Many years ago, on an idyllic vacation in the northern woods, a spider bit me. My swollen ankle turned black with necrosis, I developed clonus (involuntary muscle spasms, symptomatic of neurological disease), became delirious, and spent three weeks in the infectious disease ward of a hospital. I was given every test: MRIs, EMGs, EKGs, etc., etc. Was it encephalitis? I did not respond to the medications at first.
Slowly, I recovered. Very slowly. One afternoon, encouraged by a kind nurse, I ventured down to the cafeteria, forgetting to change out of my pajamas. When I scooped the money out of my pink bathrobe pocket, I was embarrassed to realized I wasn’t dressed. In pajamas, not fully cognizant. I consoled myself : Who cares? I’m a sick person in pajamas at a hospital. And I ate my sandwich in front of a fountain, marveling at the rush and flow of water.
Since I could not yet go home, I found refuge in books. One afternoon, as I sat in a chair by the window with its gloomy view of the hospital complex, I became lost in Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington, one of my favorite books. A doctor came in, asked me what I was reading, and was obviously relieved to see me becoming human again. He said I was well enough to go home.
“But what was the disease?” I asked.
He said that it is not always necessary to identify the disease. Not all diseases follow a typical course. They had tried different medications until I responded. They did not think I’d had encephalitis. I’d had a serious infection. I did not have brain damage. I should not worry.
Many years later, I try not to think of this illness. Everything was much harder for me for a month or two than it had ever been. At first I could barely walk to the corner and back. nd, paradoxically, I was hesitant about lying down, because I had trouble getting up again. I was in my thirties. I regained my health, little by little.
Books help with pain. One day after coming home, I lost myself in Mary Wesley’s novel, An Imaginative Experience. The novel opens with a stopped train: a sheep is lying on its back in a field, and a young woman, Julia Piper, who is returning from the funeral of her young child and estranged husband, pulls the emergency cord on the train so she can help the sheep. Two men watch her from the window: Sylvester Sykes, a charming editor whose wife is divorcing him, and Maurice, a sinister birdwatcher/stalker (yes, really) who reeks of tobacco and alcohol.
Although the novel is a love story, the prospective lovers, Julia and Sylvester, do not meet till near the end of the novel. Sylvester wonders who the plucky sheep rescuer is, but Julia is not thinking of men. Her young son Christy was the love of her life; her irresponsible husband, Giles, whom she had veen in the process of divorcing, had had his license revoked and should not have been driving. Her mother had lent Giles the car.
Sylvester’s pain is less intense, but it is still pain. His wife has left him to return to her first husband, who has grown very rich. Sylvester once loved her, but has a slightly comedic attitude toward their five-year marriage: sex had been their only connection, and she had dreadful taste. He especially hated a plaster cupid in the garden. When he comes home from the train, he smiles to see a taxi in front of the house, and his wife heaving the TV into the trunk, cursing the driver for not helping. Although she has taken almost everything he owns, he is glad to start over again, with his own things.
Sylvester and Julia come together accidentally: Sylvester needs a cleaner for her house, and Julia responds to his ad at the grocery store they frequent. Julia has a key and cleans when he is at work: they communicate by note, and never meet. And when he writes that he would like his garden tidied up, she creates a kind of secret garden. Each had assumed the other was old: when they meet, they are startled.
The now underrated Mary Wesely, who published her first novel when she was 71, had a reputation for perspicuity, a graceful style, and sharply drawn characters. Her witty novels are short and well-plotted. As a writer, her work falls somewhere between the very literary short novels of Penelope Lively and the buoyant popular fiction of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Second Fiddle is my favorite Wesley novel: I wrote about it here.
BOOKS TO READ AFTER AN ILLNESS. HERE ARE SOME RECOMMENDATIONS.
1 Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (which I posted about here.)
Muriel Spark’s mordant comedies are the flip side of P. G. Wodehouse’s featherlight farces. Ballad, published in 1960, makes you wonder who exactly the angels and the devils are in Spark’s light satire. The hero, Dougal Douglas, a Scottish trickster, moves to Peckham and, without a twinge of conscience, accepts two jobs from rival textile companies. The company directors, Mr. Druce at Meadows, Meade & Grindley, and Mr. Willis at Drover Willis, say they want him to bridge the gap between art and industry in his new position as assistant personnel manager.
Dougal is so outrageous that the reader cannot feel sympathy for him. Although he has a deformed shoulder–I kept thinking of Richard III– he uses it to get sympathy from women. He has no compassion: he refuses to visit his fiancee, Ginny, when she is ill, especially when she is in the hospital, because his “fatal flaw” is an intolerance of illness. Ginny doesn’t think much of his fatal flaw, and drops him. But Dougal uses this breakup with Ginny to get to know women at work: he has a crying breakdown in the canteen, and the women pity him, comb his hair, and tell him their stories.
I love everything Spark wrote, and this satire is perfect light reading.
2. Dodie Smith’s The New Moon with the Old. Fans of Smith’s charming novel, I Capture the Castle, will love The New Moon With the Old, a kind of fairy tale of work. It begins when Jane Minton, the new secretary of busineesman Rupert Carrington, arrives at Dome House to take up her duties. His four children are charming: Richard, a composer; Claire, 21, whose only ambition, she light-heartedly insists, is to be “a king’s mistress,” a la the women in Dumas books; Drew, 19, who is writing an Edwardian novel; and Merry, 14, an aspiring and very talented actress.
But a few days after Jane arrives, Rupert flees the country because he is guilty of fraud, and Jane is left to cope with the household. The novel is a fairy tale of work: all the Carringtons must cope with their work, and the story is fascinating.
You can read the rest of my post here.
3. Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls. Believe it or not, this is available in a Virago edition, but the cover of the 50th Anniversary Grove Press edition is more fun! Susann’s pop classic proceeds along the lines of Nancy Hale’s The Prodigal Women and Mary McCarthy’s The Group: it is the story of three young women who move to New York, become friends at the beginning of their careers, and climb the ladder of the entertainment industry, not without much popping of pills. Anne, the emotionally stable one from New England, works as a secretary and then becomes a model. She doesn’t need pills (well, only very briefly). But you can imagine what the pills do to Neely, the Broadway star who becomes a screaming home-wrecking harridan, and Jennifer, the lovely, sweet, pill-dependent woman who decides to act in French art films because no one values her for anything except her body.
4. Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life, a satiric novel, published in 1955, centered on several residents of an artists’ colony in a New England village. Is this a comedy or a tragedy? I loved every minute of it, and it is time to rediscover Mary McCarthy: her complete works are now available in Library of America editions. You can read my post here.
5. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In this brilliant novel in verse, Pushkin tells the story of Eugene Onegin, a rakish Byronic hero who, bored by carousing, wine, women, song, writing, and even books, moves from St. Petersburg to the country after inheriting an estate. He befriends a young poet, Lensky, to whom he is very devoted, but thoughtlessly wrecks their friendship by flirting at a dance with Olga, Lensky’s fiancée. The fiasco results in a duel with Lensky. (Eugene doesn’t want it, and yet somehow he doesn’t say no.) And the whole thing is complicated by Eugene”s rejection of Olga’s sister, Tataina, who writes a love letter to him.
You can read the rest of my post here.
mirabile dictu 