must rape the unfulfilled and half-willing Mary, and then murder her out of a mixture of disgust and fear.
#LESSING'S THE GRASS IS SINGING FULL#
It seems to us that the curious, well-developed relationship between Mary Turner and Moses is not carried through to its logical and emotionally necessary conclusion, but ends inconclusively, so that his murder of her is not the satisfactory resolution of a dissonance, but a mere full stop. She said that Knopf was “tremendously impressed” with the novel and “would like to make an offer” subject to some changes, including to the ending: Robert Shaplen (“for Alfred Knopf Inc.”) wrote to the literary agent Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown, Ltd. The folder I discovered in the Knopf collection filled in further details of this story. The whole point of The Grass is Singing was the unspoken, devious codes of behaviour of the whites, nothing ever said, everything understood, and the relationship between Mary Turner, the white woman, and Moses, the black man, was described so nothing was explicit. What did she know about the “mores” of Southern Africa? Besides, it was crass.
This was Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, and the Knopfs were the stars of the publishing firmament then. Lessing recounts why in the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997):Īlfred Knopf in New York said they would take the book, if I would change it so that there was an explicit rape, “in accordance with the mores of the country”. The third related to The Grass is Singing, Lessing’s first novel, which was published in 1950-but not by Knopf. The first two were mundane letters related to the editorial processes for two of her novels. I found three references to Lessing in the Knopf collection.
One afternoon I decided to pursue Watson’s suggestion. But I think she was more painstaking than is usually supposed, and that the impatience and urgency that informs her fiction is part of its style. She is often dismissed as a mainly “political” writer who was little interested in the quality of her prose. My interest is in Lessing’s creative process. It is a wonderfully diverse selection of materials from across her career, and an almost complete collection of her typescripts from the 1970s to 1999. I spent a month at the Ransom Center last year, working mainly with the extensive Doris Lessing archive. “Have you had a look in the Knopf collection?” Rick Watson, the head of reference services at the Ransom Center, sounded casual, and I wasn’t sure I had time to take the detour he was suggesting.
0 kommentar(er)
