AFTERTHOUGHT
The Skin Game
By ALAN BRIEN
The classic description of psoriasis I have encountered so far however is in fiction, though fiction that shows all the signs of being thinly- veiled autobiography. It is in John Updike's The Centaur and I cannot hope to improve upon his report as presented by a fifteen-year-old boy.
The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammer- ing, intensified the humiliation. 'Humiliation,' 'allergy'—1 never knew what to call it. It was not a disease because I generated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost every- thing: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate—allergic, in fact, to life itself . . In my conceit I believed myself to be wickedly lucky. So I had come to this conclusion about my psoriasis: it was a curse. God, to make me a man, had blessed me with a rhythmic curse that breathed in and out with His seasons. The summer sun melted my scabs; by September my chest and legs were clear but for a very faint dappling, invisibly pale seeds which the long dry shadow of the fall and the winter would bring again to bloom. The curse reached its climax of flower in the spring; but then the strengthening sun promised cure. January was a hopeless time. My elbows and knees, pressure areas of skin, were capped with crust; on my ankles, where the embrace of my socks en- couraged the scabs, they angrily ran together in a kind of pink bark. My forearms were mottled enough so that I could not turn my shirt cuffs back, in two natty folds, like other boys. Otherwise when I was in clothes, my disguise as a normal human being was good.
Needless to say, Mr. Updike is now one of the few modern novelists I can read without continu- ally stopping to pummel the cover and snarl at the fly-leaf—'Come off it. who do you think you're kidding?' I propose him to the rest of the members as the first patron of our club. The trouble with most novels is that they are fiction. They are made up of lies by some vain, nar- cissistic fellow who writes down all the brave and exciting things which should have happened to him but never did. I think this is why there is a growing. greedy appetite for thrillers. 'enter- tainments.' spy melodramas, and all those other day-dreams which make no secret of their origin in fantasy wish-fulfilment. It's almost always fatal to my enjoyment to read a serious novel by someone I know. I keep on wanting to ring him up and ask : 'But what did you really say in that situation? What really happened?' People write lies, of course. in their memoirs and diaries and letters and columns in magazines. But you can subject their evidence much more efficiently to the kind of tests and comparisons you apply to Elie evidence of your friends and colleagues every day.
What you will accept as true fiction must depend on the width of your own experience. But I cannot be the only reader who loses his trust in an author's authenticity when he finds the fellow cannot even mock up a convincing extract from Who's Who in his pages without getting the style wrong and dates which don't make sense. John Le Carre ceased to be anything for me but a writer of sombre strip-cartoon adventures when I found him untrustworthy on the geography of London. And he also allows his hero to read a newspaper which had long ceased to be published at the time of the story. If you cannot trust an author's facts, why should you trust his fancies?
I wonder what would have been my reaction to John Updike's pink-spotted boy if I had never had psoriasis? I think I would have found the passage above convincing but unnecessary. Now I feel quite proud to share such a poetic affliction, and I cannot help being cheered to find that his dose was so much worse than mine. In the novel, no one seems to prescribe any treatment for poor Peter except free sunshine in season. But then most of us have forgotten how few remedies the doctor carried in his black bag a generation ago when drugs barely existed. My own attack (or outbreak rather. because it has the distinct feel of something trying to escape from within like a New Testament demon) has responded to an ICI preparation called `Synalar,' a regular treatment with an ultra-violet lamp, and bouts of self- analysis. There seems to be something about this skin disease which brings out the Mary Baker Eddy (as one of my distinguished correspon- dents pointed out with a rap on my knuckles) even in atheists. I cannot throw off the feeling that it is the result of hubris.
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