Heller’s fight back from paralysis

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 23

Heller’s fight back from paralysis

No, Laughing Matter. By Joseph Heller and Speed Vogel. Jonathan Cape, 1986. 335 pp. 539.95.

(Reviewed by Stan Darling) Readers can put aside any notions of slogging through a narrative of high solemnity when approaching the latest

book — non-fiction this time — of Joseph Heller. “No Laughing Matter,” although a serious look at a serious, paralysing illness, contains lots of laughs of the ironic, double-talking Heller type. Alternate chapters of the account of Heller’s journey through the GuillainBarre Syndrome are written by Speed Vogel, a man of many careers who handled the author’s personal and business affairs through his illness and recuperation, and was his constant companion.

Heller was hit by the disease, which rapidly immobilised him in the intensive care unit of a New York City hospital, in 1982. He had completed several hundred manuscript pages of “God Knows,” his latest novel, but was literally unable to lift a finger to carry on with it during his months in hospital.

Vogel was at one of the many loose ends in his own life, and was able to move into the stricken writer’s apartment, which he had offered to decorate for Heller before the illness, and take over the movements his friend no longer had. Joseph Heller, who had never learned to take care of himself domestically, even in the best of health, was at a low point of his own before becoming paralysed. His marriage of many years had collapsed

and he had started down the road of court appearances after the separation.

A big eater, and member of a small band of Jewish friends who were also big eaters, he first felt the onset of Guillain-Barre when he had trouble

swallowing. Then he had trouble putting on his shirt. Within days, he was almost totally incapacitated. The only thing he could keep doing was talk, and says he thinks he would have lost his mind if he had undergone a tracheostomy. Another sufferer of the syndrome he heard about later had been unable to talk for 58 days after undergoing the surgical procedure to help him breathe. Heller’s circle of friends includes Mel Brooks, the comic director who is

also a member of the Gourmet Club, Dustin Hoffman, Mario Puzo (“The Godfather”), and Joseph Stein ("Fiddler On the Roof’). We learn that Brooks, who visits Heller’s ward whenever he is out from California, is a long-time hypochondriac who knows medical dictionaries by heart. He seems to be as familiar with the

“anecdota of the pathology” of Heller’s disease as the Write- later becomes through a detailed study of his own medical records. From Vogel, we learn that Heller has a reputation for being unsociable, even to his best friends. His personality seems to change during the disease, and his companion wonders how to give him another foreign ailment after this one wears off. Heller forms a romantic attachment

to one of his nurses, and has his friends take her on the tpwn while he is incapacitated. The friendship seems

to have lasted. As the bookends, Heller, Vogel and the! nurse are spending three weeks in the Virgin Islands.

Heller makes no attempt to gloss over his fears and weaknesses during the illness. His recurring dream during a slow recovery was of being called by name from another room, and simply standing up to go answer the call. j He is inspired by others who have suffered the disease and advise him during stages of their own recoveries. When he is finally allowed to return to his apartment in a wheelchair, after months in intensive care and a convalescent hospital, he tries to

retain some of hjs hospital surroundings for securityi He had been propped up in his hospital bed, and tried the same thing at home for a while. “Lying in a flat bed that first time in the apartment was like lying in a sheer,'deep hole, a grave,” he says. During the worst of his paralysis, he was torii between an

inability to sleep and a fear of sleeping in case he ! would stop breathing and die if he dropped off. Eventually, he was able to do many of the things he had done before Guillain-Barre, but it took three and a half years to regain the strength and “unconscious knowhow” to do deep knee bends again. At the time he wrote the book, his right arm and shoulder were the only muscle groups in his body that worked naturally. i