Bleak Return : Books: For her first memoir, novelist Doris Lessing went home to Zimbabwe to find a country ravaged by poverty, AIDS and drought.

Two years ago, novelist Doris Lessing embarked upon an autobiographical work about Zimbabwe, the African country where she grew up.

Lessing was exiled from what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1956 for her fierce opposition to its white minority government, and only returned to her native land after 1979 when it became an independent state ruled by a black majority.

She had visited the country three times--in 1982, 1988 and 1990--and envisaged a book with an upbeat ending, cautiously optimistic about its prospects under President Robert Mugabe. But then she returned this February, and knew a somber postscript was inevitable.

This last visit was to a land reeling under several heavy blows. Zimbabwe’s currency had been devalued, and poverty was more acute. The AIDS epidemic is rampant, and the government estimates it will kill more than 10% of the population by the year 2000. And now there is a drought, the worst of this century.

Lessing, 72, broods on these developments from the living room of her home, a tall narrow Victorian house with views of the entire city.

“Even the Limpopo River has dried up,” Lessing says quietly. “I don’t ever remember that happening before. So obviously I couldn’t honestly leave (the book) as it was. Things change so fast there.”

With the inclusion of comments about her 1992 visit, “African Laughter” is out from HarperCollins this month. Apart from accounts of her four visits, Lessing mixes personal recollections with observations about political corruption, AIDS and the gradual disappearance of the bush.

Over her glittering 40-year writing career, Lessing has managed to irritate and inflame substantial sectors of opinion. She was held up as a feminist icon because of her 1962 novel “The Golden Notebook,” but has since called the women’s movement “embarrassing and ineffectual.”

She espoused Marxism as a young woman, but turned her back on Communism after the Soviets invaded Hungary, and her novel “The Good Terrorist” (1985) scathingly satirized left-wing groups in London. With the publication of “African Laughter,” her first autobiographical work, she seems destined to upset many readers again.

“It is a book which I don’t see can please anybody,” she says, noting that it criticizes not only the white farmers, holdovers from the colonial era, but also the corruption of a rich, privileged black class created in the wake of independence.

“I toned down the material about the whites a bit,” she admits. “They don’t realize how awful they are, how cold and arrogant they are toward the blacks, who are warm people.

“But they are trying. They work desperately hard. They are brilliant farmers. And they care enormously about the country. They always did. They cared about it when it was ‘their’ country, and they care now.”

Lessing knows these farmers well. Her father grew tobacco, and many leisure hours of her formative years were spent on the verandas of farming families. The country “was white, provincial and narrow,” she says. “It was so boring. You couldn’t have friendships with black people, for simple reasons like the curfew. They had to be back in their locations by 8 or 9 at night. It was a real serf society.”

When she grew up, she headed for Rhodesia’s capital city, Salisbury (now Harare) and found a group of people who shared her left-of-center views. But she really wanted to be in London, and arrived here in 1949. Within a year her reputation was secure with the publication of her first novel, “The Grass Is Singing,” a story of life on a Rhodesian farm. Over the next few years she returned occasionally, but was declared a Prohibited Immigrant in 1956--a ban that remained for 25 years.

Her attitude toward exile was ambiguous. “My daylight self didn’t mind it,” she says. “I hated the society, though I missed the landscape. But being shut out, that’s very powerful, on a level we don’t know much about.”

Of the exile, she writes, “I did not want to live in Southern Rhodesia . . . it was provincial and tedious. I wanted to live in London. . . . These rational considerations did not reach some mysterious region of myself that was apparently an inexhaustible well of tears, for night after night I wept in my sleep and woke knowing I was unjustly excluded from my own best self.”

Her return after Mugabe’s accession was emotional: “When I changed my money at the airport bank the official asked if I was the writer and welcomed me in the name of Zimbabwe. I went out into the dry scented air and wept.”

A strand throughout “African Laughter” is the gradual disappearance of the bush and of wildlife, a process that the drought will only intensify. Lessing writes of it elegiacally.

“This is a country that was pristine,” she says. “But the animals have virtually gone. The trees they use to replace real trees which have disappeared are blue gum trees from Australia. It’s hard to remember what it used to be like, and then see what it’s like now. I was brought up in this paradise of animals--you couldn’t walk a step without seeing animals and birds. Now you can drive across a whole area without seeing an animal.”

Despite its problems, Lessing has hope for Zimbabwe: “Given some decent (rainy) seasons, it has a chance of working. I’m more optimistic about it than anywhere else in that area. It isn’t riven by racial hatred, there’s not much inter-tribal tension. You get the occasional flash of anti-white feeling, but on the whole it’s amiable. You don’t need hundreds of injections against disease to go there. You can travel by train. If you send a letter, it gets there. Why should it not work?”

And while Lessing describes it as “a great misfortune” that the whites cannot adapt better to changing times, she also notes: “The younger ones are going to multiracial schools, so this is only a passing phase. And things are different. For example, you would never find one white person lifting a hand to do anything. Now you go to a party and find the servants being sent home at 8. The whites do their own clearing up.”

But what of the blacks? “I feel sorry for Robert Mugabe. The talk is they’re going to try and throw him out. The trouble is the alternatives are not very appetizing. He’s not very lovable, though he did try to prevent corruption. But the top blacks (known as Chef) are very rich now. The povos (the poor) hate them. They’re bitter and angry.”

During her 1982 visit, Lessing says, whites repeatedly delivered what she calls The Monologue--a list of complaints about the blunders of the new black government. In her later visits, this gave way to a chorus from blacks about their living conditions: “If only Comrade Mugabe would. . .” “Why doesn’t Mugabe . . .?” “Mugabe should . . .”

On several occasions, Lessing asked people she met what they most wanted for their country; it seemed reasonable to ask her.

“My heart’s desire would be a competent government,” she says. “That’s what they really need. It’s not so far out of reach. The trouble is, Mugabe is kept in power by people he has made rich; ex-freedom fighters who have turned out to be baddies. There are a lot of competent people in the country, but they have to use people from other parties, use whites, use more women.”

While she says “African Laughter” will be published in Zimbabwe, “most people cannot afford books. Few blacks have heard of me.”

She says she next will write her autobiography. The first part will cover her life until she moved to England. “It was all so long ago there’s almost no one left alive to offend,” she says, smiling faintly. “The second part will be much harder.”