Books: Lady Glum About Love

A MAN AND TWO WOMEN by Doris Lessing. 316 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.

Women are always serious about love, but Doris Lessing is more than serious: she is downright glum or defeatist. She writes about people broken in love with the doom-laden tones of a Thomas Hardy telling of the time of the breaking of nations.

The 19 stories in this collection are so many small tragedies. Far from being mere slices of life, or glimpses of fantasy or of psychological freaks, they demonstrate once again that the short story is not only for light jugglery. The publishers invoke the names of Mary McCarthy and Simone de Beauvoir to suggest the quality of Mrs. Lessing’s talents, but she lacks the argumentativeness of either intellectual lady. She does not argue: she points. Only a theorem or a diagram could be as bare—or as indestructible—as her strongly jointed fictional essays.

In One off the Short List, the hero has declined from early literary promise into that well-padded asylum for mediocrity—BBC journalism. He decides to seduce Barbara Coles, a brilliant young stage designer. But it is a dreadful victory—an ego-shriveling comeuppance which Barbara achieves by 1) matching his rake’s cold heart with cool and uncommitted bedroom expertise of her own, and 2) contemptuously letting him know that she considers him a vulgar interloper in her world of uncompromised talent.

Each Other shows that Doris Lessing can write as well as accredited experts on the gymnastics of sexual love. It seems a commonplace enough story. A 19-year-old wife receives a lover in her bed the moment her husband leaves for work. The difference—and what a difference it makes—is that the adulterers are sister and brother.

To Room Nineteen is one of the bleakest stories about a woman ever written. It takes the reader over 38 blunt, brutal pages through the life—and death by gas—of Susan Rawlings. She is a career woman who has married one of her own emancipated kind —a successful journalist. Step by step, she withdraws from her husband, her children, and finally the world itself. There are no hysterics or overt scenes of disorder or despair. She simply rents a shabby hotel room and secretly goes there certain days in every week as if to meet a lover, actually to be alone with her terrible madness.

There is death, the story says, not at the end of life but in its midst. Most pitiful of all people are those to whom a choice is offered and who doom themselves to the darkness.