Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (33 page)

And the story's tide, "Paper Pills," refers to the scribblings of the doctor, which he stuffed in his pockets in the shape of round paper balls that he then read to the tall girl in the last winter of her life. Why not regard the teeth pulling as a displaced version of either the doctor's friendly abortion or else the sexual intercourse between the doctor and the girl? However you put the pieces together, you end up with the same rich results: the cost of sexuality and pleasure, the making and ending of life, the ceaseless current of energy that moves from seed to flesh to paper to language to seed.
From language to seed:
is this not the magic of literature, the task and delight of reading? "Paper Pills" could be thought of as a shorthand expression for the central vision of this book, the potency of words, the parallels between book shelf and medicine shelf.

Anderson is writing about nothing less than the Tree of Life, the large force field in which pleasure, doctoring, and death take their right-

ful places. His peculiar rendition of these matters enables us to see the doctor positioned at the very core of this tale, functioning essentially in cardiac fashion, the blood supply and flow for the separate players. This man, whose knuckles invite biting into and whose paper balls are irresistible aborts, marries and buries the tall dark woman; pulls teeth and spills the blood of others; reaches into Winesburg's community like capillaries that carry blood and oxygen into the body's many parts. The doctor is at the heart of the community's arterial life, presiding over its mysteries of seeding and dying.

We never see Doctor Reefy proffer a diagnosis as such. He is not a candidate for the scientific gaze. He is no seeker after power or illumination. Nonetheless, he is unmistakably Winesburg's head priest, the man vitally linked to its prime mysteries of generation and death, of both
eros
and
caritas.
In today's era of cool, distanced, white-coated professionals practicing in shiny, impersonal bureaucratic settings, the sepia story of Doctor Reefy and those seeds and twisted apples is a tonic example of doctoring as the most visceral and intimate of life's events. This loving doctor brings lives into and out of the world, and the medicine he practices, like the "paper pills" of the title, is vital, personal, and existential. Nothing pharmacological in sight here: just a man inscribed in the heat and heart of his living community.

Tender Is the Might,
the tragic story of a doctor marrying his sick, rich patient, is a novel that Fitzgerald, America's "golden boy" of the twenties, had great trouble finishing. He wrote as many as seventeen drafts, publishing it only in 1933, at a time when his beautiful but precarious wife was slipping ever more into psychosis, when his own problems with alcohol, nerves, and artistic vision became more complex and urgent. The book opens with the young American film starlet, Rosemary, encountering on the Riviera the charming, charismatic Divers, Dick and Nicole, and much of the early section of the novel is devoted to Rosemary's infatuation with Dick, entailing a full-scale, leisurely writerly account of the Divers's entourage of friends and sycophants— moneyed and less-moneyed Americans gravitating around this mag-

netic and glamorous couple. Dick Diver, at this point, is the poised, confident lynchpin of a madcap, supremely alluring social carnival; he no longer practices medicine.

We know that Fitzgerald felt, right up to his death, that he had botched the opening of his novel, via his decision to zero in on Diver and company at midpoint, to position Dick as the hero of both the expatriate community and also the idolizing Rosemary. Beginning in me-dias res was fine for getting Dick in at his apex, but what of his origins, his medical aspirations, his romance with Nicole? All of this would have to be brought in later, as flashbacks of sorts, in subsequent chapters.

Fitzgerald's qualms about where to begin his novel have, I think, a profound parallel with the diagnostic situation itself, as well as the narrative of exposure. When does the illness begin? When you break down? Or when the initial wounds (felt as such?) occur, years, maybe decades earlier? We write our resumes in linear fashion, from birth and early schooling on through higher education right into the list of positions we have held, finally reaching the present moment. Yet, most real human traffic goes the other direction: we possess our past and our formation as retrospective activities. But that's not all: the meaning of early events is rarely signaled as such when they happen, but it often declares itself to us in the fullness of time. To be sure, we only harvest what we have sown, but very frequendy we only discover what we have sown at the moment of harvest. Surely, this law governs our understanding of the damage that life metes out to us. Thus, it makes good sense, not only narratively but psychologically, that we first see the Divers intact, and that only gradually, by fits and starts, does the story of their missteps, their fateful choices, their warping experiences, make its way to the light.

Let me insist again: we are not talking about some kind of narrative law here. We are talking about the course of illness and about the shape of a life
as we come to grasp it.
Fitzgerald's story is larded with secrets and cover-ups, not for novelistic reasons, but because that is how the psyche conducts its affairs. The flaw in the design shows up later, much

later, in the massive breakdown it has been preparing for years and years. Time is a dreadful bell toller, insofar as it actualizes what has been dormant. Just as more and more men will be diagnosed for prostate cancer by dint of sheer longevity, so too the seemingly manageable features of youthful temperament and character—occasional insecurity, rage, depression—tend to gain weight over time, to gestate into derailing disasters. Even this formulation is too pat and histrionic, as if one fine day the curtain were lifted and the horrors trotted out; on the contrary, this is the dynamic of a lifetime, the skirmishes that we win for years and years before finally losing. That is how it has been with the Divers. That is the challenge for diagnosis. And literature alone possesses the sinuous resources, the narrative strategies, for conveying the temporal roller-coaster that every life constitutes.

Rosemary sees only Dick's magic: "He seemed kind and charming— his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities" (16). But all is not glittery, even in Camelot, as Rosemary first intuits when one of the guests at a party stumbles on strange events in the bathroom concerning Nicole, but is silenced by the Divers' bellicose friend (and Nicole's eventual lover) Tommy, who protects their reputation at all costs. But silence cannot be maintained. Later, this scene will be remembered, this time by Dick himself: "Twice within a fortnight she had broken up: there had been the night of the dinner at Tarmes when he had found her in her bedroom dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well" (168).

But the most explosive and unsettling "breakup" is presented dramatically in the text itself, at the close of the first segment, as a bizarre conclusion to a puzzling, convoluted story about the misadventures of the Divers' friend Abe North. Abe has inadvertently stirred up a race riot in Paris by cavalierly accusing an African of stealing money, but has neglected to get the "right" African, leading to white police tracking four separate black men, themselves seeking Abe North, all of which

produces ultimately a black body, dead but still bleeding, on Rosemary's bed in the Parisian hotel they are all staying at. This episode is queasy for the modern reader, inasmuch as its implicidy racist humor and callousness are not very funny today, but no reader anticipates Nicole's reaction to the bloody bedspread. We read that Dick has rushed into the bathroom, and then "Rosemary, too, could hear, louder and louder, a verbal inhumanity that penetrated the keyholes and the cracks in the doors, swept into the suite and in the shape of horror took form again" (112). Nicole is then seen, kneeling by the tub, swaying side-wise, with somediing to say to her husband:

"It's you!" she cried, "it's you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world—with your spread with red blood on it. I'll wear it for you—I'm not ashamed, though it was such a pity. On All Fools Day we had a party on the Zurichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they wouldn't let me—"

"Control yourself!"

"—so I sat in the bamroom and they brought me a domino and said wear that. I did. What else could I do?"

"Control yourself, Nicole!"

"I never expected you to love me—it was too late—only don't come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them." (112)

The key may have been thrown down the well, but the emotional doors are opening nonetheless. Nicole's past seeps out of her, not unlike a hemorrhage, in the form of bloody spreads disguised by dominos, all intertwined with her courtship with Dick, the certainty he does not love her, and the pain of violation and exposure. Now we have to go back into the past. Now Fitzgerald takes us there.

Book Two begins brighdy: "In the spring of 1917, when Doctor Richard Diver first arrived in Zurich, he was twenty-six years old, a fine age for a man, indeed the very acme of bachelorhood" (115). Dick Diver,

Rhodes Scholar possessed of degrees from Yale and Hopkins, possessed also of overwhelming, radiant charm, a brilliant student and promising scholar of the burgeoning science of psychiatry, has met, at the Dolmer Clinic ("a rich person's clinic" ... "a refuge for the broken, the incomplete, the menacing of this world") on the Zurichsee, the beautiful, damaged Nicole Warren.

Dick's colleague Franz regards Nicole's infatuation with Doctor Diver as "a transference of the most fortuitous kind," and we are treated to her letters to the dashing doctor, constituting a delicate yet throbbing portrait of infirmity, desire, and sensitive self-knowledge. The book then moves still further back, to the admission of Nicole into the clinic. Initially described by her wealthy father, Devereux Warren, to be obsessed with fantasies of male attackers, Nicole is not long a mystery; soon enough Warren tearfully divulges the novel's central echoing secret: he and his daughter were lovers, something that happened when she was still very young (the mother was dead, she'd often sleep in his bed), something that is now wreaking havoc with the girl's mental health.

Working his special magic, Fitzgerald evokes the courtship between doctor and patient, Dick's poignant, passionate sense that Nicole was "all the lost youth in the world," Nicole's increasing confidence in her beauty and vibrancy, yielding a twenties lyricist world of falling in love: "They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarreled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care—yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad" (136-137). Today's academy, in its relendess pursuit of ever keener ideological takes, is embarrassed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but you won't understand
Tender—
or
Gatsby,
for that matter—if you don't thrill a little to the sentimental, lilting, nostalgic tune he plays, as if to say of course this is illusory, cannot last, but... is it not fine? Isn't young love more splendid than any of those hard-earned truths that come in its wake? Nicole herself tells Dick as much: " 'Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me

always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night' " (201).

This is hardly Sherwood Anderson's way of depicting the courtship of Doctor Reefy and the tall dark girl, but for a heartbreaking account of how tenderness and solicitude mix in with desire, for an explanation of why physicians might fall in love with their needy patients, it is very good indeed. Nicole Warren is fabulously wealthy to boot, and her tough older sister, Baby, does not conceal from Dick that the family wants to purchase a doctor ("There was no use to worry about Nicole when they were in the position of being able to buy her a nice young doctor, the paint scarcely dry on him" [153]). Nasty? No doubt about it. Seductive nonetheless, even irresistible? Yes (tragically) also, as the whole novel is to demonstrate.

Against a chorus of warnings (Franz: "What! And devote half your life to being doctor and nurse and all—never! I know what these cases are. One time in twenty it's finished in the first push—better never see her again!" [140]), Dick marries Nicole. Which allows Fitzgerald to explore the real theme he knows only too well: the story of the woman I love; the story of my sick patient; the mix of writerly gold and personal horror that is embedded in this situation. We see, with painful detail, how quickly Dick Diver becomes owned, how trivialized his small income is vis-a-vis her immense wealth, how "his work became confused with Nicole's problems" (170). Of course she seeks to own him: "She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gendy to love, guided orphans" (180). Just consider the diagnostic pith of that last formulation: Nicole is subjected to an unblinking moral X ray, exposing her secret drives, her fraudulent mothering. As Nicole's mental instability shows, breaks through the barriers, Dick's role as husband-doctor becomes almost schizophrenic: "The dualism in his views of her—that of the husband, that of the psychiatrist—was increasingly paralyzing his faculties. In these six years she had several times carried him over the line with her, disarming him