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<I>Descent Into Hell</I> and Doris Lessing's

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<I>Descent Into Hell</I> and Doris Lessing's Volume 4 Number 1 Article 4 9-15-1976 A Briefing for Briefing: Charles Williams' Descent Into Hell and Doris Lessing's Briefing orF a Descent into Hell Ellen Cronan Rose Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Rose, Ellen Cronan (1976) "A Briefing for Briefing: Charles Williams' Descent Into Hell and Doris Lessing's Briefing orF a Descent into Hell," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 4 : No. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol4/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Asserts that “Doris Lessing’s naming of her book and its protagonist was both intentional and ironic, and that it acknowledges her indebtedness to the form of Williams’ fiction and her [...] futile gesture toward the Romantic amalgam of appearance and reality.” Additional Keywords Lessing, Doris. Briefing orF a Descent Into Hell; Williams, Charles. Descent Into Hell This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol4/iss1/4 A Briefing for Briefing: Charles W illiams' Descent Into Hell a n d Doris Lessing's Briefing For a Descent into Hell by Ellen Cronan Rose FOR YEARS I have thought it odd that no one has ever pub­ Y oga__ Zoroastrianism and esoteric Christianity; tracts on licly compared Doris Lessing's B riefing For a Descent the I Ching; Zen, w itchcraft, magic, astrology and vampir­ I n t o H e l l to Charles W illiams' Descent Into H ell. Who could ism; scholarly treatises on Sufism; the works of the Chris­ resist the tantalizing clues of the echoed title , the male tian m ystics."4 Following Lessing's advice, she "went protagonist (her first) whose first name is Charles and last through that process of ripping the heart, the pith, out of in itia l W, a Cambridge don whose personal magnetism, a subject, when she was ready for that subject" and attested to by Rosemary Baines, is as irresistible and inex­ "emerged" with the conclusion that "all these different plicable as was Charles W illiams' for his Oxford col­ faiths, or sets of ideas, were talking about the same pro­ le a g u e s ? 1 cesses, the same psychological truths. She was reading dif­ Determined to follow these clues where they might lead, ferent languages, or dialects, describing the same thing. I recently re-read both books and discovered why no one had This was true of all of them from the poems of St. John of thought to compare them. Superficially they are utterly the Cross to states of mind described in the Upanishads" dissim ilar. Williams' tale has to do with a doppelganger, a {The Four-Gated. C ity, p . 4 8 8 ) . succubus, and a revenant. Its hero is a Christian poet, I believe that the laundry basket which produced B r i e f ­ obviously modelled on T. S. E liot—or perhaps Williams him­ ing For a Descent Into H ell contained Charles Williams as self—who propounds a doctrine of "substituted love" which well as R. D. Laing, esoteric Christianity as well as science restates the orthodox Christian dogmas of incarnation and fiction. The question of literary indebtedness is compli­ atonement. Lessing's "inner space fiction" derives, it cated by Lessing's mode of acquiring facts. Compelled by would seem, from Kingsley Hall rather than Canterbury; her her own needs and vision, she must read as Martha does, dogmas are of the Philadelphia Association rather than of "taking a fragment here and a sentence there, and [building] the Holy Catholic Church. Lessing's B r i e f i n g n e i t h e r them into her mind." Like Martha, she has "in fact" not refashions W illiams' plot nor reincarnates his characters. read any author, "if reading means to take from an author The sim ilarities of title must be accidental. what he intends to convey."5 But in naming her book B r i e f ­ But no one who named the protagonist of a five-volume ing For a Descent Into H ell and its hero Charles Watkins, bildungsroman Martha Quest can be suspected of casual nam­ Lessing was, I believe, acknowledging a particular affinity ing. And Martha, who "read like a bird collecting twigs for between the interests that brought her to read Williams and a nest,"2 exemplifies Lessing's own scavenging relationship what she found in Descent Into H ell. to books. "There is only one way to read," announces Les­ However slender my justification for reading Lessing's sing, "which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, pick­ B r i e f i n g in the light of Williams' D e s c e n t may be, I have ing up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping found his book invaluable in attempting to corral that them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag.... maverick of the Lessing canon. Descent Into H ell functions The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty w ill in a reading of B r i e f i n g much in the way that, according to open doors for you when you are forty or fifty ."3 * Fifty- Robert Scholes, the title s of certain contemporary novels year-old Martha filled laundry baskets with books from function. Writing of The Lime Twig and The Unicom, S c h o le s Jimmy Wood's "potted library" of "Rosicrucianism and the says, "Interestingly, both these works, in their titles alchemists; Buddhist books and the dozen or so varieties of encourage ideation by naming objects which do not appear in the narratives. There is no lime twig in Hawkes's story and no unicorn in Iris Murdoch's. Both images offer us concepts 1 He was a man, according to R. J. R eilly, who "seems to have impressed his friends in a way not really susceptible of analysis." Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, 2 Dorrs Lessing, Martha Quest (1952; rpt. London: Panther Lewisr Williams, and Tolkien (Athens: University of Georgia Books, 1966), 220. Press, 1971), 149. Similarly, for Rosemary Baines, Charles 3 Doris Lessing, "On the Golden Notebook," P a r tis a n Watkins' lecture "was a catalyst, touched a spring, some­ R e view 40:1 (Winter, 1973), 26. thing like that.... It is hard indeed to define it." Doris Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (New York: Alfred A. L e s s in g , Briefing For a Descent Into Hell (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969), 486. A. Knopf, 1971), 173. Martha Quest, 220. 10 that help to organize our perceptions into appropriate for her talents prevents her from perceiving its meaning; structures."6 Similarly, Lessing's title encourages idea­ she cannot move in the cadences of Stanhope's verse, but t i o n . Descent Into H ell organizes our perception of B r i e f ­ "arrange[s] whole groups of words in chunks, irrespective of i n g . It provides a referential context for defining the line and meaning, but according to her own views of the emo­ form or genre to which Lessing's strange book belongs. More tional quality to be stressed" (p. 92). Bound by self, she important, it anatomizes the thematic concerns which are is unpurged by the cathartic action of the romance. embedded in Lessing's narrative. And finally, it suggests a Even more removed from redemption is Lawrence Wentworth, way of defining Lessing's relation to the Romantic tradition whose fatal egoism corrupts his scholarly responsibility to to which Charles Williams belongs. truth. His descent into a hell of isolation from his fellow Most readers, coming to B r i e f i n g either from T h e G o ld e n men is accelerated when he allows the inaccurate costumes of n o te b o o k (the one Lessing novel everyone has read) or from the Grand Duke's guard to pass. Dismissing the production The Four-Gated C ity, its immediate chronological predeces­ of Stanhope's play as unimportant, he declares his hubris sor, find it bizarre, untypical. Not only is its protago­ and seals his doom. nist not the fam iliar Lessing woman, free or yearning to be Margaret Anstruther, who can distinguish poetry from free, he is hardly a "character" in the sense of being both mere elocution (p. 56), has been redeemed before the action fully dimensional and particular. He is anonymous and of Williams' romance begins. She advises her niece Pauline, homonymous, Sinbad the Sailor, Jason, Odysseus, Jonah, Nan­ "Ask Peter Stanhope to tell you how to read verse" (p.
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