Intoxicated by My Illness by Anatole Broyard

This is a posthumously published collection by a former New York Times book reviewer and essayist who died a year after being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 1989. Broyard responded to his illness with this book that comprises the following six parts:

Part 1: Intoxicated by My Illness

Part 2: Toward a Literature of Illness

Part 3: The Patient Examines the Doctor

Part 4: A Style for Death: Journal Notes, May-September,1990

Part 5: The Literature of Death

Part 6: What the Cystoscope Said

Parts 1,2 and 5 appeared in slightly different form in the New York Times between 1981 and 1990.

Parts 2 and 3 are in part from a talk Mr. Broyard gave at the Univ. of Chicago Medical School in April 1990. Part 6 is a short story written by Broyard in 1954 about his father’s death.

Mr. Broyard had long been fascinated with death and dying, publishing “What the Cystoscope Said” in 1954.  Always an engaging essayist and reviewer, Mr. Broyard here offers what he did best—a discursive (in the best sense) soliloquy on disease, suffering, the majesty of the educated, reflective person with illness—all amplified with references from his vast experience as a professional reader and reviewer: one reads about personal fate vis-à-vis D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love; one reads, as one can read nowhere else, about illness, dying and sexuality and its relevance to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

Part 1, Intoxicated By My Illness, is a personal statement about the effect of this illness on his attitude and is rich with his own and others’ literary sense of how he should and did react to it. Part 2, written later than Part 5, deals with literature and illness as opposed to the emphasis on death in Part 5. It is interesting to compare the more powerful and personal and moving appeal of the later writings on illness (Part 2) to the more abstract, critical ruminations on death in Part 5 at a time when, in fact, Part 5 was a literary exercise. Part 2 is written from the heart.

Part 3 is a wonderful account of Broyard’s first meeting with his personal physician. Broyard reflects on what he would like in his ideal doctor. Part 4 is a brief (7 pages) collection of short diary entries reminiscent of Dag Hammarskjold’s inspirational Markings. Part 5 includes essays on death and dying in literature and what these books, e.g., Robert Kastenbaum’s Between Life and Death and David Hendin’s Death as a Fact of Life and Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, have to offer us.

Part 6 is a short story about his father’s death, the son’s sexual escapades and the relationship between the two. Clearly sex, death and their nexus have long been on Broyard’s mind. This is a welcome reflection and is of interest more as it compares to Broyard’s later writings on the subject, especially in Part 2, than for its intrinsic worth as a short story.

This book is a treasure of unique, often highly personal material. The author expresses his encyclopedic acquaintance with fine literature as well as the more traditional literature and medicine works in an unusually light and clear style. There are countless sentences that one wishes to include in any course on literature and medicine: “I’m not interested in the irony of my position. Cancer cures you of irony. Perhaps my irony was all in my prostate.” (Part 1) “Poetry, for example, might be defined as language writing itself out of a difficult situation.” (Part 2); “The mechanics of diagnosis are mostly done, in my ignorant opinion, by technicians. The technicians bring in the raw material. The doctor puts them into a poem of diagnosis.” (Part 3).

Broyard was intensely interested in his style of illness and spent much time trying to explicate it in “Intoxicated by My Illness.” He succeeded admirably, for his style in writing was the same as his style in illness —an irrepressible affirmation of the recuperability of meaning from personal experience when armed with education, bravery and optimism. And his characteristic wit. As someone who knew him, reading him is no different than the  telephone conversations we had – incredibly enjoyable and, without his attempt at it, educationa. I never talked with Anatole when I did not learn something, usually a particle of wisdom careening from the phone.

Miscellaneous

Doctor, Talk to Me, an essay first published in the New York Times and a part of this book, appears in the 1995 edition of On Doctoring (eds. R. Reynolds & J. Stone; Simon & Schuster, New York).

Clarkson Potters, New York Edition 1992