The Jesters of Infirmity : A generation of aging male writers follows that old rule: Write what you know

Actuarial tables make no allowances for genius. The bright young literary discovery of the 1960s is today nearing 60. And if, in the interval, he has kept up the standard round of dining and drinking or helped hold aloft even a small banner in the sexual and pharmacologic revolution of his heyday, by now he is likely to know something about disease.

Is that why the male writers who dominated the post-war literary world with their seriocomic styles seem so focused on illness lately? These novelists have slowly rotated their gaze from Life: The Game to Life: The Endgame. Think of Rabbit Angstrom on a Florida basketball court gasping for his last breaths after a heart attack in “Rabbit at Rest,” the fourth volume, published in 1990, of John Updike’s decadal series.

Newly published are Wilfrid Sheed’s “In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery” and “A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery” by Paul West. And Joseph Heller’s “No Laughing Matter,” a chronicle of his bout with Guillain-Barre syndrome, has just been reissued. They join a background threnody of Living White Male writing on illness that encompasses the more introspective William Styron’s excellent 1990 memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible,” Harold Brodkey’s expansive ongoing New Yorker pieces on having AIDS and Philip Roth’s most recent novel, “Operation Shylock,” with its memoir-like opening chapter about tranquilizer addiction. As a group, these writers share little beyond emphatic self-absorption; they write as if no one had ever fallen ill before. The late New York Times critic Anatole Broyard, whose reviews helped establish the pecking order for their literary generation, may have inadvertently captured their spirit with the title of his own posthumously published 1992 cancer memoir: “Intoxicated by My Illness.”

Of course disease--what Updike, in an essay on the psoriasis he had long suffered from, called “‘the presence (that) singles you out from the happy herds of healthy, normal mankind”--has been a staple of 20th-Century literature from Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” to Reynolds Price’ “A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing.” Last year’s bestseller “How We Die” by Sherwin B. Nuland, begins: “Everyone wants to know the details of dying, though few are willing to say so.” True enough, but at one time no generation seemed less eager to say so than the extended one Updike, Roth, et al. belong to--or less well-equipped to find the words. These are men brought up on Hemingway, deep imbibers of what Brodkey in his superb essay, “Dying: An Update,” calls “the forward-looking thing” in American culture. They pursued the great American novel, not the perfect death. Considerations of sickness were left to women writers like Betty Rollins, or, when something more abstract was called for, Susan Sontag.

Nothing made their male counterparts more uncomfortable than the fact that good times inevitably end. The very society that encouraged these men to think of themselves as precocious into their 50s was suddenly going back on its word, expecting them to make room for newer talent. What to do? Clearly, it was not manly to go gently from the scene. “To be greedy and materialistic about life (is) perhaps the honorable, the businesslike, the spunky thing to do,” the British-born West writes, “America (is) the country of all countries that lusts emptorially after a few extra hours, days . . . as if we had a right to them.” In the meantime, why not pretend disease was, in West’s words, “the supreme art form”? To review a book or movie, as any critic knows, is to defang it, to domesticate it. So why not review your ailment? Updike praises the cunning of the little red dots that cover him each winter. Guillain-Barre gets grudging admiration from Heller for capricious brutality, Styron finds depression a sly dog that creeps in while you’re asleep, and as West’s title would suggest, the architecture of the stroke leaves him amazed.

Love, on the other hand, is as scarce in these memoirs as anger is common: anger at self, at doctors, at insurance companies, drug manufacturers, even at the television set the writer is forced to stare at from his hospital bed. No wonder faced with the “pain and despair” of AIDS, Brodkey acknowledges finding “a wall” between himself and his grief. And if Brodkey finds a wall, less reflective writers like Heller and Sheed find a cliff.

It is the fear of oblivion that dictates the content of Heller and Sheed’s books, and it is that edgy fear that also limits them. These are not great books. Stand-up comics in shallow foxholes, these writers work too relentlessly to keep their readers amused. They are witty patients trying to make their sickroom visitors comfortable and, in so doing, they reveal, mostly, their own discomfort. Consider “No Laughing Matter.” The book is told in alternating chapters by Heller and his pal Speed Vogel. Up until the time Heller is struck down in December, 1981, by Guillain-Barre their intimacy is of the poker-night-friends sort: they are both members of the Gourmet Club, a band of sardonic, Chinese food-loving gourmands that includes Mel Brooks. In his chapters, Vogel rudely teases Heller about his disease, looks after him with real--if always unacknowledged--tenderness and chases the nurses around the bedpan.

In Heller’s portions, “No Laughing Matter” seems less a book about being sick than about being less sick than the poor guy in the next bed. But perhaps Heller’s light tone can also be explained by the special nature of Guillain-Barre Syndrome. It is that neurological rarity, a disease that reverses its own damage. Nearly six months after losing control of nearly all his muscles, Heller emerges from the hospital, severely weakened but on his way to near complete recovery. And the foreknowledge of the last act prevents him or the reader from worrying excessively. This is illness as farce, with Heller as stoic Prince Hamlet to Vogel’s rude peasant, who is full of delight when he moves into Heller’s apartment and gets to hobnob with literary lights like George Plimpton and Wilfred Sheed.

When it comes Sheed’s turn for sick bay, there is no Speed Vogel to provide the yuks. Sheed must be his own noble sufferer and jester rolled into one. Although Sheed writes comic novels--among them is the small 1963 masterpiece “The Hack”--his humor has always had a pained aloneness. This is not a man you’d want to have visit you in a hospital, let alone be there as a patient. And in “In Love With Daylight,” illness knocks not once but three times: first when, as a boy in 1944, Sheed contracts polio; then in 1987 when depression and a combination of pills and alcohol lead to a psychological crisis, and again in 1989, as he is about to turn 60, when a doctor finds precancerous cells under his tongue. Sheed undergoes both surgery and radiation and emerges at book’s end healthy but unnerved. “What distinguishes the only three illnesses I’ve ever had,” he writes, “ . . . is that all three are generally deemed incurable, and that each has caused me to lose something quite irreplaceable, something I would have sworn I couldn’t live without. The first of my Big Three, polio, cost me, for instance, the world of games, around which my whole world turned. . . . The second, addiction-depression, deprived me of not just the sleeping pills that brought it on but the whole congenial drinking life. . . . But the Big C, as they call it in show biz, has already . . . made some mean little inroads into the joy of eating, the last redoubt of the sensual man. . . . You’d be amazed at how little you’re willing to settle for.”

Students of gender distinctions will recognize here a classically male response to disease, witty and oblique, as if naming things too exactly--call it “the Big C,” never plain cancer--might prompt their return. The decision to revisit these unhappy times at all, Sheed notes, he made despite his own “unflagging resistance” to our “advice-mad society’s fondness for dwelling on disease.” “In the new world I was about to enter,” he writes after checking into a Kafkaesque dry-out tank he bitterly dubs Happy Valley, “the assumption was that it was always the truth you were flinching from . . . and never from just a cliche. . . .”

All the more welcome among the afflicted than is the rococo stylist West, a prolific novelist and essayist. He must have been, without doubt, a nightmarish patient. As feckless as any autodidact, he reads and rereads the diagnostic manual with a fervor born of terror. He learns everything about the stroke he has had, everything about the high blood pressure drugs he must take, and the risks of the pacemaker that will beat his heart from now on. He realizes: “My impulse to trifle with the minutiae of chance amounted, I eventually saw, to morbid vanity.” But not before his cardiologist has to order him to stop digging through the Physicians’ Desk Reference; his self-diagnosing is unnerving the medical staff.

When West’s friend, the poet Diane Ackerman, gives him a stuffed lion to keep him company at night, something momentous occurs: West is unashamed to curl up with his stuffed animal, even to curl up, as he tellingly puts it, in “full view of the nurses.” But then West never really goes to bed alone. A true man of letters, he tucks in with Sartre and Beckett, Bartok and Faure, in fact the entire Western culture syllabus. Disease lies buried in “A Stroke of Genius” under an avalanche of prose. For West, I’m sure this is a dodge, if a beautifully written one. But oddly, it also allows the reader closer to the truth of disease than do the other memoirs, not because West is braver--he is a complete chicken--but because he is franker.

For in the end what we want most from a writer in a hospital bed is not someone who, when faced with an injection, would complain that last time the doctor missed the vein (Sheed) or that he’d seen worse in his day (Heller) or who would ponder needles in literature (Updike), but someone who looks up in terror from the darkness and says, “Ouch.”

In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, By Wilfrid Sheed (Simon & Schuster: $23; 252 pp.)

A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery, By Paul West (Viking: $21.95; 180 pp.)

No Laughing Matter, By Joseph Heller and Speed Vogel (Donald I. Fine: $12.95, paper; 335 pp.)

Darkness Visible, By William Styron (Random House: 15.95; 84 pp.)

Operation Shylock, By Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster: $23; 398 pp.)

Intoxicated by My Illness, By Anatole Broyard (Clarkson Potter: $18; 160 pp.)

A Whole New Life: AN ILLNESS AND A HEALING, By Reynolds Price (Atheneum/Macmillan: $20; 224pp.)