A World Of Lost Connections

By Roger Rosenblatt

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a photo of author and historian William Manchester on Page One. His face was the image of despair--diluted blue eyes, a ladder of creases on his forehead--though if one did not read the story that the photo illustrated, it might have appeared that Manchester had been caught at a moment of alert creativity. The story, however, was about his inability to create, to write. At age 79, paralyzed in his left leg by two strokes suffered after his wife's death in 1998, he finds that he cannot complete the third volume of The Last Lion, his biography of Winston Churchill, for which readers have been eager for years. "I can't put things together," says Manchester. "I can't make the connections."

Of all the fears a writer experiences--and since a writer's life is composed of between 96% and 100% fear, the competition is extreme--the loss of the ability to make connections is the scariest. The writer's mind, when it's working, is like Alice's rabbit, leading hurriedly, sometimes recklessly, to mysterious yet attractive places. The animal is fretful because it has to discover and display the places simultaneously.

Take a single sentence. Take a sentence of Manchester's, on Churchill's funeral: "When his flag-draped coffin moved across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bareheaded Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned not only him and all he had meant, but all they had been, and no longer were, and would never be again." Most likely, Manchester had only the scantiest notion where that sentence would wind up when he began it. Once he caught up with it, he got it, but then there was another sentence running on ahead. Until recently, there was always another sentence.

The terror of this loss goes way beyond writers, of course. It's just that writers depend on the ability to make connections out of thin air, or no air. The novelist Jean Stafford lived with the dread that she would be crippled by a stroke (she was). H.L. Mencken was a stroke victim who, at the end of his life, was unable to read or write. One of those who sat at his bedside and read to him was Manchester.

The mind may not feel pain, but it does know when its wires are loose, and a different sort of pain comes from not being able to do anything about it. Memory loss (what's the capital of Wyoming again?) offers the most common example by evoking sudden panic. But it gets a lot worse. A college psych class I was barely in visited a mental hospital where psychiatrists interviewed several patients to demonstrate the relative severity of their illnesses. One was a former mathematics professor who, unlike the others, was calm as an evening lake in answering the doctors' questions, including high math and logic problems.

Then they asked him to explain the following: "One swallow does not make a summer." The man's face reddened; his hands flew up and down as if he were trying to dry them. Angrily, he asked what the hell the doctors were talking about, and finally he had to be told that the problem centered on two meanings of swallow. But he was too agitated to be appeased. The depth of his trouble lay not only in the inability to make connections but also in the madness that came with recognizing that fact.

I passed a woman in a wheelchair the other day. In the bright afternoon sun, she was pushed along by a nurse who greeted me cheerily as the woman in her charge--shrunken to the size of a ventriloquist's doll--stared forward, as if examining the summer heat. She was clearly beyond making connections, so in a sense she no longer was a person. Yet I connected to her in her blankness, because potentially it was mine too, as it was Manchester's.

Here's the weird thing about connections: the impulse to make them is so strong, so fundamentally human, that we connect with those who cannot make connections for themselves. We will the connectedness of particles. Stephen Sondheim seemed inspired by this idea in Sunday in the Park with George, as "piece by piece" he showed Seurat putting the contributing parts of a painting--bustles, parasols, dogs--together.

Seurat had the advantage of being able to put things together newly after taking them apart. This Manchester cannot do. For him, the despair is especially deep, because he may dimly perceive new connections made of isolated events yet still not be able to link one event to another. He has lost the words, and the process of losing them, little by little, must have been terrible.

I hold the improbable belief that for a writer, the mind at its end funnels down to a single word--one piece that, because it is connected to nothing but itself, requires no larger scheme to be intelligible. And that one word would be all that the writer's life meant. Manchester can no longer make connections, thus neither can his many readers, who mourn not only him and all he had meant, but all they had been, and no longer were, and would never be again.