To a Would-Be Doctor-Writer

0Toa Would-Be Doctor-Writer Richard Selzer I receive your first literary effort with pleasure, and I take comfort from this further bond between us. You are not the first medical student who has written to tell me that he, too, wanted to be a writer. Most are like Mrs. Pendarvis: "I should like to write," she mused. "Not to publish. Just a few guiltily lovely lines to char in the grate when I am dying." But your first short story marks you as one with a difference. Do not imagine that this gives you license to abandon the hospital wards to spend all of your time scribbling. A writer must remain rooted in the real world. Only Rilke and Flaubert did not have to. Antaeus wrestled to the death every man who dared to set foot in his kingdom. Whenever he felt himself weakening he would bend to touch his mother, Ge, who was the earth. Taking strength from her, he would rise to vanquish his adversary. In the end, Antaeus was defeated only when Hercules held him aloft in the air and squeezed him to death. But, my dear Maupassant, the story you sent me lacks kindness. It is what the French call un conte cruel. While these may be as fascinating as snakes, they evoke the same single response—horror. Jonah and the Whale, really! If you presume to retell the Bible, you must do more than describe the gastric mucosa of a whale and the physiologic process of vomiting. Else you will be no more than a literary grotesque. A writer, like a doctor, must strive for a kinder heart. A battlefield is not a mere jewelry of beautiful wounds. As you would not lambaste a patient with the grisly details of his impending doom, so ought you not to be cruel or condescending to your characters. It is wrong to lie to a patient in order to encourage him falsely. But, as any gardener knows, it is possible to fool flowers into blooming by keeping a light on all night. In writing, as in medicine, follow Emily Dickinson: "Tell the truth, but tell it slant." There will be plenty of time for horror. There always is. Nevertheless, Jonah is the quintessential surgical character, and you were instinctive to choose him. In every operation the surgeon is Jonah, albeit not one so reluctant as the original in that he does not say Literature and Medicine 1 (Rev. ed., 1992) 55-60 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 56 TO A WOULD-BE DOCTOR-WRITER non serviam. The patient on the table is the whale into whose body the surgeon enters in the service of God. At the end of the operation, the surgeon is spewed forth onto the dry land, and they are both saved. I long for the day when you, too, will make rounds and see upon the nightstands of your patients one or the other of your books. This used to cause me anxiety. My God, I thought! It cannot be good for them to read these things. At least, not preoperatively. But now I feel different. Just as the patients expose themselves to me, so do I show myself to them. We are equal. Some six years ago, my first book was published. From my electrocardiogram , you would have thought I had written Madame Bovary. The book was a collection of macabre stories (like yours) that no one ought to read after dark. Not long after, I was returning a book to the New Haven Public Library. The librarian there is an old friend. Just ahead of me at the desk stood one of those aboriginal Yankees still found in the cities of New England. Picket thin she was, and with a bun of iron-gray hair impacted at the back of her scalp. I saw at once that she was returning my book! My heart leapt as I beheld . . . that sort of thing. The librarian saw this, too, and thinking to garner for me a compliment within earshot, she said to the woman, "What did you think of that book?" The woman paused, held my little book between thumb and...