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While learning this spring that the coronavirus was taking a disproportionate toll on men, I was reading David Lehman’s account of his bladder cancer, a disease that also disproportionately afflicts men. His brilliantly circumspect 2019 memoir, “One Hundred Autobiographies,” reminded me that a conventional model of masculinity inhibits some men from expressing their emotional responses to assaults on the body.
An accomplished poet, editor and scholar, Mr. Lehman exhibits grace under the pressure exerted by disabling treatments. He thereby provides insight into the benefits and liabilities of masculine reticence about disease. Like him, quite a few men may judge it unmanly to discuss medical procedures that can unman them. Is this stoicism empowering or disabling?
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In “One Hundred Autobiographies,” Mr. Lehman informs us that he is telling and not telling his cancer story. After he discovered blood in his urine, he produced 100 vignettes to recount his life. The brief sketches were composed while he underwent several cystoscopies, a succession of transurethral resections of bladder tumors (TURBTs), eight weeks of an immunotherapy regimen, four months of chemotherapy for metastatic disease and a five-hour surgery, “in which they remove your bladder, some lymph nodes, and choice other parts of you and reorganize your insides,” along with a slew of side effects: a “heart stop,” neuropathy, infection, weight loss, digestive complaints. “And mostly I kept my cool. Mostly.”
Mr. Lehman explains in the book that he does not want to “make cancer the sun around which the rest of the planets revolve”: “I don’t want to talk about it, think about it, do anything about it except show up on time for every last appointment and try not to complain.”
While the downside of this approach means we don’t learn much about bladder cancer, the upside means we learn a good deal about Mr. Lehman: about his immigrant parents, who met in New York City after fleeing the Nazis; his observant upbringing in the Inwood section of Manhattan; his education at Columbia University; his famous mentors and friends — Lionel Trilling, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said — as well as his favorite travels, songs, jokes, movies, authors and sports teams. It is intriguing to get acquainted with an artist-critic who has shaped the contemporary poetry scene since 1988 as the founder and series editor of the annual anthology The Best American Poetry.
from "A Manly Response to Disease" by Susan Gubar in The New York Times, September 24, 2020.
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