An Opportunity of Years by Emily Waples

An Opportunity of Years 

A few days before Christmas 1962, Katherine Anne Porter walked down the hill from Rome’s Hotel d’Inghilterra and stood in the room where Keats died: a narrow chamber with high, ornate ceilings and a broad window overlooking the Spanish Steps. “I looked at that scene, the very last he ever looked at,” Porter wrote to a friend, “and I can’t tell you how nearly his presence took shape there in that place; I never felt such a living sympathy with a dead person before, except with Alexander—the Adam of my World War I story,” she qualified.

Porter’s “World War I story” is, of course, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, her semi-autobiographical short novel of 1939, drawn from her experiences during the autumn of 1918, when she met an English soldier named Alexander Barclay, who died of the Spanish Flu; she nearly did, too. “Short novel” was Porter’s preferred term for her genre; novella, she insisted, was a “slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything.” But to term Pale Horse, Pale Rider a “World War I story” seems almost willfully oblique. After all, the war exists in the periphery, in the free-floating fear that never quite settles, in the certain proximity of death, in the Liberty Bond salesmen who bombast from street corners. 

But then, perhaps this is Porter’s point. For many Americans, this was what the war was: a distant curiosity, rendered insistently present via parades and other forms of performative patriotism. Meanwhile, inexplicably, thousands of otherwise-healthy young adults fell ill with influenza, developing the sort of severe pneumonia that was usually reserved for the elderly and infirm: legions of the young, gasping for breath in hospital hallways, drowning in the oceans of their lungs.  

*

Keats, famously, was twenty-five when he died of tuberculosis—a disease that attacks lung tissue, creating cavities that fill with necrotic fluid. In its advanced stages, it was inevitably fatal, as the Scottish physician Sir James Clark—who had treated Keats, misdiagnosing him with nondescript stomach trouble—grimly noted in his 1834 Treatise on Tubercular Phthisis, or Pulmonary Consumption: “we might as reasonably expect to restore vision when the organization of the eye is destroyed, or the functions of the brain when the substance of that organ is reduced by disease to a pultaceous mass,” Clark wrote, “as to cure a patient whose lungs have been extensively destroyed by tuberculous disease.” 

When he started coughing blood in February 1820, Keats—who had trained as a surgeon before turning himself over to poetry—could clearly anticipate the pathological trajectory. “I know the color of that blood; —it is arterial blood,” he reportedly told his friend Charles Armitage Brown. “That drop of blood is my death-warrant,” he declared; “I must die.” 

Almost exactly one year later, he did. 

*

Porter was twenty-five when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis for the first time. She was treated at the Woodlawn Union Tubercular Hospital in Dallas, and then at a second sanitarium in Denver. By September 1918, she had recovered enough to accept a job as a reporter with the Rocky Mountain News. Yet within a month, she was desperately sick with a 105-degree fever, victim to the escalating epidemic that had shut down the city. While she languished in the hospital, the newspaper set her obituary in type—only the date of death left blank, suspended in anxious expectation. 

“But I didn’t die,” Porter recounted in a Denver Post interview in 1965. “I mustered the will to live.” She hovered in the death-adjacent delirium that Pale Horse, Pale Rider renders in weird, haunting lyricism. Ultimately, she made an unlikely recovery after receiving a shot of strychnine. 

“And the boy, Miss Porter?” the interviewer probed.

“It’s in the story,” she replied. 

*

Porter’s protagonist, Miranda Gay, and her soldier-boyfriend, Adam Barclay, are both twenty-four when they are caught up in the interruption of the war. They dance and go to museums and theaters and amble through the streets of Denver, smoking cigarettes and talking. They sip coffee at drug store counters, tossing off bold, wry jokes in the face of a mortal horror, a horror that is heightened by its sheer ordinariness. “Came in to make my will,” Adam tells her, “and get a supply of toothbrushes and razor blades.” The latter, we realize, is an act of sheer optimism. 

They banter. The reality of trench warfare is quickly twisted into comic absurdity. Their laughter tinges on the hysterical. “My, it’s a funny war,” Miranda says; “isn’t it? I laugh every time I think about it.” 

Funny is a word Adam has already used, in reference to “this funny new disease” that has seen soldiers “dying like flies” overseas. This is why he has been granted an unrequested extension of leave; this is why he has time to linger and laugh and flirt and fall in love with her. 

Twice during their stroll through the city, they are forced to pause for passing funerals.

* 

I was twenty-four when I was diagnosed with cancer. I was broke and listless and living in an impossibly small studio flat in London, where I’d moved in pursuit of a boy. Before my third chemotherapy treatment, I spent all the money I had left from my teaching job to take this boy on a weekend trip to Rome, where we drank water out of fountains and bought slices of pizza on the street and paid admission to stand in the room where Keats died. I adjusted my headscarf over my bald, sweating head as I contemplated the impossible smallness of the poet’s bed, imagining him weak and feverish and with nowhere to turn.  

The deathbed is a replica, of course; out of fear of contagion, the real bed was burned by the Italian authorities.

I bought a slim volume of poems in the gift shop and insisted that we take the metro a few stops out of the city, to the Protestant Cemetery where Keats is buried. Since I was immuno-suppressed from the chemo, it was a relief to escape the tourist-addled piazzas and linger amid the stones and cypresses. I sat beside his nameless grave and read his odes. 

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die. 

I was convinced that I would be dead soon; at every scan, I braced for the worst news, because if there is one thing I cannot abide, it is the foolishness of false hope.  

But of course, I didn’t die—and not because I “mustered the will to live,” or anything close to it; I just happened not to, not then. It happened—or didn’t—about as accidentally as anything ever had. 

The boy didn’t die, either; he married someone else. 

* 

Keats traveled to Italy in the fall of 1820 along with his friend Joseph Severn, hoping that the country’s more salubrious air would soothe his suffering lungs. This sort of health tourism was the standard prescription for the tubercular subjects of his day. Even into the twentieth century, doctors still recommended relocation as remedy; Katherine Anne Porter, for example, attempted to resolve her “ungodly struggle” with tuberculosis (or was it bronchitis? It never seemed certain) by migrating to kinder climates: Switzerland, Mexico. “I have no intention of dying, I never have,” she wrote to her sister in 1930, “but I saw the X-ray of my lungs and they are pretty funny looking.”  She was headed to Guadalajara, having been “ordered out of this climate.” 

This was the same year that seventeen-year-old Albert Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an affliction that would plague him all his life. After a later recurrence, Camus, too, would be ordered out of his climate, seeking relief in the Massif Central. “What awaits me in the Alps,” he wrote in his notebook, “is, together with loneliness and the idea that I shall be there to look after myself, the awareness of my illness.” In this penetrating solitude, he would author The Plague. 

*

“It seems to be a plague,” Miranda remarks of the funny new disease, “something out of the Middle Ages.” If death by the modern methods of trench and chemical warfare is too staggering for her to contemplate, death by plague seems anachronistic, superannuated. Either is inconceivable.

Yet even as she cannot quite grapple with the disease’s reality, she is already experiencing its intimations: a “burning slow headache,” a loss of taste, and through it all a sense of “something terribly wrong,” something unnamable but also uncannily knowable. “This is the beginning of the end of something,” she thinks, “Something terrible is going to happen to me.”  That night, she falls deliriously ill. There are no available ambulances, no doctors or nurses. The hospital is full, and her landlady threatens to turn her out onto the street. 

“I tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God,” the landlady cries as Adam ushers her inside.

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” Camus would famously write, “yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

*

Keats’s last letter is dated November 30, 1820. “I have a habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence,” he wrote to Brown. “God knows how it would have been—but it appears to me—however, I will not speak of that subject.” 

I’d read Keats’s letters for the first time during my cancer treatment, finding them moving and maudlin in turns. (Keats’s late letters to Fanny Brawne—‘Think of nothing but me,’ etc—pathetic, I jotted in my journal).  But posthumous existence got me, or I got it, or so I thought. It was how I felt on chemo, unreal and wraith-like, everything half-speed and tasteless. Almost two months since diagnosis and no more meaning in it, I wrote solemnly after returning from Rome; almost a quarter of a century alive and no more meaning in that either; nothing to show. I always thought I’d have that–whatever it is–something to show. 

“I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter,” Keats closed his final message to Brown. “I always made an awkward bow.”

*

There is a touching awkwardness to the scene where Adam tends to Miranda in her boarding house bedroom, as they are thrust into a sudden, embarrassing intimacy—and there is mortal risk, both realize, in this proximity. He wipes her face, offers her orange juice and ice cream. She apologizes for vomiting.

“This time last night,” she muses, “we were dancing.” 

In contemplating what she feels is coming, she talks with a mawkishness I am willing to forgive, having operated mainly in this mode when I was also twenty-four and also (I thought) dying. So far, she says, she has nothing to show: “There’s nothing to tell, after all, if it ends now, for all this time I was getting ready for something that was going to happen later, when the time came.”

“But it must have been worth having until now, wasn’t it?” Adam presses. 

“Not if this is all,” she insists. She is at once relentlessly anti-sentimental and sentimentally attached to a counterfactual future. 

She drifts to sleep, wakes screaming. Adam goes to the corner stand for coffee. “Good-by for five minutes,” he says.  

Of course, she never sees him again. 

* 

“He is gone,” Severn began a letter to Charles Brown on February 27, 1821, four days after Keats’s death; “he died with the most perfect ease – he seemed to go to sleep.”  But then, getting to this point of perfect ease had taken so much struggle: months of waning, waiting; four days of extreme decline; then, at last, the seven final hours Severn alludes to in this letter, in which he held his friend’s feverish body and watched him choke and sputter on phlegm—“but I cannot say more now,” he breaks off, “I am broken down beyond my strength—I cannot be left alone—I have not slept for nine days.” 

The poet’s body had already been autopsied. His lungs, Severn notes, “were completely gone.” So was the furniture; the police had come to confiscate it.

The letter is never sent. Severn sleeps. The furniture burns.  

* 

Porter returned from Keats’s room transformed, or so she claimed. “The presence of that bravery and that genius and that love flourishing in the narrow room, in the face of a hard life and a long death, has touched and changed me, turned me back to my path, has restored me to my own life,” she wrote. “I was suffering more than I knew, as if I had lost everything and yet could not name it or tell when it began to go.” 

Four years later, in a 1968 Paris Review interview, Porter would reflect on the Spanish Flu in a somewhat similar register: “It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready.” 

Improbably, Porter survived the most devastating pandemic in modern history. Half a century later, she maintained that she could make some sense of the alteration its losses wrought on her. Her biographer Joan Givner maintains skepticism that Porter’s relationship with the dead English soldier Alexander Barclay, whatever it was, approached the idealized, chaste flirtation represented in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. More likely, Givner speculates, over the decades, Porter had fallen in love with a character of her own creation: “the Adam of my World War I story.”

And yet what is significant about Pale Horse, Pale Rider is that there are no such romantic transformations, no revelations. Miranda comes into consciousness on Armistice. Amid the stack of correspondence that has collected by her bedside is a letter informing her of Adam’s death from influenza. Outside, there are explosions. 

“How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms—the difference is amazing Love,” Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in 1820, while “lingering upon the borders of health.” He was clinging to the false promise of time: “Let me have another opportunity of years before me,” he pleaded, “and I will not die without being remember’d.” 

In her survival, Porter’s twenty-four-year-old protagonist is offered an “opportunity of years.” She is altered, surely—but for what can she possibly be ready? The final line is a knife twist: “now there would be time for everything.”

Sometimes, Porter shows, the restoration to one’s own life is precisely where the suffering lies. Sometimes, we are suffering exactly as much as we know.

Emily Waples is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Gordon Square Review, River Teeth, and Southern Humanities Review.