The Amenities of Grippe

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

JOB never had the grippe. Job suffered from boils and such real adversities, and adversity chasteneth. But the grippe is a kind of perversity. It is like some modern novels and plays I could name: it leaves you with an intolerable situation. Nor is there any illustrious fellowship in grippe. you cannot glow with the thrill that you might experience, could you say to yourself that Chaucer, or Burton, or some other worthy, might just as well have been writing about you. How glorious in comparison are other diseases. Once, you remember, you suffered acutely for a while; but, though the doctor called your malady by strange modern names, you knew all along that you were ‘ful coleryk of compleccioun,’ and you took positive delight in your vicarious identity with immortality. Then followed, too, a vigorous convalescence, which meant that you were really well but that ‘under doctor’s orders’ you left behind the cares of this world and went off to the Islands of the Blessed, where you played thirty-six holes of golf a day, and at dinner invited a return, not without hope, of the

Even pneumonia brings its blessing. You do not remember as unmixed evil — as sheer, accursed, totally depraved perversity — that sweet anguish when your grosser nature was purged by the torturing disease and you listened transfigured to the music of the spheres. The poets must have been thinking about you again — or someone very like you.

But you cannot anatomize grippe. It has not even the minor attraction of a ‘sharp quotidian ague.’ It has not even any convalescence. You find that, like Polonius, you have ’most weak hams’; but it is small comfort to think that your only associate in all literature is a doddering old fool, and that j our kinship to him is based on a weak understanding.

How much better to die of a consumption! You might have association with the immortal dead; you might look in a mirror and say, like Byron (substituting of course your own name for his): ‘Then the ladies would all say, “See poor Snodgrass—how beautiful he looks a-dying!”’

But I would fain dwell upon the amenities of grippe. For it has its humors, too, though they don’t suggest those of Galen and his immortal progeny. I would not linger at unseemly length upon the minor joy you feel at the prospect of indefinite absence from work, without diminution of pay; but to me it is a sweet comfort, far above the stern solace ot Job. Such freedom hardly amounts to humor, it is true, till you realize bitterly how incapable you are of enjoy ing it. It can scarcely be exaggerated into an amenity.

But my reading does provide real amenities. I read George Macdonald when I have grippe. You must have infinite leisure to enjoy George Macdonald. If you are suffering from ‘normalcy,’ you resent the intrusion of plush upholstery and Victorian sentimentality; you are too busy to wade through the theological discussions and the pedantic digressions; you feel obliged, if you must read fiction, not to waste your time on anything so commonplace and genuine. But if you have the grippe, time ceases to exist. The world of the subway and the quicklunch counter, of the movie and the novel with a new device, fades into the limbo of your kaleidoscopic and misspent youth.

Enter, then, George Macdonald. You not only read, but sometimes reread, his solid Scottish disputations; you recognize, while yet a long way off, the contents of the lengthy and decorous speeches of Ian Macruady, and nevertheless go solemnly and profitably on; you discover in Mr. Walton’s virtuous company that he is about to experience a sermon — in fact, he thinks out loud in detail for your special benefit; and then, on turning the page at the end of the chapter, you come upon a whole chapter called ‘The Sermon I Preached.’ Undismayed, you read it, and read some more; and at the end of the book, you are only faintly aware of what you have endured, while there stands vivid in your mind a picture of real human beings in conflict with real, everyday situations — characters who emerge, as you hoped they would, somewhat better as a result of their conflicts. Macdonald is a true Victorian. He does n’t ask you to work up a set of characters and then leave them abruptly in the grippe of an intolerable situation. Life must go on, somewhither. He takes you solemnly on to the end of the situation. And if you are fortunate enough to have the grippe, and so time and patience to go with him, you have done yourself a good turn. And that of course deserves another volume.

An amenity familiar to all consists of the little gifts of dainties from your friends. You have no sense of smell, so you ’re sure to eat them all, with a fine catholicity of taste. Sometimes, however, they are pranked out with a poesy or an inscription which lends them special virtue. One such I remember from a friend with the mumps, who, while he accused me of enjoying ‘slender normal things,’ complained in pretty verses that he had developed ‘Cleveland’s lyric throat.’ Recently a learned friend sent me a bowl of jelly, and with it those words: —

HOC. GELATUM. EX. YIXO. TARAXACENSI. DOMESTICO. TIBI. DAT. VICINTJS. SPEKATQUE. TE. IAM, CONVALESCERE

He had the goodness to tell me that ‘Taraxacensi’ means ‘of the dandelion.’ But this gift was hardly an amenity: it was almost an event.