The Politics of Pain

Today a horror unfolded before my eyes as I surfed and worked on the web. It began with a wire service news story early in the morning: Mystery Surrounds Swayze’s Health. The wires were quoting a National Enquirer story that Dirty Dancing star Patrick Swayze had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last month and had a mere five weeks remaining in his life. Swayze was undergoing treatments at Stanford University, the reports informed, but the cancer was most certainly spreading and threatening to take the marquee idol down.

Mind you, this was not in the Entertainment News headlines but the national headers. A bummer most certainly for Swayze’s family and Swayze himself, I thought, and I suppose for the legions of Swayze’s fans because most idolators think they own their idols and grieve their loss as deeply as if they were their own family members. I went about my business and didn’t give the Patrick Swayze story another thought – if it’s true, I thought, I mean, consider the source — until I suddenly noticed that the story, after appearing on the Associated Press wires, was popping up all over the World Wide Web like a bad cold. Everyone from People magazine online to dozens and dozens of blogs were sounding the alarms over an unverified report that the film actor was in ailing health.

Imagine being Patrick Swayze at this point: Your phone rings. You recognize the caller as a friend so you answer. “Hello?”

“Dude! You gotta get online right this minute. It’s everywhere. News about your cancer, it’s spreading all over the Web.”

Sure enough, Swayze’s handlers came out to play late in the afternoon, issuing a statement confirming that Swayze is at war with an insidious illness, he is indeed undergoing treatment, and things are not quite so grim as the Enquirer let on but the prognosis isn’t all that great either. The 55-year-old performer will continue with his curent work projects, the statement informed us, and expressed the family’s “deep appreciation (of the) outpouring of support and concern” received from the public. In other words, the Swayze family was forced to play their hand and publicly acknowledge that the rumors flying everywhere at the speed of a bullet that could kill Superman were indeed true.

What a gruesome lot we humans are. The media informs us, through rumor and innuendo at first, that a celebrity is suffering from an incurable illness. They tell us this not because they think it’s important but because we, the media consumers, have informed them that stories such as these compel us.

A friend informed me this evening that the importance of news stories like this is “that it gives those so inclined, fans and friends, the opportunity to pray” for the ill and dying public figure. I suppose she is right but it also fixes in my mind, and I’m sure in the minds of others, the vivid image of a man in horrendous pain and suffering, his mind probably tortured by thoughts of mortality and nagging questions about the concept of life after organic death, undergoing invasive medical procedures, trying to enjoy the time that he has left, time that is now being counted down by the media and the public. If I want to carry a memory of Patrick Swayze in my head it is the image of a movie star whose work I wasn’t terribly fond of but I do not value acquiring the knowledge, through the media, that the man, that any person, is suffering from a debilitating and ultimately killing disease.

Perhaps I understand suffering too well. Suffering is an unpleasant activity that can only be engaged, I am inclined to believe, as a solitary affair. Illness and pain is private and personal. To find oneself separated from, as novelist John Updike calls them, “the happy herds of the healthy” is a lonely place to be.

Updike, like myself, suffers from severe psoriasis, a disease that is not, despite common misconceptions, a dermatological illness but a flaw in the immune system. It is chronic and variable and is unique, researchers have noted, among writers and artists. As Updike observed in At War With My Skin: “What was my creativity, my relentless need to produce, but a parody of my skin’s embarrassing overproduction?” From “The Hidden Delight of Psoriasis” in the Boston Medical Journal:

In addition to The Centaur, Updike devoted the novella From the Journal of a Leper to psoriasis. This is the diary of an anonymous, bumptious potter; 70% of his body is covered in psoriasis plaques. The diary begins as he starts treatment with PUVA (Ultra Violet Light). “Falling in love with the lights,” as he calls it. The basis of the story is the erotic profile of the patient with psoriasis: “Lusty, though we are loathsome to love. Keen-sighted, though we hate to look upon ourselves.” Initially, he looks at women with desire; he loves Carlotta, his mistress, longs to hide between the breasts of a waitress, lusts after the nurse with the body of a puma, and dreams about a female fellow patient. But as his skin clears up, Carlotta—who has saintly tendencies—cools on him, once he no longer has the affliction. From his part he becomes less and less interested in women. When he lies next to her with a clear skin, he discovers blemishes and spots on her skin, which once seemed so flawless. But while she loved him throughout the previous years (in the morning she would carefully brush his flakes off her body), the pale fire of his sexual desire dulls. And there is an artistic transformation worked on him by his cure as well. He loses perfectionism as a potter. He needed the affliction to create great art in compensation.

Severe psoriasis, which I have been at war with since 2000, is the outward manifestation of one hell of an inward battle, a wrestling match between the psyche, a hyperdrive, drive, drive to create (which Freud would probably label under his Death Drive construct), and the immune system shouting “Enough already!” British writer Dennis Potter captured the suffering of the severe psoriatic brilliantly in The Singing Detective. From the BMJ:

The television series The Singing Detective—based on a scenario by Dennis Potter —has had a great impact; patients call it an important source of information and doctors even recommend it as such. The main character, Philip Marlow, is a former writer of detective stories, who has been admitted to a hospital with a severe arthritis psoriatica. Potter introduces him as follows: “Marlow is glowering morosely, crumpled into himself, and his face badly disfigured with a ragingly acute psoriasis, which looks as though boiling oil has been thrown over him.” He is an example of extreme psoriasis at its worst, “cracked, scabbed, scaled, swollen, scarlet and snowy white and boiling with pain.” His medical history is impressive: coal tar, prednisone, corticosteroids, gold injections, and methotrexate, after a positive liver biopsy. All this in a cocktail with barbiturates and antidepressants. He is in agony. His ex-wife is revolted by him because he looks like a burns victim. This gains her torments of abuse from Marlow with his blinding rage.

Potter was writing from personal experience. Unlike his Chandler-esque creation, Marlow, who eventually learns that chronic illness can often be a hiding place from psychological torments and goes on to conquer or at least control his disease, Potter eventually succumbed to liver cancer as a lethal side effect of methotrexate, often considered the drug of last resort for severe psoriatics. I’ve been on doctor-ordered methotrexate since November of ‘07. Over time, the medication could shorten my life span. The medical literature underscores this point. And while I am still wearing the scars of psoriasis and have lesions here and there and painful plaque psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis that compels me to walk with a cane, I am not suffering as I once did with high fevers and endless bouts of insomnia and pain that renders impossible simple tasks like pouring a glass of water or tying one’s own shoes (well, I still can’t do that).

Like Potter, I’ve channeled my bouts with chronic illness into fiction, most notably in the Trace stories, but words cannot convey the agony that severe psoriasis can sometimes be. And messing about with desperate drugs like methotrexate certainly makes Jack London’s The Noseless One inch closer and closer to your ear. But even though I made my illness public through my writing, as the Swayze family was compelled to do this afternoon, the pain and torment I often endure is a privately felt matter. How can it be otherwise? Why should it be otherwise? Whether we accept it or not, life is a solipsistic affair: only the self exists, or can be proved to exist. I’m speculating here, of course, that Mr. Swayze is or may be in a state of suffering. Perhaps, God willing,  he’ll endure the process without an ounce of pain. But if the contrary is true, then that’s a very private matter and not fodder for anyone’s consumption except himself and those nearest to him.

“The Fine Print of Consciousness”

 Some interesting authorial news today. First up, is a little something from the Who Knew She Was Still Alive Department:

Novelist Phyllis A. Whitney, whose romantic suspense tales sold millions of copies and earned her top accolades from the Mystery Writers of America, has died. She was 104.

Whitney died Feb. 8 in a Charlottesville (Virginia) hospital, not far from her home in Nelson County, her son-in-law, Ed Pearson, said Thursday.

Whitney wrote more than 75 books, including three textbooks, and had about a hundred short stories published since the 1940s.

“I’ve slowed down in that I only write one book a year,” she said in a 1989 interview with The Associated Press, when she was 85. “A writer is what I am.”

Whitney’s last novel, “Amethyst Dreams,” was published in 1997. She began working on her autobiography at 102.

The grand old dame won a coveted Edgar Award some years back. Suddenly I feel like such a slacker.

It turns out that Ian McEwan was really impressed with the film adaptation of his novel “Atonement.” From USA Today:

McEwan says he was initially skeptical of the movie’s $40 million budget, worrying that the big investment would allow commercial considerations, such as pressure to cast marketable stars, to trump artistic integrity. But, he says, “all my fears were allayed.”

He typically regards film as “inferior” to books because “you cannot give the reader the fine print of consciousness. You cannot convey that sense of the onward rush of thought and feeling that you can in a novel.”

McEwan’s novels are an acquired taste. I’m right down the middle with the guy. “Saturday” was impressive and his new release, “On Chesil Beach”, was terrific. However, “Atonement” and “Amsterdam” were truly what-the-hell-are-people-thinking-when-they-praise-this-guy material for me.

But at least McEwan strives, sometimes self-conciously, to create literary fiction, which is more than we can say for John Grisham, right? Right. From the AP:

NEW YORK — Some things John Grisham knows: He got 15 rejections before his first book, A Time to Kill, was published. He made $9 million last year. He’s not James Joyce or William Faulkner. He’s an entertainer.

“I’m not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction,” the mega-selling author says. “I can assure you I don’t take myself serious enough to think I’m writing literary fiction and stuff that’s going to be remembered in 50 years. I’m not going to be here in 50 years; I don’t care if I’m remembered or not. It’s pure entertainment.”

Oh God. I just had a horrible thought. What if Grisham continues churning out potboilers until he’s 104? By the way, he just commenced work on his twenty-second book. There’s that “slacker” voice shouting at me again.

Speaking of voices, have you ever wondered what Jack London’s voice sounded like? Well, wonder no longer, you gold seekers and oyster pirates, as the Daily Californian tells us:

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have restored a voice recording of author Jack London’s voice, making it available to modern audiences.

The restoration, which is currently being touched up by a research team at the lab, provides a 1915 recording of a letter by the author.

The audio playback contains a dictated letter London addressed to fellow writer Max Ehrmann discussing the conditions of state prisons and supporting the claims that London made in his novel “The Star Rover.”

“Just a rush letter, ere I sail for Hawaii,” London says in the recording. “Merely want to tell you that everything concerning California prisons in ‘The Star Rover’ is true.”

More details on the restoration process can be found here.

And finally there’s this nugget of Nabokov news from the UK Times Online:

It is one of the most heated debates in contemporary literature: should Vladimir Nabokov’s final and incomplete novel be destroyed, as the author explicitly requested?

Fresh details of “The Original of Laura” — Nabokov’s last significant work — are revealed in times2 today, reviving a debate about the rights of an author to insist on his or her work being destroyed posthumously.

Novelist John Banville, winner of the Man Booker Prize for “The Sea”, says the book is worth salvaging and playwright Tom Stoppard insists the manuscript should be destroyed. The lively debate is here.
 

Roy Scheider, 1932-2008

NYT Obituary here.

UPDATE:

Director William Friedkin (”The French Connection”, “Sorcerer”) shares his candid memories of the sometimes difficult Scheider here.

They Shoot Small-Time Celebrities, Don’t They?

From long-time friend and admirer Kitty Myers, I received in the mail today a DVD of Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film adaptation of Horace McCoy’s bleak Depression era novel (1935), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the despairing tale of a tragic marathon dance contest in Los Angeles at a perilous time for the nation’s economy (Sound familiar?).

“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” is a terrific book and a fantastic movie. When I went casually looking for more information on the title at Wikipedia — notorious for a lack of oversight where outside editorial contributions are concerned — I found this link, perhaps placed by an ABC-TV employee armed with a sense of irony — at the bottom of the page.

“Day of the Locust” Redux

This is so Nathanael West.  

I was just hanging out at CNN.com for a spell and I figure, what the hell, why not click on the link for video of Heath Ledger’s body being removed from a New York apartment building? So I ask … was anyone else out there who saw this video jaw-droppingly shocked by the sheer volume of onlookers and photographers snapping away? The flashbulbs and light bars poured an especially gruesome light onto the whole scene.

“Oh my God,” I kept uttering over and over as the totally obscene two-minute video played out. “This is wrong in so many ways.”

Of course I clicked on the link, which proves that there’s an audience for such images because I’ve never seen a Heath Ledger movie in my life and wouldn’t know the guy from a toad passing me on the street but I still clicked through and watched the video.

Some days I’m ashamed of myself.

UPDATE: From the AP:

Outside the Manhattan building on an upscale street, paparazzi and gawkers gathered, and several police officers put up barricades to control the crowd of about 300. Onlookers craned their necks as officers brought out a black bodybag on a gurney, took it across the sidewalk and put it into a medical examiner’s office van.

As the door opened, bystanders snapped pictures with camera phones, rolled video and said, “He’s coming out!“