Theorist,, Novelist Present Psychology Views

A HA-HA, for those who don't know, is a pleasantly grassy little ditch serving the same function as a fence around large areas of land. The ha-ha in the title of Miss Dawson's first novel encloses a mental hospital called Gardenwell Park, the residence of her heroine. Separating as it does the world of the insane from what Miss Dawson portrays as the equally artificial world of the so-called sane, the ha-ha becomes emblematic of the heroine's state of mind. For it is the thesis of this utterly absorbing novel that the line between an imaginative but genuine clarity of perception and mental derangement can be terrifyingly narrow.

This is hardly a new idea, but Miss Dawson explores it in a compelling manner. Her heroine, Josephine Traughton, is a twenty-three year old schizophrenic whose mental breakdown was precipitated by the death of her domineering mother. The classical relationship--outer docility, inner rebelliousness, and subconscious hatred--takes shape in a series of fragmentary flashbacks which also illuminate Josephine's lonely life as an Oxford undergraduate. There are suggestions of an Electra complex and clear indications of sexual naivete and repression. Friendless and loveless, so far Josephine might be only a potential romantic heroine or an interesting, if almost too typical, psychoanalytic case study.

Instead she emerges as a vital and extraordinarily real human being. As she tells her own story, her unique perceptivity gives the admittedly limited world of her contacts a special freshness. Josephine has a penchant for questioning the connections ordinarily drawn between different aspects of everyday experience. An invitation bearing her name inspires the following reflection: "It was the hit-or-miss of these words that struck me most. I knew the collocution was supposed to represent me and no one else, but it always seemed odd that so loose an approximation as a name could have a claim on you, could intervene in your life, could summon you to the gallows, or to a party out of the blue like that."

Fascinated though she is by the irrational and the contingent, Josephine makes a determined effort to re-connect herself with the world that other people live in. As a convalescent, she takes a job and, reluctantly, attends a cocktail party given by an old school friend. But she cannot achieve anything beyond a momentary rapport with the guests; she penetrates the absurd triviality of their preoccupations all too readily and retreats, bewildered, convinced that the fault must lie within herself.

From this confusion she is rescued by a

fellow inmate of Gardenwell Park, a young medical student attempting to overcome his temporary impotence. With love and sympathy, tempered by detachment, he reassures her, as to her own value. He seduces her, simultaneously initiating into the only experience which seems to her to contain its own meaning and effecting his own cure. When he leaves, she suffers a relapse, but eventually struggles out of it. Dispassionately, she returns to her initial view of life as comic, absurd and ultimately conditioned by chance. Rejecting the mothering safety of adjustment, she chooses to preserve her own integrity at the risk of an isolation that might again plunge her into despair.

All this is told in Josephine's voice, registering the shift of her moods and the play of her creative and often distorted intelligence with a scrupulous fidelity to detail. At her worst, in suggesting the heroine's relationship with her mother, Miss Dawson is merely competent, betraying perhaps an impatience to get the psychological background out of the way and concentrate on the crisis of Josephine's life. At her best, she approaches brilliance -- Josephine at the cocktail party, alternating between poetically condensed observation and fumbling inarticulacy; Josephine in her relapse, pouring forth a jumble of seemingly disconnected sentences that reveal the horror of her private world.

The rest of Miss Dawson's characters suffer in comparison with her heroine, but they are by no means inadequate. Rarely does one suspect them of existing only to focus Josephine's speculations about the world. Her lover, Alasdair Faber, is considerably more probable than his name implies; his combination of worldly sophistication and angry disenchantment reveals itself clearly in the remarks he addresses to Josephine.

Dawson's heroine sees the world as an absurd jungle of animal and people, some real, some imaginary--all searching for meaning in their own ways, none finding it. She describes the confusion very vividly and then remarks, "Nothing in the jungle is ordained." This illustrates perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of the author's quietly individualistic style: her ability to state a complex perception in a simple, memorable way, without losing the overtones of the special experiences prompting it