Letters, p.30
Letters, page 30
I’m sorry—this is a rambling, and maybe very egotistical sort of letter. As I said at the start, I have not known how to reply. When you criticized my writing (and, by implication, I felt, me) a dozen years ago, I used to feel annihilated—incidentally, I think I did write a few decent things (like “Travel Happy”); it was not all virulent or phoney like “Doctor Kindly”—and now you express appreciation of Awakenings, it gives me immense pleasure, and a sense and sort of existing (which I lose all too easily).
I have been thinking of going to the West Coast for a few days around Xmas–New Year: will you be around then? I would love to see you—and, again, many many thanks for your exact and generous letter.
Love,
Oliver
PS: I think—indeed I am sure—you are wrong about Wystan not liking you. The two of you had not met too often—and, as I say, personal feelings were slow to grow and mature in him. But I know that he liked and admired your poetry immensely: after meeting you last summer (was it a poetry reading?) he said, “Thom writes magnificently—but he does dress very strangely!”[*72]
To Thom Gunn
December 31, 1973
37 Mapesbury Rd., London
Dear Thom,
Thank you for your friendly postcard—I much appreciated it, having felt that I had sent you a letter somehow wrong. Indeed I continue to feel somewhat obsessed by your letter (which I tend to carry with me), and have the increasing feeling that my own—like, perhaps, so many of my own writings and feelings—was less than candid, if not positively disingenuous; wanting in candour, in penetration, and perhaps too in that sort of sympathy and humanity which unites me so naturally to my patients and students, but which I find so hard to extend to my friends (or myself).
Other things make me think of you. It is a marvellous morning, of a sort one remembers from childhood, but which seems to be exceedingly rare, these days, in London: an utterly clear and cloudless sky, low low December sun, everything frosty, intense, alive, bathed in a lucid, almost Arctic sort of sunlight—the sort of sunlight which reminds me of “Sunlight”[*73]—sharp, unsparing, yet extraordinarily gentle. And yesterday (in the train, coming back from the North) I reread Etruscan Places,[*74] and that made me think of you—I remember how warmly you spoke of it soon after we met.
And (it being a bit below freezing) I have on my favourite (now rather ancient) leather jacket and mittens, in which the fetish is sublimated into proper role and friendly presence; and sitting in the garden, in the frost, in the sunlight, mitted and kitted up to my eyebrows—this also makes me think of you, what we share and variously apprehend, and of my dismissive dishonesty, in my previous letter, in speaking of “fatuous fetishes” as something behind me, done-away-with, forgotten.
What a complex business, these “emblems of identity.” Easy to be overcome and infatuated; easy to be dismissive and sneering; but so difficult to prehend or present in its full complexity (and full simplicity), without reduction or caricature. I cannot pretend to understand—although I understand enough to see the partial folly (and the partial truth) of earlier feelings, earlier writings. You, I think, always had a humour, an irony, an art—the power of detachment, of simultaneously being and seeing—being both inside and outside a certain frame-of-reference. This is, in effect, what you said to me the first time we met, viz. “I am me—not my parents, or the subject of my poems. You mustn’t confuse the writer and his subject”—or something of the sort. You always had, I suspect, this amalgam of genuine feeling from the “inside” with an artistic seeing from the “outside,” a humorous mastery which prevented any sort of total identification or engulfment: the doubleness which transforms one from passive (pulsive) to active, patient to agent, victim to—I don’t know how to say it, but a sort of mastery, without doubt. It is the sort of doubleness which I try to encourage in the patients I see, and which my analyst tries to encourage in me, in which one is both inside and outside the state of “patienthood” (forgive horrid word!), inside and outside what one suffers, and is; so that one is not dominated and devoured by a part of oneself.
I lacked that sort of doubleness, detachment, humour, mastery, for many years; doubtless (though less) the lack is still there. There was a sort of ferocity and totality of identification (with some fierce, fantastic, impregnable “Wolfhood,” as opposed to what I felt as my soft, unformed, vulnerable Oliverity!), which at once promised identity and a loss of identity, a sort of enthralling (and fatal) death and rebirth. Perhaps I gave way to such ideas especially between ’63 and ’67, after I had left San Francisco (and relative sanity), and moved into a labyrinth, a mire, of phantastica and drugs.
I cannot tell you (though there is no need)[*75] the intensity of lostness and foundness (but a false “foundness”) I traversed in those years. Nor can I assess, as yet (if ever it will be possible) the contribution of those years of almost-total immersion in drugs and phantasies to what I am now, or to be in the future. To call them “regressive,” to write them off, to disown them, to deny them—as perhaps I tended to do in my previous letter—is certainly a foolish reduction and fraud, and I feel ashamed of the dismissiveness, or contempt, which I may have expressed. But you will understand better, and forgive, if I make clear to you the degree of engulfment which I have been through in the past (and which, perhaps, in varied forms, perpetually faces me). It is a sensitive area for both of us, complex, exciting, dodgy, as any. The relation of one’s poses and postures and “pseudo” identity to one’s “real” and constant, ever-growing richly-aspectual identity is far beyond my understanding at the moment: clearly, one’s identity is in no sense simply the sum of one’s identifications; but nor is it something pure and Platonic, or completely transcendent. Auden (like the Red Queen)[*76] used to say, “Always remember who you are.” And I think he had a very good idea of who (what, why) he was. My idea of self is much fainter (or given to vanishing) and more clouded with conflicts and contradictory identifications. And yet, it is (or is it?) (at least some of) these very conflicts which provide the possibility of fruitful reconciliations and renewals in oneself.
Skip Notes
*1 Though the poem seems to be addressed to his partner, Chester Kallman, Auden had told Fox that he felt OS was “partly responsible for this poem.” It makes references to many subjects OS and Auden certainly would have chatted about, including migraines, randomness, mood swings, and neural activity. See Edward Mendelson, ed., The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, vol. 2, Poems: 1940–1973 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022).
*2 The book’s title was actually Sunlight.
*3 One wonders whether OS was consciously aware of how exactly this criticism mirrored Gunn’s criticism of OS’s early travel journals.
*4 Migraine.
*5 Subsequent pages of this letter are missing.
*6 Auden reviewed Migraine for The New York Review of Books.
*7 A reference to a line from “Talking to Myself”: “You can serve me as my emblem for the Cosmos.”
*8 The Scottish poet William Dunbar (ca. 1459–ca. 1530) wrote about his own migraines, describing his pain and sensitivity to light.
*9 Auden signed his letter of August 2, 1971, to OS “Yours ever, Wystan,” so OS now felt allowed to address him in kind.
*10 The German Romantic poet Novalis wrote, “Every disease is a musical problem; its cure a musical solution,” an aphorism OS quoted frequently. Unfortunately, there is no record of the Coleridge quotation in the Auden correspondence.
*11 Another name for encephalitis lethargica.
*12 Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) was a writer and a brother of the poet Edith Sitwell.
*13 George Henry Lewes was the author of The Life of Goethe (1855).
*14 Fox.
*15 Auden spent his summers at a farmhouse in Kirchstetten, outside Vienna.
*16 In Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.
*17 A 1964 book by Milton Rokeach about three schizophrenic men in a state hospital.
*18 At Bronx Developmental Services.
*19 The noted cartoonist was Madeline Gardner’s brother and thus a remote cousin of OS’s.
*20 Abba Eban.
*21 OS’s brother David.
*22 The celebrated violinist, who had deep ties with Israel.
*23 Auden had gone to his house near Vienna for the summer.
*24 An abridged version of this essay, “Travel Happy,” appeared in On the Move.
*25 “The Panther,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, is about a caged panther; OS might have been thinking about the second stanza:
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
(From The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell [New York: Vintage International, 1989].)
*26 OS had found a new apartment in Mount Vernon, New York, not far from AECOM.
*27 The family dog, a boxer.
*28 Friern Hospital, a psychiatric institution in London.
*29 OS wrote about his uncle Dave, one of Elsie Sacks’s brothers, in Uncle Tungsten.
*30 The new place was in a suburb just north of the Bronx and much more spacious than the Manhattan apartments OS had lived in before.
*31 A novel by D. H. Lawrence.
*32 He is quoting from “East Coker” in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
*33 At the shiva.
*34 Postencephalitic patients.
*35 To Awakenings, which was already in press.
*36 Peter du Sautoy, chair of Faber & Faber.
*37 The World as Will and Representation (1818).
*38 In this letter, Auden wrote, “Have read Awakenings and think it a masterpiece. I do congratulate.”
*39 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
*40 Neither of these books ever came to fruition.
*41 This extraordinary image reveals OS’s persistent interest in feeling and in “pre-human” animals and plants, which he returned to in a 2014 essay titled “Sentience: The Mental Life of Plants and Worms.”
*42 Auden and Chester Kallman had written the libretto for an operatic treatment of Shakespeare’s work by Nicolas Nabokov (a cousin of Vladimir Nabokov).
*43 A reference to Auden’s 1972 departure from America, where he had lived for decades, to return to England and Austria. Orlan Fox and OS had helped Auden pack his things and taken him to the airport, and Auden had given some of his belongings to each of them. To OS, he gave his stereo and record collection, as well as a volume of Goethe’s letters.
*44 A 1968 collection of primary sources edited by Henrietta Midonick.
*45 To Awakenings.
*46 Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855).
*47 A Klein bottle is somewhat analogous to a three-dimensional Möbius strip, impossible to escape.
*48 OS is referring here to his work at Bronx Psychiatric Center (also known as Bronx State), where he was frustrated by a bureaucratic and less than humane culture, but perhaps even more to several for-profit nursing homes around the city, where, in the 1970s, living conditions were notoriously cruel and filthy.
*49 Greene (1901–1982) was an older brother of the writer Graham Greene and a renowned figure himself: a publisher, a medical doctor, and an expert mountaineer who had joined the 1933 British expedition to climb Mount Everest.
*50 A reference to the title character in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, who composes mental letters to friends, family, and famous people, living or dead, apologizing for his own failings or his disappointment in others.
*51 The two words are etymologically related, as OS undoubtedly knew from his bedtime reading of The Oxford English Dictionary.
*52 OS was acquainted with Mary-Kay Wilmers, who edited The Listener; she had solicited his article “The Great Awakening.” He loved writing letters to the editor and did so often throughout his life, and these were formally addressed, as was customary at the time, to “Sir,” regardless of gender.
*53 In Goethe’s 1821 novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants.
*54 The founding of the Royal Society in London, in 1660, is often recognized as the beginning of the modern scientific era.
*55 Alexander Pope’s satirical eighteenth-century narrative poem about a goddess, Dulness, and her minions, the Dunces, whose stupidity and greed prevail over the muses of Science, Logic, Wit, Rhetoric, and Morality. Pope writes,
Thy hand great Dulness! lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness covers all.
*56 Southam raised the idea of a book exploring the topic of the “prominence of Jews in many spheres of cultural and intellectual life” and wondered if there were any serious studies that might be relevant.
*57 Although OS had been fired by BAH, he continued to stay in touch with most of his postencephalitic patients informally. He would resume working at BAH in 1975.
*58 OS did add two long footnotes about Seymour L. in a later edition of Awakenings.
*59 With later work, OS began increasingly to show essays in progress to his subjects.
*60 Gunn had recently left his house on San Francisco’s Filbert Street and moved to Cole Street.
*61 “I respond although I shall be changed,” a phrase used by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, author of I Am an Impure Thinker (1970).
*62 Although Isabelle was one of OS’s closest friends and advisers, he often misspelled her name, as he did with other friends and relatives.
*63 Awakenings was published on July 9, 1973 (OS’s fortieth birthday) in the United Kingdom, and a few months later in the United States.
*64 Auden died on September 29, 1973, in Vienna.
*65 See footnote on page this page.
*66 Rodman and his wife, Maria.
*67 Some thirty thousand hospital workers went on strike for a cost-of-living increase, but since hospital strikes were illegal according to New York State law, penalties against the union were very stiff and the workers went back after eight days, having gained very little ground. They would go on strike again in 1976.
*68 McCormick (1906–1997), a longtime editor in chief at Doubleday, had bought the rights to publish an American edition of Awakenings.
*69 OS’s comparison of himself to his parkinsonian patients is quite apt. Throughout his life as a writer, he needed an editor at close range to keep him from his frequent “too-muchness.” Perhaps this innate “obstructive-explosive” quality indeed is what drew him so powerfully to his two major neurological interests: parkinsonism and Tourette’s syndrome.
*70 Another working title for an essay or book inspired by OS’s patients that was never completed.
*71 In a letter two weeks later to Ken McCormick, OS wrote:
I have been moved by a letter from another poet, Thom Gunn, whom I used to know a bit in the early sixties when I was in San Francisco, when I occasionally burdened him with various writings of mine. He says: “…I found you so talented, but so deficient in one quality—call it humanity, or sympathy, or something like that. And, frankly, I despaired of your ever becoming a good writer because I didn’t see how one could be taught such a quality…What I didn’t know was that the growth of sympathies is something frequently delayed till one’s thirties. What was deficient in those (earlier) writings is now the supreme organizer of Awakenings, and wonderfully so. It is literally the organizer of your style, and is what enables it to be so inclusive, so receptive, and so varied.”
*72 Gunn was fond of wearing leather jackets and boots, unusual among a literary crowd in the 1970s, while Auden favored rumpled suits.
*73 A poem by Gunn.
*74 By D. H. Lawrence.
*75 Gunn used prodigious amounts of speed, LSD, and other drugs, but even he was impressed by OS’s consumption. Lawrence Weschler, in his book And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?, quotes Gunn as saying, “He did do a lot of chemical experimentation, I mean, outrageously extreme, far more than anyone else I knew.”
*76 From Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In a 1965 letter to Jenö Vincze, OS wrote, “It has been my bedside reading for 20 yrs; under the veneer of its Victorian prose (manners, heroine, morals etc.) it is Beckett, Sartre, Joyce + Wittgenstein; the human mind in puns and parables; the book of a mathematician, incapable of, yet also beyond, poetry; the final reduction of epistemology; a joke, a dream, a game once more.”
