strange case of miss r.

THE BIRD'S NEST (276 pp.)--Shirley Jackson--FarrarStraus &Young ($3.50).

Split personality seems to be the literary vogue this season. In A Garden to the Sea (TIME, April 19), Philip Toynbee split his hero four ways, mainly to tell an experimental love story. Marghanita Laski used the simpler, two-way, Jekyll & Hyde approach in The Victorian Chaise Longue (TIME, June 14). In The Bird's Nest, Novelist Shirley Jackson reverts to Toynbee's four-in-one split to document a tortuous case of mental illness.

Elizabeth Richmond is an unassuming, 22-year-old clerk-typist who trots dutifully to her museum job every morning and dutifully back to her brandy-swigging guardian, Aunt Morgen, every night. She has the looks and manners of a mouse, the brains of a flea and a fondness for cocoa ("Miserable puny stuff," snorts Aunt Morgen, "fit for kittens and unwashed boys"). Backaches and migraine headaches pin Elizabeth to her bed every so often, and Aunt Morgen is solicitous until she finds the girl sneaking out of the house in the small hours. Accused of a secret romance or worse, Elizabeth draws a blank and claims to know nothing of her nocturnal jaunts. What worries Elizabeth far more are the scrawled little notes she keeps finding on her office desk, uncapitalized in the manner of e.e. cummings, e.g., "i know all about you dirty dirty lizzie and you can't get away from me and i won't ever leave you or tell you who i am ha ha ha." Three Plus One Splits. "Honest . . .

kiddo," says Aunt Morgen, "you ought to see a doctor." Dr. Wright finds Elizabeth no more responsive than a waterlogged stick, until he tries hypnosis. Under hypnosis, Miss R.'s case, as the doctor calls it, becomes the plight of Goldilocks and those old Freudian bears, Superego, Ego and Id. Superego Elizabeth is a tense bundle of inhibitions clamped in the vise of social norms. Smothering within her is a sweet, outgoing girl, her potential Ego, whom the doctor nicknames Beth.

Lower still is the impish, fun-loving scribbler, the naughty Id, whom the doctor calls Betsy. The three of them start playing musical chairs.

At this point The Bird's Nest* promises some interesting psychological explosions.

But, except for a brief surrealistic lark when Betsy runs off to New York with her captive sisters, the novel dredges a long, dry stream-bed of consciousness.

Halfway through, in need of a fresh character, Author Jackson invents still another Miss R., a money-loving witch named Bess. By that time Miss R. is whirling through personality changes like a shifty quarterback on a hidden-ball play, and the reader is in need of a score card.

Four Plus Two Letters. After sounding like the minutes from the last psychologists' convention for some 200 pages, Dr.

Wright finally spells out the poor girl's trouble in a four-plus-two-letter word: mother.

A racing axiom has it that a thoroughbred always returns to its best form. In The Lottery and Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson gave signs of being a writing thoroughbred, but The Bird's Nest marks only scattered returns to her best form.

* Its title obviously taken from the old riddle: Elizabeth, Lizzy, Betsy and Bess All went together to seek a bird's nest; They found a nest with five eggs in it; They each took one and left four in it.

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