Current Books

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing (567 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $5.95). In her twelfth book, British Novelist Doris Lessing copes with not just one literary chestnut but a whole treeful: the sexual odyssey of a bachelor girl, the political disillusionment of a onetime Communist, the maladjustment of the overeducated modern woman. She succeeds in creating a remarkable heroine (possibly her alter ego) who somehow manages believably to combine the qualities of Kitty Foyle, Arthur Koestler and Simone de Beauvoir. Like Mrs. Lessing, Heroine Anna Wulf is a divorced writer who explains, in four different notebooks, why she is too troubled to write. Her black notebook looks back to an African experience that led to her first novel. The red records her political and intellectual life in London. The blue dissects her problems with men--which are considerable. The yellow has bits and pieces of professional writing. Individually, any one notebook gives an unsatisfactory picture of Anna, but by switching back and forth between the books. Author Lessing delineates, clearly and subtly, the relationships between the convicting parts of a complex personality.

CONFLICT, by Robert Leckie (448 pp.; Putnam; $6.95). In this first full-scale history of the Korean war, former Marine Robert Leckie dramatically reconstructs the bloody, bitter battles of a frustrating war. He brings alive the shock of the North Korean invasion, the "bugouts" of terrified G.I.s, the blare of Chinese bugles in the night, the quiet heroism of soldiers and marines dying on nameless hillsides in an alien land. Like many another marine. Leckie has a low opinion of General Douglas MacArthur, whom he charges with making a fatal mistake in splitting his forces for the dash to the Yalu River. Result was the disastrous rout of U.S. forces by the Chinese Communists, so poignantly described by S.L.A. Marshall in The River and the Gauntlet. But Leckie believes that the war was worth its high cost of 33,629 American lives. "In Korea." he writes, "invasion was repelled, and in such manner as to remind the world that an invader need not be destroyed to be repulsed.To gnash one's teeth because the invader escaped destruction is to revert to that concept of 'total war' which is no longer possible without mutual total destruction. Of Korea, then, it is enough to say: It was here that Communism suffered its first defeat. That was the only victory possible."

THE WEDDING, by Anqel M. de Lera (242 pp.; Dutton; $3.95). Spanish writers from Lope de Vega to Garcia Lorca have had a fascination for blending love and death in scenes of grotesque horror. In this tale by Spanish Novelist de Lera. the characters are cliches, and their talk is monotonous. But the novel comes powerfully alive when it reaches the love-death climax of a wedding night. The groom-to-be. Luciano, settles in a small, primitive town, picks a local beauty to marry. He has no trouble bribing her parents to let her go, but the rest of the townspeople fiercely resent an outsider taking one of their girls. They regard him with a "hatred steaming with hot blood and entrails." On his wedding day, he tries to appease the townspeople with a band he has hired, fireworks and 120 gallons of wine. But no sooner has he retired for the night with his bride than a band of hooligans show up. At first they behave in the traditional manner. They serenade the bride with dirty songs impugning her chastity. They hold a "cats concert," in which cats and dogs are tied up and encouraged to fight to the death, snarling and whining, under the bridal window. But then the pranksters smash the windows. Luciano is stabbed, staggers back to the bedroom, and dies deflowering his bride. As a commentary on the modern Spanish scene, The Wedding provides tourists with a useful tip: rural weddings can be as bloody as bullfights.

SOME HUMAN ODDITIES, by Eric J. Dingwall (198 pp.; University Books; $6) and GHOST AND GHOUL, by T. C. Lethbridge (156 pp.; Doubleday; $3.75).

In bygone days in Merry England, no one thought twice about seeing ghosts; they were as common a household item as chairs and tables. Today an estimated one out of every five English men and women still sees ghosts or experiences "psychic phenomena," but in keeping with the times scrutinizes them scientifically. Researcher Eric Dingwall analyzes some classic ghosts and ghost see-ers with the latest tools of his trade, including psychiatry and statistical research. Most famous is the 19th century Scotsman Daniel Dunglas Home, who set up a salon in Paris where he produced table rappings, voices, visions, and even floated out the window, and numbered among his fascinated visitors Trollope, Hawthorne, the Brownings, Napoleon III and his Empress Eugenie. With proper scientific detachment, Dingwall refuses to say whether these supernatural doings were real or imaginary; evidence points both ways. No such doubts trouble Author Lethbridge, an archaeologist who has often seen ghosts and has even sketched a few in his book. Ghosts are plentiful, he believes, because they are natural phenomena. "A ghost, ghoul, or uncanny sound," he writes, "is far more likely to be thought projection from one of your fellow men, still living on earth, than it is to be a broadcast from the outside." In other words, a ghost is simply a television picture, minus the sound, which is transmitted from one person to another.

THE HANDS OF ESAU, by Hiram Haydn (784 pp.; Harper; $7.50). It is the summer of a middle year for Walton Herrick, but it seems to him the winter of his lifetime. His third wife quits him and with her go their children. What a time to be urged to run for Governor! What a time to be caught in the clash of two cliques down at the foundation! Herrick--man of both sensitivity and substance--is in a Nixonian crisis or worse, and it causes his whole life to pass before his eyes. The process requires 784 pages, a great deal of recollection-in-miniature, and a wearisome whirligig of literary techniques that makes this long novel seem all the longer.

As editor of The American Scholar and Atheneum Publishers, Author Haydn, 54, has earned a reputation for scrupulous taste and sympathetic insight. But as an author, he commits gaucheries and piles up prolixities that as an editor he should have blenched at. Perhaps it is because the book is almost embarrassingly autobiographical. And at the end, the reader learns that the book is merely the first part of an unfinished trilogy.

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