Authors: Robert McCrum
To while away the long hours of August, Sarah began to read aloud to me. Together we returned to
Alice in Wonderland
, while Sarah also introduced me to her own childhood favourite, E. B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web.
We both felt there was something profoundly consoling about these old friends. I found my own thoughts spinning back to infancy (the rooks caw-cawing in the beech trees of Ashton House), and then forwards through the years. It was a self-examination enforced by the visitors to my bedside. A novice to hospital, I discovered that the patient must submit to a parade of relatives, friends, ex-lovers, co-workers, parents, siblings, each one presenting a tiny fragment of lost time for renewal. The patient is the star of the show, but the audience varies: lame-duck specialists; ghouls; true friends; compassion junkies; hypochondriacs; and people who welcome the chance to address a captive audience. (It intrigued me
to see the relief on my friends’ faces when, as one put it, they discovered that ‘you are not a drooling vegetable’.) Each post brought new letters: letters of sympathy, letters of encouragement, letters from people I hadn’t spoken to, or heard from, in years. And when I wasn’t bombarded by the past, I found I was alone with a rather interesting person, someone I had never spent much time alone with: myself.
In this way, I became my own Cambodia, with the enforced leisure and opportunity to explore myself, to analyse what made me tick, and to discover what mattered to me. Alone in my room, with only my right arm functioning properly (my right leg, though intact, was of no real use to me in this state), and with the demons of physical exhaustion constantly at hand, I began to keep a diary. This was Sarah’s idea, and I later discovered that she was writing one, too. I think the diaries helped preserve sanity for both of us. I have reproduced here the diaries we kept during August and September 1995. I can think of no more faithful account of our emotions at this time, and of what we both went through, separately and together. If, as Sarah says, I sometimes find it difficult to express my emotions in conversation, at least in my diary (which is printed just as I wrote it, with a few inevitable omissions) I found myself expressing my feelings quite freely.
My first, barely legible, scribble starts on 1 August (three days after I fell ill):
… one thing I can say about what’s happened – it’s not boring. I don’t remember much about last night, but I do remember being afraid of surgery. After a lot of discussion among the doctors, I was finally wheeled into a ward. I felt very tired and kept falling asleep. It was
very hot and I found myself revolving telephone numbers in my mind to keep awake. In the ward (which was noisy and suffocating) I tossed and turned all night. From time to time a nurse would shine a flashlight in my eyes and ask my date of birth. Finally, towards dawn, I managed to signal to a nurse who brought a cold towel and wiped my face which had become very dry with the heat.
Sarah’s diary takes up the story with this entry on Wednesday 2 August:
Robert continues to make progress. His speech is clearer, the movement in his right side is stronger [
actually, it was largely unaffected
] and according to the doctors he is showing small signs of improvement in his left side. His spirits go up and down and he is unable to express them – I try to do it for him, to anticipate what he might be thinking and verbally beat it out of him – and then I end up feeling wretched and so bossy and peremptory. I am so afraid he won’t improve, that he will never be able to walk, even though I know that is very likely not the case. I am so scared. I alternate between being very optimistic and completely despairing. I lay on our bed at home today screaming to all hell. The neighbours must have thought I was being murdered. Then I called Kathy Lette [
a friend; the author of
Foetal Attraction] and sobbed and sobbed.
Flowers continue to pour in – letters and phone calls – R. has begun to start to dictate some very funny Thank You letters. His mind is perfectly intact. The doctors scare the hell out of me. Now they’re saying it’s a clot surrounded by a little bit of bleeding, which complicates things because if they use anti-coagulants to dissolve the
clot, they will exacerbate the bleeding. We’ve gotten so many flowers that we have started to put them all down the hallway, using up the available space there too.
It was at about this time that plans were made for me to be moved from University College Hospital to the Nuffield Wing of the National Hospital in Queen Square. I was oblivious to the discussions that were taking place in the corridor outside my room, and continued to scribble in the big Black ‘n’ Red notebook that stayed at my bedside throughout these weeks.
Sarah is with me now. I’ve no idea when, or how, she got here, but it’s wonderful to have her back. Her mother, Susan, is here, too, rather amazingly. Is this the ultimate mother-in-law joke: that you have a life-threatening crisis and when you come back into consciousness you find … Your Mother-in-Law? Presumably she’s flown in from America. My parents are also ever-present, as are Mark and Stephen [my brothers].
Sarah’s diary for the next night expresses what may have been the genesis of this book:
R. very discouraged, and it’s so hard to get him to talk. He would like to do two things: one, to talk to other people who have had this happen to them; two, to talk to Dr Lees more often. I think he feels terribly abandoned.
Home for the night, the first night by myself – feeling so exhausted and beaten up and lonely, but also very guilty because the truth is it’s really nice to be able to be at home. R. fills the air and it makes me remember what
normalcy would feel like. I am pathetically wearing his T-shirt and his boxer shorts.
I have lost all track of time, but I know that today is about a week since the stroke happened. Mum and Dad came and sat next to me while I dozed. I did not feel inclined to talk to them. Later Dad very sweetly read me some favourite passages from P. G. Wodehouse, and cheered me up a lot. In the morning I read my post. I seem to have had an amazing number of letters and cards. The one I liked the best was from Jaco and Elizabeth [
Dutch publishing friends
] on Skyros to say that they’ve lit a candle for me in some Greek shrine ‘and will burn down the whole island if necessary’. I had more of a headache today, but Sarah says I am making progress. I don’t see the evidence for this, and feel endless frustration at being stuck here in the National Hospital. There are no visitors today, no doctors; I dictated a note to Roger Alton [
my friend the features editor on the
Guardian]. The world of the
Guardian
seems quite incredibly remote now and perhaps I shall never recover it. Who knows? However, I no longer feel quite so helpless. Darling Sarah has been wonderful. On the TV I watched
Europe Express
and
Jaws, the Revenge.
I find I have become quite addicted to television, perhaps because I cannot properly hold a book or newspaper to read. I feel idle and lazy and rather trapped. At least there is room for Sarah to stay the night. She sleeps on the floor in the corner and is being very, very patient. I love her so much, and feel frustration at not being able to express it.
I have no recollection of being moved to the National Hospital but once I was installed, with my cards and
flowers, the room became a kind of home, and I diverted myself with the pleasures of classical music, constructing imaginary lists of
Desert Island Discs
, of which my favourite went as follows (I’ve always longed for the chance to publish this, though perhaps not in these circumstances):
1. J. S. Bach: Suites for Unaccompanied Cello 1-6
2. Mozart: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 5
3. Schubert: Erlkönig, D 328
4. Mahler: Das Liede von der Erde
5. Brahms: A German Requiem
6. Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
7. Beethoven: Sonata No. 17, op. 31 No. 2
8. Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs (Vier Letzte Lieder)
It was during these long days, listening weepily to ‘Four Last Songs’ on my Discman, that it began to dawn on me exactly what kind of person she was I’d married, even though at that moment I wasn’t fit to be married to anyone, either physically or emotionally. As I wrote in my diary on 5 August, ‘The truth is: I feel oddly detached from the outside world. My image of myself during these days has been of a beetle or cockroach without a leg, flailing helplessly and covered in dirt, on the brink of extinction.’
But wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138
Lying in the National Hospital in the long aftermath of my stroke, with the question ‘Why me?’ reverberating through my thoughts, I found myself engulfed in the love of my family and especially of my wife. In my more melancholy moments I felt that the lesson in love I was getting perhaps justified the appalling physical cost.
As I revolved my life history, searching for clues, sometimes wondering why I had been singled out for this malign punishment (a reaction common to all young stroke-sufferers), I became fascinated by Fate, and her cousin Chance. Of course, there’s good luck and there’s bad luck. When I considered my good fortune I always returned to the inspiring, ironical figure of Sarah. Nothing had been more fortuitous than our first encounter in October 1993, but once that meeting had
happened, it seemed an irrevocable, immutable moment in both our personal histories.
In October 1993, in my capacity as editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, I was due to go to the annual Book Fair in Frankfurt. To me, this had become a regular autumnal chore and it was the measure of my disaffection with my life at this time that, when I secured a commission from the
Guardian
to write an article about the business of the fair, I launched into a ferocious attack on the whole institution.
The Book Fair runs from Wednesday to Sunday, often in a tawny, Indian-summer week at the beginning of October. I remember sitting alone in my hotel room chuckling over my copy, a sustained anti-Frankfurt rant. I was due to file in time for the Saturday edition; in practice, this meant arriving at my conclusions by midday on Thursday, before the Fair was properly under way. So my piece was based less on actual reportage than on an accumulation of frustration in which I described an important bookselling institution as ‘the
Jurassic Park
of the international literary scene - a glossy, highly organized but empty racket whose chief beneficiaries are the hoteliers, restaurateurs and taxi-drivers of the city’. Shortly after completing this breezy polemic on Wednesday afternoon, I plunged back into the business of the Fair.
My friend Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of the Grove Atlantic Press, a true Southern gentleman and one of the world’s great party animals, had invited me to join him and ‘some friends’ for dinner. To tell the truth, though I love Morgan dearly, I was not eager to go. From experience, I knew that these ‘friends’ would be gloriously blonde and probably none too bright but, more to the point, so tremendously keen on Morgan
that there’d be little room for anyone else. I was not anxious to make up the numbers at the court of King Morgan. On the other hand, I had had no better offer that night, and we were to meet at the bar of the Park Hotel. I did not at this time have much in the way of a permanent relationship. I had been married in my twenties, a marriage that had collapsed in 1984, shortly after my thirtieth birthday. (Its failure, I’m afraid, was largely my fault.) Although it was nearly ten years since my first wife and I had separated, my life remained unsettled. I was still, metaphorically, in trouble.
For ten years and more the Faber & Faber office had provided me with a kind of alternative family: its authors as my friends and dependants, its staff as my intimates and surrogate siblings, and its chairman, my friend Matthew Evans, as an older and quasi-paternal figure. Now, belatedly, I had reached the point at which I was recognizing the limitations of such an institution, and of such relationships. After a decade of personal irresponsibility I was looking for a change. But that realization did not stop me from relishing one more throw of the dice in the casino of singlehood.
That night in Frankfurt, I arrived late at the rendezvous. Morgan was already in place, enjoying his role as Mein Host; clearly unattached, he was already attended by two or three very attractive blonde women from the Calvinist parts of northern Europe. I was wondering if I should make my excuses and leave when he took me aside and explained that he’d also invited a journalist from the
New York Times
, who was covering the book fair for her newspaper, one Sarah Lyall. He suggested vaguely that it might do me some good, as a writer, to have a friend on the
Times.
Well, I’d met a few American journalists in my time, and I remember thinking, Some
chance. Anyway, I decided to stay. A moment or two later, this slight blonde figure came shyly into the bar, and we were introduced. I don’t remember much about our first conversation (Sarah claims now that I simply bragged about having filed my copy with the
Guardian
) but I do remember feeling tremendously excited and stimulated by her presence, her company, her conversation … Unlike some Americans of my acquaintance, she seemed to have a highly developed sense of humour (I still remember the thrill of finding someone with whom to share a joke about that staple of British journalistic practice, ‘the fact too good to check’), an acute appreciation of irony and a way with words that was, to me, perfectly delightful. We fell into a conversation that seemed to go on all evening, first at dinner and then, because we were all going back to the Frankfurterhof Hotel for post-prandial drinks, during what would have been otherwise an interminable walk through the rainy, confusing streets of Frankfurt. It was then that I asked her why she’d become a journalist and she replied, very frankly, and rather to my surprise, that it was probably fear. (At that moment, she seemed to me the least fearful person I’d met in ages.) When she’d graduated from college, she told me, she’d felt strangely nervous about looking for a job; nervous about dealing with people in authority; nervous about finding her way around the world. So her decision to become a reporter was counter-intuitive, as she put it, ‘like an arachnophobe choosing a career handling spiders’. I liked the fact that Sarah looked to journalism to up-end cosy assumptions (as the Chicago night-editor’s dictum has it, ‘If your mother says she loves you - check it out’). It was during this perambulation through the freezing night that she asked me how old I was. I’d already cunningly
established that she was twenty-nine, going on thirty, though in truth she looked barely twenty-one. It was then that I caught myself lying about my age. How old was I? ‘Thirty-nine,’ I snapped - supposing that forty would have seemed impossibly antique. I heard the lie with a flutter of surprise. I must be interested.