Letters, p.12
Letters, page 12
Jenö—I love you, I can think of nothing else.
* * *
—
This is the first Yom Kippur I have ever enjoyed. I had a sinful breakfast, and a sinful work-out; I am wearing my sinful jeans, and I have no intention of visiting the Synagogue. I had two beers in Mooney’s Bar—in company with three redfaced, blue-eyed, whisky-gobbling, baccy-spitting old blasphemers. And now I am writing to you, my Hungarian “shikse,” whom I love more than God. […]
Even tho’ I left my home and country, and gave up even a token regard for Jewish custom, Yom Kippur was always an uncomfortable, restless day. I could never fix my mind on anything. I was anxious and depressed. Today I feel great. I will never spurn my Jewish roots, but Judaism has retreated in the past few weeks; no longer an obsession, or uncomfortable joke, it has become a language I learned in my childhood and still remember; funny, old-fashioned, and unimportant. I’m no longer a Jew, I’m a man. And if I have a God, it’s you, my love. […]
[This] brings to my mind (you must forgive the grandiose analogy—it’s more an association than a parallel) the story of Billy Budd. You told me you were reading Moby Dick; you wd enjoy this strange other book of Melville’s.
Billy (in a sense, yet never explicit) is the ideal of homosexual beauty, radiance and virtue; his tormentor represents the perversion of lust, the hideous jealousy and malevolence, of which only a thwarted homosexual is fully capable. Their fantastic confrontation in the cabin is the moral climax of the book; they become saint and devil at this moment.
Innocence, faced with an outrageous slander, the revelation of total evil, is speechless with horror; he is totally beyond the world of words; Billy’s soul becomes an action; he clenches his fist, in imperative moral reflex, and fells and kills the other man. (Then God hurled Lucifer out of heaven.) But he has transgressed the Law of the land. In his exquisite, unassailable purity Billy dies, bewildered, among the weeping men who have to hang him.
What I am also saying, Jenö, is that you have made me feel differently about myself, and therefore about homosexuality as a whole. I am through with cringing, and apology, and “explanations,” and pious wishes that I might have been “normal.” Through with searching my past history for the aggressive mother-figure, the engulfed father-figure, the this, the that, behind my “malady.” I am not interested in such cowardice any more.
You have taught me that one can be glad and proud of being homosexual. One is not imprisoned in the Social matrix. Intelligence and sensibility are much less fettered. There are special freedoms, yet special responsibilities. You have made me see—above all, by the example of your self—that there is utterly no need for isolation, shame, concealment. Indeed, one’s potential for friendship, for living, is immensely widened.
I am so happy I want to shout from the housetops. So proud I want to describe you to all my friends, even the “normal” ones, from whom I always kept a certain (I suspect now, unnecessary) distance.
I must bring this giant letter to a close. Am I killing you with words?
I enclose the photo, and something I wrote—about a year ago—in a time of profound depression and isolation. With your help, Jenö, and your love—never again.
Your Oliver
To Jenö Vincze
October 11, 1965
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY
My dearest, distant Jenö,
It is four in the morning, how perfectly called the “dead of night.” I am obsessed by some awful words of Rimbaud: “The clock of life stopped a while ago. I am no longer in the world.” I have risen from my sleepless bed: one nightmare after another. Nightmares of being drugged again, nightmares of exposure, failure, and disgrace. I thought I was so happy. Indeed, I am. But the old old fears come back in the night. Are these things ever exorcised, or are they part of being human?
Four things: nowhere to live yet, not really in my work, fear and weakness when alone, the momentary dissipation of that marvellous happy beauty—in the coldness, deadness, emptiness of the night.
For the first: I leave this hotel tomorrow I trust. I have taken (too quickly, too impulsively, but I need a place) an apartment in a modern block. It has the fine, antiseptic, impersonal quality of these flats you see outside Copenhagen or Tel Aviv. I don’t give a damn. I am indifferent, at the moment, to domestic surroundings. I am not one of yr little fags who need to have the right address, and little chic Victorian rooms, and a colour scheme in mauve and puce. I am Oliver Sacks, whose life is in the mind, the outside world, and you.
The apt is solid and comfortable, without pretention. Close to the Village, the Station, the Road. Close enough to lights and cafés and all-night people. All New York is huddled close. But this isn’t the real reason why I took it. My mind was resolved when I saw the water. I am only a furlong from the Docks and Wharves. I’ll gaze in the evenings over the water, imagining Germany through the mist. I’ll watch the great ships as they pass my window, and scan their decks with my huge Russian lens. My room is the room of a man who is waiting.
Second: fiddling enough, Jewish Holy days over, tomorrow I plunge into work. I may not be able to write the vast letters I wrote to you last week. They were written, in part, when I should have been working.
Third and 4th: The horrible spectres are already going. I feel warmer and better as I write to you. […]
I enclose “99.”[*12] I had the sudden need, this weekend, to dig up the scribbled notes of my first bike-journey in the US, and crystallize it into sharpened images. More clearly now than ever before (and this is largely due to you), I am finding it easier to distil my sharp perceptions from the rhetoric, the self-obsession, the clumsy irony, the clichés, which have bogged me down. A good friend of mine, and wonderful poet,[*13] said I must learn to write with a “fierce discipline.” 99 is a serious try.
I hope you have received the Camus. I’d like to send you many more books, but suddenly fear you’ll think me patronizing. And write, Jenö, write! A week is too long for me to wait. If only I could phone you every day!
I love you, and I want your love
Oliver
To Jenö Vincze
October 12, 1965
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY
Jenö?
Still there? Still the same Jenö? Forgive me—it is eight days since I’ve heard from you. Eight days is nothing; one is busy; important business; the vagaries of the post; did I myself not keep you waiting for longer at a time of great uncertainty? True, true; completely true. I am too anxious, too demanding (like my mother who wants a letter every week: God forbid I should be as possessive as her!). But I feel like a fool writing to you—yet again—in the absence of response. And then I say again—a week, pfft! he hasn’t had time to respond. And then darker layers of thought come through: You idiot, Oliver! How long will you delude yourself? Jenö’s had his fill. Can you not hear him, among his gifted friends: “Liebling, the last one was a motorcyclist, intriguing but bizarre!” And then, yet deeper layers of trust and faith. What have you done, or said, or written, that I should ever doubt you? Have you not shown me, by your own example, the very essence of trust and honesty? And then, deeper still the distrust I have of myself, the fear that I am the one who will betray. And, deepest of all, the fear that there is nothing certain, nothing solid, in the world: Tout ça change. And the cool voice of Dr. Bird, when I become extravagant of word or feeling, absurd in action or expectation. “No, Oliver, no! This is reality.” He wd give me “reality” (the analyst’s gift), and I wd see how far I had strayed from it…
Jenö: why have I written all this shit? It wasn’t any intention. I SUCK at you for reassurance, like a baby at the breast. You are my lover, but not my confessor or my analyst. I talk too much (the same in writing), and demand too much. Perhaps I should divert my sick questions to an analyst. I’ve been reluctant, though, feeling I wanted to focus every thought, every feeling, on you, and you alone. You are bored, angry, bewildered, aghast, as well you might be, being the target of such a monstrous onslaught! Or is this just the delicious agonising dilemma of every lover, as he plucks off the daisy petals one by one…He loves me! He loves me not! He loves me? He loves me not? HE LOVES ME
To Jenö Vincze
Wednesday [October 13, 1965]
[Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, N.Y.]
Jenö!
Your marvellous letter today (I was not at hospital Monday and Tuesday, but at a conference). Totally unexpected. […]
I shall start an answer now, for the day and circumstances are propitious. I am sitting under a gnarled Chekhovian cherry-tree. A perfect garden, running down towards the copse: slender birches and aspens, great he-man oaks and willows, and the maples—a glory; there is nothing in the world, in our Europe or elsewhere, to compare with the New England Fall. No description, no photograph, can describe this gift, this utterly amazing beauty. Even the memory cannot hold it, so it comes as a wonder every year. The light so pure and clear: in Eliot’s phrase, “a grace of light.” And an old whitewood farmhouse, weathered, of great charm, where my host and hostess[*14] of this afternoon are living. Seeing my happiness as I opened yr letter, and the mood of delight I was in, they offered me their garden, and a pad of paper, for the quiet of afternoon. (A blue jay darted through the undergrowth.) Excellent, most perceptive, people! The wife I knew ten, God! twenty, years ago: one of our grubby Hampstead set. I had forgotten her existence, till we met again in Dr. Terry’s laboratory. I found her tranquil, creative, happy, glowing in the sun of Einstein. “Being here has made me,” she whispered in the car.
A lovely lunch, an omelette and a dryish wine; their son, a lusty three year old, has decided I’m an “apple”—one of the better class of human being in his world. I have been playing nursery rhymes for him on the Bechstein grand, upsetting that fine instrument with outrageous variations, playing with my knuckles, and my nose; telling him stories about sea-elephants, Kangaroos and boojum-trees. Enjoying, not the taste of paternity as I used to think, but the easy love of a man for a child. (The love Mark Twain describes so well.) And your letter running through my mind.
Music? You ask. […] My “relation” to it? We “live apart,” as the Law Courts say. I grew up in a house of Bach—Francesco Ticciati, a wild Italian genius, taught my brothers and myself. I speak now of 1939. The War was no time for music. After the War, romantic phase! I filled the house with Liszt and Chopin, Schumann, Grieg. I loved Schumann best: his black moods, and his sudden childlike innocence of sound: esp. Phantasiestücke op. 12, and Carnaval. My childhood love of Bach (Francesco would teach us nothing else) was forgotten for a Time. This era (12–17) was a time for sitting in the “gods” (the gallery at Covent Garden), which only cost a shilling, and hearing Aida, Boheme, Otello: I would always close my eyes to hear. Many of my friends “dug” Wagner at this time, but I could never stand him. But I loved the voluptuousness of Richard Strauss.
Oxford. An element of snobbery entered in. People would say, “But, really, my dear, Chopin!” until I felt ashamed. I went back to Bach. I played the organ in the college chapel. How I used to love that organ, in the darkness of the empty chapel! My thoughts became music, power, without a conscious effort. I tortured myself with polyphony and atonalities—Hindemith made me gag! I admitted the mysterious seductions of Fauré and Debussy. And I went mad, utterly rapt and crazy, over The Firebird. I still do. It’s a sort of musical hashish for me.
And then, Jenö (how this flows on, as tranquil as the afternoon), then the long barrenness, the boredom, turning inwards. My musical life came to an end 10 yrs ago. I ceased to go to concerts. I never possessed a gramophone. I couldn’t bear to play.
As such, music has very little place in my existence now. Sometimes, improvising in the organ-loft, I would say “Music! this is my life.” Now I feel like any other un-sensitive and un-gifted person, whose fingers received an expensive education, but are stiff now with disuse. And then again, a snatch of music drifts across the housetops, and I quiver like a setter at the hunt. I would like to re-enter the world of music; to listen from the “gods” once more; to wield the organ; with Jenö Vincze at my side.
To Jenö Vincze
October 18, 1965
[Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, N.Y.]
Your letter, Jenö, today: at last!
[…] I have been writing to you, in effect, for 48 hours, starting from the blackness before our phone-call. I am going to put my bits together: conflate them, that’s the word.
SAT MORNING: I am so cold, Jenö, so horribly frightened. I am a thermometer in your hand. Infamous week! Each day I waited for your letter. Each day I sank into deeper despair. I can’t eat, or sleep, or work—I wear the face of a murdered zombie. Your “presence” has vanished from my side. I feel so alone, so completely abandoned. […]
You have brought me the most exorbitant happiness, Jenö, a happiness so intense its extinction is death, or the feeling of death. I love you and I need your love. […] My strength was such a thin illusion.
I feel I have betrayed you day and night. Not with the mind, but the body, I pretend. I suspect that this feeling—projected—is part of my fear of your desertion, and the basis of my own self-fury. I too have been an “ugly duckling”; you tell me now that I’m virile and attractive. Must I “prove” it on every street-corner? I must catalogue my vileness. Do I do this to lacerate Jenö, or find forgiveness from him? Such trash. You would never believe! I despise them; I am utterly impotent; I wait for them to go. Item: ageing pedant who sucked me humbly in the darkness. Item: Gaunt Southerner, all bones and penis. Item: Spanish youth, mascara’d whoreish eyes. Item: a Jewish Porker (horrible! a parody of myself), his bandy legs in tight white jeans, yellow with Vaseline about the crotch: a “fine” collection of pictures, dildoes, whips. This crew? These clowns? Why do I force them down my throat? Forgive the enumeration of this pointless shit. I have to mention this, to vomit it up, like pricking an abscess in my conscience.
I do love you, Jenö. I am for you. You are for me. This is the centre of my life. All else is idiocy and neurosis, without real meaning.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON: You have made the sun come out again! If only I could phone you every day. […]
Evening: walking and walking by the river. The New Jerusalem, its billion windows golden in the setting sun. The creation of the New York night, a monstrous ganglion coming to life. Whose lamp is this, and whose is that? Cameos of ten million lives.
The fantastic Cubist backdrop of the New York waterfront. So patched and piebald, these broken buildings. So full of life and ghosts. This building is 1888; that street is pure 1820; this area is surely Emersonian. This is the profound and beautiful difference between New York and London: that New York is a mosaic of the past, like a jigsaw puzzle, while London has risen layer by layer—the present is like a film, a transparency, through which you see the past. Stand with me, Jenö, on one of London’s seven hills: Below you 1965. The cars and buses disappear; dust flies and horses neigh—it is 1765. The sound of trumpets, the panting deer. There’s Elizabeth, in a great white cape, with Essex by her side: 1565. And back and back and back and back, to the ramparts of Londinium, and that winding Neolithic valley, where a bearskinned Vincze loved a shaggy Sacks.
This, essentially, is why you, and I, will return to London. London is a face thousands of years in age. She bears, in her wrinkles, her alleys, her sudden beauties, the total experience of this time. She has evolved, layer built on layer, like the crust of the earth itself. Whereas New York, though exciting, jazzy, is entirely different: a synthetic city, if you wish, with an oddly provisional, unmerged quality: Jews here, Italians there. Crime on 85th. Dignity on 86th. This area is very pricey; that is clearly running down. Westchester for my married colleagues, Christopher St. for my queer queer self.
If only you were with me, Jenö, walking by my side. I shall write out Eliot’s “preludes” back at the flat, and send them to you with this letter. They are the most beautiful poems of London ever written. And equally well, they could be any city which smacks of greatness. Somehow, the IIIrd Prelude reminds me of our little room in Rue Cannette (I have a picture, from the window).
SUNDAY: Day of reflection, recollection.
You are you are you are you. Of course. But you have had precursors, Jenö. A bad word, but I know of no other. The last thing I mean is that they were somehow fragments of you, or that you are but an aggregate of them. Two of major importance in my life.[*15] I never had any real relation with them. Not only no physical relation, but—I suppose I was too much of a baby to relate at all. They were perhaps abstractions, more than human beings, to me:
Richard Selig (his very name means “happy”), a dozen years ago. Gifted, handsome, American poet. The first to open life for me. I realize suddenly that my favourite poets (Rimbaud, Villon) were really his: he would read them by the fireside to me. Oxford. 1953. Poor Richard. He had so little time. He had tasted only a hundredth of life’s sweetness, he was just coming into the manhood of his gifts when he was struck by a fast malignant cancer, and died a few months later—just 27, even younger than his favourite poets. (It was then that I decided to leave zoology, and become a doctor. I had such a hatred of disease and death! This is my only motive for being a good doctor, or good scientist. I shall fight against mortality. Unbearable that a Selig, Vincze, Sacks, should die!) […]
