Letters, p.14
Letters, page 14
Thank you for reading this monstrous letter!
* * *
—
Despite Vincze’s assurances, OS had been thrust into what he characterized in one missive to his lover as a “violent oscillation between absolute certainty and absolute doubt.”
To Jenö Vincze
December 9, 1965
[Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, N.Y.]
Dear Jenö:
This will be an impossible letter to write, but write I must. […]
Jenö: what shall I say to you? I wrote you a letter about a week ago, hesitated to post it, discussed it both with Mark[*22] and with a (female) intimate of mine, and then filed it away as testament to a reaction too brutal to transmit. Masquerading as a detached, clinical, analysis, it was in effect a devastating, a murderous, attack on you—denying your dignity, your manhood, your sanity, and finally your very identity as a human being. There were elements of truth, grossly travestied, in the substance of what I said: but the way I said it was inadmissible. No human being can turn on another like this, without a total moral sabotage. I hope I can be more reasoned in this letter, and more charitable. I must not be enslaved by my feelings, which are currently RAGE and PANIC.
I am up against something in myself which defies conscious control. I control it one way, it emerges another. You saw in Paris, with our poor old harmless Hoteliere, a minuscule attack of the same rage-panic reaction—and she, poor thing, had done little enough to precipitate it. In the past month I have been turning on people right and left. I shun them, I flee from them, but I carry a machine-gun in my flight. It is this of which you are frightened, this which your intuition warned you of.
I find the pleading, entreating, tone of your last letter intolerable, even less tolerable than the jealousy which preceded it. And yet you write with dignity and passion and warmth. I must tear you out of my system, because I dare not be involved. You are not the first, you will not be the last. I long for contact, but when it becomes too pressing, when it threatens my “independence” I am filled with rage and terror. I really cannot imagine life with anybody. We differ profoundly on this score, and the difference is basic and irrevocable. I have always lived in a one-man world; I fear I always will. Briefly, (oh, so briefly!), and to my own incredulous astonishment, I had a sense of sharing and togetherness. It has vanished, vanished so utterly that I can no longer conceive how it ever existed.
You do not need me. My strength is as illusory as yours. Our paths met for the briefest moment, and now they must diverge. I want no further contact with you, for like you, I am all-or-none: an attenuated relationship is worse than no relationship. So too would be one rent by distrust, jealousy and suspicion. I do not know what the word “love” means. Perhaps I loved you, but I no longer love you. I have only a sense of panic and revulsion, a categorical necessity to get away.
It is not exclusively to you that this reaction is directed. It is to anything and anybody with which I fear to be involved. The point of parting between us was that fatal little paragraph at the end of your letter—that irrelevant, insane, paragraph which started: “Does this mean divorce?” You fluctuate between grandiosity (I will be president of the US in fifteen years: I can walk through the traffic without danger) and paranoia (people are turning on me). Your mind is black and white. (Are you for me or against me?) I catered to you, to your phantasies: and you catered to mine. We were locked in a classical folie-a-deux. (We will revise the world. I will get a Nobel prize, you will be a world-famous director. I am a genius, you are a genius.) All this CRAP.
And now the cold light of reason seeps in. The play is over, the lights are up. […]
I am torn in two, and must yield to my fear. Our menage really never had a chance. Perhaps I came so close to you knowing that reality would not permit it for very long; I yielded to a dream, knowing I would wake. I have woken. The dream was beautiful and terrible. It was everything while it lasted. I have unappeasable regret. But I am awake. The alarm clock is ringing. The world is waiting. I must shave, I must dress. The dream is forgotten.
Jenö: we no longer have any point of contact, and there is no point in contact. This is my final and farewell letter to you. I wish you what you wish yourself; I implore you to do nothing rash, and to make no reply: Mark, by the way, is a good and true friend to you: he did everything he could to hold us together, but I can no more be held than a mad rhinoceros.
adieu,
Oliver
Skip Notes
*1 In On the Move, OS refers to Jenö by a pseudonym, “Karl.”
*2 The Hotel Earle on Waverly Place—now the Washington Square Hotel—was then a rather seedy apartment hotel in the heart of Greenwich Village that attracted musicians and writers. During the mid-1960s, regulars included Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Bo Diddley.
*3 OS was receiving his mail at the college.
*4 From Psalm 114.
*5 Tom Dahl, whom Oliver met at UCLA, was interested in photography and marine biology, two of OS’s longstanding passions.
*6 Terry’s lab.
*7 William Norton, a neurochemist.
*8 OS often referred to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a favorite book from his childhood. The first part of the book, about Dr. Manette’s release from the Bastille, is titled “Recalled to Life.”
*9 Having shapely buttocks.
*10 The protagonist of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
*11 Joyce wrote, “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
*12 An essay about motorcycle life that OS was working on but never published.
*13 Thom Gunn.
*14 A fellow English émigré and her husband, identity unknown.
*15 It is curious that OS omits Mel from this list, unless it is because Selig and Gunn, like Vincze, were part of the intellectual scene; Mel seems to have occupied a different place in OS’s emotional life.
*16 The actual title of this poem is “On the Move.”
*17 Gunn’s 1957 collection, which includes “On the Move.”
*18 A letter from Gunn to his partner Mike Kitay circa February 1961 indicates that Gunn first met OS at a leather-friendly bar in the Embarcadero. Gunn wrote, “There is a queer, colossally big London Jew called Wolf, a medical student, and friend of Jonathan Miller, who says my poetry changed his life—it caused him to get a bike and wear leather, and he tears around like a whirlwind—and came out to be a doctor, here because I live here.” (Quoted from The Letters of Thom Gunn, ed. Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer.)
*19 The following page of this letter is missing. OS later described, in On the Move, the florid hallucinations he experienced on a bus, and how his friend Carol Burnett, a fellow doctor, sat with him through four days of intermittent delirium—but this was likely a few weeks later as he continued to fight his dependence on chloral hydrate.
*20 In a letter to his parents around this time, OS wrote: “Had a very restless night, felt peculiarly tremulous and frightened in the morning, and started to have bizarre perceptual changes in the afternoon—buildings tilted and quadrangular, people looked insect-like with sudden nystagmoid jerkings of the eyes. Ghastly! I thought, not unnaturally, that I was going crazy. Then I thought of the chloral.”
*21 Charles Sherrington, a physiologist and Nobel laureate also known for his writings. In his book Man on His Nature (1940), he writes that the brain is “an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.”
*22 Mark Anstendig, a friend of Jenö’s.
4
Analysis
1966–1968
Augusta Bonnard, OS’s psychiatrist friend, had returned home to London but continued to see OS during his visits there. In a letter of December 13, 1965, she analyzed his continuing denial of drug use and proposed that his very fear of psychosis drove him to seek artificial, drug-induced experiences of it. He had not gotten very far in his analysis with Seymour Bird in Los Angeles, and now she suggested that he find an analyst in New York to help him, as she put it, “be the ‘mensch’ that lurks within you.” He must have agreed with her, and realized that his out-of-control amphetamine use, at least, would soon kill him. On New Year’s Eve, as he relates in On the Move, he resolved to get help.
Soon thereafter, he began seeing a new psychiatrist, Leonard Shengold. Luckily, perhaps for both of them, it turned out to be an ideal match: one of Shengold’s special interests was early trauma and parental abandonment.[*1] And OS, having been “exiled” from his parents at the age of six, sent to a boarding school in the countryside, had been deeply scarred by what he saw as his own abandonment.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
February 11, 1966
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY
Dear Ma + Pa,
This will be a short note but better than nothing.
I am sorry to have caused you anxiety, and fear that my telegram—selfishly—may have upset you further. […]
Perhaps the less said the better—after brief elation, I became rather morbidly depressed, felt estranged from everyone, hopeless, worthless, empty, at the end of the line. All the conventional melancholic symptoms.
Fortunately I think I am surfacing now, partly with some psychotherapy, and significantly from a realization (persistently denied) that poring down a microscope drives me nuts, and I need some return to clinical work. I talked this over in preliminary terms, with people at hospital today, and will probably move into a clinical setting in the summer (I can hardly imagine summer in these sub-zero days). I am not in a position to judge further ahead. I really have no sort of life in New York at present, but as I am, would have no sort of life anywhere. It is a question of changing or perishing.
Yr parcels are welcome, and form a slender tie across the ocean. I must send you my best + belated wishes for both yr birthdays and the New Year. And don’t worry, my capacity for survival is remarkably strong.
PS Very happy to hear Michael has a job. This is excellent + encouraging news.
* * *
—
A week later, OS drafted the following letter to his Auntie Len, though it is not clear whether this letter was sent.
To Helena Landau
February 18, 1966
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY
My dear Auntie Len:
I hope this letter finds you in good health and spirits, and in your usual state of enormous activity.
I am sorry for not having written to you since leaving London.[*2] This is not a specific inattention to you, but part of a general failure of communication with everybody. For one reason and another I nose-dived into a very intense, quasi-suicidal depression, from which I am now (I hope, definitively) emerging. I can’t “blame” New York for this, because this is really a marvellous city, rich, exciting, unlimited in range and depth—as London is, although the two cities are profoundly different. New York is punctate, scintillating, the way all cities look from a plane at night: it is a mosaic of qualities and people and dates and styles, a sort of enormous urban jig-saw. Whereas London has much the quality of an evolved city, the present like a transparency overlying the wafers of the past, layer on layer, extended in time, like Schliemann’s Troy, or the crust of the earth. But then again, for all its sparkling synthetic quality, New York is strangely old-fashioned, archaic. The huge girders of the “El” are a railway-phantasy of the 1880’s, the crayfish tail of the Chrysler building a pure Edwardian vanity. I can’t see the Empire State Building without the vast silhouette of King Kong scrambling up its sides. The East Bronx is like Whitechapel in the early Twenties (before the diaspora to Golders Green).
No, I can’t blame New York, although the weather (which, amongst other things, makes use of my beloved bike virtually impossible), the strike,[*3] the horrid paper-thin quadrangular cell of an apartment I got myself into etc. have added their quota. Nor can I blame Einstein, which for its combination of creative enthusiasm and human tolerance is as fine a place as I am likely to find anywhere.
I had, to put it bluntly, no life whatever in New York. That is to say, no friends, no one I could go to, speak to, trust, enjoy; my “interests” became stale and empty to me: hospital a burden daily harder to bear; harder still to dissimulate my feelings of boredom and despair. I couldn’t eat, or sleep, saw no conceivable future, saw my whole past as worthless and hateful; I compounded a deteriorating situation by drug-dependency, and—but why upset you with this horrible catalogue? I found myself, in short, finding existence intolerable, seeing no point whatever in further existence. More than this, I found myself struggling with what was, in effect, an insistent, a peremptory inner demand for acts of self-destruction, culminating in self-murder. I was in the grip of what one might term a lethal neurosis.
And though it was only in 1966 that I came finally to breaking point, and stared disaster in the face; yet I could see the same pattern of behaviour—bewildered, enraged, self-destructive—going back ten, fifteen years, back perhaps into my childhood: although this, strangely enough, was blotted out from my memory, by a dense sprawling amnesia covering the first twelve years of my life.
I went to seek some psychiatric help around the beginning of the year, for it was clear to me that I had become acutely disturbed, and would not survive (physically) unless some successful intervention could be made. […]
Let me introduce this most painful idea which has arisen in the course of intensive psychotherapy, and at a time, as I have said, when I feel myself in extremis. Time and time again, I would demand of myself: What has gone wrong? Here I am, richly endowed with physical and intellectual gifts, with fine parents I must be proud of, and every opportunity etc. etc. What has happened to me en route so that I am slipping down the greased path of withdrawal, discontent, inability to make friends, inability to have sex, etc. etc. towards suicide in a New York apartment at the age of 32? What is the nature and reason for a neurosis of such dangerous proportions? And has it anything to do with Michael’s schizophrenia?
There are many bizarre, schizophrenia-mimicking aspects to my own behavior: in particular, repeated association and macabre entanglements with schizophrenics, and second, repeated self-dosage with LSD and similar drugs which induce a temporary chemical psychosis. A million times I had to ask myself: WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS REALLY GOING ON? And the final, desperate, question: WHO AM I? What sort of person am I? Under my glibness and my postures and my facades, my imitations, what is the real Oliver like? And, is there a real Oliver? […]
I have always felt transparent, without substance, a ghost, a transient, homeless, or outcast. […]
A further hypothesis suggests itself to me, and it is in relation to this that I most seek your opinion. It seems to me that I do have a few, scattered, happy memories of early childhood, all before the age of 5. Of tea in the garden, and Kew Gardens, and the tops of buses, and maternal hugs, and Ma coming up when I said my evening prayer in bed and kissing me goodnight; a general vague memory of family warmth, and ease, and affection, somehow agglomerated into a sort of pure feeling. Summer 1938, the last time we were all happy together. At other times, I wonder if this is a sort of incorporated memory or feelings drawn from the family, rather than one provided by my own memory. Perhaps the distinction is not too important. Summer 1938. With Marcus and David wrestling on the back lawn, and Michael—already studious, quiet—reading a book in the drawing room and pudgy Ollie, the afterthought, tugging a hollyhock and laughing, and…And then. BANG CRASH. War. Raids. Blackouts. Lawn torn up for allotments. Big coloured window blown out of the hall. Family disrupted. Marcus to Leeds, David [to] Lancaster, Michael and Oliver [to] Braefield. And when it was all over—they couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Things were never the same with the Sacks Family. Mark went off, David married, Mike went crazy. A sort of ugliness, a discomfort, fell upon the big house.
But I ask myself: Was it the War? Was this the natural, inevitable, evolution of the family? Or did some change come over Ma, the insidious onset of her paranoia, probably between 1938 and 1940, an emergence of symptoms doubtless exacerbated by the War and the stresses it imposed? I know there was general evacuation etc. but I must wonder whether it was really necessary, whether it was the right thing to do, to dispatch us all in different directions?[*4] And I have, not even half-memories, but hints—I wonder whether her real affection for us, and for me in particular, dwindled and died sometime in those two years, to be replaced by the morbid, demanding, yet frigid possessiveness of paranoia.[*5]
To Marcus Sacks
March 6, 1966
