Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words

National Review, Oct 27, 1997 by Anthony Daniels

Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words, by Marty Jezer (Basic, 266 pp., $23)

Dr. Daniels is a physician, traveler, and author of Utopias Elsewhere (Crown).

IT is often said that everyone has a book in him. Until I read these volumes, I thought this both trite and untrue; but now that disease has spawned a fast-expanding literary genre all its own -- the memoir of illness -- I realize that I was sadly mistaken. Death remains the most egalitarian of all human institutions, the inflexible rule still being one man, one death, and since it is generally preceded by at least one fatal illness, even among the previously healthy, the number of potential additions to this particular literary genre is nearly equal to the entire population of the world. Indeed, it far exceeds that number, inasmuch as non-fatal diseases are nowadays also thought worthy of memorialization. I'm ill, therefore I'll write.

There are two main varieties of illness memoirs: the "Why is this happening to me, and why didn't the doctors prevent it, or diagnose and cure it earlier?" school, and the "I never realized that life was so beautiful until I contracted chronic diarrhea" school. These are not necessarily polar opposites: some of these books contain elements of both. Several of them contain the good-doc, bad-doc routine: the white-coated monster of insensitivity being replaced, after many travails and misadventures, by the omnicompassionate technological miracle worker.

The purest example of the former school is Louise DeSalvo's Breathless: An Asthma Journal. She is a professor of English at Hunter College and the author of Virginia Woolf: Sexual Abuse in Her Life and Work. Presumably, therefore, she is in touch with the latest currents of what might be called the Higher Resentment. It must be admitted that her doctors took an unconscionable time in diagnosing her condition, but I can find no justification at all for her assertion that "asthma is a breathing disorder that is caused by abuse and that it is probably a manifestation of post-traumatic stress."

The worst that seems to have happened to her is that a maiden aunt once touched her in a faintly lascivious manner in the bath when she was very young, which is not, in the context of the horrors of the twentieth century, an event of extraordinary frightfulness; and why this should have led to asthma more than four decades later is a mystery by comparison with which that of the origin of life on earth is very simple indeed to fathom.

It is clear that Professor DeSalvo longs for the halo of victimhood. To be a victim is the nearest anyone can come to sanctity in these non-judgmental days. To have been badly treated (preferably in one's childhood) is a guarantee simultaneously of one's significance and of one's moral rectitude. It justifies the permanent -- and undoubtedly pleasurable -- state of righteous indignation adopted by people who, by the standards of 99.99 per cent of the people who have ever lived, lead fortunate and privileged lives.

As I read Professor DeSalvo's simultaneously indignant, smug, and platitudinous exhortations ("Stop abusing the planet . . . Stop abusing our children . . . stop sexually abusing them . . . Stop trauma . . . [including] war"), words from a novel in which one of the characters suffers from asthma ran through my head like a refrain. In this short memoir, Professor DeSalvo mentions many characters from literature who have suffered from asthma, but --perhaps unsurprisingly -- not Piggy in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I regret to say that her complacent outrage caused me to sympathize with Piggy's tormentors, who exclaim more than once, "Sucks to your ass-mar!"

At the other end of the spectrum is February Light, an account of the author's recovery from ovarian cancer. It reads rather like an extended and superior get-well card and is very upbeat about the whole experience of potentially fatal illness. Like several other of the authors of these memoirs, Heather Trexler Remoff is rather surprised that she ever became ill at all, since she had always eaten healthily and jogged several miles a day, the two modern guarantors of eternal life. By mentioning her habits, she is establishing not only her innocence and therefore the undeserved nature of her illness, but also her credentials as a serious and responsible person. By contrast, those feckless smokers and physically immobile consumers of junk food deserve every illness they get.

Professor Remoff lives in rural Pennsylvania, in a large Victorian house by a lake, and she extols the beauty of the countryside in saccharin prose. She prays that she will survive at least until she is able to complete a book proposing a total reform of society along the lines suggested long ago by Henry George -- the kind of social reform which would make the cure of ovarian cancer by highly technological means virtually impossible. Still, one must remember that such books are written not to reform society in reality, but to establish the moral qualities of the intellectuals writing them, so as to allow them to continue to enjoy every possible advantage of society as it is currently constituted with a good liberal conscience.