I have not winced, nor cried aloud       

                                             Kathleen Quinlan 

                                  (actress who played Deb in movie of 

                               "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden") 

                                           (credit: Wikipedia) 

                        

Here’s a post that gets its point from a work of literature. Art is safer to talk about than real life. After all, a novel is fiction, right?

One of the great novels of the last century is called “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden”. It is about a period during the life of a teenaged girl named “Deb”, who suffers a serious mental illness and ends up in an asylum for nearly three years. She does get better, due partly to her family’s support, but even more to some brilliant and compassionate work by her psychiatrist whose name is "Dr. Hannah Fried". 

It’s a brilliant novel and deserves to be rated as one of the best ten or so American novels ever written. Written by a woman about a woman being healed by a woman, with the love and support of her mom, who’s also – how gratifying! – a woman. Which is all beside the point.

It’s a brilliant novel, period, regardless of which gender, class, or race it focuses on. Universal, which seems to be rated of little importance these days. But all drivel aside, my post today focuses on one scene from that novel.

Deb’s story happens during World War Two. A lot of the men are far away fighting the Japanese and the Germans, which means that jobs are hard to fill. Some of the staff in Deb’s hospital are very caring and professional, but some definitely are not. In better times, they would not even have been there. They hate the job and hate the insane, who can be pretty trying at times, which is only what one would expect.

In one scene in the novel, the strongest woman on Deb’s ward, who has in the past done serious, physical injury to other patients and to staff, has been tied down on a gurney in a wet sheet pack, a measure which was used to calm violent patients. The point is that Helene, the patient in question, is helpless, and she is in a separate room off the main hallway of the ward. Almost soundproof. 3 a.m. There are two patients in there in wet sheet packs on this night, the other being Deb.

A seriously neurotic attendant named ‘Ellis’ is on duty for midnight shift. He has come in to check their pulses to see whether they have calmed down enough to be allowed to go to sleep in their beds. He is indifferent to Deb, but he despises Helene. It soon shows. When he turns her head to get easier access to her carotid pulse, he emphasizes his power over Helene with some unnecessary roughness. She is not to be toyed with, even strapped down helpless. She curses at him. He slaps her. She spits at him. He slaps her again.

Slap. Spit. Slap. Spit. Fist.

As Deb watches, helpless, humiliated, ashamed, he punches Helene ten or a dozen times hard, while she, of course, can’t do anything but spit at him. She spits blood, then blood and chips of teeth. She gives up when she is almost beaten unconscious. He takes her pulse, picks up his clipboard, writes something, and leaves.

The scene is ugly and infuriating. Even more for Deb, it is humiliating. She must witness this ugliness and see Helene broken by violence at the hands of a dysfunctional male who never should have been in such a position of power. She feels secretly ashamed that she didn’t scream, which was, of course, because she was scared. Helene would not cry out because of her own “hard girl” code. So in the end, what gets done about the matter is nothing.

My point today, by a bit of a lateral leap, is that we are witnessing in these times, the social parallel of Helene’s suffering. People – or we should say, whole peoples, whole tribes – in some dire circumstances, become just as tough, just as determined as Helene to endure no matter what. Right into the grave.

The Palestinians have become that. They have suffered for seventy years. Robbed, beaten, humiliated, starved, killed. Abandoned even by other Arab states. They didn’t get the kind of despairing, numb, cynical, and hard they are now in a decade or even a generation. It took years and years. But they’re there now.

The Israelis could kill ninety nine percent of the people in Gaza and the West Bank. The remaining one percent – under fifty thousand – would keep spitting blood and chips of teeth. From all over the earth.  

Deb got better. A good doctor. A supportive family, both due, at least in part, to their having money. She went back to the world.

Did Helene ever get better? The book does not say. She might have. Or she might have died there. She just gets dropped out of the story.

Her character no longer shapes or informs the narrative.

But Deb’s story is all fiction anyway. Who cares?