Letters, p.26
Letters, page 26
The Shiva was marvellous (if one can use such a word), and I am sorry for your sake (as well as ours) that you could not come to it. There was an amazing, beautiful outpouring of feeling and sympathy, all day long, a most vital, genuine, real, necessary, warm exchange of feelings and memories; there was nothing (I think) strained or straining about it, and Pa and Auntie Len were visibly supported and vivified by it, as I was as well, and taken out of that terrible solitude of grief which is perhaps its least tolerable aspect. It is lovely to talk and weep together with complete freedom, with complete absence of any shame or neurotic constraint. I will never again doubt the profound emotional (and, as it were, epistemological) wisdom that is embodied in sitting Shiva. And it is an epistemological accommodation one must be helped to, for there has been a sudden amputation in one’s world-picture, the foundation and progenitor of one’s world has gone. One has become an epistemological amputee, and one desperately needs the presence of kin and friends, of nearness and dearness, and to see how they too have been bereft and affected in their different ways. […]
Michael stood up astonishingly well during the Shiva and in the disorganized fortnight thereafter, showing a common sense and a gentleness and a real-ness which I had never seen in him before; but he was obviously tortured by an anguish to which he could give no expression. (At one time he burst out to Auntie Len, “It’s OK for you, you can weep. I can’t.”), and in my own last week in London was visibly entering an intricate, labyrinthine psychosis (he is in Friern Barnet[*28] at the moment; I think, probably, he has to break down, like this, before a deeper adjustment can start). I spent a great deal of time talking to Uncle Dave,[*29] who stayed with us through the week of the Shiva. He is a wonderful old man, with a most amazing, alive memory of the past; we talked for hours and hours about the early years and days of the Landaus, and the Landau grandparents, and especially about Ma’s childhood and youth. I had a sense of Uncle Dave as a unique treasure, the only remaining repository of these memories, and of the entire span of Ma’s life. Also his strength and independence shone out: at a time when I felt so anguished myself, I was supported by seeing how he had endured so many bereavements and losses, and his strength, like an old weathered rock. He showed me (to put it crudely) that life can go on, even when one thinks it can’t. […]
The week after the Shiva ended, Pa took up most (if not all) his previous work, and visibly came together again as he did this. I am sure work is vital to him provided he does it only insofar as it is enjoyable, and not to the point of strain to which he (to which all of us) sometimes goes. […]
Ma loved you very deeply and wept on and off for several days after you had gone (she felt, I think, as you did, that she would never see you again). She also had a deep and affectionate feeling for Gay and the children, and this too she expressed freely after you had all left. It is sad that she found some difficulty in expressing it when you were all actually present, and that her real and positive feelings were sometimes overshadowed by fretfulness and irritability, etc. (At least, I gather that this was the case, especially during the earlier part of your visit, partly from Auntie Len, and partly from what seems to me a touch of aggrievement in your own letters to Pa and Auntie Len.) I may be quite wrong here (and perhaps it is impertinent of me to “read through the lines”), but I think you may have had, or still have, some feeling that Ma never “accepted” Gay, resented your marriage, felt no warmth to your children, etc. This is emphatically not the case, as you would know for yourself had you heard her speak of you all in the later part of the summer. But, during May and June, Ma was exhausted and over-strained, partly from the excitement of and preparations for the Golden Wedding, and partly from her hernia which was continually prolapsing and paining her; things easily became “too much” for her at this time, and she became irritable and over-sensitive; but I hope you will not let any unpleasant memories of this over-cloud your earlier and happier memories, or imagine that there was any deep-seated rancour or lack of affections towards you and yours.
For myself, in a sense, things have been looking up. I failed to finish my book in the summer partly because I got side-tracked onto doing an article for The Listener. But, maybe, this was a blessing in disguise, for the article obviously hit the right spot in an appreciative and responsive audience; there has been a lovely public dialogue and exchange of letters, following it; and I have been enjoying a mild but definite celebrity, of a sort which my Migraine book never achieved for me. In the last 2–3 years, I have mostly experienced unwelcome, and misunderstanding, and antagonism from other neurologists, which (as you know) made me more than a little paranoid. The Listener episode, on the other hand, gave me a lovely feeling of welcome and warmth and understanding and appreciation, and has shown me that in future I can most hope to appeal to a cultivated general audience, and as for my fellow-neurologists, they can go to blazes (neurology has been dead, imaginatively, and fundamentally, for half a century anyhow). My publisher, perceiving the interest that my article had aroused, took the extraordinary step of saying that he would have my book set in print within a week of my finishing it. (A week, as opposed to Faber’s two years!) I have already corrected the galley-proofs of the case-histories (which I wrote in the summer), and I finished the rest of the book, in the ten days following the Shiva. It was curious—as if grief had replaced my usual guilt, I had a sense of intense sobriety and clear-headedness, a sort of intoxication of sobriety, as if all the nonsense and neurosis had been knocked out of me, as if I was nakedly and boldly face-to-face with the things which really mattered (health, sickness; life, death). And in this suddenly-procured metaphysical clarity I found no difficulty whatever in writing at full speed, and finishing in a few days what I failed to do in the entire summer. Duckworth’s have put the book (Awakenings) first on their Spring-list, and it will be out in March or thereabouts. I have a great sense of relief at having got it out, for so much of what was in it was pent-up inside me, under terrible pressure, for years, precluded from expression by a hateful sense of veto or interdict. Now—and it is, I think, not merely coincidence that this should follow Ma’s death—that sense of veto is gone, or at least much attenuated. Perhaps this is a way of saying that I no longer feel like my parents’ child, or anyone’s child, but like a person in my own right, suddenly free to do or say what I want.
After a month of being cosseted and cherished in London (partly as a mourner, partly as a writer), I have a certain feeling of let-down and vacuity here—I felt so nourished by conversation, by social intercourse in London, and so starved of it here—but I am settling down to a more satisfactory and stabler modus vivendi than has been possible for me in the past. I have a splendid new apartment,[*30] and for the first time in New York am getting some sense of “home” from where I live. My work is not wildly exciting, nor is it meant to be; essentially I do just as much as I need to make ends meet, and no more, for my real life and satisfactions, increasingly, come from thinking and writing, and not from clinical practice. (Although this has its own joys, as real as its ordeals, and I would never give this up, even if I could afford to.)
I did enjoy seeing you (seeing you all) a lot in June, and I hope we can correspond and see more of each other than we have done in the past. There used to be so much difference between us, but now—when I am in my fortieth winter, and you in your fiftieth winter—we are closer together; and I also feel a temperamental kinship with you, a sense of a certain likeness between us, which I don’t really have with David (who is so outward, so denying of inner life) or Michael (who is so imprisoned in his own inner life). I do hope, especially now that our family has been visited by death, that we can draw closer, and appreciate each other’s presence more. I hope you will write back soon, and (more remotely) I also entertain the hope that I can visit you all in Australia this summer. (I have been reading Kangaroo[*31] in anticipation).
Love,
To Richard Lindenbaum
School Friend, Geneticist
January 12, 1973
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Dick,
Thank you very much for your charming New Year card […].
My mother died suddenly on November 13—an instantly-fatal coronary, without premonitory symptoms—and I flew at once to London. […] The terror and solitude of the abruption was appalling, infantile, between hearing the news on Monday evening and arriving in London on Wednesday morning; absolutely I felt as if the foundation of my own world had utterly vanished. […] I don’t know that I had any specific premonitions, but then I have had (one has had) presentiments of parental death since…I can’t remember a time when I did not have them. But in the days preceding her death (she died in Israel, a cause for odious congratulation by some ‘frum’ relatives, but an additional grief, and perhaps anger, to me, because she was a Londoner through and through, as London as a London plane-tree, and I know she wished to die, quietly, sitting in the garden, instead of being roasted to death under an alien sun, on a foolish medical-Zionist conference of a sort she always dreaded, which she’d been pestered into joining)…In the days preceding her death, then, I experienced an absolute compulsion to read about the death of Lawrence’s mother, and the letters and poems he wrote at the time, the intensity of his grief, and of his relief.
My father was shattered (David went to Israel to collect him, and the body), and himself looked pre-terminal in those first awful days; and my poor, darling Auntie Len—who had been so close to Ma, closer than anyone else, for an unimaginable three-quarters of a century—I thought she would die of grief. Michael became instantly catatonic, for a few hours, and then, in the most remarkable and unprecedented way, emerged into a tenderness, a melting, a solicitude, a sense, a real-ness, such as I had never seen in him before. For myself, I was infinitely comforted by the Shiva. Never again will I doubt the profound emotional and epistemological sense of that marvellous communal grief, a continuous pouring-forth and streaming of mind and feeling, the realest sympathy and relation I have ever known. […] Our dog, my mother’s dog, Butch, who had been away (as usual) at the kennels, came back the weekend after the Shiva, seemed to throw an instant all-seeing glance around him, and then (unprecedently) burst into a loud, terrible canine howling, and then after some hours, sank down motionless, and then ceased to eat. […] Absolutely, without a doubt, that dumb loving beast perceived in a moment the taking-away, the permanent gone-ness of Ma’s loved presence, and at once became sick with loss and grief.
Thank God (so far, and for the most part), I have felt mostly grief, with very little anger or reproach, although I feel and fear this coiled up inside me. Grief is so unlike depression: it is so filling and real and expanding and uniting and—(it sounds an almost blasphemous word)—nourishing, as opposed to depression, which is constricted and constricting, sharp, pointed, alienating, disuniting, hateful, tormenting, starving, stuffing.
Mostly, so far, I think I have felt grief, with only twinges (but terrible, even as mere intimations) of depression and reproach. I grieve for what was real in Ma. I can’t summon up a single image of her kindness, or tenderness, her absurd-dear (perhaps Victorian) simplicity, her fondness for telling stories, her delight in babies and children, her oddly-mixed taste for Schubert-lieder and turn-of-the-century music-hall melodies (which came to her, again and again, with amazing frequency AND accuracy, quite involuntarily, in the last two years of her life, and always impressed me as a sort of unconscious preparation for the end: “In my end is my beginning”).[*32] I can’t think of any of these real images, not for a moment, without breaking into tears; and yet they are good tears; lamentations without a touch of shame. But for Ma’s other side—her dark, censorious, suspicious, cruel, punishing, side—I don’t grieve for this in the least, I am glad it is gone (and wish only it were not so deeply incorporated in myself). Oddly, in my thoughts, and especially my so-vivid, many-times-nightly-dreams, I never see my mother as an old woman, but in her prime, with a streak of black in her hair, in her late thirties or very early forties (my age!), as she must have been when I was an infant; or still stranger, I dream repeatedly of her girlhood of the vast Landau family, somehow suspended in an eternal impossible summer afternoon in the old garden at Highbury (but how absurd! for the old Highbury House was pulled down in 1915), somehow, miraculously, her parents, my grandparents, whom I never knew, and all her seventeen siblings, and all my first cousins, and second cousins, and third cousins, all somehow, impossibly, contemporaneous, until the sense of impossibility grows upon me, and when it becomes sufficiently intense, awakes me! How strange! In my mother’s handbag (the only one of her “effects” I went through), I found a picture which she must have carried with her throughout her life, of her mother, as a 16 year old bride, taken in the Spring of 1872.
What a sudden sobriety, a sudden jerking into social and historical sense, it all gives one. There was the sheer spread of generations[*33]—from a telegram from Ma’s last remaining uncle (101, or so, in Paris), and her great-great-great grand-nieces […], twins whom she had brought-into-the-world three years ago, her last deliveries; so many relatives; and so many students, ex-students, former patients, those she had delivered ten or thirty or fifty years ago. I think that I had never had any sense of how far-reaching a life can be, genetically, socially, every way, and there was nothing especially far-reaching about Ma’s. (It occurs to me, if I die now, how few people really know or like me, how few would attend my funeral.) The milling of the generations gave me an odd, comforting [sense] of Ma “passing to history” (though what that means, since one is in history, one is history, all the time, I don’t know).
I poignantly regretted (and regret) that I didn’t, don’t, won’t have a family of my own, that biological continuity—at least genetic continuity—must come to a stop with me. (Ma was marvellous with grandchildren, and they were with her: there can be such a lovely, un-neurotic, un-pressured, un-competing, and almost biologically-crucial relation between grandparents and grandchildren, the real continuity, in a way, across the generational fighting. I always regretted, being the youngest of the youngest, that I never knew any of my grandparents. Aubrey—Abba Eban—the only one of my first cousins to have escaped the otherwise universal severe neurosis/psychosis, was in fact brought up by his “dear and learned grandfather”—the Oliver Wolf Sacks I am named after, but never knew.)
But perhaps I have some compensations in my own sort of generation—generations of students, readers, books, thoughts, images—I hope so, at least. […]
To Colin Haycraft
February 10, 1973
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Colin,
I have returned to find a distressing and potentially calamitous situation at Beth Abraham—and one which is reflected in thousands of Beth Abrahams all over the country. Nixon’s latest budget has upped defence (I mean “defence”) expenditure by twenty billion or whatever, and has made a merciless cut-back in monies available to schools and hospitals, especially hospitals catering for chronically ill “welfare” patients. I found on my return that Margie (our devoted speech-therapist), all the physiotherapists, occupational therapists, etc. had been summarily sacked. There has been an abrupt (and probably permanent) closing-down of our Workshop, our Rehabilitation Department, etc., as well as the dismissal of three-quarters of the nursing staff and social workers. I went up to the ward and found almost every patient speechless-motionless with fear. And they have good reason to fear, because the facilities which have been “cut back” were, by and large, the only hopeful and reconstructive ones in their lives. I saw mirrored in face after face that stunned, shocked “death-look” which augured the deaths of Sam H., Julien S.,[*34] etc. Indeed, this is a death-sentence for many of them, and for other patients in the hospital, and for many of the 3 million patients in the US in so-called “extended care” institutions, which will now become, in effect, death-camps for them. Horrible. And the fact that it has come from the highest level gives one an absolute sense of impotence.
Again, I feel like [adding] a footnote[*35]—but perhaps it would not be right at this time. Anyhow, I shall (if I can bear it) continue to visit the patients (as it were socially, as a human presence myself), and will observe the effects of this deprivation. I fear it will undo the work of the last four years, if not the last forty years. The bad things which have happened to them in the past will be as nothing to this. I saw that the patients looked absolutely shattered before I heard what had happened. And when I did hear, the words (I think from a Sanskrit poem) which came into Oppenheimer’s mind when he saw the first atomic bomb at Alamagordo came to me: “I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.” This will also gravely affect my work with the children I have been seeing, for most of the school guidance-counsellors, etc. have also been cut back, and medical services likewise. As in the double-helix, welfare and real-ness in this country will dwindle to less-and-lessness, and terribleness will surge to a level which will make the McCarthy era seem like child’s play: this, at least, is what is being said by many people. And although I am generally blind and deaf to current affairs, my moral antenna cannot miss this affair.
