A Tale of Madness
[In the review below, Theroux details the character of Francis Croft of The Bird of Night, observing Hill's "uncanny insight" about insanity.]
The "greatest poet of his age," as envisioned by Susan Hill in her novel The Bird of Night, is an owlish, manic-depressive Scot named Francis Croft, aet. 33, who courts death imprisoned in the land of catatonia, an insanitarium of self where his nerve ends, always exposed, show themselves each to be more sensitive than a rice-weevil's feeler. This isn't really a novel. It's a nervous breakdown. It's a confession. Croft as a real character is totally unrealized, but, rather, thesis-wise, he's shot to us right away in an indescribable shrillness and stays that way: a casebook barmy whose eccentric and perverse behavior stands as the single sine qua non of a genius in him we see nowhere else, certainly not in the snippets, of which we're treated to samples, of his masterpiece, Janus. We just see Croft suffer, screech.
In a kind of reverse of James's "The Aspern Papers," Croft is protected from the world—which, true to type, of course, rudely seeks to burgle his letters, his diary, his soul—by a "guardian angel" figure, 34-year-old Harvey Lawson, scholar and Egyptologist, who has more patience than St. Monica and who, inexplicably (but I'll accept love), assumes the role of wet nurse to the mad, suicidal poet, chronicling their mutual voyage to the end of night, which goes from Dorset, to Venice, to California, to a final bird sanctuary, as it were, called Schloss Vogel in Germany. Everywhere is death, of which the owl—perhaps I should have mentioned this sooner?—is an augur.
Actually, Lawson, we find, chronicles only ten of the twenty years they spend together, casually mentioning four pages from the end of his memoir (about 10 per cent of which is, literally, Croft's own diary) that he has omitted ten years from the tale and that, hohum, life went on that way pretty much the same—attempted murders, projected suicides, chronic remorse, aborted strangulations, and all of this, one assumes, without surcease of Croft's recorded hates and fears which include bats, landladies, photographs, "thundering" poems, bells, doctors, sun, night, and decaying Venetian houses. Croft, naturally, kills himself—with some pruning shears Lawson forgot to tuck away; no one expected otherwise. I guessed it, frankly, long before latecomer Lawson told us how Croft started looking up the word "hemlock" in his botany, and treasuring Marco-aurelian proverbs on death, and identifying with unattractive Gilly-white owls. How did I guess? Well, since the sun in England is not a constant, I guess I just banked on the inevitability of landladies. In any case, Lawson paternalistically burns Croft's every letter, every paper, and the poetic marriage ends with the memory of Lawson, a Shelley to Adonais, mourning: "I weep not for Francis but for myself, for the loss of him."
Susan Hill has both a keen poetic talent, native, I think, but undisciplined, and an uncanny insight into the deranged mind; much of her writing is original and beautiful and tender. Irksome is her tendency to constantly speak in metaphors, a self-indulgence that, because it prevents a forward movement in the novel, perhaps forces her to nip off ten years from the life of owl-haunted Croft which can't have been irrelevant. Over this novel, I'm afraid, I still opt for The Diary of Nijinsky.
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