Letters, p.43
Letters, page 43
“Wrote it all down!” Ah, if only I could!! So many thoughts, teeming, resolving, ceaseless, I don’t know whether they are a joy or torment: rather they are joy to entertain, and a torment when they cannot be given outer, manifest, public form. It is joy to fill my “Notebooks,” write notes on patients, write letters to friends—and this is a million-and-a-half words a year—but somehow, or sometimes, an evasion of the one thing I must do. The Book of Job has almost everything in it, including precisely this feeling, when Job cries out:
O that my words were now written!
O that they were printed in a book!
That they were graven with an iron pen and lead
In the rock for ever!
These feelings, always with me, have reached a sort of climax today, because I am going away tomorrow, to the North once again, with its dangerous allures—in the half-desperate hopes of writing my maddening leg-book, so intolerably inhibited and postponed. The absolute need to write it out, if only so that I do not, once again, act it out, and I cannot help some fears and inner quakings, when I think on my last journey North in August ’74.
So—I have packed the trunk of the car with typewriters (3) and fishing rods, and will leave for Canada tomorrow. It doesn’t have to be Canada—there are plenty of nice, restful lakes upstate in New York—but I associate Canada with a sense of freedom, and “home” (without the special dangers of England, at the moment). I hope the febrile intensity of feeling goes down, because I have a sense of some danger in this mood—and continually overlook the angry and destructive impulses down below, which I can scarcely feel—until they suddenly erupt. It is a funny mixed mood, both creative and destructive; and I must be careful not to push it too much—I am very exhausted, bone-weary, inside—and I am not under sentence of death if I don’t write now (although I tend to cultivate this feeling). Perhaps I can, or should, just “relax,” as they say, and have 2–3 weeks, if I can, of vacation from outer (and especially inner) obligations. It is the obligations that are dangerous—and the freedom that I need.
Some mixed feelings of needing to take care, and make provision, etc. led me to write a long letter to my lawyer, last night (I was very restless, too restless to sleep), in lieu of a Will—or, in effect, a “literary” Will. It dwelt especially on the enormous, the bizarre volume of unpublished but perhaps, occasionally, publishable writing; my enormous but “secret” (or secretive) productivity, which has filled the apartment with (fearfully destructible and combustible) Notebooks and manuscripts. Anyhow, I indicated that in the event of something unfortunate happening, that I wished my Assets, or Estate, such as it is (it is very little) to be used on behalf of this “literary” legacy—for it is all I leave, and I have no dependents. […] I feel somewhat easier in my mind having written it—but it should not be seen as expressive of a death-seeking impulse (I hope!), so much as a sort of protective measure (both internally and externally).
Tricky time: I miss Shengold’s presence—perhaps I have become too dependent on him. Perhaps I am writing to you, in part, in lieu of him; you must use your “third ear” and decide! […] I should be back here the week of Labour Day—perhaps around the 5th or 6th—though I might stay longer if I fall into a writing streak, and things are doing particularly well. I hope I can bring back a beautiful book; failing this, possibly a fish—or a moose; and, I pray, not a broken leg or neck. It is possible, of course, that it will all be uneventful—even to boredom. What I want is that it should be uneventful, but quiet; a good, peaceful, living quiet
“The quietude
At the centre of the movement”[*33]
I will look forward to seeing you when you come to New York in October. And, please, look after yourself—I know this year has been difficult and distressing for you too.
Love,
OLIVER
To Jonathan Cole
October 9, 1979
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Jonathan,
I’m sorry I’ve been such a lousy letter-writer myself—I always enjoy yours, which are full of life and interest, when they come, and the sense of good expansion (and crises!) they show.
I thought of you especially today, because I saw Sister (now Mother) Genevieve,[*34] whom I had not seen since she left New York, and she asked about you with great affection, and asked to be remembered to you.
Your […] job at the Whittington in geriatrics and neurology sounds ideal—I mean, for someone like yourself who will bring appreciation and concern to it. To someone ungiving, it would probably be a thundering bore. Clever and skilful doctors are common (and, so to speak, cheap): what is lovely, and rare, is to see the Three Graces—Giving, Receiving, Returning—as well as intelligence, knowledge, talent, skill—and, pre-eminently, this is what I (and clearly many others) see in you. […]
I have an increasing, an almost constant, feeling that one is lost without grace—and I use the word in a way which covers everything from the grace of a squirrel to the grace of a saint. The lovely rightness of Mother Genevieve, which so moved me when I saw her again yesterday, is because she is guided by grace. (I thought of my favourite title, Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace). The obvious wrongness of Parkinsonian movement is because it is not guided by grace: this came out very strikingly in one of my Parkinsonian patients whom Jonathan Miller interviewed when he was here for some days filming for his series: she said that she was painfully conscious of how “wooden, and mechanical, and robot-like” her walking had become, and how it now lacked grace—and life. But, she added, Nature provided a cure, in that, increasingly, she was apt to have music come to her—music she used to dance to, with a young man she once loved—and when the music came, she recovered her grace. […]
I felt tense and miserable for the first half of the year—which especially had to do with the most cruel and wretched death of my poor aunt (whom you met), after a series of appalling post-operative complications […] it all happened at the time of the damnable Strike, and what should have been fairly minor elective surgery became very major emergency surgery—practically evisceration, which would have taxed someone young and strong, and was virtually murder in an old body of 86. And there were a series of post-operative infections of a sort scarcely seen since the Crimean War—and I could not help associating these with the fact that the Hospital had no sterilizers, and had run out of sterile packs of all kinds. But she had a very good, very long, full life; and, in a way which aunts, uncles, godparents, grandparents can sometimes do—when parents cannot (simply because they are too close, and forced to play all the roles which Authority and Dependency force upon one)—she stood for Health, Sanity, Humour, etc. almost for Life, in the darkest days of my childhood—and ever after. […]
A turning point for me was going away to a lovely island in Lake Huron, Manitoulin […]. I have never known a place of such beauty and quietude—and I felt my torn, irritable, nerves (“heart”) healing with every minute and hour, partly in the immense natural beauty and peace of the place, and partly in the remarkable feeling of community I had—of very strong, simple, kindly souls, wisely innocent and incorruptible, a very remarkable island community altogether. Unprecedently, for me, I found myself talking, easily, and deeply, with everyone I met: absorbing, equally, the social and natural history of the place, its ecology and economy, and how it had survived, so full and free and spacious and fertile, with all the dangers of isolation and desolation, on the one hand, and of spoilage and corruption, on the other. […]
I had an immense feeling of mildness, forgiveness, the absence of censoriousness, anger, accusation, on the island. I don’t know how much was inhibition and introjection from a very rare and lovely place: and how much projection of an eased heart, which, after months of tormenting, had reached some sort of unaccusing, unpersecuting, forgiving inner peace. After about ten days on the island, I felt a sudden “quickening” of my book within me, and had written 50,000 words in ten days. I did hope that I might complete it there, but fifteen hours of typing a day started to do my back and cervical roots in, and it became apparent (and has since become more apparent) that—at least in this writing—I have a far vaster task on my hands than I imagined. I had thought of a Bagatelle, a Divertimento, of about 30,000 words (Migraine and Awakenings are about 70,000 each), but am instead facing a Symphony of about 250,000 (a single day—admittedly a crucial one—in the Hospital, occupies 70,000 words, and may be the longest day in literature since Ulysses!). So I find myself, willy-nilly, not intending it, in a sort of Marathon, and despite a reasonably steady 4-5000 words a day, may find myself writing till Xmas—and then have my publishers (or public) say “Yes, it’s marvellous, each page is full of interest—only you can’t expect us to read three thousand pages!” It has extended itself, you will gather, very much beyond a case-history, into a sort of novelistic autobiography, and—and—
“Expand not into boundless desires and designs” says Browne.
“I thought all I should have to say on this matter would have been contained in one sheet of paper,” writes Locke, in his Epistle to the Reader, “but the further I went, the larger prospect I had; new discoveries led me still on, and so it grew insensibly to the bulk it now appears in.” He adds, “I will not deny, but possibly it might be reduced to a narrower compass than it is, and that some parts of it might be contracted. But, to confess the truth, I am now too lazy, or too busy, to make it shorter.” Anyhow, for myself, I will at present let it take the shape and scale it seems to flow out in, in defiance of all my programmes and plans (because, I suppose, it is genitum non factum[*35]—or, better, factum cum genitum)—and only cast a critical-contracting eye on it when it is done. I hope I can go back to Manitoulin, for it was there that the magic circle was completed, the threads were gathered together, and the needed sense of spaciousness and mildness came upon me—and I would like to set an “Epilogue” there.
I must stop now—perhaps in future I should use airmail forms—otherwise you are likely to receive a Treatise rather than a letter. I hope to come to London, MS in hand, sometime later in the Autumn, God willing! My thanks again for your very appreciated and cordial letters—and my regrets at being so erratic (and eccentric) in reply.
Warmest regards,
Oliver
Skip Notes
*1 Lan became an acclaimed playwright and director and served as artistic director of the Young Vic from 2000 to 2018.
*2 OS never granted exclusivity to either playwright. In 1982, he received a package from Harold Pinter containing the script of a one-act play, A Kind of Alaska, based on Awakenings, which he gave his blessing to.
*3 In On the Move, OS tells the story of how Arnold P. Friedman, his boss at the headache clinic, tried to appropriate his work.
*4 The National Institutes of Health, in Washington, D.C.
*5 A group of physicians concerned with movement disorders (Parkinson’s, Tourette’s, Huntington’s, etc.) who met monthly to keep abreast of new work in the field.
*6 OS loved to use the word “amateur” in its original sense, as referring to someone who might be quite knowledgeable but is motivated primarily by love for the subject rather than professional advancement. His book Oaxaca Journal (2002) chronicled his travels in Mexico with a group of amateur fern enthusiasts.
*7 James Purdon Martin, a neurologist specializing in movement disorders.
*8 William Harvey, best known for his delineation of the circulation of blood in the human body.
*9 Joseph Babinski (1857–1932), a French-Polish neurologist.
*10 A French philosopher who died in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, Weil was the author of The Need for Roots and Gravity and Grace.
*11 Madeline Gardner, who had also had a stroke six or seven years earlier, again regained a good deal of speech afterward, this time with the help of a speech therapist.
*12 There are two main forms of aphasia: receptive aphasia, in which people are unable to understand the speech of others, and expressive aphasia, in which they are unable to express themselves (if both forms are present, the disorder is termed “global aphasia”). Madeline had expressive aphasia but learned, over the years, how to communicate effectively, with the patience and help of those around her.
*13 OS often felt that the reason it took him the better part of a decade to finish A Leg to Stand On was his ambivalence and anger at his surgeons, and his inability to articulate that.
*14 Katzman, a pioneer in the study of Alzheimer’s, published an editorial in 1976 suggesting that Alzheimer’s was the most common form of dementia. Until then, most physicians were still using the diagnosis of “organic brain syndrome,” “dementia,” or simply “senility” to describe such patients.
*15 As mentioned in chapter 1, OS frequently used this classic neurological test of drawing a circle and asking the patient to write the appropriate “clock face” numbers in it.
*16 Another patient known to Katzman.
*17 A psychiatrist.
*18 Miller had been OS’s physical therapist at the convalescent home in London where he stayed following his leg injury in 1974.
*19 OS’s beloved Aunt Len.
*20 A reference to Rodman’s wife, Maria, who had died in 1974.
*21 Helena Landau did not actually found the Jewish Fresh Air Home and School for Delicate Children, but she was its head of school from its founding in 1921 to her retirement in 1959.
*22 OS, ever the etymologist, was fond of pointing out that the word “paradise” originally meant a protected walled garden.
*23 D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971)—an influential psychologist as well as a pediatrician and psychoanalyst—was deeply concerned with the role of play in child development, and here OS, knowing that Rodman was a Winnicott scholar, is invoking that work.
*24 The Body in Question, a companion book to the thirteen-part television series.
*25 Rodman had recently remarried.
*26 Lee was a neighbor and friend of Bob Rodman’s.
*27 Lee’s review, of Gunn’s Jack Straw’s Castle and Hughes’s Gaudete, was titled “The Roots of Violence” and appeared in the spring 1977 Chicago Review.
*28 Byrnies are a type of chain mail shirt that Gunn made the subject of a poem.
*29 OS later used this phrase of Chesterton’s, “the landscape of his dreams,” as the title of a chapter in An Anthropologist on Mars.
*30 Bol was Lennie’s pet name for OS.
*31 Lennie died on January 22, 1979.
*32 This dream has obvious resonances to OS’s leg-injury experiences and learning how to walk again. But it also evokes his earlier descriptions of parkinsonian patients, as well as a patient he had recently seen and would write about in “The Disembodied Lady.”
*33 From Octavio Paz’s poem “Solo for Two Voices.”
*34 Sister Genevieve was a member of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious order founded in nineteenth-century France. The nuns serve the elderly poor by running residences around the world, and many of them rotate to different residences every few years. Thus, Sister Genevieve had left her post in one of the New York residences to become a Mother Superior elsewhere. OS worked at several LSP homes in the New York area for almost forty years, and he kept in touch with many of the Sisters as they moved about the country.
*35 Begotten, not made.
10
Clinical Tales
1980–1984
To Robert Katzman
January 14, 1980
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Bob:
Just today, at one of the Little Sisters [homes], by chance, I had occasion to see one of the not-so-rare sorts of patients I mentioned to you on Friday, with a fairly rapidly-progressive concurrent Parkinsonism and dementia. I herewith enclose copies of my notes etc. since I first saw him in September ’75 (there are also CAT scans and EEG’s—but, of course, no brain biopsy!), and you will see how in little more than four years he has passed from a very minimal syndrome, clinically, to an almost terminal one. It didn’t occur to me to link the Parkinsonism with the dementia etc.—and perhaps they are not linked. I found his course sufficiently puzzling to send him in to Labe[*1] last year for a diagnostic work-up (he came back, I think, with the usual double diagnosis of “Parkinson’s disease” and “Alzheimer’s disease”)—and also to Bronx Lebanon for a work-up back in the winter of ’76–77, when he presented a transient appearance of what was later to become the continuing picture. Some of these strange and sudden “flare-ups,” which I have seen in other such patients, have been (mis)interpreted as “strokes”—but there is neither good clinical nor other evidence that he has had strokes. The course has really been continuously and relentlessly downhill, though with the odd lability (see, for example, the great change in intellectual function—ability to write—within a five minute period in test sheet of Jan 30/79), of a clinical picture which I have seen in so many. He also shows a very characteristic excessive sensitivity to (and intolerance of) both antiparkinsonian and tranquillizing drugs—which I also think may be characteristic.[*2]
