Authors: Robert McCrum
I am reading Marcus Aurelius’
Meditations
in the 60p Penguin edition (a perfect size and weight for one-handed reading) and today found this passage: ‘In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien
land; and after repute, oblivion.’ I read this through a veil of tears with a shock of recognition, as if spoken to across a vast abyss of time and history.
Wordsworth, famously, spoke of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. In hospital, I experienced memory as emotion recollected in immobility. When I tried to attach precise months and years to the things that had happened to me I was often forced to admit that much of what had taken place seemed fuzzy and indistinct. The eighties returned to me as a brilliant kaleidoscope of work, alcohol, travel, sex and insomnia. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and I didn’t. Publishing in that decade seemed at times to be as much about extravagant hospitality as about the struggles of the unknown writer. And yet, when I went back to 1981, there was none of the euphoria or excitement people now associate with the eighties.
The mid-eighties also saw the launch of
The Story of English
, the television series I’d worked on during the previous four years. When I look at the programmes now I cannot imagine how I was able to find the time both to research and write the scripts, and also to be an effective editor at Queen Square. I seemed to have so much energy then; we all did. In the quest for explanations, some people suggested, perhaps predictably, that I’d had the stroke from overwork, but there’s no medical evidence to support this. There are things you do when you’re young that defy analysis. The programmes were a huge success in America, largely thanks to the popularity of our presenter, Robert MacNeil; the accompanying book spent several weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller lists; for a few months in 1986 my
feet hardly touched the ground. I was thirty-three then, and thought I was immortal.
It’s amazing how quickly you can move from the world of the well into the world of the sick. I, who was so worried about the indignities of pregnancy, and who have always been so faint-hearted about and repelled by the idea of hospital and sick people, am now conversant with a whole new culture. I think of all the things that could have happened, that could have been worse: R. could have had a head injury or broken his spine or had his arm mangled in a meat-rendering machine, or been blinded by a shard of flying glass, or been hit by a car and broken every bone in his body.
Small improvements each day. R’s speech is improving a lot, but he is still speaking with a stutter and slurring a little, and so I hope that he will be fine soon - it’ll make it so much easier for him to communicate. And it will improve his spirits too. The last week has been a real testament to anti-depressants already. I’m still so afraid.
As I began to recover, my responses to the outside world became sharper. Within two weeks of the initial ‘insult’ I was once again becoming conscious, as I had not been for several days, of the passage of time, and the frustrations of delay:
At the weekend, even the BUPA-sponsored Nuffield goes half-speed. At twelve o’clock the standby physiotherapist came, and we did basic manoeuvres for about
an hour. By the end I was exhausted, and then slept like a log. I am getting more competent at basic standing, but my speech is still very slurred, I think. It’s frustrating, but I am slowly getting over the first shock of the stroke. I have to find time to get my equilibrium back. Mum and Dad came to visit, Sarah went shopping and I had the regular Nuffield lunch: soup, sandwiches and fruit, none of it very appealing to eat. Taste, and the pleasure in food, has gone.
Then they took me out into Queen Square in the wheelchair. I felt sorry for my parents, having to wheel me around at their advanced age [
actually, neither was then yet 70
] and at a time when I should be looking after them, not vice versa. I think they have been stunned by the experience of my being in hospital with a stroke, though of course they will not admit it.
Back in the ward I read some more Marcus Aurelius and then slept heavily. Later on, Julio Etchart came by, and we chatted about our foreign trips together, especially East Timor, which seems very far away, very remote and, now, quite impossible.
Tonight - it is now seven o’clock - I slept three or four hours, and still feel very sleepy. I find I think about sex a lot, having sex with the nurses - silly stuff, but hard to put out of my mind, not having had sex for so long. [
One of the first things I did when I came round at University College Hospital was to check, with my good right hand, that I could still have an erection. I could.
] I am also keen to get back to my laptop word processor as soon as possible if I can. I have become obsessed by the names on the hospital furniture. I lie in bed staring at the ceiling or the wall or the television screen or the door frame … All the articles of furniture here seem to have been made by a company called Nesbit Evans.
To pass the time, and to test my memory, I find myself trying to remember, alphabetically, author by author, the Faber list. Does this mean I am going crazy?
It would be several months before I faced up to the fact that the half-baked wish of my ‘old’ life had come true, and that I could no longer function as the editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde:
The Importance of Being Earnest
Cyril Connolly’s
Enemies of Promise
is often quoted by English writers for its identification of the ultimate threat to a young writer’s creativity, ‘the pram in the hall’. For me, during my years at Faber & Faber, there was another passage that used to haunt my imagination almost as profoundly. ‘As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers,’ writes Connolly, ‘so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.’ Perhaps Connolly’s intuition is fundamentally accurate, but speaking for myself I found that my life as a publisher overflowed with activity and incident and interest, especially in retrospect. In the National Hospital, I continued to review my nearly twenty years at Faber & Faber Lying on your back in bed for two months, virtually unable to move, is a strange experience. Immobility made even the slightest and most trivial events from the past seem historical.
Everything, the smallest thing, assumed a heightened significance to me. I traced extraordinary imaginary journeys across the fissures and vacant spaces of the ceiling. I stared at the little square of blue that signified the outside world, and wondered about my place in it. Often I reflected on the moments of recent history I’d watched from the sidelines.
There was, for instance, that house I’d negotiated to buy in the spring of 1992. The day I arrived the place was empty, but I was still uneasy about going in. I stood on the doorstep with the key, nervously looking over my shoulder. There was a huge pile of rubbish in the area outside, and junk mail, stuffed through the letterbox, drifting glossily on the doormat within. Inside, it was gloomy, brown and dank. The hall light didn’t work, but once I got the shutters open, I could see what was what. Books, clothes, an empty wine glass. The previous occupants had obviously left in a hurry. Well, I could fix that. On the top floor there was a wonderful writing room, filled with light and sunshine. A huge ink stain on the carpet indicated where the last owner had had his desk. He’d already told me he’d written his book up here. I searched up and down, but could find no other evidence of
The Satanic Verses.
The books on the shelves dated to February 1989, which was when the Iranians imposed the
fatwa
, and when Salman Rushdie had fled into hiding. Being here now was rather like visiting the
Marie Celeste.
For the first few months after I moved in I wondered anxiously about the likelihood of an assault on the house by an Iranian hit-squad, though the Special Branch had given every kind of assurance that the house was safe.
It often occurred to me in hospital that my house in St Peter’s Street had witnessed more than its fair share
of personal catastrophe. Occasionally, when the doctors spoke of my eventual return home - an idea that was becoming an increasingly important part of my personal, convalescent agenda - I found myself dreading the idea of going back to the place in which I might have died.
The doctors are, for the first time, making optimistic pronouncements. Dr Lees said he was very encouraged. Dr Whurr the speech therapist (R. calls her ‘Dr Click’) said I should stop worrying, that from now on it was all recovery; and that he will be all right. What he will be like physically at the end of this process still remains to be seen - the physiotherapist who saw him today said we could expect three months - three months! - in the rehab centre and then that he won’t have a normal gait (her word) at the end of it all. I think it is probably too early to predict. It seems that a lot of it depends upon how well his brain heals on its own. But yesterday for the first time I felt something very near to happiness. I felt that this will be all right in the end. It will be a weird feeling and a massive change of life, to spend the next three months more or less apart, with me here in London at the home I consider Robert’s more than mine, and him in hospital, in a hospital learning to walk again. The poor, poor thing. I look at him lying in bed asleep (the physiotherapy tires him out terribly) and wonder if he actually comprehends what he is in for. I hope the two of us can weather this. I’m convinced that if he can, I can. He’s snoring the tiniest bit, lying on his back stretched out to the length of the bed in blue shorts and a green shirt, his hair is soft and shiny and falling nicely. His body is wonderful. He could be at home asleep.
It’s cooler today. Dr Click [
Whurr
] came by at twelve o’clock. I am making good progress with my speech, apparently, but I must remember to practise. Apparently, some stroke survivors can’t even swallow: it can take six months to get them able to do this. In the middle of the morning Ish [
Kazuo Ishiguro
] visited. It was very nice to see him. He was quite frisky and admitted he was relieved to find I was still myself. [
As a child, he’d known a relative who’d suffered a severe left-side stroke, and had bad memories of profound neurological trauma.
] The truth is that the visitor’s assumption of the patient’s incapacity runs deep. And not just the visitor’s, either. For example, there’s a Mr Kemal, one of several Arabs here, down the hall. The nurses order him around as if he was stone deaf and/or mentally retarded. ‘Come on, Mr Kemal. Do you want some lunch,
lunch?
LUNCH
? A bit of fish, a piece of
chicken
,
CHICKEN
? Why do people become nurses, I wonder?
Even the good nurses have no idea how much they can hurt, how much hurt they can cause by wrenching my left arm, which is still totally paralysed and helpless, at the wrong moment. There’s one nurse who causes pain every day. She is loud, brash and infuriating. I think she must be insecure. But the others, Colette, Julia, Linda, the Scottish lady and Mamie the West Indian, are all great, and I have become very fond of them.
Hospital food: pâté and cold toast, chicken Kiev, soggy vegetables, chips, salads, summer pudding.
I realize now when I think about it that I was last in hospital when I was (I think) about ten years old. I remember the whole experience of the anaesthetic, the surgeon counting 1, 2, 3 … and the fading from consciousness, and the big children’s ward that I was in, all
those years ago in Reading, and then being at home, lying in bed watching black-and-white TV with my leg in plaster, and the real fear that I would never walk again. And now - strange irony - I can’t walk at all.
We’re getting into a real routine - I come in in the morning, go to work [
at the
New York Times’
London bureau
] in the afternoon, and come back in the evening. Tonight we watched a video of our wedding for the first time together. When we got to Robert’s speech, he did something I had never really seen him do before - he started to cry. I had been trying so hard to get him to talk about how he feels. But now he’s starting to talk about it more, and what he says is quite astonishing and quite encouraging, that he feels philosophical and ruminative, and that he’s regarding the whole next phase of his life (the learning to walk phase) as a project, a goal. I pray that he will keep feeling that way and not get discouraged or feel sorry for himself. When he cried I wondered if he was crying for the lost self he saw in the video. He said earlier that he felt sad because we had been so happy and doing so nicely together before this happened, and that’s how I feel too. It seems so cruel. But then, but then. I read recently about someone who had a cerebral aneurysm and who fell into a coma and died, and then … Reg Gadney [
a thriller writer published by Faber
] tells us about his sister who died of a massive stroke six weeks ago. I feel I want to shout thanks to the heavens. He’s alive and the worst is over and I can bear the rest.