An Insight into Blindness

THE FOURTH WORLD (318 pp.)--Daphne Afhas--Putnam ($3.75).

In the Bible, both Luke and Matthew are agreed that if the blind lead the blind, both will wind up in the ditch./- In The Fourth World, Novelist Daphne Athas does more than underwrite the common sense of the Gospels. She digs a fictional ditch big enough to hold both the sighted and the sightless, and the world into which she leads the reader would seem simply nightmarish if it did not also ring simply true.

A Different Breed. It is nine years now since Author Athas wrote a small but heartbreaking first novel, The Weather of the Heart (TIME, June 2, 1947), a tragedy of teen-age lovers which proved absolute authority in that difficult literary place, the world of childhood. She is back in that world again, with the additional passport of one who taught algebra to the blind after leaving college. That the problems she sensed were deeper than those she put to her students is clearly evident in The Fourth World, a world as eerie and haunting as any that this year's crop of fiction is apt to produce.

At Canopus Institution (See-Eye) the students are shackled by more than sightlessness. Dr. August, the director, is an icy administrator who thinks the blind really are a different breed, not inhuman, perhaps, but difficult wards of the sighted. What he can least abide is the merest evidence that the blind can also love. The boys and the girls are taught in the same classrooms but they may not associate. A passed note conceived in puppy love is enough to bring down severe punishment. A stolen kiss, a harmless rendezvous, may result in being "shipped," and the likelihood that no other school will accept what Canopus has discarded.

In a way, Dr. August is right. These blind kids are different. They resent the pity, the implied superiority, the power that normal vision gives to the sighted. Seeing through their other senses, they catalogue the weaknesses of their teachers and parody them mercilessly. They have a simple rule of thumb: a teacher is on their side when they circumvent the puritanical rules set up by Dr. August, or an ally of the blindness of those who can see. Some of their teachers are them selves blind, but the same rule applies.

A Novelist's Eye. When she is with her sightless children, Author Athas can be fascinating. Their wide-ranging imaginations, their fantastic sixth sense, these most difficult things are precisely the ones she records best. The tragedy of her teen-age hero and heroine, compounded by a weirdly accidental death and the girl's pregnancy, is moving without a single assist from sentimentality. But what remains finally is a careful delineation of a world that could not be imagined from passing any number of the blind on the street. It is possible that most Dr. Augusts will be as surprised by The Fourth World as those who cannot spell Braille. For Daphne Athas sees with the sharp eye of the novelist.

Structurally, her book is not a good novel. It halts, it twists and turns. But in the very special world of her blind children, tense, frustrated and febrile, Author Athas moves with uncommon grace and dignity. That world is enough to make The Fourth World memorable.

/-And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.--Matthew 15:14-Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?--Luke 6:39.

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