Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday…‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.
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MODERN CLASSIC
DORIS LESSING
Briefing for a
Descent Into Hell
this is for my son John,
the sea-loving man
If yonder raindrop should its heart disclose,
Behold therein a hundred seas displayed. In every atom, if thou gaze aright, Thousands of reasoning beings are contained. The gnat in limbs doth match the elephant. In name is yonder drop as Nile’s broad flood. In every grain a thousand harvests dwell. The world within a grain of millet’s heart. The universe in the mosquito’s wing contained. Within that point in space the heavens roll. Upon one little spot within the heart Resteth the Lord and Master of the worlds. Therein two worlds commingled may be seen …
The Sage Mahmoud Shabistari, in the fourteenth century
(The Secret Garden)
… this minuscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and flora of the capillary water are single-celled animals and plants, water mites, shrimplike crustacea, insects, and the larvae of infinitely small worms—all living, dying, swimming, feeding, breathing, reproducing in a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the microdroplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea.
The marine biologist, Rachel Carson, twentieth century
(The Edge of the Sea)
Contents
Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
Afterword
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Category:
Inner-space fiction
For there is never anywhere to go but in.
CENTRAL INTAKE HOSPITAL
| Admittance Sheet | Friday, August 15th,1969 |
| Name… | Unknown |
| Sex… | Male |
| Age… | Unknown |
| Address… | Unknown |
General Remarks
… At midnight the police found Patient wandering on the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge. They took him into the station thinking he was drunk or drugged. They describe him as Rambling, Confused and Amenable. Brought him to us at 3 a.m. by ambulance. During admittance Patient attempted several times to lie down on the desk. He seemed to think it was a boat or a raft. Police are checking ports, ships, etc. Patient was well-dressed but had not changed his clothes for some time. He did not seem very hungry or thirsty. He was wearing trousers and a sweater, but he had no papers or wallet or money or marks of identity. Police think he was robbed. He is an educated man. He was given two Libriums but did not sleep. He was talking loudly. Patient was moved into the small Observation ward as he was disturbing the other Patients.
NIGHT NURSE 6 a.m.
Patient has been awake all day, rambling, hallucinated, animated. Two Librium three-hourly. Police no information. Clothes sent for tracing, but unlikely to yield results: chainstore sweater and shirt and underclothes. Trousers Italian. Patient still under the impression he is on some sort of voyage. Police say possibly an amateur or a yachtsman.
DOCTOR Y. 6 p.m.
I need a wind. A good strong wind. The air is stagnant. The current must be pounding along at a fair rate. Yes, but I can’t feel it. Where’s my compass? That went days ago, don’t you remember? I need a wind, a good strong wind. I’ll whistle for one. I would whistle for one if I had paid the piper. A wind from the East, hard on to my back, yes. Perhaps I am still too near the shore? After so many days at sea, too near the shore? But who knows, I might have drifted back again inshore. Oh no, no, I’ll try rowing. The oars are gone, don’t you remember, they went days ago. No, you must be nearer landfall than you think. The Cape Verde Islands were to starboard—when? Last week. Last when? That was no weak, that was my wife. The sea is saltier here than close inshore. A salt, salt sea, the brine coming flecked off the horses’ jaws to mine. On my face, thick crusts of salt. I can taste it. Tears, seawater. I can taste salt from the sea. From the desert. The deserted sea. Sea horses. Dunes. The wind flicks sand from the crest of dunes, spins off the curl of waves. Sand moves and sways and masses itself into waves, but slower. Slow. The eye that would measure the pace of sand horses, as I watch the rolling gallop of sea horses would be an eye indeed. Aye Aye. I. I could catch a horse, perhaps and ride it, but for me a sea horse, no horse of sand, since my time is man-time and it is God for deserts. Some ride dolphins. Plenty have testified. I may leave my sinking raft and cling to the neck of a sea horse, all the way to Jamaica and poor Charlie’s Nancy, or, if the current swings me south at last, to the coast where the white bird is waiting.
Round and round and round I go, the Diamond Coast, the Canary Isles, a dip across the Tropic of Cancer and up and across with a shout at the West Indies to port, where Nancy waits for her poor Charlie, and around, giving the Sargasso Sea a miss to starboard, with Florida florissant to port, and around and around, in the swing of the Gulf Stream, and around, with the Azores just outside the turn of my elbow, and down, past the coasts of Portugal where my Conchita waits for me, passing Madeira, passing the Canaries, always
