My Life As A Man

In the midst of my contentment there was one difficulty: my headaches. While a soldier I had developed such severe migraines that I had finally to be separated with a medical discharge after serving only eleven months of my two-year term. Of course, I didn’t miss the tedium and boredom of peacetime army life; from the day I was drafted I had been marking off the time until I could return to a life no less regimented and disciplined than a soldier’s, but overseen by me and for the sake of serious literary studies. However, to have been released back into a studious vocation because of physical incapacity was disconcerting to one who had spent nearly ten years building himself, by way of exercise and diet, into a brawny young man who looked as though he could take care of himself out in the harsh world. How doggedly I had worked to bury the frail child who used to lie in his bed musing over his father’s puzzles, while the other little children were out on the streets learning to be agile and fearless! I had even been pleased, in a way, when I had found myself assigned by the army to military police school in Georgia: they did not make sissy invalids into MPs, that was for sure. I was to become a man with a pistol on his hip and starch in the knifelike creases of his khakis: a humanist with a swagger, an English teacher with a billy club. The collected stories of Isaac Babel had not appeared yet in the famous paperback edition, but when I read them five years later, I recognized in Babel’s experience as a bespectacled Jew with the Red cavalry something like a highly charged version of what I had experienced during my brief tour of duty as an MP in the state of Georgia. An MP, until those headaches knocked me off my spit-shined boots…and I lay mummified on my bed for twenty-four hours at a stretch, the most ordinary little sound outside the barracks window-a soldier scratching at the grass with a rake, some passerby whistling a tune between his teeth-as unbearable as a spike being driven in my brain; even a beam of sunlight, filtering through the worn spot in the drawn green shade back of my bunk, a sunbeam no larger than the head of a pin, would be, in those circumstances, intolerable.

My “buddies,” most of them without a twelfth-grade education, assumed that the college genius (and Jewboy) was malingering, especially when I discovered that I could tell the day before that one of my disabling headaches was on its way. It was my contention that if only I were allowed to retire to my bed prior to the onset of the headache, and to remain there in the dark and quiet for five hours or so, I could ward off an otherwise inevitable attack. “Look, I think you could too,” said the wise sergeant, while denying me permission to do so, “I have often thought the same thing about myself. You can’t beat a day in the sack for making you feel good all over.” Nor was the doctor on sick call much more sympathetic; I convinced no one, not even myself. The “floating” or “ghostly” sensation, the aura of malaise that served as my warning system was, in truth, so unsubstantial, so faint, that I too had to wonder if I wasn’t imagining it; and then subsequently “imagining” the headache to justify the premonition.

Eventually, when headaches began to flatten me regularly every ten or twelve days, I was admitted to the post hospital for “observation,” which meant that, except if I was actually in pain, I was to walk around in a pair of blue army pajamas pushing a dry mop. To be sure, when the aura of a headache came upon me, I could now retire immediately to my bed; but that, as it turned out, worked only to forestall the headache for another twelve hours or so; on the other hand, if I were to remain continually in bed…But I couldn’t; in the words of Bartleby the Scrivener (words that were with me frequently in the hospital, though I had not read the story for several years), I preferred not to. I preferred instead to push my mop from one ward to another and wait for the blow to fall.

Rather quickly I came to understand that my daily work routine had been devised as a combination punishment and cure by the hospital authorities. I had been assigned my mop so as to be brought into contact with those who were truly ill, irreversibly and horribly so. Each day, for instance, I went off to mop between the beds of patients in “the burn ward,” young men so badly disfigured by fire that in the beginning either I had to turn away at the sight of them or else could not withdraw my gaze at all. Then there were amputees who had lost limbs in training accidents, in automobile collisions, in operations undertaken to arrest the spread of malignancies. The idea seemed to be that I would somehow be shamed out of my alleged illness by the daily contact that I made on my rounds with these doomed mortals, most of them no older than myself. Only after I was called before a medical board and awarded a discharge did I learn that no such subtle or sadistic therapy had been ordered in my case. My internment in the hospital had been a bureaucratic necessity and not some sly form of purifying and healing imprisonment. The “cure” had been wholly of my own devising, my housecleaning duties having been somewhat less extensive than I had imagined. The nurse in charge of my section, an easygoing and genial woman, was amused to learn from me, on the day of my discharge, that I had been wandering through the hospital from nine to five every day, cleaning the floors of all the open wards, when the instructions she had given me had been only to clean up each morning around my own bed. After that I was to have considered myself free to come and go as I wished, so long as I did not leave the hospital. “Didn’t anyone ever stop you?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, “in the beginning. But I told them I’d been ordered to do it.” I pretended to be as amused as she was by the “misunderstanding,” but wondered if bad conscience was not leading her to lie now about the instructions she had given me on the day I had become her patient.

In Chicago, a civilian again, I was examined by a neurologist at Billings Hospital who could offer no explanation for the headaches, except to say that my pattern was typical enough. He prescribed the same drugs that the army had, none of which did me any good, and told me that migraines ordinarily diminish in intensity and frequency with time, generally dying out around the age of fifty. I had vaguely expected that mine would the out as soon as I was my own man again and back at the university; along with my sergeant and my envious colleagues, I continued to believe that I had induced this condition in myself in order to provide me with grounds for discharge from an army that was wasting my valuable time. That the pain not only continued to plague me, but in the months following my discharge began to spread until it had encompassed both halves of my skull, served to bolster, in a grim way, a faltering sense of my own probity.

Unless, of course, I was covering my tracks, “allowing” the headaches a somewhat longer lease on my life than might be physically desirable, for the sake of my moral well-being. For who could accuse me of falling ill as a means of cutting short my tour of army duty when it was clear that the rewarding academic life I had been so anxious to return to continued to be as marred by this affliction as my purposeless military existence had been? Each time I had emerged from another twenty-four-hour session of pain, I would think to myself, “How many more, before I’ve met my obligation?” I wondered if it was not perhaps the “plan” of these headaches to visit themselves upon me until such time as I would have been discharged from the service under ordinary conditions. Did I, as it were, owe the army a migraine for each month of service I had escaped, or was it for each week, or each day, or each hour? Even to believe that they might the out by the time I was fifty was hardly consolation to an ambitious twenty-four-year-old with as strong a distaste for the sickbed as I had developed in my childhood; also to one made buoyant by fulfilling the exacting demands of schedules and routines, the prospect of being dead to the world and to my work for twenty-four hours every ten days for the next thirty-six years, the thought of all that waste, was as distressing as the anticipation of the pain itself. Three times a month, for God only knew how long, I was to be sealed into a coffin (so I described it to myself, admittedly in the clutch of self-pity) and buried alive. Why?

I had already considered (and dismissed) the idea of taking myself to a psychoanalyst, even before the neurologist at Billings informed me that a study in psychosomatic medicine was about to be initiated at a North Shore clinic, under the direction of an eminent Freudian analyst. He thought it was more than likely that I might be taken on as a patient at a modest fee, especially as they were said to be interested particularly in the ailments that manifested themselves in “intellectuals” and “creative types.” The neurologist was not suggesting that migraines were necessarily symptomatic of a neurotic personality disturbance; rather he was responding, he said, to what he took to be “a Freudian orientation” in the questions I asked him and in the manner in which I had gone about presenting the history of the disorder.

I did not know that it was a Freudian orientation so much as a literary habit of mind which the neurologist was not accustomed to: that is to say, I could not resist reflecting upon my migraines in the same supramedical way that I might consider the illnesses of Milly Theale or Hans Castorp or the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, or ruminate upon the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, or search out the “meaning” in Gogol’s short story of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev’s temporary loss of his nose. Whereas an ordinary man might complain, “I get these damn headaches” (and have been content to leave it at that), I tended, like a student of high literature or a savage who paints his body blue, to see the migraines as standing for something, as a disclosure or “epiphany,” isolated or accidental or inexplicable only to one who was blind to the design of a life or a book. What did my migraines signify?

The possibilities I came up with did not satisfy a student as “sophisticated” as myself; compared with