Letters, p.17
Letters, page 17
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In London that summer, OS proceeded, as he recounts in On the Move, “to write a book on migraine over the course of a couple of weeks. It spilled out suddenly, without conscious planning.” He took the manuscript to Faber & Faber, an English publisher, and they liked it. He returned to New York in September and hoped to complete his revisions swiftly. But as the months went by, those plans went awry.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
March 24, 1968
234 East 78th St., New York[*25]
Dear Ma and Pa,
It is, as you say, as I regret, more than four months since I have written to you, or, indeed, since I have written to anyone. It is not that I am lazy or have nothing to say, but that I have felt myself in an unpleasing situation and frame of mind (more or less, with ups and downs, since my return in September), and thought it best to keep my feelings to myself. […]
It is very difficult for me to do any writing, any creative work, coolly and consistently. I do it in sudden excited bursts, when conditions are right. They are rarely right, probably not more than 1 pc. of the time. They were right in the summer, in London, at home, in the garden, in what you (Pop) called an “exalted” frame of mind. It wasn’t exalted, it was merely healthy, and urgent, a brief liberation from tensions which interfere with creative work. I made a major error in returning when I did; another two weeks and I would have had the revised MS complete, and in Faber & Faber’s hands. As it was, my sense of dread and premonition regarding return to New York was entirely borne out by the course of events. Jonathan Miller warned me about this, and he was entirely correct in his ominous prognostications. My momentum carried me through one more chapter when I returned, and that was it. I ran into several sorts of impasse, in particular my boss Friedman,[*26] who saw in the manuscript an originality he lacked and hated, and a promise of success and quality which threatened to throw his own countless (174) trashy, trivial publications on the subject into obscurity. Not that this would have been the case, but this was how it was formulated in his suspicious, envious, spiteful and ungenerous mind. He adopted an attitude of frank paranoia—“Sacks” (he used to call me Oliver before), “you’ve jumped the gun. You can’t do this. It is umm, presumptuous. I refuse to let you use any clinical material from the Headache Unit,” etc. etc. […I] chose to ignore everything I had heard about him from everyone who had ever worked with him. I had been told, over and over again, that he demanded a passive, mindless, servility from anyone who worked in the HU, and immediately turned against them. [I tried to] “bring him round,” to argue with him, to revise the MS extensively, to compromise, to accommodate etc. It was entirely futile. I even went so far as to write a further paper (on “Migraine Aura”), at his specific request, for the yearly handbook on Headache. This provoked a literally insane personal attack on me: how dare I quote so many “ancient obsolete sources” (I provided an extensive historical introduction in order to place the entire subject in a meaningful context); how dare I criticize the “accepted” theories of a local vascular origin; […] how dare I use so many semi-colons and dashes etc. etc. Regarding the substance of what I had said, the arguments and evidence I had marshalled, he eschewed comment. […]
It should be evident to you, as it has finally become evident to me, that he is an impossible man, and that I can only proceed with the book when I resign from the HU and escape his orbit. What was my fault, and deeply neurotic, was to put up with all this shit, to comply with his demands for silence and inactivity, to turn myself off, and, in effect, to destroy my own creation. […]
At Beth Abraham I have sole (neurological) charge of over 400 patients, and am beginning to get immersed in a number of research and therapeutic projects. The latter include the setting-up of special model wards for three classes of patients in whom I am specially interested, and who respond, to an astonishing degree, to loving and patient attention: namely, (senile and pre-senile) dements, aphasics, and Parkinsonian patients (here, I am choosing especially the younger and post-encephalitic patients). Some of the research work which is gaining momentum has regard to some chromosome studies in a number of unusual hereditary diseases, immunological work in disseminated sclerosis, and some enzyme-studies in ALS. I have become neurological tutor to the entire senior year of medical students at the College, and they come over to me twice weekly at Beth Abraham. I love teaching: it is perhaps the only area where I consistently function at my best and most un-neurotic level, and from which I always derive pleasure. This seems to be increasingly recognized at the College, and I am gradually being given more teaching responsibilities. […]
Incidentally, I had a flattering letter yesterday, out of the blue, from the Chairman of the Neurology Dept. at Chicago, saying he had heard about me from “someone who knows me personally,” and would I be interested in a full time (assistant professorial) teaching position, one of the few such in the States, where teaching is generally relegated a poor second behind “research,” and the gifted teacher/poor researcher like myself doesn’t have a chance. I shall thank him for his kind letter, but explain that I am not considering any move at present. Indeed the only move which makes sense to me now is to return to England.
If I returned to England I would probably like the sort of work I am doing now, namely working in chronic disease institutions. The majority of doctors can’t stand this, and indeed such positions carry a lowered “status” compared with fully academic positions. However, it is what I like, what I am good at, and what I can derive much information from. […]
Of course everything would have been much happier and greatly facilitated if I had been able to proceed with my Migraine book. Ideally, I would finish this, abstract it to a [doctoral] thesis, follow it up with the Parkinsonian book, achieve a modest critical success with both, and return to England esteemed and desired. Ideally. However, what is possible theoretically is often impossible in practice. I may have to come back with my tail between my legs, as it were, i.e. without any special publications to prove my worth. I have to admit that the last few months have been wretched and unproductive, and that I am far from confident that this turn of affairs can be altered. Further, my tolerance of New York and this country has worn about as thin as it can go. For much of the time, I have the feeling of being in some awful cross between a kindergarten and a concentration-camp. The country is seething with violence, and moral ugliness. The continuous barrages of lying and double-talk come daily closer to the conditions of 1984. […]
I will carry my neurotic conflicts and pains wherever I go. These will not be resolved by migrations (as they were not resolved by the last eight years of flying here and there). However, above and in addition to these, I have an unappeasable nostalgia, a wish to return to family and friends, to a city and a country and a civilization which means something to me, which formed the backdrop of my memories, development, feelings, and which, if bankrupt, is at least gentle, and given to reminiscence and compromise, rather than this country, which, first, is essentially foreign, alien, and without depth or meaning to my eyes, and which, secondly, seems embarked on an irreversible and hideous cultural psychosis, currently corresponding to the state of Germany in, say, 1937.
I must wind up this letter. I shall certainly come to England in the summer, and I shall take off at least six weeks, if not eight. This would cover July and August. I need a massive break from things here. I need time to write, because it occurs to me that only conditions approximating to last summer will allow me to start writing again, and I must realistically look round for future positions. […]
Enough. Please write soon.
Love to everybody, and tell Auntie Len I will write her soon.
* * *
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OS continued seeing patients at the migraine clinic, but Friedman forbade him to take home copies of his notes about patients. In June 1968, OS managed a way around this; he arranged with a janitor to get into the clinic at night, so that he could make copies of his own consultation reports, by hand. Shortly thereafter, he left for London.
To Mike Warvarovsky
Friend From Muscle Beach
July 24, 1968
[37 Mapesbury Rd., London]
Hello Mike,
This is just a “hello” letter and minor chat. Not another thesis, I promise you.
I cut some things out of today’s Times which I thought might interest you. A notice of a huge Art exhibit in Munich, an obituary of Henry Dale,[*27] and a letter by Bertrand Russell and a galaxy of English Eminences. Dale, who just died at 93, was going strong to the moment of his death. Russell, who is 96 or 97, is absolutely lucid and crystalline in his thought, as you can judge from the letter. Marvellous Russell, the godson of John Stuart Mill—I sometimes regard him as the last living embodiment of reason and social passion. It excites me to think of these extraordinary, chimerical old men, intensely creative in their tenth decades. One has to think of Picasso also, and of Stravinsky. And of Margaret Murray, the archaeologist, who wrote a charming autobiography entitled My First Hundred Years.
I can’t say any nice things about myself. I am terribly restless and irritable. I can’t work. I can’t stand my parents—my mother brooding, paranoiac and depressed, the walls oozing with accusation, everything suspended between blame and guilt. My father, clownish, scholarly, doing his best to avoid the house.
And my brother Michael, both deeply schizophrenic and completely logical and truthful, crucified in attitudes of spite and vengeance, his humanity monstrously extended at both ends of this spectrum, into animality and divinity. He makes sense, tragic sense. […]
So, I can’t stand THEM—my family, although they are blood and flesh, and my past, and most of myself; yet I long for them so desperately. I hate and love them with a vengeance. Moreover, jobs are terribly tight in England. It occurs to me that I may have to stay in America, even though I can’t stand it, either. I could oversimplify the situation, and put it diagrammatically, and say: I have a good living but no (possibility of) life in the States, whereas here I could have a (possibility of) life, but no living. I think this is what they call a Double Bind. The only way out, I can imagine, is to write and write, and become sufficiently recognized to make my own terms wherever I am. But then, I am too angry and too spiteful at the moment to let myself write. I don’t know the answer. But I must somehow hold on, and not regress into rage, depression, drugs, etc.
Write soon,
Yrs,
To Mike Warvarovsky
August 31, 1968
37 Mapesbury Rd., London
Dear Mike,
A hurried note to say, first, that a friend of mine—Orlan Fox (I believe you met him in New York) will be in Munich[*28] for a couple of days this week. […] I have taken the liberty of giving him your address—he’s a pleasant, open chap, I think you might enjoy meeting him, and could perhaps show him round a bit.
The rest of my own news I can also put briefly. My first month here (July) I spent, as you know, in neurotic quarreling with my parents, and also awaiting some move by my chief, Friedman, who had warned me not to proceed with my book. (He is insanely paranoid, jealous, petty.) Around the beginning of August, I had made some sort of internal accommodation, and was able to start a little, desultory work. Mid-August, a bombshell arrived: Friedman fired me. There was no warning, no reason given, no compensation; just a curt letter. I was abruptly deprived of my patients, whom I enjoyed, and also of half my salary (10,000 a year). I flew into a violent rage, but was of course impotent to do anything. I wrote a ferocious letter, a little masterpiece, but it was too actionable to send. Then, not unnaturally, I turned all the rage inwards and got very depressed. So much so, in fact, that I took to my bed for two weeks, and refused to get up, and felt constantly nauseated with a horrible sense of foreboding and impending suicide.
Now, start of September, I have got up and out, and have decided to stay here an extra two weeks, and am working hard on the book. Not in a state of creative fury like last year—I cannot command this sort of inspiration, and my interest in the subject has been killed, so to speak. But I have already done all the thinking and organizing, and its redrafting is pretty much a routine job which I must force myself to do—for I have been hagridden and guilty about it for more than a year.
I return to New York about September 15. It will be my last year, because I can’t stand the American Scene any more. (Did you read about the clubbings, etc. in Chicago? When Nixon comes in, as he must, I see that the lights will go out all over America, and a brutally repressive police-state will become a daily reality. There is nothing to choose, these days, between Russia and America—or the Pope, for that matter.) I think Western Europe, poor, dilapidated, pessimistic as it is, is now the sole repository of the possibilities of civilization. The rest of the world will be resolved into monstrous, lying, warring Superpowers, and their pitiful squashed satellites.
I will also be changing from neurology to psychiatry. I plan to make my double transition next summer.
Do write and tell me what’s doing with you. And whether I can expect to see you in New York soon.
Yrs,
Oliver
* * *
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On September 1, still in London, OS challenged himself to rewrite the manuscript completely and submit it to Faber & Faber within ten days. In On the Move he describes how this—which he accomplished without drugs—produced a manic, exalted state that lasted for about six weeks, well into October.
To Jonathan Miller
September 23, 1968
234 East 78th St., New York
Dear Jonathan,
[…] It has been an incredible three weeks, a concentrated, maniacal, annus mirabile. I have had a superb eruption of creative powers—I will never know more, generically, than I know now—and in so doing, as perhaps I always feared (and good reason to refrain from the danger!) I have utterly blown my ego to pieces. I suppose it might be called an acute schizophrenic psychosis, if labels are useful. Certainly I have been fantastically, beautifully hallucinated in the past week; the entire world has been no more than a tabula rasa on which I would project my metaphors as hallucinations. I have been literally ecstatic (ecstatic paresthesiae here and there, wherever I want, with the flow of my thoughts). I had an incredible, Adamic feeling of rebirth, at 11.20 last Monday, and seemed to emerge into the full shadowless sunlight of utter reality. I saw all the faces about me darkened, partial, anxious, ignorant, superstitious, credulous, stubborn and blind. I wanted to shout “Eureka” or “Hallelujah,” and run amok, praising and saving: but I realized it would have been awfully bad taste, so I refrained. I have kept my marvellous psychosis a secret, between my analyst, a few friends, and myself: for it is important to eat and sleep, to observe bounds, and to “function” externally.
I have had similar, if milder, “episodes” before. I would call them manic, because they did no work: their insights were denied; they resembled moral and emotional and existential loans with no capital in hand—and they were paid back by awful penitential depression, stupors, sense of meaninglessness and accidie. This one has done triumphant work, both in the book, and in me. And I will never be the same. Some, I must, and have already, re-repressed—one cannot live in an acute psychosis/ecstasy. I retreat from the Icarus position, to that of father Daedalus. I am in full possession of my powers. I feel like a troubadour, jester, or Shakespearian “fool”: I feel utterly transparent, consumed by the truth, and with the need to spread it in witty, beautiful and valid metaphors.
As for my ego???? I have no sense of anxiety, shame, cringing, diffidence, distrust, paranoia, or those beastly sadomasochistic cravings which made my life hell. I feel utterly liberated from the cage of neurosis, from the four dimensional meshwork of paranoia (family: Jewishness: Medicine: America). Although my state is libidinously driven, I feel no explicit sex-cravings at the moment—neither homo- nor hetero- nor fetishistic, nor anything. But the whole universe is my Kunt. My readers will be my Kunt. My words and intelligence are my Penis, etc. etc. Everything crystal-clear, in shadowless consciousness.
I can’t predict the future, and am making no grandiose plans. But this is where I stand, on Sept 23. And it is not all narcissism: for I love my friends, and among them, most especially you.
Yours,
* * *
—
While OS continued to correspond frequently with Augusta Bonnard, they had entered into mutual recrimination centering on a debt incurred in 1964, when Bonnard had lent OS $2,000 from her American bank account before leaving the States.
To Augusta Bonnard
October 10, 1968
234 East 78th St., New York
Dear Augusta,
Thank you for your letter. It was not entirely unexpected, and I am not wholly sure what to reply.
It is unfortunate, for you, that you made it so difficult for me to repay you when I was in a position to make a partial settlement, in July.[*29] For the following month, I was sacked from Montefiore Hospital—without reason, warning, or compensation—and at a single stroke deprived of half my livelihood. This being so, I am now in a state, not of penury, but in which my expenditure considerably exceeds my income. Being in a position of professional and emotional equilibrium, in other respects, I am in no hurry to secure myself an indifferent job simply to make up the balance. I am therefore, as you will understand, in need of the $2000 which I managed to save last year to see me through these relatively lean months. […]
