Letters, p.40
Letters, page 40
*2 Polanyi (1891–1976) was a Hungarian-British philosopher.
*3 Rodman’s wife, Maria, had died in September 1974, and he had begun to write a memoir about her illness. The book, Not Dying, was published in 1977.
*4 OS added this footnote to his letter: “I realize, re-reading this, that I am unconsciously paraphrasing part of the Preface to Nietzsche’s Fröhliche Wissenschaft.”
*5 The actual wording is “No metaphor, remember, can express / A real historical unhappiness.” From Auden’s poem “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.”
*6 Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534–1572) reinterpreted and systematized the mystical doctrines of Kabbalah.
*7 Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was a German-Israeli philosopher whose writings in the 1960s brought the history of Jewish mysticism to broader awareness.
*8 Albert Scheflen, a professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
*9 Smith Ely Jelliffe, an early observer of encephalitis lethargica.
*10 This letter was also published in slightly condensed form in On the Move. Cole did come to observe OS’s work with patients for several weeks in 1977, and he became a lifelong close friend and colleague.
*11 Dr. Papavasiliou worked in the lab of George Cotzias, who pioneered the use of L-dopa in people with Parkinson’s disease. The New England Journal of Medicine called their work “the most important contribution to medical therapy of neurological disease in the past 50 years.”
*12 A refined version of L-dopa.
*13 In the British Clinical Journal.
*14 Having reduced muscle tone.
*15 A dachshund, a family pet in OS’s youth.
*16 Eleanor Bronson Pyle was a friend of Bob Rodman’s.
*17 Robert Silvers, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books, began reading drafts of OS’s work in the early 1970s (though it is not clear which essay OS is referring to in this letter). OS’s attitude of bravado here (“he can lump it”) contrasts with the deep respect he felt for Silvers. For his part, Silvers spent years getting to know OS (as he must have done with hundreds of other promising writers), encouraging him, sending him books of interest, and giving detailed critiques of works in progress. It was not until 1984, though, that the NYRB first published OS, with “The Lost Mariner.”
*18 OS’s fondness for Star Trek led him to call the nurse in A Leg to Stand On “Nurse Sulu.”
*19 “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” Dating back at least to the twelfth-century booklet known as The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, this image has been revisited by the Kabbalists, Pascal, Voltaire, and Borges, among others.
*20 A student of OS’s at AECOM, now embarked on his surgical residency.
*21 Goodacre, a vicar in the north of England, reviewed Awakenings for a tiny publication called Carême, a quarterly review of books on health and spirituality.
*22 De Luccia replied to OS, thanking him for his “prompt and honest” response. She wrote: “You chose your words very, very carefully, and I know that this dreadful illness can never be reversed or cured in the immediate future. I will continue to care for and love my husband as best I can. […] Your letter was received on a dark and rainy day with my mood to match, but it was written with gentle thoughtfulness and compassion. I am going to save your letter and when my spirits are low and depression hits me, I will read it over and over again.”
*23 Erpelding’s wife.
*24 The American Psychiatric Association had its annual meeting that year in Toronto; the program included a showing of the 1974 Yorkshire Television documentary of the Awakenings patients.
*25 Case, a scholar, wrote that he wanted “to find a way to show the urgent need to introduce matters philosophical into the education and training of scientists […] especially those in medicine, psychology and social work.”
*26 OS frequently invoked the philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), often in reference to Buber’s concept of the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship.
*27 In 1973, OS wrote an essay about Luria for The Listener.
*28 Korn.
*29 Jonathan Sacks, OS’s nephew and David’s son, who was then going to graduate school in New York.
*30 Carmel Eban Ross, Aubrey’s sister.
*31 Abba Eban: An Autobiography, published in 1977.
*32 A note in OS’s hand at the top of this letter says, “NOT SENT. This man is already too ‘threatened.’ ”
*33 I.e., the patient’s medical chart.
9
Coming to Terms
1978–1979
To Innes Rose
Literary Agent, John Farquharson, Ltd.
March 13, 1978
[No Address Given]
Dear Innes,
[…] I think that David Lan[*1] is a gifted and responsible young artist, who has a real and deep interest in Awakenings. I think that he would spare no effort, as he intimated when he first approached me, to create a play which would be “faithful in substance and spirit” to Awakenings. I think he would probably be successful in so doing. In answer to a very nice letter he sent me about three weeks ago, I said that I would be happy to show him my patients, notes, films, and other “material” pertaining to Awakenings. So far, so good.
What worries me are the following considerations:
1) The propriety, or otherwise, of making a play about patients and persons still living. As you know I agonize constantly about “exposing” my patients—or myself—to the Public: divulging what, in some sense, I feel as confidential or private. This is the alpha and omega of my own inhibitions—and the reason why I have only published two rather than twenty books. […]
A book is already at an imaginative remove. And a play—inspired by a book—is at two removes. Nonetheless, I cannot avoid a shrinking and fear—and trauma to my patients, and trauma to me. But then again, I know that many of these feelings are neurotic, and that they are likely to become assuaged with time. Thus NOW, five years later, seeing my poor patients, or those who remain, de-differentiate once more into the greyness from which they came, I am unashamedly glad and grateful that I did write Awakenings, and let a [documentary] film be made: for otherwise, their story, their situation; something phenomenologically, historically, medically, humanly, dramatically, and poetically unique would never have known the light of day. […]
If I have observed faithfully or truly in my book, I want it—or any part of it—to be the subject of scientific research, responsible investigation. Do I want it to be subject of an artistic presentation? Here I hesitate. I do—and I don’t. I do have a strong feeling of Awakenings, and all my work, as representing a rather rare sort of genuine Art-Science; I have the strongest feeling that all sorts of things, which are not amenable to scientific analysis, are depictable by artistic presentation—and, indeed, in no other way.
2) […] My first point, essentially, has to do with propriety; and my second, essentially, revolves round the concept of property (it occurs to me that both words form an etymological doublet!). It is true that I am the sole author of the book called Awakenings—but to what extent, or in what way, is the subject “mine”? To what extent is anything mine—to give another exclusive rights to? […] If Awakenings were entirely a work of fiction, then perhaps I could more justly lay claim to it; and obviously, in some sense it is—in the sense that almost everything has been transformed by being refracted through me. But I also feel it is a piece of History, and a piece of Science, which belongs to everyone, is in the public domain, and public property (if it can be called “property” at all). I would not, for example, feel that I had any right to stake a claim in Physiology: for example, to claim that “Parkinsonism” or Migraine was mine. […]
There is obviously some complex ambivalence in myself about having anything to do with other people, in any sort of collaboration. Of course here, things should be much easier, because I am in no sense directly involved. I would make my work and myself available to David Lan—and, so to speak, bless his endeavours; but his endeavours would be wholly and solely his own, as my own are wholly and solely my own; what he made of Awakenings would be HIS business, and not mine—and yet…
How damnably complicated and involuted all of this! Or is it?
If he wrote a wonderful play, then—of course—I would be delighted and grateful. But supposing he wrote an awful play; or (to avoid value judgements) a play which aroused my passionate distaste; or one which I felt was not faithful to the substance and spirit of Awakenings, but, indeed, in violation of them at every possible point—what then?
I do not want to be put in a critical position. I am a creator, not a critic or censor.
I don’t want to be put in a position where I might feel compromised, or embarrassed, or somehow “responsible.”
I do enough agonizing and obsessing about my own work, and don’t want to do it with anyone else’s. […]
A last point. This relates to the exclusiveness of rights. And this in turn relates to my ambiguous feelings about property. Supposing someone else wished to make a play about/from Awakenings; they would be prevented from doing so by the terms of the contract. But, by the same token, David Lan would be protected, as he should be, in a way, if he devotes much time and effort and spirit to the work.
For example: Alan Bennett, it so happened, expressed an interest in a dramatization of Awakenings the moment it was published, in 1973; and re-expressed this, when I saw him in New York in December. I told him, at the time, that I had met and discussed things with David Lan, and had been much impressed by Lan’s sensibility.[*2] Alan said something about “not committing oneself,” adding, “Why shouldn’t twenty of us make dramatizations if we wish?” Why not indeed. Should I prevent Alan Bennett, say, to protect David Lan? Have I the right (or the wish) to do so? Is “prevention” in fact involved. Or precisely what is being prevented? Obviously plagiarism should be prevented (as when a certain Dr. X[*3] published several chapters of my Migraine under his own name); but should “free enterprise” or “competition”? Again, this all comes back to the vexed notion of property, my sense that I am not the Owner of a (literary) Property, with the right/power to grant “Rights” of one sort and another. And yet, in a way, I suppose I am—I do not have a strong sense of, say, Copyright. […]
Sorry about this mad letter. Give me some sensible sober Scottish advice!
To Harvey Shapiro
May 7, 1978
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Dr. Shapiro,
I take the liberty of enclosing this fascinating and important article from this month’s Epilepsia.
I found it particularly interesting, and relevant, because I have been finding an astonishing incidence of precisely such syndromes in the geriatric population at Bronx State—and in the elderly non-psychotic, but often very confused, patients I see elsewhere.
The importance, obviously, is this: that we have here an eminently treatable form of “organic brain syndrome,” which may be overlooked and untreated indefinitely—unless one is vigilantly aware of its existence, and prepared to do careful EEG monitoring of patients.
I now have quite a series of patients who had been labelled (often for years) as “senile,” “confused,” “arteriosclerotic,” etc. who have shown striking improvements in clinical state with the use of anticonvulsants.
I bring this up, as I could bring up a dozen further reasons and indications, because I feel that not having an EEG service at Beth Abraham—one which is instantly available, and causes no stress or inconvenience to patients or others, and can be read by someone who is acutely and intelligently aware of the patient’s syndromes and situations (myself!)—is definitely detrimental to patient care, and may deprive some patients of beneficial treatment.
I have waited more than three months now for “Administration” to respond to my offering such a service. It was obvious, indeed, speaking to them, that they were placing ludicrous considerations of a “political” and “commercial” sort before the primary consideration of patient care. I say “ludicrous” because such considerations do not in fact arise at all. Can YOU do anything to expedite matters? It may be, as happens increasingly with everything at BAH, that far from opposing my suggestion, Administration has simply forgotten it. It is paradoxical that the more people (and computers etc.) they have, the more inefficient they become!
Yours sincerely,
Oliver
To Barbara Beasley
Colleague
May 13, 1978
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Barbara,
Nice talking to you this afternoon—I hope all goes well down at NIH,[*4] and I will do my best to run the clinic smoothly on Wednesday. […]
I got a funny feeling from the Movement Disorder Group—mostly at Columbia.[*5] I have been trying to define what it is that I find “funny”—the feeling is very strong, but not easy to define. I think it’s this: that most of them seemed to have a “professional interest” in the subject, as opposed to a real interest—and by a “real” interest I mean a real love for the subject, a feeling and wonder for the phenomena themselves—as opposed to an itch to label them, classify them (in a purely nosological, not phenomenological, way), and—get rid of them. I have pretty much the same feeling now about the Tourette Group, which has professionalized (and also commercialized) itself so much. And I did, years ago, with the Migraine Group—the people who “run” Migraine in this country (somewhat, perhaps, as General Motors is “run”), and who regard the subject as “theirs.” I think there is something essentially wrong and suspect about such Groups, such Attitudes, such a proprietary feeling towards part of Nature. Something quite horrible—it gives me the creeps—and something utterly different to the “amateur”[*6] amative approach, which distinguishes Purdon Martin,[*7] and You, and Me. But it is not easy to survive—professionally, financially, etc.—when everything is increasingly taken over by Medical Business & Professionalism (it is in an attempt to survive, I imagine, that you are going to NIH). They kept talking about “data” and “data processing” last week […] much as they do at the Tourette Association. I wanted to make a protest—and say that though I had nothing against “data,” of course, I felt that essential sorts of understanding were being ignored, but I think that such a protest would have been unintelligible. Anyhow […] that evening sharpened my feeling that I (and a few fellow-spirits) constituted a separate species, and that we must struggle at all times to maintain individuality, and to minimize contact with professional “groups” (I almost wrote “gangs”—Friedman et al. certainly formed a Migraine Gang!). And, by the same token, not form (even defensively!) a “Group” ourselves. There is something most dangerous about Groups as such—they can pool all sorts of resources and powers, but they are likely to do so by doing away with individual freedom. And yet, one can be so limited and cut-off if one reacts to the other extreme, and become a total Solitary or Hermit. I must confess, for myself, that I find the whole question of association (personal, professional, creative, or whatever) extraordinarily difficult—and yet unavoidable!
Best,
Oliver
To Colin Haycraft
September 15, 1978
[New York]
Dear Colin,
[…] I will be coming to London on October 12 and staying for 2–3 weeks (my old man is having some surgery—not intrinsically serious, but he is old, somewhat ailing, and not the best surgical risk). I expect to bring with me a completed manuscript of the Leg book—at least, I pray to God, now, that I can go on to complete it, with no more inhibitions, or gross errors of propriety and tone: hold the whole thing in the right mood and perspective, and I will look forward to seeing lots of you then. Specifically, something I’d love to go over with you is a fascinating notebook (De Motu Locali Animalium) which Harvey[*8] put together in 1627 (the year before he published De Motu Cordis). The MS was “lost” for three hundred years (in the British Museum, or some such place), but published, belatedly, at the tercentenary of his death (1959). I found reading it, even in the obviously paraphrased and sometimes misleading translation, an astonishing experience—I cannot tell you what it meant to me, but something of the feeling will be conveyed if I say that there was such an intimacy and affinity of feeling, that I felt almost as if this half-written, half-conceived masterpiece of 1627 had been waiting, three and a half centuries, for me to finish it! But I would very much like to go over the original with you, to mull over its meaning(s)—and I hope you may not be too busy to spare an hour or two on this. You might find it interesting as well—he is so Aristotelian, in a way; but also, obviously, writing in reaction to Galileo, and, as such, dwelling on living motion, “inner” motion, generating motion, joyful motion; as opposed to the outer, “impressed” motion of Galilean projectiles and bodies. And, again, he is so clearly a physician—and experimenter. And, again, an artist who is intensely sensitive of the art of movement: the last part is a wondering wonderful mass of images and metaphors dealing, especially, with the music(ality) of animal motion, once all its mechanical (and “cybernetic”) aspects have been discussed, quite incredibly, considering the time; then Harvey, says, This is not enough. It is not just a procedure or technique. Not just a process, or series of actions. It has more than Gravity—it has Grace. It has the lightness and beauty and wholeness of Art. And especially that Art which is the closest to life, and not dependent on Images, “Meaning,” Representations—namely Music. This is so close to my own feelings and approach to the theme, that I have the book as a most dear companion.
