The Memory Book (24 page)
Authors: Howard Engel
Engel used other, more conventional help as well. His editor read the entire book to him once he had made his corrections to the first draft, and this was crucial in helping him to fix the overall structure of the book in his memory, so that he could reorganize it, work on it, thereafter, in a radical way. He also tried an electronic reading program, but found this, for various reasons, unsatisfactory.
Some years ago I saw an eminent publisher, a very literate man, who had also, like Engel, developed visual alexia. (Unlike Engel, he had developed it slowly, in consequence of a deteriorating brain disease, a gradual atrophy of the posterior visual parts of the brain—such a slow degeneration, a so-called focal atrophy, was also present in the alexic pianist whom I later saw.) This publisher found his whole orientation changing with this. He found himself becoming an auditory rather than a visual reader and writer; he devoured books on tape, and wrote by dictation—not only letters and memoranda, but essays, and
an entire memoir. Engel, by contrast, has remained much more visual, and seems to prefer the tussle of trying to read books and write them visually, despite his difficulties with this.
Engel sometimes wonders about other writers who have struggled with alexia. He tells me that H.L. Mencken lost the ability to read after he suffered a stroke, but I can ascertain no details of this—Mencken may have suffered a pure alexia, but it seems likely that he had a much more debilitating aphasic stroke, for he did not write in the ten years following his stroke. By chance, today, looking at the August 12, 2004, issue of the
New York Review of Books
which just arrived, I see a review of a book by the German novelist Gert Hofman. This and two other novels, I read, “were written after Gert Hofman suffered a stroke, which left him unable to read. He dictated them to his wife, and she read the drafts back to him ‘to correct and embellish aloud.’”
The alexic pianist whom I wrote about (“The Case of Anna H.”), after she became unable to read music, developed an extraordinary ability to listen to orchestral and choral works and arrange them for piano entirely in her mind, where before she would have needed manuscript paper and pencil to do this. The alexic publisher also told me that his power to “hear” what he had read or written, and to organize it in his mind, had steadily increased after his alexia. Similar compensatory heightenings are almost universal in the blind—not only the congenitally blind,
but those who have lost their sight later in life—and it seems likely that it also occurs in the alexic.
Whatever the strategies employed—whether it is visually learning the shapes of letters anew, or copying and then “reading” them by means of tongue or finger movements, or developing heightened powers of auditory and conceptual memory, there seem to be many ways by which a person with alexia—especially a resourceful, verbal, highly motivated person like a writer—can get around the deficit, find new ways of doing things now that the old ways are unavailable. No doubt, too, there are changes in the brain underlying these adaptations, though these might be beyond the power of present brain imaging to show.
This is not to minimize the continuing impact of a condition like alexia in a world full of newspapers and books, maps and street signs, printed labels and directions on everything one uses—and above all, its impact on a writer like Howard Engel, and the continuing, daily struggle to transcend it, one way or another. It is a struggle that calls for heroic determination and courage, as well as great resourcefulness, patience, and, not least, humour—simply to survive, let alone to produce, as Howard Engel has done, a book (and he tells me that he has just completed another Benny Cooperman novel, to be published after
Memory Book).
Given this struggle, this of-necessity unorthodox way of writing, does Engel succeed as a writer? Is the present volume up to the standard of the previous Benny Cooperman
novels? My answer, as a reader of detective stories, is “Yes, absolutely.” Indeed, I think this may be the most remarkable of them all, because of its special personal dimension. There have been a number of recent books that have incorporated medical or neurological themes (detectives with Tourette’s syndrome, detectives with autism, etc.)—and indeed this goes back, in suspense novels, to the fiction of Wilkie Collins in the nineteenth century. But
Memory Book
has a unique depth and authenticity, because Howard Engel has known and traversed all that he writes about. He has, as Bertrand Russell would say, “knowledge by experience,” and no knowledge by description can ever match this.
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