The Fiction of Lessing's Politics

Either Doris Lessing's much proclaimed vision has tired and gone limp, or, it has been overrated from the start. With over a dozen books behind her, ranging from poetry and reportage to novel upon novel, the author of the last collection of stories might as well be begging posterity to forget her. These stories are a rehash--which only the most avid of her fans could call a refinement--of her standard motifs; menopausing women, middle aged socialism, dislocation in London, eccentricity fading into conformity, the last gasp.

The title story, about an aging socialist sick of it all, is, probably the worst and certainly the most tiresome in this less than gripping display of good intentions. For one thing, the story is endless, seventy pages long. Fifty longer than it need be. It is also mercilessly superficial, and badly written. Jack Orkney's socialism, like Parisian communism and New York radical chic, is actually only another throb in the bleeding heart of liberalism. The politics here described are, no less disappointingly, such now antiquated rituals (once known and loved) as the sit-in, the pray-in, the fast-in Jack Orkney's complaint, if I may improve on the title, is the standard complaint of anyone who has ever had anything to do with The or any other movement; splinter groups ad infinitum, closed circuit appeal, and the impotence of social protest that caters at best to the audience of educational television, and at worst, which is more often, to little more than the egoism of its leadership. The situation--a fatigued politico surrounded by his socialist progeny and friends--has all the makings of a humorous subject. Humor however, is not the strong point in any of three stories. As for the temptation, about which the author seems a trifle undecided, it seems to be the dream life Orkney suddenly discovers after the death of his father. The temptation has something to do with a "terror associated with the knowledge of time passing" and couldn't be vaguer, Perhaps that's the point?

To write vaguely about vagueness is no less criminal, in fiction as elsewhere, than to write blandly about blandness, as if it were scripture. Fortunately, the other stories in the collection are somewhat more authoritative--with a little help from our friends D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. One story, "Not a Very Nice Story," about a symbiotic pair of marriages, seems to be a direct imitation of Lawrence, or at least of his less attractive side. With a similar conspiratorial and chatty tone, Lessing one-ups over her characters by pretending a sympathy she and the reader know she doesn't really mean. "Most definitely she did not want to think; it was extraordinary, the strength of her instinct not to examine that area of her life," Lessing writes of one of her victims. Such stylistic affinities with Lawrence permeate the story. It is a credit to Lessing's common sense, however, that she does not try her hand at the greater Lawrentian feat of sensualizing descriptive prose.

Two better stories, "A Year in Regent's Par," and "Lions, Leaves, Roses..." recall Virginia Woolf, both in style and in the love, shared with Henry James as well, of the garden metaphor and the English park. The writing in these two stories is quite skillful, at times almost beautiful. "Lions, Leaves, Roses..." ends especially well with a dizzying sense of infinite space and possibility: "Leaves, words, people, shadows, whirled together towards autumn and the solstice."

Two other stories are worth mentioning-as assaults, the one astonishingly good, the other astonishingly awful, on the reader who otherwise would be in serious danger of falling asleep over this lame and longwinded assemblage of "short" (if only they were shorter) stories. The first of these, "Mrs. Fortescue" succeeds quite possibly by shock value alone. An angry adolescent discovers that an old woman living in the apartment upstairs is a whore, whom he promptly-if I may quote-"I think the appropriate word here is screws." Lessing spares the reader no detail of the act. It is horrible and pathetic, and apparently the only way the boy knows to achieve adult status, both in his own eyes and in those of his idolized and scornful older sister. Eminently disturbing, although perhaps for not quite the best reasons, still this is the only consummate story of the lot.

The other story, "Report on the Threatened City" is simply idiotic, and for a writer of Lessing's age and status, unpardonably sophomoric. Extra-terrestrial visitors-from Mars, no doubt-have this to say of planet earth": the young take to drugs, the old to convention, in five years the earthquakes will have destroyed the world, in the meantime everyone is dying of indifference and analysis. Which is more unoriginal, the critique of its technique, is moot. The amazing thing is that Lessing takes herself seriously. The language of "Report" may be pseudo-scientific, but mock-serious it is not. Lessing slaps on truism after truism with the plaster knife of all her wellworn and well meaning liberal convictions. Once again the saving grace of humor is absent where it is most needed.

The other stories in the book, while more or less mediocre, demonstrate along with the story of the boy and the ancient prostitute, a certain ability for the particular and an insight into the quixotic. Although the over-riding characteristic of Lessing's writing-which is extremely uneven from story to story-is long-windedness, it is only when she addresses social abstracts that she makes a fool of herself. Then, appreciable as her sentiments may be it is one long wince for the reader, and, especially if the reader is under thirty, rather like watching one's parents do the twist. One wishes they wouldn't.

There are other criticisms one could make from a literary point of view. Very few of Lessing's characters get off without one or another dehumanizing analysis of their personalities. Lessing has an annoying habit of randomly doing away with articles and pronouns. She occasionally writes a very bad sentence (for instance: "The flight was called and he was airborne, floating west inside grey cloud that was his inner state,"). But these are aesthetic blights, and none so damaging-or so interesting-as this inability of hers to write convincing, let alone good, fiction about politics.

With examples like Doestoevski or Orwell dangling before the mind's eye of the literary student of politics or the political student of literature, one could hardly argue for the blanket incompatibility of art and politics. The trouble with Lessing is that her fiction is not its own end, but a vehicle, at best, for reportage. She documents rather than transfigures a world too much with her, Like Mailer, but without his conscious purpose, Lessing belongs to that category of writers who face the future in the uncertain terms of the journalist: event-ridden, self conscious, and without a philosophy strong enough to bear the burden of past and future instead she seeks refuge in the present, a present she neither loves nor hates. With nothing so inspired as Doestoevskian contempt, she only disapproves. Lessing, with all her social conscience, simply hasn't got the consciousness, historical or prophetic, to tell us anything we haven't heard before, As for posterity, what will be her longevity? Nothing, as the past several years have proved only too-well, is so quickly dated as-dare I say it?--relevance.