In October 2017 the academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst went to see a neurologist in Oxford. A couple of months earlier a weird thing had happened: he’d gone on a long walk and ended it shuffling along, like an old man in slippers. He wasn’t yet 50. Having had a scan, he was looking forward to hearing there was nothing to worry about. ‘I’m going to come right out with it,’ the neurologist said, fixing him in the eye. ‘I think you have multiple sclerosis.’
Contemplating a trip to Dignitas, he wonders if people generally buy a two-way ticket or just the single
All of us, Douglas-Fairhurst writes in Metamorphosis, his heartening and unexpectedly gripping memoir, find at one point or other that we are standing on a trap-door. If we are lucky it doesn’t open, or we step off it. If we are unlucky it opens. Hearing the diagnosis was his trapdoor moment: ‘There was a break of wood, the sharp click of a sliding bolt, and then nothing but the sensation of rushing air.’
The book records what happened next, from the dizzying weeks after his diagnosis to his life now, or now-ish. But it isn’t, thank God, just the log of someone getting more and more radically unwell. Douglas-Fairhurst intertwines his dispatch from what Susan Sontag called ‘the kingdom of the sick’ with stories of other writers who have passed into it – particularly Bruce Frederick Cummings, the author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man (published under the pseudonym W.N.P. Barbellion), who had MS and died in 1919, at just 30.
Kafka looms large too. When Douglas-Fairhurst was diagnosed, he found a new affinity with the character Gregor Samsa, who turns into a bug overnight. At first, Samsa’s family care for him, and feed him the rotten food he craves. But gradually their support wanes. He dies, and his body ends up being chucked out with the household rubbish. A decade after the story was published, Kafka himself ended up trapped in a mutineering body. By 1924, suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx, he could only communicate by writing on scraps of paper. ‘Move the lilacs into the sun,’ was one of his final requests.
Academics, Douglas-Fairhurst notes, are often dazzlingly ignorant about subjects beyond their sphere of knowledge. So it was with him. Before getting MS he had a few misty ideas about it, but they all turned out to be wrong, so he had to bone up. The book whistles through the history of the disease, and offers the clearest of guides as to what MS is, and what it does to the body. This is all rather interesting. But Metamorphosis is at its best when it considers what being ill does to the mind. Or, if you like, to the spirit. Douglas-Fairhurst had long had a detached relationship with his body: he fed it and exercised it a little; he could be vain about it (he admits to periodically taking himself off to a skin clinic in London to have his face ‘ironed’). But he didn’t see it as really ‘him’. MS both alerted him to this disjunction and made it worse. The diagnosis ‘felt like a piece of bad news I should pass on to somebody else’, he writes. Diplomatic relations had to be established.
There are some desolate moments. You want to shut your eyes when he falls for the first time (near the Bodleian), and to berate every teenager who smirkingly assumes he’s too hammered to walk normally. But it’s not a depressing book. He writes with breeze and zip about even the darkest moments: contemplating a trip to Dignitas, he wonders if people generally buy a two-way ticket or just the single. And the second half becomes virtually a thriller, as he is accepted on to a pioneering medical trial that could freeze the progression of his disease.
Possibly too much space is given over to the life of Cummings, who had serious ‘main character energy’ as they say these days. Penniless and paralysed in 1917, he scorned the idea that he should be pitied, writing:
I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse.
Watch it pal, you think.
Still, this is an immensely powerful book that whets the appetite for life rather than killing it. It’s a touching love letter to the people who have supported the author through his illness. And it persuasively builds the case for the ability of stories to offer hope and solace; to help us become ourselves, over and over, even in extremis. At points, he admits, his faith in books has been shaken. He has found himself agreeing with the Larkin line, that they are ‘a load of crap’. But his faith has a way of returning.
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