BOOKS
117
THE LESSING REPORT
A MAN AND TWO WOMEN.
By
Doris Lessing. Simon
&
Schuster. $5.00.
Published here last year,
The Golden Notebook
was the first
of Doris Lessing's fifteen works to gain wide recognition in America,
though as early as
Retreat to Innocence
Elizabeth Hardwick had seized
on her as a novelist preferable to Muriel Spark (for one). We have
yet to see Mrs. Lessing's two plays performed, but they read with the
same earnest, talkative energy that charges her new book of short stories,
the first since
The Habit of Loving.
That energy which is dedicated
chiefly to its own increase, an utter confidence in the value of polemic
(I argue, therefore I am), and a fanatic idea of sex as
the
decisive
human function, determining, not determined by, all others-these pre–
occupations characterize an
oeuvre
which in a dozen years has assumed
considerable proportions.
Yet
it
would not occur to Mrs. Lessing's readers, or at least to her
admirers, to ask
her
the question put so often and often admiringly
to Muriel Spark: "How do you write so many books so fast?" (The
Spark reply has become canonical as self-exposure: "It's quite simple.
I write very quickly and never revise.") For all their crippling faults,
Mrs. Spark's novels are always to be found, or at least are striving to be
found, in the crowded provinces of art. Doris Lessing takes her stand
elsewhere, with Lawrence when he says: "there is another kind of
poetry; the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present.
In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, noth–
ing finished." Such an
ars poetica
inevitably entails a great deal of
waste: sloppy, shrill and unpersuasive prose. Yet I bracket Mrs. Lessing
with Lawrence, not because her achievement suggests his, whatever her
aspirations: Lawrence's record of surfaces never jeopardized the con–
sistency of his own vision. Though not possessed of either the talent of
that record or the genius of that vision, Mrs. Lessing is with Lawrence
because she is the one English novelist now writing who acknowledges
Lawrence's challenge to selfhood, his erosion of the private ego. What
best equips her to accept the challenge is her unabating exploitation of
her position within England's most embattled minority group: she is a
woman. No Jew or homosexual, no Negro or Communist (of course
Mrs. Lessing writes a great deal about all four; sometimes I even think
she
is
all four) has employed to such enthralling effect a minority status
for narrative purposes.
