¹ “The Small Personal Voice,” in Declaration, ed. Tom MascWer (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), pp. 19-20

² Lynn Sukenik indicates, accurately enough, the change in Lessing's focus of concern as Martha evolves from participating in “the collective conscience of communism” to “participating in the collective psyche.” But it is a basic error to see Martha as a mere “vessel, a channel for all the emotions seething around her,” and to negate the importance, for Lessing, of the relation between the individual conscience and either collective. “Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessing's Fiction,” Contemporary Literature, 14 (1973), 532-33.

³ In a talk at the New School for Social Research (27 Sept. 1973), Lessing refers to Laing as “a peg”: “All educated [sic] look for a key authority figure who will then act as a law giver. Laing became that figure.” Lessing's statement (quoted by Nancy S. Hardin, Contemporary Literature, 14, 1973, 571-72) makes clear her awareness of Laing's importance but—somewhat unfairly and erroneously (at least for his position in the U. S.)—seems to represent him as influential primarily among academics. On the contrary, members of the American “underground” culture have revered Laing for some time, while until very recently the psychiatric and literary establishment have tended to discount his views and treat them with surprisingly undisguised disgust, skepticism, or ridicule. To quote one example among literary critics: “[Lessing] is no Laing, no touter of the void, to use Herzog's phrase, as though it were so much real estate” (Roger Sale, “Watchman, What of the Night?” review of Briefing in The New York Review of Books, 6 May 1971, p. 17).

For further opinions on Laing, expressed by American and British professionals, primarily from within the field of psychiatry, see the special issue of Salmagundi, R. D. Laing & Anti-Psychiatry, No. 16 (Spring 1971).

⁴ Laing R. D., The Divided Self (1959; rpt. London: Penguin, 1965), p. 73. Hereafter page numbers from this edition will be preceded by DS.

⁵ Writing that Briefing “resembles the flashy insistence of R. D. Laing that the insane are the only truly sane,” Sale (p. 15) presents a common and serious misinterpretation of Laing.

⁶ The Politics of Experience (1967; rpt. New York: Ballantine, 1970), pp. 58–59. Hereafter cited as PE.

⁷ The Golden Notebook (New York: Simon, 1962), p. 402. Hereafter cited as GN.

⁸ Janet Sydney Kaplan makes an interesting comparison between Anna's and Martha's views of the function of words—respectively, “containers” and “catalysts” of meaning—and demonstrates how their different views produce different types of ego breakdown. “The Limits of Consciouoness*** in the Novels of Doris Lessing,” Contemporary Literature, 14 (1973), 541-44.

⁹ The Four-Gated City (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 394. Hereafter cited as FGC.

¹⁰ The Inner World of Mental Illness, ed. Bert Kaplan (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 4–5. True accounts of psychotic episodes provide fascinating and, perhaps, necessary supplements to understanding psychic trips in both Lessing and Laing. Lessing thinks highly of Kaplan (see her comment quoted by Hardin, p. 575, and also her review of his anthology in The New York Times Book Review, 23 Sept. 1973, pp. 16-18). Another compelling book, a description of one individual's 6-month experience, is Barbara O'Brien's Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic (Cambridge, Mass: Arlington, 1958). An interesting analysis of hospitals, doctors, and drugs is provided in an otherwise rather turgid and melodramatic description of religious experience by Morag Coate, Beyond All Reason (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965). Finally, for a revelation of the process of actual Laingian therapy see Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Mary Barnes, Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (New York: Harcourt, 1972). Mary Barnes spent 5 years at Kingsley Hall, Laing's own therapeutic community in London; her psychiatrist, Joseph Berke, contributes his perspective on her regression into infancy and her emerging self-expression through painting.

¹¹ Ihab Hassan (quoted by Douglass Bolling in “Structure and Theme in Briefing for a Descent into Hell,” Contemporary Literature, 14, 1973, p. 551) says that criticism “may have to become apocalyptic before it can compel our sense of relevance.” Given that so much contemporary literature portrays humanity's terrible adjustment to its own future destruction, it seems that the least criticism can do is be equal to the sense of apocalypse in the art it analyzes. Apocalypse, as D. J. Enright says (“Shivery Games,” The New York Review of Books, 31 July 1969, pp. 22–24), may indeed be “sensational,” but to dismiss it as a “gimmick” is not only to find The City boring but, perhaps, to participate in the blindness that both Lessing and Laing warn against.

¹² To Frederick R. Karl the “symbiotic” relationships of The City are “an infection, a slow stain throughout the society” (“Doris Lessing in the Sixties: The New Anatomy of Melancholy,” Contemporary Literature, 13, 1972, p. 32). Benjamin DeMott (“Toward a More Human World,” Saturday Review, 13 March 1971, p. 86) is, of course, more perceptive in seeing generosity as the moral keynote of The City. But. although there is a hopeful sympathy in Martha's sharing Lynda's madness, it is inaccurate to say that Martha “gives herself” to her friend. The relationship between the 2 women is the vehicle for, not the substance of, their psychic experiences which are parallel but separate.

¹³ Martha Quest (1952; rpt. New York: Simon, 1964), pp. 62–63.

¹⁴ As Kaplan J. S. says (p. 546), Martha discovers through her vision in the African veld that the universe is impersonal and her own ego is inconsequential. But it is Kaplan, not Lessing, who makes the further equation between an “inhuman” universe and a violent one. Anna does not feel that the destructive force at the root of life, a force that is reflected in her sexual struggles with Saul, determines the entirety of existence. And even in Charles Watkins' view from the Crystal, the earth's subjugation to the deadly moon is offset by the peaceful influence of the sun.

¹⁵ Kaplan J. S. has an interesting analysis (pp. 546–48) of Martha's using sexual relations, like madness, to connect herself with “a universal consciousness.” Kaplan develops the theory that Martha fears ego-loss through sex but discovers a paradoxical unification with chaotic reality when she accepts the dissolution of herself within the sexual experience.

¹⁶ Interesting parallels may be noted between the science fiction elements in Lessing's recent work and Arthur C. Clarke's novels, particularly Childhood's End (1953; rpt. New York: Ballantine, 1974). Like Lessing, Clarke portrays the children of the present adult generation evolving into a different species with new abilities and a new mode of perception. And Clarke's “Overlords,” sent by the “Overmind” to assure the survival of the new species on a planet about to be annihilated, are somewhat analogous to the gods in human form who descend to the earth to struggle against its destruction in Briefing for a Descent into Hell.

¹⁷ O'Brien, pp. 141–42. See also Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, “What Is Schizophrenia?” Psychedelic Review, No. 7 (1966), pp. 90-91.

Furthermore, Lessing is clearly committed to the Sufi belief in the necessity of conscious evolution (see the quotation from The Sufis by Indries Shah that precedes Pt. IV of The City). Hardin offers the most complete analysis, so far, of the Sufi influence on Lessing, and draws attention (p. 576) to Jack Orkney's fantasy of “willed mutation” in the younger generation as the only way of breaking the cycle of endlessly repeated but increasingly destructive experience.

¹⁸ Briefing for a Descent into Hell (London: Cape, 1971), p. 103. Hereafter cited as BDH.

¹⁹ Hardin (esp. pp. 569, 571) discusses Lessing's interest in Sufi thought as a way of disrupting conventional patterns of perception, particularly the tendency to compartmentalize and to make an artificial division between physical and mental reality. Thus, the aims of Dervish teaching stories (like the one that prefaces The City) can be seen reflected—rather less effectively—in Charles's messages from his hospital bed.