August 18, 2009

DATELINE: Tierra Tranquila, a house on a mountain above the Pacific in Costa Rica

LAST NIGHT we sat out under the equatorial stars and listened to the sounds of howler monkeys, birds, and cicadas. At 2,000 feet, there are no mosquitoes. This morning at dawn we watched three toucans zoom in and slash at their breakfast – a bunch of bananas we cut down from our trees and hung beside the patio. Among the plantains, mangoes, papayas, avocados, and limes, birds abound: hummingbirds hovering under the leaves of the purple banana flowers, flocks of parrots, a pair of blue-crested mot mots with tails twice as long as their bodies, soaring hawks, and portending vultures. Each morning you can spot a new, rolled-up banana leaf and watch it on and off all day until it unfurls fully, a lime-green flag of fecundity. On the dirt road, our neighbor goes by with his oxen dragging the trunk of a pechote tree – a wood that, like the native teak, resists termites. It is valuable, and protected. Only fallen trunks can be gathered and sold.

The community of 20 farm families live along the road up the mountain. There is an elementary school, a social center, and a women’s cooperative micro-loan bank, which in 11 years has never had a default. The nearest village is down a dirt road with 13 hairpin turns, and has two paved streets. Costa Rica is a designated world “Green Zone’’ – getting top scores for environmental policy – and our province is a world “Blue Zone,’’ for the longevity of its inhabitants.

The summer of 2004 my wife and I were asked to lead a cultural dialogue here between American and Costa Rican (“Tico’’) teenagers, in which our daughter participated. Our trepidation about what might happen in an America ruled by a second Cheney/Bush, coupled with our sense of sanctuary in Costa Rica, led us to buy the house. We have returned to the dialogue/camp each summer.

On a trip with the campers to a local waterfall, one of the counselors fell on the rocks and gashed his head. In the village was a modern, fully-equipped clinic: doctor, nurse, and pharmacist. The young woman doctor saw the patient right away, did a thorough exam, and sutured him up. By the time she was done, the pharmacist had brought in the antibiotics and pain medication. Our cost: zero. She told us that every village of any size has a clinic staffed by a doctor – all of it free.

How do they do it?

The answer came from a question the Ticos asked the Americans in dialogue: “What does it feel like to live in a country that’s always at war?’’

For my whole lifetime, America has been fighting an endless progression of foreign wars – and, truth is, it feels insane. America’s effort in World War II fattened into a military-industrial economy that has devoured our national purpose, which now includes lies and torture. Our healthcare, a for-profit “industry,’’ leaves 50 million uninsured, a national disaster. Here, every Tico has free healthcare. Hospitals are good – some Americans come to San Jose for the joint repairs they cannot afford at home.

How is this possible in a small country without valuable resources such as oil, gas, or metals? Simple: In 1948, the government outlawed an army. It cannot go to war. It spends zero on its Department of Defense – there is none. Rather, there is a single department for both Environment and Energy – all the energy (except gasoline) is renewable, from water and wind to geothermal and solar. The country is not a utopia – the Tico teens admired the Americans’ sense of freedom and individual possibilities, material wealth, and world leadership – but it is an enticement.

If you don’t waste money on an empire, you might just have money for a true democracy. This country that cannot go to war, that has a president who won the Nobel Peace Prize, generates a certain peace among its citizens. They know that if they get sick, they get care; if they want an education, they get one; if they want work, they can have it (not just bananas or coffee, but Intel chips); and whether or not they want natural beauty and the blessings of animals, plants, friends and family, and long life, they have them.

Throughout the country there is a common greeting: When we meet on the mountain and ask, “Como esta?’’ – “How are you?’’ – they answer, “Pura vida’’ – “Pure life,’’ or “Life is good.’’

Stephen Bergman is a guest columnist. Under the pen name Samuel Shlem, he is the author of “The House of God’’ and “The Spirit of the Place.’’

Read Bergman’s speech as prepared for delivery

Listen to Bergman’s speech:

John was the second writer I ever met. It was 1979, my first novel had come out, he was 46, I 34. We met at a party of PEN New England at the house of the writers Robie Macauley and Pam Painter. My first impression was clouded by nervous awe, but luckily it was summer and our conversation turned to golf, John’s passion, and my sport at our shared alma mater, Harvard. A week later I was out on a forlorn public golf course packed with carts-full of beer-swilling guys in T-shirts whose swings were converted from hockey. There had been a mistake and we were a five-some. A six-some, actually. Another young writer in the group, supposedly happily married, had brought along his petite blond girlfriend and spent a lot of time in the woods with her while we played on. Reappearing, flustered, they would walk along with her arm around his waist, her hand tucked neatly into the hip pocket of his jeans—a true Updikean touch.

You can tell everything about a person by the way they play a sport. Last night I calculated that in thirty years John and I spent at least 5000 hours playing golf. We had a regular foursome, and often played with his son David, now also a dear friend. But often it was just John and I, walking along together, bags on our shoulders, talking. In golf John was meticulous—our scorekeeper, cherishing those little yellow golf pencils; frugal, picking up pencils and tees all during the round; steady as a fair Christian but for an uncontrolled deviance into the raw sensuality of woods and briars and swamps and lakes and sand traps; reliable to a fault on the greens; capable of astonishing flights of golf poetry and sudden crashes into golf trash—and really funny. Once when he and I were teamed up against the other two and I complained of a bad back, on the 2nd tee he said, “Steve, I want you to know that if it’s a choice between helping the team and hurting your back, I want you to hurt your back.” Always on the 4th hole he and I would talk about his medical questions, and always walking up the long par five 8th fairway we had our “literature and career” chat, what we were reading and writing, the folly of both popular and literary taste, what the gossip was. Often he would repeat something I said, and I knew I would soon see it in a book. He had an astonishing eye, and in golf gathered details—one fall day he walked off the course to make sure he knew the name of the last tree to turn color—I believe ash, or hickory. Harry’s condo in Florida in RABBIT AT REST was, in fact, my parents, whom John stayed with to make sure he got it right.

Janet and I had a house in Gloucester, twenty minutes from him and Martha, and we became another foursome—seeing each other often for dinner, celebrating each birthday together, and Christmas at their home with their mixed families. Soon there started arriving book after book, and private editions as birthday presents, as well as cartoons and drawings—such as a set of four golf balls, on each a cartoon of the face of a member of our foursome. One night Janet, a psychologist, insisted that John and I take the Meyers Briggs Personality Inventory, and then announced the results. I came out as a writer; he came out as an office worker or clerk. So much for psych testing. Every book he sent had an inscription, often blaming me: “For Steve, who ruined this novel by a) suggesting it, b) inquiring after it constantly and making me talk its lovely essence away.” For a New Yorker review of The Bible: “For Steve, without whom this piece would have been composed with much less distraction”—but to each of these he added, “with affection and esteem.” John was the most loyal friend I ever had: he would always show up at events for my books or plays, he would listen attentively to my publishing woes, and if I was going through a rough time and we hadn’t talked on the phone for a while, he would always call—imagine, a man who always calls! When my publisher asked him if he’d write the introduction to a 25TH anniversary edition of my novel THE HOUSE OF GOD, to my surprise he said yes, and included it in one of his anthologies. Though never directly, in postcards and letters and half-joking inscriptions, he pointed out my strengths and weaknesses as a writer, always in an encouraging way.

I never saw him yawn, and he rarely lost his temper: mostly on the golf course, once at dinner at home when he was so angry that he pointedly let his napkin drop a full five inches from his hand to the table. He was the most generous of critics; only in the last few years did I ever hear him voice irritation at a writer—one in particular, who shall remain nameless. He talked freely with me about the craft. I learned an enormous amount from him.

We had a secret joke: in THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK, he wrote “The new young editor of the Word, Toby Bergman, slipped on a frozen stick outside the barber shop and broke his leg.” In my next novel, THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE, I wrote, “The new young editor of the Crier, Toby Updike, slipped on a frozen stick…” etc. And when last year I received his last novel, THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, sure enough there “Toby Bergman” was again. In my new novel there is a final, leg-rebroken, “Toby Updike.”

The last few years of our friendship, because of various orthopedic surgeries on my part, were not on the golf course. Rather we would meet for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. He timed our lunches to his delivery of boxes of his personal papers to Houghton Library. He always seemed shy when he announced himself to the librarian—John was always wonderfully humble. He was modest, but with a rock-solid confidence. Once, after a novel of his had gotten panned, I asked how he handled it. “They’re talking about my novel,” he said, “not about me.”

Last summer we had a belated joint-birthday lunch at Myopia Hunt Club, John’s exclusive old-Yankee golf course at which he never seemed quite comfortable. I noted his old man’s wrinkled and scarred face but then—when I looked into his eyes—(those eyes!)—I recognized the signature boyish joy at being alive and at play for another great day. He and I, two small-town boys sitting there in a grown-up’s exclusive club eating our BLT’s off bone China on a starched white tablecloth. The sun shone hot on the 18thgreen, lighting it up as if it were made of crushed emeralds. Over lunch we laughed, hard, happy to see each other again and delighted with our good fortune in life, talking about everything as best friends do, and then parting, he with his gentle handshake and slight stammer. As I drove off I turned and saw him walking away slightly stooped, snowy hair shining in the sunlight, but with a bounce in his step as he swung his putter along, heading toward the green to practice.

That was the last time I ever saw him.

There was a last postcard, in November. He told me about his diagnosis, and a few other things, and about the care his family was showing him. After that, he drew back, into himself. I knew that the suddenness and aggressiveness of his cancer had been a shock to his self-image, an end that simply does not happen to those who, despite their bodies, feel young, feel in touch with, in his transcendent line in one of his last poems, : “our heaven at the start and not the end of life.” I kept in touch through David, and notes I wrote him.

There are all different kinds of love in the world, and John wrote brilliantly about most of them. He taught me a lot about the love in a friendship, and I find myself thinking about him most days as if he’s still around, and then, realizing he’s not, missing him pretty badly. When you don’t get to say goodbye, there’s a hole in your heart, sometimes for a long time. So I just want to say, “Goodbye, John. I loved you. You will live with me, and all of us here today, for the rest of our lives.”

Reviewed by Jim O’Toole, The American
Oxonian (California and Hertford, ’66)

At one time or another in that long and often tortuous journey of human growth that we hope ends in wisdom, almost all of us feel compelled to “return home” in an attempt to learn who we are through discovering where we came from and what early influences shaped the persons we were to become. In his (now largely unread) 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe chronicled the all-too-frequent disappointment of those who attempt such a side excursion from life’s main path. Indeed, most people seem to find that their old homes aren’t what they used to be, or what they thought they were; many even fail to locate any real home, at all.

But the protagonist in Samuel Shem’s award-winning novel, The Spirit of the Place, not only goes home again, he finds there what has been missing in his life: strong ties to family and community. Orville Rose, M.D., is a modern American wandering Jew, a Leopold Bloom from “Columbia”-on-Hudson. Rootless and purposeless, he travels the globe without a moral compass in futile search of just what he doesn’t know. The theme may be familiar, but Shem infuses the old story with layers of original insight and contemporary significance. Rose, the reader finds, is every disillusioned American Baby Boomer. His home town–divided by racial, religious, and ideological antagonisms, and rife with drugs, violence, and materialism—has all that is the worst of America (and, paradoxically, also the best in terms of the ability to adapt, innovate, and coalesce around common values). And the moral of the book is universal: if we are patient, willing to engage in deep reflection and, above all, willing to make ourselves vulnerable by opening up to others, we all can learn a great deal by returning to the places where it began.

Orville Rose is a lost soul when he returns to Columbia. When faced with the need to make any meaningful commitment, his predilection is to run away. But in Columbia he gradually learns the true lesson is not that you can’t go home again; instead, it is that you can’t run away. The town’s movers and shakers are hell bent on tearing down an historically significant old hotel on the main square in order to erect a shopping mall. At first, Orville is indifferent to the efforts of preservationists to prevent the destruction of the building, but in the nick of time he sees that he is running away from a social obligation to act, and ends up taking a principled stand to save the hotel. Shem uses preservation as a metaphor for the longing for lost youth, a past that cannot be relived, but can be positively reclaimed through reflection and forgiveness.

In particular, Orville learns that he must come to terms, finally, with the memory of his recently deceased, and decidedly difficult, mother (whose “spirit” he sees floating about the streets of the city). Shem is telling us to face the fact that we don’t outgrow the effects of our parents until we die; hence, it is prudent to deal with them even after they are gone. Orville finally gets mom to quit hovering overhead by saying to her spirit the things he should have said while she was alive.

I may be making the book sound sentimental, or preachy. Fear not: Samuel Shem is the very same author of the comic best seller, The House of God, and too skilled a writer to let his story become a sermon. In strong evidence in these pages are Shem’s trademark humor, ribaldry, and ability to turn emergency room surgery into a madcap tragi-comedy of gushing blood and nauseating gore. For example, Columbia’s hunters are habitually…blasting off parts of their own bodies—a toe, a foot, a finger, a hand, an arm, a leg, a head—yes, even a head—leaving gaping wounds behind. Exhausted by all this, Orville worked like crazy to find creative solutions, ways to make these remnants of severings and eviscerations and amputations and gapings and, out of them, as the New York antiquers were always putting it, make art—that is, make not necessarily humans but bodies.

A major theme of the book is medicine as art. Physician Rose, by necessity, must harden himself in order to cope with the unspeakable horrors of the emergency room. But in the process, he risks losing his humanity. To be a fully functioning human—and an effective doctor—Rose must be both a scientist and an artist. Perhaps Shem’s greatest strength as a writer is his ability to resolve the tension between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,” science and the humanities. That’s probably because the author has a foot firmly planted in both worlds: On the one foot, before pursuing his medical degree at Harvard, Stephen Bergman earned a doctorate in experimental physiology from Oxford (he wired the brains of cockroaches to learn something or other); on other foot, he and his wife, Janet Surrey, co-authored a critically acclaimed play about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous that recently ran off-Broadway. In The Spirit of the Place, as in his three previous novels, Shem/Bergman brings compassion to the medical profession, and wisdom about the human condition to us all.

Read John Updike’s new introduction below:

“We expect the world of doctors. Out of our own need, we revere them; we imagine that their training and expertise and saintly dedication have purged them of all the uncertainty, trepidation, and disgust that we would feel in their position, seeing what they see and being asked to cure it Blood and vomit and pus do not revolt them; senility and dementia have no terrors; it does not alarm them to plunge into the slippery tangle of internal organs, or to handle the infected and contagious. For them, the flesh and its diseases have been abstracted, rendered coolly diagrammatic and quickly subject to infallible diagnosis and effective treatment. The House of God is a book to relieve you of these illusions; it does for medical training what Catch-22 did for the military life-displays it as farce, a melee of blunderers laboring to murky purpose under corrupt and platitudinous superiors. In a sense The House of God is more outrageous than Catch-22, since the military has long attracted (indeed, has forcibly drafted) detractors and satirists, wheras medical practitioners as represented in fiction are generiffiy benign, often heroic, and at worst of drolly dubious efficacy, like the enthusiastic magus, Hofrat Behrens of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

Not that the young interns and residents and nurses con­jured up by Samuel Shem are not sympathetic; they all bring to the grisly fun house of hospital care a residue of their initial dedication, and the most cynical of them, the Fat Man, is the most effective and expert. Our hero, Roy Basch, suggests Voltaire’s Candide in his buoyant inno­cence and his persistent-for all the running hypochondria of his hectic confessional narrative–health. Three things serve him as windows looking out of the claustra! hospital fun house onto the sunlit lost landscape of health: sex, boyhood nostalgia, and basketball. The sex is most con­spicuous, and in the orgies with Angel and Molly acquires an epic size and pornographic ideality. A glimpse of Molly’s underpants becomes, in one of the book’s many impetuous parlays of imagery, a sail bulging with the breath of life:

. . . in the instant between the sit down and the leg cross, there’s a flash of .the fantasy triangle, the French panty bulging out over the downy mons like a spinnaker before the soft blond and hairy trade winds. Even though, medically, I knew all about these organs, and had my hands in diseased ones all the time, still, knowing, I wanted it and since it was imagined and healthy and young and fresh and blond and downy soft and pungent, I wanted it all the more.

In the prevailing morbid milieu, spurts of lust arrive from a world as remote as the world of Basch’s father’s letters, with their serenely illogical conjunctions. Sexual activity between female nurse and male doctor figures here as mutual relief, as a refuge for both classes of caregiver from the circumambient illness and death, from everything distasteful and pathetic and futile and repulsive about the flesh. It is the coed version of the groggy camaraderie of the novice interns: “We were sharing something big and murderous and grand.”

The heroic note, not struck as often and blatantly as the note of mockery, is nevertheless sounded, and is perhaps as valuable to the thousands of interns who have put themselves to school with the overtly pedagogic elements of Shem’s distinctly didactic novel: the thirteen laws laid down by the Fat Man; the doctrines of gomer immortality and curative minimalism; the hospital politics of TURFING and BUFFING and WALLS and SIEVES; the psychoanalysis of unsound doctors like Jo and Potts; the barrage of medical incidents that amounts to a pageant of dos and don’ts. It would be a rare case, I imagine, that a medical intern would encounter and not find foreshadowed somewhere in ,this Bible of dire possibilities.
Useful even to its mostly straight-faced glossary, The House of God yet glows with the celebratory essence of a real novel, defined by Henry James as “an impression of life.” Sentences leap out with a supercharged vitality, as first novelist Shem grabs the wheel of that old hot rod, the English language.

The jackhammers of the Wing of Zock had been wiggling my ossicles for twelve hours.
From her ruffled front unbuttoned down past her clavicular notch showing her cleavage, to her full tightly held breasts, from the red of her nail polish and lipstick !o the blue of her lids and the black of her lashes and even the twinkly gold of the little cross from her Catholic nursing school, she was a rainbow in a waterfall.

We felt sad that someone our age who’d been playing ball witlh his six-year-old son on one of the super twilight, summer, was now a vegetable with a head full of blood, about to have his skull cracked by the surgeons.

We have here thirty-year-old Roy Basch’s belated bildungsroman. the taste of his venture into the valley of death and the truth of the flesh, ending with his eminently sane and sanely sensual Berry. Richard Nixon-the most fascinating of twentieth-century presidents, at least to fiction writers-and the mounting Walcrgate scandal fonn the historical background of thenovel, pinning it to 1973-74. The House of God could probably not be written now, at least so unabashedly; its lavish use of freewheeling, multiethnic caricature would be inhihited by the current tenns “racist,” “sexist,” and “ageist.” Its ’70s sex is not safe; AIDS does not figure among the plethora of vividly described diseases; and a whole array of organ transplants has come along to enrich the surgeon’s armory. Yet the book’s concerns are more timely than ever, as the American health-care systemapproaches crisis condition–ever more overused, over­worked, expensive. and beset by bad publicity, as grotes­queries of mismanagement and fatal mistreatment outdo fiction in the daily newspapers. As it enters its second mil­lion of paperback sales, The House of God continues to afford medical students the shock of recognition, and to offer them comfort and amusement in the midst of their Hippocratic travails.

JOHN UPDIKE April 1995″