My Life as a Man (9 page)

Eventually, when headaches began to flatten me regularly every ten or twelve days, I was admitted to the post hospital for
“
observation,
”
which meant that, except if I was actually in pain, I was to walk around in a pair of blue army pajamas pushing a dry mop. To be sure, when the aura of a headache came upon me, I could now retire
immediately
to my bed; but that, as it turned out, worked only to forestall the headache for another twelve hours or so; on the other hand, if I were to remain
continually
in bed
…
But I couldn
’
t; in the words of Bartleby the Scrivener (words that were with me frequen
tly
in the hospital, though I had not read the story for several years), I preferred not to. I preferred instead to push my mop from one ward to another and wait for the blow to fall.

Rather quic
kl
y I came to understand that my daily work routine had been devised as a combination punishment and cure by the hospital authorities. I had been assigned my mop so as to be brought into contact with those who were truly ill, irreversibly and horribly so. Each day, for instance, I went off to mop between the beds of patients in
“
the burn ward,
”
young men so badly disfigured by fire that in
the
beginning either I had to turn
away
at the sight of them or else could not withdraw my gaze at all. Then there were amputees who had lost limbs in training accidents, in automobile collisions, in operations undertaken to arrest the spread of malignancies. The idea seemed to be that I would somehow be shamed out of my alleged illness by the daily contact that I made on my rounds with these doomed mortals, most of them no older than myself. Only after I was called before a medical board and awarded a discharge did I learn that no such sub
tl
e or sadistic
th
erapy had been ordered in my case. My internment in the hospital had been a bureaucratic necessity and not some sly form of purifying and healing imprisonment. The
“
cure
”
had been wholly of
my own devising, my houseclean
ing duties having been somewhat less extensive than I had imagined. The nurse in charge of my section, an easygoing and genial woman, was amused to learn from me, on the day of my discharge, that I had been wandering
through
the hospital from nine to five every day, cleaning the floors of all the open wards, when the instructions she had given me had been only to clean up each morning around my own bed. After that I was to have considered myself free to come and go as I wished, so long as I did not leave the hospital.
“
Didn
’
t anyone ever stop you?
”
she asked.
“
Yes,
”
I said,
“
in
the
beginning. But I told them I
’
d been ordered to do it.
”
I pretended to be as amused as she was by the
“
misunderstanding,
”
but wondered if bad conscience was not leading her to lie now about the instructions she had given me on the day I had become her patient.

In Chicago, a civilian again, I was examined by a neurologist at Billings Hospital who could offer no explanation for the headaches, except to say that my pattern was typical enough. He prescribed the same drugs that the army had, none of which did me any good, and told me that migraines ordinarily diminish in intensity and frequency with time, generally dying out around the age of fifty. I had vaguely expected that mine would
the
out as soon as I was my own man again and back at the university; along with my sergeant and my
envious colleagues, I continued
to believe that I had induced this condition in myself in order to provide me
with
grounds for discharge from an army that was wasting my valuable time. That the pain not only continued to plague me, but in the months following my discharge began to spread until it had encompassed both halves of my skull, served to bolster, in a grim way, a faltering sense of my own probity.

Unless, of course, I was covering my tracks,
“
allowing
”
the headaches a somewhat longer lease on my life than might be physically desirable, for the sake of my moral well-being. For who could accuse me of falling ill as a means of cutting short my tour of army duty when it was clear that the rewarding academic life I had been so anxious to return to continued to be as marred by this affliction as my purposeless military existence had been? Each time I had emerged from another twenty-four-hour session of pain, I would think to myself,
“
How many more, before I
’
ve met my obligation?
”
I wondered if it was not perhaps the
“
plan
”
of these headaches to visit themselves upon me until such time as I would have been discharged from the service under ordinary conditions. Did I, as it were,
owe
the army a migraine for each month of service I had escaped, or was it for each week, or each day, or each hour? Even to believe that they might
the
out by the time I was fifty was hardly consolation to an ambitious twenty-four-year-old with as strong a distaste for the sickbed as I had developed in my childhood; also to one made buoyant by fulfilling the exacting demands of schedules and routines, the prospect of being dead to the world and to my work for twenty-four hours every ten days for the next thirty-six years, the thought of all
that
waste, was as distressing as the anticipation of the pain itself. Three times a month, for God only knew how long, I was to be sealed into a coffin (so I described it to myself, admittedly in the clutch of self-pity) and buried alive. Why?

I had already considered (and dismissed) the idea of taking myself to a psychoanalyst, even before the neurologist at Billings informed me that a study in p
sychosomatic medicine was about
to be initiated at a North Shore clinic, under the direction of an eminent Freudian analyst. He thought it was more than likely that I might be taken on as a patient at a modest fee, especially as they were said to be interested particularly in the ailments that manifested themselves in
“
intellectuals
”
and
“
creative types.
”
The neurologist was not suggesting that migraines were necessarily symptomatic of a neurotic personality disturbance; rather he was responding, he said, to what he took to be
“
a Freudian orientation
”
in the questions I asked him and in the manner in which I had gone about presenting the history of the disorder.

I did not know that it was a Freudian orientation so much as a literary habit of mind which the neurologist was not accustomed to: that is to say, I could not resist reflecting upon my migraines in the same supramedical way that I might consider the illnesses of Milly Theale or Hans Castorp or the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, or ruminate upon the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, or search out the
“
meaning
”
in Gogol
’
s short story of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev
’
s temporary loss of his nose. Whereas an ordinary man might complain,
“
I get these damn headaches
”
(and have been content to leave it at that), I tended, like a student of high literature or a savage who paints his body blue, to see the migraines as
standing for something,
as a disclosure or
“
epiphany,
”
isolated or accidental or inexplicable only to one who was blind to the design of a life or a book. What did my migraines
signify?

The possibilities I came up with did not satisfy a student as
“
sophisticated
”
as myself; compared
with
The Magic Mountain
or even
“
The Nose,
”
the texture of my own story was thin to the point of transparency. It was disappointing, for instance, to find myself associating the disability that had come over me when I had begun to wear a pistol on my hip with either my adolescent terror of the physical life or some traditional Jewish abhorrence of violence—such an explanation seemed too conventional and simplistic, too
“
easy.
”
A more attractive, if in the end no less obvious, idea had to do with a
kind of psychological civil war th
at had broken out between the dreamy, needy, and helpless child I had been, and the independent, robust, manly adult I wanted to be. At the time I recalled it, Bar
tl
eby
’
s passive but defiant formula,
“
I would prefer not to,
”
had struck me as the voice of the man in me defying the child and his temptation to helplessness; but couldn
’
t it just as well be the voice of the frail and sickly little boy answering the call to perform the duties of a man? Or of a
policeman?
No, no, much too pat—my life surely must be more complex and subtle
than
that;
The Wings of the Dove
was. No, I could not imagine myself
writing
a story so tidy and facile in its psychology, let alone living one.

The stories I
was
writing—the fact of the writing itself—did not escape my scrutiny. It was to keep open the lines to my sanity and intelligence, to engage in a solitary, thoughtful activity at the end of those mindless days of directing traffic and checking passes at the gate into town, that I had taken up writing for three hours each evening at a table in the corner of the post library. After only a few nights, however, I had put aside my notes for the critical article I had planned on some novels of Virginia Woolf (for an issue of
Modern Fiction Studies
to be devoted entirely to her work) to begin what was to turn out to be my first published short story. Shor
tly
thereafter, when the migraines began, and the search for a cause, a reason, a meaning, I thought I saw in the unexpected alteration the course of my writing had taken something analogous to that shift in my attention that used to disconcert my father when he presented the little boy in the sickbed with those neat arithmetical puzzles of his—the movement from intellectual or logical analysis to seemingly irrelevant speculation of an imaginary nature. And in the hospital, where in six weeks
’
time I had written my second and
third
stories, I could not help wondering if for me illness was not a necessary catalyst to activate the imagination. I understood that this was not an original hypothesis, but if that made it more or less applicable to my situation I couldn
’
t tell; nor did I know what to do with the fact that the illness itself
was the one that
had regularly afflicted Virginia Woolf and to some degree contributed to the debilitation that led to suicide. I knew about Virginia Woolf
’
s migraines from having read her posthumous book,
A Writer
’
s Diary,
edited by her husband and published in my senior year of college. I even had the book with me in my footlocker, for the essay I had been going to write on her work. What was I to think then? No more than a coincidence? Or was I imitating the agony of this admirable writer, as in my stories I was imitating the techniques and simulating the sensibilities of still other writers I admired?

Following my examination by the neurologist, I decided to stop worrying about the
“
significance
”
of my condition and to try to consider myself, as the neurologist obviously did, to be one hundred and eighty pounds of living tissue subject to the pathology of the species, rather than a character in a novel whose disease the reader may be encouraged to diagnose by way of moral, psychological, or metaphysical hypotheses. As I was unable to endow my predicament with sufficient density or originality to satisfy my own literary tastes—unable to do
“
for
”
migraines what Mann had done in
The Magic Mountain
for TB or in
Death in Venice
for cholera—I had decided that the only sensible thing was to have my migraine and then forget about it till the next time. To look for meaning was fruitless as well as pretentious. Though I wondered: Couldn
’
t the migraines themselves be diagnosed as
“
pretentious
”
in origin?