CHAPTER FOUR

A Tale of Two Eyes

While I was still at college, a situation arose which would affect my whole life, and would cast its reflections across my writing and

## particularly over my poetry. It is something that I hesitate to speak

of, as I tend to squirm at recitals of personal ailments, in which there may be an element either of morbidness or of self-pity, if not of both. However, in this case the facts must be told if the story is to be kept in perspective. While in most ways I have been blessed with excellent health all my life, in one respect the record has been less than perfect: with regard to my eyes. Indeed, the facts have, I can say without exaggeration, been unusual.

Multitudes, particularly among students, are known to suffer from optical complaints; therefore, when my eyes began to bother me I had no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary. There had, it is true, been some disagreement among specialists as to the source of the complaint: one had prescribed glasses for far-sightedness, and another had, confusingly, ordered lenses for near-sightedness. But the disturbances did not become acute until my first graduate year, when, at my father’s urging, I was studying law (which I was to abandon with a sigh of relief that I can almost hear even now). I would have the alarming experience of walking down a street at night and seeing a lamp-post split into two. Or I would stare at a man, and he would divide into twins. True, the twins would always be reassociated, after some queer shifting, wavering, and dancing. No! do not suspect that I had been drinking; my headiest beverage was milk. The gift of double sight was, however, annoying, though perhaps little more than annoying; what was more alarming was that, at the same time, I was developing an inability to do close work. Pains would shoot through my eyeballs; the muscles would quiver and flicker and refuse to focus on the page; there came a time when I could not so much as glance at the morning paper. College work was, of course, now out of the question, though by special dispensation I was permitted to take my examinations on the typewriter, which I could use with but little eye-strain.

Several oculists, consulted in swift succession, attempted different remedies. One did the obvious, and prescribed new glasses; another ordered eye exercises; a third recommended prisms--lenses of a special type, which, I was told, would act as crutches for my eyes. But nothing was of any avail. During an entire summer, since I could not read, I worked at my father’s behest as a life insurance agent (a vocation for which I showed an incapacity that was all but total, though I did have many delightful conversations with interesting people, none of whom had any intention whatever of ordering policies). When the summer was over, and my eyes gave more cause for concern than ever, a Stockton physician told my father of a specialist in San Francisco who might help me. And thus it came about that, accompanied by my parent, I paid my first visit to Dr. O (whose full name I withhold, for reasons that will soon be apparent).

Dr. O was a square-faced, beefy-cheeked man of about forty, who wore glasses, just like every other eye doctor I have ever seen. He lost no time in diagnosing my case, and appalled me with the announcement, “Young man, you are suffering from exophoria.”

“X O what?” I asked, my heart sinking.

“Exophoria. It’s what the man on the street knows as being wall-eyed.”

In other words, my eyes were not working together; they were diverging from each other, or turning outward, and at times each formed a separate image, which accounted for my seeing double. But what was the remedy? There was only one possibility, unless I wished the malady to get worse and worse until I had virtually lost the use of one eye. The cure--which should be applied as soon as possible--was an operation or series of operations to draw the muscles together; for this Dr. O had developed a special technique, which he often applied with entire success.

The prospect of getting back the full use of my eyes, the hope of being able to read again, was something for which I would have pawned my future, if anyone would have put up money on so doubtful a commodity. And so, after some deliberation, Dr. O was commissioned to perform the operations.

I need not go into the details. The first of the series was scheduled at a hospital, to which I hopefully walked one morning after a hearty breakfast (no one had advised me that the very worst thing to do before an operation is to eat, or that the resulting digestive disturbances would cause me more distress than the after-symptoms of the incision itself). During the operation something seemed to go wrong, or it may be that the local anaesthetic was not far-reaching enough, for at one point it felt exactly as if the surgeon was trying to pull off the top of my head. However, this was but a momentary sensation; finally, to my vast relief, the operation was over; and subsequently two other operations were carried out, one of them a minor one, performed at Dr. O’s office.

In general, as I can thankfully testify, Dr. O did achieve his objective. The “exophoria” was sharply reduced; the long hoped-for, long-coveted time did arrive when I could once more concentrate on a book. But just at this point fate, with sly secret wiles, had her little trick in store for me.

As I sat in a college classroom not long after the bandages of the last operation were removed, the frosted lamps above began to hurt my eyes. Yet these lights were not particularly bright; they were, in fact, of a kind I had long been used to and had never noticed before. This was my first intimation that my eyes could no longer endure direct exposure to ordinary artificial light. But the knowledge was to grow upon me in the days and months that followed. Somewhere, somehow, something had gone wrong in one of the operations; Dr. O had cut too deeply into the muscles; had ruined their delicate natural balance, and impaired forever their accommodation to light and motion.

This was proved not only by the marked new sensitiveness to light; it was shown by the fact that my eyes could not adjust to rapid movements, as of a bird darting before my face; while light in motion, and especially flickering light, could cause me acute pain. It may seem strange to those who have not had the experience, but I have never since been able to see a match struck half a block away without a prick of pain; no one (unless I am forewarned and have closed my eyes) can switch on a light, nor pull a shade up or down without making it feel as if little hands tear and clutch at my eye-muscles; flickering candles at a dinner party may cause me pain in the eyeballs and

## partial inability to use my eyes for as much as two weeks; the spurt

of a flashlight or the glare of automobile headlamps may stab me like daggers; while bright lights of any kind are a torture. Thus, though I lived in New York for years, I avoided all artificially illuminated streets whenever possible, and my definition of hell was Broadway at night--this was, indeed, not the least of my reasons for exchanging New York in 1938 for the wood-lanes of a small California suburban town.

A recent incident may illustrate my predicament. Not long ago I attended a writers’ conference, which opened with a panel discussion in which I was expected to participate. But upon reaching the discussion room, I found it dominated from above by a flood-light like a locomotive headlamp, making it impossible for me to enter. My wife Flora, therefore, stepped in where I could not tread, and tried to explain the situation to the hostess; but the latter (like most people) failed to understand, and made no offer to dim the quite superfluous glare. Hence I had no choice but to absent myself from the meeting which I had come two thousand miles to attend.

Other incidents in a similar vein come back to mind. I remember, for example, the case of the usually considerate old lady who (at considerable cost to my eyes) decided to keep a purely ornamental blaze burning in her fireplace because “otherwise the fuel would be wasted.” Likewise, there was the case of the lady, a friend of many years’ standing, who had invited Flora and me to a Christmas Eve party, and who--though she well knew the state of my eyes--had decorated the table with lighted candles. I made no comment or request; but as we sat down at the table, I adjusted a pair of dark glasses, which would reduce though they would not eliminate the irritation. At this the hostess turned to me defensively. “Sorry, Stanton, you’ll have to get used to those candles. We just can’t put them out--it wouldn’t be the Christmas spirit.” I had occasion to wonder about her idea of the Christmas spirit during long subsequent evenings when I lay with closed eyes in a dark room.

Still another case--not injurious to my eyes, though it did not leave me quite unruffled--was that of the old friends, the Grillers, who had invited Flora and me to their home for the evening. All went well until Mary Griller remembered some moving pictures of last summer’s vacation trip. “I know Stanton can’t look at them,” she said, regretfully, “but I’m sure he wouldn’t want to deprive Flora of the opportunity.” Being foolishly polite, I admitted that I was not such a brute as to deny Flora anything so precious (she afterwards confessed to me that she could have missed the pictures without loss). The hostess then led me out to the only available room, the kitchen. And there, without even a book or paper to help while away the time, I passed a somewhat-less-than-sociable hour, in company with the colored maid, who glowered at me as if resenting this invasion of her private terrain, or as if wondering what offense I had committed to subject me to this peculiar punishment.

But did I make no efforts to overcome the ailment? Ah, yes, I made many efforts; eye specialists on both coasts have tried remedies, tests, and drugs without stint--and without success. Long ago, I resigned myself to the fact that the condition is one I must live with, though it has altered my life in little ways and great. It is a mere trifle that my house, unlike most others in the area, must do without a fireplace; it is likewise of no importance, though occasionally a source of embarrassment compelling my temporary withdrawal from a company, that I have been unable to face photographers’ flashlights. I do not too greatly regret that, for me, motion pictures and television are out of the question; nor that my inability to face headlights and sun-flashes has made it inadvisable to drive a car--though in the suburban town where I have lived ever since 1938 and where even the most impecunious family has at least one broken-down four-wheeler and most have two or three, the lack of a car is regarded, if not as a proof of miserliness, at least as an eccentricity that no one but a poet would commit.

However, these are mere minor deprivations. I have sometimes more deeply regretted the fact that I can go out at night only very sparingly, if at all; and that I am debarred from many literary and other gatherings. This has, inevitably, cut down my connections and contacts, and may even give the false impression that I am anti-social. But nothing, absolutely nothing, has seemed of any importance beside the fact that my eyes, with all their impairments, have served and are still serving my main life-purpose; for this I have been deeply thankful.

Moreover, I sometimes wonder if the balance is not on the positive side. I wonder if some overseeing power, planning to keep me on the track of my major interests and make it impossible to yield to frequent diversions, could have devised a more serviceable disability than mine. Many a night, lying in the dark in order to rest my eyes, perhaps listening to the soft music drifting to me from the phonograph or tape recorder, I have meditated on matters that have given rise to poems, poems I might not otherwise have written. And those poems have been created without the use of eyes, since I developed long ago an ability to compose as much as two sonnets in my mind without putting any word on paper, and can even revise the stanzas, which in many cases have not been jotted down until the next day.

And so it may be that that error, that unnoticed slip of the knife made long ago by Dr. O, has been my poetic salvation.