Please, doctor, tell me no lays

I once encountered an amusing list of much needed but as yet unpublished books. My favorite was entitled "The Helping Hand Strikes Again," and I hope one day to appropriate it for an autobiographical essay dealing with my experiences with the healing arts. Why medical doctors are among the perennial heroes of American popular culture has, on the basis of my personal experience at least, always been a bit of a mystery to me. Without going beyond a small group of my generation of medievalists, I know two fellows seriously damaged by the "routine" procedures meant to spruce them up; and one distinguished historian, recently defunct, spent his final years stone-blind as a result of a little slip of the healing knife.

Such monuments of the helping hand were very much on my mind last week when, on doctor's orders, I underwent a "stress test" at a local "imaging center." The purpose of this test, as I understand it, is to gauge the functioning of the coronary arteries at a time when the exercised heart is beating rapidly. Now that part of the test, which involves a simulated trot up a 14-degree slope on a treadmill, I passed with full honors. The real "stress" was elsewhere. First of all, a nurse sticks a horse needle in the crook of your arm. I am used to nurses who have difficulty locating the right vein; this one was defeated by the challenge of finding the right arm; but he eventually achieved the desired conduit for injecting what the doctor himself, who now arrived on the scene preemptively annoyed, called "the radioactive stuff."

"This may feel a little cold in your arm, but it has no side-effects and no aftereffects. Lay down on the table," (pointing) "legs that way." Perhaps if Dr. Goodscalpel had said the magic word "Please," my professorial resistance would not have been engaged; but he didn't. "Lie," I said. "Please lie on the table." He took on an expression in which grumpiness contested the field with dull incomprehension. "Lay is a transitive verb," I explained. "You pick something up and you lay it down. Chickens lay eggs. 'Lay down your arms and come out with your hands up.' That sort of thing. Lie is intransitive. 'Amaryllis lies upon her fragrant bed of myrtle.'" That's a pretty wacko line under the best of circumstances, but if the only Myrtle known to you is your wife's cousin, it apparently becomes a bit kinky as well. But all he said was, "Lay, lie — what's the difference?"

I had, of course, just explained the difference; and society should be concerned that a man who finds it inconsequential is licensed to pump me full of "radioactive stuff" at premium rates. Distinctions in the lay/lie families of words are not insignificant, as I then tried to demonstrate by using my one famous author story.

One evening in 1959 the great poet W. H. Auden was in my room at Oxford. He was slightly drunk, and indeed spilled most of a bottle of port over four volumes of my Cambridge History of English Literature. (Purple stains of such provenance somewhat removed the opprobrium of the words "Cheap Edition" that were actually goldstamped on the books' spines.) Mr. Auden also autographed my own cheap Penguin edition of his collected poems and made a few corrections in the printed text, leaving me with a "rarity" that only increases in value as his fame grows. These very poems he told me, had recently been translated into French. "How do you like the translation?" I asked.

"For the most part it is excellent," he slurred. "I have found only one serious mistake." He paused for effect. I effected. "Yes . . . I had used the perfectly fine American expression 'a good lay' . . ." "And . . . ?" I asked. "And it is rendered as un grand poème."

"What's your point?" asks Goodscalpel. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.