Author's Back Despises Literature
By Leonard Wibberley
First printed on April 17, 1979
3/29/2018
The reason this is not going to be a very interesting column is that my back has gone out on me again.
My back is the anti-literature part of me. It utterly despises all writing, has never read a word in its life, has no use for novels or for poetry or for plays and would perk up a little over Shakespeare if it heard that he was a champion hammer thrower.
Once, before I took to letters, my back and I got along excellently together. It never gave me the slightest trouble and exulted in carrying two or three children or picking up heavy weights or playing soccer or wrestling or scuba diving.
But as soon as I turned to writing it became sulky and then downright inimical. The first time it rebelled against my literary career, I had just written a chapter of a book and lay down on a small couch to rest and consider whether there was not an easier way of making a living.
I fell asleep and when I woke up discovered that my back had rebelled. It had seized up and I could not straighten myself up, but walked around bent almost double and in intense pain.
I went to my doctor, who had me hobble down a corridor and then assured me that my left leg was a little shorter than my right leg and that was the cause of the trouble.
“But,” said I, “my left leg has been shorter than my right leg for half a century and my back has never given any trouble before.”
“You have a theory of your own?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “My back does not like me as an author. It would sooner I was a wrestler. It hates writing.”
“Take these,” he said and handed me a prescription. “Come back and see me in a week.”
But at the end of the week and two chapters further along, my back was as painful as ever—so I went to see an osteopath. He twisted me around as if I was a snake or a laundered sheet that had to be wrung out by hand and, at the end of it, my back was still sulking and still painful.
I went to another doctor who gave me some injections for it, but without effect.
Eventually, being a man of sense, I decided to drown myself. I put on a swimsuit and threw myself into the sea. As the third and I hoped last wave burst over me and the more interesting parts of my life were beginning to appear before me, my back suddenly straightened out.
All the pain was gone, so I swam ashore and cautiously returned to writing again.
But ever since, whatever exercise I take, my back at the oddest moments after thinking the thing over for a long time, will go out on me again. It wants me to be an athlete, not a writer.
Once I made a misstep coming down stairs and all the muscles of my back stiffened into iron plates and gave me wrench after wrench. Once I bent down to tie up my shoelace and it did the same thing.
Yesterday all I did was put a piece of paper in a wastepaper basket and the thing seized up and my wife returned home to find me on my hands and knees in the living room.
“Chalene and Deidre are not coming,” she said, thinking I was getting ready to give them a ride. They are my grandchildren.
“My back is killing me,” I replied. “Furthermore, I see someone has dropped some spaghetti sauce on this carpet which is not yet paid for.”
“It isn’t spaghetti sauce,” she said. “It’s strawberry jam.”
She assisted me into bed, where I drank two cups of hot coffee, a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and swallowed three aspirins. This is very hard on my stomach but my back likes the diet, for it is an animal, and now I am able to get about as spry as if I were but 80 years of age.
If you’re thinking it’s a slipped disc, it isn’t. I have had the whole of my spine X-rayed and all the pieces are in place. It is the muscles of my back and they have only one way of communicating with me, which is to seize up.
I call it “writer’s back” because the term has some stature and, if I am going to suffer from something, it might as well have an interesting name. I remember when W.B. Yeats was told by his doctor that be had arteriosclerosis and in an advanced stage.
“Arteriosclerosis,” Yeats exclaimed, delighted with the word. “Why I’d sooner have that than be pronounced emperor of the Seven Kingdoms of the Upper Nile.”
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