Reading this third memoir by Graham Caveney, a knot in my chest tightened. It wasn’t only because it’s a cancer memoir; it was because the unfolding of history so often shows that abuse begets self-destructive behaviour. To parody Auden:
I and the public know
What all healthcare staff learn
Those to whom evil is done
Destroy themselves in turn.
Caveney’s two previous memoirs, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness and Agoraphobia, outlined his working-class childhood in Accrington, Lancashire, and his winning of a place at a Catholic grammar school. But where the school succeeded in helping him achieve his aim of becoming a writer, it also screwed with his head, because he was not only taken to plays but also played with by a member of staff.
Caveney then embarked for a few years on a course of self-destruction, involving alcohol and drugs, though it’s testimony to his talent that he still managed to forge a successful career as a writer. Sadly, all such actions have consequences, and however understandable it was that an angry man should take refuge in heavy substance abuse, in May 2022, after several surreal episodes of hiccuping while eating, Caveney was endoscoped and a malignant tumour in his oesophagus was found.
As he and his partner Emma struggled to absorb this shock diagnosis (Caveney was only 57), they were told that the subsequent CT scan showed that the cancer had spread to the liver, and that he had six months to live without treatment, and perhaps 18 months with it. Caveney’s initial reaction was that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life on NHS wards; but he reconsidered, and underwent an onerous course of chemo-therapy, each cycle of which left him exhausted, breathless, and with signs of peripheral neuropathy. Mouth ulcers became the norm. His mood changed more frequently than the British weather.
The Body in the Library is much more than just a cancer diary. Caveney’s enquiring mind, familiar from his previous books, is wonderfully evident here, too. He muses on how many writers he admires have led lives mired in ill health or, like Chekhov and Somerset Maugham, have been doctors themselves. He looks back on his childhood, and his parents when they were ill. His dying father became ‘impossible’, according to his late mother. The wide-angled lens also takes in our addiction to medical dramas, our need for the comfort of the ideal nurse and the way the sick become observers of society, excluded from the productive world.
The machine-gun fire of Caveney’s endless analyses could become a distraction, but for his passion and scholarly knowledge. Reading his book can sometimes feel like having John Cooper Clarke bark his poems at you without a break:
We lie in order to make sense of the chaos of our lives, to carve a realistic account out of the daily Dada. We impose causality and order on events which have neither and serve them as Gospel. The lies we tell ourselves become the stories we tell our doctors.
But Caveney is too smart to bore us, and just as he senses we’ve had enough existential fury, his tone will change again.
As a connoisseur of hospitals, I recognise one aspect of sickness – often ignored – that Caveney tackles head on: mood. Knowing that your lifespan is severely limited not only makes you sad. It can also make you angry, impatient and intolerant, which overflows on those around you. But Caveney corrects his focus when it sways off course. He decries the government for the underfunding of the NHS. Yet there is also deep tenderness when he talks about Emma, and about the two swans which circle the lake near their home and become a symbol of hope and possibility. I loved this poignant, erudite book. Caveney’s writing will keep his memory alive for decades to come.
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