Tooth drama, a story to the rescue

Turning to literature really is a thing

This has been a lost week, an interior week, one in which I had to cancel all plans, classes and interviews and attend only to a pain the cause of which was discovered on Tuesday morning when my kind dentist saw me first thing after Labor Day weekend and diagnosed two abscessed teeth.

“I have two classes to teach today,” said I, reluctant to change course.

“You can’t,” he said. “This is an emergency.”

From then on I was hurled into a drama that involved many appointments with three different specialists, trips to CVS, conscience-crushing decisions about whether or not the pain justified popping a Tylenol #3 (it did, 3 times) or sticking to Advil only, watching The Godfather twice, all of Girls again, buying the online screen version of Where the Crawdads Sing, don’t even ask, my infected teeth infected my thinking. Ultimately, inevitably, I turned to literature for solace. Film just won’t do, they’re not private enough even watched on the phone under the covers, too many hands made the pie, there isn’t the singular sensibility parallel to my own that I find in books. I needed a mind, a voice, a perspective. What story would you pick to read under the circumstances? I knew the one for me—“The Interior Castle” by Jean Stafford, one of my favorite stories ever. A more perfect depiction of the deep privacy and unknowability and preciousness of being in a state of unremitting pain there never was. The name comes from St. Theresa of Avila’s famous guide for development of the spirit. The story turns that premise on its head…exactly what has happened to Pansy.

Pansy Vanneman has a car accident that really does a number on her. She’s broken and in the hospital, lying perfectly still under a seersucker counterpane for weeks, perceiving herself to be the subject of much speculation and gossip among the nurses for her absence of the usual expressions of pain but being far more interested in herself alone. She drifts into memory, but it doesn’t secure her. “…she knew that she could never again love anything as ecstatically as she loved the spirit of Pansy Vanneman, enclosed within her head.”

I remember the first time I read this probably forty years ago and how that line made me laugh. I had never before seen articulated the vanity of endurance, though I’d certainly experienced it. I had a no-novocaine dentist when I was a child, and there were no fluoride treatments then so I got many cavities (British teeth). To endure the hideous drilling sessions I figured out a method for traveling into the pain and examining it closely that I was very proud of. I loved Jean Stafford calling me on it. And she goes so much further.

The main action of the story involves an operation on her smashed nose that has been put off for weeks while other pieces of her recover. Finally the day comes. The surgeon is surgically examined by the author. “Miss Vanneman did not doubt his humaneness or his talent—he was a celebrated man—but she questioned whether he had imagination. Immediately beyond the prongs of his speculum lay her treasure whose price he, no more than the nurses, could estimate.” Will he nick her brain while he’s up her nose? Therein lies the suspense. I must say I had similar fears this week, though mine were more along the lines of heart attack or systemic infection than lobotomy, but such is the difference between mouth and nose. The drama in “The Interior Castle”is intense and hilarious and terrifying and relatable, but I had gone to the story for the description of pain. Could it soothe me in media res?

I don’t want to overwhelm my readers here with her long description of her ordeal. Not that it would hurt. Those who have read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, or those who have noticed that it is possible to see violence without feeling any transmission of the trauma witnessed beyond an empathetic wince, know that the pain of others doesn’t hurt us, and that our own pain is impossible to describe except in metaphor and figurative language. Stafford goes there, does she ever, enough so that even though it is ever impossible to bridge the gap between one body and another, she has done the thing that literature can do by making the effort to find words for the experience that offer the reader a path out of mute suffering to shared history.

“To be sure, it came usually of its own accord, running like a wild fire through all the convolutions to fill with flame the small sockets and ravines and then, at last, too withdraw, leaving behind a throbbing and an echo. On these occasions she was as helpless as a tree in the wind. But at other times when, by closing her eyes and rolling up her eyeballs in such a way that she fancied she looked directly on the place where her brain was, the pain woke sluggishly and came at her at a snail’s pace. Then, bit by bit, it gained speed. Sometimes it faltered back, subsided altogether, and then rushed like a tidal wave driven by a hurricane, lashing and roaring until she lifted her hands from the counterpane, crushed her broken teeth into her swollen lip, stared in panic at the soothing walls with her ruby eyes, stretched out her legs until she felt her bones must snap.”

Yowza! Yes. How exquisite, which is exactly how Pansy feels about it. It’s hers. This pain allows her to see the jewel of her pink brain, hidden inside of so many structures, unknown to the world. What happens when the surgeon gets close? Read the story and discover. It’s devastating, smart, and witty.

My situation wasn’t as bad. But when on Thursday I saw the final dentist on the case and found him so kind that I actually spoke aloud the fact that I had become anxious after a first unsuccessful attempt at a tooth removal and having to miss teaching and that I was reluctant to have a novocaine needle stuck in my very sore cheek. I told him I was a professor but I’d becomes so undone by all of this that I couldn’t communicate properly. He countered with a description of the sawing and hammering and noise and pressure I’d have to endure to get the broken tooth and old root canal and nerves out of my head. We looked at each other over our masks. It was a lot for each of us. “You know, if you want to wait until tomorrow, I can do this under a light sedation,” he said.

He left the room to let me mull it over. I considered my long term stoical identity, the attraction of getting it over with right then as opposed to waiting another day to attend to the necessary pre-operative fast, the lesser expense of a simple yank. Then I considered the decades of pains that had subsided but hadn’t left me, the many many times I’d invented methods to get from one side to another of hurt, and the kinds of memories that would arise, as they had forPansy Vanneman, when he had his hands in my mouth. My pink brain would likely never been the same either, if I had to go through it and witness it all.

When he came back in I was able to say without any shame and in full acceptance that I am no longer the toughie I once was, “yes, please. Put me out.”

***

Link for the week

My favorite movie scene ever, The Godfather hospital scene. Michael walks through a dark portal and discovers his power.

Come back next week to learn how I had to turn to “The Remission” by Mavis Gallant to process the royal death.