Oh, to Be in England

IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH (240 pp.) --Doris Lessing--Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

This book is low comedy as well as reporting of a very high order. Like most true comedy, it is also edged with sadness, but every page bears the mark of truth and is as unfailingly readable as first-rate fiction. Author Doris Lessing was born in Persia of British parents, grew up in Southern Rhodesia; in 1949, when she was 30, with a two-year-old son and a near-empty purse, she set out to discover the land of her fathers. Already a very good writer (The Grass Is Singing), she wanted to meet men and women who worked with their hands, to live with them and see them with their hair down. Having as little money as she did, she found her working people in a London rooming house, and their hair was down most of the time.

Running the house, once a good enough home but now much the worse for bomb damage, is Dan, an ex-navyman who is good at repairs, rapacious for rent money, and not above sharp practices akin to stealing. He is dull, sexually primitive and demanding, but he has just the wife to understand and cope with him. Flo had the great good luck to have an Italian grandmother. She cooks overpowering meals, handles her brutish husband with a nice Mediterranean mixture of tears, seeming ignorance and docility. She is greedy and vulgar, and yet so full of the juices of life that it is impossible to dislike her. Among the tenants Author Lessing found types who, at first glance, might resemble people anywhere, but who in looks, sound and character prove to be not merely human but inevitably English. Only in the tight little isle could one find a prostitute like Miss Privet. She and a postman could discuss their respective employments with complete propriety and professional objectivity. Miss Privet had little use for either sex or men, nor was she especially drawn to marriage. And when Mrs. Lessing asked her point-blank if she didn't like sex, she replied indignantly: "If you're going to talk dirty, I'm not interested."

The virgin shopgirl who finally discovers the love she has been missing, the deserted wife (or were they ever married?) who throws herself down two flights of stairs to induce an abortion, the incomparable spiv who is closer to the heart of modern England than anything Kipling had in mind, move through Author Lessing's narrative like pulsing presences. This is the kind of slice-of-life book that can get to be, and almost always is, a bore at about Chapter 2. What saves it for Author Lessing and the reader is the artlessness that conceals art, the conversational pace that never flags, and above all the refusal to be surprised by anything the English creature does in its own habitat.

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