A Time to Heal
From a review of Warm Springs by Susan Richards Shreve
I remember being scared of the iron lung and not so much of the disease itself. Cause and effect were not yet prerequisites of childhood when I was growing up in the early ‘50s in a small do-nothing town in western Massachusetts. There were overheard dinner-table conversations about an epidemic, and forced March of Dimes collections with my mother, but polio was a pretty vague menace for a lively kid with trouble to get into. Vague, that is, until my friend’s sister caught the virus, and it became anything but, and the whole town stunned, pitched in to send her to Boston to be saved.
This memory and so many others – of coming of age (or trying to) in a time when national and family and personal values really were different – have been revived for me, courtesy of Susan Richards Shreve in Warm Springs, her sensitive account of the two years she spent between 1950 and 1952 at the polio rehabilitation hospital established by Franklin Roosevelt in the early 1920s in Warm Springs, Georgia.
The bare-bone facts of this tender memoir are these: Shreve contracts paralytic polio when she is one, leaving her right side largely paralyzed, though she is eventually able to walk with braces. Her parents – mother, loving and indomitable; father, loving and distant – accept the fact of her illness but not necessarily its handicaps. Her mother devises exercise after exercise to spark new life in her daughter’s leg, turning the do-it-yourself restoration regime into a game. Shreve attends school, plays sport and goes to camp just like other children, except she is not physically just like other children. When she is 11, in 1950, she travels to Warm Springs in the hope that when the doctors and therapists are done with her, she will be just like other children. During two stays there, she develops crushes on a boy named Joey and a priest named Father James, flirts with Catholicism, has muscles transplanted, defies accepted Southern racial customs, experiences her first period, wears a sanitary belt round her neck into the Bay’s Ward, and engages in a disastrous wheelchair race and is sent home in disgrace.
Shreve is a novelist who has approached her story with a reporter’s eye. She has done her research on polio and Warm Springs, weaving the history of this once-dreaded disease unobtrusively into her own. But it is the diligent way in which she has re-examined herself as the girl she was from the perspective of the woman she has become (“the truth of this story is in the way I see it now”), and fitting the girl back into a time and place a half-century gone, that distinguishes Warm Springs from so many of the verticalpronoun bores arriving at bookstores these days.
For example, Shreve on Shreve: “By inclination I was unsurprised by failure, and good at it, and even felt a kind of satisfaction in the resilience required to bounce back, as if the failure itself were lengthening my chances of survival. But I also expected to win, and the two were strangely complementary in my mind”. For all the investigations Shreve did of herself, interestingly, she did not seek out any of her fellow patients, an omission of commission, she says: “A reason, maybe the real reason, I never made an effort to be in touch with these people, who were so central to me for an important period of my growing up, is part of the reason I wanted to write this book in the first place. Not so much to discover anyone I’d lost, but to understand why I wanted to lose them.” Or as she writes later: “It was, I think, a place to be ‘in the moment’. And after the moment it was time to be someplace else.”
Of her present self, except as defined by her girl self, Shreve is circumspect: she has married, had children, divorced, written novels. Of her physical self, there is nothing. Though that’s not the story Warm Springs sets out to tell, when I finished the book, and to Shreve’s credit, I still wanted to know more about what had become of the girl who left Georgia with her right leg three and a half inches shorter than her left one.
Abbott Combes, The New York Times Book Review