Letters, p.29
Letters, page 29
So, I will ask you, as I ask others in Beth Abraham, to be patient. (In a sense, I am glad that the book will first be published in another country; there was even a time when I thought of not allowing it to be published in America, in order to spare the feelings of my colleagues and patients.)
I feel too frail at the moment, in these last days before publication, to show the book, in detail, to anyone.[*59]
Once it is published, it will be public property, and I will be able to detach myself from such feelings, from identification with it. But this is still a while to go.
I am most happy to see you so well again—most happy, and most astonished. It is a great wonder, almost a miracle, and it shows, once again, the unconquerable spirit which lives in you.
With kindest regards,
To Thom Gunn
July 7, 1973
37 Mapesbury Rd., London
Dear Thom,
You are often in my thoughts, and I am always meaning to write to you—but—so little is translated into action.
I fear I never thanked you for your poetic New Year’s card—although it resides permanently on my mantelpiece. I gather (from Faber’s) that you have changed your address; but I can only visualize you in the surroundings of Filbert.[*60] I have asked my publisher to send you a copy of my (so-long-obstructed-and-delayed) new book Awakenings—I hope it has arrived, or will do so shortly. First reactions, here, have been very kind. But, fortunately or unfortunately, my mind is so fixed on the next book, the real one—it will be, I think, a very general one, which I shall call “Station and Motion”—that Awakenings, and reactions to it, do not seem quite real. I have also been pondering about pain—Faber’s have asked me if I would write about it for them (but I fear it would become a theological book); do you remember how we once talked of pain?—it must have been ten or a dozen years ago.
Time: Time the preserver, time the destroyer—I shall be 40 in two day’s time. It doesn’t upset me as I once thought it would; I suppose I have found the last 5 years easier and pleasanter than the years of often almost hopeless neurosis which preceded them. On the whole now, though it comes and goes, I have a lovely feeling of movement and change, and a preparedness for change whatever it entails: “Respondeo etsi mutabor.”[*61] The years of neurosis were years of transfixion, of an absolute terror and incapacity for change.
Time. These last few days I have had the strangest rush of ancient memories (some, perhaps, phantasies), most dating from my earliest childhood (’35, ’36). I find the old Broad St. train (which I take every day to the Heath) is like a catalyst, a releaser, a Proustian mnemonic; it has become a memory train, conveying me back into the mid 1930’s; and if ever I try my hand at an autobiography, I will use it as this, as a train back to childhood.
Images of home, of journeys, seem to occupy me constantly now (I must try to dig up “Travel Happy,” that one piece of my former writing you felt was—real).
The need for travel, for some sort of pilgrimage (the nature of which will become clear only later) is very intense: I may be going to Italy for a while: two summers ago, I was immensely moved by Goethe’s Italian Journey, and last summer by Lawrence’s Italy-books, (especially Etruscan Places, which you mentioned to me in 1960, I think)—And this summer, perhaps, I shall have my own Italian Journey.
Do write, Thom, and tell me something of yourself and your plans—and, in particular, whether you have any thoughts of England or New York this year.
Yours,
Oliver
To Isabelle Rapin
Pediatric Neurologist
August 15, 1973
37 Mapesbury Rd., London
Dear Isobel,[*62]
I thank you for your kind letter of July 20. I failed to reply […], perhaps because I have spent most of the past eight weeks in a “paradoxical” depression.
Paradoxical—because Awakenings received quite splendid reviews from many of the most significant critics[*63] —at least outside the Neurology scene. As for what my “colleagues” will say, I am not quite sure, but I have been greatly warmed (and, as it were, pre-protected) by a beautiful letter from Luria himself (actually the second of two letters from him), in which he says that he finds the book “delightful,” and that I have revived the forgotten and necessary art of clinical observation and biography with great success. And if Luria—the man I most esteem in Neuropsychology—likes Awakenings, I will not be so upset by what lesser men say.
The book has also brought me in a flood of correspondence—from poets to philosophers to psychologists to physiologists, and has given me a vivid sense of how many passionately thoughtful, honest, clear-headed people there are, whose sensibilities (like mine) have long been outraged by the lifeless reductionist quality of Science today, and who look forward to, and are creating, the “new” Science-Art of the future. All this makes me realize, in a way, that the real thinking of the world is not done in University Departments or Professorial Chairs, but by deeply-reflective individuals here and there, whose significant contacts are personal rather than academic. Certainly our own relation—which has always been stimulating and fruitful for me, and I hope (occasionally!) for you—has had this quality, and takes place in a garden or over dinner, etc., and not in the barrenness of a Conference Hall. These letters, phone calls, seeing people, being asked to talk or partake in small conversational groups, has given me a lovely sense of being real, having a place in the world. But—there is another side to it: which is a strong (and not entirely neurotic) tendency to shun such contact, because, in some fundamental sense, I have to think out everything for myself, in my own idiosyncratic, roundabout way. I have to nurture my thoughts in something which approaches a total though not hostile solitude—I feel this, although I am far from understanding it. […]
To F. Robert Rodman
Fellow Resident at UCLA
October 27, 1973
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
My dear Bob,
Your letter gave me enormous pleasure—so clear and kind and dear and you.
I hope that what you say about Awakenings may become true. Texts age, theories become obsolete, but there is (if it is genuine—maybe it is the only test of this) something continually fresh and ageless about real experience and feeling—I feel Donne so vividly alive to me, the impact of his experiences and feelings so immediate and relevant—it means nothing that they are “350 years old.”
Age, death: so vital that one gives and leaves something—children, books, help, whatever—to compensate for mortality […] And the last month has been mournful too: Auden had become very dear to me in the last 2–3 years (he and my analyst, finally, were my ultimate “reality-bearers”)![*64] The sense that I—we—will never see his face, hear that extraordinary voice, again gives me (perhaps even more than my mother’s death) such a sense of the irreplaceable uniqueness and preciousness of the individual. At least we corresponded fully in his last months, and his letters are so alive, so intimate—more so (at least to me) than many of his poems—I am re-dedicating Awakenings to his memory. […]
You sound so much happier and deeper than you used to be—the transformation of “feel” and tone is unmistakable, and extraordinary: how much you owe to your analysis, and how much to everything else, God only knows. But it is a great mercy and a blessing (and astonishing too, in a way) that one can change and develop so much in one’s thirties, and later, when so many of one’s contemporaries have come to a dead stop, transfixed.
Lovely to hear that you are expressing yourself all sorts of other ways as well—Poems, Carpentry, building, sailing.
Whatever is to be said for an intellectual Jewish upbringing, it is so damnably mental and mentalistic, so blind to the joys and necessities of the body, of doing things, the joys of making, of building with one’s hands, etc.—I am rediscovering some of these things too, late, but better than never. (Did you ever read Groddeck’s[*65] remarkable essay on “Massage”—which Auden, I think, first translated, as a student. He had such a sense of the unity of body and soul.) […]
I miss you […]—I must visit you, both of you,[*66] soon. […]
Love,
Oliver
* * *
—
Several television producers had approached OS to suggest a documentary about the Awakenings patients. After meeting Duncan Dallas from Yorkshire Television, OS agreed, hesitantly, knowing that a record on film might be of unique scientific importance. He writes in On the Move that he was not sure of the propriety of making such a film, but when he asked the patients how they felt, most of them said, in effect, “Go ahead, tell our story, or it will never be known.”
To Duncan Dallas
Documentary Filmmaker
November 20, 1973
[No Address Given]
Dear Duncan,
I was delighted to get your letter of the 13th. It is very thoughtful of you to let me know that the “raw material,” at least, has come out excitingly, and exists. […]
It is as well that you filmed when you did, because (as you may have heard) nearly fifty NY Hospitals were struck, stricken might be a better word, by a hateful strike earlier this month.[*67] In many ways my sympathies were (at first, at least) with the strikers, who had been very shoddily dealt with by Washington; but the ensuing horrors—which were especially intense in Beth Abraham—rather changed my mind. About half our population had to be transferred, and we did what we could with the remainder. I managed to mobilize some students to help me, and more or less acted as an orderly-lifter-maid-of-all-work etc. for ten days. During those ten days 22 of our patients died (including seven Parkinsonians), as a more or less direct effect of the strike, not being properly fed, turned, toileted, etc., and the final cost—in terms of the ultimate effects of trauma and strain—is not to be calculated. Really, a murderous business. On the last evening, enraged picketers smashed my car up, as well as those of most of the others who cared for the patients “in defiance” of them. It was the mood of the strike, the strikers, the whole atmosphere of the discourteous, nothing reasonable, anywhere, just an awful murderous battle with x thousands of patients as pawns, and their lives at stake.
I can imagine that the editing [of the film] will take you a full month and more. Although I keep thinking of all the things which were missed; for example, Gussie S. “woke up” in a most extraordinary way during the strike—in a way which she hadn’t since 1969—and was talking nineteen-to-the-dozen, very clearly, very fascinating. And, and, and—so much else. But, for you, I imagine, the problem is almost the reverse: of having too much material, and all the dilemmas of selecting and cutting. I think I might come to London around Xmas myself […] and wondered whether perhaps things might be ready, or in some sort of rough shape, for me to look at with you then? […]
To Kenneth McCormick
Editor in Chief, Doubleday & Co.[*68]
November 24, 1973
[No Address Given]
Dear Mr. McCormick,
Many thanks for your two letters of the 20th. […]
Be reassured!—there are no more footnotes concealed deep down in the envelope, and my paroxysm of footnotery (my friend Jonathan Miller speaks of my propensity for making comments on comments on comments etc. “commentorrhoea”) seems to have exhausted itself. I am what I am: like many of my patients, I suffer from an “obstructive-explosive” sort of character, so that at times I cannot think or write to save my life, and at other times I cannot stop doing so. And here, you, as my editor, are forced to take a sort of therapeutic role, as moderator or umpire, as someone who says with authority “Enough!” “Time’s Up!” etc. Sometimes I need encouraging, and sometimes I need stopping—like my patients: I am sorry.[*69] I will await the copyedited manuscript (?galleys), and perhaps we can then decide together whether or not it would be worthwhile to insert these last addenda.
I am busy now with “Tics & Spasms”[*70]—I have just been rushing into it without too clear an idea of what form it will assume; but I find I do violence to my spontaneity if I try to plan ahead too minutely.
Many thanks for everything again,
Yours sincerely,
To Thom Gunn
November 29, 1973
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Thom,
I was most affected by your letter of—almost two months ago; I appreciated it—its feeling and thought and care—more, I think, than any other letter anyone has written me about Awakenings; and if I have been slow in answering (and if this answer is laboured or stilted), it is not because I have been unmindful or ungrateful for your letter, but, rather, that it obsessed me in a way, and gave rise to such a range of reflection and retrospection, and such conflict, that I wasn’t sure how to write back.[*71]
First, I thank you for your sympathy about Wystan’s death, and I feel too the loss this must be to you, and so many others. I originally met him four or five years ago, and we approached each other very slowly as people—we were both intensely shy in a way. In the past year he had become very dear to me—I really came to love him in all sorts of ways. In particular he stood for trust, an immense solidity and substance and depth, with a beautiful candour and transparency: so that the impulse to lie or distort or conceal or falsify (etc.) went away in his presence, and in some fundamental way he taught me how to be myself, by being himself. You speculate as to what has happened to/with me, what has brought out some sort of humanity or sympathy which seemed absent or dormant in the early sixties. It has been a slow process, and God knows one fraught with the continual danger of lapses and regressions—when something hateful takes possession of me, and I again find myself writing (though not acting out) things and situations of the “Doctor Kindly” genre. You are surely right when you say that one cannot be taught sympathy, humanity, etc—in the sense that it is not amenable to injection, instructional instillation, etc. I always had a sort of empathic passion for “Nature,” but, bye and large, it was a “Nature” which more or less excluded human beings. I could feel at ease with a theorem, or a poem, or a landscape, but almost never with a person, and almost never with myself. I think this has changed a good deal over the past few years, but I really don’t know what have been the chief determinants. I have found working and loving increasingly synonymous; I cannot understand anything, I cannot approach it intellectually, except as a relation, in a sort of devotion or intimacy; and I had the blessing of a marvellous group of patients, who were at once as singular as the fauna of the Galapagos, and yet intensely real to me as human beings; I think they made a decisive difference to me, as (perhaps) I did to them: and this, in a way, has been a sort of love-affair.
The two individuals who have meant most to me in the last five years have been my analyst—and Wystan, among the “living living”; they have stood for trust, and love, or at least the sense of the possibility of these, in a way I could scarcely have imagined five or six years ago. These, and the “living dead,” the voices and teachers from the past, who have spoken to my condition, who have induced and carried me through various crises, and who have felt so palpably present, at times, as to give me an almost physical joy and warmth. There have been a dozen or more such teachers, out of the past: and the one who has most moved me, who has seemed to me richest in reality and suggestion and aesthetic delight, has been Leibniz, who I “discovered” in April of last year. It is odd, I found I had read quite [a lot] of him twenty years ago, as a student, but had “forgotten” it all; it left no impact; I wasn’t ready; and then suddenly—indeed it was sudden, like a revelation, at 4.30 on April 18 of last year!—I “remembered” him again, and plunged back with a sense of continually-growing delight and awareness, and above all, that lovely sense of recapturing the past, one’s past, the human past, my childhood—a sort of marvellous Platonic anamnesis. I have suffered very much from losing the past, losing my childhood; I have, unlike you, lacked continuity and roots in this absolutely fundamental sort of way; it has given rise to all sorts of nostalgias, genuine and phoney (drugs, on the whole, seemed to me—or at least the way I used them, which was mischievous and narcissistic, to give me only a phoney past, a regression, instead of the awareness and continuity I sought); but various people—patients, students, friends, Wystan, and my analyst—have helped me to recover some of what I had thought to be irredeemably lost, and to become—if only intermittently—a real person.
But no, alas!, there has been no “falling in love” with anyone, in the more literal sense, in the sense of a deep mutuality and respect and wish to share, etc; my “infatuations” and fatuous fetishes etc. have grown weaker, and less satisfactory as love-substitutes, as substitutes for anything; but they have left something of a vacuum, erotic, spiritual, or whatever; and I often feel intensely and genuinely lonely now in a way in which I never used to. I would love to love and be loved, and have a lover, and be a lover; but I am very isolated, I see very few people, and perhaps (ironically, now I am perhaps mature enough to maintain such a relation) I am now too old. At least I feel painfully old, at the moment; I have since the death of my mother, last November. […]
