Current reading - A Nearly Normal LIfe

Charles L Mee’s memoir A Nearly Normal Life (Little, Brown & Co, 1999) wonderfully evokes the atmosphere of early 1950’s small-town America and the constant dread that the annual polio epidemics brought to a land so shaped by the ethos of optimism, youth and health and can-do. But the last thing Mee, a 14-year-old, ‘with buck teeth, a crew cut, a love of swimming, football and comic books’ expects is that his life will be for ever changed by this disease. This was something that happened to other people. There was no cure for the disease and it struck unpredictably…

…and left its victims dead or paralyzed, washed up in wheelchairs, white-faced, shrunken, with frightened eyes, light blankets over their legs, or lying on their backs inside iron lungs, constantly shushing and hissing with the intake and exhaust of pressure that made a person’s diaphragm expand and contract, breathing for him because the muscles in his chest had stopped working - his head and feet sticking out uselessly at either end.

In 1953, the 14-year-old Mee himself catches the dread disease. He seems to have picked up the virus on a road trip with his mother and sister from their home in Barrington, Illinois, to Boulder, Colorado.

By the time they return home, he is beginning the initial ‘flu-like symptoms that herald the onset of polio. Mee is a writer and he carries the reader deep into the physical and psychological impact of the three weeks or so during which the disease is raging in his body:

The isolation ward was well named: I have never been so alone in my life as in that bed, where I was confined for the next three weeks, feverish and contagious; where I would learn thoroughly the lesson of self-reliance. It was an education that would sustain me for the rest of my life - and cut me off from others so that, even today, I have to work to remember that what I learned so well was wrong or incomplete.

And somewhere deep inside I turned as tough as old leather for ten or fifteen years.

Mee doesn’t allow us to turn away from the physical pain of polio either:

In the next two weeks, in the summer heat, delirious from fever, I went from a healthy athletic boy weighing 160 pounds to a frightened child of 90 pounds, unable to move a muscle except for three fingers of my left hand, not knowing where it would all end.

As the neurons in my body died one by one during those two weeks, I felt relentless pain, like the pain of a tooth being drilled without novocaine, but all over my body. As thought a dentist was peeling back my skin, layer by layer, exposing each neuron individually, taking hold of each one with a pair of tweezers, and drilling down the length of it, until he had burned it out.

He takes stock of himself, finds he is still alive and - in the best American tradition - decides he has to make the best of what he has left, be it ever so limited.

After three weeks he is released from the isolation ward and taken to the children’s ward where his rehabilitation begins. Hot blankets to warm and free up the muscles that have tautened and seized up during the fever, passive movement (painful at first) of his stiffened body, and eventually - after much struggle - getting ready to walk between parallel bars.

The goal was to be a real person who could walk. Walking was the whole deal.

‘He’ll never walk again’ was the killer Hollywood movie line.

And whenever you did see someone begin to walk again - so awkward, fragile and dangerous an enterprise - it seemed a miracle.

Mee describes how he achieves this desirable state by using the horizontal bars in the physiotherapy room to pull himself out of his wheelchair until he was ‘trying to stand there, holding on, midsection swaying from side to side, my knees giving out from time to time…’ And his legs had to learn how to keep his knees from buckling under him. His right leg he could manage, ‘but my left knee buckled no matter what I did.’

And so the bracemakers were called in to measure me, and they fashioned a device that had two thick strips of steel to go down along each side of my left leg. These steel strips were held together by several steel crossbars and by leather straps. Halfway down the leg, at the knee, a hinge allowed the brace to bend so that I could sit down. When I stood, I slid a little steel band down onto the hinge to lock it in place. My knee was held firm and unbending by a leather pad. And the low ends of the steel strips went down past my ankle and were anchored into a special shoe. In this way, my left knee could no longer bend when I stood.

Three months and five days after he had been carried into the isolation ward he takes his first halting step. From this point until he is declared ready to go home - and thus, he realizes, abandoned by his faithful physiotherapist, Mrs Jones, - is still a long and difficult road.

It is only when he gets home and is taken to a football match that the full realization of what he has lost hits him. He, who had hopes of being a professional footballer, will never again run, will never again experience the physicality of football. He has already concluded that he will live in his head and by his brain, and he never again wants to watch others doing what he cannot do.

Mee is very fortunate in his family. His parents, particularly his mother, are constant in their support - although a gulf of separation opens between him and his father when his father arranges for a Catholic priest to give Charles extreme unction. Mee immediately disavows a church that would write him off to death so easily and is distanced from a father who, by calling in the priest, had clearly also abandoned his son to the realms of death. It is not until his father nears his own death that Mee is fully reconciled with him. But, compared with many other polio children, Mee’s family are rock-like in their support.

And yet, he is the one who has had polio. He has to resist their sympathy. He - true American that he is - has to make his own way in the world, and has done so as a successful writer and historian.

This review, taken from the Philadelphia Inquirer, neatly sums up the virtues of this memoir:

Both a memoir and a reflective essay about America in the 1950s, polio, and the corrosive messages of a culture relentlessly in pursuit of the ‘normal’… Mee argues convincingly that we still need lessons in appreciating the complexity of human experience and resisting facile representations of ourselves to ourselves and by the media.

I can highly recommend this beautifully written autobiographical piece, particularly for those of us, whether in the USA, the UK or elsewhere, who were children in that long-ago era of hot summers and polio.