Surrealism under the Knife in Myla Goldberg's Wickett's Remedy

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.

—Emerson, "Experience"

Myla Goldberg opens her short "Author's Note" to Wickett's Remedy (2005) with a historical reference to the overwhelming influenza pandemic of 1918, the cause of which remains debatable, she says, although its devastating effect is a matter of record. Basing her observations on five years of writing and research for her novel, she states that the pestilence "killed more Americans in ten months than died in all twentieth-century wars combined, and killed well over 20 million people worldwide."¹ If the epidemic began in the United States, and American troops carried it into Europe when they sailed there to fight in the last battles of World War I, as Goldberg says is generally thought to have happened, then many of those soldiers, following their patriotic dream of destroying the German army, saw it transform into a nightmare that brought death and destruction to themselves instead before they ever reached the battlefields. Goldberg illustrates the havoc indirectly through letters and reports as well as shocking snatches of conversation aboard a military transport ship in which large numbers of infected troops are dying as they sail to war.

These are but a few of the many assorted fragments, announcements, newspaper articles, tributes, advertisements, and letters that she has incorporated in the construction of her surrealistic second novel, Wickett's Remedy. Michael Kilkenny, for example, mails two such letters home to South Boston from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he is sent on being drafted, having rushed to register as soon as President Wilson declared war against Germany. In the first he describes his initial week's experience of army life at Fort Devens. In his second letter a week later he tells his family that "a nasty flu [is] going around" (105), and in the next communication received from the fort they learn that Michael already has died of it. Thinking back on him, and recalling his son as heroic and patriotic as he excitedly came home waving his draft notice "like it was a winning lottery ticket" (95), his father is proud of him for having signed up for the draft, but the fun-loving young man, recently married, has died before he can fight the despised enemy, before he can even board a troopship for Europe. Michael's family is deeply grieved, of course, especially his sister Lydia, younger than her brother by a year and already a widow, having lost her husband, Henry Wickett, to the flu after a short marriage.

Henry, like Lydia's brother Michael, also attempts to join the army: "As a soldier I will be able to write about everything that is going on over there. By the time I return, I'll be a first-class journalist" (52), he writes in a letter to her before leaving. The letter, she recalls, however, is short, and after his death, Henry from beyond the grave remembers his actual and much longer letter, as cited in the sidebar of Goldberg's page, where the dead speak indirectly to each other and to whomever and whatever may be able to overhear them.² While still alive, he had said that, writing as an army journalist, "I will . . . fulfill what I have always suspected to be my true calling" (52). But unlike Michael, Henry is rejected because of his basic frailty. Sensitive and talented as a writer, he is unrealistic, a dreamer somewhat like Lydia herself, but unlike her he cannot realize his impractical dreams. When he meets Lydia and begins to court her, she is a saleslady in a large department store in Boston where she has worked since graduating from grammar school eight years earlier in order to escape the old neighborhood at least during the days. He, in sharp contrast, is a medical student, an unhappy one as she learns to her dismay soon after their marriage when he informs her then that he no longer aspires to become a doctor and has consequently left medical school. Instead he plans to "realize [his...