The Will to (Still) Believe

WAY BACK IN 1896, William James counselled the more maleable boys down at Yale on the subject. As he then figured it was probably safer to choose, despite any doubts, to believe. For who knew what the skeptic risked by leaving life's riddles unanswered? But the times, as they say, have a-changed. Belief is not the sure bet it once was. Too often belief, when not merely irrelevant, has been shown to be destructive or self-defeating. so many philosophies, life styles, governments have been tried--and abandoned--over the past seventy years, that it is little wonder that one hardly feels up to trying, once more, all over again.

If you need further convincing on the matter, Doris Lessing's new novel. The Four-Gates City, is something of a scoreboard on which the hits and misses of the second half of the twentieth century have been recorded. That that score is most often a losing one should surprise no one. In this, the final volume of her Children of Violence quintet, Mrs. Lessing takes her heroine Martha Quest from the ruins that passed as London after World War II and deposits her on the brink of the twenty-first century amid its assorted, but not at all surprising, cataclysms. As Martha passes through each successive decade (the late fourties and an attempted return to normalcy; the espionage and red-baiting of the fifties; the calculated idiosyncracies and extravagant violence of the present), Martha's progress becomes more and more analogous to that of a snake as she outgrows and stoically must shed restrictive skins of convictions and illusions. Hers is a progress of discarding belief. And since the direction of Martha's growth is never really voluntary, it is not a "quest" at all-it is simply the inevitable path awaiting anyone who has attained for impressive level of self-consciousness and self-awareness. Similarly, if the reader rarely finds Mrs. Lessing's judgments on recent social and intellectual history surprising. I don't think it is because she ever resorts to the hackneyed or the cliched. Rather, we, like Martha, have become supremely conscious of events around us. It is the price one pays for attending all those ever-so-serious "rap sessions." And so Mrs. Lessing can be enthusiastically read for the confirmation she often gives to one's own opinions as well as for the general clarity with which she treats those few areas in which our opinions might not yet be formed.

IN ITS SCOPE and thoroughness, The Four-Gated City is very much a nineteenth century novel. However, its concerns are much more contemporary. To simplify matters immeasurably--and, for those who have read the book, perhaps intolerably--the narrative alternates between the two poles of politics and insanity--the public and private responses of modern man. As literary marriages go, it seems the successful offspring of an alliance between George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.

As the novel opens, Martha, in her thirties and a white refugee from colonial Africa, is wandering through a dislocated London where cellars are damp and paint is blistering and wood is rotting. In evoking a gray, totalitarian world, and in showing how, no matter what minor fluctuations the government undergoes, the poor never escape that world, this novel reflects Orwell's paternal influence. Politics, particularly the opposition politics of the Labour Party and those groups to its left, become the novel's initial concern. Yet, for Mrs. Lessing, politics are now something of a dead end. She sardonically delights in unearthing their hidden contradictions that scurry about in the dark like beetles under stones. On a superficial level, there is

Graham Pattern, for instance, still a Marxist, and fond of saying that "everything is run by the dozen men who were in my year at Oxford and Cambridge." He said this with pride. Which did not prevent him and everybody else saluting the new classlessness, which meant that some talents from the provinces or from the lower classes had been attracted to London and had been absorbed--exactly as had always happened.

More seriously, the novel documents the assimilation of whole radical movements into impotent forms of institutionalized dissent. The various peace and ban-the bomb movements become so large they are powerless. In the midst of self-satisfied, ineffectual dissenters, one baffled American

joked at supper than in his own country, an outsider because radical, he had never felt more of an outsider than this weekend, surrounded by radicals who "believed--correct me if I'm wrong--that political protest is a question of stating a problem."

As if no confirm his suspicion, Martha's employer and sometimes lover, a leftist writer by the name of Mark Coldridge, retreats to his study, which he wallpapers with world maps on which various colored markers denote War, Famine, Riots, Poverty, Prisons, "like medieval Humours."

IT WOULD SEEM, then, the Mrs. Lessing leaves little to believe in. And the statement is indeed true when applied to the first five-sixths of the book. However, there is another movement afoot. For a number of years now, a friend of mine--something of a neo-classicist himself--has been adamant in insisting that a New Romanticism is upon us. I've rarely argued the point with him, for one can hardly be unaware of the fact that we (the Now Generation, right?) are entering a new era (the Age of Aquarius, of course) where all we really need is Love. All perfectly obvious. The Four-Gated City, however, is persuasive evidence that the New Romanticism, properly so-called, goes a lot further than just the celebration of the immediate. It retains a view of history. It makes no attempt to erase the undeniable downhill slide of civilization. For, before Romanticism, must come cynicism. And the cynic says men were never very good. There were only fewer of them. Mrs. Lessing pinpoints the popularization of jazz along with its "patient long-suffering tolerance of other people's disabilities, loyalty to one's intimates, a contained despair" as the beginning of a romanticism of despair. "Not since the days of Werther, "she writes, "has there been so sentimental a cult."

But, somehow, all this doesn't lead to despair. Despair--or what would lead to it--is transmorgrified. It is the old ugly duckling routine: man, we are told, is ugly, the uglier the better, because (and this is where the inexorable logic of the human heart denies the overwhelming evidence of history) man is soon to become the swan. What kind of swan? Well, the speculation forms the basis for a whole body of literature, a literature whose only real unity is a pervasive belief in man's future transfiguration. Tolkein, Hesse, Arthur C. Clark, all the fountainheads of their respective cults, offer variants on the theme. Man, either as an individual or as a society, is still in his adolescence. He is yet to attain a simpler kind of community, a deeper level of spirituality, or a transcedent form of evolution. The hopes of the Romantic are to be vindicated.

In its second emphasis, in its examination of insanity, The Four-Gated City offers one such vindication. For Lessing, the Coldridge townhouse is an elaborate metaphorical conceit--at its base, in its cellar, it house Linda, Mark's mad wife. In another novel produced during another time, Linda would have probably been left to her solitary fate--most probably, like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, Linda would have simply destroyed herself. At best, she could only hope to remain locked up for life, half-mad, in a Gothic tower. But, in this novel, Linda is treated as a prophet as she conducts Martha through the looking glass into another, better world.

FOR MRS. LESSING, those that society has labelled mad are actually those super-perceptive, rare individuals whose natural telepathic and extrasensory powers have not atrophied. Martha, in her role as a letter-day Mrs. Dalloway peering into the crevice that separates two eras, discovers that she shares certain affinities with Linda. From that point, it is not long before Martha is voluntarily undergoing harrowing experiments in order to determine the limits of her consciousness. As the novel closes, she is stranded off the Scottish coast, England having been decimated by poison gas and radioactivity. She has also become a member of a telepathic community whose members speak to each other across great distance through the power of their own shared thoughts. In doing so, Martha attains a perspective that permits her to see, in the midst of the chaos, a terrible beauty being born. Around the world, mutant infants begin to appear. To their earthbound parents, these children that "see" and "hear" in dramatic new ways seem ethereal. In her final letter, Martha writes of such children on her own island, "These seven children are our--but we have no word for it. The nearest to it is that they are our guardians. They guard us." More remarkable still, these children of violence are born free of the curse of violence. And when one exceptional child does want to fight, "the children regarded him as some sort of unfortunate born with the need to quarrel as if as might have had a harelip."

All quite far-fetched? Yes. Perhaps. Yet, in the context of this otherwise doggedly realistic novel, the mutant children are a surprisingly compelling solution. After all, it is a reworking of the Noah myth. Mrs. Lessing, because of her careful analysis of modern society, sees fit to purge mankind in a grand psychic, as well as physical, deluge. Only the extrasensory survive.

To concentrate on its conclusion, though, may be to do an injustice to the rest of the book. For it is constructed very much like an iceberg--in order to support a tiny prominence of prophecy and speculation, the narrative spends most of its time examining the submerged bulk of past history. Besides her other gifts, Doris Lessing, is at all times, the lady novelist--and a good one, too. If her sentences sometimes seem too explicitly diagnostic in an effort to delineate complex emotions, she nonetheless never loses a dark, undercut ting humor. Her cynical view of society's absurdities is often quite brilliant, as when she describes how

Linda, who was as mad as they come, and showing more strain with every day that passed, did not strike anyone as more than engagingly different."

Her gloves, for instance: they charmed everyone. When asked why she wore them she said it was because she bit her nails until they bled. "Lynda's gloves" became a kind of family joke--among dozens of people.

Lynda, asked why she didn't have any affairs, replied that she couldn't have an affairs because she never took her gloves off: the remark was found the very essence of "camp."

The situation--one in which the conventional terms "sanity" and "insanity" are reversed--is all too commonplace nowadays. And yet its popular acceptance has created the atmosphere which enriches a book such as The Four-Gated City. For we are still playing the same Jamesian game of placing bets on the resolution of the future. When rational, we are, of course more skeptical. Only now we are even less inclined to pretend we are making our choices on anything like rational grounds. No, instead we accept the fact that our psychology drives us toward accepting the "irrational" as the only possible solution. Since I know little of odds-making I have no idea how probable or improbable this novel's prognosis for history is. But, as provocative reading in a new, developing genre, The Four-Gated City is anything but a long shot