The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank's well-known 1995 study of “illness narratives,” charts the difficulties a storyteller faces when, in the face of traumatic illness, he or she tries to construct a “coherent sense of life's sequence.” Caught in a static and frequently painful present, the narrator attempts to fuse the past with the present, supplying a created coherence in the place of chaos. Frank argues that “what makes an illness story good is the act of witness that says, implicitly or explicitly, ‘I will tell you not what you want to hear but what I know to be true because I have lived it.’” Eyewitness testimony converts the narrator into a kind of truth-teller, one whose experience is instructive even if not identical to the reader's.

Eyewitness accounts are suspect these days, and literary “truth-telling” is as much challenged by the furor over false memory syndrome as by the debates that circle, sniff, and bark around the “constructed reportage” of memoir. …

Wally Roberts, who died of AIDS in late 1995, is lovingly and achingly present throughout Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, who was Roberts' lover for twelve years and the primary care giver during his illness. The narrative moves gracefully between the past—sojourns in Boston and then in Vermont while Doty teaches at Goddard College, the couple's decision to move to Provincetown after Roberts is diagnosed as HIV positive—and the present, with the gradual and agonizingly steady deterioration of Roberts through progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a viral brain infection attacking people with compromised immune systems and leading to paralysis and strokelike conditions.

As does [Alan] Shapiro [in Vigil], Doty alters the chronology of the story, beginning the memoir after Roberts' death and circling back to the galvanizing moment that altered their lives forever: the HIV test the couple took in the spring of 1989, the results of which indicated that Wally was HIV positive and Mark was not. “I remember the stunned aura around him, the sense of an enormous rupture—not a surprise, but nonetheless a horror. … I remember thinking it didn't matter which of us it was, that his news was mine.” Whether or not one finds that last statement emotionally convincing, Heaven's Coast is at its very heart the story of a relationship. Doty explains his task in this way: “Because the story of Wally's life came to a conclusion, at least those parts of the story in which he would take an active role, the experiences of our past needed to be re-seen, re-viewed. Not exactly for his story to be finished, but in service of the way his life would continue in me, braided with the story of mine.” Wally's death requires a “new negotiation with memory.”

And what a rememberer Doty is. If Shapiro works filmically, developing coherence from sequenced scenes, Doty's is a poet's technique, a linking of nugget scenes associatively rather than linearly, seeking the congruence between the part and the whole. The story unfolds via poetic synecdoche, a process Patricia Hampl has described memorably in “The Need to Say It,” her essay on writing memoirs. She suggests that memory moves from the keen contemplation of a “single detail” to a reconstruction of “the world,” remarking how uncanny it is “to go back in memory to a house from which time has stolen all the furniture, and to find the one remembered chair, and write it so large, so deep, that it furnishes the entire vacant room.”¹

Doty continually finds the crucial chair that furnishes the entire room. One such wrenching scene occurs when Doty and Roberts temporarily lose their dog, a beloved black Lab named Arden. The still ambulatory but barely independent Roberts is taking the dog for a walk while Doty is in New York City honoring a teaching commitment. Arden bolts after a rabbit; there is the sickening sound of brakes squealing in the distance and, despite a frantic search, the dog cannot be found. After Roberts calls Doty back to Provincetown the two search long into the night, covering and re-covering their neighborhood's tiny crosshatched streets between Commercial and Bradford. Although Doty himself is seriously concerned by nightfall, he describes Roberts as displaying “some panic and terror more primal than mine, a pain that seems to go all the way to the root of him.”

Arden is found the next day, disoriented but unhurt, yet the incident becomes a burning metaphor for the progression of the disease, a haunting harbinger of what is to come: “Arden and Wally both struck, everything out of control, everything veering into his life, unstoppable, an event from which he couldn't be rescued. … Arden was our future's dark vessel.”

Roberts' descent into AIDS temporarily widens the cast of characters: doctors who help and who hinder, support groups, a compassionate therapist, a resourceful home-healthcare worker. Some friends and family turn up who can deal with the illness; others turn up who cannot. But as death approaches the cast thins, and with the arrival of Christmas, 1995, “Wally doesn't want anyone else around.” “Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. … All week I feel like we're taking one another in, looking and looking.” When death is near, Roberts' mother visits to say goodbye and he “opens his right eye just a tiny bit; we can tell that he sees her.” So, into that line of vision Doty brings their two cats and two dogs, and then he writes, “I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on, since the house is circled in snow and early winter darkness. The afternoon's so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.”

Doty's luminous, rhythmic language raises the events leading to and away from Roberts' death into a radiant hymn. As the book closes he walks the coastline of the Outer Cape, his beloved “heaven's coast,” a landscape he thickens with metaphors—his way of knowing the world. Gradually he concludes that in trying to “save” Roberts' life through narrative he has, in fact, saved his own. …

Given the ubiquity of suffering and the popularity of eyewitness accounts in contemporary letters, how we come to understand the benefits and burdens of suffering may well become, in Elizabeth Spelman's words, “the housework of humanity.” The stories of Shapiro, Doty, and Brodkey are inscribed with the effort to transform witness into insight: illness generates pain, pain converts to loss, and grief comes round to comprehension by listening to its own testimony.

Note

1. From The Writer on Her Work, vol. 2, edited by Janet Sternburg, New York: W. W. Norton, 1991: 29.