The Barrier
Private World of Pain. By Grace Stuart. (Allen & Unwin. 10s. 6d.) A BOOK now and then appears that must disturb the general reader because it is written from the other side of a barrier. The barrier may be no more than the walls of a monastery ; more often it is unleapable, being, as in Mrs. Stuart's personal record, a story of crippling pain. The victims of rheumatoid arthritis, like the products of plastic surgery, are not looking for pity, nor again for the self- consciously averted eye. At their simplest they desire only to tell those on the hither side of the barrier how they have drifted to this no-man's-land which yet holds men and women, and to describe the manner of existence left to them. Mrs. Stuart explores the question far more widely. She has the advantage over most fellow-sufferers of being a writer, to whom, in a sense, this long experience of pain and reduced mobility is as raw material, not willingly acquired nor easily transmuted, but directing her mind to the kind of investigation authors pursue over less intimate themes. At the same time, she has tried all her intellectual arguments by the bitter reality of a physical test. What she now writes is a history, not a thesis, of the conquering (so far as may be) of a disability.
Mrs. Stuart was a promising Oxford student when arthritis stalked her, cutting her off at first for a season only, then recurring in a manner to show clearly that she was not going to make the return. During the tedious years she faced her situation fully ; and after a few early errors of trying to minimise the inability by taking on too much, she realised the folly of the heroic. Instead, she acquired, in the rather glib words of medical men, a " good philosophy." In this narrative, written for the most part while she was waiting for the promised relief of cortisone, Mrs. Stuart expounds something of that "good philosophy." Hers is undoubtedly as balanced, unsenti- mental and unembittered a creed as can ever have come from one so baulked of life. She rejects all pseudo-Christian sophistry about the suffering that ennobles, or that is sent purposely as a punishment for sin. These doctrines simply do not work in everyday existence ; the state of mind that credits them is as abnormal as the diseased body, coddles its condition and thus adds to morbidity. The prac- tical virtue, as Mrs. Stuart has found it, lies in a mental adjustment from sickness to normality, no matter how crippling is the physical disease.
The frankness of her personal research continues to its conclusion : an arthritic sufferer cannot, in the long run, live adequately by mental effort only; • to this must be added cortisone. And is that drug a miracle-worker ? There are no miracles ; the relief js limited, but it helps. Mrs. Stuart's courageous, commonsense investigation is a real addition to the sane study of physical abnormality. Besides that, it is an uncannily magnetic story, written in fine prose.
SYLVA NORMAN
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