VERBAL MEDICINE

By R.Z. Sheppard

Unlike the rest of the working wounded, sick writers can turn their health problems into therapeutic books. Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor undoubtedly helped her and thousands of readers deal with cancer. William Styron's Darkness Visible benefited its author as well as others torpedoed by depression.

Wilfrid Sheed's In Love with Daylight (Simon & Schuster; 252 pages; $23) and Paul West's A Stroke of Genius (Viking; 181 pages; $21.95) are similar medical memoirs, kind of Blue Cross specials in which the writers recount their tussles with diseases and the imperfect professionals who treat them. Sheed is a novelist, essayist and critic with few equals in the styling of buoyant observations on the decline and fall of just about everything. Prolific only begins to describe West, whose 14 novels, nine works of nonfiction and two volumes of poetry exhibit a range of imagination and richness of expression that were greatly appreciated before the culture submitted to a literary lobotomy.

That both writers are British-born Americans is less notable than that both are now in their 60s, the decade when payment is due for living the lives their doctors advised against. Too many celebratory swigs and strong after-dinner cigars eventually led Sheed to seek treatment for alcoholism, depression and cancer of the tongue--a significant piece of which had to be surgically removed.

West, a lifelong migraine sufferer, was used to weird sensations in his head. So when he felt a familiar woozy pain coming on, he downed a tumbler of Cognac and went to bed. The next morning his breakfast coffee dribbled down his chin and his words turned to mush. These symptoms of a mild stroke quickly cleared, but not the cause: cardiac arrhythmias that required the planting of a pacemaker in his chest. West variously refers to this retrofit as his "titanium tit" and that "little lead soldier ... making a small battuta on my suet."

Sheed too knows how to deflect fear with badinage. His denial of denial is especially inventive, and the account of his English boyhood is high spirited, considering that he was permanently hobbled by polio and had to trade in his cricket gear for braces and crutches. Yet catching an early bad break had an unexpected upside. "The period when I might have been learning to adjust to the word [handicapped]," Sheed writes, "was so packed with small accomplishments that it was impossible not to feel like one of the world's winners ever afterwards."

West faces infirmity with the same sort of confidence, seeing his medical history as part of "a big, holistic swoosh." The author of Lord Byron's Doctor gives his own case the Byronic treatment. "From my first chemistry set, I knew that I was an experiment too ... I walked and breathed immersed in a world not mine, not made of me" is a fair sample of his lyric urges. West's prose thrives on making connections: the interactions of hospital gadgetry with his own balky machinery; or how a late Beethoven quartet integrates opposing moods. West lists those moods as bold, mutinous, euphoric, sedate and restive, which add up to a pretty good description of his book.

With their generous literary gifts, Sheed and West elevate an often dreary, self-absorbed genre. They are also above-average grousers. West on medical bureaucracies: "How many tyrannical oafs does a hospital need before it dwindles into incorrigible uselessness?" Sheed on members of Alcoholics Anonymous: "People who talk in bumper stickers and have only one mood." It's a good sign. The patients are sitting up and taking umbrage.