A Hundred Names for Love

The following is taken from a book review in the NYT.

How Language Heals
By ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Published: April 15, 2011

Diane Ackerman and Paul West have combined brilliant literary careers with the most enviable of marriages, a “decades-long duet.” Speculating on their longevity as a couple in “One Hundred Names for Love,” Ackerman writes: “We stayed together for the children — each was the other’s child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful. . . . All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”


ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE
A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing
By Diane Ackerman
322 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.


Excerpt: ‘One Hundred Names for Love’ (Google Books)

Lives: The Husband’s Speech (Februa
As a young man, West had been an R.A.F. officer and a collegiate and county cricketer, and had graduated with a first from Oxford, something achieved through impressive feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle — he managed both. A novelist by the time he and Ackerman fell in love in the early 1970s, he “had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons,” Acker man writes. Indeed, words were the oxygen of their love. Every morning, she knew she’d “find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away. . . . A new note appeared almost every day for decades.”

Thus it was particularly tragic when, in 2003, West suffered a stroke that left him with global aphasia: an inability to produce words or to understand words spoken to him. “He had chosen to live the proverbial ‘life of the mind’ to the exclusion of all else, reserving his energy for writing and for his equally word-­passionate wife,” Ackerman writes. “Taking words from Paul was like emptying his toy chest, rendering him a deadbeat, switching his identity, severing his umbilical to loved ones and stealing his manna.” His new vocabulary consisted of only one word, a meaningless syllable that he repeated, raising the volume when he was frustrated: “MEM, MEM, MEM. . . .”

Ackerman is an unwavering presence at her husband’s side. As a naturalist, she produces observations that make this book so much more than a pathography, or a narrative of illness: “In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it’s easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul’s old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share.”

West’s every utterance becomes an exhausting guessing game. Years later, after he has recovered the ability to speak and write — though “aphasia still plagues him with its merry dances, . . . its occasionally missed adverbs and verbs, its automatically repeated words or phrases,” Acker man explains — he is able to describe his own efforts. “On rare occasions,” he tells his wife, “the word I sought lay like an angel, begging to be used, even if only to be used in spirit ditties of no tone. I had the beginnings of a word, . . . maybe miles away, maybe too far for customary use, and it would remain, a delusive harbinger of night, a word unborn, doomed to remain unsaid as humm — or thal — unable to complete itself because of my aphasic ineptitude.”

A speech therapist working with West at home points to a picture of an angel, and West says “cherubim,” which the therapist thinks is a nonsense word. Acker­man corrects her, then decides to devise her own exercises “tailored to his lifelong strengths, words and creativity, exercises with a little fun, a little flair, and not condescending.” She realizes, too, that he has a great desire to write again, and she helps him at first by taking dictation — a hugely difficult task. Eventually, as he gradually improves, he begins to write on his own.

Why would West want to write when he is already expending huge energy trying to convey the simplest of desires? “Because of the huge gap between what he could say and what he could think,” Ackerman recalls. “Ideas inched through his speech, but they whipped around his thoughts like ice yachts.” Or as she quotes West explaining it: “The contrast reassured me as to what lay ahead. It was merely a matter of lining up the two in sync, making a match between my pall-mall thought and aphasia. Would it take six months or a year, or never happen at all? This was the great unknown of my life.”

As in her previous work — “A Natural History of Love” and “A Natural History of the Senses” being my favorites — here, Ackerman weds exquisite writing with profound insights, this time into speech and imagination: “Creativity is an intellectual adventure into those jungles where the jaguars of sweet laughter croon, with a willingness to double back, ignore fences or switch directions at the drop of a coconut.”

The book’s title stems from the fact that “once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo.” The stroke has left him struggling to say his wife’s name. When a friend asks him, “Do you have a pet name for Diane?” his face falls “as if touched by a Taser,” Ackerman writes. “ ‘Used to have . . . hundreds,’ he said with infinite sadness. ‘Now I can’t think of one.’ ”

Ackerman begins teaching him the names again, beginning with the simplest, “swan, pilot-poet,” and he recognizes them. She coaxes him to invent new ones, a morning ritual, and slowly “names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as ‘Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory.’ ” An appendix lists the One Hundred Names, which Ackerman notes “continue to flow and flower, some funny, some romantic, some playfully outlandish — all a testament to how a brain can repair itself, and how a duet between two lovers can endure hardship. This is what we have made of a diminished thing. A bell with a crack in it may not ring as clearly, but it can ring as sweetly.”

I will confess I was deeply affected by “One Hundred Names for Love.” Ackerman and West’s is an extraordinary love story, and that a devastating stroke intervened has made it only more moving. Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof.