Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words.

Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words, by Marty Jezer (Basic, 266 pp., $23)

Dr. Daniels is a physician, traveler, and author of Utopias Elsewhere (Crown).

IT is often said that everyone has a book in him. Until I read these volumes, I thought this both trite and untrue; but now that disease has spawned a fast-expanding literary genre all its own -- the memoir of illness -- I realize that I was sadly mistaken. Death remains the most egalitarian of all human institutions, the inflexible rule still being one man, one death, and since it is generally preceded by at least one fatal illness, even among the previously healthy, the number of potential additions to this particular literary genre is nearly equal to the entire population of the world. Indeed, it far exceeds that number, inasmuch as non-fatal diseases are nowadays also thought worthy of memorialization. I'm ill, therefore I'll write.

There are two main varieties of illness memoirs: the "Why is this happening to me, and why didn't the doctors prevent it, or diagnose and cure it earlier?" school, and the "I never realized that life was so beautiful until I contracted chronic diarrhea" school. These are not necessarily polar opposites: some of these books contain elements of both. Several of them contain the good-doc, bad-doc routine: the white-coated monster of insensitivity being replaced, after many travails and misadventures, by the omnicompassionate technological miracle worker.

The purest example of the former school is Louise DeSalvo's Breathless: An Asthma Journal. She is a professor of English at Hunter College and the author of Virginia Woolf: Sexual Abuse in Her Life and Work. Presumably, therefore, she is in touch with the latest currents of what might be called the Higher Resentment. It must be admitted that her doctors took an unconscionable time in diagnosing her condition, but I can find no justification at all for her assertion that "asthma is a breathing disorder that is caused by abuse and that it is probably a manifestation of post-traumatic stress."

The worst that seems to have happened to her is that a maiden aunt once touched her in a faintly lascivious manner in the bath when she was very young, which is not, in the context of the horrors of the twentieth century, an event of extraordinary frightfulness; and why this should have led to asthma more than four decades later is a mystery by comparison with which that of the origin of life on earth is very simple indeed to fathom.

It is clear that Professor DeSalvo longs for the halo of victimhood. To be a victim is the nearest anyone can come to sanctity in these non-judgmental days. To have been badly treated (preferably in one's childhood) is a guarantee simultaneously of one's significance and of one's moral rectitude. It justifies the permanent -- and undoubtedly pleasurable -- state of righteous indignation adopted by people who, by the standards of 99.99 per cent of the people who have ever lived, lead fortunate and privileged lives.

As I read Professor DeSalvo's simultaneously indignant, smug, and platitudinous exhortations ("Stop abusing the planet . . . Stop abusing our children . . . stop sexually abusing them . . . Stop trauma . . . [including] war"), words from a novel in which one of the characters suffers from asthma ran through my head like a refrain. In this short memoir, Professor DeSalvo mentions many characters from literature who have suffered from asthma, but --perhaps unsurprisingly -- not Piggy in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I regret to say that her complacent outrage caused me to sympathize with Piggy's tormentors, who exclaim more than once, "Sucks to your ass-mar!"

At the other end of the spectrum is February Light, an account of the author's recovery from ovarian cancer. It reads rather like an extended and superior get-well card and is very upbeat about the whole experience of potentially fatal illness. Like several other of the authors of these memoirs, Heather Trexler Remoff is rather surprised that she ever became ill at all, since she had always eaten healthily and jogged several miles a day, the two modern guarantors of eternal life. By mentioning her habits, she is establishing not only her innocence and therefore the undeserved nature of her illness, but also her credentials as a serious and responsible person. By contrast, those feckless smokers and physically immobile consumers of junk food deserve every illness they get.

Professor Remoff lives in rural Pennsylvania, in a large Victorian house by a lake, and she extols the beauty of the countryside in saccharin prose. She prays that she will survive at least until she is able to complete a book proposing a total reform of society along the lines suggested long ago by Henry George -- the kind of social reform which would make the cure of ovarian cancer by highly technological means virtually impossible. Still, one must remember that such books are written not to reform society in reality, but to establish the moral qualities of the intellectuals writing them, so as to allow them to continue to enjoy every possible advantage of society as it is currently constituted with a good liberal conscience.

Of all these books the most valuable by far is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a Frenchman who, still in his early forties, had a rare kind of stroke that left him conscious but virtually unable to communicate with others, in the so-called "locked-in syndrome." He managed to dictate this short memoir by using the blink of his left eye (the only part of his body still under voluntary control) to indicate the letter of the alphabet when read a list of letters by an amanuensis, laboriously to spell out words. Most poignantly, he died a couple of days after its French publication.

Bauby was editor of Elle and, until his stroke, led the kind of glamorous existence which is not necessarily an aid to deep philosophical reflection. Le Monde even questioned whether it was possible that this memoir was really his, rather than a work of semi-fiction by his amanuensis. I see no reason to doubt its authenticity, however, and it is a moving affirmation of the value of life even after so catastrophic an event.

Interestingly, shortly after I finished reading this book, The Lancet published an interview with the former president of the British Royal College of Physicians, Professor Raymond Hoffenberg, in which he said that his worst nightmare was to be treated for locked-in syndrome by a physician who did not believe in euthanasia. The juxtaposition of this memoir and that interview neatly encapsulated the fallacy of the concept of the living will: you can't decide whether life is still worth living under certain conditions until you're actually experiencing them -- by which time, of course, it may be too late.

THE other four memoirs record their authors' struggles with conditions as diverse as Churg-Strauss syndrome (a rare complication of asthma), stuttering, rectal cancer, and optic neuritis causing temporary blindness. Written with various degrees of sensitivity (and largely padded out with memories of this and that from their pre-morbid lives), they raise the interesting question of whom they are written for, and why.

It can hardly be that they are written for fellow sufferers, since, according to the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, there had been only 154 cases of Churg-Strauss syndrome reported in the world as of 1996, and some of the people so afflicted had died, so that sales of Ben Watt's Patient, an account of his experience of this condition, would have been exiguous even by the standards of academic publishing had they relied solely upon Churg-Straussians.

By contrast, Barbara Barrie's Second Act, subtitled Life after Colostomy and Other Adventures, deals with a common condition, and I can quite see that the thousands of people who undergo colostomy every year need practical information about the procedure and its aftereffects. But this is not that kind of book: it seems to be aimed at the general reader. The Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data categorize this book, inter alia, under the heading "Colostomy -- popular works." When I showed this to a book-dealer friend of mine, he began to wonder whether he shouldn't set a shelf aside in his store for the subject; but quite why any sane person who is not a coprophiliac would wish to read about it is to me utterly inexplicable.

Stuttering is more properly a disability than an illness, though the author of the memoir of that title believes it is caused by a physical cerebral condition too subtle to be diagnosable by the tools that are currently available to neurologists. Marty Jezer strikes me as a thoroughly decent man, of the kind who apologizes to you when you stand on his toes. He is brave, too, inasmuch as he became a political activist despite his truly appalling stutter. His memoir unintentionally records the steady decline in the moral seriousness of American liberalism: from civil rights through the Vietnam War to political correctness.

He describes very well the social difficulties and embarrassments that stutterers face, but this is a subject that perhaps is better suited to an article or an essay than to an entire book. As Voltaire so wisely remarked, the secret of being a bore is to tell everything. And unfortunately Mr. Jezer goes in for that most politically correct of all psychological concepts, self-esteem. "I love myself," he writes, "and accept my stuttering, but I'll never learn . . . to love my stuttering." This is the Oprah Winfrey school of self-examination, simultaneously shallow and destructive. Anybody who can say that he loves himself, or alternatively that he doesn't love himself, is an irredeemably lost soul.

The Seeing Glass is an account of temporary blindness, whose author captures very graphically the terror of fast-disappearing sight due to optic neuritis of uncertain cause. But Jacqueline Germane's account takes an insufficient number of pages to make a book, and therefore she adds in her memories of her autistic brother, sadly killed in a road accident when he was only 31 years old. But her blindness is sufficiently well conveyed to the reader that he shares in her joy at the recovery of her sight.

Despite moving moments in these books, the question still arises as to why this literary genre should have become so popular in the last few years. I have on my shelves scores of such memoirs of illness, sent to me for review, and the number seems to be rising geometrically. It is all most curious.

Perhaps it is because, for the first time in human history, there are large numbers of people alive who have never experienced serious illness. In our assumption of good health, we have forgotten the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. For the sufferers themselves, the experience is so totally unexpected that they feel impelled to write about it; while for readers, the land of illness is as exotic as foreign countries were before the era of the jumbo jet and mass tourism, which have converted everywhere into a neighborhood of everywhere else. Memoirs of illness are thus the modern equivalent of travel literature. Disease is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

There is another reason for our modern obsession with health and deviations therefrom. Despite our longevity, unparalleled in history, we are in a state of existential funk. We are no longer convinced, as our forefathers were, that life has a transcendent meaning or purpose. In these somewhat alarming circumstances, we believe that our present life is all we have, and that its marginal prolongation is the best that we can hope for. We read about health, disease, and death as eagerly and greedily as the pathological gambler reads about systems of betting in roulette or the form of horses. We are looking for auguries of immortality.

Besides, the authors of memoirs of illness enjoy a great and automatic advantage: one must not speak ill of the ill. To cast doubt upon their moral authority is no better than to mug a person in a wheelchair. In an age of rude good health, the ill are heroes, no less to be admired than the warriors and statesmen of old. Let us, therefore, praise unwell men.