Even a great mind can suffer the great insult of a stroke
Stroke is the third biggest killer in the UK, after cancer and heart disease. In the time most people will devote to reading this review, at least one person in Britain will suffer a stroke, what doctors call an "insult to the brain". And of those afflicted, one third will die. The brain-damaged survivors are a rag-tag army ranging from wheel-chair veterans to men and women with sticks to that tragically impaired minority who make an almost complete physical recovery but never recover the use of language, spoken or written.
Professor Sir John Hale was one of these latter stroke survivors. A brilliant Renaissance historian, with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances among the great and the good of British intellectual life, he was struck down at the age of 69 in 1992. His devoted wife Sheila found him on the floor of his study smiling "the sweet, witless smile of a baby". After a period of dreadful anxiety she properly describes as "hell", he was able to go home and, thanks to her refusal to write his case off as hopeless, slowly resumed some kind of limited normality.
Except he couldn't speak. Hale's "cerebral vascular accident" had so nuked the language centers in his brain that this brilliant, articulate and charismatic man was reduced to "Da woahs, da woahs, woahs, ach ga ga da woahs."
The amazing thing about John Hale was that this didn't seem to matter. Such was the charm and brilliance of his personality that friends and family (and even complete strangers) who spent time in his company often had the sense of having participated in a conversation. As Sheila Hale puts it: "His conversational behaviour is so natural that many people are persuaded that his voice, though evidently naked, is somehow clothed in meaning."
It sounds weird, and it is, but I can testify from my own meeting with Professor Hale in 1998 (both of us the walking wounded from the battlefield of cerebral vascular disorder) that although he had indeed "lost his language" he had not lost his extraordinary powers of communication. "There is something about his eyes and voice and body language" writes Mrs Hale, "that seems to speak more directly to their hearts than all the words with which he charmed and taught throughout his speaking life."
This book raises some profound questions about the relationship of language to our humanity, questions that Hale himself would have taken pleasure in. Sheila Hale's account of her husband's post stroke experience is really two books. The part that moved me the most "a kind of love letter", was the part that narrates the highs and lows of Hale's affliction. Sandwiched within this is a long, well researched analysis, based on her own vivid experience, of aphasia as it manifested itself in John's case. This will become required reading for those who treat this dreadful illness and who try to grapple with the fathomless mysteries of the brain.
What unites these two narratives - the memoir of a life in extremis, and a wife's painful quest for meaning - is Hale's honesty and courage and her cool analytical prose. Her suffering as a partner might have inspired self-pity and destructive rage. Instead she has channeled her energies into one of the most remarkable additions to the literature of illness in our time, a book that can stand alongside professor Hale's own marvelous oeuvre.
Robert McCrum, The Times, Wednesday June 26 2002
