The Powers That Haunt

ASYLUM PIECE (312 pp.)--Anna Kavan --Doubleday ($2.50).

. . . The most intimate friends work against each other, man and wife deceive each other . . , the spirit becomes bestial . . . snakes crawl through the town . . . horses and cattle begin to talk. . . .

This description by a Chinese philosopher of the 3rd Century B.C. serves as a prelude to one of the 34 grim studies in contemporary psychosis (that make up Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece. Despite lushness of metaphor and over-ornamentation of style, it is skillful fiction by a 30-year-old Englishwoman who has spent several years working among the insane.

No blunt report in the novel-form of Mary Jane Ward's The Snake Pit (TIME, May 6), Asylum Piece is a highly sensitive, subtle attempt to see the world through the eyes of a score of demented people, true not to life but to the living death of insanity.

Fixed Obsessions. Some of Author Kavan's characters live in their own homes, some in Swiss and English clinics, some in the makeshift hospitals that cared for England's military psychotics in World War II. But all share a world where normal proportions and meanings have given place to certain fixed obsessions of supreme personal importance.

To the insane, Author Kavan shows, the normal man is apt to appear either as a potential "traitor" and "betrayer" or as a blind, stolid creature who has no awareness of the terrifying "powers" that control the destinies of man. Sometimes these omnipotent powers assume human shape. They become "authorities," "officials," "advisers"--suave, tough men & women with hypodermic syringes who may rudely invade your own home at any moment, pack your suitcase, and drive you away to "prison" in a closed car--while the husband who once told you he loved you looks the other way, or assists the invaders.

Occasional Glimpses. The most terrifying "powers" are those that have no name, no form. They can be glimpsed occasionally, but never described; they haunt you night & day, often organizing the whole world into an implacable conspiracy of persecution against you. It is these unknown powers that condemn you to be treated by a doctor you instantly recognize as a notorious murderer. They are the ones who arrange the subtle changes in weather that oppress you so much, who turn your home into an "ambush," who make your simplest acts and thoughts incomprehensible.

One of Author Kavan's mad characters asks, "to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one's innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there's no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame."

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