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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Modern Classics set on hospital wards: Memento Mori & One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

6/3/2021

14 Comments

 
Here we have two highly successful mid-twentieth century novels with hospital settings. The first is a comedy of manners only partly set on a medical ward for older women in a London hospital; the second is an exuberant but ultimately devastating portrayal of an Oregon State medical hospital. What’s it like to read/reread them during pandemic six decades after they first hit the shelves?

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Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

When Lettie answers the phone to hear a man whose voice she doesn’t recognise remind her she must die, others in her social circle wonder if she’s hallucinating. Her brother, Godfrey, only begins to take her seriously when he receives the same call. Then it spreads to his wife, Charmian. Soon, the whole set of elderly friends and frenemies is infected, although they disagree on the possible identity of the caller and the meaning of his message.
 
No matter. Although structured around their attempts to find the culprit, that’s not really what the novel’s about.
 
I’m not sure it’s even about ageing, and edging closer to death. The large cast of characters includes no-one under sixty, apart from Olive, a twenty-four-year-old who serves as confidante, and a little more, to several of the men. But it’s also a younger writer’s perspective on the elderly: Muriel Spark wasn’t yet forty when it was first published in 1959.
 
With housekeepers and daily women, it’s focus is upper-class antics, which holds little interest to me. Although I did enjoy elements of Godfrey and Charmian’s loveless marriage, with the husband’s envious attacks on his author wife’s success. Generally, it’s a comedy of manners, with the backdrop of betrayals, blackmail and infidelity. I can’t recall when I first read it, but it seems extremely dated in 2021.
 
Also dated – or least I hope so – was the Maud Long Medical Ward, where twelve women residents, all addressed as Granny, regardless of whether they’d had children, listen to their horoscopes as they await the Grim Reaper. Nowadays, they wouldn’t be in hospital, but in a care home or ‘the community’, dependent on rushed visits from overworked and underpaid care staff.
 
Have you read this novel, reissued by Virago Modern Classics in 2019? Do you think it would stand the test of time?


One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

When Randall McMurphy wrangles his way into a 1960s mental hospital, the other patients don’t know what’s hit them. Half are excited, scared and enlivened by his affability and blatant disregard for the rules; the other half are too far gone to notice. But the nurse who runs the ward with an iron fist cloaked in velveteen is braced for a battle. Who will win the war of wills and what will it cost?
 
Familiar with this story from the movie starring Jack Nicholson, I was surprised to find it narrated by Chief Bromden, the Native American who has languished among the Chronics for years. But, with his broom, and feigned deafness, he is ideally placed to eavesdrop on both patients and staff. His backstory of a community cheated out of their land and culture, is sensitively told.
 
Overall, I enjoyed this modern classic, first published in 1962, but it’s very much of its time. It’s not so much that the long-stay psychiatric hospitals have been demolished – the backdrop to my forthcoming novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home  – but that the Chief’s crazy-but-true belief in the Combine, a far-reaching system of social control, seems mild relative to the challenges we face today. (The climate and refugee crisis and our conscious collusion in capitalism’s intrusion into every area of our lives.) But maybe I would say that!
 
The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must … learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf is the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about.
 
It might be a fair reflection of the times, but I was uncomfortable about the racial divides, where it seems that patients – apart from the Chief – and senior staff are white, while ‘black boys’ attend to the basics. And while single-sex wards inevitably furnish a cast of male characters, I wondered about the stereotyped roles for women as battle-axes, double-binding mothers and ‘whores’.
 
That said, it’s an absorbing and impressive debut novel, and a trenchant indictment of oppression and conformity pressures in mid-20th-century America, and of psychiatry not as care or treatment but as social control. Plus my 2005 Penguin edition comes with illustrations by the author. My Goodreads record has this marked as already read, but I reckon – sixty years after publication – I’m a first timer.
 
Incidentally, if you follow my newsletter, you’ll find One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest cropping up again – maybe even twice – around the end of April or early May. If you’ve not yet subscribed, a click on the image will take you to one portal. Get on board before March 12 to take part in a competition to win a signed copy of Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home.

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Checking the prompt for the latest flash fiction challenge on the day I determined to write my review of Cuckoo’s Nest, I had the idea of pairing the two on the assumption – delusion? – sweet potatoes were a Native American thing. Maybe so, but it didn’t show as such on Wikipedia. But something else did, which surprised me – in a good way – and before too long I had my 99-word story. Let me know what you think.

Playing her sweet potato
 
Sounds stretched and shrunk, colours dissembled. Violet trees and turquoise cows drained her energy. The hospital promised to replenish it.
 
She requested seclusion, but they insisted new admissions sleep in the dorm. Sleep? With that symphony of snorts, sigh and squeals quarrelling with her inner voices. Hardly therapeutic!
 
The food was cordon bleu. Her taste buds functioned fine, but butternut squash repulsed them. She ate the lamb, pushed the vegetable aside. “Ain’t you eating your roast potato?” They claimed she’d ordered those nightmare orange lumps.
 
Now she sits in solitary, coaxing a tune from her sweet potato (AKA ocarina).
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
14 Comments
Norah Colvin
7/3/2021 09:31:14 am

She must have really objected to those nasty orange lumps. I'm sure she made pleasant music on her sweet potato ocarina though.
I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in a previous lifetime (it seems), a bit like your 'having read'. I can't remember much about it and nothing you describe rustles up any memories. Maybe I only think I read it. Like the staff thought she'd ordered potato. I look forward to seeing why you reference Cuckoo again.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
8/3/2021 03:01:06 pm

Ah, yes, the sweet potato was the cuckoo in her nest of lamb. Or she was the misplaced cuckoo on the ward. Maybe that novel will come back to you with a couple more prompts. I couldn't read it without picturing Jack Nicholson.

Reply
Norah Colvin
14/3/2021 09:28:57 am

Jack Nicholson is all I can picture. :)

Anne Goodwin
15/3/2021 07:51:24 am

He was perfect for the part.

JulesPaige link
7/3/2021 12:47:43 pm

What a beautiful instrument. I looked it up and even listened to it at the Wiki entry. It sounds very much like a recorder (the instrument) that at one point every child was introduced to in the lower grade schools. I had a relative who actually for a very long time played a recorder regularly. I have a couple, but I can never seem to work out the right breathing. I'm not musical that way.

Thanks for introducing your character and the instrument.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
8/3/2021 03:04:15 pm

Thanks, Jules, I have a recorder but never learn to play it. Somehow missed that at school. Which might be why, when I bought an ocarina from a market in Ecuador, I couldn't produce a tune. I'm sure I didn't realise the shape was like a sweet potato. Maybe they weren't so common in the UK at that time – about twenty years ago.

Reply
Colleen Chesebro link
7/3/2021 08:18:26 pm

I was instantly drawn to your use of color in your flash, Anne. I've recently learned that like regular potatoes, you can eat the skins of sweet potatoes! I boil them like regular potatoes and serve with a dash of butter and salt. The color is pleasant and nutritionists tell you to eat a colorful plate. Sounds like you discovered a little known tid-bit about the ocarina. <3

Reply
Anne Goodwin
8/3/2021 03:08:51 pm

Thanks, Colleen, I'd forgotten that nutritional advice about colour on the plate. We've always cooked sweet potatoes in the skins, usually chopped and roasted, but that might be because they didn't crop up in the UK until there was a push against peeling vegetables in general. Great for lazy cooks like me, although I sometimes find grit in my unpeeled carrots.

Reply
Charli Mills
8/3/2021 03:36:27 am

Two interesting classics. I had not heard of Momento Mori. I can't help but ponder the stereotype of Nurse Ratched in 1962 and how it serves as a warning to men who let women have unfettered control. And your comment regarding "...psychiatry not as care or treatment but as social control." It has definitely been that way in America from the time of the Scarlet Letter A. How sad it makes me that Indigenous people got swept up in the madness it truly is.

I love your first sentence about sound and colors. It sets the perception!

Reply
Anne Goodwin
8/3/2021 03:19:07 pm

Yeah, I imagine Momento Mori is less well known outside the UK. But it's the same author as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which I imagine is more familiar. I confess I have never read The Scarlet Letter – although I think there's at least one more recent novel I have read with the same name!

To be fair to Ken Kesey, he does allow one extremely minor female character to be both pleasant and have some authority, but overall I found the stereotypes offputting. And yes, psychiatric systems continue to treat minorities more harshly – in Britain there are a disproportionate number of Black men on locked wards.

Reply
D. Avery link
9/3/2021 11:30:03 pm

Is Cuckoo's Nest that old already? I read it in the late seventies, as a teen, and liked it, Chief Broom was unforgettable. Of course then the movie, so it becomes hard to separate those images from the initial reading, though as I recall it was true to the book, and well cast. That book, along with Kesey's Electric Koolaid Acid Test was one that the hippie neighbors gave to me as I went about on my bicycle exchanging books. I got my hands on stuff I would not have known about otherwise! I may have been too young and naive to be properly offended by the stereotypes in Cuckoo's Nest, it was the way things were. One of the neighbors fed me her old MS. magazines and a copy of The Women's Room so I started to become more aware and also naively believed things only got better with time.
Great flash. She got her solitary, and with a sweet potato to play!

Reply
Anne Goodwin
11/3/2021 01:55:00 pm

I think it's a great book for a teenager, all that righteous outrage. I don't recall reading anything about mental health, unless you count Jane Eyre. Yes, it did seem to be getting better for a while. Lockdown seems to have turned back the clock for a lot of women.

Reply
Olga Núñez Miret link
16/3/2021 08:12:58 pm

I've never read Memento Mori, and from your description, I suspect I wouldn't enjoy it, but I also read Someone Flew... a long time ago, have watched the movie, and remember I went to watch an amateur theatre production of it, with a team of staff from a long-stay mental health unit where I was working at the time (many years back, at least 21 or 22). I remember we found it quite funny, because we kept finding similarities in behaviours (staff and patients' alike), although, of course, the setting and the techniques used were totally different, but...

Reply
Anne Goodwin
17/3/2021 04:32:34 pm

Wow, Olga, that sounds like the perfect way to experience Cuckoo's Nest. I wonder if anyone owned up to being Nurse Ratched.

Reply



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