The Witness as Prophet

THE FOUR-GATED CITY by Doris Lessing. 613 pages. Knopf. $7.50.

Fans of British Novelist Doris Lessing talk about a composite character called the Lessing Woman in much the same way as people once talked about the Hemingway Man. The Lessing Woman is a formidable female. She hasn't been to a university but she has read everything and remembers it. Her ideals are high and unsullied. She works (or has worked) at lost political causes. Although she loathes marriage, she gamely raises children and endures domestic woes. She cooks well, keeps a spotless house (except when depressed) and does excellent writing, research or secretarial work. She is any man's moral and intellectual superior, and she rarely hesitates to tell him so.

Mostly she is Martha Quest of Children of Violence, Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook--or Doris Lessing, for virtually all of the author's writing is autobiographical. The Four-Gated City is the last of five novels in a Martha Quest series. The first four were set in an imaginary country named Zambesia (Lessing was raised in Rhodesia). They followed Martha through girlhood rebellion against baffled parents, two short bad marriages, immersion in the Communist Party during World War II, and a subsequent period of psychic drying-out.

Sound of Whimpering. The new novel finds her arrived from Zambesia, lugging her suitcase around London in a superexistential funk. When her second marriage collapsed in the previous volume, she had promised herself, "When I get to England, I'll find a man I can really be married to."

No such luck. Instead, she fetches up as secretary-housekeeper to Mark Coldridge, a leftist writer whose crowded Bloomsbury house is a Dostoevskian rendering of the Victorian family. "Everything as sick and neurotic and hopeless as you can imagine. A dominating mama over all, and a wife in a mental hospital, and a man just sitting waiting for some sucker like me to cope with everything," she muses. The household rocks with emotion--pent-up, misdirected, short-circuited. Martha is nearly driven out by the sound of solitary whimpering behind closed doors.

In the hands of a writer with a gram of sentimentality the situation would be ludicrous. But as with all Lessing novels, the immersed reader is too involved to laugh. The reaction is more akin to horror. People are suffering because they are caught in the breakdown of society. Private institutions like marriage and the family lead to isolation or madness; public causes and institutions reflect that madness in alternating currents of paranoia and greed. Old activists like Mark Coldridge have quit fighting. His only political activity is to keep two huge world maps, one charting wars and riots, the other showing stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons.

Futuristic Coda. If Lessing has given up on politics, she has not given up causes, and in Mark's wife Lynda lies the key to her new radical direction. As the book progresses, Martha becomes more camera than character, and Lynda takes over as the book's imaginative center. It becomes clear that she is not mad at all but maimed--by a troubled childhood, by marriage to Mark, by years of corrosive drugs casually administered in mental hospitals. She is also a mystical speaker of truth whose hallucinations are eerily accurate. She hears voices, consults cards, studies astrological charts. She and Martha sit down and reread the classics with "openings in their brains. What they searched for was everywhere, all around them, like a finer air shimmering in the flat air of every day."

Shocking as it may be to her disciplined following of rationalists, Lessing is coming out for ESP, and fearless as ever, she writes her way right into the 1990s to prove her point. Like Mark's maps come to life, Lessing depicts most centers of civilization as destroyed by nuclear and bacterial chaos. Survivors huddle together in remote regions, and a human mutant begins to flourish: a people in touch with the past and the future not through signs or portents but through a consciousness expanded to link the past with the future.

The futuristic coda comes as a letdown. It is too sketchy either as science fiction or as an ending to a novel whose main strength is its meticulous reading of psychic signals. The author's thesis is hardly novel, but it cannot be ignored: in a sick society, the roles of madness and sanity are reversed. This society is sick unto disaster, so alternatives must be sought in areas removed from what passes as reason. Lessing may be a flawed prophet, but as witness she is persuasive and disturbing.

"There are a lot of dopes in the medical profession," says Doris Lessing. "In ten or 15 years, people will regard this as the Dark Ages."

Surprisingly, she doesn't say it very loud. Or make an interviewer feel like a dupe of the Dark Age. Her voice is more like a whisper than an assertive British whine, reports TIME'S Martha Duffy. Seated in a New York restaurant on her first trip to the U.S., she is more apt to fiddle with the silverware than stare down a companion.

Can it be Doris Lessing--unabashed ex-Communist, uncompromising feminist, the world's most fearless woman novelist? Yes, if you listen carefully. "In time, many people who are now called schizophrenics won't be called ill at all," she continues. "Like Lynda, they are depressed, with good reason to be. All this categorization! Putting a label on something is a way of stopping thinking about it. We should ask psychiatrists many more questions."

That is what Doris Lessing is about --questions, not opinions. She began asking them as a girl growing up in the vast, empty landscape of Rhodesia. Her questions concerned racism, and the answers led her into radical leftism and membership in a Communist group "so pure it must have been blessed by Lenin in his grave." When she moved to England in 1949, at the beginning of her writing career, she was a party member for a few years.

Over the years, however, politics paled. "At first it's fun, because you get the illusion of achieving. But I've spent my life with political people and they never accomplish anything. We ex-Communists have a flavor that is instantaneously recognizable to each other --a sort of dryness. It is very hard to get on with the young socialists today. They seem so romantic--as if nothing had ever happened."

Mental Pictures. At 49, she wants to write without encumbrance. "I haven't been married for years, thank God," she says. "No one knows the virtues it requires, and I haven't got them. It's a hair shirt." Yet she quietly insists that "I am an inspired amateur cook," and is serenely, unmistakably feminine, a small woman with delicate features and huge gray eyes that seem to refract light. "People say I'm bleak about being a woman, but that isn't true. I'm bleak about being a human being. We talk about the disasters of the future. Well, the disasters are happening right now all over the world."

Lessing does not merely believe in ESP; she experiences it. In the novel, Martha realizes after a friend's suicide that she had seen it in her mind before it happened. Doris Lessing admits to seeing such pictures "all the time. I am capable of remarkable mental pictures." She believes that ESP is a normal perceptive sense that has atrophied, and that hallucination is often another misnomer--a way that scientists have of labeling things to seal off inquiry. In her new pursuit, she is clear-eyed, dedicated and calm. Her next book is to be called Briefing for a Descent into Hell.

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