Doris Lessing: Briefing for a Descent into Hell

The two now sat close, in a half dark. The man sitting up listening to the radio laughed out loud, held his breath in anticipation of an expected joke, and laughed again.

“So that’s why, you see, Violet. The shock might shock me into remembering what it is that I know is there, the shadow I can see out of the corner of my eye.”

“But it might turn out to be just that — you are Professor Charles Watkins?”

“I know I am taking a chance. I know that very well. Perhaps the shock will make me forget what I already know. That I should be living quite differently.”

“Yes, but how, we all say that, we do keep saying that, I know that is the point of everything, but how?”

“There’s something I have to reach. I have to tell people. People don’t know it but it is as if they are living in a poisoned air. They are not awake. They’ve been knocked on the head, long ago, and they don’t know that is why they are living like zombies and killing each other.”

“Like Eliza Frensham after a shock.”

“Or like me, tomorrow, after mine. Yes I know.”

“But how can we be different? How can we get out? If you find out, will you come and take me with you?”

“It’s all timing, you see. Sometimes it is easier for us to get out than other times.…”

“Miss Stoke!” said the nurse from the door.

“Coming,” said the girl. “I said I was coming and I am. Right?”

She slipped off the bed and stood close to the elderly man’s pillow.

“There are people in the world all the time who know,” the Professor said. “But they keep quiet. They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the trap. And then, for the ones who have got out, it’s like coming around from chloroform. They realise that all their lives they’ve been asleep and dreaming. And then it’s their turn to learn the rules and the timing. And they become the ones to live quietly in the world, just as human beings might if there were only a few human beings on a planet that had monkeys on it for inhabitants, but the monkeys had the possibility of learning to think like human beings. But in the poor sad monkeys’ damaged brains there’s a knowledge half buried. They sometimes think that if they only knew how, if only they could remember properly, then they could get out of the trap, they could stop being zombies. It’s something like that Violet. And I’ve got to take the chance.”

“I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow morning.”

“Goodnight my dear.”

“Goodnight Charles.”

“Goodnight Professor.”

“Goodnight Nurse.”

OH MY DEAR DEAR CHARLES,

Doctor Y telephoned me to say you are yourself again. I’m coming up to fetch you on Thursday. Oh my dear dear dear dearest darling Charles. And the boys are so happy and so looking forward. I can’t write … this is just to say I’ll be there on Thursday at four with the car.

FELICITY

DEAR CHARLES,

Felicity tells me you are restored to yourself. It goes without saying that I’m delighted. I had planned to give the series of lectures you had engaged for this term — as well as holding the fort for you in various other directions. But I’m only too delighted to hand back the responsibility to you. The first is The Homeric Epithet, Part I, The Iliad. It is on Monday week. If you don’t feel up to it, never mind. Please let me know.

JEREMY

DEAR JEREMY,

Thank you for everything. I’m sorry I’ve been such a bore. I seem to be in full possession of my faculties again. I do remember all about the lecture series. I feel quite well enough to undertake them.

Yours,

CHARLES

DEAR MILES,

I have to thank you for your very kind interest while I was ill. But I am better again. Are you thinking of coming up to London at all this winter? If so we could have a meal? Do let me know if you are. Or a family weekend in Cambridge?

Yours,

CHARLES

DEAR MISS BAINES,

I am sure you will be pleased to hear that I am fully recovered again, and so expect not to be such a burden on your continuing kind interest. Incidentally, I have to thank you for your patience on the night when I inflicted myself on you in what was an unforgivable way. Please apologise on my behalf to Mr. Larson. As I shall be back in Cambridge and extremely busy I am afraid I shall not be able to accept your very kind invitation to dinner.

Yours sincerely,

CHARLES WATKINS

A SMALL, RELEVANT REMINISCENCE

Some years ago I wrote a story for a film. This story was the result of a close friendship with a man whose senses were different from the normal person’s.

BLAKE ASKS:

How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way ,

Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?

To know very well, and for a long time, a person who experiences everything differently from “normal” people, poses the same question.

The point of this film was that the hero’s or protagonist’s extra sensitivity and perception must be a handicap in a society organised as ours is, to favour the conforming, the average, the obedient.

The script was shown to various film-makers, several of whom toyed lengthily with the idea of doing it — as is the way of that industry, but they all asked the same question: What is wrong with the man in the film?

Now, it had not occurred to me to think of that before, partly because to my mind the way I had written the thing made the question irrelevant, and partly because, in life, the original of the hero, or main character, had been diagnosed by the medical profession so variously and contradictorily for so many years, that thinking on these lines seemed unhelpful.

Also, one has to be particularly trained to believe that to put a label on a feeling, a state of mind, a thing — to find a set of words or a phrase; in short, to describe it — is the same as understanding and experiencing it. Such a training is the education obligatory in our schools, the larger part of which education is devoted to teaching children how to use labels, to choose words, to define.

I thought of something to do. I sent the script to two doctors. One was the Consultant Psychiatrist at a teaching hospital attached to a large university — a man who trained future doctors and who treated patients. The other was a neurologist working at a large London teaching hospital, who had a Harley Street practice.

In short, these were men at the head of their profession.

I asked them to read the script and to tell me what was wrong with the man, as dispassionately as if he were a patient coming to their consulting rooms or outpatient departments.

They were kind enough to do so, taking trouble over it, and time.

But their skilled and compassionate diagnoses, while authoritative, were quite different from each other’s. They agreed about nothing at all.