Books: The Witness as Prophet

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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.