Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven
By Susan Richards Shreve
Houghton Mifflin, 214 pages, $24
It’s almost impossible to imagine from our vantage point of 2007 that polio scares were once a common feature of the landscape of childhood, before the Salk vaccine was put into widespread use in 1954 and virtually eradicated the disease. In her compelling memoir, “Warm Springs,” novelist Susan Richards Shreve recounts her own experience as a child who had contracted polio as a baby and lived from ages 11 to 13 as a patient at the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, an old spa-turned-rehabilitation hospital founded and funded by President Franklin Roosevelt.
Placing her personal story of self-discovery in the social and cultural context of the times, Shreve also provides a richly textured historical record of middle-class life in postwar America, an era of contradictory hopes, racial divides and McCarthyism, when girls were still expected to live by certain rules. By her own description, the young Susan was a “a girl of high temperament and little patience.” Separated from her beloved, protective mother and her father and younger brother Jeffrey, she gradually recognizes the effect her illness has on her family:
“Children who are ill know this about themselves. They aren’t blind to the pain and trouble their illness causes the people who love them. And I can imagine even in my own mother a silent exhaustion, a growing irritation, at what had befallen her young life, her brand-new marriage, in the first four years of mine.”
In the strangely homelike institutional setting of Warm Springs, one she describes as happy and democratic, Susan comes of age, refusing simply to be a sick child. Her lively imagination frequently gets her into trouble, and her fascination with storytelling allows her access to a world beyond the narrow confines of Warm Springs. Her most ardent desires focus on her future, her spiritual life, her curiosity about becoming a woman and her goal to become the kind of person who will attract friends. “I was always in the process of inventing someone I wasn’t, someone I might become,” she says in words that could easily spill from the mouth of any young girl on the brink of adolescence. Stuck in bed for much of her childhood, Susan quickly learns, “If I wanted to command the attention of visitors to my room so they’d want to stay with me, I would have to be engaging and uncomplaining and cheerful, full of stories to detain them.”
Spirited and rebellious, Susan wants what just about every adolescent girl desires — to be normal (read “likable”) — though in her case, this desire is complicated by her physical limitations and the invasive physical treatments she must endure. At heart she is a compassionate child, a champion of the underdog who takes under her wing some of the more-neglected children, including the deaf, and very troubled, daughter of one of the cleaning staff, which leads to a disaster she doesn’t fully understand.
One of Susan’s favorite pastimes is flying down the hall in her standard-issue wheelchair to play with the babies in the Children’s Ward. Another is spending time with Joey Buckley, her first love, who is a patient in the Boys’ Ward at Warm Springs.
Writing and talking about illness involves particular challenges, in part, as Susan Sontag reminds us, because of the limiting metaphors and myths that surround disease. Shreve writes that polio came with a stigma that it was somehow a dirty disease that afflicted the poor. But young Susan, while acknowledging the confusion over the “perplexing” and “unclear” boundaries, never lets the disease get in the way of being a person, though she struggles with what she refers to as her “habit of bursting out of the starting gate before the gun.”
This kind of self-reflection is likely borne from her reality as a child who “had spent long hours alone and knew the benefits — that a certain kind of courage was easier to come by alone, that I was more alert, my sense sharper, my vision in particular, and that as a solitary girl I would put myself forward in ways that wouldn’t be necessary in the company of my parents.”
In addition to developing her independence, her experiences at Warm Springs open the door to an evolving spiritual life. “I loved the ceremony of religion,” she tells us, and compares it to theater. Raised Quaker, she begins catechism with an Irish priest, Father James, who works at the center, and to whom she has become very attached. “What I must have been hoping to find with Father James was my own self,” she writes. In one of the most startling moments in the book, Susan one day finds herself being reprimanded by Father James for having violated a rule in an act of kindness that has gone awry. ” ‘You ask for trouble,’ ” he tells her. ” ‘Why ask for trouble? . . . Why do you need problems when you have enough?’ “
For this reader, Father James’ scorching words lie at the heart of the book, which is as much about the limits society places on a bright young woman, full of curiosity and imagination, as it is about her struggle with polio. Like many girls, Susan can be savagely critical of herself in what she perceives as her failure to please those she genuinely loves. Shreve writes: “I had never been a good girl, in the conventional perception of goodness as obedience, and at some level I knew that I needed a self-corrective list, as if I were learning a new language.”
What makes this memoir remarkable is the range of subjects Shreve juggles, including an intriguing history of Warm Springs and Roosevelt’s role there, as she places her own experience in the context of ’50s America. This book is as much about a time and place as it is about the struggles of a fascinating young woman to know and accept herself. “Traces,” Shreve informs us at the start of the book, “are little whispers of life in muscles destroyed by the polio virus. They promise the possibility of a new future.”
———-
Alyce Miller’s most recent book of fiction is the story collection “Water,” due out this year. She is a professor in the English department at Indiana University.
