* * *

  —

  During the first few months of 1974, as he mentions in the previous letter to his father, OS wrote more than a dozen essays about the patients he was seeing at Bronx State, a public psychiatric hospital—mostly people with autism, schizophrenia, or severe learning disabilities. He had tried to engage with them in ways no doctors had before: he obtained a piano for them, and a Ping-Pong table; he even took one patient, a nonverbal artist long immured in the hospital, to the nearby New York Botanical Garden (where the young man uttered his first word: “dandelion”). But when OS objected to the institution’s use of “behavior modification”—i.e., punishment—his bosses retaliated by insinuating that there were rumors that OS had “abused” his patients. Horrified, and in a fit of rage (typically, directed at himself as much as anyone else), in mid-April he impulsively destroyed his essays, trying to erase the whole traumatic experience.

  In the meantime, Bob Rodman, the psychiatrist who was OS’s closest friend from his UCLA days, was consumed by a crisis of his own: his thirty-eight-year-old wife was suffering from debilitating pain in her abdomen, and he feared the worst. By June, Rodman was writing long letters to OS almost daily, sharing his agony and uncertainty as he and his wife visited numerous medical specialists—none of whom could agree on a diagnosis or, indeed, even whether to tell Maria of their findings. He wondered whether to take the family to Maria’s homeland, Sweden, for what seemed likely to be her final days. How could he continue treating his own patients when he was so distraught? How could he face the prospect of telling their young daughters, aged nine and eleven? He remarked in a letter to OS that he could not afford the “luxury” of suicide because of them.

  To F. Robert Rodman

  June 25, 1974

  11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY

  My dear Bob,

  I was painfully surprised and distressed by your letter and wept as I read it, for you and with you. I did not quite know, however, how to “respond”: I have thought of you many times in the last few days, picked up the phone receiver and put it down, started letters and stopped them. I wish I had not been so blind before. I did see that you were in the throes of crisis, but I failed to see the real and agonising events behind it and sort of took you at your own word, that it was merely a sort of age-generation-generativity thing.

  It sounds as if the two of you have had a frightening time these last few months—no, frightening is too mild a word, horror and panic, which you use, are nearer the mark. And any sort of coming-to-terms precluded by uncertainty as to what is going on. I gather that Maria will be seeing the lung-man around now—and perhaps he will offer you the knowledge, if not the reassurance, you so need; or perhaps not. You have to know what’s happening, whatever it is (I pray that it turns out to be no more than a tardily resolving post-surgical pneumonia). Because if you don’t know, you are in a quicksand of anxiety, everything keeps giving way beneath you, and you are prevented from achieving that certitude, and still worse, that fortitude which you so much need…and of which you have so much, when you are not being undone, or unmanned, by extraordinary circumstances.

  I think too that you must have someone to talk to at your end, someone who is both physically and emotionally close to you; you are maddening yourself by being silent, and secretive, on so grave a matter, and when you feel as you do; whether it is your former analyst, or another psychiatrist, or a friend, you must disburden yourself and find a sympathetic (and practical, but above all sympathetic) ear and heart. You must have at least one such friend near you in Los Angeles. It is folly, and a sort of pride, to bear this cross alone.

  Your strength will be tested enough, and more than enough, by facing what you have been facing, and may have to face, even given sympathetic understanding and support; to deny yourself this is surely an act of condemnation of some sort, condemning yourself to suffering alone, in gratuitous secrecy and silence.

  As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude. Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

  I know very well those forces which shut one up and in, which confine one in an extra hell, when one most needs to reach out towards others, towards one another. You must fight these forces, and let your friends deliver you to some extent: this is, ultimately, what they are for. I am physically too far away, alas! to do more than write or phone, on the whole. You need the actual, physical, living presence of people, of someone, who can commiserate, comfort, sympathize, advise.

  Wittgenstein says somewhere, about suicide (he was always thinking of it), that a man never commits suicide unless he rushes his defences. I am relieved that you feel you must not consider this last luxury because you have your girls, who depend on you; but you make no mention of the feeling, and perhaps it is lost at the moment (in which case it must be revived), that you have no right to suicide because of your duty to yourself, a most gifted man, in the prime of life, and the prime of his powers, who has so much to give and live for, so much to fulfil, even if the worst should happen. It is the sense of being annihilated, of having lost the grounds and spring of your own sense of life, which strikes an ominous (and morbid) note in your letter. Or perhaps not morbid: of course, one is diminished, at times almost extinguished, by the illness, let alone death, of those one most loves; the soul shrinks back into itself, and says “Me? Let me die too! What right do I have to live now? For whom, for what, should I live?” and the answer “For yourself, for others” carries almost no force. You must sit quiet, however much grief and terror wash over you (by sit quiet, I mean not give way, not rush your defences). I am sure that seeing your patients, however painful it is, is as vital for you as it is for them: you must hold on, and gather your courage, and—above all—have someone near you on whom you can lean (and it is no shame to lean on someone at such a time: we are all leaners and leaned-on, anaclitic, at desperate times).

  I hope more than I can say that you have painted too grim a picture, and that things are already taking a turn for the better. Do write again, or phone, Bob; and perhaps we can meet in the summer, soon; don’t despair—it’s a sin, and don’t forget that there are many who love, esteem and need you.

  Love,

  Oliver

  To F. Robert Rodman

  July 22, 1974

  37 Mapesbury Road, London

  Dear Bob,

  […] Yes, I have received all your letters, with their impressive and frightening range and depth of feeling, and their beauty of expression, which never deserts you however tortured you are. […]

  I feared for you from the tone of some of your later letters, because some sort of “breakdown” seemed to be—hanging over you; you were close to the edge (although there are people, and you are perhaps one of them, who can go close to the edge, and even over the edge, and may have to, in order to traverse an experience entirely); and I wanted to say—but couldn’t: “don’t break down now, when she needs all your sympathy, support, and above all, sanity; break down—if you must—later, but attend to her, not yourself, in the few weeks that remain.” I don’t know whether this would have been the right thing to say—how you would have taken it; whether I should say it now; or whether, indeed, either saying or not-saying such things make any difference at all.

  Let me add (but you know this already from your knowledge of me): that I see nothing shameful or disreputable or improper about a “breakdown”—whether it be paranoiac or of any other form; if one is to taste and test one’s emotions to the full, to go through an experience of horror undenied, one almost has to become psychotic, or at least to enter the realm of “as-if” psychosis; one has to do this, to submerge completely, and then re-emerge, purified of the horror. But it is a dangerous process, an internal Odyssey before which the strongest may quail unless they have some human life-line to “reality.” For my patients, perhaps, whom I was constantly with, and whom I could treat with that special sort of absolutely intimate, yet dispassionate, concern (which is the proper relation of physician to patient, or Artist to Art), some such guidance was possible; as again it has been possible between my analyst and myself; but I don’t know how possible it is between friends—especially if they have been separated, and are at a (physical) distance from one another. I was discussing this very point with Alvarez[*8] last summer: you remember how he opens his book, The Savage God, with a beautifully-analysed yet agonized memory of Sylvia Plath’s suicide and final days, and the tormenting question as to whether he—as her friend, her confidante, her neighbour—could or should have known more clearly what was going on, and whether he might not have acted to save her: these questions of Insight and Responsibility were still on his mind, fourteen years later.

  I am sure that you are both doing the right thing in returning to Sweden for your wife’s last days: one should die, as one should be born, among one’s own, and at home. (My poor mother said to me, many times, that when her time came she wanted to die at home, in the garden, at Mapesbury: and one of the things I found most distressing was the thought that she had been denied this, that she had died in Israel, on some idiot tour, under the burning heat of an alien sun.) I think the metaphysics of dying (if this is the right word) are of the profoundest importance: by which I mean—not any sort of deathbed conversion, repentance, etc.—but a final coming-to-terms with one’s life and one’s death, with everything one has been, and the—the nothingness, darkness, mystery (who knows?) before one. This is the time for deathwork, her death-work, in which you must be her closest companion: not the time for neurosis of your own, which you have every right to, but not now…later. […]

  It is not given to us to die like oak-trees, or like animals (do you know Tolstoy’s story “Three Deaths”?), but I think that death-anxiety, and death-fuss, are the great spoilers of death. Even if one has been tormented by death-fears all one’s life, one’s death, when it comes, can be, if not welcome, at least a deeply peaceful and serene acquiescence (one sees this very strikingly, as Boswell describes it, in Johnson’s last days, his last weeks of life, when he was relieved from the intense death-fears which had obsessed him all his life).[*9]

  Obviously this is much more difficult to achieve when one is struck down in one’s prime—the sense of anger, of outrage, the continuing violence of one’s will to live, may make such an acquiescence tremendously difficult; but it must be achieved, if one is to die decently and properly, without a fierce peace-depriving agony. One’s death-work has to be the greatest and hardest work of one’s life; and, perhaps, as the philosophers say, all life, in a sense, is such a preparation for death.

  Enough—or too much—said. All I can do is to reiterate once more my deepest sympathy to you both in this—this farewell situation; and to assure you that I am not far away, and am within easy writing, phoning, or coming distance.

  Your friend,

  Oliver

  * * *

  —

  In August, still deeply shaken by his treatment at Bronx State, and facing Shengold’s annual month of holiday, OS took off for a few weeks in London and Norway.

  To Al Alvarez

  Poet, Writer

  August 20, 1974

  Hotel Ullensvang, Lofthus, Norway

  Dear Al,

  I am sorry not to have seen you since last summer: some wretched spirit of perversion makes me keep away from people I like and admire.

  My particular reason for writing now is because just before coming here I lighted on your book on Beckett (it is the only book I have with me here in the fjords!). I think it’s uncannily penetrating—frighteningly so; I was mesmerized by Molloy and Malone Dies twenty-plus years ago, when they came out, but have not read any Beckett since; your book rouses my appetite—but alas! there isn’t a Beckett-containing bookshop within a hundred miles of here! To paraphrase something you said in yr review of Awakenings, your book on Beckett shows how deeply you understand his world of nothingness—eternal sloth and nothingness and boredom, nothing to say with the obligation to say it. I think your book is an extraordinary act of sympathy or empathy, entering into another’s almost-unimaginable imagination, and conveying it. And it fills one with admiration for Beckett’s resolution, that he has kept going, and said—incomparably, and beautifully—what is almost too awful to say. It also fills me with admiration for you, that you keep so active and productive, and so affable and benevolent, when (it is clear) you yourself have to contend with and contain a nihilistic spirit of perhaps comparable depth and power.

  I wish I could say the same of myself. The book I have to write now (I keep destroying what I write) is also, in a way, a book about nothingness, hopelessness, futurelessness, situationlessness, vacuity, boredom, monotony, sloth. You had suggested, last summer, that I should perhaps try to write a book on Institutions, and it is—especially—a devastating experience since then (in a madhouse) which on the one hand almost did me in (I compromised with suicide by literary infanticide—destroying a book of essays I had written in February–March: pity, crime, because I think it was perhaps the best thing I’d ever done), but on the other has given me, and focussed for me, how appalling and perverting institutional life can be. I shall call it “Ward 23” (it was Ward 23, in Bronx State Hospital: for youngsters doubly labelled “autistic” and “retarded,” and in most cases abandoned by their parents, and institutionalized since the age of 5 or 6). I had originally thought of doing it in quasi-fictional form, like Chekhov’s “Ward 6” or Solzhenitsyn’s “One day in…”[*10] but now incline, for various reasons, to write it in the form of essays, interspersed with anecdotes (illuminations, epiphanies, sudden brilliant, revelatory Kairoi,[*11] standing out against timeless Chronos, the dullness and darkness and nothingness of the rest). What so intrigued and appalled me, and what needs to be conveyed, is the amazing potential richness and vividness of mental life, especially moral and authentic sensitivity and experience, even in those who are virtually devoid of “intelligence” and “Reason” (as usually understood); the hopefulness of the patients, despite their dire histories, as opposed to the hopelessness and stupidity and cruelty of the Institution: the awful resonance of passivity and confusion and nihilism between the patients, the place, and the shadowy, sadistic System in the background. Ward 23 was run by a complex, strange, and rather terrible man, a Buddhist Hobbesian (!)—a mixture almost as lethal as the Jewish Jesuit in The Magic Mountain.

  My experiences on Ward 23 were awful in a way “Mount Carmel”[*12] occasionally hinted at, but never really approached. They brought back, with overwhelming force, my own childhood experiences in a concentration-camp-like boarding school, between the ages of 6 and 9.[*13] I wonder if something similar gripped Orwell all his life: I am struck by the similarities between “Such, such were the joys” and 1984—it is essentially the same, or same sort of, nightmare in both.

  Have you read Bettelheim’s[*14] most recent book (A Home for the Heart, or some such title)? It’s rather laborious, but the genuineness of the man and the place stand out—an ideal sort of institution—one cannot doubt for a moment the power of such a therapeutic universe even for the most “hopelessly” ill. An essential clue to Bettelheim’s insight and achievement, it seems to me, were his own years confined in concentration camps; knowing from his own experience, the depth of indignity and hopelessness to be faced, and that which could (perhaps) allow a man to survive—similarly with Viktor Frankl, who greatly impresses me; his understanding could not have been achieved without his having endured a concentration camp.[*15]

  I wonder—you don’t really touch on it in yr book—what sort of early experience tilted Beckett into his savage darkness; and I also wonder (impertinently) what sort of experience(s) gave you your very exceptional power to appreciate and convey some of the worst things in the world. And again, I wonder about Thomas Mann—I reread The Magic Mountain last month; I hadn’t read it since I was eighteen or so—and was stunned (among so much else) by his wonderful depiction of empty time, all the paradoxes of vacuous, actionless, pastless/futureless time, endless and empty, slothful and restless; how easily and terribly it can devour a man’s life; and how insidiously and easily, without really knowing it, some people can be beguiled, bewitched, into timeless nonentity.

  I’m sorry for this sudden, rambling, peculiar letter; I hope it doesn’t offend you. But I felt I had to write to you, because I have been so moved by yr book on Beckett, and—and—all sorts of things. I spent my days here swimming further and further out in the fjords; I swim (I suspect) as you climb (how marvellous “Snow” is in The Magic Mountain). […]

  Again, please forgive this wordy, illegible, and perhaps impertinent letter; and, again, congratulations on your excellent book—and thank you for—all sorts of things.

  My best regards to you both,

  Oliver

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, as he was hiking alone up a Norwegian mountain, OS fell and broke a leg; the accident would have been fatal had he not been discovered, just before nightfall, by two reindeer hunters. He was taken to a local hospital, then flown back to London and operated on. The leg was immobilized in a full-length cast for several weeks—and, in a deeply uncanny way, soon ceased to seem attached to his body. He could not will it to move, and he could no longer even imagine doing so. This experience ultimately led to a very different book than the one he had in mind; it was a book not only about institutions but about the passivity and helplessness of patienthood.[*16]