Enough said. I will cease to shoot letters and footnotes in your direction for a while. I will try and cool off, and will await further news from you by and by (or is it bye and bye).

  Best regards,

  To Jean Cunningham

  Editor, Faber & Faber

  March 6, 1973

  11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY

  Dear Miss Cunningham,

  Unexpectedly, and simultaneously, I have just received your letter of March 1 and Mr. du Sautoy’s[*36] of March 2. Let me say, first, that I feel most complimented, delighted, at the suggestion that I might try my hand at a book on Pain for Faber’s.

  But what a subject! How huge, how deep, how various, how many-sided—how on earth would one tackle such a subject? It would, I admit, be a fascinating challenge. And the subject fascinates me, as it must fascinate everybody. It is so basic, so elemental, and—so utterly mysterious. Whenever I wade through some of the existing tomes on the subject (like the quarter-million words in White & Sweet’s book), which try to reduce everything to pathways and mechanisms, and to tabulate the mystery of pain out of existence, I think of that marvellous bit of dialogue in Hard Times:

  “Are you in pain, dear Mother?”

  “I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,” said Mrs. Gradgrind, “but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.”

  I have been thinking of pain, so it happens, a good deal lately, partly with the anguish of bereavement, and—at a more humdrum level—with the minor neuralgic torments of a disc which is playing up at the moment. Indeed, just yesterday, when I had burning paresthesiae in one hand, I jotted down in my notebook some of its qualities, its basic characteristics (I wrote: Pins and Needles. Quanta of Pain. Prickling, flickering, sparkling, tingling, ringing—a tinnitus of pain (cp discrete and continuous pain to clonus/tonus, jerks & spasms). Needling, acicular, nagging, goading. Pungent pain, pungent and titillating, like snuffs and curries. Pain as elementally, irreduceable, irritating, a basic aspect of biological irritability.) This is the sort of thing I jot down at odd moments, interspersed with odd quotes, aphorisms, diagrams.

  But jottings are one thing, and a book is another. Assuredly not a day goes by without my patients presenting me with pains—from banal prickles to strange unlocalizable sensations, or states-of-mind, like those of the dying Mrs. Gradgrind.

  I have always been interested in Pain. I suppose every neurotic is: it is his passionate interest in pain and suffering, his experience of it, his penetration into it, which gives Schopenhauer his edge over Kant, and gives (at least some chapters of) his masterpiece[*37] its almost-unbearable eloquence and intensity.

  Pain. Twelve years ago another author of yours (Thom Gunn) suggested I try to write a book on Pain. I forget what got me started, but I did get started on one of those huge monologues, or, more accurately, soliloquies I am prone to, a soliloquy on Pain, which was called forth by something or other Thom had just said. And he listened to me for two hours and said: “That’s your subject. I wish we’d had a tape-recorder around—one day you’ll write a book about Pain.”

  The first paper I ever wrote was on Pain—also, I think, in 1961. But, alas!—like so many things I have written—I lost it, and didn’t have a copy. […]

  I had meant to write you a two-line letter—and I find myself taking-off in all directions. I must think about the subject—that is, as a possible subject for a book. […]

  To W. H. Auden

  March 31, 1973

  11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY

  Dear Wystan,

  When I got your lovely letter of February 21,[*38] I was filled with a rush of affection and gratitude, immediately wrote an answer, put it in an envelope and stamped it, placed it under a volume of the OED to flatten it, took it the next day meaning to post it—and I cannot be sure whether I actually did so or not. I have been tormenting myself for more than a month by trying to visualize the exact moment of posting (or non-posting). These things happen. I find they happen especially frequently with me if my feelings are aroused. Since obsessional indecision cannot be resolved in its own terms, I am (what perhaps I should have done a month ago) taking the liberty of writing another letter. […]

  First then (and if I am repeating myself, it is better than not saying it at all), thank you immensely for your magnanimous reaction to my book. You are the only person, other than my publisher, to whom I have shown a copy; and there is nobody whose favourable response could make me happier than your own. I did do a Glossary when I was in London in January, and I certainly hope that the book secures some readers outside the profession. Perhaps my experience has been an atypical one; perhaps I have been provocative, or sought alienation; but the positive experience with the Listener article, like the five years of negative experience which preceded it, persuade me that it is all-but-impossible to have any real and fruitful dialogue in Medicine and medical circles (especially the barren neurological ones to which I belong), whereas there is obviously a mass of real, alive people outside Medicine who will listen to me, and with whom I can enjoy the delight (the necessity) of real converse, what (if I remember correctly) Dr. Johnson called “a streaming of mind.”

  Essentially, at the moment, I am mourning, and I am awaiting the publication of Awakenings (originally scheduled for April 26, delayed by rail-strike, now re-scheduled for May 17—but who knows?) I do not feel fully alive. I felt diminished almost to zero by my mother’s death; the greater part of me seemed to have died with her (I was, no doubt, too closely attached to her); and it is only in the last few days, perhaps, with the signs of Spring all round me, that I have started to feel a re-stirring of my own sap, and a re-realization that I exist in my own right, that—unexpectedly, amazingly—I am still here, and the world is here, and—it scarcely seems possible, but more than four months have passed since her death. I am beginning, I think, to recapture some sense of real-time and history, and of seeing the past as past, never to be forgotten, but no longer forming a spurious present.

  For some reason or other, I have found it almost impossible to concentrate on anything except D. H. Lawrence, and especially some of his lovely, earlier stories which are so full of life and love, and where his bitter-ranting-mad part is not in evidence. I do a great deal of pondering, and jotting in my notebooks—those notebooks which are so much better, fresher, finer, than anything I can achieve in my “finished” writings—but have not put pen (or typewriter) to paper on anything in particular. In addition to the book on Parkinsonism which I will be doing for Raymond Greene of Heinemann—a book to which I shall give the most orthological form I can, and which will (I hope) have some resemblance of the “Investigations”[*39] in style and intent—I have been excited by a suggestion from Faber’s that I do a book on Pain for them.[*40] It seems to me that I have been thinking about pain (that one thinks about pain) all my life—and it is exactly the sort of deep, elemental (and generally misunderstood) subject I should like to deal with: indeed the night after hearing from them, I dreamt I was an amoeba, feeling my way through the world, feeling regions of possible hurt—too hot here, too acid here, etc.—experiencing some indistinguishable, primal mixture of fear-pain-shrinking through which I palpated the world, and judged what I could do, where I could go, etc.[*41]

  I am delighted that Love’s Labour Lost[*42] went off well in Brussels, and full of admiration for your energy in undertaking so much, in so many different ways and places. I wish I had your resoluteness—you seem to go and do things at once, while I continually hover and waver, and inspissate myself in coils of indecision. […]

  I do not know whether you will still be in England when I come there in May. […] If (as I fear) I will miss you then, I will at least hope to hear from you, and to see you here, there or somewhere soon. I remember, at the airport, on that painful Saturday,[*43] when a stranger came up and greeted you, I asked you whether you thought of the world as being a large or a small place; and you replied, “Neither. A cosy place.” So—the world being a cosy place—I am sure I will see you in England, Austria or New York within the next few months.

  P.S. I will now go and post this letter instantly, lest it get caught up in indecision like the last one!

  To Richard Lindenbaum

  March 31, 1973

  Beth Abraham Hospital, Bronx, NY

  Dear Dick,

  I think I wrote to you a few weeks back—but […] I do want to thank you, most particularly, for the Treasury of Mathematics[*44] you gave me, which has more or less become my bedside reading (strangely companioned by Sir Thomas Browne and D. H. Lawrence), and has led me into some strange seas of thought. How wrong most of our education was—on the whole! The masters are so much easier to understand than the rotten, lifeless, second-hand, ground-up stuff we were crammed with at school. In particular I enjoy Sylvester (I was so struck, on the train back from Didcot, by a passage from him, that I quoted it at length in my Epilogue).[*45] I seem, increasingly, to be able to see Invariants and Covariants floating in the air, wonderfully pure and distinct, like Platonic Forms. Gauss[*46] is tremendously difficult, partly I suppose because of the intrinsic difficulty, partly of his unrelenting rigour and terseness—but so rewarding! I found the section on curved surfaces—“surfaces not as boundaries of bodies, but as bodies of which one dimension vanishes…flexible” has gradually allowed me to grasp, to visualize (and I can’t properly hold anything in my mind until it becomes an image of some sort) increasingly everything—“inner” and outer space—as curved, closed, continuous, variously warped surfaces. I can understand (a bit more of) Einstein much more clearly now I have read Gauss; and in particular the cartoon-like deformations of structure-space which seem (to me, anyhow) so characteristic of neurosis, Parkinsonism, and other such violently warped and polarized states. There is a wonderful passage in Proust where he speaks of his own two states (the aesthetic-epiphanic vs. the neurotic-egocentric): “I learned to distinguish between these two states which reigned alternately in my mind…contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to myself, in one state, what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the other.” The shape-space of these two states—the state of poise, so open and hospitable, with perception of everything in its eachness, its richness, its harmony; and the state of tension, so violently warped, like a terrible force-field, and utterly closed, mean, tendentious, and egocentric—their contiguity and their absolute contrast have become much clearer to me since reading Gauss. God knows, one spends so much of one’s life in these unbearably but inescapably closed inner spaces—like a fly in a Klein bottle;[*47] but gradually, now and then, by a mercy, one does—often quite suddenly—find oneself outside the labyrinth, in a divinely spacious real space, and able to look down or back at the neurotic state as a sort of transient and local deformation (deformity); but only sometimes—the neurotic state, while it has hegemony, cannot but be felt as absolute, totally confining, and permanent. […]

  My present work—now I have left Beth Abraham—is mean and abrasive and unrewarding.[*48] I can scarcely stand it—but it pays the rent (just). I can only stand it by thinking of it as temporary. With my mother’s death, and also with leaving (as I had to) the patients at Beth Abraham who were so dear to me, I find I have no real motives/reasons left for staying here in New York: or, rather, only one reason, namely my analyst, who means so much to me, and can (as much as anyone) see me through some of the tortures and distortions. I wait eagerly, and with some anxiety, for Awakenings to come out. […] Auden (bless him!), to whom I gave a proof-copy the day I saw you, has been magnanimous enough to call it a “masterpiece,” which makes me feel good (that is, in those moments when one is allowed to feel good).

  * * *

  —

  OS met Raymond Greene in the summer of 1971, when Greene, a publisher, asked him to write a general book about Parkinson’s disease (as opposed to the rare form of postencephalitic parkinsonism that affected his Awakenings patients).[*49] Preoccupied with writing Awakenings, OS turned in earnest to the more general book only in the spring of 1973, after Awakenings had finally gone to press. Over the span of about a week OS wrote two very lengthy letters to Greene, outlining his thoughts on Parkinson’s. The following is excerpted from the second of these, which by itself ran to sixteen typed pages.

  To Raymond Greene

  Chairman, Heinemann Medical Books

  April 6, 1973

  [No Address Given]

  Dear Dr. Greene,

  […] In the past few days I have been seeing (unless I deceive myself) a clearer and simpler structure to the whole. I may also need to enter the book, as it were, obliquely, and by stealth, through a series of letters which insensibly become chapters. One other preliminary remark: anything I say now about a possible plan or design for the book may be ignored when I actually get down to it: I have never found that I could plan or calculate too much in advance without doing violence to my own spontaneity, or to that unconscious planning which is so much deeper and surer than all one’s calculations and cogitations, and which one discovers in what one has done when one has done it. […]

  I find conversation, the writing of letters, and the composition of imaginary dialogues, much easier than “proper” formal writing. And this is true in my reading: for example, I adore Goethe’s letters, conversations, aphorisms, Italian Journey etc., but can scarcely move in his finished works, his opera. I have wondered, in relation to this, about writing some “Parkinsonian letters,” analogous, perhaps, to the Screwtape letters, or to take a nobler example, Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underworld. I have also wondered about reviving the dialogue as an expository instrument: it comes so naturally to me, that I always carry pens of different colours, in order to delineate the imaginary personae who converse in my notebooks. […]

  I had not sufficiently grasped at the time of my Listener article the necessity of all descriptions (pictures, representations) being metaphorical—frameworks-of-reference, ways-of-looking-at etc. which are neither more nor less than ideas. For example, I was still hung up with the Newtonian-Lockean idea of “absolute” space, space as a sort of empty container in which things happen: an epistemological assumption which is implicit, for example, in all current neurophysiology, certainly that of the Sherrington and Pavlovian schools. Although I said something about the odd-shaped spaces or fields in which these patients lived (I have one patient who tends to get rather sudden onsets and offsets of severe Parkinsonism: he once said to me, “It’s like a magnet being switched on and off in my brain. Suddenly, it’s there and pulling me out of shape.”), I failed to realize that “space” itself is a metaphor, time equally, and that one may have any number of space-times (or geometries, or metrics) all equally useful, equally elegant, as frames-of-reference, for making pictures of the world. Curiously, although I intellectually perceived the truth of this relativistic principle when I was reading Einstein last year, it only came to me with intense, visual vividness when I read Gauss’ incredible papers on curved surfaces of 1825 and 1827; and especially at that marvellous point where the excitement breaks through the rigid formality of his language and he speaks of “a new point of view, where a wide and still wholly uncultivated field is open to investigation.” […] I had tormenting dreams in the early part of the night, when (like Alice, perhaps) I found myself before a door fumbling impotently with an enormous bunch of keys, and none of them fitted the door, and I knew it; and then I fell into one of those very deep, dreamless, but so fruitful sleeps one sometimes has (Jonathan Miller, in his entry in the National Dictionary of Biography or whatever, lists as his recreation “deep sleep”); and, in the morning again dreamt of finding myself in front of that door, but this time with a single key which I knew was the right key; and it was, and the door opened—and outside was the world, a marvellous feeling of spaciousness and ease. I also dreamt that morning of a hippopotamus as a sort of convoluted, grey, homogeneous, mobile hyper-surface—a dream which was a joke, but a vital one, because in its absurd, idiosyncratic way it fixed the images of curved spaces and surfaces well and truly in my mind). […]

  With kind regards,

  Postscript (April 8): (I should, perhaps, have posted this letter two days ago when it was mostly written; otherwise it will become one of those interminable Herzogian[*50] monstrosities such as I am always writing and never posting!) […]

  One last note, by the way (it gets back to something I have raised again and again). It is a question of style, but I think there is nothing deeper than style: being is style, one only has being in style. One sees again and again (it would be a lovely subject for an essay) how even the greatest thinkers, if they do not actually do violence to their own impressions and thoughts, seem blind to their nature, or present them in a completely unnatural, artificial, systematic manner which must be utterly different from the vivid, intuitive, living mental processes which produced them. […]

  [Newton’s] Principia (partly because of intrinsic difficulty, but no less because of style) seems to me unreadable: but the Quaeries to the Opticks are utterly delightful, and reveal a completely different and very engaging Newton, Newton-at-play, throwing up ideas and catching them, or—in his own death-bed image—playing with pebbles on the seashore). […]