Varieties of Love

THE HABIT OF LOVING (311 pp.)--Don's Lessing--CroweLL ($4).

A woman has slipped into the uneasy circle of England's Angry Young Men. No charter member of that club--not even Osborne or Amis--can have much to teach Author Doris Lessing about her craft. Moreover, her anger is never clothed in whining self-pity or adolescent sneers. Born in Persia, raised in South Africa and now a Londoner, Doris Lessing finds life less than perfect wherever she finds herself. The short stories in The Habit of Loving pick up her quarry in places as varied as France, South Africa, England, Bavaria. As might be expected, the title is ironic. In these stories there is a good deal more of habit than of loving.

In the title story, an old man of the theater still has the habit but not the manpower to go with it. Left by his mistress, aging George tries to remarry his divorced wife. Turned down, he turns to a much younger woman for whom the old boy is a catch of convenience. Married, he discovers that a marriage of male habit and female indifference is not enough to keep off the evening chill. After a trip to Italy, his wife recites a simple fact of life to him: "George, you know you're getting too old for this sort of thing--it's not good for you; you look ghastly." But Author Lessing does not play this situation for sexual repartee. Her story is a comment on vapid people who have grown incapable of the emotions that can cement a marriage or even a love affair.

Neither selfless love nor old-fashioned romantic love gets much of a chance in these stories. Their themes can be banal, as in He, which has a pathetic and overworked English shrew driving her husband into the arms of another woman but wanting him back at any cost. Sometimes the habit becomes just plain infidelity, as in Getting Off the Altitude. In A Mild Attack of Locusts, the habit turns into love of the land, even when the African locusts make the land a crushing burden. A female leftist in The Day Stalin Died has the party habit so bad that Stalin's death inspires her to intone: "We will have to pledge ourselves to be worthy of him."

The best story of the lot is the last and longest, The Eye of God in Paradise. Two doctors, a man and a woman, arrive in the Bavarian Alps on a skiing holiday. They are English and lovers, and each has lost a former love during the war. Both are generous, both are hopeful that the time of Hitler was a decent nation's inexplicable nightmare--but they run into enough of the Nazi mentality to live a nightmare of their own. Author Lessing's tale is too carefully loaded to be fully convincing or fair. But it has enough truth and strength to be a chilling literary experience.

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