Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (11 page)

GUILTY GUMS

12/17/49

NOW THAT CHILDREN'S TEETH
can be protected by adding fluorine to their drinking water, dentists are casting around for some new place to sink their drills. It looks as though they may have found it, too. Last week, Dr. Robert S. Gilbert told his fellow-dentists that a patient's open mouth is a stage on which is enacted the drama of his emotional life. Plenty of people who complain of toothache are just upset, and he (Gilbert) has him-self cured a man whose teeth were hurting because of guilt feelings about a dead sister. This is wonderful news, this broadening of the scope of dentistry. We, in our own lifetime, have seen dentistry come a long way. We recall clearly the days when a cavity was a hole that a dentist could feel by poking about with his pry. Then came X-ray, and a cavity was some-thing that the dentist could see on the negative but the patient couldn't, and dentists would drill according to a plotted position on a chart, crashing their way through fine, sturdy old walls of enamel to get to some infinitesimal weakness far within. Now dentists are in search of guilt, not caries, and go rummaging around among the gums for signs of emotional instability. The toothpaste people will undoubtedly follow along—guilt paste, fear paste, and old Doc Lyon's psychosomatipowder.

RADIOGRAPHY

2/24/51

MODERN MEDICINE
has led us down many a dead-end street, up many a stagnant backwater, following health's gleam. None of our previous excursions, though, can match last week's trip, which ended in a brand-new radiography room where the operator, a young lady, was unfamiliar with the new, bigger, faster machine and candidly admitted it. It was there, in that fateful chamber, that the old art of healing, long in decline, seemed at last to expire.

Strangely enough, our journey had started with a simple nosebleed the day before. The bleeding persisted, so our doctor suggested that we get the offending blood vessel cauterized. Obediently, we got it cauterized—a simple, early-morning nasal tuneup in the gay East Seventies. The treatment, of course, induced sneezing, and we sneezed steadily and happily while riding downtown to the office. As we stepped from our cab, we were suddenly stricken with an enormous back pain. (In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.) When our pain failed to subside, we phoned our doctor and reported it, and he ordered us to start upstream again next morning, to be interviewed and photographed. This trip, as it turned out, consumed exactly five hours and wrote a new chapter in ordeal by radiography.

Some temperaments are probably well adapted to the role of guinea pig—to standing or lying in unnatural poses while some-body tries to get the hang of a new camera—but ours is not one of them. Gowned in the classic cotton tie-back frock of the X-ray victim—the frock with the plunging hipline—we exposed our bony structure for countless takes and retakes while the operator tentatively fooled with the new knobs, fought the new adjustments, and shook her pretty head over the new formulae for exposure. The machine, with its baffling wall charts, was obviously too complex for the human mind to grasp, and our sympathy at this point was with the girl. After all, we told ourself, it's no worse than taking a trial spin in a space ship, with Ed Wynn at the controls (and his bright, childish laughter at the takeofl).

An hour passed—with intervals of sitting outside in the hall waiting for plates to be developed. Gradually the idea assailed us that we were absorbing more rays than a Bikini
*
goat. Our back pain was almost gone—just a memory, really. Our nose showed not a trace of blood. But our condition was bad, and if we had been running the joint we would have placed ourself immediately on the critical list and prescribed massive doses of whiskey.

When the first two series of pictures failed to reveal a human spine, the operator called for help. A new girl showed up, and a conference was held, in which we were invited to join. “What d'ya say we just forget these
new
charts,” murmured the consultant, “and use the old one that we always used to use” (the one, we presumed, that went with the other machine—the old, slow, reciprocating job of yesteryear). At this idea the girls brightened perceptibly, and one of them put the matter squarely up to us. “Don't you think,” she asked, “that there's nothing like the old
tried
formulas?”

We mustered a tiny smile and nodded, and she disappeared behind her lead wall. “Stop breathing!” she commanded, speaking through the slot in the wall. We stopped breathing. The vast machine, goaded by the old, tried formula, retched and wheezed and bored through us. “Breathe!” she cried. But there was no zest for breath any more, no grounds for inhalation, and we walked airily away, trailing the grotesque gown, along the endless corridor, toward the last dressing room.

If any doctor wants us again, he will first have to start up the breathing.

THE COLD

11/10/51

WE ARE AT THIS WRITING IN BED
, entertaining our first cold of the 1951-52 virus season. It would greatly satisfy our curiosity to know at precisely what moment the virus gained entrance and took hold—for there must have been such a moment, such a division point. Prior to that moment, we were a whole man; subsequent to it, and until the symptoms appeared, we were the unwitting host to evil and corruption. One wonders about all such tremendous turning points: the moment when a child is conceived, the moment when the tide stops flooding and starts ebbing. We have often wondered at precisely what moment in life our defenses were successfully breached by another, deadlier virus—the point that marked the exact end of youth's high innocence and purity of design, the beginning of compromise, acquiescence, conformity, and the general lassitude of maturity. There must in every person's life (except a few rare ones) have been such a moment. In the case of the cold, the lag between the penetration of the disease and the appearance of the symptoms is a matter of hours; in the case of the other virus, a matter of years.

 

Statisticians have computed the very great interruptive strength of the common cold in our society, have shown how it slows the wheels of industry. That is only one side to the virus, however. We are such docile creatures, normally, that it takes a virus to jolt us out of life's routine. A couple of days in a fever bed are, in a sense, health-giving; the change in body temperature, the change in pulse rate, and the change of scene have a restorative effect on the system equal to the hell they raise. We heard once of a man who went to bed with a cold one day and never got up again. The seizure was soon over and his health restored, but the adventure of being in bed impressed him deeply and he felt that he had discovered his niche at last.

Medical science understands this paradox of the virus, and virus diseases are now the white hope of cancer research. (It has already been shown that they tend to congregate in cancer cells.) Thermometer in mouth, we await the day of victory, when the common cold, which has long been the butt of our anger, will emerge as the knight that slew the dragon.

CRICKET-IN-THE-EAR

9/13/52

MID-SEPTEMBER
, the cricket's festival, is the hardest time of year for a friend of ours who suffers from a ringing in the ears. He tells us that at this season it is almost impossible, walking or riding in the country, to distinguish between the poetry of earth and the racket inside his own head. The sound of insects has become, for him, completely identified with personal deterioration. He doesn't know, and hasn't been able to learn from his doctor, what cricket-in-the-ear signifies, if anything, but he recalls that the Hemingway hero in “Across the River and Into the Trees” was afflicted the same way and only lasted two days—died in the back seat of an automobile after closing the door carefully and well. Our friend can't disabuse himself of the fear that he is just a day or two from dead, and it is really pitiful to see him shut a door, the care he takes.

HOSPITAL VISIT

2/16/57

MODERN MEDICINE IS A WONDERFUL THING
, but we doubt whether it ever catches up with modern man, who is way out in front and running strong. One morning at the hospital, the
Times
was delivered to our breakfast table (by a woman tall enough to reach to that dizzy height) and we turned idly to an article on tranquillizers, headed “
WARNS OF HEALTH PERIL.
” Clinicians, the article said, have found some of the effects of the drugs to be Parkinsonism, allergic dermatitis, constipation, diarrhea, jaundice, and depression. We finished our frozen juice and turned to face an entering nurse, who presented us with a tiny paper cup containing a white pill. “Take this,” she said, smiling a knowing smile. We bowed and she left. We picked up the pill, examined it closely, and there, sure enough, was the familiar monogram of Miltown. Dutifully we swallowed it, and immediately felt the first symptoms of Parkinson's disease, the first faint flush of yellow jaundice. Then we looked back at the tray and noticed that our morning milk had arrived in a waxpaper carton—the same sort of carton that was in the news some months ago, suspected by scientists of being carcinogenic. Recklessly we poured the milk and raised the glass to our image in the mirror. “Cheers!” we croaked, and fell back onto the pillows, in the last stages of allergic dermatitis.

 

The curative value of a hospital, for us, is that it keeps us busy. In our normal life in the outside world, we seldom have anything to do from morning till night and we simply wander about, a writer who rarely writes, lonely and at peace, getting through the day cunningly, the way an alcoholic works his way along from drink to drink, cleverly spaced. But once we're in a hospital, the nights and days are crowded with events and accomplishment. Supper is at six, breakfast at nine, which means that for about fifteen hours we subsist in a semistarved condition, like a man in a lifeboat; and when our stomach is empty our mind and heart are full, and we are up and about, doing housework, catching up on correspondence, outwitting the air-conditioning system, taking sleeping pills, reading names on nurses' badges, arranging flowers, picking up after the last tenant, fighting the roller shade that has lost its spring, making plans for death, inventing dodges to circumvent therapy, attaching a string to the bed table to render it accessible to the immobilized patient, flushing undesirable medication down the toilet, prying into the private affairs of the floor nurse, gazing out at the wheeling planets and the lovely arabesques of the Jersey shore. Dawn comes, and an early nurse, to test with her little fingers whether our heart still beats. And then we shave and practice counting to fifteen, so that when they jab us with Sodium Pentothal and ask us to count, we can race them to the knockout. Busyness is really the solution to a man's life, in this cold sunless clime. And a hospital is the place.

THE ICE DANCE

3/23/35

THE WINTER
ends on a clear, high note with the fabulous ice extravaganza at the Garden.
*
Skating, which has a sort of cold purity anyway, has suddenly come to be one of the most exciting expressions—to us the ice dance is potentially a greater thing than the dance. If we were a student of the dance, we'd sell our little shoon and buy ourself a pair of skates; there is a sublimity about skating, cold as a fountain, warm-blooded as love, extra-dimensional, an ecstatic emancipation which Maude Adams hinted at when, trussed up by a wire, she flew across the stage and translated every child's dream. A few skaters have begun to realize what can be done in musical interpretation, have given up acrobatics and grapevines, and settled down to set their skates to music. We remember Grafstrom, the Swede; he was an inspired dancer, the first we ever saw. The other night Miss Hulten, also of Sweden, gave a beautiful exhibition, and so did a pair from Toronto, dancing to “Isle of Capri.” The Garden, in half-darkness, seemed to cohere, faces in shadow, the spotlight trailing the silvery course of the dance—a really thrilling thing to watch. Ice is an odd substance to have at last freed the body in its persistent attempt to catch up with the spirit.

8

Science

MYSTERIES OF LIFE

9/22/28

ABOUT ONCE A YEAR
the human soul gets into the papers, when the British scientists convene. Once a year the mystery of life, the riddle of death, are either cleared up or left hanging. The reports of the learned men enthrall us, and there have been moments when we've felt that we were really approaching an understanding of life's secret. We experienced one of those moments the other morning, reading a long article on the chemistry of the cell. Unfortunately, when we finished we happened to glance into our goldfish tank and saw there a new inhabitant. Frisky, our pet snail, had given birth to a tiny son while our back was turned. The baby mollusk was even then hunching along the glassy depths, wiggling his feelers, shaking his whelky head. Nothing about Frisky's appearance or conduct had given us the slightest intimation of the blessed event; and gazing at the little newcomer, we grew very humble, and threw the morning paper away. Life was as mysterious as ever.

SEEING THINGS

2/18/28

THE NEW REPTILE HALL
was officially opened a few days ago in the Museum of Natural History and we visited it amidst a group of youngsters who kept crying “Good night!” and their mothers who kept murmuring “Mercy!” The place is like that. It might be called the Conan Doyle Hall, with certain exhibits marked: “Strong Influence of Lewis Carroll.” Things out of the dead worlds of Sir Arthur's writings and Mr. Carroll's “Looking Glass” are here but you have to accept the word of eminent scientists that they once lived. Place of honor goes to the dragon lizards which, brought from the Dutch West Indies, lived for a while at the Bronx Zoo. They look like dinosaurs reduced nine-tenths and, in fact, were spotted for dinosaurs by excited travellers who saw them rear up on their hind legs at a distance and gave the Sunday papers an annual feature story for ten years until the Museum went down and caught a few. The largest is nine feet long.

Even taking into account the grimly handsome Sphlenodon, which looks exactly like William Boyd in the last act of “What Price Glory,” we like most the group of fat Brazilian horned frogs which have soft velvety black and green heads and must have been cronies of Tweedledum and his brother. Some of the exhibits tie up neatly with literature, such as the Russell's Viper, which has the title röle in the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Speckled Band,” and the tiny mongoose which is the Rikki-tikki-tavi of Kipling's tales. The mongoose is shown snap-ping its fingers at a King Cobra, which mongooses devote their life to chivvying about and killing, thus becoming, in our opinion, the world's bravest animal.

In one case reposes the world's largest frog, and although right next door is a tiny reptile whose sex life and fighting skill are described minutely, the sign by the world's largest frog frankly says, “Nothing is known of its habits,” thus giving us an example of the oddities of scientific research to ponder about the rest of our life. All the snakes are here, including one with no card telling what it is, and the Green Mamba, which is as lovely as a jade necklace and as poisonous as the devil. The snake that interested us most, though, is the Pine Snake, for this is the one the lady snake charmers play with, and it is described as harmless and of very gentle disposition, the worst it ever does being to make a noise like a hot iron plunged into water.

We never go to the Museum but we look up two favorite exhibits of ours. One is the incredible raccoon bear, a cross between those two animals and, we like to believe, a sheer figment of the craftsmanship of the whimsical doctor who said he found one in Tibet. The other is the thirty-six-ton siderite which Peary
*
brought back from Greenland after two vain tries. The sign tells of the immensity of the task and relates that the mammoth hunk of almost pure iron was finally brought here and given to the museum. But how this was done is left to our imagination, which never fails to be both interested and baffled.

TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

7/13/35

ON A ROCKY ISLAND
in the blue sea, shining white, its tall tower naked and beautiful in the sun, a lighthouse stood, abandoned. We passed by in a boat, remembering when the place was full of life, the keeper tending his light and drawing his pay, his wife hanging out flannel drawers to the Seabreeze, his children, like Captain January's daughter, roving the island, watching the ships. Now, in the channel, three or four hundred yards off the rocks, is a gas buoy, winking its mechanical warning, supplanting a whole family. To us, an idle mariner on a painted ocean, the empty lighthouse seemed a symbol of all that is going on in the world: new devices putting men and their families out of work. As we passed the forsaken island and stared at the boarded-up windows and thought about the family applying for relief and the Congress worrying about new taxes to provide the dole, we wondered whether it wouldn't just have been simpler, somehow, for the government never to have bought a gas buoy. Is it really cheaper to support a light-house keeper on relief than to support him in his lighthouse? Science, blessing us with gas buoys, is a hard master and perhaps an evil one, giving us steel for flesh, dole for wages, solving every problem save the essential one: what to do about the pride of a former lighthouse-keeper, who doesn't want relief, who wants bread earned by toil, seeing his light shine afar.

 

Of course, the defenders of scientific progress claim that for every displaced victim of technology, there is a new job opening up—if not in the service industries, or in entertainment, then in the field of invention. Maybe this is true. Certainly there are some queer new jobs that one hears about these days. There is the engineer, for instance, who carved out a niche for himself in the world by devising an apparatus which copes with the problem of the flies which hover by the thousands over the manure beds on mushroom farms. A huge fan sucks the flies across a refrigerating coil, which chills them and drops them, dormant, into large milk cans. The lids are then clamped on the milk cans and the flies are shipped to frog-growers, who chill them again and serve them, with a dash of bitters, to frogs. Maybe some ex-lighthouse-keeper can busy himself, in our brave new world, by thinking up something nifty like that.

GRAVITY

4/3/37

IT SEEMS AS THOUGH NO LAWS
, not even fairly old ones, can safely be regarded as unassailable. The force of gravity, which we have always ascribed to the “pull of the earth,” was reinterpreted the other day by a scientist who says that when we fall it is not earth pulling us, it is heaven pushing us. This blasts the rock on which we sit. If science can do a rightabout-face on a thing as fundamental as gravity, maybe Newton was a sucker not to have just eaten the apple.

There's one thing about this new gravitational theory, though: it explains the fierce, frenzied noise that big airplanes make, fighting their way through the inhospitable sky. We now know that a plane, roaring through the air, is not straining against the attraction of one friendly earth, but is sneering loudly at the repulsion of innumerable stars.

SILENCE OF THE SPHERES

10/30/48

ASTRONOMY IS NO LONGER
a mere matter of gazing at the stars; one must listen to them, too. The Milky Way sends on a frequency of 14.2 megacycles. The other galaxies and the sun maintain a tighter broadcasting schedule than N. B. C. There is, in fact, a sort of cosmic signal always going out to the earth, and the new equipment of our astrophysicists enables them to hear it as plainly as a soap opera. It sounds, in the words of a Harvard listener, “like a combination of gravel falling on the roof and the howling of wolves.” If we remember right, the
silence
of the spheres had something to do with the conversion of Pascal: he discovered faith when he became conscious of silence. Little did he know how noisy his world was, how deceptive silence can be (and the nearness of wolves and the steady rain of gravel).

The time in our own life when we came closest to being convinced by silence was one time at sea in a light fall of snow. We heard nothing—no gravel, no wind, no wave, no wolves, no bell buoy. It was convincing and it was beautiful. We are sorry to learn, at this date, that there was nothing to it.

HOT PIPES

3/1/52

WE READ A NEWS STORY
the other day telling about the withdrawal of a group of young atomic scientists from the world. When the doors closed behind them, these fellows entered a life as pure and as remote as that of a monk on a mountaintop. Instead of disappearing into puffs of cumulus clouds, they vanished into the swirling mists of secrecy. It gave us quite a turn, secrecy being the slow death of science, purity its most debilitating quality. Science can't possibly serve people well till it belongs openly to all and associates itself with wisdom and sense—those contaminating but healthful influences.

 

We saw a remarkable example, recently, of an architect's remoteness from the world—as though he had withdrawn to his own private mountaintop. We chanced to pay a visit to a student's dormitory room in an engineering college, to see how things were going. The building was a modern one, and of course the designer must have had access to the vast storehouse of technical knowledge that the institution had assembled through the years, so we expected to find something pretty good in the way of digs—something sensible, if modest. What we found was an immaculate little torture chamber suitable for cremating a cat in. The temperature was 92'. Two large steampipes extended from floor to ceiling. These supplied constant heat, day and night. The only way to subdue the hot pipes was to open the window. The only place the bed would fit was under the window. The student admitted, under close questioning, that his living conditions were less than marginal and said he'd already been to the infirmary with a stiff neck caused by extreme exposure. He was not at all disgruntled, however, and was at work on a counter architectural wonder of his own—a system of baffles to carry the cold outside air directly onto the hot pipes, bypassing the bed, confounding the original designer, raising the institution's fuel bill, and investing the room with a Goldbergian quality proper to youth. We looked over his schedule while we were there. One of his courses was something called Heat Engineering. Probably the architect who designed the room took the same course, years ago, and got honors. But it isn't enough that a designer understand Heat Engineering to save humanity, he must have once slept next to a hot pipe.

FRED ON SPACE

11/16/57

WHEN THE NEWS BROKE
about the dog in the sky, I went down into the shabby woods below my dump to see if Fred's ghost was walking. Fred
*
is a dead dachshund of mine. He is restless in death, as he was in life, and I often encounter his ghost wandering about in the dingle where his grave is. There are a couple of wild apple trees down there, struggling among hackmatacks to gain light. A grapevine strangles one of these trees in its strong, purple grip. The place is brambly, rank with weeds, and full of graves and the spirits of the departed. Partridges like it, and so do skunks and porcupines and red squirrels, so it is an ideal spot for Fred's ghost. I went down because I felt confused about the Russian satellite and wanted to interview Fred on the subject. He was an objectionable dog, but I learned a lot from him, and on this occasion I felt that his views on outer space would be instructive.

Fred's ghost was there, just as I suspected it might be. The ghost pretended not to notice me as I entered the woods, but that was a characteristic of Fred's—pretending not to notice one's arrival. Fred went to Hell when he died, but his shade is not touchy about it. “I regret nothing,” it told me once. The ghost appeared to be smoking a cigar as I bearded him for the interview. The interview follows, as near as I can recapture it from memory:

Q—
The Soviet Union, as you probably know, Fred, has launched a second rocket into space. This one contains a female dog. Would you care to comment on this event?

A—
Yes. They put the wrong dog in it.

Q—
How do you mean?

A—
If they wanted to get rid of a dog the hard way, they should have used that thing you have up at the house these days—that black puppy you call Augie. There's the dog for outer space.

Q—
Why?

A—
Because he's a lightweight. Perfect for floating through space, vomiting as he goes.

Q—
Vomiting? You think, then, that nausea sets in when the pull of gravity ceases?

(Fred's lips curled back, revealing a trace of wispy foam. He seemed to be smiling his old knowing smile.)

A—
Certainly it does. Can you imagine the conditions inside that capsule? What a contribution to make to the firmament!

Q—
As an ex-dog, how do you feel about space in general? Do you think Man will emancipate himself by his experiments with rockets?

A—
If you ask me, space has backfired already.

Q—
Backfired?

A—
Sure. Men think they need more space, so what happens? They put a dog in a strait jacket. No space at all, the poor bitch. I got more space in Hell than this Russian pooch, who is also sick at her stomach. Hell is quite roomy; I like that about it.

Q—
The Russian dog is said to be travelling at seventeen thousand eight hundred and forty miles an hour. Do you care to comment on that?

A—
Remember the day I found that woodchuck down by the boathouse? Seventeen thousand miles an hour! Don't make me laugh. I was doing a good eighteen if I was moving at all, and I wasn't orbiting, either. Who wants to orbit? You go around the earth once, you've had it.