Word: martha
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Driving down a deserted beach road at midnight on the island resort of Martha's Vineyard, Mass., Senator Edward Kennedy lost control of his car. The black 1967 Oldsmobile 88 careened off a 10-ft.-wide wooden bridge leading to the dunes, and overturned in a salt pond. Somehow, Ted Kennedy escaped. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, a pretty, witty blonde who had worked as a secretary for Robert Kennedy, was not so fortunate. Trapped in the car, she drowned...
Mostly she is Martha Quest of Children of Violence, Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook-or Doris Lessing, for virtually all of the author's writing is autobiographical. The Four-Gated City is the last of five novels in a Martha Quest series. The first four were set in an imaginary country named Zambesia (Lessing was raised in Rhodesia). They followed Martha through girlhood rebellion against baffled parents, two short bad marriages, immersion in the Communist Party during World War II, and a subsequent period of psychic drying...
...sick and neurotic and hopeless as you can imagine. A dominating mama over all, and a wife in a mental hospital, and a man just sitting waiting for some sucker like me to cope with everything," she muses. The household rocks with emotion-pent-up, misdirected, short-circuited. Martha is nearly driven out by the sound of solitary whimpering behind closed doors...
Futuristic Coda. If Lessing has given up on politics, she has not given up causes, and in Mark's wife Lynda lies the key to her new radical direction. As the book progresses, Martha becomes more camera than character, and Lynda takes over as the book's imaginative center. It becomes clear that she is not mad at all but maimed-by a troubled childhood, by marriage to Mark, by years of corrosive drugs casually administered in mental hospitals. She is also a mystical speaker of truth whose hallucinations are eerily accurate. She hears voices, consults cards, studies...
Surprisingly, she doesn't say it very loud. Or make an interviewer feel like a dupe of the Dark Age. Her voice is more like a whisper than an assertive British whine, reports TIME'S Martha Duffy. Seated in a New York restaurant on her first trip to the U.S., she is more apt to fiddle with the silverware than stare down a companion...