Courtesy Houghton Mifflin
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven
By Susan Richards Shreve (Houghton Mifflin)
Review by Julia M. Klein, July 2007
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In the 1950s, before Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin finished their race for the
cure, young "polios" were often shuttled off to Warm Springs Polio
Foundation to recover the use of their paralyzed limbs. The Georgia hospital
and rehabilitation center established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered
state-of-the-art medical care and genuine community. But it was also a vaguely
Dickensian place where everyone was at least temporarily orphaned.
Susan Richards Shreve's experience there was complex and emotionally
nuanced: she emptied bedpans, nurtured babies, befriended a priest, exercised
her storytelling gifts, and fell innocently in love. But what traces of this
two-year sojourn remain in her memory and her adult life and, for that matter,
in our history of the time? This is the question at the heart of Shreve's
memoir, Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven,
whose title also plays on the notion of "traces" of muscle left after
paralysis.
An English professor at George Mason University as well as a prolific
novelist, Shreve constructs her narrative by weaving back and forth in time,
and hedges it with a certain reticence that may be personal or may be literary.
The result is delicate and precisely observed—but also frustrating, with
few obvious dramatic payoffs. We get at first only fugitive glimpses of her
life at Warm Springs, including her painful surgeries, tentative friendships,
and (not entirely unjustified) feelings of abandonment. Shreve teases us,
circling around the tragedy that finally caused her eviction from this
imperfect Eden and that still haunts her today.
Aside perhaps from her polio, Shreve's mother was the most powerful
influence on her childhood. Mostly loving and supportive, her mother appears to
have suffered from a variety of phobias that the family took in stride. For an
entire year, she confined herself to her bedroom and the family ordered its
existence around her. "We lived in …a finely spun fairy-tale,"
thinking this life was normal, Shreve reports. Her mother was also
afraid to drive alone. Later on, she fled her daughter's surgical bedside
at Warm Springs—a pivotal abandonment—to accommodate her own
stepmother, the embodiment of fairy-tale evil.
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Or was she? Both memory and perception, Shreve knows, may derive as much
from need as truth. "I didn't realize until I was older," she
writes, "that seeing is a matter of choice." Her first, early attempt
to write about Warm Springs was an unpublished novel ("that quite awful
manuscript," she calls it). Its ending reversed reality, creating a more
just outcome—what she required at the time. She and other
"polios" were, she now writes, "proficient at denial." The
memoir is thus an act of courage: an attempt to see clearly her stigmatizing
illness, her own adolescent rebellion against it, and the devastating
consequences of that rebellion on the boy she loved.
In
Warm Springs, she spirits herself and the reader back into
the body and mind of her girlish self, recalling the powerful enchantments cast
on her by a priest, a baby, and a young boy, Joey Buckley, whose dearest and
most hopeless wish was to play college football. With the exception of one
girlfriend, none of her companions at Warm Springs remained part of her life.
She wrote the book, she says, "not so much to discover anyone I'd
lost, but to understand why I had wanted to lose them." In the process,
though, she recovers precious traces of her past, along with a mostly forgotten
slice of American social history.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, writes
for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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