Books: The Inner Pit

FACES IN THE WATER (254 pp.)—Janet Frame—Braziller ($4).

To be mad, says Istina Mavet, is to know that things are far, far from what they seem. Workmen apparently digging a ditch are actually digging her grave. Peering into the depths of a mirror, she sees not her image but nothingness. Answering a phone, she hears only the voice she dreads. Even flowers nodding in the wind are not flowers but explosions caused by “sinister collisions of color.”

Istina is the heroine of this largely autobiographical novel which, like The Snake Pit and a dozen other books, takes place inside a mental institution; but Faces in the Water is especially brilliant in its descriptions of what happens inside the patient’s mind. When Istina, a schoolteacher, is committed to New Zealand’s Cliffhaven hospital, medicine does what it can. But the nurses are exhausted by twelve-hour days, and there are only 1½ doctors for each thousand patients. Istina gets electric shock treatment, insulin is pumped into her veins, and she is shunted to foul-smelling dayrooms with the other “hopeless” ones—Esme, who crouches in a corner with her nightgown over her head; Bertha, who sings endlessly; and Mary-Margaret, who ends each day with a cheery broadcast to Egypt, signing off with “Good night, the World. Good night, everyone, everywhere.” When all else fails, the patients scream and curse, fling themselves against “wooden doors that have been kicked and hammered upon for 70 years.”

Istina runs away and comes back, attempts suicide, emerges occasionally into the blinding sunlight of sanity, then plunges again into the pit. She believes there can never be any cure, because what the mentally ill need is “a swifter warmth than most people, even lovers, are prepared to give.” The medical staff decides that Istina should have a frontal lobotomy. With the feeling that her personality has been condemned like a slum dwelling, she fearfully awaits the surgeon’s scalpel and the terrible peace of mindlessness. But one doctor says no. “I don’t want you changed,” he tells Istina. “I want you to stay as you are.”

His decision works no magic—in fact, the truest magic in the book lies in Author Frame’s eerie knack of conveying Istina’s inability to know whether she is getting better or worse. After, nine long years, Istina walks away from Cliffhaven as from the scene of a terrible accident, leaving behind her a thousand moaning others still trapped in the smashup.

Like her accomplished New Zealand predecessors, Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia (Spinster) Ashton-Warner, Janet Frame, 36, writes with a cool eye, a detached sympathy, and a warm but un-sloppy love of sane and insane alike. The daughter of a New Zealand railwayman, Author Frame has herself been in and out of mental hospitals as a voluntary patient. Shy and wary of publicity, she has recently changed her name to Janet Clutha (after a New Zealand river). But, under whatever name, her writing is sensitive, and her evocation of madness unforgettable.