Letters, p.31
Letters, page 31
7
Astronomer of the Inward
1974–1975
The reception of Awakenings was mixed. OS’s medical colleagues greeted the book with a resounding silence, and in the United States it received only a single review (by Peter Prescott in Newsweek). Yet it was noticed by the literary world, at least in the United Kingdom, and would win the Hawthornden Prize, placing OS in the company of such previous winners as Vita Sackville-West, Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, and Michael Frayn.
Colin and Anna Haycraft made OS a guest of honor at their 1973 Christmas party. As he recounted in On the Move, Jonathan Miller said to him after that party, “You’re famous now.”
To Thom Gunn
January 13, 1974
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
[Postscript to the letter to Gunn from New Year’s Eve 1973]
To resume this odd letter (if “letter” is the right word, perhaps it is more a soliloquy, or an apologia, or—I don’t know): to resume it, then, after a fortnight, I almost phoned you on New Year’s eve—I tore myself out of a party and went restlessly from one bar to another, thinking of the happy-acid-New Year’s eve which you had spent, which I had hoped we might spend, four years ago, 1969/70.
My 17 days in England were marvellous, marvellous for self-focus and self-esteem: if the first 50 weeks of 1973 were among the most miserable of my life, the last two weeks, mercifully, extraordinarily, have been among the happiest. You knew recognition (recognition of your true self and powers and achievement, etc) at 25 or so; I have had to wait till the age of 40. But it is a sweet feeling, especially after so many years of non-recognition, rejection, getting-nowhere, being-nothing, etc. The sort of recognition is interesting, but perhaps not entirely surprising: I write a book about the central problems in Medicine (at least, these are as close to the book’s centre as anything could be in an essentially centreless book), and everyone seems to be fascinated by it except my own profession, my colleagues, my “set,” who have managed to cold-shoulder it (and me) entirely. […]
Trying to digest all of this, I have the feeling that it represents, somehow, an “identity-crisis,” or, rather, the resolution of one (which is normally accomplished in adolescence or early manhood, but which in my own case was protracted for a quarter of a century). It has become clearer to me who and what I am, and what I must do. And very necessary, I now realize, is the act of confessing but also transmuting the experiences and changes of the last few years in the form of an autobiography—an autobiography which neither omits nor simplifies, neither pleads nor extenuates; candid, but without self pity or contempt; funny, maybe picaresque: something which will render (to the best of my ability) suffering, perversion, inauthenticity, cruelty, etc in the mode of sympathy, and, above all, comedy; which will expose the fruitfulness of conflicts and contradictions; the core of authentic passion and enquiry which has always lain “behind” the fetishes, fixations, etc…I will regard this autobiography as a fuller attempt to answer the questions you posed in your frighteningly-penetrating letter of last October. […]
I am sorry I did not get a chance to see you over Xmas; but I had a sudden, peremptory feeling that I needed to go to London. I think, however, that I will come to the West Coast in Spring or early Summer—
Please write, and tell me how you are. Reading between the lines of your letter I find myself somewhat concerned, and would be reassured to hear fully from you.
Love,
Oliver
To Martin Snellgrove
Correspondent
February 9, 1974
[No Address Given]
Dear Martin Snellgrove,
I am most grateful to you for your letter and your Poems. I had an immediate empathic response, and much admiration for your skills and sensibilities. […]
It seems to me—as perhaps to you—that words are our greatest blessing (and privilege) and our greatest curse. They are so powerful—and so impotent. Twenty years ago, as a student, I saved up for months to buy the big OED, thinking then that words could give one a precision in a pointing sense for conveying one’s thoughts and feelings. I still love the OED, but in a completely different sort of way now. I ignore the definitions and find delight in the enormous variety of meanings which words have, their evocative precision, as opposed to their defining or pointing quality. I think of all experience as metaphorical, and I suppose I think of the world too as metaphorical—at least, as inaccessible and unconveyable in any mode but that of metaphor. I don’t mean in any sense that I deny objects; merely that the only way in which we can know the world—or in which the world can know and compose itself—is in terms of an infinite richness of presentations and representations. […]
I don’t see why you should say of yourself that you are employing poetry “as a vehicle for something essentially extraneous to it”; because nothing is extraneous to poetry, or, putting it another way, that everything is essentially poetic and symbolic. I think the dissociation of, say, poetry and mathematics is quite artificial. (One feels that really great mathematics and mathematicians are also great poets, and essentially so, in their way, using their vehicles of election. One sees this beautifully, for example, in Gauss’ extraordinary papers on the curvature of space and possible spaces, on his insistence that “space” itself is only a way of describing experience and action, that it is a metaphor, or, rather, a plenum of metaphors all of which are interesting, relevant, useful.)
I love the richness of concrete imagery in your poems. The only thing which disturbs me—once in a while—is when you sometimes seem to speak of “pure” thought, or Aethers, or a sort of structureless Oneness, or Nothingness, or “holes.” (Similarly, in Thom Gunn’s poems, which I so love, I sometimes get disturbed by references to a sort of abstract Will, rather than the orchestration of an infinite number and variety of wills.) I mean, I think there is always Order, infinite Order, in all real thoughts and in reality itself, infinite differentiation, infinite integration, infinite simplicity, infinite complexity (as opposed to fracture and fractionation, or addition and concatenation, or simplification and complication). And I cannot distinguish “soul” from “body,” or Thought from Reality: it seems to me that everything is Thought, but thought which is incarnate and enactive—deeds. […]
With kind regards,
To Mel Erpelding
February 10, 1974
[No Address Given]
Dear Mel,
[…] It is a bitterly cold night—for New York, cruelly cold, and we are low on heating-oil in the house. And so I have wrapped myself up, I have put on a thick woolly jersey and my old and faithful leather jerkin; and (my fingers being freezing after a couple of hours of shovelling snow outside) I am wearing an old and faithful pair of gloves. I am encased, enclosed, contained, in warm and protective clothes—skins and tunics. And now, after hours of feeling frozen and drenched and miserable, I feel deliciously warm and cosy. I feel like a naked fledgling protected in its nest—almost like a foetus in the womb. I feel safe—I feel at home.
And your words echo and re-echo in my mind. I am thinking of your words about the Barbour suit,[*1] your sense of safety and protection, and almost of invulnerability. […] The sense of being safely, warmly, beautifully enclosed is, surely, one which must go back much farther than the time we first met; it must go back to earliest childhood, and perhaps still earlier; and it is not peculiar to us, it is something universal, something deep and mysterious in Nature itself, which each of us (all of us) remember and find in our own special ways. And it is this thought/feeling which you touch on in your letter (over and above whatever sense of warmth, safety, protection, etc. we ourselves shared in our gear, our kit, on our bikes, in our travels, in our own and personal togetherness), and this thought, to which I shall try now to give a more general form. (Incidentally, am I to take it that you still have your bike, or another one? And, I also wonder, do you still Scuba-dive sometimes, in that other and allied protective suit?) As I write, my eyes shift every so often from the paper before me, to a lovely pearly Nautilus which rests in my study; and I think of the Nautilus, naked and vulnerable, in its pearly chambered suit it has made for itself. […]
The idea of enclosure is surely as elemental as any—whether it is the nucleus of an atom enclosed within its electron-shells, tiny animals and plants in their cysts and spores, chicklets in eggs, embryos in wombs, birds in nests, the nesting of words within phrases (which Chomsky so beautifully analyses), knights in their armour, animals in their skins, or you, Mel, in your Barbour suit. There was a time, for many years, when I thought of bike-leathers and other sorts of “kit” as mere fetishes or fixations, something deeply compelling and compulsive, but also entirely neurotic and regressive, something shameful, designed not only to protect but to hide, to hide behind, to be dishonest behind…And, no doubt, in a way, it was—that is, when I thought of “kit” in this excluding-and-concealing way, and used it as such. I now see that when I thought and behaved in such a fashion, I emphasized the neurotic aspect to the exclusion of other aspects—aspects which were healthier and more natural, universals of Nature itself. […]
I do not think that one can properly speak of men, of any beings, of Nature, as having an “inside” as opposed to an “outside,” as having a “core” as opposed to superficies. There are only—phenomena. But the phenomena of the world have an infinite plication: there is continuity, and yet there are layers; one’s skin is infolded to become the membranes and mucosae of one’s organs and viscera; their membranes are infolded to become the membranes of one’s cells; their membranes are infolded to become the membranes of molecules; molecules are infolded to become atoms enclosed in electronic shells; or, going “outwards,” one’s skin is “exfolded” to become the (in)vestments one wears on one’s clad body, one’s surface, one’s skin, extends and coextends into the skin of the world, that infinite membrane which is Einsteinian spacetime. One is naked, one is clad, one is necessarily both. A man in his Barbour suit is as natural a phenomenon as a squid in its mantle or a penis in its foreskin. The mystery of the world is a mystery of folding—one sees why Leonardo, why all the great artists, have had such a passion for draperies and folds, those mysterious multi-plications (omni-plications) which show us the variety and unity of Nature. The earth itself, clad in mountains and valleys, infolded, outfolded, is like a man in a suit. […]
There is nobody else in the world to whom I could have written (would have dared to try writing!) so peculiar a letter. I hope that it neither offends nor upsets you. It is not my wish (as it once was) to vex or to claim you, but to see what we share in this odd business of living, of being fellow-travellers in the mysterious world of reality.
Dear Mel, Brother-Animal, I love you, your thoughts, your body, your Barbour suit, and all. (If it makes sense) I even love the atoms which compose you. And love—real love—doesn’t make claims or possess; it gives reality, recognition, to oneself and the world. Write when you write; come when you come; the very thought of your presence, however separated we are in space and time, gives me a selfless joy and the loving-lovely feeling of sharing the world.
To Samuel Sacks
March 3, 1974
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Pop,
I tried to phone you this morning, but your (silly) Answering Service said you were away for the weekend—I spoke, briefly, to Auntie Len and Michael; and David phoned me twice, reassuringly, last week.[*2] […]
I was also particularly pleased by that Editorial in the British Clinical Journal (do you know who the editor is, by the way?). It has been the first generous and genuine response from the profession; I wrote to tell him how grateful I was. Because there is no doubt that Awakenings has been received by my colleagues, on the whole, with a mixture of hostility, bewilderment and mean-ness—just the mixture which has so confined me since Arnold Friedman, 1967, and even years before this. It is paradoxical that the last people to grant one a proper recognition are so often one’s colleagues and fellow-workers in a subject. Anyhow, I see intimations, as doubtless you do also, that my stature and nature (however idiosyncratic!) is coming to be properly recognized at last.
Medicine has fallen on evil days, since the days of Henry Head, Kinnier Wilson, etc. The very notion of Care has practically vanished, and been replaced by a pedantic passion for new drugs, procedures, methods, techniques. I used to wonder why, almost 60 years ago, you chose to relinquish a potential career as a Specialist, and to become a General Practitioner instead. I now see that you instinctively and intuitively made the right move; you have loved and cared for tens of thousands of patients, as they have loved and cared for you in return; I think your professional life has been infinitely more significant and rewarding, more genuine, than the half-lives of most hospital Consultants and Specialists.
I think good General Practitioners are the salt of the earth; and it is a major tragedy and symptom of our times that they—and the whole concept of care, the whole Art of Healing—have all but vanished from contemporary life.
I have made this point rather central in a piece I have written (a requiem) for Auden.[*3] His father was a general practitioner, and Auden himself, throughout his life, was deeply concerned with the nature of doctors, healing and care. In his last book of poems, no less than four are dedicated to beloved physicians—the last of these to me; and in his very last letter to me, this summer, he quoted some words of Osler which his father used to quote him: “Care for the individual patient, more than for the disease from which he appears to be suffering.”
Both you and Ma (whatever else was the case) showed a lifelong passion for the care of individual patients. Medicine, for both of you, was a dedication and a calling; and I am deeply happy and grateful that you have both transmitted this great tradition of compassion to me. And equally (again, despite anything else) to Marcus and David, and Caroline as well.[*4]
I am well and active and happy. I have just written—spontaneously, unintendedly—ten short essays on various aspects of Cares and perhaps these, rather than anything else, can be dovetailed together to form my next book. I expect to come home for Pesach, though briefly, and look forward to being with you—you all—at that time.
Love,
Oliver
* * *
—
Early-twentieth-century psychology was largely dominated by the behaviorist work of Pavlov and Skinner, which simplified human behavior into stimulus and response, but this began to change with the work of A. R. Luria and his colleague Lev Vygotsky. These two Soviet psychologists created the new discipline of neuropsychology, working from their deep investigations of linguistic and cultural factors, which they were convinced were equally important to brain function. As a medical student, OS had heard Luria lecture in London, and he had read Luria’s monumental Higher Cortical Functions in Man and Human Brain and Psychological Processes shortly after moving to New York. He also greatly admired Luria’s two very detailed narrative case histories: The Mind of a Mnemonist, about a man with a highly unusual autobiographical memory—he seemed to forget nothing that had happened in his life, and The Man with a Shattered World, about a young soldier with severe traumatic brain injury and his struggles to put his fragmented world back together. These works had become models for OS in writing about his postencephalitic patients. Although they would never meet—it was difficult for Luria to travel, given the restrictions of the Soviet Union—they carried on an extended correspondence, and he became a lodestar for OS.
To A. R. Luria
Neuropsychologist
April 13, 1974
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
My dear Professor Luria,[*5]
Thank you very much for your last letter—my heart always misses a beat or two when I see in my letterbox one of your delightful, rare, prized letters, with their great Russian stamps and their unmistakable handwriting! […]
I just had occasion to see a youngish man with an extraordinarily severe Korsakoff’s syndrome[*6]—his memory-slate for immediate traces seems to get wiped clean in about five seconds. What makes his predicament so striking, so pathetic, so challenging, is the fact that he is in no sense “psychotic,” and though he “confabulates” (as it were, automatically) he is neither delusional, mendacious, nor lacking in insight. Indeed, he seems to me altogether a fine man—fine in intelligence, fine in character and courage. He wrings my heart (as he challenges my intellect); and in the hour or two since seeing him, I have been continually asking myself how he might be helped, what sort of therapeutic programme or activities could conceivably help him in his—his chaos. And chaos it is, in a sense, for he is like a man outside History, absolutely unmoored and disoriented, in a constant movement of ever-changing, bewildering, meaningless moments. He is enveloped in immediate amnesia; but beyond this amnesic circle, so to speak, his general memory and associational nexus seem to be entirely intact.[*7] How can we help him to leap or bridge this intense amnesic gap? How can we restore him to continuity? Of course he has continuity, in innumerable ways: his use of language, for example, is eloquent, perfect. I haven’t started to investigate him or his problems, and it is precipitate and premature to mention him/them now. But I am wondering what your own experience has been with such patients, how you would approach/assist him, etc. I constantly have such thoughts when I see patients: I am always saying to myself “Now what would Luria think? How would he formulate or approach the (phenomenal or procedural) problems here?” So forgive me if I take the liberty, this once, of actually asking, where I so often ask in imagination. […]
