The Magic Mountain or even “The Nose,” the texture of my own story was thin to the point of transparency. It was disappointing, for instance, to find myself associating the disability that had come over me when I had begun to wear a pistol on my hip with either my adolescent terror of the physical life or some traditional Jewish abhorrence of violence-such an explanation seemed too conventional and simplistic, too “easy.” A more attractive, if in the end no less obvious, idea had to do with a kind of psychological civil war that had broken out between the dreamy, needy, and helpless child I had been, and the independent, robust, manly adult I wanted to be. At the time I recalled it, Bartleby’s passive but defiant formula, “I would prefer not to,” had struck me as the voice of the man in me defying the child and his temptation to helplessness; but couldn’t it just as well be the voice of the frail and sickly little boy answering the call to perform the duties of a man? Or of a policeman? No, no, much too pat-my life surely must be more complex and subtle than that; The Wings of the Dove was. No, I could not imagine myself writing a story so tidy and facile in its psychology, let alone living one.
The stories I was writing-the fact of the writing itself-did not escape my scrutiny. It was to keep open the lines to my sanity and intelligence, to engage in a solitary, thoughtful activity at the end of those mindless days of directing traffic and checking passes at the gate into town, that I had taken up writing for three hours each evening at a table in the corner of the post library. After only a few nights, however, I had put aside my notes for the critical article I had planned on some novels of Virginia Woolf (for an issue of Modern Fiction Studies to be devoted entirely to her work) to begin what was to turn out to be my first published short story. Shortly thereafter, when the migraines began, and the search for a cause, a reason, a meaning, I thought I saw in the unexpected alteration the course of my writing had taken something analogous to that shift in my attention that used to disconcert my father when he presented the little boy in the sickbed with those neat arithmetical puzzles of his-the movement from intellectual or logical analysis to seemingly irrelevant speculation of an imaginary nature. And in the hospital, where in six weeks’ time I had written my second and third stories, I could not help wondering if for me illness was not a necessary catalyst to activate the imagination. I understood that this was not an original hypothesis, but if that made it more or less applicable to my situation I couldn’t tell; nor did I know what to do with the fact that the illness itself was the one that had regularly afflicted Virginia Woolf and to some degree contributed to the debilitation that led to suicide. I knew about Virginia Woolf’s migraines from having read her posthumous book, A Writer’s Diary, edited by her husband and published in my senior year of college. I even had the book with me in my footlocker, for the essay I had been going to write on her work. What was I to think then? No more than a coincidence? Or was I imitating the agony of this admirable writer, as in my stories I was imitating the techniques and simulating the sensibilities of still other writers I admired?
Following my examination by the neurologist, I decided to stop worrying about the “significance” of my condition and to try to consider myself, as the neurologist obviously did, to be one hundred and eighty pounds of living tissue subject to the pathology of the species, rather than a character in a novel whose disease the reader may be encouraged to diagnose by way of moral, psychological, or metaphysical hypotheses. As I was unable to endow my predicament with sufficient density or originality to satisfy my own literary tastes-unable to do “for” migraines what Mann had done in The Magic Mountain for TB or in Death in Venice for cholera-I had decided that the only sensible thing was to have my migraine and then forget about it till the next time. To look for meaning was fruitless as well as pretentious. Though I wondered: Couldn’t the migraines themselves be diagnosed as “pretentious” in origin?
I also withstood the temptation to take myself for an interview to the North Shore clinic where the study of psychosomatic ailments was getting under way. Not that I was out of sympathy with the theories or techniques of psychotherapy as I had grasped them through my reading. It was, rather, that aside from these headaches, I was as vigorous in the execution of my duties, and as thrilled with the circumstances of my life, as I could ever have dreamed of being. To be sure, to try to teach sixty-five freshmen to write an English sentence that was clear, logical, and precise was not always an enchanting experience; yet, even when teaching was most tedious, I maintained my missionary spirit and with it the conviction that with every cliched expression or mindless argument I exposed in the margins of my students’ essays, I was waging a kind of guerrilla war against the army of slobs, philistines, and barbarians who seemed to me to control the national mind, either through the media or the government. The presidential press conference provided me with material for any number of classroom sessions; I would have samples of the Eisenhower porridge mimeographed for distribution and then leave him to the students to correct and grade. I would submit for their analysis a sermon by Norman Vincent Peale, the president’s religious adviser; or an ad for General Motors; or a “cover story” from Time. What with television quiz shows, advertising agencies, and the Cold War all flourishing, it was a period in which a composition teacher did not necessarily have to possess the credentials or doctrines of a clergyman to consider himself engaged in the business of saving souls.
If the classroom caused me to imagine myself to be something of a priest, the university neighborhood seemed to me something like my parish-and of course something of a Bloomsbury-a community of the faithful, observing the sacraments of literacy, benevolence, good taste, and social concern. My own street of low, soot-stained brick apartment buildings was on the grim side, and the next one over, run-down only the year before, was already in rubble-leveled as though by blockbusters for an urban renewal project; also, in the year I had been away, there had been a marked increase of random nighttime violence in the neighborhood. Nonetheless, within an hour of my return, I felt as comfortable and at home as someone whose family had dwelled in the same small town for generations. Simultaneously I could never forget that it was not in such a paradise of true believers that I had been born and raised; and even if I should live in the Hyde Park neighborhood for the next fifty years-and why should I ever want to live elsewhere?-the city itself, with streets named for the prairie and the Wabash, with railroad trains marked “Illinois Central” and a lake bearing the name “Michigan,” would always have the flavor of the faraway for one whose fantasies of adventure had been nurtured in a sickbed in Camden, New Jersey, over an aeon of lonely afternoons. How could I be in “Chicago”? The question, coming at me while shopping in the Loop, or watching a movie at the Hyde Park Theatre, or simply opening a can of sardines for lunch at my apartment on Drexel, seemed to me unanswerable. I suppose my wonderment and my joy were akin to my parents’, when they would address those envelopes to me in care of Faculty Exchange. How could he be a professor, who could barely breathe with that bronchitis? All this by way of explaining why I did not betake myself to that clinic for the study of psychosomatic ailments and offer up my carcass and unconscious for investigation. I was too happy. Everything that was a part of getting older seemed to me to be a pleasure: the independence and authority, of course, but no less so the refinement and strengthening of one’s moral nature-to be magnanimous where one had been selfish and carping, to be forgiving where one had been resentful, to be patient where one had been impetuous, to be generous and helpful where one had previously been needful…It seemed to me at twenty-four as natural to be solicitous of my sixty-year-old parents as to be decisive and in command with my eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students. Toward the young girls in my classes, some as lovely and tempting as the junior at Pembroke College with whom I had just concluded a love affair, I behaved as I was expected to; it went without saying that as their teacher I must not allow myself to take a sexual interest in them or to exploit my authority for personal gratification. No difficulty I encountered seemed beyond my powers, whether it was concluding a love affair, or teaching the principles of logic to my dullest composition students, or rising with a dry mouth to address the Senate of the Faculty, or writing a short story four times over to get it “right”…How could I turn myself over to a psychoanalyst as “a case”? All the evidence of my life (exclusive of the migraines) argued too strongly against that, certainly to one to whom it meant so much never to be classified as a patient again. Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath of a headache, I would experience such elation just from the absence of pain that I would almost believe that whatever had laid that dose of suffering upon me had been driven from my body for good-that the powerful enemy (yes, more feeble interpretation, or superstition) who had unleashed upon me all his violence, who had dragged me to the very end of my endurance, had been proved unable in the end to do me in. The worse the headache the more certain I was when it was over that I had defeated the affliction once and for all. And was a better man for it. (And no, my body was not painted blue in these years, nor did I otherwise believe in angels, demons, or deities.) Often I vomited during the attacks, and afterward, not quite daring to move (for fear of breaking), I lay on the bathroom floor with my chin on the toilet bowl and a hand mirror to my face, in a parody perhaps of Narcissus. I wanted to see what I looked like having suffered so and survived; in that feeble and euphoric state, it would not have frightened me-might even have thrilled me-to have observed black vapors, something like cannon smoke, rolling out
