THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503020431
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
A STROKE OF GENIUS
Illness and Self-Discovery
PAUL WEST
Viking. 180 pp. $21.95.
ANYONE WHO HAS ever been sucked into the Kafkaesque wind tunnel of hospitals and modern medicine will relate to Paul West's new memoir. But only if they share West's bemused charm and talent for phrasing could they record their harrowing experiences half as well.
Shocking, amusing, grotesque and affecting, A Stroke of Genius is West's chronicle of an appalling progression of ailments that washed over him like a relentless ocean surf: Just as he recovered from one bout, a new wave of illness would smash down on him, as if nature had chosen to make him an example of the worst it could do.
West was a chronic migraine sufferer by age 10 when he ``could almost guarantee an attack by staring at sunlit snow or brightly lighted white paper (hazards while sledding or reading!).'' As an adult he ``supermarketed, cooked, and lectured during attacks, never mind that the price tags danced in fragments, or that I could not see what I stirred while it bubbled. . . or that whatever notes I had were useless and the audience had become a random collage.'' Yet he seems cheerful, almost jovial about his pain (``. . . migraine is rather democratic, afflicting plowmen, bankers, hurdlers, and academics in equal measure, although I have sometimes thought that those subject to it might form an exclusive league''), and gives his hours spent in isolated sickness much of the credit for his extraordinary poetic imagination.
One morning, after a particularly savage migraine, he awakes to find that his lips refuse to cooperate in the simple act of drinking: ``The coffee simply swilled down over my chin.'' Within minutes his mouth and half of his drooping face are paralyzed; he's unable to swallow or speak clearly. He affects humorous bravado as he's loaded in the ambulance, waving cheerily at alarmed neighbors. Unknown to West, he's had a stroke. It will be followed in rapid succession by heart disease, diabetes and a platoon of lesser illnesses.
But West is a disciplined writer determined to impose some sort of order even on the ungovernable. When his doctor shows him the snaky pacemaker to be implanted, the writer's fertile imagination becomes a curse: ``What set my teeth on edge was the slithering lead, when it went past the defenseless portals at my core, silver interloper where the sun had never shone and where there was never rest. My heart would be cuddling a propeller forever.'' He finally invokes that same gift for imagery to make his peace with the infernal intruder: ``Instead of that chimney-brush lead, I was going to have the pink and velvet-gentle pistol of a hibiscus slid into my vein, with five red-spotted stamens in the vanguard. . . ''
West mocks medical technology even as he marvels, aghast, at its power. ``Medicine, like religion, is a court of miracles, but disease, unlike faith, is not a man-made thing. . . There is a cabalistic, exclusive side to medicine that we, the suffering public should heed; it afflicts drug manufacturers too, who, much as the medical profession converts illness into magic, convert it into money.''
A Stroke of Genius is tragedy, in that West does not rebound at the end, fully recovered from the depredations of illness. But it is a triumph of the spirit, a testimony to the indomitable nature of the human mind and body; reminiscent of Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor. It is the extraordinary narrative of a medical ordeal that rivals Job's, by a survivor unafraid to use his own body as raw material, drawing creative energy from the very physical infirmities that seek to extinguish his creative fire. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern Shore,
where she is at work on her second novel. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by NEIL STUART
by CNB