Cities of the Living: Disease and the Traveler in the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner
Characterizing his short fiction as "rest stops" along life's journey, Wallace Stegner claims the Collected Stories to mark the itinerary in no significant order—they "lie as they fell." Nevertheless, the volume opens with "The Traveler" stalled on a snowy road in the American West, and closes in a hotel room with another traveler looking out on the Nile. In both stories men involuntarily break journeys, and in encountering boys confront themselves. The unnamed protagonist of "The Traveler" comes face to face with his younger self; Robert Chapman in "The City of the Living" nearly loses his own son to find the beginnings of wisdom in a glimpse of an Egyptian boy at prayer.
More striking than the shared theme of travel is the medicinal link that connects the first and last of Stegner's Collected Stories. The traveler "betrayed" by an aging automobile is a salesman of pharmaceuticals who peddles "drugs, some of them designed to cure anything—wonder drugs, sulfas, streptomycin, Aureomycin, penicillin, pills and anti-toxins and unguents. . . . " Confronted suddenly with mortality and a boy's need, the "Salesman of wonder cures . . . must now produce something to calm this overworried boy, restore a dying man." In "The City of the Living," medicines also function paradoxically and even more significantly: playing their therapeutic role in the recovery of the protagonist's dangerously ill son, they serve as ironic image of a dependence on science that, attempting to negate death, appears also to negate life.
Throughout Stegner's short fiction, characters travel into or away from exile, retrace steps to rediscover the past, or explore new paths in quest of new selves. His American homeland can reject immigrants like Mah Li and Mah Jim in "The Chink" or the young Angelinos of "He Who Spits at the Sky," but it can also nurture and teach travelers like Lucy Graham or the young Englishman of "Genesis." Besides the natives and the "foreigners" who range his continent, Stegner also writes about Americans who travel to other parts of "the whole confused world." Despite his apparent comfort with the notion of life as a journey, Stegner's stories of Third-World travel betray an ambivalent response to newly encountered threats to security and well-being. In "Volcano," North American tourists take sightseeing trips to the site of a Mexican volcano, whose inexorable death-dealing strikes the central observer as parallel to the war raging in Europe. "Something Spurious from the Mindanao Deep," a story set in the Philippines, not only places an American traveler in an exotic locale, but also treats the theme of disease and medication explored in "The City of the Living."
Travel, as Susan Sontag points out in Illness As Metaphor [1978], has come to be considered therapeutic: "to be cured, the patient has to be taken out of his or her daily routine." Although Stegner's stories of travelers within the United States don't contradict the notion of travel as restorative, his fictional journeys to the Southern Hemisphere exhaust and weaken. Unlike Lucy Graham, the English war bride in "The View from the Balcony," who greedily absorbs American sunshine and wholesome food after the deprivations of wartime Europe, or Rusty (né Lionel) Cullen, who achieves manly vigor in the New World wild, Stegner's Americans abroad lose physical wellbeing. While the warmth of an Indiana summer "makes the corn grow," and Lucy Graham takes "the sun like medicine," the heat of the Philippines poses a threat: under a "vertical sun," "Manila Bay was congealed lead, with three rusty hulks jutting above the surface, not quite melted down." The alien tropical landscapes of "Something Spurious from the Mindanao Deep" and "The City of the Living" harbor lurking enemies and are infused with menace.
In these thematically complementary stories, middle-aged American men confront an otherness of land and people that disturbs their image of themselves and destroys their illusions of safety in a world revealed as perilous. Fearing the "xenophobic germs" that populate the Philippines, Burns in "Something Spurious ... " uses illness to justify fortifying himself against experience with an array of totemic pills and capsules. Chapman, in "The City of the Living," bitterly aware of "the steady, unrelieved, incessant effort that it took in [Egypt] to stay alive," realizes that neither the potions of science nor bureaucratic guarantees can permanently outwit mortality.
In Stegner's Manila, "The palms hung without stir in the red evening, the hulks were black on the molten water, the promontory of Bataan was a dark low silhouette against a salmon-colored sky." Against this backdrop, Robert Burns views himself and others anew. Struck by the prospect of the Bay as by a "lurid" "surrealist painting," he puts himself in the picture, "metamorphosed," as a "shrouded Indian with feet like bird claws or like roots." Catching sight of an "emaciated face reflected back at him from a dusky glass door," Burns doubts its and thus his own identity: the reflection "might be a caricature of his real face, or again it might be the face of beast or bird."
The prevailing atmosphere of personal and political passion also disturbs his equilibrium. At once attracted and repelled by people who take more chances than he dares take, Burns perceives falsity both in their "overlively" emotional lives and in the background of unrest and violence against which those lives are lived. "Filipinos lived for drama," he concludes; "if the Huks had not existed they would have had to be invented." He holds himself aloof from the drama of Ramon Avellanos and Pacita Delgado. When Pacita stakes her life on winning her lover, Burns recognizes, however, that what he had apprehended as "falseness" was in fact "a more passionate reality." It is, however, too late for Burns, debilitated by sickness and exile, to experience that passionate reality. Tellingly, he refuses to attend the cockfight, a symbolic folk drama, according to Avellanos, of the gambling spirit that characterizes the Philippines.
During the seven months of Burns's travels, he has covered much of the territory of what was once an "Empire": "Cairo, Alexandria, Karachi, Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Madras, Calcutta, Singapore, Bangkok." Along the way, he has accumulated an impressive catalogue of ailments: "I have had hepatitis, a strep throat, mononucleosis, and two bouts of what is affectionately called Delhi Belly. All I need is a case of amoebic to set me right up. . . . I just don't have any resistance to strange bugs." The more distance Burns covers over the world's space, the more he retreats in time. Once critical of "segregated compounds," he has become all too wearily willing to take refuge in bars or clubs that serve as "residual fortresses . . . where Europeans and Americans kept themselves aloof. . . . Nearing the end of his tour of duty, he was also nearing the rueful admission that East was East and West was West."
Burns experiences travel, not as bracing and broadening, but as an ordeal that prompts withdrawal to the political and social evasions of an earlier and supposedly alien order. As Susan Sontag suggests, "illness" effects a change of nationality:
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
Burns has switched his allegiance from the "health" of democratic ideals of brotherhood to the traditional ills of prejudice and estrangement. He presents the spectacle of an erstwhile New World man retreating behind old fortifications to avoid encounters with "people . . . who were marked in his mind as unalterably different from himself."
What will Burns take home besides a new and rueful sense of being "a fatigued stranger in a crowd not his own"? The story's title suggests questionable souvenirs other than the wares offered by the story's emblematic embodiment of the racial other: the peddler of pearls from "the Mindanao deep." Haunted for a week by the persistent hawker of "phony" pearls, an exasperated Burns at last offers his nemesis "five pesos to disappear":
For a second they stood braced and squinting. Then the peddler shrugged. "Okay."
Smiling broadly, seeming to search Burns' face for some corroboration, he took the five pesos. The wind flapped his shirt tails. "Well, what the hell," he said, and emptied into Burns' palm the four polished bits of shell. Moving away, he threw his open hand into the air in cheerful, perhaps mocking, salute.
In "Something Spurious from the Mindanao Deep," Robert Burns engages himself in a rhetorical relationship. The third-person narrative chronicles a dispirited inner debate that results in uncomfortable awareness of having missed out: "the mementos of his mission, like his relations with the people he met, too often turned out to be spurious or ambiguous, or forced upon him. The real thing eluded him, or he evaded it." To assuage fatigue and fear of sickness and their attendant "wistful shame," Burns seeks the solace of a gimlet, "characteristic drink of the Empire," and the spurious protection of "pills and capsules."
Robert Chapman, protagonist of "The City of the Living," also travels with a precautionary supply of medicine: "penicillin tablets, Empirin, sulfaguanidine, Dramamine against travel sickness, Chloromycetin and Aureomycin in case we got sick anywhere out of reach of medical care and had a real emergency." In this title story of the collection in which it originally appeared, the dreaded "emergency" occurs, and Robert Chapman, like Burns an American cultural ambassador, is saved from ruin by his "little kit of pills." The danger he faces is all the more menacing in that it threatens not his own person but that of his child. In a hotel on the Nile, Chapman anxiously watches while his son suffers through the crisis of typhoid, cured at last by the Chloromycetin dutifully dispensed throughout the long night.
The displacement of sickness onto the beloved son means that Chapman remains in full possession of his senses, through which he can perceive illness, suffering, and death. Whereas Daniel is lost in disease, his father is quarantined in a silent fear that sharpens his sensory perceptions. He sees "the vague shape under the [mosquito] net," the stars in the "rich blue-black" sky, and his son's emaciated pain-wracked body and "wasted" face. He hears the "occasional dry clashing" of the palms and "the rise and fall of the muezzin's cry." He smells the "carbolic reek of disinfectant" and "the inhuman poisonous stench of the sickness." He feels the heat of his son's "fever through sheet and net and three feet of air." He tastes "bile," and "the chlorine bite of the halazone tablets" in the water from his carafe.
During the solitary night-long ordeal during which he speaks to no one and realizes that there is no one to whom he can even write, Chapman is also forced into sharpened perceptions of himself. The glimpsed "sight of his own trapped eyes glittering was an intense, dreamlike plausibility until he realized that he was looking into a mirror." From determined disbelief in the nightmare of his son's disease, he moves to desperate attempts to reassure himself with the guarantees of Western science and contemporary social organization. Driven by need of some activity to pass the terrible hours, he resorts to writing a check to pay an insurance premium, an endeavor that epitomizes the vanity of his attempts to achieve security. Casting his lot with insurance and the wonder cures so cynically regarded by the drug salesman of "The Traveler," Chapman attempts to reestablish contact with "the order and security of home." "I believe in insurance," he recalls having said, and mentally reviews the comforting catalogue of his policies. The Chapman automobile is covered for "personal injury, property damage, collision, fire, theft," and the Chapman house for "window breakage, hail, wind, fire, earthquake, falling airplanes." As for the Chapman body, it is protected "anywhere in the world" by "medical and hospital plans." Recalling the "little kit of pills" brought from home and now put to desperate use, Chapman dwells on these consolations until he goes to wash his face and so confronts again his own "shadowed eyes in the mirror."
In European and North American culture, "medical thought," as [Michel] Foucault has observed, "is fully engaged in the philosophical status of man" [The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, 1963]. Making the individual both "subject and object of his own knowledge," modern medicine binds human beings more rather than less closely to their own "finitude." Constantly evoking and yet exorcising death, modern medicine "reminds" human beings of both mortality and "that technical world that is the armed, positive, full form of [their] finitude." Stegner's Robert Chapman at once experiences and observes a dire threat to the flesh of his own flesh; he thus becomes "subject and object of his own knowledge." The chemical potions that he duly administers to stave off death serve to sharpen his realization of what Foucault terms "finitude"; catching sight of his own "shadowed eyes" in the mirror, he is recalled to an awareness of mortality. The vivid dream of death that follows this second view of himself awakens Chapman to the harsh realities measured by the hands of his watch and the thermometer's mercury.
Frustrated by a helplessness that is rendered all the keener by the knowledge that promises remedy, Chapman resorts to falsifying his perception of the right-angled pattern of the tiled bathroom in the hope of controlling dreaded disorder: "squinting or widening his eyes," he forces the tiles to spin out of their order and then back again:
He held the squares firmly in focus for a minute, stretched them, let them spin, brought them back under the discipline of will and eye, relaxed again and let them spin, enjoying the control he had of them and of himself.
Hypnotized into a last period of uneasy sleep, Chapman wakes to the story's final reflected self-image and a resulting projection of frustration onto the alien landscape: "He looked at his haggard, smudged face in the mirror and he hated Egypt with a kind of ecstasy."
Egypt, engaged in a perpetual struggle with poverty and disease, challenges Western complacencies about safety, health, and death: Chapman stands amazed at "the effort, the steady, unrelieved, incessant effort that it took in this place to stay alive." The threat he perceives to be posed by the place is one of infection—of trachoma, bilharziasis, syphilis, tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid. Such danger cannot be countered with courage and manliness; it must be fought by manufactured drugs and disinfectants. Just before dawn, Chapman discovers the pills to have done their work; Daniel is sleeping normally, freed from the wasting fever. Once he is "Safe, relieved of anxiety, reassured, rescued," Chapman can begin to learn the lessons that Egypt can teach. He looks with new insight (soon aided by binoculars) on "the river that when they first came had seemed to him a dirty, mudbanked sewer":
It came down grandly, one of the really mighty rivers, pouring not so much out of the heart of the continent as out of all backward time, and in its yellow water it carried the rich silt for delta cotton fields, the bilharzia worms to infect the sweating fellahin at the ditch heads, the sewage and the waste, the fecundity, the feculence. The river was literally Egypt.
From the panorama of the Nile and its creatures, Chapman comes to focus on one boy who, in a corner of the hotel garden, removes his clothes, washes himself, and prays. "A skinny, one-eyed boy with a horizon no wider than the garden he worked in," the praying youth is nonetheless "not pathetic or repulsive or ridiculous"; he is rather "completely natural." Having linked fecundity with feculence, Chapman can posit the connection of life and death. "Whatever he is praying to has more death in it than anything we know. Maybe it had more life too." His own prayers, the American realizes, are addressed to lesser deities:
He had been doing something like praying all night, praying to modern medicine, propitiating science, purifying himself with germicides, placating the germ theory of disease. But suppose he had prayed in thanksgiving, where would he have directed his prayer? Not to God, not to Allah, not to the Nile or any of its creature-gods or the deities of light. To some laboratory technician in a white coat. To the Antibiotic God. For the first time it occurred to him what the word "antibiotic" really meant.
Chapman's tale, unlike the story of Robert Burns, does not end in inadequacy. Like Burns, Chapman has grasped that something is missing from his life, something amiss in his philosophy. But whereas Burns shrinks from risk and allows sickness to become a part of his nature. Chapman transcends disease by accepting mortality. In a state of "rebellious, wistful shame" at his own fear and weakness, Burns will take home souvenirs that embody his journey's failure: the "fake" Mindanao pearls and a "little figurine of the goddess Lakshmi," that he considers equally "spurious." Chapman, on the other hand, has purchased wisdom in the shape of a "vulture-headed" figure that is at once harbinger of death and image of "Mut, the Lady of Thebes, the Mother of the World." Whereas "Something Spurious from the Mindanao Deep" illustrates the inadequacy of man-made nostrums, Stegner has wisely placed last in his Collected Stories "The City of the Living," a text that teaches that acceptance of mortality is necessary to validate the journey of life.
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