RAGE INSIDE, RAGE OUTSIDE

By SHERWIN B. NULAND

THE MEMOIR CAN BE A DANGEROUS literary form, especially when it is the work of a gifted writer embarked on a voyage to discover some elusive personal truth. In Heart: A Memoir (Warner Books; 323 pages; $22.95), Lance Morrow, a writer and essayist for TIME since 1965, does not shrink from the realization that the surest path toward self-discovery is self-disclosure. In an effort to heal body and spirit following a second coronary-bypass operation at the relatively young age of 52, he was determined to seek out the sources of the internalized anger that had twice threatened to choke off his life by causing a heart attack. This evocative book is the result.

Morrow's memories draw the reader in from the start. "A heart attack feels like this," he writes. "A sickness suddenly surrounds the lungs, a sort of toxic interior glow--fleeting at first, lightly slithering, but returning a moment later, more insistent...Something dangerous has come inside and will not leave." As he lies in a coronary-care unit awaiting his bypass operation, Morrow begins to relate his own medical predicament to events in the outside world: "My mind went wandering about, working as a kind of journalist of memory and anger. I sought to connect my inner world and my dilemma (the rage that gave me this blocked heart) to outer catastrophes. I sailed off to Bosnia and Hiroshima--big objective correlatives." Spasms of bloodthirsty fury, he observes, can block up the collective heart of entire ethnic groups, who cannot let go of old grievances.

Interspersed with these reflections of the chaos he has witnessed as an adult are Morrow's bittersweet memories of his troubled childhood. He recalls injustices at the hands of self-absorbed parents whose "dreamy narcissism" and "dangerous veerings" kept them too preoccupied with their own lives to be concerned with his. What is revealed behind Morrow's frustrated rage is the uncomprehending powerlessness of a damaged, loveless child. "When the heart aches," he tells us, exposing the impotence of the violated, "the poor thing is screaming for blood."

Later, in the same finely tuned and almost poetic form of free association, Morrow describes his postoperative period of convalescence at his farm in Dutchess County, New York; a reporting junket to the West Indies with his teenage son; and a cross-country automobile trip with his wife to celebrate the first anniversary of his successful surgery. Several times during his narration, Morrow writes of being invisible--of being, in various contexts, an unseen observer. Everywhere, turbulent memories surface and are recorded with the faithfulness of a man whose search for answers will not be denied. In the end, however, he concludes that his introspection has been "useless, or anyway illusory, that it is silly to think I can understand the reasons for these implosions of mine..." But he is wrong.

It is precisely because of these uncensored recollections and the insights they arouse that the memoir of an honest man often reveals more than the author intends or recognizes. Morrow's luminous study of self, spurred by a medical crisis, strikes an unexpectedly universal chord. Every man is Everyman, and so the author deals not only with the inner torment of Lance Morrow but also with that of all of us.

Sherwin B. Nuland is clinical professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. His book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter won the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction.