I browse in Phillip Griffiths' Slides on historical development of Hodge-theory and these include a sketch of the original approach with Lefschetz used to study complex surfaces in his famous hypersurface theorem.
The part where I need some clarifications in presented on pages 22-24.
The idea was to study embedded complex surfaces $$ S = \{f(x,y,z)=0 \} \subset \mathbb{P}^3_{\mathbb{C}} $$
($y \in \mathbb{C}$ or $\mathbb{P}^1$ if we compactify $S$) by inductive methods on their dimension and so consideringing the fibers
$$ C_y = \{f(x,y,z)=0, y = \text{ constant } \} $$
of the projection map to first coordinate which in a modern framework corresponds to map $F:\overline{S} \to \mathbb{P}^1$ which is given by Lefschetz fibration which arise as blow up along the base locus of the pencil. The next argument on slide 24 (of see below for the picture) I not understand.
Historically Lefschetz' idea was to introduce slits like below in the base space $\mathbb{P}^1$ where $y_1,..., y_N$ correspond to points having singular fiber $C_{y_i}$ and $C_{y_0}$ is a fixed smooth reference curve.
The next step is confusing. It says that since the complement of the above configuration $R:= \bigcup_{i=0}^N \overline{y_0 y_i}$ is contractible in sphere $\mathbb{P}^1 \cong S^2$, so the whole surface retracts onto the part lying over the slits in the complex plane. Here the important slide:
Why? The last sentence on the right in the image doesn't make any sense. The existence of such retraction fails already in the base space, since there is no retraction of whole $S^2$ onto $R$, so so why should exist a 'lifted' retraction of $S$ into $F^{-1}(R)$.
Maybe I misunderstand to idea. Does anybody see what is here meant? I think that this slides are going to elaborate the gaps of the unclear sketch of Lefschetz original proof from wiki , but this retraction statement confuses me.
