Ever read the book, "The man who mistook his wife for a hat"?.

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One day in June of 2003, my husband, Paul West, lay in a hospital room in Ithaca, New York, watching the sun’s hallelujahs beyond the sealed window and aching to go home. He’d already been there for three weeks with a kidney infection that became systemic, one of those rootin’-tootin’ staph bugs older than sharks or ginkgo trees, and I’d camped out with him, lest he trip over several leashes and the two lines dripping fluids into or out of him. Struggling from bed, he made his way to the bathroom. The next morning he would be heading home at last.

A few moments later he walked back out and stood at the foot of the bed, eyes glazed, his face like fallen ice. Paul had had a massive stroke, one tailored to his own private hell. The author of more than 50 stylishly written books, a master of English prose with the largest working vocabulary I’d ever encountered, a man whose life revolved around words, he had suffered brain damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Global aphasia, it’s called — the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt. He understood little of what people said, and all he could utter was the syllable “mem.” Nothing more.

Many doctors, tests, and frantic days followed, and his prognosis was grim. The brain cells were dead in Broca’s area and some of Wernicke’s area, he could no longer swallow food without choking, and, worst of all, it was a left hemisphere stroke. I’d just published a poetics of the brain, and I knew that the left hemisphere processes positive feelings, the right negative ones; unopposed, the remaining right hemisphere could spark dark angry emotions for the rest of his life.

But Paul had a couple of important traits going for him. Because he had wordsmithed for seven decades, he had forged dense thickets of brain connections for language. Also, he could be diabolically determined.

After three weeks in the hospital’s rehab unit, he was able one day to say proudly: “I can talk good coffee,” but little more. Still, it was a complete sentence. I took him home, hired speech therapists, who, alas, weren’t able to help him move beyond simple utterances. Whenever he spoke, the wrong names for things tumbled out. Aphasia is, above all, a sorting disorder. And, with short-term memory clobbered, by the time he got to the second half of a sentence he had forgotten the first half.

“You know, dear,” I said to him one day, about two months after the stroke, when he was feeling mighty low, “maybe you want to write the first aphasic memoir.” He smiled broadly, said, “Good idea! Mem, mem, mem.” And so he began dictating, sometimes with mountain-moving effort, and at others sailing along at a good clip, an account of what he’d just gone through, what the mental world of aphasia felt and looked like. Writing the book was the best speech therapy anyone could have prescribed. For three exhausting hours each day, he forced his brain to recruit cells, build new connections, find the right sounds to go with words, and piece together whole sentences. Going over the text the next day helped refine his thoughts and showed him some of aphasia’s fingerprints in the prose.

Now, three years later, he has just finished writing his first novel since the stroke, one with Westian characters and themes. During a three-hour window of heightened fluency in the middle of the day, he can write in longhand, make phone calls, lunch with friends. He has reloomed vibrant carpets of vocabulary, and happily, despite the left hemisphere stroke, he seems happier than before, and I think his life feels richer in a score of ways.

What follows is an excerpt from The Shadow Factory, the aphasic memoir Paul dictated with such struggle and resolve, “forcing language back on itself.” In it, he recalls life in the hospital’s rehab unit, what he felt and thought, and explores some of the all-too-real tricks the mind plays to save itself from the tomb of lost words.

— DIANE ACKERMAN

more at: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/mem-west.html