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ROBERT GARIS
who comes to believe there is gold on his land-I lost faith in Mrs.
Lessing's methods and, specifically, in her taste. A friend rightly told
me to look again. Much of what I had expected does happen. The
obsessed man lets the farm go to ruin; his wife turns sour and puts
her hope in the son, but he turns out to be just as cold to her ideal of
self-betterment through education as to his father's incompetent fanati–
cism; yet the son feels the pull of the gold too, forms a casual partner–
ship with a small-time prospector, and it is they who actually find the
gold. Now all of this teeters so dangerously on the brink of banality
that it is particularly instructive about the nature of Mrs. Lessing's
talent to see how she escapes the disaster I expected. She neither taste–
fully soft-pedals, nor excitedly intensifies, the pattern. Instead, she
straightforwardly sets out to earn the strpng ironic effect she wants
by a full accumulation of accurately observed and rendered action:
Paul would have liked to accept [his mother's silence about a
new twist in the father's obsession] at its surface value, for it
would have left him free to move cheerfully frpm one parent
to the other without feeling guilt. But he was deeply disturbed.
He saw his mother, with the new eyes of adolescence, for the
first time, as distinct from
feeling
her, as the maternal
image.
He saw her, critically, as a fading, tired woman, with grey
hair. He watched her at evening, sitting by the lamp, with the
mending on her lap, in the shabby living-room; he saw how
she knitted her brows and peered
tp
thread a needle; and how
the sock or shirt might lie forgotten while she went off into
some dream of her own which kept her motionless, her face
sad and pinched, for half an hour at a time, while her hands
rubbed unconsciously in a hard and nervous movement over
the arms of the chair. It is always a bad time when a son
grows up and sees his mother as an elderly lady; but this did
not last longer than a few days with Paul; because at once
the pathos and tiredness of her gripped him, and with it, a
sullen anger against his own father.
No major revelation aoout adolescence here, and the relationship be–
tween the words I have italicized is hardly exact. But the elderly lady'S
dry mechanical habits are accurately recorded and they make the dis–
tinction between the new "seeing" and the old "feeling" convincing;
then the easy word "pathos" can also adequately and accurately ex–
press the result of seeing. Almost every paragraph in the story contains
as much action as this and
all
of these actions are rendered with the
same sufficiency. Sufficiency doesn't sound like much, but it is what
makes the minor stories of Lawrence and Chekhov independently
valuable, not just failed major works. It is in fact a sign of major talent,
