Love,

  OLIVER

  Skip Notes

  *1 OS had spent most of June in London. He would continue to spend a month or two there each summer for a decade or more.

  *2 A cousin.

  *3 Oxford English Dictionary.

  *4 Mel still remembers OS teaching him the name “dinoflagellates” for these tiny luminous organisms.

  *5 October 24 was day nine of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy had announced two days earlier that the United States would blockade Cuba in response to the presence of Soviet missiles there.

  *6 Identity unknown; perhaps a fellow expatriate who knew OS’s parents.

  *7 Gerhardt von Bonin (1890–1979) was a neuropathologist and neuroanatomist.

  *8 A bookseller in London’s Charing Cross Road.

  *9 The abstract of his first paper, on hereditary photomyoclonus (a seizure disorder triggered by light), which he hoped to present at the American Academy of Neurology meeting.

  *10 Merritt was chair of the Neurological Institute at Columbia University from 1948 to 1967.

  *11 Eban, the Israeli statesman, was OS’s first cousin on his father’s side.

  *12 Having grown up in wartime England, OS felt overheated once the temperature rose above 60 degrees. As one Miller family joke had it, while he was babysitting infant Tom, even though it was January in New York, OS flung open the windows of the apartment, nearly freezing the child. (Tom remained unscathed.)

  *13 OS’s duties as a resident included working at a nearby Veterans Administration hospital.

  *14 On hereditary photomyoclonus.

  *15 OS refers to his brother variously as Marcus, Marc, or Mark.

  *16 OS and Marcus shared a complete inability to recognize even the most familiar surroundings, and frequently got lost even in their own neighborhoods.

  *17 Chris Herrmann and Charles Markham, two of the neurology faculty at UCLA.

  *18 This would be OS’s lifelong pattern: he was never able to simply read a paper in public. He would painstakingly sketch out an annotated outline of his themes, but as soon as he was onstage, he improvised.

  *19 Long-distance telephone calls (to say nothing of transatlantic calls), like telegrams, were quite expensive then, and thus usually as brief as possible.

  *20 Lionel Trilling, author of The Liberal Imagination.

  *21 Edmund Wilson, author of To the Finland Station.

  *22 OS’s pet names for Los Angeles.

  *23 Gimpel, the protagonist in a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is widely tricked and mocked in his village but remains good-natured.

  *24 Difficult to know whether he is thinking here of Henry James (whom he admired but less often referred to) or William James, one of his greatest heroes.

  *25 Denizens of Muscle Beach in this era included world-class weight lifters Dave Ashman, Chuck Ahrens, Dave Sheppard, and Isaac “Ike” Berger. (Although Berger had been accused of statutory rape, OS was likely exaggerating his “imprisonment.”)

  *26 He had just turned thirty.

  *27 OS discovered the work of Sir Thomas Browne in his university days and often quoted this phrase, among others.

  *28 James Baldwin’s novel Another Country was published in 1962.

  *29 Steve Merjanian, Jim Hamilton, and Bill “Peanuts” West.

  *30 Freddie Blassie, heavyweight wrestler.

  *31 In German, “all the best.”

  *32 The house at 37 Mapesbury Road in Northwest London where OS and his brothers grew up.

  *33 Later, in his essay “Water Babies,” OS related this story as an episode that happened to him, not to Michael.

  *34 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital.

  *35 A bulbous, bumpy red nose.

  *36 Letter incomplete, possibly unsent or an early draft.

  *37 History of Neurology at UCLA, privately published.

  *38 And yet, Markham added, “Despite his strength and bulk he was always gentle and tender with and liked by his patients.” Rose himself later characterized OS as “a mix of non-conformity, [a] touch of irresponsibility and brilliance coupled with intense drive and great capability.”

  *39 He is quoting Macbeth (as one does).

  *40 OS attended the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Denver to present a paper on hereditary myoclonus with his co-authors.

  *41 Bonnard, who had long been friends with both OS’s parents and Jonathan Miller’s parents, had come to Los Angeles for a yearlong study leave.

  *42 The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, had been founded only a decade earlier, as a part of Yeshiva University, and attracted many American Jewish doctors, as well as many European refugees. In its early days, it was set apart from more established institutions by its interdisciplinary approach and its esprit de corps.

  *43 The charismatic Robert Terry was a pioneer in using electron microscopy to study Alzheimer’s, which was seen then as an exceedingly rare form of early-onset dementia. Terry and his colleague Robert Katzman realized that the more common condition that had thus far been considered “age-related” or “senile” dementia was not a vascular condition, as once thought, but in fact a form of Alzheimer’s disease.

  *44 Seymour Bird, the psychiatrist OS had begun seeing in Los Angeles.

  *45 OS presented a poster exhibit on Canavan’s sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the brain, at the 1965 meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, in Cleveland.

  3

  Jenö

  1965

  In August 1965, OS went, as usual, to London for a few weeks. He was due to take up his new position at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AECOM) in September—but notified the college that he would be arriving a few weeks late, so he could attend a neurology conference in Vienna. In the meantime, he met Jenö Vincze,[*1] a charismatic Hungarian theater director living in Berlin, with whom he spent a short-lived but passionate and amphetamine-fueled few days in Paris and Amsterdam (missing the Vienna conference entirely). He returned to New York City at the end of September, taking up temporary residence at a hotel in Greenwich Village.[*2] Over the following few months, OS and Vincze exchanged numerous letters. At first these were exalted, exultant—they were madly in love and planning a life together.

  To Jenö Vincze

  [October 4, 1965]

  [Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, N.Y.]

  My dearest Jenö:

  I have clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I have time to write to you. It is seven o’clock, the ending of a perfect day. The sun is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Reflected from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec city. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing through the sky. A jet is climbing on a long white tail. Howling wind. I love its howling, I want to howl for joy myself. The trees are thrashing to and fro. An old man runs after his hat. Darker now. The sun has set, City. A black diagram on the sombre skyline. And soon there’ll be a billion lights.

  We’re alone in the lab, just two of us. The coffee’s boiling on a Bunsen Burner: terrible coffee, but that’s how you make it when you’re here at night. The cryostat makes a friendly bubbling. There’s a smell of hot wax, and formalin, and the thousand concoctions we need for our stains. Beautiful smell, full of memories: back to my first dogfish, long ago. And slides all around me: the jigsaw of a human brain.

  You’re so right, Jenö: I don’t feel the distance either, only the nearness. We’re together all the while. I feel your breath on the side of my neck. Your hair is tickling my nostrils. I have that tingling in my penis.

  Your letter! What are you doing to me? I tore it open, and found myself trembling between tears and laughter. I pretended I had something in my eye, and rushed out of the room.[*3] You have said what I had intended to say. I wrote in my diary (my “diary” is really an endless letter to you, a conversation) after we’d been on the phone: I stride along the road too fast, driven by the rush of thoughts. My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions. Everyone catches and reflects my smile. They nod, and grin, and shout “great day.”

  The mountains skip like rams, the hills like lambs.[*4]

  I read Psalms in profanity, for the joy they contain, and the trust and the love, and the pure morning language.

  And suddenly, Chaucer again. Did Chaucer know he was the first? Grabbed Aquinas and Venerable Bede: dust, theories and dead history. Beowulf. Heroes. There are no heroes. Great Chaucer who looked and felt and shat and fucked, the beginning of real literature. I feel beginnings in my blood, a vast field has opened beneath my feet. The air, real air. Voices. Bodies. Intensely real. And you the realest of the real.

  My letter, my diary, is a sort of madness. I write so much. I want to catch everything and share it with you. You will be deprived of all your social life, your sleep, your food, condemned to read interminable letters. Poor Jenö, committed to a lover who’s never silent, who talks all day, and talks all night, and talks in company, and talks to himself. Words are the medium into which I must translate reality. I live in words, in images, metaphors, syllables, rhymes. I can’t help it. Occasionally, just occasionally, I can catch a moment, a feeling, with the camera, and short-circuit the enormous flood of words.

  I enclose such a photo. Boy, about to dive. Moment of incredible grace. Intimation, epiphany. I don’t want a movie sequence of the dive. Fuck the movement. I want the moment which precedes the movement, yet contains it. About to become. […]

  Friends. Jonathan is the only one that matters. No, two fine men in Los Angeles. One of them, Tom,[*5] wrote me today from the seashore, and said he wished we were together. He writes: “Tidepools, which are my laboratory, are the best therapy for the constricted soul.” He’s right. I long for tidepools, for the intense happiness of those long long days. There’ll always be a feeling of regret, somehow attenuated into a film of happiness. We’ll go to the tidepools together, Jenö. Tom was a good friend and a married man, and square, but fine. But you’re everything. I want to share my joys with you. To see the green crab scuttling for the shadow, translucent egg cases hung from seaweed. A little octopus, just hatched, jetting for joy in the salty water. Sea anemones. The soft sweet pressure if you touch their center. The chalky hands of barnacles. And polychaetes in their splendid liveries (they remind me of Versailles), moving with insensate grace. And dive with me under the ocean, Jenö. Through fish, like birds, which accept your presence. And scarlet sponges in a hidden cave. And the freedom, the complete and utter freedom of motion, second only to that of space itself.

  I’m lost; I keep dreaming all the while. Friends, I was saying. I have none in New York. They seem thin as wafers. Their actual presence is less than your imagined presence. […]

  No, I don’t have an apartment yet. I have looked a little, rather indolently. I don’t mind staying in a cheap hotel. I have the freedom of the streets and cafes, and the freedom of my skull. The Village is fun. Phoney, commercialized, not what it was: these are the comments you always hear. But it is intensely alive. Lights, cafes, bookshops, people; lovers, children, bums, and queers. A sort of gimcrack St. Germain des Prés. The weather has been of supernal beauty. The day steeps everything in golden liquid. I saw a van Gogh reproduction last night. I don’t know its name. A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love. I don’t feel mad; I have thrown away those hateful drugs; I do feel great; and I’m gone for you.

  I never saw that golden light before we met in Paris.

  Whorls and diadems of light, the mirage of New York, the silence of the empty school, unreality. The only reality is the clack of the typewriter, my laboured attempt to speak to you.

  You asked me questions [about my job], and I put you off with fancies. […] An incredible warmth pervades this place.[*6] So different from the aloofness, the meanness, the idiocy of Los Angeles. Norton,[*7] my other chief, would speak to me—if the need arose—as ruthlessly as you did by the Seine, and as tenderly. There is a fantastic creative furor in the place. Not the ugly pressure, the competitiveness, of Los Angeles. But an impatience to find out the truth.

  Terry’s assistant, another coincidence (so many of them!), is a Magyar. I liked him at once. I want to learn Hungarian with him, and German on the train each morning, so I can talk to you in your native tongues. […]

  Do they treat me well? How shall I answer. They treat me as a man. They speak straight. They don’t pretend. They’re not out to make impressions. None of that awful childish ring (guilt: punishment; command: disobedience; guilt: punishment) which seemed to be the round of my life in Los Angeles, where they treated me as a child, and I reacted as a child. I think I shall love it here. I think it will be the making of me. I see a future rise above the horizon of hypothesis. […]

  Go out and have a coffee, Jenö. You’ve got pins and needles, your mouth is dry, you’ve been reading this letter for much too long. But I want to tell you all. I have been greedy of every moment.

  I didn’t feel too much last week. I was busy, frightened, and confused. I hadn’t heard from you. And little uncertainties—how shall I say it—fluttered like moths about the lamp of uncertainty. Your voice was anguish and beauty and strength. It made sense, it lent strength, it comforted me in the vastness of New York, and the vaster vastness of a new life.

  I never admitted it in full, though perhaps you guessed. I was drugged the whole summer. In a close tight cell of amphetamine madness. A pharmacological Bastille of my own creation. And you led me out. Doctor Manette: “restored to life.”[*8] Two sides to every question. Paris was the positive radiant answer. […] I doubt if I shall ever take drugs again. […]

  Nine o’clock! Two hours gone? Forgotten supper, forgotten gym, and the phone calls I might have made, and…Another time. This is the time for you. I feel closest when I read your letters, and when I write to you.

  I went down to the Docks on Saturday after your call, and sat on the Quay and watched and watched. How the huge ships squeeze through a narrow neck. And the statue of Liberty (false bitch!), which you so want to see. I took a picture of a young man who was also sitting on the quay. Perhaps he too was dreaming of a far-off lover. […]

  Late afternoon when I rose to my feet. A dark Guinness in an Irish bar. The light is glinting in its foam. The long shadows of afternoon. Irish boy behind the bar, a callipygous[*9] pig, a sexy moron in his dirty apron. Silent drinkers: faces in a tarnished mirror.

  Another dockside bar, brown and smoke-filled, radiant in the evening sun. You remember that bar in Villejuif, with its pure translucent essence of France? (I have a photo of it. It came out.) Well, this bar was America, powerful, tarry. And I fumbled with my camera like a fool. A man came out, H. C. Earwicker,[*10] Finnegan the hodmaker in all his glory, a gross primordial man with a wad of tobacco in his mouth—he came out, and spat at me (fatuous tourist with his silly Nikon). He was right, of course. I must be covert. Joyce knew. “The artist must refine himself out of existence (in drama), above, behind, beyond his creation.”[*11] Something like this, I forget exactly. […]

  Even the typewriter ribbon is grey and tired. But not I. I am filled with an indomitable ferocious energy. The title of a vulgar hit: RAGE FOR LIFE. That’s it. Look at your handiwork, Jenö: this creature you have set in motion. Pygmalion: are you pleased with your Galatea? […]

  I must finish. I could sit up all night. I could write you a book. I want to write you a book. If ever I write a book, it will be for you. It will be two books in one: a book for the public, and a book for you. A book of amphibolies, double meanings and private references. […]

  To Jenö Vincze

  [October 6, 1965]

  Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY

  Jenö!

  I love you insanely, yet it is the sweetest sanity I have ever known. I read and reread your wonderful letter. I feel it in my pocket through ten layers of clothing. Its trust, its warmth, exceed anything I have ever known. […]

  How constantly I talk with you! I write to you, continuously, in my Diary. My last letter was overloaded, it had been building up for eight long days; it was congested, and in places false. Some of the things I wanted to describe for you had gone stale, or dead, as “set pieces.” I have never learned to write a letter. I have a nasty tendency to write at people, instead of to them. It is histrionic, egocentric; one is consciously “erudite,” “charming” or “fey.” One quotes oneself, applauds discreetly. One keeps a carbon copy, for posterity! One pre-selects opinions, moods. Forgive me—I will try to change.

  Your own letter was of the most profound and beautiful spontaneity. (“I am amazed, as I never had the intention to write what I am writing at present.”) I am so glad you did write what you did! When you spoke in Paris (with such knowledge, such experience, such a man-of-the-world matter-of-factness) of a time, x weeks, or months, a year, whatever, a period after which we would have explored each other to the bottom, the inevitability of boredom, of parting company—I couldn’t bear it, I was speechless with misery. I’m a simpleton, I know; I have never had […] an “affaire” before. But I can’t bear to think of weeks or years, of personality in pints or pounds. I believe we are both infinite, Jenö. I see the future as an endless expansion of the present, not the remorseless tearing-off of calendar leaves. […]