Letters, p.16
Letters, page 16
Love, happy Pesach to you all,
OLIVER
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Late in 1966, OS began a number of new part-time jobs in the Bronx: working in a headache clinic at Montefiore Hospital and seeing patients at Beth Abraham Hospital as well as Bronx Psychiatric Center. He also taught a group of AECOM medical students, doing rounds with them at Beth Abraham, often followed by a discussion in the nearby New York Botanical Garden.
To Mel Erpelding
Friend
[ca. December 1966]
165 Christopher St., New York
Dear Mel,
I started a reply the day I received your letter, and then another, and another, and got furious with myself, and confused, and never did get to the postbox. You know the syndrome. They call it: CONFLICT! […] How I miss the mountains and deserts of the West now I’ve left them! And New York is strictly murderous for a two-wheeler: the roads cobbled, shattered, cratered, greasy, four months of squall and slush and ice in the winter, and the traffic unspeakably violent and deadly. I confess I have had my fill of it, and am getting a car—a Volvo probably—because I don’t think I will survive another winter on the bike here. Not that I’ll give it up; bikes will always remain my dearest symbol of some sort of freedom I sometimes feel but can never formulate—but I’ll keep it for weekends, for decent weather, for the country, for friends, and give up the nightmarish, daily 25-mile ride to Hospital. […]
I thought at first I could survive on a two-day work week, and hopefully write and write for the rest. It worked—for a month: during October I wrote over 200 pages of a Beach novel. It started as loose, easy, Lardnerish[*11] sketches, and then became more involved, more introspective, more contrapuntal, until I got suffocated in the labyrinth of my own indecisions: emotional indecisions, that is, as to where I—the liver, the writer—stood in relation to my “characters,” my friends. I had in mind something analogous to Ulysses in a way, the shifting web of the Beach, its dozens and hundreds moving in and out of each other’s lives, its timelessness, its rootlessness, its restlessness, against the groundtheme of the Ocean. All the action to be kaleidoscoped into a single day, given extension through the memories and phantasies of the characters, but utterly superficial, like the froth on the Ocean. The whole to take place between two Tides, and the movement of the sea to be the movement of the book: starting with a sort of birth, the adolescents, as I would see them every morning, in the grey dawn, rocking and rocking on their surfboards, rocking in the lap of the Sea (Thalatta, thalatta, our great green mother!), and ending—but I never even approached my ending: in the phosphorescent waters of a summer night, swimming far, far out, two of my characters (you guess which), recovering at the end of the long, frantic, restless day the sense of reality, of the strength and the calm of the Ocean, and at the moment of their knowledge, being drowned, and sinking into the green and changeless abyss. Me and my bloody Death-ecstasy obsession. Anyhow, I’ve destroyed the whole fucking thing. And on destroying it, suddenly found my hands empty, and the sense of panic and emptiness all round me again, and the sense of loss, and of having destroyed what meant so much to me.
And now? I am, for the moment, less saturated in the Past, less committed to it. My clinic, my patients, give me a sort of satisfaction I haven’t had for a long time, and I now have teaching appointments both at Einstein and a smaller, satellite hospital.[*12] With patients and with students I feel, at least to some consistent degree, at ease, which I could never do in “research”; for research, last year, and before that eleven years ago,[*13] has always crystallized into a malignant love-hate struggle with my boss, alternately teasing and masochistic, and utterly destructive. I have some sort of life at the moment, and, starting Jan 1, will be earning about $20,000 a year, without any overwork. I will be moving into a fairly decent apartment, instead of the hateful tenement I have condemned myself to for the last year, and—maybe, maybe—there is the possibility of a future. I have a horror of “success,” as defined in Manhattan professional terms, seeing it as a constriction, a mutilation, a sort of leucotomy. But these are my fears, not the fears of anyone who knows me.
And I must have a piano, which I have desperately missed in the last year. I have just been looking at a beautiful interview with the 90-year-old Casals, who has a little house by the sea in Puerto Rico. Every morning he walks on the beach, and then sits down at the piano, as he has done for eighty years, and plays from Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. “Bach and Nature,” he says, “are two approaches to the same thing: a wonderful way to greet a new day. The amazing thing about the Preludes and Fugues is that even though I have known every note of it all my life, listening and playing it every single day, there is always something left to discover in it.”[*14] Isn’t that an incredible, an utterly beautiful thing for a man of ninety to say? I am reminded of the great old man in Kazantzakis.[*15]
And a Hi-Fi, so I can listen every day to Casals, and Bach, and supplement my wretched inability to play decently. And a darkroom, because I have terribly missed the happiness of creating pictures, of saving thoughts and feelings, which I can sometimes do as a photographer. It is less easy to lie in pictures than in words, and New York—so ugly, so monstrous, so wicked, so cruel—is full of sudden and fantastic beauties, like jewels bedded in a dung-heap. One of the jewels—I hope we can spend some afternoons there together—is the Natural History Museum, where some unknown and anonymous genius has created marvellous dioramas of America and Africa, caverns, sunsets, ice cliffs, deserts: the mostest in vicarious travel. There is one diorama of that huge bony tumulus in Wyoming, which I saw and partly climbed in ’61. It is pure reality; I think I viewed it from that very spot, and it brings back that strange, tortured, wonderful ride round the country I had.
How we have travelled, Mel! Always fleeing, always seeking, always deceiving ourselves, never arriving. Anchored to the Past, dreaming of the Future, and—in some fatal, blind sense—oblivious to the Present.
Lists of regrets, manufacture of dreams! I say to myself: Why did I leave Santa Monica? Beaches, white foam, Topanga, friends, the exhilaration which saturated every day. Bah! But what madness to leave San Francisco! Aerial, hilly, New Jerusalem. Or why did I not stay in the wilds, in the backwoods of Canada, a lumberman and poet? Or was not the real spitefulness ever to leave London—my only, wondrous London—my home, and the home of my people? Or was the real and ultimate sadness to grow up, to leave the Magic Region of childhood, the time of wish-fulfilment and infinite power, the feeling of love and an endless future?
IDIOCY! It is all idiocy and vain regrets. Fatally easy to transfigure the past, to see in it millennia of epic happiness followed by cruel unmerited expulsions. It is the myth of Genesis all over again. In anticipation every move is an Exodus, and in retrospect every move is a Genesis. Did I not cross the ocean to the New World, the Vita Nuova, on the 27th birthday, the symbol of Rebirth? And was not California prejudged as El Dorado or the Fleece of Gold? And New York, in turn, as the Ultimate Metropolis—rich, brilliant, ablaze with promise—that same false promise which drew Dick Whittington[*16] to London Town six hundred years ago?
And in you, Mel, for reasons beyond articulation, that feeling of spiritual twinship (companion in hope and misery, co-Hero in the world of Promise, co-Victim in the world of Disillusion); that feeling which it seems to me I have always had, and shall never lose.
Slowly, terribly slowly, with pain and elation and backsliding and progress, we learn. I have been finding my analysis invaluable. Much of the grandiosity has been punctured, but something solid, something substantial and indestructible, something Real, is beginning to emerge. There is no Promised Land, but there is promise in myself. All the power I need, and all the power I need to destroy. That awful, predestined turning against self, the violent smashing of self and others, the perpetual sabotage of all one does—I am beginning to realize its demonic force, its roots in the past, and to grapple with my unseen enemy. Will we allow ourselves to survive?
The snow is falling past my window. I have been typing two hours in a sort of trance. I can’t help myself, there is such a feeling of happy-miserable turmoil.
Please write me a long letter about yourself, and life in Florida, and scuba diving. I feel sure you did the right thing going there, and I have confidence that things will work out—not suddenly, or miraculously, but by degrees, and learning, and starts and stops.
And when will you (both)[*17] come to New York, and see your old friend? Christmas, New Year. I am always waiting, but I wait without impatience, because there is a feeling of nearness which makes distance irrelevant. How I hated that feeling of estrangement last year! Or I am in most evenings, so give me a ring.
Time to stop. Time to send you […] all my love and best wishes for the coming year, and to hope that we see plenty of one another.
Yours (for good and bad),
Oliver
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Although OS was making progress in his analysis with Dr. Shengold, he had not yet fully given up amphetamines. One February night in 1967, he came across a rare volume in AECOM’s library: Edward Liveing’s nineteenth-century book On Megrim, which he read through in a single sitting. Enthralled by its rich narrative style, and in what he later described as “an amphetamine induced epiphany,”[*18] he resolved to write his own book on migraine, based on the patients he was seeing at the Montefiore clinic. This new role as a physician, listening to and sometimes helping patients, teaching students, and, especially, combining this with the creative engagement of writing, changed his life. In Hallucinations, he would write, “The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.” Freud emphasized the importance of work and love; OS, though he had given up on romantic love, had fallen in love with his work.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
June 19, 1967
10 Sheridan Square, New York[*19]
Dear Ma and Pa,
[…] Like all of you at home, I have been hanging on the news of the Middle East Crisis.[*20] A fantastic muddle, almost inextricable labyrinth of grievances fancied and just, lies, equivocations, bravery, cowardice, glory, dishonour, hysteria—perhaps Israel is the only country that thought clearly and acted honourably. I found, to my intense surprise, a tremendous feeling for Israel welling up in me. I may have entertained phantasies about rendering medical aid to North Vietnam, clinical aid to Bertrand Russell, but I practically got a ticket to Jerusalem. More than thirty of my students went, bless them. I felt very proud of you, Pa, when David told me of your almost going there too in the Crisis. It is so strange that violence can clarify, and ugliness point the way to sense and virtue. I was assailed by long-buried (but not forgotten; there is no such thing as “forgetting”) memories, feelings, suddenly remembering the 137th Psalm in its entirety, suddenly weeping at a picture of soldiers at the Wailing Wall. Even fingering the Hierusalemic knickknacks which are part of the “furnishings” of my new apartment.
The new apartment is absolutely delightful: high, airy, spacious, as much as my former one was troglodytic, box-like, beastly, penitential. […] It is fully, indeed excessively, furnished by its present owner […] in solid, Jewish, middle-class, style (I dare not say “taste”!), and contains, in addition to superabundant furniture (so how many chairs could she sit in?), quantities of Jewish mnemonia—terracotta models of Rachel’s tomb, beaten Druze brass, and Graetz’ History of the Jews in 127 abnormally heavy volumes.[*21] It commands a splendid view in several directions, from the Statue of Liberty to the West (when I stand on the stove) to the Empire State Building from the bath. I am really extraordinarily happy, indeed hypomanic, since I moved in. So nice to have a place one isn’t ashamed of; to entertain one’s friends and colleagues; to sit at my broad desk composing the definitive monograph on “Migraine”; and to lie on my bed with the windows open, bathed in the sulphurous vapors of New York. […] The sense of home—albeit a temporary one—is very congenial, very necessary, and something I forewent entirely in my disastrous first year in New York.
The mention of “home” brings me to the subject of Michael. Indeed it has been partly sympathy if not identification with his predicament, as well as not knowing what to say, and knowing that whatever I might say would be attended with guilty and angry reactions all round, that has delayed my writing to you.
In a matter as confused and as charged as this, there are few certainties and fewer “right things to do.”
I think I would like you to show this letter to Michael, partly because I have difficulty in writing to him directly, as he would have difficulty in replying to such a letter. Indeed, this failure of communication has been central to his problem. It is very difficult for Michael to speak to you, fully or meaningfully, and almost equally difficult for you to speak to him. There is, partially, and tragically, a mutual incomprehension.
His inability to express himself in a fashion (or for you to listen to him in a modulated fashion) made it necessary, I would guess, to “explode” the way he did. It was a sudden violent eruption of discontent and accusation which must have been boiling up in him (unknown to you, and quite probably unknown to himself) for a long time. Following his passionate accusations and threats, he felt panicked, annihilated, and fled the house. He walked and walked, guilt-ridden, like Orestes, till he collapsed. He then maintained he would prefer to be institutionalized rather than remain at home.
This was violently, unfairly and cruelly expressed; he was enraged, not fully in control; but you cannot call it “delirious,” nor should you call it “chemical.” He is, in a sense, entirely right. He apprehends the mutilation, the humiliation, of remaining “at home,” and the fact that continuance of an intolerable situation can only fortify his “illness.” He is caught in a web of tragic ambiguities; one part of him wants to remain at home, to be looked after, to be treated as an appendage, the other part is crying for liberation. Yet the “outside” is felt to be very dangerous; he fears he lacks the “savoir faire” etc. etc.
I don’t think Michael is in any sense “burnt out,” altho’ he has coped with violent and conflicting feelings for many years, by obsessional, constrictive, ritualistic practices etc. His “calm” over the past few years has not represented a definitive equilibrium.
I am inclined to think that he should live away from home, should have a job, and should have first-class psychotherapy on a regular and moderately intensive basis. That he is (potentially) capable of supporting himself, of living independently, and of resolving at least some of his very major problems, and of achieving at least a measure of emotional clarity and fulfilment.
He has important assets which have not been in the least eroded by his “illness”: he is intelligent, he is imaginative, he is painfully honest, and he has obvious capacities for giving and accepting affection.
I do not gainsay the use of tranquilizers etc.—they may be quite useful in cutting down acute agitation, insomnia etc—but I think it a major error to label him as “organic,” “schizophrenic” etc. and leave it like this. It is an error, let me add (for I aim to clarify not to accuse) which has been fortified by 150 years of medical jargon and incomprehension and is enormously widespread. Certainly one can be “crazy”—but this is a way of reacting; Michael became violent because he had to make his point and I think he must be listened to.
Maybe I’ve said too much. Perhaps you will be in no mood for the rest of my “news.”
The last 3 months, bye and large, have been busy, happy and fairly productive. I shall stay on at the Headache Unit, though with less work and more pay. […] Migraine, seemingly a dull, trivial subject at first, has opened a door for me into an immensely complex and fascinating area inhabited by all the “functional” illnesses, and I believe that I have some ideas of first-class worth in this area.
I have been asked to stay on, and moreover “take over” Beth Abraham,[*22] which I will do in conjunction with a considerable increase of student teaching. My fondness and flair for teaching has been appreciated, and expanded in the warm light of recognition, and the College will be placing a major portion of undergraduate Neurology tuition in my hands.
I have also enjoyed consultancy at the Bronx State Hospital[*23] (an immense psychiatric (and epileptic) “back ward”) and hope I can consolidate my position there.
I can look back at the last few months with thankfulness, for I was really a beggar back in October, timidly asking for part-time work, and I am now, to some extent, being recognized and even in a position to make demands. I must ascribe this largely, tho’ not exclusively, to psychotherapy. My potential is exceptional, but so also have been a variety of neurotic and (transiently) psychotic predicaments. I don’t feel, in any final sense, “out of the woods,” but I have a measure of clarity and hope. […]
I saw a good deal of David and Elizabeth[*24] last week, and enjoyed their charms and company immensely. I was also struck by the quantity of odd, violent, if not downright crazy feelings they both contained, as indeed we all contain, both of you, as well as myself, as Michael does. It takes 5 or 10 generations to make a “character,” neurotic or otherwise, so there should be less blaming and naming, and more understanding.
Write soon,
Love,
OLIVER
PS Buy The Divided Self by R. D. Laing (Pelican), a remarkable and illuminating book.
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