The White Bird of Truth

By Melvin Maddocks

BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL by Doris Lessing. 308 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

A third of the way through Doris Lessing's new novel, a great white bird appears--4 ft. tall with a straight yellow beak. The light shines off its feathers "like sun off a snowfield." Its eyes are round, golden and steadily staring--in invitation, in challenge.

After the five novels in the Children of Violence series, and after The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing has finally confronted her Moby Dick. All the weathered idealism that survived two arduous decades of fiction-writing in South Africa, then England--all the hopefulness of a fundamentally hopeful woman--has gone into the beating wings of her bird. Like the bird, the novel is a brilliant and untamed image of the possibilities that Miss Lessing dreams, rather than believes, may still constitute man's destiny.

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962) is a key to the new book, as it is a key to all her work. The sections of the notebook divide themselves by color. Black: dealing with Africa--the failed hope of homeland for one of her principal characters. Red: dealing with politics--the failed hope of Communism. Blue: dealing with emotions--the failed hope of possessive love. Yellow: the story within the stories--the hope of art to make sense of all the rest. In effect, Miss Lessing has been working through this sequence of disillusion toward a private religion of her own. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell she has arrived.

Described as "innerspace fiction," the book treats the stay in a psychiatric hospital of Charles Watkins, 50, a classics professor, who was picked up rambling and confused near London's Waterloo Bridge at midnight, under the impression that he had survived an odyssey as bizarre as anything out of Homer. Watkins fights to remember his visions, which involve legendary yellow beasts as well as the great white bird, and a bloody, obscene war between a species of monkeys and "rat-dogs." Doctors X and Y try to make him remember his wife, his family, his name and occupation--what they call reality. A fantastic prose-poem myth struggles against, and alternates with, the dry formulas of a psychiatric case history.

Miss Lessing leaves little doubt where her sympathies lie. In the final pages of The Four-Gated City, she had already worked out a theory that what is commonly called madness may often be extraordinary vision--an anticipation of the next evolution of mankind. Like Watkins, she is prepared to believe that "normal" man is half asleep and that only certain "abnormal" men and women, the avant-garde of a mutation of the species, can see real reality.

Her dream of this reality is "a great web of patterning oscillations and quiverings" somewhere in a "finer air" beyond the earth. She visualizes a perspective from which mankind looks like "a minute grey crust here and there." Amid the harmony of the spheres "life is one" and "I" is no longer divorced from "we."

Upon this mystical heaven, upon the great white bird that takes Watkins there--in other words upon some ultimate metaphysical truth--Miss Lessing stakes her faith in the future. Her self-absorption is both irritating and fascinating as she gambles at the borderline of sanity, just as she once gambled at the far-out edges of politics and sex.

More than a decade ago Norman Mailer predicted that the cultural hero of the future might be the "philosophical psychopath." That future has arrived, for Miss Lessing is not alone. To a psychiatrist like R.D. Laing, madness, the rationalist's despair, has become a romantic last hope. "Perhaps," agrees the French antinovelist Marguerite Duras, "a madman is a person whose essential prejudice has been destroyed."

Doris Lessing is prepared to assume--as others have before her--that in a world gone mad, those whom the world calls mad may be the only sane ones. What she has forfeited--and the loss has to be enormous for any novelist--is the scale of humanity. To the point of abstraction she has willed herself into a universe of absolutes where nihilism and revelation, madness and sanity become the same thing. At that point she stands alone, with no life in sight but the white bird of her obsession.

. Melvin Maddocks

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