Surviving : Pain is the experience of a single person, inexpressible and unshareable. But no one’s inner strength is sufficient to bear it alone. : A WHOLE NEW LIFE: An Illness and a Healing, <i> By Reynolds Price (Atheneum: $20; 213 pp.)</i>

It is only natural that a writer make the literary most of whatever happens to him. In April 1984 the distinguished novelist Reynolds Price was asked by a friend with whom he was walking why he kept slapping his foot on the pavement. It was the first faint whisper of the monstrous illness that would roar across his body for the next four years. For unbeknown, an eel-shaped tubular cancer had taken root and was compressing his spinal cord.

For the next four years the author would undergo radiation to his spinal cord, multiple surgical procedures--diagnostic, palliative and the last, one hopes, curative. In addition to the paralysis of the lower half of the body, there was a slowly ascending numbness to just below the nipple line. And there was pain, real and phantom, the latter no less severe for all its suggestion of unreality. It was suffering worthy of Job. On page after page, we are confronted by the downright ugliness of suffering, its senselessness. Pain is not noble; it is disgustingly ordinary.

The reader tries to imagine the pain, but the language of pain is exclusive; it is a tongue spoken by one person only. The rest of us are not conversant in it, nor can it be conveyed in words. Never mind, we shall know it in our turn. There is some danger in the reiteration of pain, that it will eventually have an anesthetic effect no matter how persuasive the writing. In this, it is not unlike pornography that within minutes becomes tedious. The rapture of others cannot be rendered in words either; for that too we must wait our turn.

“A Whole New Life” is Reynolds Price’s candid account of his ordeal, written, he announces, to furnish others in similar trouble “a companionable voice that’s lasted beyond all rational expectation.” He has written it years after the white heat of the events and from the vantage of the crippled survivor. Like many such recountings, I suspect it was written also to exteriorize the horror, to put a barrier of printed pages between himself and what can best be described as a re-enactment of Dante’s “Inferno.” Eschewing the novelist’s proven gifts of style--there is none of the elegance, nuance, ambiguity or wit of his powerful novel, “Kate Vaiden”--he tells his story in a prose that is stripped down and pell-mell, utterly devoid of the pomp of language or the writer’s vanity. The sentences come spilling out much as the facts were remembered, but the meaning of the sometimes clotted paragraphs is never in doubt.

Much of the book tells of the few ups and the many downs in his agonizing struggle to live--the progressive loss of strength and sensation and function. With each diminution, along with the author, we contemplate sadly the little that remains from the much that was. A good deal of the account is moving: his brother’s preoperative kiss, and the fellowship of the “gimps” at the the rehabilitation center all striving to recover a modicum of independence. We cheer each brief respite from pain as we do his brave resumption of writing and teaching.

What sustained him? There was a seemingly endless line of kind friends and acquaintances who committed themselves over long periods of time to assist Price in recapturing the pace of his life. One’s inner strength is no match for suffering. It is not our own strength alone that will help us prevail, but the strength and commiseration of others. It takes courage to lean on others, but great suffering demands of us that humility.

Too, there is Price’s lifelong belief in a God who is personally interested in him, if not always benevolent. This belief was made powerfully manifest just prior to the course of irradiation. The area on his back to be treated had already been marked out with purple dye. The radiation oncologist had informed the patient of all the possibilities. Shortly thereafter, Reynolds Price experienced an uncanny translocation in which he found himself lying on a slope by the Sea of Galilee in 1st-Century Palestine. Sleeping nearby were Christ and his 12 apostles all dressed in the tunics and cloaks of the time. In the distance he saw the town of Capernaum just as it was. Jesus looked much like the Flemish paintings of him, lean, “tall with dark hair, unblemished skin and a self-possession both natural and imposing.” He rose, directed Price to undress, then led the naked man into the waters of Galilee. Now, existing both with and outside of his body, the author could see the purple marks on his back. Again and again Jesus poured handfuls of water over him. There was dialogue:

“Your sins are forgiven.”

“Am I also to be cured?”

“That too.”

From the moment Price’s mind returned to the here and now, he has believed this event to be neither dream nor vision but “an external gift . . . of an alternate time and place in which to live through a crucial act.” For Price, this experience had a tactile reality. It happened. Even the skeptical reader shivers in wild surmise.

The man who emerges from these pages is feisty, gritty, angry, sometimes snobbish and, notwithstanding, most appealing. He makes no effort to portray himself as a saint or a martyr. The clerk at the hospital is “sullen.” The cardiac fitness participants are imagined as “a squad of garrulous heart-attack survivors in designer sweat suits.” Many of the “true practical saints” who offer to help him are “boring as root canals.” It is the radiation oncologist, cast as the villain, who bears the brunt of Price’s anger and resentment. He has “all the visible concern of a steel cheese-grater”; he “never offered to tell me . . . “; he is “the frozen oncologist.”

And here another physician must demur. Was it not this very doctor, among others, whose judgment and therapy brought about the cure of his patient? Surely, that he is not also gifted with charm or bedside manner might be forgiven? Some doctors, particularly those whose work brings them daily into contact with the gravely ill and whose treatments themselves augment the suffering, may function better when they withhold or even stifle pity, compassion, aesthetic response than when they allow these feelings full sway. Certainly there are great doctors who are also haughty, cold, materialistic and insensitive; just as there are great artists who fall short of expectations. Beethoven, Wagner and Richard Strauss were bigoted, angry, domineering. Schopenhauer and Rossini were scornful and misanthropic. Da Vinci and Goethe were detached, aloof and condescending. And then there was Robert Frost.

It is in the final section of the book that Reynolds Price rises above the dreadful years and reaches out to his new life. It is a life full of satisfactions, work, friends and even erotic love. “Reynolds Price,” he told himself, “is dead.” And asked himself: “Who can you be?” The answer is: a writer and a teacher as before, only now with the patience and watchfulness born of suffering, and the blessing of whole days of focused energy undiluted by the distractions of the able-bodied. In the years since his illness, Reynolds Price has written 14 books. His last advice to the afflicted is to finish grieving for the former self, to reach out hungrily to the new and to find work that sustains the spirit. In writing “A Whole New Life” Reynolds Price has come, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “to see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail.” There can be no sweeter use made of adversity than this act of generosity that comes in the form of a book.