James V. Forrestal with Harry S. Truman
Shakespeare’s famous “Seven Ages of
Man” have through the wonders of modern science been augmented by an eighth:
the ætas medica, for the variable duration
of which one’s chief occupation is being transported to and fro various modern
day temples of Asclepius. Last week I
had a kind of medical version of a busman’s holiday. Given a week’s reprieve from my wonted regime,
I spent my Wednesday instead in a gleaming new wing of the Langone Hospital in
New York having what is best described as a micro-collander infiltrated into my
cardiac appendage. There are not too
many things that leave you happy to get back to your good old chemo, so when
one appears it needs be noted.
But today
I’ll be back to chemo, which takes place in a medical suite in Plainsboro, some
three miles south of my house. When I
first arrived in these parts Plainsboro was a small village clustered around an
old church and surrounded by potato fields, presumably the “plains” alluded to
in its romantic name. All that has
changed, and it’s quite a bustling place now.
Gone are the potato fields. They
put up a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot. Actually it's a Marriott, a CVS pharmacy, and
a Panera, but same idea. Also numerous
medical offices, always to be found in proximity to retirement communities and
nursing homes, of which there are several round and about. The opium den I frequent—euphemistically
denominated an “infusion lab”--is a spacious well-lighted place divided into semi-private
cubicles, each furnished with a sybaritically luxurious high-tech chair with built-in
butt-warmer and more bells and whistles than First Class on Air France.
To get
there involves driving through Princeton’s Forrestal campus, the site of the
Plasma Physical Laboratory and its Project Matterhorn’s continuing efforts to
achieve fusion and an energy bonanza of mind-boggling opulence. Few humanists have even been there, but I am
lucky enough to have a most remarkable friend, a retired physicist, who has
shown me around a couple of times. The
campus is named for James V. Forrestal of the Class of 1915. The origins of my interest in Forrestal are
eccentric; he is the only famous person known to me with the initials JVF.
He was a genuine war hero, the brilliant Secretary of the Navy more
consequential for the defeat of Japan than even Admirals Halsey or Nimitz. He then became the first American Secretary
of Defense. He deserves to be
memorialized by the academy; he was a great proponent of government support for
scientific research. Unfortunately he is
today more remembered for his death than for his life. On May 22, 1949, he appears to have leapt to
his death from a sixteenth-floor window of a hospital in Bethesda, MD. I say “appears,” though suicide is not in
much doubt—just enough to float a dozen conspiracy theories involving Harry
Truman, the embryonic Israeli Mossad, and/or extraterrestrials.
Soon after
I arrived in England in 1958 there appeared on the cultural scene a literary
sensation in the form of a novel: The
Rack, by A. E. Ellis, the pseudonym of one Derek Lindsay. So far as I know, the literary world never
heard of this one-book wonder again; but sometimes one book suffices. The
Rack is the story of a tubercular English military officer, Paul, who
survived the War but is unlikely to survive the “cure” of two years of gruesome
therapy in an Alpine sanatorium. It
naturally invited comparison with the great Magic
Mountain (1924) of the great Thomas Mann, so I will offer one. Mann’s sanatorium is all about philosophy,
Ellis’s about tuberculosis. Seldom has
such a repellent subject received such a tragicomic treatment. For the comedy part you might begin with the
daunting advice in a brochure prepared by the institution’s weird superintendent. “Sexual activities are strongly discounselled
during illness and convalescence.
Patients should at all times bear in mind that a single orgasm (male or
female) is equivalent, in energy expended, to a five-mile walk over rough
country.” The tragedy part, of which
there is considerably more, is the remorselessness of suffering inflicted by a
dread disease exacerbated by human folly and cruelty. The reader very soon suspects that by the
last page Paul will be contemplating self-destruction. And so he is, and in a dauntingly literary
fashion. He reads on the last page of
the Memoirs of the painter Benjamin
Haydon the artist's anguished misquotation from the last page of King Lear written, perhaps, only minutes before he killed himself:
“Stretch me no more on this rough world.”
Paul realizes the citation is slightly wrong. Shakespeare’s phrase is “upon the rack of this tough world.”
I read The Rack and numerous other books in paperback
Penguins shared among a circle of friends.
One particularly brilliant member of this group, speaking of the novel’s
ending, said to me: “He must have been thinking of James Forrestal”. For the evidence suggests that Forrestal spent
his last moments alive copying out some twenty choral verses from Sophocles’s
tragedy Ajax, foreshadowing the
warrior’s suicide, the subject of the play.
It little surprised me that he knew about Forrestal, for he knew about
practically everything; but it does rather haunt me. My friend’s name, too, was James; and less
than a year later he put the muzzle of a fowling gun to his head and pulled the
trigger.
Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass!
He hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him
out longer.
The Death of Ajax (Greek krater)
