Amor Vincit Omnia?

By Melvin Maddocks

THE HABIT OF LOVING

by DORIS LESSING

311 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell. $6.95.

Love in these Doris Lessing stories is a disease, often contagious, occasionally fatal. Only the very young confuse it with pleasure. A mild attack of love can drive Lessing women to pray: "O God, make me old soon." It is almost as if love were Mrs. Lessing's version of hubris--a case of overreach for which those who would be like gods must be punished. And, in fact, whether these 17 reprinted tales (first collected in 1957) take place in Mrs. Lessing's own southern Africa or London or Paris, the settings are harsh and foreboding enough for Greek tragedy.

In Flavors of Exile the sun bakes down on two adolescents sitting under a pomegranate tree. The last piece of fruit falls--overripe, fermenting, already crawling with ants. The boy takes a stick and skewers the fruit as casually as he has already skewered the girl's affection for him. In The Words He Said, two lovers sit by a bonfire at a country dance, tense, frustrated, until the very heat of the fire seems to raise their feelings to the even hotter temperatures of hate. In Wine, a couple linger in a Paris cafe. The man recalls a youthful affair. The woman suddenly sees him in his story as she has not seen him in life. With a kind of sinister coincidence his present affair seems to die as he relates the conclusion of his old love.

Is there an alternative to love? In these stories, written not long before The Golden Notebook (1962)--Mrs. Lessing's broadest consideration of all the wars between the sexes--her answer appears to be a rueful no. Those who want to live, apparently, are more or less doomed to love. But cheer up --a little. Love, like the blight in A Mild Attack of Locusts, can be endured. The sturdy wind up saying "It could have been worse." Mrs. Lessing has always been a slow, deliberate writer who seems unable to spare herself or her reader the slightest wince of pain. She is strong as perhaps no male writer of love stories is strong. Yet the stark honesty, the masterly bleakness of these stories are not finally depressing. It may even be praise to say that after a Lessing story--as after a painful episode of life--the reader feels a kind of exaltation just to survive.

Melvin Maddocks

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