PAT AND ROALD by Barry Farrell. 241 pages. Random House. $6.95.
On Feb. 17, 1965, an artery ruptured inside Patricia Neal's head, causing paralysis of her right side and affecting the part of her brain dealing with speech and word recognition. To complicate the nearly fatal matter, the actress was expecting her fifth child.
There was some doubt that she could possibly deliver a normal baby. There was little doubt that her acting career had come to an end. Yet three years after her stroke, Patricia Neal was not only mothering a healthy new daughter but was also basking in public acclaim for her motion picture role in The Subject Was Roses.
Pat and Roald is a muted account of her remarkable recovery, written by a journalist—now a columnist for LIFE —who came for a magazine story and stayed to research a book. In the process he became an intimate friend of Miss Neal and her husband, the English short-story and film writer Roald Dahl. As a comeback saga, Barry Farrell's book fulfills the function of encouraging the stricken. As a family chronicle it has an attraction as unsettling as some of Dahl's own bizarre stories.
The Dahls seem to be one of those families that have been singled out by the gods for cruel sport. In 1960, their four-month-old son Theo received multiple skull fractures when his carriage was slammed into the side of a New York City bus by a taxi. The child's injuries resulted in hydrocephalus, a condition in which fluid accumulation causes the skull to enlarge and the brain to compress.
After years of painful operations, the condition was arrested and the child's normal development resumed.
Two years after Theo's accident, the Dahls' seven-year-old daughter Olivia died from measles encephalitis.
Palimpsest. After Pat's stroke, Roald settled the family in their country house outside London. He set up a relentless therapy schedule and organized relay teams of visitors to keep the patient's morale up. Pat's principal enemy was despair. Her career seemed shattered. Her right leg was bracketed in an unsightly brace, and her brain was as faint and blurry as a palimpsest. She fished in vain for the names of common objects. Even Peter Rabbit eluded her.
But with Roald as the sergeant major in charge of rehabilitation, Pat's normal functions slowly came back. With them returned her unique beauty and that combination of assertiveness and receptivity that marked her—even in her early Hollywood years—as a woman among exaggerated love-objects.
Farrell conveys Patricia Neal's feminine qualities with unusual sensitivity. His profile of Roald—a combination of intelligence, stoicism and optimism—is equally good. What Pat and Roald lacks is more of Farrell himself: his own feelings about these people whose lives he has entered, or some audacious perceptions about the events that make up the story—something, at least, to raise this skillful book above the level of the tactful neutrality of its own professional competence.