PANDEMIC LITERATURE: “The horrors that nature inflicts on people, the horrors that make humans least significant”
By Jennifer Levasseur
Boarded shopfront, Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans, May 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
“Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.”
–Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy
Clearly, I’m not alone in wanting to stare open-eyed at the worst. I will not be watching catastrophe films, such as the popular-again Contagion, but like many others, I find my desire rising for tales of unstoppable viruses, frustrated medical professionals, and politicians faced with decisions no one can confidently make with such shifting, inconclusive information. True, what we witness and learn through these stories, fictional or otherwise, is harrowing, but even though we lost millions of people in the Great Influenza, for instance, somehow we—as an arguably prosperous human race—are still here. There has to be a way out. There can be comfort in witnessing the ways that families, cities, and governments failed and sometimes succeeded in previous crises as we peer into the unknowable future.
These five books have provided insight and a foundation through which to understand our present condition. They helped me question the rhetoric, understand the abilities and limitations of experts contending with a novel virus, and take from the examples of those who cared for themselves and others during what seemed like their own ends of the world.
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson (2020)
I started, innocently enough, with Erik Larson’s narrative of Churchill’s first year as prime minister, when the new leader weathered and led the British people through home-front war. While I had planned to read The Splendid and the Vile even before schools closed and stay-at-home mandates went into place, when our collective situation changed I used it as a metaphorical temperature check: knowing that in the grand scheme it would all turn out well, could I handle the details of very specific mass suffering and grief? Would the stories of families ripped apart, children hungry, homes shelled and burned, and love cut short make me even more fearful and uncertain? It did not. In fact, it gave me hope and reminded me that our forebears went through much more difficult times than many of us, safe and comfortable, can realistically imagine. We are compelled to carry on.
Larson reminds us that good leadership and honest assessments of the facts—even, and especially, when the news is terrible—gives us the courage and forbearance to push through the worst. As in The Devil and the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, Larson combines riveting storytelling and the novelist’s flair for character building with meticulous research backed up by extensive primary source material. His deft use of diary entries and letters written by small and grand historical figures, including those by Churchill’s daughter and wife and the many volunteers of the Mass Observation diary project, transforms the reader into bosom confidant. He creates such an encompassing atmosphere of stalwart but uncertain bravery that it’s possible while reading these pages to wonder whether the United Kingdom will survive. Mothers send their husbands to battle and their children to presumed greater safety in the country. Young women pass fresh bodies on the street on their way to the office. Wedding vows become tighter, and sometimes looser, as each moment may prove to be the last. In the darkest moments, there remains hope that a return to peace is coming ever closer.
When my quarantine partner ran into John Barry in the French Quarter (masked and at an appropriate social distance), he told the author that he’d thought about him as the pandemic emerged. As the news unfolded, he prompted, you must have been terrified. Barry paused to consider his answer. After several long seconds, he replied: I felt a sense of dread.
While it’s unusual for any nonfiction work to rocket back up the bestseller list more than fifteen years after its first publication, The Great Influenza now has become the handbook for those looking to the closest example from the past to explain our present. Barry, who teaches in Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has become a go-to oracle to clear the hazy unknown. While not one to sow panic, he’s upfront about how he thinks we’re doing, especially in the United States, which recently exceeded 100,000 deaths from COVID-19. He told the Washington Post that his previous assessment of the national response as a 3.5 out of 10 was “overly generous” and that the federal administration’s actions have been “incomprehensibly incoherent.”
He has also been forthcoming about what has been learned since the publication of his book. While he outlined the theory that the so-called Spanish flu likely began in Kansas, he acknowledges that it remains impossible to know for sure; it may have begun in France or China, though Spain was the first to properly acknowledge it in a free press unencumbered by wartime censorship intended to bolster morale.
While The Great Influenza contains multitudes—it is a (shocking!) history of medicine and medical schools in the United States, a multifaceted character study of infectious disease specialists, an indictment of journalism afraid to tell the truth, and a cautionary tale of political hubris—each of its meticulously researched threads deserves our study. Though it’s a minor aspect of the book, Barry’s interest in literature shows in the book’s patterns. I found his filaments of literary history a welcome reprieve from some of the more gruesome and heartbreaking details.
As he notes, we seldom discussed the worst pandemic in the history of the planet, at least prior to this novel coronavirus. I realized that while I had heard family stories about various wars and hurricanes, no one ever talked about the Great Influenza. Had my mostly rural family been spared? No, it had not. Why the collective silence? Barry reminds us that even Woodrow Wilson, who contracted influenza and nearly died from it while president, never made a public statement about the virus that felled so many that bodies remained in homes for days and even weeks because there was no one able or willing to remove them. (Barry also argues, as have some other historians, that Wilson’s virus delirium may have been partly to blame for the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles, the severity of German reparations, and the eventual rise of Hitler.)
Like my family (and maybe yours), writers who went through the pandemic also remained largely silent. Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood discusses the aftermath of her being orphaned by the virus. Katherine Anne Porter, who became seriously ill and whose fiancé died of influenza, later published “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” based on the experience. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos (who contracted the virus) avoided the topic.
“People write about war. They write about the Holocaust. They write about horrors that people inflict on people,” Barry writes. “Apparently they forget the horrors that nature inflicts on people, the horrors that make humans least significant. And yet the pandemic resonated. When the Nazis took control of Germany in 1933, Christopher Isherwood wrote of Berlin [in Berlin Stories]: ‘The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear. I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones.’”
Discarded mask, New Orleans, May 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
Armed with research on the 1918 pandemic and the ways in which whole societies have managed manmade and natural crises, I felt ready to retreat to my standby, fiction. How have writers throughout time imagined plagues? What have we learned, if anything, through each iteration of suffering? I had the vague notion that I would feel comforted by how far we’ve come, how many more resources we have not only to get us through but to battle disease.
I’ve made no secret of my affection for the work of Josh Russell. I read his erotic story of love, deception, and revenge set in New Orleans during a yellow fever scourge shortly after its release and then again when I used it in an introductory English course for freshmen at a Catholic college (I now wonder at how much more brazen I was in my youth!). I thought of the novel as it became clear that we were entering our own pandemic. His familiar setting—the city where I find myself after years away—held the images of the terrors that might await us.
In Yellow Jack, a rogue apprentice of Louis Daguerre destroys his workshop, steals the French artist’s discovery and spirits it to America, where he hopes to escape his crime and pass the invention off as his own. As his craft makes him equally comfortable among the crust and cream of society, a fever slowly invades the city. Theories of its origin abound even as the destitute scramble and the elite amuse themselves with novel diversions.
“Some speculate it is a vapor that hangs in the air,” a character notes. “They’re the ones sure the cannons disrupt the plague, that the tar smothers it, that a mask can filter the poison. Others feel it must come from food or water, and there are even those who assume it is a curse some African spun. I have heard that one physician makes a case for trees being to blame.”
When the fever takes over, Claude Marchand must decide whether he will make postmortem daguerreotypes of the remains hauled into his studio in coffins and blankets, as he juggles his clever, passionate mulatto mistress, a businessman’s precocious daughter with whom he’s obsessed, his own failing health from mercury exposure, and the constant threat of bankruptcy and death.
While yellow fever’s danger is real and widespread—mothers are stripped of their newborns and the betrothed are widows and widowers before their wedding days—the virus also fires political ambition and deception as residents either flee the congested city or submit to the almost inevitable plague.
Mississippi River, New Orleans, May 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
The End of October by Lawrence Wright (2020)
Journalist Lawrence Wright (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Looming Tower) used his research and interviewing skills to learn about one of the most pressing dangers of our time—the threat of a highly contagious airborne disease—and wove his worst-scenario findings into a compelling, terrifying and page-turning thriller that imagines a novel virus that originates in Asia and quickly spreads around the world despite quarantine efforts, causing not just widespread horrific sickness and death but also political, economic, and technological failure that threatens to destroy civilization as we know it. While Wright did not plan his novel’s release to coincide with our own pandemic (who could?), its arrival proves how many specialists knew that this kind of outbreak was inevitable sometime in the not-too-distant (not distant at all) future.
At the heart of his novel, CDC virologist Henry Parsons is an unlikely hero. Respected but hemmed in by lack of resources and reduced ability to persuade leaders of the risk before it’s too late, he must leave his family behind to staunch the spread. Not only does the virus takes hold globally, cracks in leadership and infrastructure means that the sick go untended and bodies unburied, electricity and internet connections fail. With health experts and doctors unprotected and communications nearly nonexistent, little thrives but the disease and fear. In an echo of the 1918 pandemic, neighbors ignore pleas of help from hungry orphaned children, knowing that compassion will kill them.
While Wright has proven spookily prescient, it’s actually a relief to read The End of October. Most of the complications Wright explores have occurred in some variation, but the very worst he envisions—bringing to mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—has not come to pass, though we may have luck to thank rather than design or preparation.
[A completely unrelated side note: Lawrence Wright appears as an expert on twins in the fascinating documentary Three Identical Strangers (2018), the shocking story of brothers secretly separated at birth. The footage of Wright’s boxes of research notes alone is a treat for anyone who gets drunk on the excitement of old fashioned deep-dive investigation.]
Boarded bookstore, Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans, May 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
“Ship Fever” by Andrea Barrett (1996)
The title novella in Andrea Barrett’s collection juxtaposes two major crises: the Irish potato famine and the emigration it prompts alongside an epidemic of deadly typhus that spreads from the passengers of those ships arriving in Canada.
Like many works of fiction and nonfiction that detail epidemics, “Ship Fever” explores the theme of how we behave—how humanity proves or does not prove itself—in the face of mortal danger when the enemy is mysterious and fearsome. By helping others, we risk our own lives and those lives depending on us. However, if we cower in fear, ignoring pleas for help, do we deserve our hard-won safety?
Full of unrequited love for a married neighbor and ashamed of his leisure, a young doctor volunteers to work in a quarantine station removing sick immigrants from ships before they move deeper into Canada. His boss advises him of the danger: “No doubt you have read in the newspapers the various expressions of alarm by the citizens of Quebec and Montreal. Their alarm is justified, I believe.”
As the ships full of dead and dying arrive, the doctor falls back on his training, calling for beds and nurses to tend if not cure. The volume is such, however, that even small kindnesses become unattainable luxuries.
When he returns home briefly—and straight to his neighbor’s home—the maid bars his entry. “And why would you be thinking I’d let you into this house, still carrying the sickness on you?” she asks. “Not me, not through this door.” He seems dumbfounded when she demands that he strip in a storeroom, wash himself with hot water and soap, and give her his clothes for boiling.
It’s telling that even before doctors understood why and how such behaviors staunched the spread of disease, the watchful servant taught herself about what safety was to be had and forced the measure on others.
Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans, May 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
Blindness by Jose Saramago (English translation 1997)
Of the pandemic literature I read, the fantastical Blindness left me the most uneasy and, frankly, depressed. In the Nobel Prize-winning author’s novel, a man stops at a traffic light. Without warning, his vision dissolves into a bright illumination. He can see nothing. Fellow drivers help him, after the inevitable honking and yelling make way for the surprising explanation.
A visit to the ophthalmologist offers no explanation: nothing is physically wrong with the man’s eyes. Before long, almost everyone the man has encountered—the thief who stole his car, the doctor, the other patients in the waiting room—have also had their vision replaced with a bright white light. The government forces those afflicted into mandatory military quarantine. Because of the ease with which the disease spreads, and because it is unheard of in the medical literature, the blind inmates are abandoned aside from the guards stationed outside. Food is delivered three times per day, but the newly blind must fumble to find and carry it inside because no one will come to their aid.
Inside, there is one sighted person, the ophthalmologist’s wife who could not bear having her husband ripped from her and wrongly assumed that she would soon become blind anyway. When her vision persists, the couple closely guards the secret.
Chaos descends as the blind are increasingly detested. As the crowd inside grows, violence erupts, followed by the hoarding of food and systematic sexual violence.
I thought I’d continue my pandemic literature binge until we came to some sort of end, or at least a reprieve (after all, I still hadn’t revisited The Plague or A Journal of the Plague Year or Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders), but Saramago’s novel not only quenched my desire for more horrors; it sent me into an existential angst, forcing me to wonder whether we would ever get out of this crisis without losing our humanity, our ability to love those we don’t know, to do for others even when we’re hurting.
But as Walker Percy understood, the most serious crises intrinsically seek humor and irreverence to help force our understanding—after they demand the solemnity of our collective horror and grief. In his apocalyptic novel of civilization unraveling through widespread mass malaise, Love in the Ruins (1971), he displays the absurdity, the mundane, and the contrary pulls that each of us experiences even during calamities. His narrator understands the terror of what is to come, but he would like to make his quarantine as comfortable as possible (with whiskey and multiple mistresses he’s juggling in one motel) and in hopes that he has time to publish his scientific findings to acclaim before the end. “A catastrophe, however,” he admits, “has both pleasant and unpleasant aspects familiar to everyone—though no one likes to admit the pleasantness.”
Cake Walk, Uptown New Orleans, May 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.
While the literature shows much to fear and guard against, there are infinite examples of generosity, of individuals and organizations coming together to feed those who can’t go out and who are taking care of the sick, artists sharing their creations, strangers doing little things that increase our happiness and comfort in countless small ways. There’s the man in our neighborhood who bakes lemon pound cakes every Monday and hands out slices to those who pass by. And the lady who tacks coloring sheets to the side of her house for children to take and return for display. There are yard signs thanking, celebrating, loving, encouraging. There are the remnants of chalk messages written by teachers in front of their students’ homes and by strangers grateful to all the helpers risking their lives every shift. As I take solo walks through the surrounding areas, nearly everyone waves and smiles. We’re staying safe, we’re remaining distant, but we’re not afraid of each other.
Where to go from here? Somehow, this spate of reading has led me to Jill Lepore’s These Truths (2018), which I’d been meaning to read since its release. At more than nine hundred pages, it is a condensed but rich history of the United States, in all its shame and glory. There are many episodes within her pages that inspire pride and many that remind we have been much worse than we are today—and many more that demonstrate how much we must do to become our better selves.
I’m reading her tome as a handbook of what we’ve gotten wrong—and right—and as a signpost in the struggle to do better as we attempt to beat on.
Ashley Longshore Studio Gallery, New Orleans, April 2020. Photograph by Kevin Rabalais.