Ghosts and Portents

By Melvin Maddocks

THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR by DORIS LESSING 213 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

Futurologists tend to be either projectors or mystics. The projectors take the present, put it on the old slide rule, and compute ahead into tomorrow, worrying whether technology's last achievement will be to foresee technology's demise. On the other hand, the mystics think of the future not as the next extension on the graph but rather as an alternative universe, as different from this one as heaven or hell.

British Novelist Doris Lessing is a mystic. Once, in The Golden Notebook, her frontier was women's liberation. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and now in The Memoirs of a Survivor, she has so abstracted herself from the present and the actual as to deserve another name than novelist. Call her latest book a ghost story of the future.

Her anonymous narrator, a woman living alone in an unidentified city, finds herself existing in a kind of end-time--an apocalypse disguised by understatement. Other tenants are quietly abandoning her apartment building, joining the migrant tribes that suddenly appear, briefly camp, and just as suddenly move on "to the East," leaving no trace but the marks of bonfires on the pavement. Machines no longer work. The electricity is off. Water sells by the bucket and good air is beyond price. Only the bureaucracy goes on, still fussing about regulations as if nothing has happened. Bureaucrats, the government and the press are contemptuously referred to as "the talkers" by the general population. People slowly understand that the way the world is officially described has nothing to do with the way it really is. Meanwhile, packs of seven, eight-and nine-year-old abandoned children have run wild. They ruthlessly hunt food together and live where underground railways used to run, pathetic proofs that homemaking is reverting to something more like "cave-keeping"--that civilization is returning to original rubble.

At this time of cosmic crackup, a twelve-year-old girl named Emily is inexplicably thrust upon the narrator, as if the child represented one last responsibility in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Under the extreme pressures put upon her, the girl swiftly and somewhat surrealistically goes through many of the phases and feelings of a woman's life in a relatively short period. The narrative, so far as there is one, describes Emily's odd, intense relationships with her new guardian, with her lover Gerald (a natural leader who founds a commune), and Hugo her pet, a curious animal with the body of a dog and the face of a cat that seems to suggest the general mutation of the world, including the human race.

Mrs. Lessing's final, heartbreaking effect is to place her characters and her readers between the dead ghosts of the past and the unborn ghosts of the future. She goes so far as to invent a set of rooms into which, as in a recurrent dream, her narrator magically steps to observe a child (herself as a child, or an Emily from another time, or both) living out some fairly loveless incidents from a past that may be real or subconscious. But no past of any sort can look as bleak as Mrs. Lessing's present. Only the future can outdo that.

The Memoirs of a Survivor is an extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility in an unprecedented time that places unbearable demands upon people. It is also a panicked intuition turned into a tentative myth. To ask it to have a conclusion, or even an ending, is to ask too much. The future is less a theme than an obsession for Mrs. Lessing. With all the force and all the limitations of one possessed, she has written a visionary's history of the future--that nightmare from which she is trying to awaken.

sb Melvin Maddocks

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